by Cat Winters
My eyes drifted back up to the ceiling while he brought me into focus and finished the camera’s preparations. I would have felt much better if I could have seen Mrs. Embers myself.
“All right.” His head reemerged from beneath the cloth. “Let’s get started. Stay still now, and keep looking this way.” He leaned his lips toward the camera’s outstretched leather bellows and whispered something to the machinery—a ritual I’d seen him perform the last time I posed for him. From the few words I could hear, I gathered he was making some sort of plea to the other side. He then straightened his posture and cried out, “Spirits, we summon you. I bring you Mary Shelley Black, named after an author of dark tales who believed in the mysterious powers of electrical currents—”
Something dropped to the floor upstairs. Julius flinched and raised his voice: “She’s drawn hundreds of mourners to me with her angelic image. Send us another spirit to stand beside her. Bring her a loved one she wants to see.” He held up his tray of flash powder. “Mary Shelley Black—summon the dead!”
He opened the cap of a round lens that gaped like the eye of a Cyclops.
The flash exploded with a blinding burst of flames and smoke.
Inside the camera, a chemically treated plate was imprinted with a miniature version of my body.
“There.” Julius coughed on a dense white cloud that drifted around his head. “It’s done.” He screwed the lens cap back into place and inserted the glass plate’s protective dark slide inside the rear of the camera.
My eyes watered so much from the scorching air that I had to wipe them with my sleeve. The blast made me remember the Christmas when Stephen’s father burned off his eyebrows with a particularly volatile flash explosion.
“Shall I give the package to her now, Julius?” asked Gracie.
“Yes.”
Another thump from above caused dust from the ceiling’s beams to shower upon us. Footsteps pounded throughout the house, far louder than the phonograph’s music. I blinked through the smoke and saw Julius’s face go as pale as his cousin’s.
The pocket doors to the front hall crashed open. Mrs. Embers stumbled into the studio, strands of dark hair falling across her eyes. “I need your help, Julius. I’m hurt.” She clutched her stomach.
“Christ!” Julius put down the flashlamp. “Get them out of here, Gracie.” He charged across the room and grabbed his mother by the arm to escort her away.
“You need to go immediately.” Gracie handed me Stephen’s parcel and pushed on my back to get me to move faster.
I looked over my shoulder. “What happened to Mrs. Embers?”
“Please, just go.”
“When should we come back for the photograph?” asked Aunt Eva.
“I don’t know. Monday morning, maybe.” Gracie opened the door and gave me another shove. “A family emergency has arisen,” she called to the line of customers, which now spilled over onto the front sidewalk. “The spirits are letting us know they need their rest. Come back another day.” She propelled Aunt Eva outside behind me and slammed the door closed on all of us.
Cries of unrest came from the black-clothed grievers.
“What did you do in there, you little hussy?” asked the same heavyset woman who had pushed Aunt Eva off the steps. “Why’d you ruin it for the rest of us?”
“That’s Mary Shelley Black,” said a young brunette behind her. “You can’t talk to her like that.”
“I don’t care if she’s Mary, Queen of Scots. I’ve been waiting four hours to get a picture taken with my poor Harold, and she just ruined it all.”
“I didn’t ruin anything—”
Aunt Eva grabbed my hand. “Let’s run.”
“That’ll only make us look guilty,” I said.
“Run!”
Two hefty men from the back of the line were now headed our way with murder in their eyes, so I did as she said—I used my Boy Scout boots’ double soles of reinforced solid oak leather and bolted across the grass and down the coastal neighborhood’s sidewalks, until Ocean Boulevard disappeared behind us.
We didn’t stop running until we jumped onto the streetcar, and even then my heart kept racing. I sat beside my aunt on the wooden seat and clutched Stephen’s parcel to my chest.
“What was all of that about?” I asked while trying to catch my breath. “What happened to Mrs. Embers upstairs?”
Aunt Eva gasped for air and rubbed a stitch in her side. “I don’t know. But I’m sure meeting mourners on a constant basis … and worrying about a loved one overseas … can destroy one’s nerves.”
