My Son Points at the Old Photos and Names the Dead

My son found the old family album in a cupboard and became obsessed with it, the way four-year-olds fixate, demanding we go through it nightly. At first it was sweet — him pointing at faces, us naming them, a little ritual. Then he started naming them first, and getting them right, and the ritual curdled into something I do not have a word for.

He points at my grandmother, dead nineteen years before he was born, in a photograph where she's a young woman I myself can barely identify, and says her name. Correctly. Her first name, which we do not use in the house because there's no occasion to. He points at a great-uncle killed in an accident decades ago, a man reduced to one blurry seaside photo and a sad silence, and names him, and then says, matter-of-factly, 'he doesn't like the water,' which is a thing the family said for years after how he died and has not said in my son's lifetime.

The one that made my mother put the album down and leave the room was a photograph of a group of children, sepia, unlabelled, from her own childhood — a crowd of kids, most of them unknown even to her now. My son put his finger on one small boy at the edge and said a name. A nickname. 'Bunny,' he said, and moved on to the next page, bored. My mother went white and said, into the silence, that Bunny had been her cousin's nickname — a boy who'd died young, of an illness, when she herself was small, a nickname nobody had spoken aloud in over fifty years, that appears on no document, that my son could not have heard because the last mouths that said it fell silent before I was born.