by Lisa Samson
“Well, he should have been paying attention.”
“You’re angry at him? Sara, don’t be. I was the clumsy one, not Finn.”
She bears the pain with uncomplaining nobility. Only her ashen skin and the way she hunches her shoulders forward protectively betrays how much her finger must hurt. The nurse settles us into a small examination room.
“Sit up there and the doctor will be with you,” she says, motioning Aunt Bel onto the paper-lined adjustable table.
Another nurse taps on the door twenty minutes later and takes Aunt Bel away—just down the hall for X-rays. Alone in the room, the curled corners of the anatomy charts—the human eye in cross-section and the cardiovascular system—and the gritty floor tiles do little to inspire confidence. I can feel my heart thumping with anxiety, and yes, with anger: at Finn for letting something like this happen, at myself for not putting up a fight when he suggested letting her try the press, for letting my busyness overrule my better judgment.
Aunt Bel returns with a different nurse this time.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
She shrugs. “They don’t tell you anything.”
We wait another half hour or so for the doctor to arrive, a tiny Asian woman in pearls and lavender scrubs who takes one look at the X-ray in her hand and says, “Oh yes, you did a number on yourself, didn’t you?”
“It is broken?” I ask.
“In two places—here and, you see, right along here.” She slaps the film against the light box on the wall, indicating faint lines bisecting the bone. “On a scale of one to ten,” she says, “how would you rate your pain right now?”
Aunt Bel considers, then says, “Two.”
The doctor glances at me, surprised. “She must be a pretty tough customer.”
Either that, or her scale for pain is calibrated a little differently.
“What about this?” the doctor asks, extending my aunt’s arm and manipulating the hand. “Does that hurt? And this? Okay, we’re going to set this and get you going.”
The doctor pulls a high stool next to the table, taking Aunt Bel’s hand in her lap. She works quickly, setting the pinkie, staking it with a metal brace, and wrapping it tight against the ring finger. As she puts the final touches on the job, the doctor draws Aunt Bel’s arm farther forward, then pauses to frown.
“Can you bend it?” she asks, meaning the arm, not the finger.
Aunt Bel’s pale cheeks flush. “Not all the way.”
The doctor folds the arm back and forth, rolling it in its socket, testing the range of mobility. “It wasn’t properly set? How long ago was this?”
Aunt Bel winces as the doctor rolls her arm to the left, elbow out.
“We should get an X-ray of this,” the doctor says.
But Aunt Bel starts shaking her head. “No, no, it’s fine.”
“I’d like to take a look. It hasn’t healed correctly, and you may need to have it reset or you’ll run into some problems—”
Sliding off the table, Aunt Bel clutches her bandaged hand to her chest. Before I can speak, my aunt slips through the door, disappearing into the corridor. The doctor looks at me, puzzled.
“Is she coming back?”
I don’t answer this, but ask, “What’s wrong with her arm?”
“Looks to me like it was broken, and whoever treated it didn’t set it properly. She can’t turn her hand all the way, and the arm doesn’t extend fully. It isn’t any wonder she was injured trying to use it.”
The thought makes me queasy.
“She’s been overseas. I don’t know what the health-care options were like where she was.”
She glances into the hallway, but Aunt Bel is gone. “It really needs to be X-rayed,” she says on her way out.
And that’s that. Both Finn and Aunt Bel are missing from the waiting room, so I assume they’re outside. Finn heads me off halfway to the car.
“What’s the problem?” he asks. “She’s sitting in the car and she seems pretty freaked out. Is the break really bad?”
“It’s not that,” I say. “Come on, let’s go.”
Finn drives and I ride shotgun. In the seat behind him, Bel stares silently out the window. “What was that all about back there?” I ask, leaning over to look back between the front seats. “Running out on the doctor. When did you break your arm? She says you’re gonna need to have it looked at.”
“I don’t want to talk,” Aunt Bel says.
