The Family Photo I Would Not Fix

The photo

I need to explain the photo, because if you do not understand the photo you will not understand why a sixty-one-year-old woman ended up screaming on a beach at sunset.

Every year, on one evening of the trip, when the light goes gold and long, the whole family walks down to the water and a nice arrangement is made with a tripod and a timer, or lately with Kayla’s husband’s fancy camera, and they take the family portrait. All of them, in coordinating colors, Sharon picks the colors, on the sand with the ocean behind them. Twenty years of these. They hang in the upstairs hallway of Sharon and Rob’s house at home in a long climbing row, the family getting bigger and older frame by frame, the boys arriving, Brett arriving, Dylan and me two years ago, my first one, standing stiff at the edge in a coral shirt Sharon had chosen.

This year was a milestone year. This year was the first portrait with the new grandson. With Miles.

Sharon had been talking about it for months. Dylan told me, back in the spring, that his mother could not wait to get “the baby’s first beach picture,” that she had already picked the colors (soft blue and white, and she had told everyone twice), that she had told her sister and her church friends and the ladies at her book club that this was the year the newest Nelson would be in the picture. She had, in a real way, built the whole trip around it. Nine hours in a car with a screaming baby, in part, so that Sharon could have the photograph she had been bragging about since February.

And Miles, I need you to understand, does not go to anyone but me. Not for a minute, not for a photo, not for anything, and certainly not at the end of the day when he is tired and the light is strange and there are waves and wind and strangers’ faces. If I am not holding him he cries, and not a polite cry, a red-faced world-ending cry, and the only cure is my arms and my chest and quiet. He is eight months old and he is mine down to the cell.

Which means a simple, quiet fact sat underneath that whole golden evening, a fact I had not engineered and could not have engineered, a fact that was simply true: if I was not in the photo, Miles was not in the photo. We were a package. Where I went, he went. There was no version of the milestone picture that had the grandson but not the mother, because the grandson would not be pried off the mother without a scene that no camera wanted.