Months later, he found the camera with the pictures. There wasn't anything salacious about them, she was fully clothed, but what was she doing snapping pictures of herself? Most featured her odd smile, an almost bloodless smear stretched above her chin. In a portrait of her college basketball team, twelve beaming girls in pigtails, she had been the only one whose teeth were hidden. What, she'd wondered to him, could that mean?
He thought she clamped her lips shut to hide the gap between her central incisors. "My gap tooth, like the wife of Bath," she'd said the first time they had sex. "A sign of lust in Chaucer's time." It had been their private joke; when she wanted him, she smiled so that gap showed.
Once she'd made him a Valentine day's card, which he'd stuck in the drawer of his drafting table. When they sold the desk —who used drafting tables anymore? —he'd sorted the contents into two piles. He saved the letters from his Vietnam buddy and a gaudy card with swans from his mother. Both his parents were still alive and well in Arizona, sunning at the side of a pool. He tossed the card she'd made. Whenever their relationship was up for renegotiation, she brought that up.
"But you're here. I don't need to be reminded of you," he'd said the last time they'd argued.
"And your parents? That had more value than something I labored over?" She'd grinned, exposing her tooth gap.
They both knew it hadn't taken much time to cut out the doily and paste it on the red heart. But still, maybe he had picked the wrong card to throw away. Because she was the one who was gone.
He took the camera to bed with him and clicked through the pictures. She'd changed her clothes a few times, probably trying to find the color that suited her, made her eyes stand out. In the full body shots, he assumed she wanted to look thin. If he squinted, he could tell what she was thinking, that the light denim made her look fat, that the crease across her tummy added pounds. The turtleneck didn't cover the tendon that jutted out and made her look old. The angle of another shot — the ceiling low and her head bent —made her look like she was in Being John Malkovich.
Maybe she'd had an intuition that she wasn't long for this world. And look, her voice said, you're paying more attention to me now than you did in life. If she'd shown him these portraits while she was alive, he would have glanced at one or two and said he couldn't tell the difference between the red turtleneck and the green shirt.
But look, he could hear her telling him, making him wonder if she had shown him these shots and he hadn't been paying attention, the focal point of this one is my middle. I took it at counter level. It makes me look fat. He imagined her studying the viewer, hitting erase, and trying again from a different height.
The pictures appeared to be taken from various vantage points; he could trace them by the backgrounds. The first series in the dining room against the windows. Some in the kitchen. A few in her office in front of the green wall. One from a bookcase shelf. This is from about the height it would be if a person were taking it and I wasn't using the timer. Others at her desk, the camera balanced on her unabridged. He liked that portrait. It had a fragile look, like when he first met her, and even though her cheeks were shiny, she looked young.
He'd never used their little photo printer. She'd always done the printing. Truth is, he hadn't used the camera much, either. They'd bought it for her to take to her reunion the summer before. Those pictures were still on the camera, too, people's faces he didn't know.
He found the manuals, fired up the system, printed the series full-sized. She'd object because the larger they were, the more defects showed — slight skin discolorations, small wrinkles around her eyes, and the few strands of gray.
Even examining the enlarged prints didn't tell him why she'd taken them. He carried the glossy sheets to bed, lined them on the pillow next to him. They were almost a full year old, taken months before she'd died. If she'd wanted him to have one, she would have printed it and stuck it in his wallet. So they must have been for someone else. Someone who didn't know what she looked like, or someone who wanted a picture to carry close to his heart. He hoped she hadn't given away a copy of the one he hadn't at first noticed, the one he now placed in the center of her pillow, the one with the gap-toothed grin.
C.A. Cole lives in Colorado and has just completed a novel. Recent credits include QWF, Perigree, and Crimson Highway, with upcoming stories in Cantaraville and The Smoking Poet.