Finn turns in his seat. “You broke your arm?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. I’m tired. I want to sleep.”
“Aunt Bel, what happened to you?” I ask.
She gives me a solemn look, but says nothing.
“Let’s take her home.”
Once she’s settled upstairs, Finn asks me for the whole story. By the end, I feel shaken and psychologically bruised, not so much by Aunt Bel’s past injury as by her strange reaction, her refusal to talk, as if the improperly healed arm was not just an inconvenience but a source of shame.
“I think something happened to Aunt Bel,” I say.
“Something like what?”
I shake my head. “Whatever it was, she’s not ready to talk. But it does make me wonder why she suddenly decided to come home. Could she have been in an abusive relationship?”
“I hope not.”
Neither one of us knows what else to say, so Finn puts his arms around me and we hug. We have let something into our lives, someone. And both of us have enough faith to know it was for a reason, but clearly not enough insight to know exactly what that is.
“Tell you what,” he whispers. “I’ll stay with her, see if she’ll open up. You go back to work, okay? Let Huey and Diana know everything’s all right. We should keep the arm thing to ourselves, though.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll call on my way home. And I think this needs to be the end of Aunt Bel’s printing career.”
He smiles. “Yeah, you have a point.”
I pause at the door. “You know, if she really didn’t want to be found out, she would have just made up some excuse about having an injury years ago on the field.”
“But she didn’t.”
“No. She didn’t.”
On the way to the studio, I call Daddy and tell him what happened.
“Is she going to be okay?” he asks.
“Yes. She’s in a lot of pain right now, but she’s handling it. Listen, did she say anything to you about a broken arm?” I ask.
“No.”
“So she didn’t tell you about it when it happened?”
“No, Sara, I swear. I haven’t communicated at that level with your aunt for fifteen years. We just sent a postcard to each other every year or so with the most basic of news: yes, we’re all still alive. That sort of thing.”
“I wonder why she wouldn’t tell you?”
He sighs. “I don’t know. I always proved trustworthy, or at least I tried to. Bel knew she could always count on me. It must have been bad.”
That’s what I’m afraid of.
Diana is easy to reassure. She takes everything I say at face value and seems genuinely relieved. Over her shoulder, though, Huey fixes me with that skeptical gaze of his, telling me he knows better but isn’t going to call me on it. For now. They go back to work and leave me to settle at my desk, but half an hour later I hear Huey breathing over my shoulder.
“What?” I ask.
“That’s just what I was gonna say. I can tell when you’re holding back, and you were definitely holding back just now. Is the finger even worse than it looked?”
I shake my head.
“Good. I think she just lost her focus. Looked lost for a sec. You know what I mean?”
“Well, whatever’s going on with Bel, she’s not confiding anything in me. She just shuts down.”
“You don’t know how to talk to her.”
“Is that right?”
“Really, Sara, I don’t know what it is, but you’re not yourself arou
nd Bel.”
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’ve been a little busy.” That came out a little too quickly.
“I think she’d like to be close to you, Boss.”
“That’s what she told you, huh?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, she did.”
“Huey, why are you giving me such a hard time?”
“I’m trying to help.”
I cross my arms. “You were trying to help when you wanted to pop her finger back into joint, and if I hadn’t stopped you, you would have made it much worse.”
He holds up his palms in mock surrender. “If you don’t wanna hear it, I got plenty of other things to be doing. But I’m serious here, Sara. You just don’t understand her.”
“And you do?”
“I’ll tell you something,” he says, settling down on the edge of my desk, folding his arms all contemplative-like. “Know who your aunt reminds me of sometimes? She reminds me of ol’ Prince Myshkin.”
I give him a blank stare. “I’m supposed to know who that is?”
“Pardon me, Boss. I apologize for making a literary allusion in the presence of a college graduate like yourself, when all I ever managed to do was scrape through high school. I just assumed, you know, that in the oh-so-ivory towers of your university, they did still read—you know—books?”
