1
There is a white scar across the photograph on the landing, running from the top left corner down to the middle, and where it crosses the group of people it takes out one face entirely.
2
The photograph is from 1963. It shows eleven members of my family outside a church in Sligo after a christening. Ten faces are perfectly clear. The eleventh, third from the left in the back row, is a white streak.
3
I spent most of my childhood deciding who it was.
4
The obvious candidate was my great-uncle Fintan, who left for Boston in 1965 and did not write, and whose name in my grandmother's house was said in a slightly lowered voice. He was the right height, roughly, judging from the shoulders, and the story had the correct shape: a person removed from a photograph is a person who has been removed from something. I did the work a child does, which is to say a great deal of it and none of it well. I took the photograph off the wall twice a year and measured the shoulders against the width of a matchbox, and I went through every other picture in the house for a man who might match, and there were four. I asked my cousin, who was eleven, and she told me there had been an argument at the christening itself, a detail she produced instantly and could not repeat the same way a year later. By the time I was fourteen I had assembled a fairly complete account in which the scar was a deliberate erasure, and the fact that nobody would confirm it was itself the strongest evidence.
5
I asked my grandmother directly when I was nineteen. She looked at the photograph for a while and then said she had no idea who was third from the left, and that the scar had been on it when it came back from the chemist.
6
I did not believe her. I want to record that, because it is the part I am least comfortable with. I decided she was protecting Fintan, and I said something to that effect, and she was hurt in a way I did not understand until much later, and the conversation ended badly.
7
What resolved it was not a confession. It was a shoebox, in 2011, containing the negatives.
8
The negative for that frame has the scratch. It is a physical gouge in the emulsion, about four centimeters long, of the kind produced by grit in the film path — and the grit had been there for two more frames, because the two negatives adjacent to it have the same scratch in progressively different positions. I looked at them the way negatives have to be looked at, against something bright, holding the strips up to the kitchen window one at a time with the light of the road coming through them. They were in glassine sleeves gone brittle at the folds, eight strips of six, numbered along the edge by the film itself, and the christening runs from frame nineteen to frame twenty-eight. The box had sat in a wardrobe since my aunt moved house, under a bag of curtain hooks, unopened because nobody knew whose it was. Those two frames were never printed. There is no version of this photograph without the white line, and there never was, and the damage happened inside a camera in County Sligo in 1963 before anyone had seen the picture at all.
9
So there is nothing behind the scar. There was never anything behind the scar. The face that is missing is missing in the way that a face outside the frame is missing, which is to say not at all — it was simply never recorded.
10
I had built a person out of an absence, and then built a family story out of the person, and then treated my grandmother's failure to confirm the story as proof of it.
11
I have thought about why the empty version was so much easier to hold than the accidental one, and I think it is this: an erasure has an agent. It implies somebody decided. A scratch implies nothing, and a photograph with a meaningless flaw in it is harder to live with on a landing than a photograph with a secret, because a secret is at least a shape.
12
The story had also traveled, which I did not learn until later. I told the erasure version at a wedding in 1999, to two cousins and an aunt by marriage, and in 2014 one of those cousins told it back to me as something she had always understood about the family, with a detail added about a letter being burned. I had put that letter into the account myself at nineteen, and I had known even then that I was inventing it.
13
My grandmother died in 2016. I never showed her the negatives, which I could have done in the five years I had, and I have no explanation for that except that it would have required me to begin by saying I had not believed her.
14
The photograph is still on the landing. I have not had the scar digitally removed, though it could be done in an afternoon and my cousin has offered twice. Ten faces and a white streak, and the streak is the only part of it I have ever really looked at, which I now think says more about me than about 1963.