Buddy studied the family photo to see if anything had changed. Not in the actual image, of course. The chemical compositions of paper and dyes was permanent—eternal, measured by the span of any ordinary life. The deportment and distribution of Leanne, himself, Gloria, and Robbie inside the heavy wooden frame was forever fixed. How long ago had it been taken? Just over a year, he calculated. Christ! How could things have unravelled so quickly?
They couldn’t have, really!
Leanne, standing next to him behind the kids, looked into the camera. She smiled in that prim, confident way of hers, allowing him to drape his arm over her shoulder, unaltered by his display of affection. As if to say, ‘Of course my husband loves me, but that doesn’t change who I am.’
Buddy cringed, looking at his own likeness. Did I really look that stupid? They’d laughed at his expression when the official, matted and framed version of the photo was unveiled in the kitchen at Sunnyside. But looking at it now, Buddy was embarrassed not to have recognized his vacant, distracted expression for what it was: a premonition of fear. The look you’d see in the eyes of a man peering over the edge of a desolate crag into a fog, on the brink of an awful awareness, the sound of a restless ocean thrashing below. How could we have mistaken it for anything even remotely funny?
Perhaps they’d attributed his distracted appearance to the technicalities of taking a group selfie. He’d centred them on his mobile’s screen, the phone attached to his tripod with a special holder, set the timer, pushed the button, then scurried into the frame while the seconds blinked down to zero. They’d cheered him on, laughing, chanting, and clapping as he dashed into place. He’d laughed, too. Remembered himself draping his arm over Leanne’s shoulder and the millisecond of her stiffening, then relenting for the sake of appearances. He couldn’t subdue the grotesque comparisons between their happy family photo, the Gorge glittering in the background, their familiar neighbourhood registering on the retinas of their sun-flecked eyes, and the eviscerated images of ordinary families that had been executed in genocides of one sort or another.
How had that monstrous juxtoposition emerged? Buddy didn’t want to know.
Gloria beamed, the laughter at her old man hustling down the path to get into the scene lingering on her lips and in her bright eyes. Buddy couldn’t imagine loving anyone or anything on this earth more than he loved his daughter. Same goes for Robbie. He smiled at his son’s relaxed, outgoing manner, which Buddy had come to envy in a proud, fatherly way. What will the two of them think of me in 20 years’ time? he wondered. If I’m still around.
He remembered an exchange between him and Robbie when they were driving from UVic to Sunnyside. Buddy had offered to pick his son up, and they’d wrestled Robbie’s bike into the back of the Matrix for the drive home.
“The speed limit’s fifty, Dad!” Robbie gibed.
“Yeah. So?”
Robbie smiled indulgently. “That doesn’t mean you actually have to drive fifty, Dad. You’re going to cause an accident.” They shared a good laugh.
It wasn’t so much that he couldn’t drive fast anymore; he just wasn’t in a hurry. He was comfortable letting the car roll along at its own speed while he took in the scenery, thought about why the city had been laid out the way it was, what kept trees from toppling, and buildings collapsing—as if some as-yet-unheard-of implosive weapon had been deployed by the inveterate enemies of anything North American, or European, or redolent of Christianity and capitalism.
He had to admit, disgusted as he felt about it, that there were people in the world who would spit at the framed picture he was holding up in front of him.
Why?
Buddy shut the question out. Clung to the simple truth that there was nobody in the world who cared for his family the way he did. Nobody! Hang on to that, man! he told himself. It’s the only thing that will keep you afloat.
So why did you leave them?
The question caught him off-guard. He winced.
“You shit! Coward! You fucking bastard!”
Leanne’s vitriol, etched into the circuitry of his mind, stung. Activated his inescapable guilt.
He looked for a spot inside the camper to hang or prop up the family photo. On the dining table? No. That seemed overly sentimental, as if he might be playing to his own sense of tragic destiny in a maudlin, made-for-Netflix genre. On the counter, next to the kitchen sink? Naw. Too exposed to dishwater splashes and cooking grease. How about on the padded ledge next to his double bunk?
“That’ll do.”
But as he was reaching over the landscape of rumpled blankets and pillows to place the picture, he froze, then climbed back down, staring into the frame adoringly.
“Not quite yet,” he said, placing the family portrait on the camper’s table.
Next: The First Supper