Five Pictures of Grace Polk, a joan of arcadia fanfic

Disclaimer: If I owned this show, do you think I'd let Hilary Duff guest-star?

A/N: This story kept bugging me, and held a gun to my head at one point, so I wrote it. In doing so, I make up a whole bunch of backstories for characters that have had only about 10 minutes of screen time on the show. Yes, I'm fully aware that I'll probably be jossed when it comes time for May sweeps. This is unbeta-ed for now because my lovely beta is off on vacation - come back, Hope! Also, beware of anvils.

The baby picture on the Bat Mitzvah invitations is the portrait of Grace at six-months, taken professionally at the only studio in Arcadia your mother-in-law approved of. If it were up to you, you wouldn't have chosen that picture, but it's not up to you. In fact, you've had remarkably little say in the whole matter concerning your daughter's Bat Mitzvah.

It is understood that you are mostly responsible for showing up sober, and when you try to help with anything else, talk to the caterers or book the place for the party, Grace growls quietly and tells you she will take care of it. You let her, of course, because who are you kidding? You haven't been able to take care of anyone or anything for a long time.

So you get yourself a beer (just one) and curl up with a photograph album, flipping through the endless snapshots of smiling faces when you see that picture again, the perfect picture of Grace that you've never really liked.

It is a beautiful portrait of course, as promised by the photographer, who specialized in capturing images of angelic-looking children for their parents to remember them by. You dislike the picture for that very reason: it is a lie, and the baby in the picture is not Grace.

The Grace you remember did not wear frilly dresses or keep bows in her hair or smile at the camera in the fake, bright way that you smile at people now. The Grace you remember fought whenever you strapped her into the car seat, pulled off the hats you put on her head and hurled them across the room, and shrieked every time you gave her a bath. Grace was never charitable with her smiles, but when she did smile, the world lit up for you, and you could forget, for a moment, the suffocating emptiness of your house and the way your family was slowly sucking out all the oxygen in your life.

There is a picture of Grace, somewhere inside this photo album or maybe another, in which she is slurping on two of her fingers and staring into the distance, looking pensive. This is the picture you would have chosen, because this is the Grace you remember. A solemn little girl, sometimes looking mildly irritated by the stupidity of the people around her, sometimes looking as though she couldn't wait to conquer the future.

But everybody prefers a perfect picture, a little lie that the camera tells, so the picture sent to relatives, kept in purses and taken out during family functions, is always the one of Grace, six months, smiling into the camera in a yellow dress with embroidered daisies.

You hate that picture because it is a lie, like many other things in your life.

So you keep it, to remind yourself; you keep it framed, in silver, by your bed.

ii.

The second picture is a drawing ripped from Elizabeth Rove's sketchbook, a rough pencil sketch of two children sitting in a sandbox, hard at work.

You knew Elizabeth from high school. She was a quiet girl, the top art student, and you worked with her the year you worked in Student Council and allocated money to her for an art fair. You two were never friends, because she was destined to stay in Arcadia forever, and you had bigger, better dreams of elsewhere. It wasn't until you sent Grace to preschool and she didn't get along with any of the children except for one little boy that you remembered Elizabeth.

Grace and Adam were an inseparable pair, which meant you and Elizabeth were too. Every Wednesday after school, you and Elizabeth and the children had lunch together, and then you would go to the park. Grace didn't like the slide (too much waiting in line) and Adam was wary of the jungle gym, so they stayed in the sandbox.

Near the sandbox were two spring-loaded, bobbling toys, and Grace always took the turtle while Adam took the duck. Grace argued that Vincent (the turtle) was always faster than Burt, and whenever Adam's lip trembled and his eyes began to water (because it wasn't fair Burt always came in last), she would roll her eyes a little and say, All right, Vincent can slow down so Burt can catch up and they can hold hands and run beside each other.

When they tired of the sandbox and Vincent and Burt, you and Elizabeth would take them to the ice cream stand and buy them Fudgsicles, even if it spoiled their appetites and stained their clothes and made their fingers sticky. You knew you shouldn't, but it always delighted Grace and Adam, and Elizabeth too, so sometimes you got one yourself and tried to ignore the ice cream that was dripping off your daughter's chin and onto her shirt.

