Still In Pictures

     “Sara, listen to yourself.  You’re not being rational.”    

Amber’s voice carried the intensity of a negotiator pleading for the release of hostages.

Sara tried to focus through her tears. 

     “I’m telling you it’s him!”  Sara wailed, looking off and remembering.  It was if she had just lost him.

     “Sara, you’re my best friend, but Bobby was six years old when he died.  You were there when the doctors turned off his life support.  This is insane.”  

      Amber continued, begging Sara to listen to reason.  She made a lot of sense.  Bobby was only six when the car wreck left him brain dead.  Sara had been driving the car, her head turned toward the backseat telling Bobby to quiet down.  She never saw the light change, or had time to react to the car that hit her broadside at Bobby’s door.  She sat by his side for three days before her husband and the doctors forced her into letting him go. 

      Sara’s grandfather once told her that in even in the most insane notion there is a wisp of reason.  The kid she saw on the news tonight was Bobby.  Okay, so to everyone else it was a crazy idea.  It had been ten years since Bobby supposedly died.  This kid looked to be sixteen.  He was on the news with a group of students who were competing in a ski competition of sorts.  It had been snowing for days and the ski resorts were enjoying one of their best seasons.  It was one of the perks of living in Colorado.

     In her heart, Sara knew it was Bobby.  Everything that was maternal in her confirmed it.

     “Sara, are you even listening to me?”  Amber was crying now, knowing her voice fell on the deaf ears of a mother desperate for her lost child.

     “I’m telling you it’s him.’  Sara shoved the picture she had been clutching toward Amber.  For ten years this had been her only relief from grieving… her only relief from being unable to forgive herself.

     “Oh Sara, you promised you wouldn’t do this again.”   Amber looked at the picture of the teen.  “Are there others?”  Sara wouldn’t answer.

     Amber abruptly got up from the kitchen table and walked to the den.  Her heart sank as she looked around the room.  As expected there were pictures of Bobby up to the age of six when he died.  However, the chronology didn’t end there.  The pictures continued to the present.  Pictures of Bobby playing baseball, riding his bike, graduating middle school, all taken years after his death sat around the room. 

     “I’m telling you it’s him,” Sara pleaded while following Amber into the den, holding the picture of Bobby tight to her chest.  “Just wait till I tell Sam I found him.  He’ll come home for sure.”

     Sam was Bobby’s dad and Sara’s estranged husband.  He stayed with her for eight years after Bobby’s death.  He stayed through years of medication, therapy and mental institutions.  In desperation he even turned back to the very God he cursed when his only son died, anything to try to save his wife, his marriage.  Always when he thought they were making progress he would come home from work and find more pictures.  Ultimately, he realized in order to let Bobby go, he had to let Sara go. 

     Sara enlisted the help of a computer graphics artist to keep Bobby alive.  Amber had heard about using computer technology to project what missing children might look like as they turned older to assist with finding them.  Sara was using the technology to keep Bobby alive.  She invented a life for him.

     This wasn’t the first time one of the computer-generated images resembled another child.  Twice before Sara had been arrested.  On the year that would have marked Bobby’s eighth birthday she attacked a woman in a department store, convinced the child with her was Bobby.  He looked just like the picture she carried.  Another time, when Bobby would have turned twelve, Sara began making visits to a boy she saw on a little league baseball team.  Sara almost had him convinced he had been kidnapped as a child when his parents found out, had Sara arrested, and got a restraining order against her.  In both instances Sara had spent time in a mental institution in an agreement to avoid incarceration. 

     To Sara, mental hospitals were just a game some people had to play.  Whether you’re willing to play the game and how well you play determines your length of stay.  Sara saw Amber pick up the phone.

     “You’re calling them aren’t you?”

     “Sara, I love you… you know that.  We have to get you help.” 

     The game had started.  Sara knew she had little choice but to play.  She would sit bored through the endless monotony of sessions that filled each day.  She would politely complete the required tests that appeared to have been written by someone with a child’s intellect.  She would nod, smile, say yes or no, cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s if it made them happy.  She would live a lie to gain freedom to pursue the truth.  Bobby was alive, regardless of what anybody said.

     She had the pictures to prove it.