“Poor cousin Gracie seemed as anxious as a frightened mouse.”
“Poor cousin Gracie is a flu survivor. Her hair went white and fell out from the fever. That’s why she wears a wig.”
“That was a wig?”
My aunt nodded.
I gulped. “It almost seemed to me, with all the spirit activity in that house, the family believes they’re being haunted.”
Aunt Eva fidgeted in her seat, but she didn’t admit the Emberses’ house disturbed her. It certainly disturbed me. I could almost understand why Stephen was in such a hurry to get out of there.
I lowered the package to my lap and trailed my fingers over my own name, penned in handwriting I adored—handwriting that mirrored the writer’s artistic nature. The S in Shelley resembled a treble clef. The B in Black could have been called voluptuous. My odd, dark name always transformed into something lyrical and beautiful through Stephen’s pen.
I noticed the string tying the parcel paper together hung loose on one end, as though someone had already slid the string aside to inspect the contents of the package. A small tear also marred the paper. “I think someone’s already opened this. Do you suppose Julius—?”
“Mary Shelley.” My name passed over my aunt’s lips as a tired groan.
I peeled back the tampered end of the paper and slid out a framed photograph. My labored breath caught in my throat. Warmth flushed throughout my face and chest and spread to the tips of my fingers and toes. The strings of my mask tightened with a grin the size of Alaska.
As his last gift to me before leaving for the war, Stephen—fully aware of my love of electricity—had given me a photograph of a jagged lightning bolt striking a sepia nighttime sea.
I HADN’T PLANNED TO HANG ANY DECORATIONS ON THE walls of my bedroom in Aunt Eva’s house. Doing so would have been an admission that San Diego was to become my home for a long while.
However, on Sunday, the day after we visited the Emberses, I couldn’t help but mount Stephen’s lightning bolt on a strip of gilded wallpaper just beyond the foot of my bed. I asked Aunt Eva’s permission to pound two nails into her wall and hung both of his photographs side by side, the butterfly and the electricity. I never found any note in his parcel and was certain Julius had taken it. But the picture had finally reached my hands.
I discovered Stephen had crossed out some words in the lower right-hand corner, perhaps a rejected title, and between gold and white ripples in the ocean, he had written one of his anagrams:
I DO LOSE INK
I squinted and pulled other words out of the letters. Sink. Die. Nod. Skid. Oiled. Link. But none of the phrases I deciphered struck me as being the name of a photograph of a powerful storm over the Pacific.
Aunt Eva knocked on my open door and breezed into my room. “I think I’ll go pick up Julius’s picture of you early tomorrow morning before work. I can catch the first ferry. I’ll just wear a skirt over my work trousers.”
I stepped away from the images on the wall. “Will the studio be open that early?”
“I assume so. Julius is a hard worker.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“That’s not a good idea. You shouldn’t be out in public air any more than you have to be.”
“I didn’t have to go to his house yesterday, but you let me. It’s mainly clean ocean air we’ll be breathing.”
“I’ll think about it.” She spied the mounted
photographs. “Are you sure you want those hanging on your wall?”
“Why wouldn’t I? They’re beautiful.”
“Oh, Mary Shelley …” She tutted and took my hand. “Come here. Sit down with me for a moment so we can talk about something important.” She sat me on my bed and perched beside me on Grandma Ernestine’s old blue and white quilt that served as a bedspread. “I know you’ve never had a mother in your life to teach you the ways of the heart—”
“Don’t bring up that morning I kissed Stephen.”
“I’m not. I just want to say I know you think you’re deeply in love with that boy, but you need to keep in mind you’re still so very young. And … he might never come home.”
“I already know that.” I pulled my hand away from her. “Why would you remind me of such a thing?”
“Because every time his name comes up in conversation, your eyes brighten like he’s about to walk into the room. And now you’re hanging his photos on the wall and further surrounding yourself with him. Did he even ask you to wait for him?”
