The husband and wife loved their daughter Frida with all their hearts. Nevertheless, in the end they had to send her away, and in this they didn’t have much choice. For sure she would have killed one of them, most likely sooner than later. The die was cast early one December morning after Frida, which is to say without exaggeration two hundred and eighty pounds of autism and rage, had hurled the husband through the sliding glass door, mercifully left open, straight out of the house and into the little backyard. The husband had only tried to coax Frida out of a growing tempest of self-loathing. She had been inflicting obscenities upon herself in a frightful crescendo. She had paced wildly, punching herself on one side of her head, then the other.
Like a zookeeper the husband had approached. “Frida, please,” he pleaded, coming in close with arms open to take her in, except she had grown so large there was no taking her in. She threw him off as if he were a monkey, and nothing, neither his wife’s screams nor his own howling in pain, nor the bleeding from his hands where he had tried to break his fall on the sharp gravel, had disrupted for one instance Frida’s crazed pacing and self-flagellation.
The next day they had taken Frida away, which is what they had been encouraged to do for so long by everyone they knew—family, friends, especially health professionals. Remarkably, she had not made a fuss.
The following weekend the husband and wife drove to the pier in Santa Monica. They parked their car several blocks away in one of the public parking garages provided by the city. On the way to the pier, they stopped to eat fish and chips. They sat across from each other at one of the tables placed on the sidewalk and were kept warm by a heat lamp. It was neither a happy nor sad experience. It was merely the first time they had eaten like this, just the two of them, in as long as they could remember. They hardly spoke. Mostly they watched—the people walking past, the people at other tables. They watched as if they were tourists from somewhere far away, except for them distance was measured in time—to when they were the kind of young people who had named their first and only daughter after a famed Mexican painter. But that flower had not blossomed.
Once on the pier they felt both light and deflated. Standing close together, the two of them leaned against the cold steel bars of railing and looked down at the waves that were breaking below. The wind blew the wife’s hair across her face. A wisp of it touched the husband’s cheek. They began to feel cold and decided to walk back and take the stairs that led from the pier to the beach. There, three thousand and forty six crosses were placed in neat rows across the sand. Some of the crosses had flowers placed next to them. Each cross, about 12 inches high and made of two pieces of slat wood painted white, represented an American soldier killed in Iraq. People took pictures. A few handed out flyers. There was no way they could have brought Frida here, they agreed. She might have trampled the crosses or picked one up and thrown it. There was no telling.
The husband decided to wander in a few rows, then a few more. Other people did the same. He bent down to read some of the names, along with descriptions of how the soldiers had died. Most had been killed by improvised explosive devices. After a while he stood up. He groaned from the effort and turned to look at his wife. She waited for him, her hands pushed deep into the pockets of her fleece coat. The afternoon’s fog was just beginning to come in from the ocean. Tendrils of it whispered overhead. When he reached her, he asked if she was cold. She shook her head and smiled bravely, but her nose was running. A rivulet of snot reached her upper lip before she sniffed it back up.
“So many dead soldiers,” the husband said. “What a shame.” He reached into his coat pocket. “I’ll take a picture of you.” He turned the camera on and began to lift it to his eyes. A young man stopped and asked, “Would you like me to take a picture of the two of you?” The husband hesitated. He looked at his wife, but she could not help him. “OK,” he said, and he gave the camera to the young man. The husband stood next to his wife and put his arm around her. The young man aimed the camera and told them to smile. They smiled, and he took the picture. He gave them back the camera, and they thanked him. It was a digital camera, and so they were able to take a peek at the picture the young man had taken of them.
“Hey, it’s a good photo,” the wife said. She nudged her husband. The husband looked closer at the image on the back of the camera. He thought that his wife looked good, she was photogenic, but his own face disturbed him. He saw the imperfections and the effects of the years. “Don’t you think so?” the wife asked.
The husband would have liked to delete the photo, but instead he put the camera away and took his wife’s hand in his. With his other hand he rewrapped the loose end of the scarf that she wore around her neck. “Yes, I do,” he said.
But as they walked away, he began to question what exactly was good about the photo. It couldn’t be the subject matter—two people, smiling but tired, and behind them rows upon rows of crosses that signified the deaths of thousands of young people. Perhaps the photo was good because the husband and wife were in focus and adequately centered. Or perhaps it was good because the exposure was neither too light nor too dark. Was this all there was to it? To make a photo good? Somehow the husband didn’t think so. So then why say it was a good photo?
The husband and wife continued to walk diagonally away from the pier and toward the bike path. The wind pushed them forward, but the deep sand slowed them. This was it; they were going home already. The bike path would take them back to the pedestrian bridge that crossed the Pacific Coast Highway to the bluff overlooking the beach, then back to the streets of Santa Monica and the parking structure.
The husband held on to his wife’s hand. He was determined not to let go and to leave no witness but that he was good and that it really didn’t matter about the photo. His heart settled into a steady, efficient rhythm. Soon the husband and wife were back up on the bluff. They turned to look at the pier and the beach one last time. So beautiful. The Pacific ocean looked big as the earth itself. Directly in front of them, just on the other side of a wood fence that separated them from the bluff’s edge, the roots and twisted limbs of a tree barely held on to the crumbling cliff. A crow hopped between the roots, picking up twigs, which he studied, then threw away. Perhaps the crow could not fly or didn’t feel like it anymore. The husband and wife laughed as a pair of ground squirrels teased the crow. Each time the squirrels came near, the crow stared them down, then he attacked. But each time they were too fast.
–Art by Mustafa Dedeoğlu