Shared Album

Crosswind’s Red Eye Horror #014

I’ve gone back and forth on posting this because I know how ridiculous it sounds.

My ex-wife has the same screenshots I do, so at least I know I didn’t imagine it. We don’t agree on what happened, but we agree that it happened. I’m hoping somebody here has a boring explanation I haven’t thought of.

The shared album started a few months after our divorce. It wasn’t some emotional decision or last attempt to stay connected. She texted me one night asking if I wanted an invite, I said yes, and that was pretty much the end of the conversation.

By then we’d gotten good at communicating the way divorced people do. Pickup at five. Dentist appointment got moved. He needs new shoes. Can you check his backpack for the library book? The album was just another logistical solution to another logistical problem.

Honestly, it ended up being one of the better ideas we had. If he did something funny at my house, she’d still get to see it. If he lost another tooth during her week, I’d get the picture before she remembered to tell me about it. The little moments didn’t belong to one parent anymore, and after a while nobody even thought about the album. Pictures showed up, people reacted, and life kept moving.

The only predictable thing about the album was my ex’s mother. Every single upload got the exact same comment.

“My handsome little man ❤️”

It didn’t matter if he was smiling, crying, covered in mud, or wearing a superhero costume three sizes too big. She somehow managed to type the exact same thing every single time.

The part that bothered me was that she lived less than an hour away and almost never showed up for anything in person, but she never once missed a picture and more than once I hovered over the button that would remove her from the album.

I never pressed it, mostly because I figured she probably wouldn’t notice.

My son turned five this spring.

Five is a ridiculous age because they’re old enough to have opinions about everything but still young enough that none of those opinions make any sense. Every conversation starts with “Guess what?” Sometimes he actually has something to tell me. Most of the time he forgets halfway through and just stares at me until I start guessing random things.

“Daddy, guess what?”

“What?”

“No, guess.”

“Did you see a dinosaur?”

“No.”

“Did you learn a new song?”

“No.”

Then he’ll stand there another ten seconds before shrugging because whatever he wanted to tell me has apparently vanished forever.

He’s also reached the age where every minor inconvenience becomes a national emergency. A few weeks ago he cried because syrup touched his pancakes. There wasn’t too much syrup, and he actually wanted syrup. It had simply made contact with the pancake before he was emotionally prepared for it.

I still don’t know how to parent around that.

Right now his entire personality revolves around monster trucks, specifically Megalodon. If you aren’t familiar with monster trucks, Megalodon is the shark one, which explains why he loves it and his mother hates it. She’s terrified of sharks in a way that isn’t funny. The Discovery Channel makes her uncomfortable. Pictures of open water make her uncomfortable. He figured that out exactly once and immediately decided the giant insulated Megalodon cup he got for his birthday was now the only cup he would ever drink from.

That thing goes everywhere. It rides in the backseat, sits on the bathroom counter while he brushes his teeth, and one night he even tried taking it to bed because he was worried it would “get lonely.” If he comes to my house without it, somebody is driving across the subdivision before dinner to go get it.

If you scroll through the shared album long enough, the cup becomes its own supporting character. It’s on the kitchen table, the soccer sidelines, the couch, the playground, and half the pictures in the album have that stupid shark smiling at the camera.

Everything else in the album changed from week to week. That stupid shark cup somehow ended up in almost every picture.

I work in IT from home, which mostly means people calling me because something “suddenly stopped working” only to discover twenty minutes later that they never actually restarted it. The job has its moments, but one upside is that nobody really cares where I am as long as I answer my phone and fix whatever broke.

Most days I eat lunch standing at the kitchen island with my laptop still open. I tell myself I’m taking a break, but I’m usually reading emails with one hand while reheating leftovers with the other. After enough years of working from home, the line between work and home gets blurry.

Somewhere along the way I got into the habit of checking the shared album during lunch. I don’t know exactly why. Maybe because the house was quiet or maybe because it became part of the routine the same way checking the weather or the mailbox becomes part of the routine. Half the pictures were things I already knew happened because my ex had texted me about them. The other half were little moments that would’ve disappeared forever if somebody hadn’t pulled out a phone.

