Chapter 128 Family Portrait

Chapter 128 Family Portrait
Lara's POV

The family portrait was Ethan's idea.

Which surprised me, because Ethan was not usually the person in this family who suggested things that required everyone to be in the same place at the same time doing a coordinated activity. That was more Richie's territory, the grand proposals, the enthusiastic suggestions, the complete failure to anticipate the logistical challenges of executing them.

But Ethan came to me on a Sunday morning in December and said he thought we should get a proper family photograph done, all five of us, and that he had already looked into it and found a photographer he liked the work of and that the only question was whether I agreed.

I agreed.

Damien agreed when I told him, with the particular agreement of a man who would not have suggested it himself but was genuinely glad someone had.

Richie agreed with so much enthusiasm that it required several minutes to explain that a family portrait was not the same as a party and would not involve cake, which was his primary point of clarification.

Catherine was four months old and had no opinion on the matter that she was able to express in words, but I felt confident she would have agreed if she could.

The photographer came to the house on a Saturday morning in December.

Her name was Adaeze and she was calm and efficient and very good at managing the particular chaos of photographing a family that included a four month old, a five year old, and a fifteen year old, which was not a combination that naturally produced stillness or cooperation.

She arrived at ten.

By ten fifteen Richie had already asked her three questions about her camera, tried to look through the lens uninvited, and explained to her at some length that dinosaurs were his main interest if she needed to know anything about him for the photographs.

She handled all of this without missing a beat, which told me she had done this before.

We started outside in the garden.

Damien had, of course, ensured the roses were in their best possible state for the occasion, which given that it was December meant he had done something to them that I didn't fully understand but that had resulted in them looking better than most roses looked in December.

The gate at the far end was closed.

Just a gate.

Adaeze positioned us near the roses, which was where she said the light was best, and started arranging us with the particular cheerful authority of someone who had learned that the only way to manage families in front of a camera was to be direct about it.

"Dad, can you stand here. Mum, next to him. Can the big one stand on that side. And the little one—"

"I'm Richie," Richie said.

"Richie," she said, without pausing. "Can you stand in front of Dad. And the baby—"

"She's Catherine," Richie said. "She's four months. She's very clever."

"Catherine," Adaeze said, again without missing a beat, "can go in the middle with Mum."

She looked at us.

Made a small adjustment to where Damien was standing.

Made another small adjustment to Ethan, who had positioned himself with the careful nonchalance of a teenager who wanted to appear not to care about the photograph while actually caring quite a lot about how he looked in it.

"Okay," she said. "Let's start."

The first few photographs were, as first photographs always were, slightly stiff.

Everyone aware of being photographed, aware of themselves, making small adjustments to how they were holding their faces that were the opposite of how faces looked when nobody was looking at them.

Adaeze kept talking to us while she worked, which helped, asking questions about nothing in particular, about Richie's dinosaur interest which he was delighted to elaborate on at length, about what Ethan was planning for after school, about whether Catherine had a preference for morning or afternoon which was absurd but made Damien laugh properly, and his laugh was genuine and the camera caught it and I saw it on her screen when she showed us later and it was one of the best photographs of him I had ever seen.

At some point Richie decided that the arrangement we were in was not quite right and needed to be adjusted.

"Catherine should be in front," he said. "She can't see anything from there."

"She can see fine," I said.

"She told me she can't," he said.

Adaeze, to her considerable credit, kept taking photographs throughout this exchange.

"What if I move slightly so Catherine is more visible," I said, doing so without waiting for his response.

Richie assessed the result.

"Better," he said, with the authority of a creative director.

Damien caught my eye over Richie's head.

I looked back at him and kept my face straight through considerable effort.

Ethan, from his position on the other side, made the very small sound he made when something was funny and he was not going to acknowledge it.

We moved around the garden for the next hour.

Different positions. Different light. Different configurations of us, some with all five, some with just the boys, some with just me and Catherine, some with Damien and the children without me and some with me and the children without Damien.

At one point Adaeze asked for just Ethan and Catherine.

