Free Baby by Patricia MacLachlan Page A

this, Cat?”
    Cat sighed.
    “My pictures are so …” She waved her hand to the pile of pictures. “So …”
    “Boring,” Grandfather finished for her.
    I felt my face flush with anger, but Cat laughed.
    “Take it, Grandpa,” she said cheerfully.
    Grandfather turned to me.
    “Journey?”
    “No.”
    What did he think I’d take pictures of? This farm? I could close my eyes and see it—the spruce trees at the edge of the meadow, the stream cutting through, the stone walls that framed it all. I knew every inch of every acre. What would pictures tell me? And the people. What would pictures tell me of my grandmother, so secretive; my grandfather, tall and blunt?
    On Cat’s dresser was a picture of our father who had gone away somewhere a long time ago. He was young in the picture, laughing, his eyes looking past the camera, past the place, past me. When I was little, I carried that picture around, trying to remember him, trying to place the picture so that the eyes would look into mine. But they never did. His face was like carved stone, not flesh and blood. And the picture never told me the things I wanted to know.Did he think about Cat and me? Where was he? Would I know him if I saw him?
    I turned and the camera clicked: Grandfather’s first picture of me. I stared at him angrily, and slowly he lowered the camera and looked at me with a surprised and dismayed expression, as if he’d seen something through the lens that he hadn’t expected.
    Grandma’s voice broke the silence. “I’ll take the flute, Cat. And this.” Grandma had put on the sweatshirt that Mama had given Cat, LIDDIE written across the front in big letters.
    “No!” My voice sounded harsher than I meant. “That’s Mama’s shirt!”
    Grandfather put his hand on my shoulder.
    “Your mama left it, Journey.”
    I shook off his hand and stepped away from him.
    Grandma stood in the light of the window, her hair all tumbled like Mama’s in the barn. I looked at Cat to see if she noticed, but Cat was smiling at Grandma.
    “You look wonderful, Gran.”
    Cat pulled me after her and went to hugGrandma. And Grandfather took a picture that would startle me every time I saw it: not Grandma, her hair tied back with a piece of string, smiling slightly as if she knew the secrets of the world; not Cat, her head thrown back, laughing; but my face, staring into the camera with such fury that even in the midst of the light and the laughter the focus of the picture is me.

Chapter Two
    The first letter that wasn’t a letter came in the noon mail. It lay in the middle of the kitchen table like a dropped apple, addressed to Cat and me, Mama’s name in the left-hand corner.
    I’d watched Cat walk up the front path from the mailbox, slowly, as if caught by the camera in slow motion or in a series of what Grandfather called stills: Cat smiling. Cat looking eager. Cat, her face suddenly unfolding out of a smile. She brushed past me at the front door and opened her hand, the letter falling to the table.
    “No return address,” she said flatly.
    My grandmother stirred soup on the stove and looked sideways at me. After a moment she looked away again.
    Grandfather, cleaning his camera lens with lens paper, lifted his shoulders in a sigh, the way he always did when he was about to say something I didn’t want to hear.
    “I expect—” he began.
    Grandma’s voice made me jump.
    “Marcus!” Then softer. “Let it be.”
    Cat began to cut carrots at the kitchen counter. My grandfather flinched with each violent stroke.
    “I think (thwack) that what Grandpa (thwack) means is that there will be (thwack) money in that envelope. Not words.”
    Cat stopped and stared down at the counter, the sudden silence like noise filling the room.
    “Not the words you want,” Cat said softly.
    I felt tears behind my eyes. There was something soft and sad in Cat’s voice that made me think of Mama.
    Grandma stopped stirring the soup, and Grandfather cleared his