The Photograph in the Attic

The photograph was small, square, and faded. It was an instant-camera print from the early 1970s, the kind that had been developed by a chemical sleeve over the surface of the print. The colours had gone slightly brown.

It showed three children at the edge of a lake.

Imogen had found it in a brown envelope at the back of a drawer in her grandmother's bedside table. She was fifteen and had been helping her parents clear out her grandmother's house in Wales. Her grandmother had died in March. The clearing had been put off until the summer.

Imogen had been given the bedside table. The drawer had a stack of birthday cards, a small leather notebook, three rosaries, and the brown envelope. The envelope was unmarked. Imogen had opened it without thinking.

The photograph had a date written, in pencil, in tiny handwriting on the back. Llyn Geirionydd, August 1973.

In the photograph, the three children stood in a row. The tallest was a girl of about ten. The middle was a boy of about eight. The smallest was a girl of about four.

The middle child was, unmistakably, Imogen's father.

Her father had — Imogen had been told her whole life — been an only child.

She turned the photograph over again. Llyn Geirionydd, August 1973. Underneath, in smaller writing: the year before.

Imogen sat on the bedroom floor with the photograph for a long time. She did not, at first, take it out of theroom. She did not show her parents. She did not show her brother. She studied the three children, very carefully.

The tallest girl had — Imogen could see clearly — the same eyes as Imogen's father. The same jaw. The same set of the shoulders. They were, plainly, siblings.

The smallest girl had a different shape of face — but had her hand wrapped, very firmly, around Imogen's father's hand.

Three siblings.

In a family that, Imogen had been told, had only ever had one child.

Her grandmother had — Imogen had also been told her whole life — wanted a large family but had not been able to have one. Imogen's father had been her only successful birth. There had been, the family story said, complications. Her grandmother had not spoken of them.

The family story, Imogen now suspected, was not the whole story.

She put the photograph in her own bag. She took it home, on the long drive south, with the rest of her grandmother's small inheritance items. She did not show anyone, on the drive, what she had found.

That night, in her own bedroom, she put the photograph on her desk and looked at it for an hour.

She did not, that night, ask her father.

She had a feeling — she could not have said why — that asking her father would only bring out a polite version of the family story. She had a feeling that, whatever the photograph was about, her father was not going to be the first person she should talk to.

She thought, instead, about the date on the back. August 1973. And about the phrase: the year before.

The year before what.

She decided, before she went to sleep, that this was a question she would, very quietly, find the answer to over the summer.

She did not sleep well that night. She kept thinking of the smallest girl's hand on the boy's hand.