Nia Rivera
Since there was no more yard work to do and the commercial was finally finished, Hal and Callie were helping me clean out my desk and straighten up around the office. One of my mother’s mantras is that you should always leave something better than you find it, so I cleaned my desk and was wiping it down with disinfectant as Callie emptied out all the drawers.
“Man o man, Nia, you should be on that show Hoarders or whatever it’s called,” she said, pulling junk out of the drawer. “How did you manage to collect so much stuff so fast?”
“Other people use this desk, too,” I grumbled. “And apparently they are not Ramona Rivera’s daughters and have no idea about standards of cleanliness . . .”
When the desktop was cleaned, I started on the file drawer. I pulled the files out one by one and handed them to Hal who wiped them down and stacked them boy-fashion (which is to say, sloppily) against the wall. As I was pulling the last file out of the drawer, I noticed a white square of glossy paper pressed down into the bottom of the drawer. It looked like the back of a photograph.
Gingerly, I peeled the photo from the bottom of the drawer, and when I turned it over, I gasped.
“What is it?” Hal asked, leaning over. Callie, too, stopped.
I held the photo up so they could see it. A girl about our age was standing behind a little boy, her arms draped around his neck. They were both smiling. The girl had long, red hair, and both the girl and the boy appeared to be wearing clown costumes.
“Hang on a minute.” Callie whispered. She took the photo from me, holding it carefully between her fingers. “That’s Amanda wearing one of her wigs.”
I nodded, and pointed to the boy in the photo. “So who’s this little boy with her?”
“Oh my goodness, where did you find that?” The booming voice behind us startled us, and I turned my head to see Barbara looming over us, a huge smile on her face. “I thought that photo was gone for good! Let’s see: that’s Iggy Two and his mentor Amy Vincent the Halloween party.”
“Iggy Two?”
Barbara chuckled. “Ignacio Juarez, Jr., but nobody called him that. Everybody just called him Iggy Two. That picture was taken right before they left us.”
“Where’d they go?” Callie asked.
Barbara thought a moment. “Well, Iggy Two went to live with his grandparents somewhere out west, and Amy…well, Amy just stopped showing up. The Halloween party was the last we saw of her. Guess she was pretty heartbroken about Iggy Two leaving. They were like peas and carrots.”
After Barbara walked away, Hal took the picture from Callie, examining it. After a moment, he started to smile. “Hey, check it out. Look what’s in the background.”
We leaned in, and a closer look at the picture showed that Amanda and Iggy Two were standing just in front of the tree with the AV + IT written on it.
I laughed. “Of course! Iggy Two,” I said. “Iggy Two is IT.”
This photo of Amanda is just what we need--the beautiful twins of affirmation and confirmation. She’d really been here, at this center. She’d mentored a little boy named Iggy Two. And ok, now they were both gone, but they had been here, and that counts, somehow, it really counts.
ICUPEEKING
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