“Hey,” he said, “you wanna see pictures of Bunny as a baby?”

I had already mentally imagined at least a dozen ways this night could go, but I had not imagined Ray would suggest something I would actually want to do. “Of course!” I said.

He paused, gave me a smirk I couldn’t interpret. “You want me to pour you a glass?” He gestured with the wine bottle.

“Oh, that’s all right,” I said.

“C’mon,” he said. “I won’t tell if you don’t.” And he got down another jumbo wineglass and poured enough red wine in it that a goldfish could have comfortably swum around in there. I felt ridiculous, though I accepted the glass. I had no intention of drinking any of it, but I did not wish to be rude. “That’ll put hair on your chest,” he said. Before I could think about it, I said, “What I’ve always wanted—chest hair.”

I was worried this would offend him, but instead he laughed uproariously and clapped me on the back.

He led me to his office, that wonderful wood-paneled room that no one ever seemed to spend time in, and pulled down from the shelf two fat black leather-bound photo albums. We sat, he on the big brown tufted chair, I on the ottoman, and he opened up what seemed to me another world. No one my age had printed photos, our childhoods were on memory cards, but Ray Lampert must have been a man who liked real cameras and developing film. The pictures were of an overexposed, brightly sunny, ’90s world I could hardly recognize. He skipped hurriedly past the photos that interested me most, which were the wedding photos and early pictures of Bunny’s mother before Bunny was born.

There was one large photo of Bunny and her mother that hung in the upstairs hallway, a posed portrait with a black background that must have seemed modern at the time. The woman I saw there was a pretty ice bitch: small features, pearly skin, glossy brown hair, an oatmeal-colored sweater. Bunny was dressed in a white T-shirt, both of them were wearing jeans, and they stared at the camera with a certain smugness, like they were members of a select club. But these more candid photos showed Bunny’s mother, her name was Allison, to be silly, goofy even, mugging for the camera, making the west side sign with her fingers. She had a tattoo on her upper arm, though he flipped by too fast for me to properly see what it was; I thought a flower, something delicate and faded. In their wedding photo she was wearing a simple white cotton dress and holding a bouquet of Technicolor daisies, so happy she seemed delirious, and I had the overwhelming impression that she was some kind of white witch.

And then there was Bunny: a large, fat, potato-y baby, so big it looked like her mom was holding a Christmas turkey. She was often dressed in weirdly Victorian clothes, and even as a baby they had put black patent-leather Mary Janes on her tuberous little feet.

“She was such a funny little girl,” he said. “You might think she was a tomboy, but no, it was princess princess princess.” There was Bunny in a pink swimsuit and clacking plastic Minnie Mouse high heels dripping water all over the foyer. There was Bunny frustratedly peeling an orange at some kind of picnic table. There were Bunny and her mother, safe and rocking in a big white hammock, some beautiful, exotic-looking locale in the background. I saw that her mother had been a gardener, and their yard, assuming it was the same house, which perhaps it was not, had been a wonderland of plants before the pool was put in. I saw Bunny, perhaps five, pulling a carrot from the ground. On her head was a hastily twined crown of wildflowers that clashed with her red T-shirt.

The older Bunny got in the photos, the less interested I became. By the time she was in middle school the only photos of her were taken before, during, or after games. There were no images of her not in some uniform or another. But those early photos of her fascinated me, and I wished I could go back and really look at the divide in her life: before her mother’s death, and then after. When she ceased to be part of a scene that her father was documenting and began to be posed artificially, always on her own. Was I imagining the sadness I saw in her smile? Or was it an effect of the camera flash, the glossy way the photos had been printed, that made her seem trapped in those images, sealed in and suffocating behind the plastic sheeting of the photo album?

“Thank you for showing these to me,” I said.

“Aw, thank you for looking at them! I don’t have many people to share these with.” While I objected to almost everything about Ray Lampert, in that moment I was able to really like him, to feel I knew him. His skin had the clammy sweet smell of my own father’s when he was drunk, and for a moment I missed my dad so intensely I became light-headed. The night my mother had been arrested, they didn’t let us go to the ER with him, maybe because he was so drunk. The squad car, my mother handcuffed inside, drove off; the ambulance, my father recumbent inside, glided into the dark, sirens like the call of a robotic whooping crane; and I assumed that Gabby and I would stay in the house. We had been alone in the house so many times, I didn’t even think about it, and I was horrified when I understood that we were going to be taken, against our will, somewhere else.

We were driven to some lady’s house in Torrance. She was a retired nurse with a mastiff named Cookie. We stayed with her for three days and no one came to get us. Why didn’t he come then? He could have waltzed in, flashed his photo ID, and legally claimed our lives. But he didn’t. What did he do during those days? Did he sit in our empty house and think about things? What did he decide?

After the first seventy-two hours, we were moved to another house, this time in Inglewood, a house full of kids, the oldest of whom was named Renaldo and who stole my pajamas. I was involuntarily extremely attracted to him, and I can still viscerally recall what it felt like to be that mad and humiliated and turned on at the same time. I found out later that Aunt Deedee tried to come get us in those first three days, but she didn’t have the right paperwork to prove she was related to us, and she had to wait until our detention hearing. But at the detention hearing, dear old Dad suddenly showed up. And the judge had to decide who to put us with: him or Aunt Deedee.

What did she say? What did she dare say in front of him, to his face? Had she seen the bruises on Viv’s neck? Had she noticed the way Gabby flinched when someone moved too quickly? I imagine him getting redder and redder—he was always angriest when he was ashamed—and blurting out, “This is bullshit, Your Honor, this is fucking bullshit.” He was like an eighteen-year-old who one day woke up in a thirty-five-year-old man’s completely fucked-up life. Whatever she said, it was enough. The judge awarded her custody, and set a jurisdictional hearing where my father would have a chance to defend himself and regain custody. But he never showed up at the court date they set, and I had not seen or heard from him since. I knew that if I did see him now, he would take one look at me and know that I was gay, and his shame and disgust would ignite in a whoosh, and all the love that had ever been there would be gone.

Bunny was lucky to have Ray as a dad. That’s what I was thinking when Ray’s phone rang. He checked the number. “Shit, I gotta take this. Business.”