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.

He names the dead. Not all of them, not consistently, only sometimes, only when the album is open and the mood takes him, in the same offhand tone he'd use to name the characters in a cartoon. When we ask him how he knows, he gives the maddening non-answer of the very young: 'I just know them.' When we press — gently, we're careful — he sometimes adds a detail, and the details keep being right, and keep being things he has no way to know, and my mother has started finding reasons not to be in the room for album time.

He's five now, and it's fading, the way everyone says it fades — he names fewer of them, and gets one wrong sometimes now, which is oddly a relief. Soon, I think, he'll look at the album and see only strangers, the way I do, the way you're supposed to. But for a year my little boy turned the pages of our dead and greeted them by name, including a fifty-year-buried nickname, as easily as if they'd all just stepped out of the room, and I will never open that album again without waiting, half-hoping, for him to say one more.