“If you’re going to educate me, Huey, just do it. We’ve already crowned you smartest person in the office. I’ve got nothing left to give you.”
“Prince Myshkin,” he says. “From the Dosty-evsky novel.”
“Dostoevsky,” I correct him, then wince at my own puniness.
“So you know how to say it, you just ain’t read it. I guess that diploma was worth something. Anyway, this prince, he’s what they call a holy fool. What people mistake for his stupidity or slowness isn’t that—it’s actually goodness, innocence. Only they live in a world so far gone they can’t even recognize those things for what they are and have to twist them. I think Bel’s a little bit like that. She’s too good to be understood.”
“You just think she’s pretty,” I say.
He gives me a sly smile. “She is too. But this other thing applies just as much. I think you’d see it if she didn’t make you uncomfortable. And why is that?”
Huey can talk to me this way because he talks to everybody this way. Somehow he’s earned the right by virtue of his persona. Observant and unpretentious, always quick to speak the truth even when it’s uncomfortable—perhaps especially then. But he’s pushing me harder than he’s ever done before, hard enough to make me wonder if what he says might be true. She does make me feel itchy inside. And maybe I resent that a little. It is one thing to resent a mother who broke up your family, and quite another to resent an aunt who, before she was old enough to feel responsible for anything much, left on some altruistic quest.
“I don’t think I’m holding anything against her,” I say. “You say I’m different around her—maybe so, but she’s different around me too. She doesn’t talk to me the way she does to the rest of you.”
“She doesn’t feel the need to make such an effort with the rest of us,” he says, patting my shoulder. “All I’m saying is, she’s a pretty amazing lady, if you think about it. Me, I’m not religious by a long shot, but even I can appreciate that. So should you.”
“Thanks,” I tell him. “I’ll try.”
Part of me wants to open up to Huey, to tell him about my aunt’s improperly set arm and see what he makes of that. But Finn and I agreed to keep it to ourselves. I see the wisdom in that. Family is family, and if Aunt Bel wants to keep things to herself, even if I don’t like it, I have to respect that. But I wonder what else she’s keeping a secret if the resentment in my mom is any indication.
“What’s the name of this book?” I ask him, catching him as he walks away. “The Dostoevsky novel.”
“It’s called The Idiot—”
“Uh-huh.”
“—and before you make fun, you oughta read it for yourself.”
After he’s gone, I look up the title online. Over six hundred pages. I’m going to have to save that one for a rainy day. But this notion of Huey’s—the holy fool—appeals to me. Suppose Huey sees something I cannot, and Aunt Bel is a holy fool, her dunce cap actually a halo. Which would suggest that, like Prince Myshkin’s detractors, I may be too far gone to recognize goodness when I see it. Or maybe I’m too scared to.
Before I start the walk home, I call to check on Finn. He and Bel are running errands, he says. She’s feeling much better. With Huey’s words in my head, I leave Diana to lock up the studio, going a few blocks out of my way to pass the camera store where Finn bought my Autocord and I dropped off my first rolls of film for processing.
“You haven’t shot film before, huh?” the kid behind the counter asks. He hands me the square prints in an envelope, along with a disc containing the scanned negatives. If he’s old enough to drink, I’d be surprised, despite the scraggly fringe of beard along his baby-fat cheeks. “You need to use a light meter, you know, to get the best results.”
“I did use one,” I say. “I downloaded the app for my phone.”
The kid looks sideways and suppresses a smug grin. “I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it. Practice makes perfect. You were getting there by the end.”
On the way home, I flip through the prints. They’re all underexposed, more black-and-gray than black-and-white, giving the images a sinister film noir vibe. The old man on the stoop looks wraith-like; the boy whizzing by on the bike resembles the shadow of some monstrous bird. Even the basketball players appear ominous. Still, the results excite me a lot. The quality of detail, the depth—so much better with medium format than anything I could achieve digitally, or with 35mm. And the Autocord’s taking lens is dead sharp, separating every subject from its background with beautiful precision. Even with the exposure problems, I can live with these images. The darkness lends a mood I find appealing.
