Then the man turned toward the hidden camera. He seemed to realize, all at once, that we were watching him. He reached up and removed his mask, slowly, the way a man does when he has decided there is no longer any point in hiding. Helen dropped the tablet. It hit the driveway with a crack that sounded loud in the sudden quiet, and she did not bend to pick it up. She just stared at the screen, which Simone had caught before it fell, and her face went through a series of expressions I could not name, shock and recognition and grief all colliding at once.
I knew that face. I had seen it on Helen's mantel a dozen times, in a photograph of a man standing beside a utility van, a man holding a toddler who had to be Naomi, a man wearing a dark work jacket with the Meridian Response emblem stitched above the pocket. The man in my attic was older, thinner, worn down in a way the photograph had not prepared me for, but it was him. There was no mistaking it. I remembered the afternoons I had spent in Helen's living room after Danielle died, when she brought dinner on Sundays and I sat at her table because sitting at my own felt too empty, and that photograph had always been there on the mantel, slightly faded, slightly tilted, the glass catching the light from her kitchen window. I had looked at it without really seeing it, the way you look at someone else's family pictures when you are a guest and trying not to stare. A young father, smiling, holding his little girl. A work jacket. A van. A life that was supposed to have ended in a fire eight years ago. And now that same man was kneeling in the cramped space above my daughter's bedroom, surrounded by equipment I did not understand, holding photographs of people I loved. The mantel photograph had been a memorial. It had been a story Helen told herself and told me, a story about loss that explained the quiet in her house and the way she kept to herself. I thought about all the Sundays I had eaten at her table beneath that photograph, and how she must have looked at it after I left, and what it must have cost her to keep smiling at a guest while the face on the mantel belonged to a son she believed was ash and a closed casket. I did not know then what the truth was. I only knew that the photograph had lied to both of us, and that the lie had been sitting in plain sight on a mantel shelf for years, dusted and straightened and loved, while the living man moved through the dark spaces of my house.
It was Aaron Burke. Helen's son. Naomi's father. The man Helen had told everyone died eight years earlier.
According to Helen, Aaron had died in an electrical fire at a communications warehouse outside Pittsburgh. The body had been identified through dental records. The casket had remained closed. Naomi had been eight years old. I remembered Helen telling me that story once, years ago, in the flat voice people use when they have told a terrible thing so many times that the telling has worn smooth. I had believed her, because why would I not believe her? And now the dead man was kneeling in my attic, looking directly into a camera, holding a case full of photographs of my family.
Naomi made a sound beside me, small and broken. "That isn't him."
Helen bent slowly and retrieved the tablet from the driveway. Her hands were steady in a way that frightened me, because steadiness like that does not come from calm. It comes from a person holding herself together with both hands.
"It is," she said.
"No." Naomi shook her head, hard, like she could shake the image off the screen. "He died."
"I know what I told you."
"You said you saw him at the hospital."
Helen's face tightened, and for the first time since I had known her, she looked old in a way that had nothing to do with her seventy two years and everything to do with a weight she had been carrying alone.
"I saw a covered body."
"You identified him."
"They showed me his watch."
Naomi began crying, not loudly, but with the quiet, helpless sobs of someone whose world has just split open and who does not know which half to stand on. "You lied."