Ethan sat on the garden bench and I put Catherine in his arms, carefully, adjusting his hold the way I had shown him in the hospital, and he sat there with his sister and looked down at her and Adaeze took photographs that I knew even then, before I saw them, were going to be something.

Because of the way he looked at her.

The same way he had looked at her in the hospital room. Like she was already his whole world. Like he had been waiting for her specifically.

Catherine looked up at him with her focused attention.

He said something to her quietly, too quiet for anyone to hear, and her face did something responsive, not quite a smile, she was still too young for smiles that meant something definite, but something in the direction of one.

Adaeze took three photographs in quick succession.

None of us said anything.

Then Richie came over and inserted himself onto the bench beside Ethan and looked at Catherine too and Adaeze kept taking photographs without being asked to and that sequence, the three of them on the bench, became the one I put on the wall in the study eventually, framed properly, the one I looked at when I needed reminding of something true.

The formal session wound down around noon.

Adaeze started packing her equipment and I went inside to get her water and when I came back out Damien had put Catherine in the carrier and was standing in the garden talking to Ethan about something and Richie was doing something with a stick and a patch of soil near the rose wall that I chose not to investigate.

Just a Saturday morning in our garden.

Just this.

I stood in the doorway and watched them for a moment.

Adaeze appeared beside me, bag on her shoulder.

"You have a good family," she said simply, not as a professional courtesy but as an observation.

"I know," I said. "Thank you."

She left.

I stayed in the doorway a moment longer.

Damien looked up and saw me standing there and said something to Ethan who looked over too and then Richie, who had apparently finished whatever he was doing with the stick, came running across the garden toward me at full speed for no particular reason.

He crashed into me in the doorway with the energy of a child who ran everywhere and hugged with his whole body and I caught him and held on and he talked into my shoulder about something that had happened at nursery that week involving David and a sandcastle and a highly contested outcome that had clearly not been fully resolved.

I listened and held him and looked over his head at Damien and Ethan still talking near the roses, Catherine's small face visible above the carrier edge, looking at the roses with her usual focused attention.

Later that afternoon, when Adaeze sent through a selection of the morning's photographs, we all sat together looking at them on Damien's laptop.

Richie had opinions about all of them.

Mostly the opinions were about whether he looked good, which he expressed without any self consciousness whatsoever, pointing at photographs of himself and saying things like that one is good or my face looks funny in that one with complete equanimity.

Ethan looked at the photographs with the careful attention he looked at most things with and occasionally said something specific about one of them, why the light was good or why the composition worked, which told me he had actually looked at the photographer's portfolio before suggesting her and had learned something from it.

Damien said little but I noticed which photographs he kept going back to.

The one of him laughing.

The one of Ethan and Catherine on the bench.

One of me looking away from the camera at something outside the frame, which I didn't remember being taken and which showed me something about how I looked when I wasn't aware of being looked at.

"This one," he said, pointing at the last one.

I looked at it.

"I look distracted," I said.

"You look like yourself," he said.

I looked at it again.

A woman in a garden in December, looking at something outside the frame, something that had made her expression go soft and open and completely unguarded, everything she was usually careful about showing visible all at once because she hadn't known anyone was watching.

"What was I looking at?" I asked.

Damien pointed to the edge of the photograph.

Just visible at the very edge, almost out of frame, a small hand reaching up toward something.

Richie's hand.

I had been watching Richie.

"You always look like that when you're watching them," Damien said. "Like the thing you're looking at is the best thing you've ever seen."

I looked at the photograph.

At the woman in it.

At the soft open unguarded face of someone watching her child.

"Print that one," I said.

"Which size?" Ethan asked.

"Large," I said. "For the living room."

He nodded and made a note on his phone with the particular efficiency of a person who had been given a task and was going to execute it properly.

Richie looked at the photograph.

"Is that me?" he said, pointing at the small hand at the edge.

"It's your hand," I said.

He looked at it.

"Print a big one," he said, with complete satisfaction, as if the presence of his hand at the edge of a photograph of his mother was the ideal outcome of the entire morning.

I looked at Damien.

He was looking at me.

"Large," he confirmed, to Ethan, without looking away from me.

"Already on it," Ethan said.