Tom and Shirley on the couch with her parents.

Tom and Shirley fishing in a boat in the middle of the lake.

Tom holding up a bass.

Shirley smiling, shielding her face from the sun.

I page through the notebook, photo after photo after photo, mostly of Tom and Shirley but also of friends I recognize but whose names I can’t recall. I close the book. What would those years have been like for me if Mary hadn’t gone away? Would the three of us, John included, have thrived here in Nysa? Would we have stayed even as things deteriorated, as people moved away, as Nysa shrank? Would we have grown old alongside Tom and Shirley, spent Labor Days and Memorial Days together on the lake, eating burgers and watching John (and maybe more of our own children) jump off the dock or water ski or jump off The Point?

A shot of curiosity moves through me, something like adrenaline mixed with dread and hope all at once. I slide the notebook back and look to the left of it, my eyes roaming the shelves.

There it is.

A book from the summer before John was born. The second summer that we lived at the cabin.

I take it down and hold it in my hands. I imagine the photos Shirley must have taken that summer, pictures of Mary’s swelling stomach and of me, baby-faced, standing beside her with my baseball cap on backwards, grinning awkwardly. Eighteen years old.

I turn the notebook over and over. I can open it if I want—there’s nothing keeping me from it—but there is something inside of me that’s afraid of those days, afraid of going back. I’ve run from that time of my life for forty years, and even when it’s right here in front of me, those years waiting to be viewed, mulled over, I can’t make myself do it.

But I have to.

I open it, and a sob catches in my throat. There are faded photos tinted orange of us at the cabin that summer and fall. John is a baby. These are photos Shirley took days before Mary left us. One of them in particular grabs my emotions. The two of us are sitting at the end of the dock, and the sun glares off the water. Our bodies both face out over the lake, but we’re looking over our shoulders at Shirley and the camera. I’m grinning and holding up a hand (“Stop, Shirley!”), while Mary tilts her head and smiles. At the bottom of the photo, I can see our hands resting on the splintered wood of the pier, our fingers barely touching.

I don’t see any sign of John in the photo. Was this taken in the weeks before his birth? It’s hard to tell—I can’t see Mary’s stomach.

Of all the things taking place in the photo—the sunny day, Shirley stealing another photo, me protesting, and Mary calmly letting it all happen—the detail that remains is the touch of Mary’s fingers on mine. Whenever our hands touched, her fingers were always moving, grazing over mine so lightly I could barely feel them. Yet there it was—her touch. It was like magic.