That was what your friendship with Elizabeth Rove was like: afternoons in the park, Burt and Vincent, Fudgsicles from the ice cream vendor. She sat beside you on the bench by the sandbox and drew in her sketchbooks. You watched the children sometimes, and other times you watched her draw, andevery now and thenyou realized what she drew resembled nothing that you saw.

You envied Elizabeth Rove, because her life was so small, yet she never wanted anything else. When she looked at the children, she saw smiles and sandcastles and sun-dappled hair; when you looked at the children, you only saw chocolate stains and carried-home sand you would never be able to get out of your house.

You wished you could see the world as Elizabeth did, but you couldn't. Perhaps this was why you were friends with her: she complimented you perfectly; she was light and you were dark.

You can't remember when that picture was drawn or when Elizabeth gave it to you, but you do remember spending hours poring over it, trying to find the secret to Elizabeth's ability to view the world with such open ease.

The trips to the park stopped after second or third grade, and you stopped talking to Elizabeth around the time she lost that baby, the little girl who was never buried. You didn't know what you could possibly say to her, and by then, you were seeking better solace in a bottle of vodka.

You do remember the last time you saw her. It was November, and you were shortcutting home through the park. Vincent and Burt had long been ripped away, the sandbox destroyed, and in their place stood a tangle of plastic and metal in bright primary colors. The bench was still there though, and Elizabeth was sitting as she used to, only she no longer her sketchbook with her.

You called her name but she didn't respond. You sat down beside her and saw in her eyes that she was already gone. You bought her an ice cream bar, placed it to her lips, but she couldn't remember how to eat it, couldn't remember how to swallow. So you threw it away in the garbage, and took off your coat to put it around her. You held her hands, her once-artist hands that were nothing more now than frail bird-bones. She looked at you and said, I think I need to be somewhere else. You nodded and took her home, told Carl to keep a closer eye on her.

The next week, she was dead.

You didn't go to her funeral. Instead, you stayed home, made a toast to her from where you lay on the kitchen floor.

Once in a while, you find yourself studying that picture again, the old drawing that is starting to yellow and curl in the corners. You no longer wish to have what Elizabeth had, because it didn't manage to save her in the end. Instead, you simply wish to see your two children as you can no longer remember them. Children in the truest sense of the word, children who didn't know or have to worry that their mothers would fail them.

Elizabeth failed her child by leaving, and you failed yours by staying.

When you look at that picture, you revisit a simpler time, when neither you nor Elizabeth saw what was coming.

iii.

The third picture is really a memory.

One evening during dinner when Grace was in first grade, she announced to you and your husband that she was going to sell her soul to the devil for Splashes the Beanie Baby.

Your husband, more amused than anything else, set down his fork and said, Gracie, my girl, we're Jewish. Jews don't believe in the devil.

Grace scowled and flattened her pile of mashed potatoes a spoon, and you thought it was a shame your mother-in-law never came for dinner when the conversations were actually interesting.

That night, while your husband contemplated which of Grace's gentile friends was teaching her about the devil, you wondered if you should find some way to obtain the much-desired Splashes for your daughter. Your husband thought it was ridiculous, the whole Beanie Baby craze was ridiculous and Grace would abandon the toy in two weeks, but you knew Grace rarely wanted anything so much.

Grace didn't like to beg. She never whined for a new toy when she passed by Toys R Us, or pleaded for cookies and candies when she walked down the snack aisle of the supermarket. (This didn't mean you didn't buy them for her, because you understood the importance of a Fruit Roll-Up every now and then.)

So Grace must have really wanted this toy in order to ask, and you wanted to give it to her. After all, it was highly inappropriate for the rabbi's daughter to sell her soul to the devil.

You asked around and learned that a store in Baltimore would be releasing the second run of Splashes in a few weeks, and when the time came, you forced yourself out of bed at an unholy hour and drove fifty miles to wait outside in the dark at five in the morning. There were other parents whose children had also made a pact with the devil, as well as avid Beanie Baby collectors, one of whom tried to buy yours for twice the selling price when you finally got yours around lunch time.

