Registry of Absences

The town looked smaller from the bus window than it had in any memory Mara allowed herself to possess. Buildings leaned toward other buildings on Main Street as if whispering secrets into each other's eaves, and the familiar brick of the post office held the same stubborn, indifferent face it had when she was a child. She had returned often enough through the years for holidays and short funerals of acquaintances, but this time the trip felt like folding a paper map along some crease she could not remember making. The road into Marrowbridge threaded between blackened birches and fields that had shifted from corn to fallow. A gray sky pressed the colors flat. When she stepped off the bus her hands were full of city habits—her coat had pockets that wanted receipts and business cards, a small leather folder with a worn spine, a pen she kept clipped to the outside; all of it seemed absurd against the damp, sweet smell of old wood and the hospital-quiet air around the church.

Jonah's funeral was a blur mediated by ritual. The minister intoned a phrase about finding rest, and neighbors she had not seen in years pressed hands into hers and offered identical variations of “I’m sorry.” Mara watched them like someone analysing handwriting; grief has a grammar and she could read it even when she did not feel its conjugations. Jonah had been restless, a local presence who made trouble like small improvements: he painted ugly fences with bright colors and left scrawled notes in bus shelters that made people laugh and then frown, like a weather vane that would not stop. He had loved to talk. When the congregation stood to sing, the particular shape of absence in the pew where he would have sat tugged at her with a phantom weight. She catalogued those old gestures—how his laugh warmed his whole face, how he kept his hair out of his eyes with a crease of his fingers—because memory was the only careful thing left to her.

After the crowd thinned and the formal expressions of condolence were exhausted, Mara found herself in the parlor of the house she had grown up in, the rooms papered with repetitions of family history. Her mother had set out albums on the coffee table; the leather bindings were cupped with the hands of decades. Mara opened one and let her professional instincts do their quiet work. She looked at edges of photographs, at the way adhesives ghosted the backings, at the small inked labels that named people and dates. It was this meticulous habit—this willingness to notice the margin—that had kept her in preservation work for so long. The album landed under her palms like a small boat. She turned pages with a measured reverence until she reached the photograph where he should have been.

The place where Jonah's face ought to have been was an absence so precise it seemed like a joke. A neat oval of paper had been removed from the smear of grain where a child's features should have been; the surrounding image was unremarkable: a summer day, three children on a porch step, their knees dusty. Where the middle child's face belonged, there was only the pale ghost of torn paper and a slight ring where adhesive had once hugged the back. Mara's first reaction was practical: someone had cut him out. That could be explained with anger or shame or some petty pettyer sentiment that people kept in cupboards. But when she lifted the photograph and held it close, her fingers felt at the edges and the removed area did not yield the same way a cut edge did. It was smoother, as if the paper had been rubbed thin until the image had simply worn away. Her thumb brushed across it and felt an emptiness that was almost cool, like touching the inside of a hollow bone."