Anybody remembers birthdays and Christmas morning. It’s the random picture of your kid asleep in the backseat with one sock missing or sitting on the driveway eating a popsicle before it melts all over his shirt that catches you off guard years later.

I’ve never been very good at deleting things.

My phone still has videos from when my son couldn’t pronounce “excavator,” a picture of a grilled cheese sandwich because he insisted it looked like Texas, and about forty nearly identical pictures of him asleep on the couch because every time I lowered the phone another sock seemed to disappear.

Storage warnings don’t bother me anymore. I just pay Apple another few dollars every month and move on with my life.

The first picture showed up on a Tuesday. I only remember that because Tuesdays are the days my son comes over after preschool, so I was already looking forward to the afternoon when my phone buzzed with a notification saying a new photo had been added to the album.

He was sitting on the couch at my house with cartoons on in the background, the Megalodon cup tucked against his leg, a blanket wrapped around his feet, and one sock halfway off because apparently his feet reject fabric whenever he sits still.

If you’d asked me about it an hour later, I probably couldn’t have described it. It looked like hundreds of other pictures already sitting in the album, and that’s exactly why I never expected to remember it.

Later that afternoon I was on a video call with someone from accounting who insisted they’d already restarted their computer even though the uptime counter on my screen suggested otherwise. While they were talking, the picture drifted back into my head for no obvious reason and I realized I couldn’t remember taking it.

That shouldn’t have bothered me as much as it did. What bothered me was that I usually took too many pictures. I’d snap ten nearly identical photos before realizing he’d already moved on to something else.

When the meeting ended I opened the album again and tapped the information button, expecting to find it had uploaded late or synced from another device.

Instead the timestamp said it had been added tomorrow.

I frowned at the screen, checked the date on my phone, glanced at the clock on my computer, and even looked at the microwave display, which doesn’t make much sense now except that my brain had already decided one of them had to be wrong. They all agreed.

I closed the app, finished my workday, and spent the drive to preschool convincing myself there had to be some boring explanation involving cloud storage or time zones that I just hadn’t thought of yet.

By the time I picked my son up, I’d already talked myself into believing the whole thing was a software issue. Working in IT probably makes that easier. Spend enough years around computers and you stop assuming impossible things are impossible. Usually somebody forgot an update, a clock drifted out of sync, or a database did exactly what it was told instead of what it was supposed to do. Most problems have boring explanations, and I’ve built an entire career around finding them.

He climbed into the truck, made me guess dinosaurs, sharks, pizza, lawnmowers, and monster trucks before admitting he’d forgotten what he wanted to tell me, then spent the drive home making engine noises loud enough that I couldn’t hear the radio. He built a city out of couch cushions, informed me adults needed construction permits to enter, and later gave me a surprisingly detailed explanation for why monster trucks should be allowed through the Chick-fil-A drive-thru because they were technically trucks.

I carried his dinner into the living room and stopped without understanding why. Nothing looked wrong. It just looked familiar. The blanket was wrapped around his legs the same way it had been in the picture, the Megalodon cup leaned against his knee, and the same cartoon played in the background. It wasn’t an exact match. His hair was different, the blanket twisted the opposite direction, and the cup sat a few inches closer to the armrest, but I still found myself pulling out my phone and comparing the room to the picture longer than I’d like to admit.

If somebody had walked in they probably would’ve thought I was trying to remember where I’d left my keys.

Eventually I sat down beside him and let it go. Within thirty seconds he was asking whether sharks could drive monster trucks underwater, and somehow answering impossible questions from a five-year-old felt more important than asking impossible questions about my phone.

That night I opened the album again because I wanted to see whether the timestamp had fixed itself.

I refreshed the page, closed the app, opened it again, and even checked from my laptop because I convinced myself my phone had to be displaying something incorrectly. Nothing changed. The picture was still there, and the upload information still said tomorrow.

I finally gave up sometime after midnight, but the next morning I checked again while my coffee was brewing and the timestamp still said tomorrow.

By lunchtime I’d almost convinced myself to stop caring. Meetings piled up, tickets piled up, and the picture had already started feeling less like a mystery and more like one of those little glitches you eventually stop noticing.