You called your husband to tell him, and he chided you for encouraging this type of ludicrous behavior, but you knew if he didn't have to be at the synagogue and if he could wake himself up at 2:00 AM, he would have done it, too, for Grace. Maybe your husband knew more than you gave him credit for, but then he began asking about how you were enjoying co-chairing the new book club with Miriam Goldberg, so maybe he didn't know much after all.

Grace was still at school when you got home, you placed the stuffed whale on Grace's nightstand and started that horrid novel Miriam Goldberg had chosen as this month's selection. You had your finger in chapter three of Anna Karenina and your eye on the latest episode of General Hospital when Grace's bus dropped her off.

She tore through the back door and bounded upstairs before you could tell her to slow down. Mom, she called out, Adam's coming over. We're going to build a fort and that's going to be our secret hideout and nobody can go in there except us.

Then it was silent, and you weren't sure if Grace had found the toy or if she was busy scouring her bedroom for fort-building materials, so you put down your book and went to check on her. You had scarcely made it to the bottom of the stairs when she ran down, throwing herself into your arms.

Thank you thank you thank you, she said. She had one arm wrapped around Splashes, hugging it to her chest, and one arm around your neck, clinging onto you like those koalas in travel documentaries of places you would never have a chance to go. She was getting almost too big for you to carry, but normally Grace would never let you baby her, so you took the chance while you had it and toted her up the stairs. You carried her back to her room, where she told you what happened in school and you listened to her talk until Adam arrived.

When you look back now, which you do often, you always wish you could have had a camera to capture the way she looked at you as hurtled down those stairs towards you. It was a look of pure joy, and love, and trust. It was the look of a child who still believed her mother was capable of magic.

You've read somewhere or watched on TV that when people die, their whole lives flash before their eyes.

When you die, you only wish for that moment again.

That is the picture of Grace you will take with you forever.

iv.

The centerpiece for the fourth picture is really Great Aunt Esther's sunflowers, which had, that summer, crossed the line from phenomenal horticultural triumphs to menacing freaks of nature. There is only a hint of you in the photograph, standing on the porch and hidden by the flowers, but the camera manages to capture Grace standing at the other end of the porch, glaring at you.

It was the last Annual Disastrous Polonsky Family Reunion you went to. That was the Year of Great Aunt Esther's Sunflowers. The year before was the Year of Uncle David and Uncle Harvey's Great Fallout. The year after, you were told, was the Year Sarah and Grace Didn't Show Up, as was the year after that, but by then everybody convinced themselves that it was because you had gotten in a fight with Rebecca or Jenny, and Grace was opposed to the Styrofoam cups and plastic cutlery Esther bought in bulk.

Mostly, you remember the sunflowers. You remember sitting in the car on Esther's driveway for ten minutes, staring at the bright yellow monstrosities. Your husband had turned off the ignition. He sat quietly, hands still on the wheel. Grace was in the backseat and you could see her scowl from the rearview mirror.

You made a joke about the sunflowers, how if one of the blossoms fell, somebody would get seriously injured. Your husband smiled a little, but you knew he was wondering if you could make it through the party, and Grace jammed her headphones over her ears and looked out the window. It had been a month since Becky Coogan slept over, and she hadn't been able to look at you in the eye since.

Finally, Esther and David came out of the house and you put on a happy smile. You hugged and they remarked on how much Grace had grown, and soon you were caught up in greeting other relatives and exchanging stories of what happened in the past year. Your husband disappeared to discuss death and taxes, and Grace was ushered off to play with her cousins, which meant the cousins were huddled around the PlayStation while Grace sat on the other side of the room with a look of scorn on her face.

You found yourself caught in a dispute between Rebecca and Jenny over whose cake recipe was better, and at some point, somebody poured you a glass of wine. You wanted to refuse, but it was early in the afternoon and listening to Rebecca's story of how her grandmother brought the cake recipe from Poland was not something you wanted to do with a clear head. You brought the glass with you onto the porch, where you sat down, closed your eyes, and took a sip.

