“Mr. Gascon came to see me yesterday. In person.” The hard edge in his voice suggested this was nothing to celebrate. “He told me you challenged him over these unfounded rumors concerning Mendacium.”
Kelly shaped her mouth to respond, but nothing came out.
Arnold jumped into the space she’d left. “All you did yesterday was make a fool out of our entire team, but most importantly, you made a fool out of me. When you’re on company time, you put the team first. You sell the product and its wonders in treating screen addiction in children. You have your sales scripts, and you have the mentoring program if you need help reading them. You need to give 110 percent to survive in this business.”
Kelly couldn’t help herself. “Arnold, I think integrity stands out.”
A bitter laugh. “I know people with integrity. They’re the ones who take my coffee order in the morning.”
Tears welled and watered blooming resentment. Thank goodness this wasn’t a video call.
“Understood, Kelly?”
“Understood.”
Kelly hated just one thing more than not being heard, and that was being lectured. She grasped at the right way to end this call. To save face. But Arnold saved her the trouble.
Kelly rested her forehead on the steering wheel, this time unable to hold back a tsunami of tears. The job that was supposed to be temporary was day by day becoming more permanent—and was eating her alive.
* * *
The knife came down hard on the board as Kelly chopped at onions that brought even more tears. She mulled over the best way to start the conversation with Daniel when he got home. Long ago they could have talked for hours without an agenda. Now she needed to script how to even begin.
She looked up through the tears to see Daniel looking at her, his head cocked, his brow unknotted. “What’s the matter?”
Kelly put down the knife and dissolved. Daniel leaped forward and wrapped her in his arms.
After a few moments, Kelly stepped back and wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“What for? Obviously something’s wrong.”
The mess of her day flooded out of her. “I’m being cut out of my job by my own company, and I don’t think I can take any more.” The sobs racked her. “And Milly needs me . . . and I can’t keep lying like that . . . and with Gramps going . . .” Her hurricane of emotions dragged in every other sadness of life into her storm of tears.
“Let’s talk about one thing at a time. What do you mean being cut out by your own company?”
Kelly stepped back from the counter. “A new bunch of reps who look like they’ve stepped off the catwalk are now my competition. One young woman visited my clients today and tried to sweep them out from underneath me.” Her voice hardened as her anger flickered back to life.
“Can you complain about it? Isn’t there some kind of process for making sure your company doesn’t do that?”
Kelly laughed through the stinging tears. “I did complain. All Arnold did was tell me to compete harder.”
“You said you can’t keep lying like that. What did you mean?”
“There are rumors that Mendacium has serious side effects—giving young children untreatable splitting migraines, among other things. Gascon said today he’d address them, but he didn’t, and I have to tell doctors that our product is fine.”
Milly walked into the kitchen with her phone raised in front of her face and a slight smile.
Kelly glanced back at Daniel in time to see his brow furrow. Please, Daniel, not now.
“Can you confront them at work and ask for some evidence so you can be honest with your clients?”
Kelly felt the disconnection with a jolt. Just listen to me. “If I do that I’ll lose my job . . . which won’t be a bad thing, necessarily.”
Kelly felt Daniel tense. Their usual sticking point, the barnacled reef on which conversations foundered. Milly thumbed in her earbuds and disappeared up the stairs.
“Can you hang on for another month or two?”
Kelly stood back from Daniel and wiped her eyes. “Why is it taking so long?”
Daniel snorted. “It just is.”
Kelly closed her eyes. “I’m not sure how much longer I can hang on. And Milly needs me now.” She opened her eyes to Daniel’s pursed lips. Those knitted brows.
“But if you quit now, we could lose the house and everything we’ve been working toward. I’m trying as hard as I can.”
In that moment, Kelly saw the husband she once knew, not one head down and charging ahead but one without all the answers. “It’s nice to talk again. We used to talk about everything. What happened to those days?”
“It happens to a lot of couples when they get busy or hit this stage in life. It’s normal.”
“Is that what you say to the couples you work with? Things are normal?”
The question was innocent enough as it left Kelly’s lips, but it seemed to reach Daniel’s ears with a pointed intent. He dropped his eyes and strode toward his study, head down, back to his regular distance.
Kelly grabbed the knife. The tears came back as she chopped again at the already chopped onions. She would love to go back to those happier days when the world was in front of them and they were tackling it together rather than it squeezing in on them and pushing them apart. Jasmine’s comment burrowed in deeper under her skin as thoughts she never imagined possible danced around her. Keeping open an empty account at a strange bank. Leaving the man she’d promised to love forever. Returning to their early days would be impossible, but she could force better days ahead.
What would life be like if I left? A daydream scrolled across her mind, one in which she packed her suitcase and threw it in the back of the car, and then drove away from all this baggage.
Nine
The tiny bell jingled, and the waft of chemicals again pinched Daniel’s nose. The smell of something developing.
On a small sign sitting on the unattended counter, a smiling cartoon camera checked its oversized wristwatch: “Back in a minute!” Another relic from another time.
At the back of the lab, a white-and-blue behemoth of right angles and metal took up half the floor space with a gentle hum and occasional clicks. Another relic, from a time when the larger the technology, the more its sophistication.
