The Photo Nobody Took

In my grandmother’s album there’s a photo from the summer of 1962. She’s nine, on the beach at Carrow Bay, squinting at the camera in a white sun hat.

Next to her stands another girl, the same height, in a striped dress, holding her hand.

I found it when I was twelve and asked who the other girl was. Grandma took the album, closed it, and said, “I was alone that day.” Then she went into the kitchen and ran the tap for a long time.

I asked again at sixteen, and at twenty, and at twenty-five. Same answer every time. I was alone that day. And every time, her hands shook.

Last spring, after her fall, she moved in with us. One night I heard her in the living room at 2 a.m., the album open on her lap at that page.

“You can tell me,” I said.

She looked at the girl in the striped dress for a long time.

“Her name was Ellen,” she said. “And she wasn’t supposed to be in the picture, because she wasn’t supposed to exist.”

I sat down beside her. She didn’t close the album this time.

“Ellen was my twin,” she said. “Born four minutes after me. My mother was very young, and not married, and it was a different time. A family in the next town couldn’t have children. The adults decided. One baby stayed, one baby went. They chose me to stay. Nobody ever told me why.”

“How did you find out?”

“I didn’t. Not then. That summer at Carrow Bay, a girl walked up to me on the beach and just — took my hand. She had my face. We didn’t say a word. We didn’t need to. My father lifted the camera to take a picture of me, and there she was, and he went white as a sheet. Her mother came running from the other end of the beach. They pulled us apart. We drove home in silence, and I was told never, ever to speak about it.”

“Did you ever see her again?”

Grandma turned the page. Behind the photo, tucked into the album’s paper, was a folded letter I’d never noticed. The envelope was dated 1981.

“She found me once I was grown. We wrote for thirty years. Never met — I was too frightened, and then too ashamed of being frightened. She passed in 2012.”

She unfolded the letter. The last line was underlined twice.

I’ve never once been alone either. I’ve had you, the whole time, four minutes away.

Grandma pressed the photo flat with her thumb.

“I said I was alone that day,” she said, “because that was the only day in my whole life I wasn’t.”

In June we drove to Carrow Bay together. She walked down to the water’s edge, slowly, on my arm, and stood exactly where the photo was taken. I lifted my phone.

She reached out her other hand — to no one, to the air — and held it there.

I took the picture.