Then another notification appeared. A new photo had been added to the album. I expected another picture from preschool or maybe something my ex had taken in the backyard. Instead I found a cereal bowl tipped onto its side, milk spreading across my kitchen table, the Megalodon cup lying on the floor, and my son standing beside the chair with the exact expression kids wear when they’re trying to decide whether honesty is the best policy.

I must have looked at that picture for five minutes because I couldn’t stop wondering why anyone would take a picture of spilled milk instead of cleaning it up.

The next afternoon I heard cabinet doors opening and closing in the kitchen, then the cereal box scrape across the counter, then the refrigerator, and finally one quiet little “Uh oh” that immediately made me stop what I was doing. Parents eventually learn there’s a version of “Daddy” that means somebody wants you to admire a Lego tower and another version that means the problem has already happened.

When I walked into the kitchen, milk was already spreading across the table. The bowl had rolled onto its side, the Megalodon cup was lying on the floor, and my son stood perfectly still trying to calculate whether honesty was going to work out in his favor.

What has stayed with me isn’t the mess.

It’s that for one completely irrational second I reached toward my pocket before I reached for the paper towels.

My phone wasn’t coming out because I wanted to take a picture.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I was trying to remember whether I already had one.

I never told my ex about any of it.

Not because I thought she’d laugh. We actually got along better after the divorce than we had during the last year of our marriage. We stopped trying to fix each other and focused on raising our son instead, and somewhere along the way we settled into something that looked less like a failed marriage and more like two people working the same job from different offices.

Still, every version of the conversation sounded ridiculous in my head, so I buried the whole thing under work and routine until it slowly started feeling stupid.

For a while, that actually worked.

The album went back to soccer pictures, library trips, drawings that required captions because neither of us could tell what they were supposed to be, and another comment from her mother calling him her handsome little man.

I got better at ignoring it.

The text from my ex came on a Wednesday just before lunch while I was deciding whether reheated chicken was worth eating.

“Did you stop by the house this morning?”

I read it twice because the question didn’t make any sense. We lived in the same subdivision, but I had no reason to be there and she knew I’d been working all morning. I told her no and figured she’d texted the wrong person.

A minute later she sent another message with a screenshot from the shared album.

“Then who took this?”

At first it looked completely ordinary. Our son was asleep on her couch with the blanket kicked halfway off and the Megalodon cup lying on the floor beside him. There wasn’t anything unusual about him or the room.

It took me a second to understand what she was asking.

The only unusual thing was where the picture had been taken from.

I knew that hallway well enough to picture exactly where the photographer had been standing because I’d stood there myself a hundred times carrying laundry upstairs or waiting for my son to brush his teeth before bed. The angle wasn’t impossible. It wasn’t hidden.

It just wasn’t where a parent naturally stops.

If your kid falls asleep on the couch, you walk into the room. You straighten the blanket, pick him up, carry the cup to the kitchen, and head upstairs. You become part of the moment without thinking about it.

Whoever took that picture never did.

They just watched.

I stared at it until I noticed she’d sent one more message.

“I didn’t take that.”

I remember opening the album again and comparing the screenshot she’d sent to the one already sitting in front of me. I must’ve looked back and forth a dozen times before accepting they were identical, and even then I spent another few minutes trying to convince myself I was missing something obvious.

Mostly, though, I remember trying to imagine the person standing in that hallway. I couldn’t think of any reason a parent would stop there.

That thought stayed with me the rest of the day. Work happened around it. Dinner happened around it. My son wanted to know whether sharks got hiccups, and I told him I honestly had no idea because my brain was somewhere else entirely. By bedtime I’d almost convinced myself there had to be another explanation I simply hadn’t found yet.

Then, out of habit more than curiosity, I opened the album one last time before putting my phone on the charger.

There was another upload waiting.

At first I thought I’d accidentally opened the same picture because the couch, the blanket, and even the Megalodon cup all looked exactly the way they had before. It took me a few seconds to understand what my brain was trying to tell me.

The room hadn’t changed.

It was just empty.