I was always the one holding the camera
He filmed every recital, soccer game and birthday for nine years. When his daughter needed a photo of the two of them for school, the only one they could find was his reflection in a sliding glass door.
This is a composite story. Names and personal details are invented and combined from real experiences people in this community have shared.
Personal experiences are individual and aren’t medical advice. Talk to a qualified professional about your own health.
The only photo of Luis Ferreira with his daughter from the last five years showed the back of her head, a birthday cake with nine candles, and, if you looked closely at the sliding glass door behind them, a man's reflection holding up a phone.
Rosa found it on a Sunday night. She was eleven, the poster board was due Tuesday, and the assignment sheet said a photo of you with a grown-up who matters to you. She had scrolled the family album for twenty minutes, past four thousand pictures of herself and her little brother Benny, past soccer and cousins and the dog in a sweater, before she turned the laptop around on the kitchen table.
"Is that you?" she said, and pointed at the glass.
It was.
The designated filmer
Luis was forty-six and ran a one-truck irrigation repair business out of his garage. He spent his days kneeling on other people's lawns in full sun, digging out cracked sprinkler heads, and he had the face to prove it: red across the nose and cheeks, brown spots on his forehead he'd stopped counting, lines around his eyes his wife Tess said were deep enough to plant tomatoes in. He laughed when she said it. He also quietly stopped standing near windows.
Somewhere in the years after Benny was born, holding the phone had become his whole job at family events. It felt like love, and mostly it was. He had filmed every recital, every Saturday game, every blown-out candle. He knew how to crouch at the end of a stage so the lights didn't wash the kids out. He had a clip of Rosa's first goal that he watched in the truck on bad days.
And he was very good at never handing the phone off. When another parent offered to get one of the whole family, Luis said thanks, he had it, and tilted the phone so it caught only the kids. When Tess aimed her phone at him, he put a hand up like a celebrity leaving a courthouse, and everyone laughed, and she lowered it.
He told himself nobody wanted to look at him anyway. The thing is, he believed it.
The hallway
Rosa used the reflection photo. He offered to find a better one, and she said there wasn't one, which was true, and she said it without any meanness at all, which was worse.
Two weeks later it was open house. The posters hung along the fifth-grade hallway at kid height, thirty of them, and Luis walked the row with a paper cup of lemonade. A girl with her grandmother at a pumpkin patch. A boy on his uncle's shoulders at a ballgame. A dad and daughter in matching sunglasses, grinning into a selfie.
Then his. A glued-on photo, a little crooked, labeled in purple marker: me and my dad (in the glass).
Other parents smiled at it. One of the moms said it was so creative. Luis stood there a long time, the lemonade getting warm in his hand, looking at a man who had made himself into a smudge on a door.
The long way around
He didn't wake up the next morning a new man. He woke up at 5:40 and went to fix a zone valve at a dentist's office. But that week he did one thing he'd put off for years. He let Tess book him a dermatologist, because of a spot on his temple she'd been pointing at since spring.
The spot turned out to be nothing. The dermatologist, a dry older man with reading glasses on a cord, examined the rest of his face and said that nothing was not the same thing as fine, and talked to him for a long time about sun. Luis walked out with a list.
The list was not exciting. Sunscreen before the truck every morning, and again at lunch, which he forgot for three straight weeks until Tess put a tube in the cupholder where his energy drink used to ride. A wide-brimmed hat that Benny said made him look like a man who owned a boat. Fewer energy drinks, more water. Bed before the late news instead of after. He spent evenings reading, carefully, about what men his age did for skin that had been outside for twenty-five years, and he trusted most of it about as much as he trusted a sprinkler salesman.
In the dermatologist's waiting room, on his second visit, he read a story about a pharmacist who spent six years stepping out of group photos. He recognized the edge-of-the-frame thing. He had never once thought of it as a system. He'd thought of it as being helpful.
It was slow. The redness settled first, over a couple of months. Some of the spots faded; the doctor had warned him some wouldn't, and some didn't. His face still looked like it belonged to a man who worked outside. It just looked like that man had slept, and wasn't flinching at the truck window anymore.
The spring concert
In May, Rosa played clarinet in the fifth-grade concert, off-key and with enormous conviction. Luis crouched at the end of the stage like always and filmed the entire thing.
Afterward, in the crowded hallway by the cookie table, a mom he half knew from soccer asked if he wanted one of the two of them.
He almost said he had it. Then he handed her the phone.
Rosa stood next to him holding her clarinet case, and at the last second she said, "Dad, bend down, you're too tall," so he bent down, and the mom took four in a row because somebody's grandpa walked through the first three.
The fourth one is on the fridge now, under a magnet from the hardware store, right next to the poster, which Rosa has told him he is not allowed to throw away.