Andy watched DeVaughn grow from a baby cradled in his mother’s arms to a toddler who stood, holding her hand and looking up with adoration, to a little boy with a Wiffle bat, to a bigger boy with a bike. He saw the pictures go from black-and-white to Polaroids to color. Mr. Sills grew an Afro, and wore a succession of eyeglasses, each pair more enormous than the last, while his wife traded her ironed dresses for bell-bottoms and turtlenecks. The pictures all had the same thing written underneath them— DeVaughn Anthony Sills, April 14, our “pride and joy.” They went all the way through 1978, when the pattern broke. There was the April shot, with DeVaughn smiling as he put one large hand on his father’s shoulders and the other one on his mother’s back. Then there was another picture, taken only a couple of months later. Same spot on the street, in front of the house where Andy was now sitting, same arrangement—son standing between mom and dad—only this time, DeVaughn was in a cap and gown. The cap seemed to float on top of his cloud of hair, and the robe was dark-purple with gold accents, Roman Catholic’s colors. Mr. Sills was smiling so broadly that his glasses had been lifted to eyebrow level, and Mrs. Sills, in a brightly colored patterned shirt that Andy thought was called a dashiki, held a white handkerchief in one hand. “High school graduation, 1978,” Mr. Sills had written.
There were no more pictures after that one, just a blank page, followed by a single clipping from the Examiner: Arrest Made in Murder Case.
A 19-year-old man has been charged with murder in the wake of a shooting in Kensington. DeVaughn Anthony Sills was arrested Monday in connection with the October slaying of David Cassady, who was found mortally wounded on the 200 block of East Indiana Street at 4:29 a.m., police said. Cassady, 19, had been shot once in the abdomen, and was pronounced dead at Temple University Hospital later that morning. Eyewitnesses say they saw a dark-colored sedan drive up Indiana. The driver then rolled down his window and shot Cassady, police said. They are now searching for the car’s passenger and the murder weapon.
My father, Andy thought. His knee was bouncing, faster and faster, causing the plastic-topped pages of the album to bounce against his other leg.
He turned the page. On November 26, 1980, a Common Pleas Court jury convicted DeVaughn Anthony Sills and Andrew Raymond Landis in the 1978 slaying of Kensington native David Cassady.
Andy stilled his leg and his drumming fingers and made himself get up, go to the kitchen, find a glass, and drink some water. Change the setting, change the mood, his therapist, the one he’d seen for a year, used to say. When he got stuck in the spiral of feeling insurmountably embarrassed, she’d taught him to make himself go outside if he was in, or inside if he was out, to interrupt the plummet with something as simple as making a cup of tea or spending a few minutes working on a crossword puzzle. He’d downloaded apps for Sudoku and Whirly Word on his phone and had stocked his cabinets back in Brooklyn with a dozen different varieties of herbal tea.
Back in Mr. Sills’s living room, he sat, thinking. The windowsills were lined with potted plants, a half-dozen orchids with white and pink and purple blooms, succulents and aloe plants and cacti that Andy hoped he could convince some of the neighbors to take. He imagined his old friend cutting these stories out of the newspaper, centering them on the page, annotating them in his own handwriting—DeVaughn was all he’d put beneath the article. How had it felt to write his son’s name there, the way he had for each of the birthday shots, and the pictures of DeVaughn on his bike, at his T-ball and softball games, at a dozen birthday parties and Christmases? What had it cost him, to put those letters down on paper, underneath the stories about the awful things his “pride and joy” had done?
For years following DeVaughn’s conviction there were no pictures at all. Mr. Sills had left a few blank pages, as if he and his wife and his imprisoned son had disappeared, had fallen down into the hole of their grief and pulled the manhole cover up over the top. Andy wondered if he’d gone to visit his son and what that had been like, and whether anyone had thought to bring a camera.
When the pages started to fill again, Mrs. Sills’s hair had been cut very short and was starting to go gray. Mr. Sills had put on perhaps twenty pounds, and had shaved off the extravagant mustache he’d worn during DeVaughn’s high school years. Andy noticed the way Mrs. Sills’s mouth always turned down at the corners, where previously she’d greeted the camera with a sunny smile, and the way Mr. Sills’s eyes looked weary behind the lenses of his glasses, as he and his wife posed, arm in arm, at picnics and weddings and family reunions in Fairmount Park, at anniversaries and retirement parties and christenings. Midway through 1982, there was a picture of a niece’s Sweet Sixteen. Then another blank page. Andy’s fingers began drumming as he flipped and saw, under the plastic, not a photograph but, instead, a black-bordered program. Lavonia Rita Sills. 1942–1983. There was a picture, a black-and-white shot of just her face in profile, centered beneath the dates, and then the words Who can find a virtuous woman, for her price is far above rubies. Strength and honor are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.