Daniel made his way to the shelves, drawn in by a wooden box, concertinaed leather separating rich mahogany. The camera sat in the shelf’s center, its thick lens beaming like a cyclops. A burnished gold plaque on the front carried the proud name of its maker: Cameo 1915. This camera was more than a hundred years old but somehow also new. A tiny white square hung from a cotton thread tied to a wooden arm. Daniel gave a low whistle at the handwritten price—$10,000 or W.I.N. These old cameras were valuable. And those initials must represent a photographic term.
A dusty, scratched, black-and-beige box sat next to the Cameo, on top a thick, dirty-white serrated plastic knob and a small cylindrical trigger also in plastic. On the camera’s face was a recessed lens beneath a scratched red label: Kodak. This camera had lived a life.
Daniel fingered the tiny white square that hung from it: $95 or W.I.N. It must not work. This would interest only someone who wanted to relive long-forgotten childhood memories.
Farther along the shelf the cameras evolved with the decades. Shining silver replaced dark wood. The black was a constant but moved from leather to plastic. At the end of the shelf sat a stout, proud camera with a large hooded bulb hovering over it like a gargoyle on a stone crypt. A technological marvel of its day, but its thick buttons and cogs now out of place in a world of screens. Its tiny white paper square announced $500 or W.I.N.
Daniel picked it up and squinted through the viewfinder. The cameras on the shelves sprang to life, the leather now new, the wood buffed, the silver polished. Razor-sharp edges and fine detail. Simon wasn’t kidding; the clarity was incredible.
Daniel swung around to see what the camera would make of the frames on the opposite wall. Slick,
parallel lines of silver hair filled his vision, and Daniel jumped a mile.
“There’s just something about the clarity old cameras provide, isn’t there?”
Daniel fumbled to put the camera back on the shelf. “You scared the life out of me!”
“I hope not. Life is all we have. That, and truth.”
Simon reached for the wooden camera with the concertina nose, his voice a reverent whisper. “This is the best photography, capturing moments of reality. It’s not like today’s technology where software and filters create a world we’d like to believe is real and photographs are deleted because they’re not perfect.”
Daniel forced the cadence from his voice. His professional voice. “You love cameras, don’t you?”
Simon smiled, his eyes drifting beyond Daniel to the shelves. “I love the truth my cameras show. We can’t trust our memories. They gloss over details, change words to ones we wish we’d used, and bury the secrets we try to hide. Photos give us clear memories and show us what really happened. The camera never lies, you know.”
Daniel’s breath deserted him. The phrase from the bottom of Gramps’s camera.
“The camera reveals how our lives truly are. We can’t trick it, even if sometimes we think we can trick ourselves and everyone around us.”
Daniel chuckled. “You should be a counselor.”
“Why is that?”
“You seem to have great clarity, to use your word. That’s what you need when you’re dealing with people’s issues.”
“And your own, I suspect.”
Daniel was taken aback at the sudden switch in the conversation. Simon grinned at Daniel as he placed the camera back on the shelf, and then he clicked his fingers and dropped to his haunches. “That reminds me, once you get your photos back, you’ll want more film.” He pulled a box from under the shelves. “Because of the great clarity of the Olympus HS-10 Infinity, you’ll need a box. We’ve got an opening special on fifty—”
Daniel grunted to put an end to the sales pitch before it eroded even more of his morning. “You gave me one last time. I’m not sure I need another—the photos Gramps took were not very clear at all. In fact, the color was washed out.”
A grin crept across Simon’s face and froze into place. “I know. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
Wonderful? “All I want is Gramps’s last photos.”
Simon swept an arm toward the frames on the far wall. “But don’t you see? These photographs will provide you with great insight and reveal so much about life.”
Daniel looked across the room to the faces framed in dark timber, ornate painted wood, silver, and metal. And at an empty frame closest to the counter.
“Simon, look—”
A soft buzz emanated from the blue-and-white machine. Simon jumped up and sprinted behind the counter, pulling on white gloves. He reached for a handful of photographs from the racks nestled into one side of the processing machine, smiling as he counted his way through them. He put them in an envelope and raced back to the counter, peeled a sticker from a roll under the counter, and sealed the envelope with great care. He held it out to Daniel with a solemn nod. “This is always a big moment, when people find out what their cameras have captured.”
Daniel grasped the envelope, but Simon still held on to it. Daniel pulled a little harder, and Simon let go. He would ask Monique to consult Google again for another processing place. One online even.
Simon rose again on the balls of his feet. “I trust those photographs show you what you need to see. And you can have that roll of film.”
Daniel quick-stepped out of this strange conversation, and the tiny bell jingled at his escape.
The sticker on the envelope—a replica of an old-fashioned wax seal—proclaimed that Simon’s Film Lab provided “greater clarity than you’ve ever had for those moments in life that matter the most.” The weight of the moment settled onto Daniel. He peeled away the sticker and steeled himself for the emotion he knew would come. In his hand, he held the last images Gramps cared enough about to capture before he passed away.