When you opened your eyes, Grace was there, and something about the way she looked at you made you want to grab her shoulders and shake her hard.

It wasn't that she was angry. You could deal with her being angry; you would understand if she was angry. But she wasn't. There were many things contained in the look on her face, but anger was not one of them. Disappointment was one, resignation was another, but not surprise or anger or hatred, and you thought that the lack of that last one was the worst. It would be so much easier if Grace hated you, because maybe then you could finally convince yourself to finish packing the other half of the suitcase in your closet and get the hell out of that house, out of Arcadia.

But Grace loved you, and that held you back. You loved her enough to let her, but you didn't love her enough to keep your promises. That didn't stop you from making them, even though you were beginning to realize that nobody believed them, not even yourself.

Still, out of habit, or maybe out of peace of mind, you got onto your feet and tried to walk over to Grace, telling her, Gracie sweetie, it's just one glass. Just one. I'm not going to have any more.

She stood, studied you for another minute - that was the moment captured on film by whoever was taking the photograph of the sunflowers - and then she turned around and left, stuffing her sloppy ponytail under her backwards baseball cap.

The next year, you stayed in bed, and Grace chopped off her hair with your sewing shears.

There is a mix-up at the photo lab, and for a while nobody knows what happened to Grace's Bat Mizvah pictures. Finally, the photo place calls one morning to tell you that the prints are ready for pick-up. When you arrive, the clerk apologizes for having taken so long. Something about some confusion as to whether it was Polk or Polonsky. But now the pictures are ready, the young man says with the enthusiasm of someone who hasn't lived enough life. I hope you don't mind me saying, Mrs. Polonsky, but some of them didn't turn out so well.

He suggests that you should buy a digital camera, one of the greatest inventions of this century, right next to the iPod and the Tivo. With a digital camera, you can make sure that your pictures turn out just the way you want them to, and if they don't, you can always delete them from your memory card.

You have no interest in what the clerk is talking about, but you let him ramble on about megapixels and avi movies and Kodak print stations they have at the store. You nod and smile at the right places; after all, he is simply doing his job, and you are doing yours.

When you get home, you fix yourself a cup of coffee and lay out the photographs on the kitchen table. The clerk is right: most of them have turned out all right, but a few are too dark, a few too bright, and one or two are out of focus.

There are the obligatory family photos (you looking happy, your mother looking lost, Grace looking desperate), and there are funny candids (one of Grace and her friends trying to smack Ruth Friedman's son), and then there is the one picture, as there always is, that stands out from all the others.

It is one of the imperfect pictures that the clerk from the photo place would have deleted if it had been on a digital camera, and it is the only one where the camera doesn't lie.

Grace's face is blurry in the photograph; the camera caught her in mid-movement, but you can see that she is smiling. She is glancing up at Luke, who has his eyes on her and is laughing at something. From where she stands beside Grace, Joan glowers at them with a perfect mixture of amusement and annoyance. Adam is the only one who is looking at the camera. He has his arm around Joan's shoulder. He smiles Elizabeth's smile.

This is the picture that you want to keep on the mantle. This is the picture that makes your fingers tremble, your breathing hitch as you begin to cry. This is the picture that contains all the happiness you've wished for your daughter, but are unable to give her yourself. This is everything you've ever wanted for Grace, and you are glad that she was able to have it, even if it was only for a moment, even if you hadn't been the one to give it to her.

You know that your husband, when he comes home, will pick through the photographs and choose the best to show his friends, and they will not include this one. You know Grace will feign disinterest and threaten to burn the negatives, and afterwards she will take the photographs back to her room. You know that she won't see what you see, because nobody ever does, and you will want to talk about it later, show her that picture and talk about it, but it's been so long since you've talked to your daughter and you know you can never find the right words.

You know that in time, the magic will wear away, and that picture would just be a picture to you then, as it is to everybody else.

That is how it works: sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes a picture is just a picture, nothing else.

So you pour yourself another drink.