For a moment, I tried to imagine this whole thing as one tremendous coincidence, but I knew that it wasn’t, and I sat there stunned. I didn’t know what to do. Your mind works in funny ways as a kid; there was a large part of me that was afraid of getting in trouble simply for still being awake. I wanted to wake up my mother. I wanted to tell her that there was something wrong here. I wanted to run into her bedroom and throw the pictures onto her comforter and just shout “Look!” and have her hug me and tell me that everything was going to be fine — that I had nothing to be afraid of. But I just sat there with the looming feeling of having made some irreparable transgression. I decided that I would wait until the morning.
The next day, my mom was off work and spent most of the morning cleaning up around the house. I stared blankly at the cartoons on the television and waited until I thought it was a good time to show her the Polaroids. When she went out to get the mail, I grabbed a couple of the pictures and put them on the table in front of me; I sat waiting for her to come back in. I couldn’t even think of how to begin, and I dug my fingernails into the chipping paint on the table as I tried desperately to think of the perfect way to explain everything. When she returned, she was already opening the mail. I heard her throw some junk mail into the trashcan, and I took a deep breath and forced words out of my mouth.
“Mom, can you come here? I… I have these pictures—”
“Just give me a minute, honey. I need to mark these on the calendar.”
After a moment, she came and stood behind me and asked me what I needed. I could hear her shuffling with the mail, but I just looked at the Polaroids and told her about them. I reminded her about the Balloon Project and how I had only gotten a picture in my first correspondence. I told her that after that one they just kept coming, but I never said anything because they were just stupid pictures. I dug my fingernails harder into the table and told her that I had saved them all and had gotten so excited when the dollar came back that I stayed up late looking at all the photos.
As I went on in my explanation and pointed to the pictures, her frequent “uh-huh’s” and “okay’s” decreased, and she was suddenly completely quiet and making only a little noise with the mail. I had run out of things to say, but I couldn’t turn around and face her. I waited for her to say something, but the next noise I heard from her sounded as if she were trying to catch her breath in a room that had no air left in it. At last, she subdued her struggling gasps and simply dropped the remaining mail on the table right next to me and ran to the kitchen to get the cordless phone.
“Mom! I’m sorry, I didn’t know about these! Don’t be mad at me!”
With the phone pressed to her ear, she was alternating running and walking back and forth while shouting into the mouthpiece. I couldn’t understand what she was saying or who she could be calling. Was it my teacher? No, this wasn’t her fault. I nervously fiddled with the mail that was sitting next to the Polaroids I had arranged. The top envelope had something sticking out of it that I thoughtlessly and anxiously pulled on until it came out.
It was another Polaroid.
Confused, I thought that somehow one of my Polaroids had slipped into the stack when she threw the mail down, but when I turned it over and looked at it, I realized that I had not seen this one before. It was me, but this one was a much closer shot. I was surrounded by trees and was smiling. But it wasn’t just me. Josh was there too. I felt my mouth go dry as I realized that this was us from yesterday.
I started yelling for my mom who was still screaming into the phone. As I called to her more loudly, she shouted more loudly into the phone to compensate, and this exchange repeated until she finally responded with “What?!”
Suddenly, I had her attention, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I could only think to ask, “Who are you calling?”
“I’m talking with the police, honey.”
“But why? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do anything… please mom!”
She answered me with a response that I never understood until I was forced to revisit these events from the earliest years of my life. She grabbed the envelope off the table, and the picture of Josh and I spun and slid, landing next to the other Polaroids in front of me. She held the front of the envelope up to my eyes, but I could only look at her and watch as all the color began draining out of her face, as if something was siphoning the life right out of her. With tears welling up in her eyes, she said that she had to call the police because there was no postmark.
Boxes
I spent the summer before kindergarten learning how to climb trees. There was an abundance of trees in my neighborhood, but there was one particular pine tree right outside my house that seemed almost designed for me. It had branches that were so low I could grab them easily without a boost, and for the first couple of days after I learned how to pull myself up, I would just sit on the lowest branch, dangling my feet.
The tree was outside our back fence and was easily visible from the living room of our house. Before too long, and without explicitly discussing that this would be the arrangement, my mother and I developed a routine where I would go play on the tree when she would watch her TV shows, since she could easily see me while she did other things. This was unlike our trips to the YMCA pool where I would insist that she watch every moment of my amazing ability to keep my head under water — sometimes for up to ten minutes; she never seemed that impressed, though I think it was because I was breathing the entire time through a snorkel.
As the summer passed, my abilities grew. Dangling my feet while sitting on a branch quickly lost its appeal, so I had begun to move up the branches, and before too long, I was climbing fairly high. As I climbed farther up the tree, I discovered that its branches not only got thinner but also more widely spaced, and so eventually I reached a point where I couldn’t actually climb any higher. This meant that the game had to change; I began to concentrate on speed, and in the end, I could reach my highest branch in twenty-five seconds.
In my mind, I was quite a skilled climber, but my expertise was specialized. I only ever climbed that particular tree, and I always took the same path — I had worn off the bark on some of the branches from the grinding of my shoes and the wringing of my hands as I moved from one branch to another in the same, familiar path.
I got too confident, and one afternoon I tried to step from a branch before I had firmly grasped the next one. I fell about twenty feet, and when I hit the earth, all the air was violently pushed out of my lungs. Dazed, I attempted to get up, but as I put more weight on my left arm, it failed me, and I fell back to the ground. When I looked at the arm that had betrayed me, I understood that I had simply asked too much of it; my forearm was twisted and bent like my tree’s roots, and when I tried to move my fingers, I found that they either all moved together or not at all.
My mom was running toward me yelling something, and I remember her sounding like she was underwater — I don’t recall what she said, but I do remember being surprised by just how white my bone was.
I couldn’t climb trees any more after that.
I was going to start kindergarten with a cast and wouldn’t even have any friends to sign it. My mother and I had put a great deal of preparation into making my first day of school a success, but we weren’t prepared for this. She must have felt terrible, because the day before I started school, she brought home a kitten. He was just a baby and was striped with tan and white; and he was a talker — the soundtrack of my excitement was a never-ending series of short but continuous cries.