The gray hairs had been the first sign.

They’d started to sprout after Rachel stopped dyeing her hair, the occasional silver streak running through her short, dark locks. It had been endearing at first – Rachel had always appeared younger than her years, almost ethereal, and that first reminder of her years made her somehow more real.

There were other signs as well – loose skin and wrinkles where he hadn’t noticed them before, as well as inexplicable aches and soreness at the beginning and end of each day. She’d be forty soon. He couldn’t say where the time had gone.

The insomnia was another change. Rachel had always kept later hours than he did, but lately it had gotten to the point that she couldn’t get to sleep before two in the morning, no matter how she tried. On top of that, her restlessness made her irritable, and it was hard for him to muster affection for her in her perpetually sour mood.

‘Too tired to sleep’, she said. As if that meant anything. And so it was another woman who appeared unbidden before him late at night.

Her face had been one of many he’d glimpsed while digging through hundreds of family photographs. His aunt Maria had recently passed, and in doing so willed her entire library of albums to his mother, who had in turn delegated the task of organizing so many volumes to him.

He’d first seen her seated among four other women in the back of a flatbed truck, somewhere hot and barren. Her golden hair crackled in the heat. Sweat beaded on her neck and chest, freckled in the summer sun. She wore a dark red bandeau and cut-off shorts cinched with a wide belt.

There was an entire collage of these images. The blonde in the tube top joined her friends in rock climbing, in comparing tans and drinking beer by a campfire. He didn’t recognize any of the women in the pictures, though they must have been family. And as he’d been sorting those photos, one more slipped out.

Her eyes were wide in the last photo, one hand reaching toward the camera and the other moving just too slowly to cover her breasts. Despite being caught unawares, she laughed, as if the nude picture was just a prank between friends. She was perhaps twenty years old, her young body tight and firm, her dark eyes sparkling in the camera flash.

Bertie had started seeing her in his dreams. She’d appear to him like a mirage to a man parched with thirst, and she’d take him in her mouth without question or hesitation. Or she’d remove that belt, her shorts dropping into the sand. Underneath she would be bare, her full bush glistening, and she would invite Bertie to drink his full of her – once the belt had marked him to her satisfaction, of course.

Or maybe he’d be the one taking her over his knee. That mischievous grin told him that she was a brat - maybe it was Bertie’s turn to be on top again. He was a little out of practice, but anything was possible in dreams.

It didn’t feel right to have these thoughts. But she wasn’t so much a person as a harmless fantasy. Surely there wasn’t anything wrong with that?

“Are you alright there?” his mother asked, pointing with her chin.

Bertie looked up from his task. Almost a full half of Maria’s photos were loose in their boxes, either fallen out of their albums or having been randomly found elsewhere and tossed into the pile. He’d been hoping for another sighting of the blonde in the tube top, but he’d so far been disappointed.

“I’m just preoccupied,” he explained, and then added, “Rachel hasn’t been feeling well the last few weeks.”

Alicia limped up beside him, inspecting his work. She’d refused to use a cane after her fall on the stairs, but without it she ended up dragging her boot cast around the house. Bertie didn’t see how it was any improvement.

“I’m not really surprised. When’s the big day again?”

“The end of this year.” He sighed. “I’m starting to lose sleep, too. She’s up all hours of the night, and when she does get to bed, she’s never comfortable. I’m kind of glad to be gone by the time she wakes up—“

“Welcome to middle age. And you might want to muster up some sympathy for your poor girlfriend, because she’s not much older than you are. Soon you’ll be the one waking up in the night without remembering why.”

To be honest, Bertie still thought of himself, if not as a young man, then at least young-ish. He still had a full head of hair, and his eyesight and hearing were as sharp as he’d ever remembered. The college students who worked for him still spoke to him as a peer in their off-hours.

But Bertie hadn’t really come into his own until his mid-twenties – he was very much a late bloomer, and he’d comfortably spent his life since then (ten years!) in the same apartment, with the same partner. Before that, the only woman in his life had been Alicia.

He considered his mother. Growing up, his relationship with her had revolved around him trying to meet the standards she’d set for him. He’d worshipped and hated her in equal measure, but at some point that dynamic had changed. She’d become personable, even fragile, as her latest injury showed. The shifting expectations and the passive-aggressive motivation had just… ended, that part of his life finished without comment.

“Mom… Does it get better?”

“Getting old? No, but you get used to it.”

The blonde in the tube top would be an old woman by now. In his mind, he’d tried to construct what she’d look like, to no success. Neither cellulite nor stretch marks could mark that sun-kissed complexion; no crow’s feet could touch those lovely eyes. The photograph had trapped her in amber.

Amber. She had a name now.

***

She sat at the edge of the mesa, looking down on the valley below. Bertie had read in a book that it got cold in the desert at night, but she seemed comfortable enough with only the small fire for warmth.

There was no other light but the stars.

“We need to stop meeting like this, Bertie. It’s not healthy.”

“Because I have a girlfriend?”

“Because even you think we’re probably related. I’m all for keeping it in the family, but there’s a limit, you know?”

“Amber…”

“You know that’s not my name, right?”

In the firelight, she looked different than she had in the photographs. Her cheeks were dimpled, thin hair lining the edge of her jaw. He realized that she was younger than he’d taken her for, maybe only seventeen or eighteen – about half his age.

His mother and her family weren’t close. He knew she had a sister. He’d heard about some cousins, but he couldn’t put any faces to the names.

“Are you my Aunt Maria, then?”

Amber laughed, a braying noise that echoed off the canyons.

“You mean Maria Gordinha?” She patted her flat stomach. “That doesn’t sound like me, does it?”