“He said I didn’t have to wait unless I wanted to. He doesn’t want me to waste my life worrying about him.”
“Oh.” She sounded surprised. “Well … that was kind of him.”
“He’s a kind person.”
She took my hand again and cradled it in her calloused palm. “If he urged you to be free, then let him go. Don’t waste your youth wondering if a boy from your past will ever return to you.”
My throat itched with the threat of tears. “I don’t think you fully comprehend how much Stephen and I mean to each other.”
“Mary—”
“Did I ever tell you how we became friends?”
Her hazel eyes softened behind her glasses. “No, I don’t think you did.”
“I was eight at the time, and he wasn’t yet ten. I’d seen him at school before, but he was always just a nice, quiet boy with an interesting last name, and I mainly played with girls. This one day, though, he brought this little Brownie pocket camera to school.” I used my hands to demonstrate the camera’s width, about eight inches. “It was just a small one with a beautiful deep-red bellows and an imitation leather covering. I was walking home with my friend Nell and two other girls, and I saw him in the distance, taking pictures of a tabby cat lying on the steps of an old church. Well”—my shoulders tensed at the ensuing memory—“these older boys swaggered up to him and teased him about being Julius’s sissy brother. They grabbed his camera and threw it onto the sidewalk. I heard a terrible crack and watched pieces scatter across the cement. And then those boys shoved him in the shoulder and walked away.”
Aunt Eva cringed. “I’m sure their father was furious that a camera got broken.”
“That’s what Stephen shouted after them. He said, ‘My father’s going to call the cops on all of you,’ and then he added some colorful curse words I’d never heard come out of a nice boy’s mouth before. I told my friends to go on home, and then I joined him to help find all the lost pieces. Some screws had come loose, and part of the wood casing had split apart beneath the fake leather. Stephen said I wouldn’t be able to help him because I was a girl, but I sat right down on the steps of that church and screwed everything back in place with a little spectacle repair kit Dad had given me. I also pulled my ribbon out of my hair and wrapped up the cracked body to avoid any further damage before he could glue the wood back together at home.”
“Ah, yes.” Aunt Eva nodded. “Wasn’t that around the time Uncle Lars decided to buy you a larger tool kit?”
“I think so.”
A smile lit her face. “I’d forgotten all about that.”
“So there I was,” I continued, “piecing Stephen’s camera together like a puzzle, fastening the nickel lens board back in place, chatting about the book poking out of his satchel—Jack London’s White Fang. And all the while Stephen stared at me as if I were something magical. Not the ugly way other people sometimes stare at me, like I’m a circus freak. But with respect and recognition, like he was meeting someone in a foreign country who spoke his language when no one else could. That’s how it’s been between us ever since. We understand each other, even when we astound each other.”
Her eyes dampened. “I just don’t want you to get hurt. I hope you’ll be able to move on and find other things in life that make you happy.”
“Just let me keep hope in my heart for him for now, all right? Let me leave his photographs hanging on my wall to remind me that something beautiful once happened in the middle of all the year’s horrors.”
She pulled me against her side and sniffed back tears. “All right. But keep your heart guarded. I know what it’s like to have love turn agonizing. There’s nothing more painful in the world.”
NO ONE ANSWERED THE STUDIO DOOR AT DAWN. WE stood outside the Emberses’ house in a fog so thick we couldn’t see the Pacific across the street.
I tugged my coat around me. “Should we knock on the front door?”
“I don’t know.” Aunt Eva waddled down the side staircase and peered through the mist toward the main entrance. She wore a blue plaid skirt over her work trousers to disguise her uniform, and the pants beneath produced so much bulk that she looked like a giant handbell—skinny torso, bulbous hips. “I don’t want to disturb his mother. She seemed ill the other day.”
“You can’t be late for work, though.”
“I’m not sure what to do.” She trekked back up the stairs and knocked again.
