Five Years Outside Their Photos, So I Finally Walked Out Forever novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Portrait
Willa holds the reflector at her mother-in-law's family portrait, is told to step out of the frame again, and finally sets it down and walks out with her cat.
On my mother-in-law's sixty-third birthday, forty guests watched her tell me to step out of the family portrait.
"Willa, dear, you're in the way of the hydrangeas."
I was standing at the end of the back row, one shoulder in the frame, holding the silver reflector.
I had held it for four hours.
It was the first Saturday in May, and the Bradlee lawn looked like a magazine cover.
Colleen sat on a white bench in her pearls.
Gavin stood behind her with his hand on her shoulder, and his sister Sabrina stood beside him with her phone raised.
Sabrina was filming for the family account, the one with eighteen thousand followers.
"Say hi to everyone, Bradlees," she sang. "This is the Harbor Family, live."
I smiled at the lens.
Five years of Christmas cards, regatta shots and birthday portraits, and I had never once been inside the edge of one.
Gavin always had a reason.
He came over now and took the reflector out of my hand, which I knew meant he was about to be kind.
"Babe, just this one," he said quietly. "Mum's friends are all here, and you know how she is about the symmetry."
"It's the same one you said last year."
"And it's still true." He kissed my temple. "You know you're the one who matters to me. The picture is just for show."
He was so warm about it.
For five years that warmth had worked on me.
The photographer hadn't looked up from his camera.
He was a lean man in a canvas jacket and a gray cap pulled low, and he had been moving around the lawn all morning without speaking to anyone.
Gavin had introduced him to the guests as "my brother Elias, in from Portland for the day."
I had never met him.
Gavin had told me, in our first year, that his brother was a closed door and I should leave it shut.
Now Elias lowered the camera.
He looked at Gavin, and then at the reflector in Gavin's hand, and then, for about a second, at me.
"Is she in the shot or not?" he asked.
His voice was low and even, and he was the only person on the lawn who had said a word to me in an hour.
Colleen's smile stayed exactly where it was.
"She's holding the light, Elias. Photograph the family."
"She is the family."
"The family card is for the harbor committee," Colleen said. "Gavin knows which faces go on it."
The guests had gone quiet.
A woman near the tent set her glass down.
Sabrina's phone was still up, and its little red dot was still blinking.
I looked down at my hands.
They were empty.
They had held a hundred reflectors, and none of the cards in Colleen's drawer had my face.
I had put my grandmother's sixty thousand dollars into Gavin's boat business the year we married, because he said we were building something together.
There was no photograph of that either.
"Babe?" Gavin said.
I did not feel angry.
I felt like I had spent five years waiting for this exact moment.
"Hold this," I said.
I took the reflector back from him and laid it down flat on the grass, in the middle of the lawn, in front of everyone.
"What are you doing?" Colleen said, very softly, so only the front row could hear.
"Stepping out," I said.
Sabrina swung her phone toward me.
I looked straight into it.
"Please tag me in this one," I said. "I'd love to be in at least one."
Then I walked across the lawn, past the hydrangeas, past forty faces holding their drinks.
Behind me I heard Gavin laugh, the way he laughed when he wanted a room to think it was a joke.
"She's tired," he said. "It's been a long week. Everyone, please, she's fine."
I did not turn around.
I went up the back steps and through the kitchen, and into the apartment over the marine office that Colleen owned and that I had never been allowed to paint.
Mustard was asleep on the arm of the couch.
He opened one yellow eye when I picked him up, and then he climbed onto my shoulder the way he always did.
He had hated the Bradlees since the day he moved in.
I took my library badge from the hook, my grandmother's quilt from the chair and the carrier from under the bed.
I took nothing Gavin had bought me.
When I came back down the outside stairs, the party was still on the lawn.
Nobody had moved.
My car was at the end of the drive with the rain starting, and the man in the canvas jacket was standing next to it.
He had followed me, camera hanging at his chest.
He didn't speak until I had the carrier in the back seat.
"Lake road's closed at the Pell bridge," he said. "Go around by the highway."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet." He glanced up the drive. "Do you have somewhere to go tonight?"
My phone buzzed in the cup holder.
I looked at it.
Gavin had written, "Back by Sunday. You always are."
Under it, a second message arrived from Sabrina, a link to the livestream, with a caption.
"Family portrait complete. Everyone present!"
I opened it and counted the faces.
Three.
Colleen, Gavin and Sabrina.
I wasn't in it, and neither was the brother who had taken the picture.
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