Cavanaugh’s off-the-cuff remark—Zeb managed to find his dad’s collection of old things. It was a shoebox in the upper shelf of his closet behind sweaters and folded dress shirts, and Zeb located it one day after school hours but before Oliver would get home. Like his mom’s, this historical capsule contained newspaper clippings. It also held a couple of eight track cassettes: Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album, The Beatles’ Yesterday , The Moody Blues’ In Search of the Lost Chord . But the most startling and interesting thing he found in the box was a stack of yellowing photographs. They were of a naked young woman. Her skin was porcelain, her hair dark, and Zeb was sure it was his aunt Sicily until he realized that, despite similar appearances, the naked lady in the pictures was actually his own mother, Sadie Nadine Redfield.
Jackson Cavanaugh, son of the King and Queen of Cheese was right: his mom was a babe. A total babe.
Zeb guessed the pictures were taken before the wedding, during a courtship that lasted less than a year, he knew. She was smiling and giggling, clearly pleased, maybe even drunk. Some shots were from behind her, over a shoulder as she smiled at the lens, some where from the front as she lay in a hammock that looked like it was stretched across an apartment’s living room. Across her in some shots fell the shadow of the photographer: undoubtedly his father. Oliver had taken, or at least saved, nearly seventy shots of his young and darling soon-to-be bride. Some were Polaroid and some where color prints from a 35 mm. Some were in black and white and some actually showed great skill in their composition. It was stunning for Zeb to see all that flesh, nipples, hairy parts. In his mind’s eye, his mother wasn’t a woman. She was a face, a kind and loving one, but just a face.
Zeb looked at those shots for a long while, shuffled through them. They made him embarrassed at first, later even made him aroused, but most importantly they made him witness to a new side of both of his parents. His mother was vulnerable. She was open and content. And his dad could actually take time to do fun things, even showing skill with the camera. Zeb could nearly hear his father’s voice beside his mother’s giggles: Put your arm this way, Sadie-babe. Look back at the camera. That’s it, Sadie-babe. He pictured Oliver laughing along with Sadie, laughing right along with her behind the camera. Over your shoulder, yeah, just like that —he said in Zeb’s mind as she laughed and teased— you look so beautiful . Zeb looked at the pictures and he saw them happy, both of them deliriously happy. And that was something he had not remembered from his whole lifetime. Not ever.
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Zeb’s outward existence, he realized, moved along in big sloppy intervals that interchanged popularity with solitude. Almost without any help from himself, it seemed.
When he was little, his world consisted of his mother and his water paints. Then he found complete solitude.
Or, perhaps, it found him.
Years before these figurative curves had claimed him, though, years before he even cared about such sloppy up-and-down waves, Zeb’s mother took him to Wonderland, a premier theme park in Vaughan, a drawing point from all over the country and the Atlantic states as well. Families that were closer to Toronto than Disney World in Florida planned their summer holidays around trips to Wonderland; it was a big deal to go.
Zeb was eight, his mother just twenty-nine, and on that crowded, sweltering Saturday he begged her to take him on the Bat, a corkscrew rollercoaster that launched its passengers up and down in a series of extreme curves before sending them through a vomit-inducing loop. And when she finally succumbed to his pleas, that notorious loop made Zeb feel like his insides were going to rip loose too. But it was that last part, that part when the coaster finally slows, when the thrill feels like it’s
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