The first photo showed Anna Potts in deep conversation with a couple as they sat in her office.
What?
Daniel flicked through the envelope. The staff of Crossroads Counseling appeared in every photo. These weren’t Gramps’s last memories. Someone in the practice had used his camera. Annoyance bit deep into him. It had to be Peter, the photography buff, but encroaching on personal space like that was out of character for him.
So who took the photos?
“Excuse me!” A woman with a laundry basket full of clothes pushed past him and into the laundromat.
Daniel sputtered an apology, still reeling from the intrusion into his privacy. He would raise it at their staff meeting tomorrow.
He flicked through the photographs again. Anna counseled a couple. Cameron, his business manager, stared out his office window as if dreaming of somewhere else. Jade, his practice manager, had her cell phone pressed into a tearstained cheek. Ordinary photos of ordinary people doing ordinary things. And echoes of the photos from Gramps’s album—his staff didn’t even know their photo was being taken.
In the next photo Anna stood in his office doorway, staring beyond the camera, her head tilted, her cheeks flushed under a faraway stare. He’d never seen her like that, and why would he?
Monique winked at the camera and blew a kiss to whoever was holding it. He reached for his cuffs. So it wasn’t her.
Two faces weren’t represented: his and Peter’s. Friend and colleague aside, a line had been crossed.
In another photo, papers were strewn across a desk, a mix of bills and bank statements. Maybe this photo belonged to someone else and Simon had mixed up two orders when pulling them from the film processor.
In the final photo, a book sat on his office chair. A familiar book. The sharp contrast of two words in chunky black writing on a stark white cover. Two words burned into his memory.
No Secrets.
But something was missing—something he’d seen thousands of times, something that had brought mixed emotions when he saw it for the first time. Pride. Nerves.
His name.
Below the title was white space where his name usually sat. His name had been erased.
Daniel’s mouth went dry as a memory knocked at a long-shut-off door in his mind.
He needed to know two things.
Who took this photo?
And why?
Ten
Han Solo stood tall on the desk in front of Kelly as Dr. Anthony Scott tweaked Chewbacca and Yoda in the line of Star Wars figurines. “This is the downside of keeping children distracted during a diagnosis.”
The soft smiles of animal puppets filled the shelves behind the doctor, and a haphazard, jagged Lego castle teetered on a pint-size table to her left.
Kelly looked back to the doctor and into his searching gaze. “Kelly, I need to ask you about Mendacium.”
Another news alert about the side effects of Rubicon Pharma’s wonder drug had woken Kelly. The company was shutting down the media’s questions instead of answering them.
“It’s a wonderful drug that’s already helped dozens of the children I see when it comes to screen addiction—and I’m grateful for what it delivers. I’m booked up for months with parents wanting to see me for a prescription, so it’s good for the practice. But when I see stories about untreatable migraines in small children, I need to ask questions.”
Kelly flicked a glance at the puppets on the shelf and felt a kinship. “I’ve seen those rumors as well, but I’ve spoken directly with our CEO, and he advises me there is nothing to worry about.”
Kelly weighed that statement and found no lies.
The doctor steepled his fingers in front of his face and drilled her with sparkling blue eyes. “So you can give me a guarantee that Mendacium is safe to prescribe?”
Kelly balanced on the high wire of the company line and delicately toed it. “What I can tell yo
u, Anthony, is that the information I’ve been given from my company is that there’s nothing to worry about.” Each word in that sentence passed inspection.
Anthony’s gaze was unrelenting. “I hope you’re right, because I have two patients after lunch who are glued to their devices. Really young kids too. This would be the obvious treatment, but if there are risks, I won’t hesitate to drop Mendacium, no matter how much of a wonder drug it is.”
Kelly was sure her pulse throbbed an inch out of her temples. “I think you’ll be fine.” She didn’t bother to evaluate that statement, taken verbatim from the morning’s all-staff email. The script for the day.
Anthony’s eyes flashed a softer blue. “Thanks for not overselling me or offering to distract my medical opinion with tickets to the ballet like the other reps seem to love doing. I appreciate your honesty.”
Kelly smiled, although a tinge of guilt tugged at its corners.
Dr. Scott stood and extended a hand. “It’s wonderful to see you, as always.”
Anthony’s soft palm surprised Kelly as a playfulness danced in his eyes.
“Lovely to see you, Anthony—as always.”
She withdrew her hand, too slowly, hoping to finish the conversation on a good note before one too many questions was thrown out. The high wire beckoned again.
The doctor ushered her to the door. “Speaking of other reps, my practice manager has booked in an appointment late this afternoon with someone else from Rubicon. Why do I need visits from two reps?”
Kelly’s head dropped before steel took over her voice. “You can cancel that appointment, Anthony. I’ll take care of your needs.”
“Good to know. Take care.”
Kelly left the doctor’s office, buoyed with the win, however minor. It was good to have one.
The minimal wording from the CEO’s email elbowed its way into her thinking. And the ember of the lie she’d just given Anthony Scott, savior of children with a damaging obsession with a tiny screen, burned slow in her heart.
The Camera Never Lies Page 5