We found it behind the drywall in the second bedroom, the one we were opening up to put the closet in. My husband did the demo — he likes that part, he says it's cathartic — and I was pulling the insulation out in sections, working my way along the stud bays, when the Polaroid fell out.
It landed face-down on the subfloor. I picked it up.
The first thing I noticed: it was white-bordered, the old kind, with the square image and the wide white bottom. The image had faded somewhat, the colors shifted toward yellow, the way Polaroids do when they're twenty or thirty years old. This made sense — the drywall we were removing was original to the house, which was built in 1962. Something left in the wall in the eighties would look exactly like this.
The second thing I noticed: the house in the photograph was this house.
I don't mean a similar house. I mean this house, identifiable down to the specific crack in the living room plaster that we'd been meaning to patch, the particular angle of the afternoon light through the south window, the way the newel post at the bottom of the stairs has been painted over so many times that it has a slightly lumpy profile. Our furniture, not the furniture of previous owners. Our rug. The quilt from the back of the couch that we brought from our old apartment.
This house, as it exists now, furnished as we have furnished it.
The third thing: we were in it.
In the living room, visible through the doorway at the back of the photograph, a woman is sitting on the couch. She is me. The posture is mine — slightly hunched, one leg tucked under — and the shirt is mine, the blue-gray henley I've owned for three years. She is reading something. She is not looking at the camera.
At the edge of the frame, in the kitchen doorway, a man's arm and shoulder are visible. My husband's flannel shirt. He is facing away from the camera.
I am looking at a photograph of my husband and me in our house, on what appears to be the basis of the furniture arrangement and the quilt — yesterday afternoon.
I do not remember being photographed. My husband does not remember being photographed. We do not own a Polaroid camera. There was nobody else in the house.
We put the photograph in a bag. We called the non-emergency police line and were told, politely, that there was nothing criminal about a photograph being found in a wall. The officer suggested a previous owner may have taken a photograph of the house at some point and it resembled our current arrangement by coincidence.
I did not mention the blue-gray henley. I did not mention the quilt. I knew these details would not survive the transition into a police report.
My husband went back to the demo the next morning. I was at the kitchen table when he called me into the room. His voice was strange — flat and careful, the voice he uses when he's making sure not to react before he understands something.
I went in.
He was holding the wall open, the drywall peeled back along the next stud bay. In the bay, resting on the bottom plate, was another Polaroid.
In this photograph, we were looking at the first photograph. I could see myself holding it, my husband leaning over my shoulder. The angle was from above — from the ceiling, roughly — looking down. The detail was sharp enough that I could read my own expression. I looked afraid.
I was afraid.
Behind us, in the photograph, taken from above and behind, there is a third figure. Standing in the doorway of the bedroom. Facing us. The resolution was not high enough to make out the face.
We have not continued the renovation. The walls are open. We have not patched them. We have not looked at what is in the remaining bays because I am not sure I want to know the sequence and I am not sure I want to see how recent the most recent photograph is and I am not sure I want to see who is in the background.
The photographs are in a box in the car. We are not sleeping in the house.
We are not sleeping anywhere very well.