The sound of an automobile motor sped our way. We both craned our necks to see the approaching vehicle through the fog: a plain black Model T. The car careened around the corner, clipped the curb with its carriage-sized wheels, and squealed to a jerking stop on the side street next to the house.
A man with uncombed black hair spilled out of the passenger seat.
Aunt Eva rubbed her throat and asked in a whisper, “Is that Julius?”
I squinted through the fog. “I think so.”
“You going to be OK, Julius?” asked the driver, a solid-looking, bespectacled fellow who appeared to be closer to my age than Julius’s. “You sure you don’t want me running the studio instead of closing it for the day?”
Julius ignored the driver and stumbled up to the house, his shirt untucked, his chin dark with whiskers. His face resembled Uncle Wilfred’s in the throes of tuberculosis: gray, clammy, sunken. His red-rimmed eyes caught sight of us standing on the steps. “Why are you here?” He didn’t sound pleased.
“We came for Mary Shelley’s photograph. Are you unwell, Julius?”
He blustered past us, smelling of cologne and something sweet, even though he looked like he could use a bath. “Come in and take it quickly. Then please go. I’m not feeling well.”
Aunt Eva jumped out of the way. “It’s not the flu, is it?”
“No, it’s not the damn flu.” He fumbled to open the door and reached around to a switch that lit a quartet of electric wall lamps. “Wait here. I’ll get it.” He went in.
Behind us, the Model T rumbled away.
I stepped a foot inside the studio and watched Julius disappear through a doorway next to the dark background curtain. I’d always assumed the door led to a closet, but it appeared to be the entrance to an office in which photographs hung on a string to dry like laundry on a clothesline.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
Aunt Eva still massaged her throat. “I have no idea. I’ve never seen him like this.”
“Is it the opium?”
“Mary Shelley!”
Julius walked back into the studio with a brown folder. “Here, take it.” He held out the concealed picture in the tips of his fingers.
I approached and took it from him, feeling my stomach dip with nervousness as I did so.
His red eyes watered. “Now go. Please.”
“I’d like to see the photograph first.”
“Go.”
I held my breath and flipped the folder open. There I was, i
n black and white, seated on the velvet-cushioned chair with my camphor pouch and clock-gear necklace strung around my neck. My pale eyes peered at the camera above my flu mask.
A transparent figure stood behind me—a handsome brown-haired boy in a dress shirt and tie.
Stephen.
Stephen was the ghost in my photograph.
Aunt Eva took the folder from my hand. “Oh no, Julius. Is that your brother?”
The words cut deep. I realized what they implied.
“Is he …” Aunt Eva’s lips failed to shape the word.
Julius cleared his throat. “We just learned he died in battle. The telegram said it was a ferocious fight at the beginning of October. He went heroically.”
All the oxygen left that room. I held my stomach and heard the warning signs of unconsciousness buzz inside my eardrums. My vision dimmed. My legs started to give way.
Aunt Eva took hold of my arm to steady me. “Mary Shelley, are you all right?”
Julius turned his back on me. “Take her outside.”
A scream from upstairs jolted me to my senses. We all peered toward the ceiling.
“Stephen!” cried Mrs. Embers, as if someone were tearing her heart to shreds. “Stephen!”
Julius grabbed my arms and turned me around. “I said take her out of here. Both of you, get outside. Go far, far away. My brother’s childhood sweetheart is the last person we need to see right now.”
My feet tripped from the reckless way he steered me across the floor. Before I could regain my balance, Aunt Eva and I were back outside in the fog. The door slammed behind us. We could still hear Mrs. Embers’s screams beyond the walls, even over the thunder of the waves.
“Let’s go.” My aunt took my hand and guided me down the steps. “We need to let them mourn. What a terrible, terrible thing to lose a loved one clear across the world.”
My body felt out of control. I couldn’t walk or breathe right. Pain squeezed my lungs so hard that Aunt Eva had to shoulder my weight to help me move.
“I warned you not to long for him.” She put her hand around my waist to better support me. “I knew he’d break your heart.”