As I reach the bottom of the stack, shots 23 and 24, the last two on my second roll of film, I don’t recognize the subjects at first. Then I pause on the sidewalk.
They are pictures of me.
In the first one, I am sitting at the table in the kitchen, Finn facing me so that his back is just in the shot. I am talking rather intently, the camera capturing my mouth half open, eyes intense, one finger raised in the air. In the second picture, I am laying on the couch with my legs under me, my GOOD TASTE T-shirt pulled down over my knees, asleep in the glow of the television. Unlike the photos I shot, these are perfectly exposed.
Perfectly exposed, and also nicely composed. My sense of surprise at being photographed without my knowledge—followed by a flash of anger—quickly subsides, replaced by interest (these are really good) and eventually awe (better than mine). I don’t like to see myself in photos—I don’t have the kind of symmetrical features that photograph well, and the camera always seems to exacerbate my faults, capturing me mid-expression with my eyelids half closed.
But I do like these. The photos capture the way I look to myself, the way I look in the mirror to my own eyes—which I’ve never been able to get on film, despite trying, and had come to assume was uncapturable. Or perhaps unreal, just a trick my mind played on me, telling myself I looked better in real life than the camera could perceive.
Aunt Bel took the pictures. No one else could have. I’d left the Autocord downstairs, meaning to shoot the last frames on the roll, and she must have picked it up—two nights ago, three?—and done the work for me. I had no idea she knew her way around a camera, especially one so exotic.
I study the two pictures awhile, as people pass me on the sidewalk, until a drop of rain hits the back of my hand. The sky rumbles overhead, promising more rain, and I tuck the pictures away. The thought of Bel gazing at me through the lens of the camera, dialing me into focus, pressing the shutter release, preserving on a piece of celluloid the image of my true self—a more intimate bond between us than any moment we have
experienced in the flesh. I feel a strange debt to her, for showing me myself.
The two of them have beaten me home. I put my things down next to the front mat, shrugging out of my coat and shedding raindrops everywhere. Finn comes in from the kitchen, the aroma of the chicken curry he’s making for dinner comingling with his clothing and hair, and gives me an absentminded kiss.
“Where’s Aunt Bel?” I ask, leaning down to dig in my bag. Then: “Did you know she took pictures with my camera?”
He looks to the ceiling, trying to remember, then smiles. “When you were sleeping? You looked so cute.”
“Did you teach her how to use the camera?” I hand him the package from the camera store.
“She already knew,” he says, taking the photos and flipping through them. “You should ask her for some pointers. I don’t think your settings are quite right.”
“Where is she?”
“Guess what? I took what you said to heart, and I think you’re right. At first I wanted her to learn how to operate the press so she’d have something to do, a creative outlet. But that’s not what she wanted to do—so we went shopping. Come down to the basement.”
He leads me through the kitchen where the rice cooker is spitting and down the stairs, where he has draped an old waffle blanket over the hole in the half bath wall. Beside the wall, the worktable he assembled in anticipation of building my darkroom is now covered with oil paints and brushes and a pair of oversized Canson sketch pads, most of them still in the plastic. Aunt Bel hovers over the pile, her body swaying from side to side, a little step here, another there, examining and organizing, her bandaged hand tucked close to her chest like the wing of a bird.
For some reason, this touches my heart.
“Help me, Finn,” she says, not noticing at first that I am with him. She holds out a set of paints, wanting him to help remove the packaging.
“Let me,” I say.
She looks up, surprised. “Maybe this is silly.” She smiles nervously, stealing a glance down at the pile of art supplies.
“But you were all excited at the art store,” Finn reminds her.
“I think it’s great,” I say, inwardly muttering at Huey for always being right. “You might have some challenges, trying to paint one-handed, though. And the light down here is terrible. You should come upstairs.”