photograph: a man in his forties, laughing, with a sixteen-year-old girl on his shoulders. Me. And my father. The last photo taken before he disappeared.
The man in the bath looked at the photo. And something moved behind his eyes — something that had been buried under twenty years of trauma and homelessness and a mind that had protected itself by forgetting.
“Where did you get that,” he whispered.
“My father gave it to me,” I said, and I was crying so hard I could barely speak. “For my sixteenth birthday. Two weeks before he went to work one morning and never came home. There was an accident at the construction site he worked at. They never found him. They told my mother he was gone.
He had a birthmark. Right there. On his right shoulder. Shaped like a crescent moon. I used to trace it when I was little.
Dad.