“To be fair, I’ve never met her. She and Mom had some kind of falling out before I was born.” He padded around her on the flat stone, sizing her up. “Cousin Luisa?”

“Is this really what you want to do right now?”

She pulled up the blanket on which she’d been sitting and pulled one end over her shoulder. She offered the other to Bertie.

A stiff breeze reminded him of the desert chill. He took the blanket, cuddling beside her for warmth. This close to her, he couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d met in the waking world. There was something too… familiar?

“No funny business, mister,” she warned him, her breath hot against his cheek. “You don’t want me to have to spank you.”

It was a tempting idea.

“I know you, don’t I?”

She was getting bored of the game, he could tell. But the faint recognition that she’d awakened nagged at him the closer he got to her. After a moment, she tugged at one side of her top.

Bertie was expecting a birthmark or a tattoo, but she kept pulling until the breast popped free, her nipple pert and hardened in the cool night air. He almost averted his eyes, purely out of habit.

She pointed with her chin. “Cop a feel. See if it jogs any memories.”

He cupped his hand underneath, his thumb tracing the ring of her areola. She shivered, both from the wind and from his touch. Still, as kind as her invitation had been, it left him more confused than before. He felt as if he should nestle his face into her chest, but couldn’t articulate why.

“Nothing? I know it’s been a while.” Her fingers crept in under his beltline.

Bertie shook his head. “You’d think I’d remember that. And whatever happened to ‘no funny business’?”

“Hey man, it’s your daydream.”

***

“Bertie, focus!”

The album in his hand was cheap, a ten-cent journal in its day that wasn’t designed to handle the rigours of time. It crumbled in his hands, its contents floating down to the carpet.

He didn’t even remember picking it up.

Alicia hobbled over beside him, shepherding the fallen pictures as best she could with her foot. Bertie was going to suggest that a broom might be more useful, and then he noticed the writing on the back of one of the photos.

Drumheller 1975.

He flipped the picture over. It was the same landscape he’d just seen in his fantasy, this time in the light of day, and he could see from the pile that it was one of many.

He passed the first image to Alicia. “Do you remember this?”

She squinted a moment, and then nodded.

“I’d just gotten accepted to university along with one of my cousins – you don’t know her. So with Maria having just gotten married and Luisa and I heading out of province for school, we thought we’d have a big farewell party in the badlands.”

“Sounds like fun.”

Alicia snorted. “I remember being sunburned and hungover for most of it. The things you do when you’re young.” She shuffled through the photos until she came to a round young woman in the passenger seat of the familiar pickup truck. “That’s your Aunt Maria. We used to call her—“

“Chubby Maria, right?” Catching himself, he added, “I think you told me before.”

“Ah, so you’ve been paying attention.” She found a group photo further down. “That’s my sister-in-law Patty in this one, Maria never liked her but insisted that she come anyway. Luisa I mentioned already…“

…And Amber, he saw, throwing up a peace sign from the truck’s bed – that just happened to be directly behind Maria’s head. Clearly, she’d been the troublemaker of that group.

“Where are you in these?” he asked, not wanting to seem conspicuous.

Alicia gave him an odd look, almost as if she were hurt.

“I guess the years haven’t been kind,” she said, and pointed.

Bertie blinked.

“It’s the hair, isn’t it? Take it from me - never use bleach right before going someplace hot and dry. Of course, in that getup nobody was looking at my hair.” She handed the photos back to Bertie. “Have you found any more of these?”

“Uh, no,” he lied.

She held her gaze, but if she suspected the truth, she didn’t say it.

“Your uncle Carlo took those pictures,” she said finally, “Maria’s husband. They’d only been married a few months when we made that trip, but he was the only one of us with a truck. It earned him a lot of goodwill with my family. Being out there in the desert, surrounded by all those… young ladies…”

“Mom?”

Alicia perked up. “I think that’s enough sorting for today. They won’t go anywhere before the next time you come over. “

There were easily another four boxes of albums, but Bertie was glad for the reprieve. It had often felt awkward to hug his mother as an adult, as if somehow she’d shrunk since the last time they’d touched. Now he had a new reason for his discomfort.

“And Bertie? If you find the rest of those pictures… burn them.”

He couldn’t, of course. Not because of the lingering fondness he still had for the memory of Amb—the girl in the photo, but because the fire alarms in his apartment building were notoriously sensitive. He settled for dumping the photos with the bathroom garbage.

The last one was the hardest to let go of. Her hands over her bare breasts, that embarrassed smile in the light of the camera flash – Bertie had almost let himself believe they’d been for him, as if they’d been waiting for him, long before he would be born. But they were someone else’s memories, somebody else’s story.

Someone else’s secrets.

“Did you have dinner at your mom’s?”

He startled at Rachel’s voice. She’d been still in her work clothes when he got home, on the computer, headphones on, blind and deaf to the world. At some point since then, she’d taken off the headphones – and also the clothes.

It was always her thighs that drew his attention. The most prominent part of her naked body, they’d gotten plumper over the years and lined with thin blue veins. He’d learned that they’d gotten more ticklish as well. She stood waiting for him, one hand cocked on her hip, the other holding a towel against her chest.

“Bertie?”

“No, I haven’t had dinner. But I could eat,” he added.

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Honey. I still need to shower, and probably trim my nails. But if you’re still awake after that… maybe.”

She slipped past him into the bathroom, expertly dodging his attempt to pinch her butt, and shut the door.

She wasn’t the same young woman he’d fallen in love with, all those years ago. In many ways, she was better – more comfortable, more willing to show affection, more confident in her own skin. And more to the point – Bertie couldn’t stop time, for Rachel or for anyone else.

“Bertie?” Her voice came out muffled by the barrier. “Why is there a bunch of vintage porn in the trash?”