The girl in the photograph had my face. Same wide gray eyes, same cowlick at the left temple, same thin white scar running from her upper lip toward her nose, where a surgeon had closed the gap I was born with. On the back, in my father's square capitals, it said: INGRID, LAKE QUILL, OCTOBER 1994.
I was born in February 1995.
I sat on the floor of his office with the drawer open in front of me and turned the print over and back, as if one side would give up and agree with the other.
He had been dead for twenty-five days. His reading glasses were still folded on the blotter. The small brass key on his ring had opened the bottom drawer of his desk, the one drawer he kept locked my whole life.
There were three things inside. The photograph. A bronze coin stamped 33 YEARS, which I understood: Dad quit drinking two years before I was born, and apparently he had never stopped counting. And two old keys on a twist of wire, with a paper tag that said LQ.
I restore old photographs for a living. People bring me their grandparents in shoeboxes, water-stained and torn down the middle by divorces, and I bring them back. You learn to read a print the way a mechanic listens to an engine. This one was a 4x6 glossy, the color drifting toward magenta the way drugstore prints from the nineties always drift. On the back, under the handwriting, a lab had stamped its batch code in faint purple: NORTHSTAR PHOTO 10 94.
The lab agreed with my father.
In the picture the girl stood at the end of a wooden dock in a yellow raincoat, holding up a small perch with both hands and grinning around a missing front tooth. Behind her was gray water, a dark line of pines, and at the end of the dock the soft shape of an adult who had wandered into the frame.
She was about seven. I had a second-grade school picture where I looked exactly like that. Same tooth missing, even.
"Ingrid? Are you finding everything?"
My mother's voice came down the hall, cheerful and a little too loud, the voice she'd used since the funeral. I heard newspaper tearing. The realtor's sign had gone up on Thursday, showings started Monday, and she'd given me until Sunday night to clear his office.
I got up off the floor.
She was at the kitchen table wrapping the good plates in old newspaper, corners folded in. Slim and upright, her silver hair set that morning, a pencil behind one ear for the box labels. She'd taken off one clip-on earring to answer the phone. It lay beside the tape, a little gold knot.
"Who's this?" I held out the photograph.
She glanced at it with her hands full of plate. Something happened in her face, very fast, the way a film jumps when the projector catches. Then it was gone.
"That's you, sweetheart."
"It says October 1994."
"Then your father wrote the wrong year. He wrote checks with the wrong year until March, every year. You know that."
I did know that. It was also not an answer.
"The lab stamped it, Mom. It was printed four months before I was born."
"Then it's a reprint." She tore a sheet along the fold, very neatly. "Give it to me and I'll put it with the albums."
"What albums?"
She stopped tearing.
"The basement flooded in 1997 and took every picture from before I was two. That's what you've always told me. There isn't one photo of you and Dad before I was born. Not one wedding picture." My voice was climbing and I couldn't stop it. "So where did this come from?"
My mother held out her hand, palm up, the way she did when I was small and had something in my mouth I shouldn't.
"Ingrid. Give it here."
I put the keys in her palm instead.
Her thumb moved once across the paper tag.
"Lake Quill," she said. "Your father's old fishing place, up north. We sold it in '95." She stood, opened the junk drawer and dropped the keys in among the twist ties. "I have three hundred plates to wrap and a realtor at nine on Monday. Please, honey. Just finish the office."
Her hands, picking up the next plate, were completely steady.
When she bent over the box, I opened the drawer, took the keys back, and put them in my pocket with the photograph.
My studio is two rooms above a frame shop in Northeast Minneapolis, and the scanner cost more than my car. I got there a little before ten and left the overhead lights off, the way I always do when I scan.
I laid the print face down on the glass and scanned it at 4800 dots per inch, far more than a snapshot deserves. I sat in my coat and watched the bar crawl.
Then the girl filled my whole monitor, and I made myself look at her the way I'd look at anyone else's child.
I had been hoping for similar. It was the same scar. The same slight pull at the left of the lip, the same pale stitch-line climbing toward the nostril. I'd spent my teens hating mine in the bathroom mirror. I knew its shape better than my signature.
I scrolled past her, out along the dock, to the figure at the end.
At normal size she was a smudge in a gray coat. Enlarged, she was a woman in profile against the water, looking down at the girl. I sharpened the area, then pulled up the shadows until the grain began to swim.
Short dark hair. A straight nose. And the stance: one hand pressed flat to the small of her back, the way my mother still stands at the end of a long day in the kitchen.
The coat was buttoned only at the top. Below her hand it curved out over her stomach, round and unmistakable.
My mother was standing at the end of the dock behind the girl, five or six months pregnant.
The girl on the dock couldn't be me. In October 1994, I was the one inside her.