The first home I remember is not the house on Bull Street where I grew up.
It’s my grandmother Margaret’s cottage on Tybee Island, 20 miles east of Savannah, with a screened porch that smelled of salt and old wicker and a kitchen that smelled of butter and biscuit dough.
My grandmother kept a Polaroid camera on a little side table by the door, the way other people keep a dish for keys.
From the time I could walk until the year my sister Caroline was born, I lived more nights of the week at my grandmother’s house than at my parents’.
My mother had what she called her quiet times.
My grandmother called them what they were and took me home with her.
I was, for those first 5 years, photographed.
I remember holding a sand dollar up to the lens.
I remember my grandmother saying, “Hold still, Petra. Hold still, my love.”
I remember the click and the white slip and the slow miracle of my own face emerging on the film.
Then Caroline was born in the spring of 2001, and our family began over.
I do not mean that emotionally.
I mean it physically.
Every photo album in our house—and there were six of them, leather-bound on the lower shelf of the dining room sideboard—begins with Caroline in a baby bonnet on my mother’s lap in the Savannah Hospital nursery.
There are no photos before that day.
Page one is Caroline.
Page two is Caroline.
Page three is Caroline.
On page eight, my mother begins to label her photographs with a calligraphy pen.
Caroline’s first smile.
Caroline’s first tooth.
Caroline at the lighthouse.
I never appear in those albums.
Not when I am six.
Not when I am 10.
There is one photograph of me in the entire collection, on page 42 of book three.
My back in a green Easter dress, walking ahead of Caroline through Foresight Park.
You cannot see my face.
The caption underneath reads, in my mother’s handwriting: Caroline at the Fountain.
I once asked my mother, when I was 9 years old, why my baby pictures were not in the family albums.
She was at the kitchen island. She did not look up from her recipe card.
She said, smiling, “Oh, sweetheart, you were a very plain baby. Grandma kept the only good ones, and now they’re gone.”
Then she laughed.
Six women from her bridge club were in the dining room.
They laughed, too.
I never asked again.
My grandmother died in the late winter of 2008.
Pancreatic cancer.
She was 75.
She left a will, my mother said, but it was a small one.
And everything, my mother said, went to Mom’s mortgage and her medical bills.
That was a lie.
I would learn that later.
But that was what I was told at 12 years old, in a black dress, in the back of the funeral home off East Bay, while my father held the camcorder and my mother greeted mourners and my sister ate a butter cookie and slept against my father’s shoulder.
The week after the funeral, my mother took my father’s pickup and a stack of empty cardboard boxes and drove out to Taibbe.
She came back three days later, and the cottage was emptied.
The Polaroid camera, the side tables, the wicker, the kitchen tins, the framed photographs from the hallway—all gone.
My mother said she had donated most of it to the church thrift and burned what was ruined by mold.
She wore a yellow sweater she had taken from my grandmother’s closet, and she kept it as a Savannah housecoat for the next 15 years.
She also brought back four heavy garbage bags.
She did not let me look in them.
I came home from school one day and saw them at the curb in the rain, and a sanitation truck swallowed them whole.
The next morning, I went down to the sideboard in the dining room and pulled out all six leather albums and turned every page.
Every page.
I was looking for the cottage, the screen porch, the Polaroid camera, the sand dollar.
There was nothing.
I asked my mother that night at dinner, “Mom, where are the pictures from Grandma’s house?”
My mother put down her wineglass.
She said, “Petra, why do you always have to make things sad? Eat your shrimp.”
My father did not look up.
Caroline, seven, said, “What pictures?”
We never talked about it again.
I learned to live in a house with no record of myself.
I learned the smell of a sideboard full of someone else’s smile.
I learned that when my mother said, “We don’t have any pictures of that, dear,” it was not the same as saying, “There are no pictures.”
There were pictures.
They had simply chosen not to remember.
When I was 16, my high school yearbook came out.
My mother flipped through it at the kitchen table and pointed at a candid of me on the debate team and said, smiling, “You always make such a strange face when you concentrate.”
She said it the way she had said, when I was nine, that I had been a plain baby.
The exact same smile.
The exact same room.
The exact same audience of bridge ladies in the dining room.
The next year, I turned 18 and I left.
And I never asked my mother for a photograph of myself again.
But I did not forget.
I am a conservator.
We do not forget.
Chapter 4: Becoming a conservator
The first thing I learned at SCAD’s photographic preservation program was that paper has a memory.
Photographs fade.
Paper yellows.
But the chemistry that touched a sheet of paper in 1968 does not leave it.
We can pull a Polaroid out of a flooded attic and, with the right solvents and the right hands, we can bring the face back even when the surface is gone.
I took to it like a girl who had been waiting for someone to tell her that the past could be made visible again.
My second year, my professor handed me a project: a family album that had been intentionally damaged.
Pages razored out.