by Lisa Preston
Black was white and white was black. Peering at the tiny wet frame, imagining the shades of gray reversed, she couldn’t be sure. She would have to wait for the negative to dry before she could make a print, but her best guess was that the shot showed a row of raggedy children, shoulder to shoulder, outdoors in a scarier time, the most evocative film rescue she’d developed.
The children might all be dead by now. Were they loved, missed? There was no one claiming this photo, no one to speak for the subjects, to tell their story, to stand up for them. Had anyone, ever?
There had never been anyone to speak for her. The resentment she’d felt since early childhood toward her ridiculously alcoholic parents boiled up, and she tamped its poison down for self-preservation. She saw her hands, red in the light, like a murder victim’s. Imagine the life she might have had if things had been different. She shook her head to clear her eyes. She could have sworn she heard a child’s cry emanate from the negative, and she half wanted to shred the entire strip. Another part of her wanted to bolt for the little studio apartment, to pretend, as she’d been pretending since childhood.
Desire, a side of herself she’d never known existed, suddenly flickered, begged for acknowledgment. The risks of a wholly different way of life terrified her. She covered her head with her hands, desperate to shut down the call.
CHAPTER 4
After sunrise, Gillian watched Paul collect a wooden cup, flakes of smelly green maté twigs and leaves, then the peculiar metal straw. His drink of choice took time to prepare, but he liked the ritual, gathering the gourd and bombilla, adding the yerba leaves to the bowl and then the scalding water.
Paul fell for maté in Brazil on a rocket launch project two years ago. Gillian accompanied him, carrying the new Hassy camera he’d given her. A proper camera for a real freelancer, he’d said. And she’d snapped exotic photos in a dream location for the first and last time. Before and since, she’d only imagined traveling remote locations, a rucksack slung over one shoulder banging into her khaki-clad legs, an oversize denim shirt making her look chic and weary, the epitome of an elite photojournalist.
Instead, she shot digitals of private events, products for ad agencies, and portraiture of every kind in the greater Seattle area. A bit of contract work, some assignments from local magazines and newspapers. And contests, she entered contests. True, some shots were spectacular, having earned a bit of gallery exhibit space and sales, resales even. She also developed rediscovered old film, usually for people who found a few rolls in their parents’ or grandparents’ estate. Sometimes the film was rescued from a cheapie 1970s Instamatic, occasionally from an expensive vintage camera. Sometimes the finds were startlingly precious, but often the customer couldn’t identify the people in the photos. Could that be my uncle or is it my dad? And Gillian would think, You should have asked him when he was alive. You should have had this film developed years and years ago. Yes, I can improve the shading, maybe sharpen the image. But identifying the time, the setting, the people, that’s a lost opportunity.
Gratifying as it was to give retirees shots they’d forgotten taking, it didn’t pay well. The darkroom was dabbling, not a great niche. Financially, it had been a bust. Meanwhile, Paul continued to teach advanced physics at the University, develop theoretical plans for contingencies in suborbital launches, improve satellite technology, and offer arguments on the best way to travel to Mars. By Friday afternoon, he’d have two days off when he wouldn’t need to think about work. He’d go to his fancy gym and sweat, and he’d come home wanting to eat, talk, read, walk the dog, and make love.
“Last night was wonderful,” he said between sips. “Did you get up after?”
“I did some darkroom work. Look, where exactly did you buy the cameras you gave me yesterday?”
He rolled his eyes to the side, thinking. “Ah, driving back from squash last Saturday, I took side streets to avoid a road closure. There was a penny sale, knickknacks, antiques, junk, everything, and I just pulled over when I saw old cameras on the sidewalk table. The house is actually walking distance, basically between Myron and Becky’s place and here. Did you find something good on one of the cameras?”
“Maybe so.”
Paul checked his watch, leaned forward, and kissed her hair. “You want to chat with the seller? Let’s take Rima on a morning stroll. We could walk and talk. We need to talk.”
Paul routed their walk to a depreciating neighborhood—some trick in the Seattle real estate market. The decaying buildings, a few with scrubby businesses run out of makeshift apartments, left the area undecided about whether it was for living or working. No one dealt with the ivy and blackberries. Wind-blown garbage drifted and tree roots broke up the sidewalks.
The city’s streets glistened with old rain. Weathered concrete held pockets of water like dark jewels. Almost tripping over Rima when he stopped to sniff another dog’s pile on the sidewalk, Gillian shot mental daggers at both dogs.
“I should finish telling you about my stepmother,” Paul said, using an odd, special tone for the last word. When they’d first gotten to know one another, she and Paul had given each other the basics on their families, and it boiled down to the only family either of them had was Gillian’s sister, Becky.
He’d been shocked and tender at her bare story of breaking contact with her irredeemably alcoholic parents when Becky graduated high school. Paul’s parents had been enamored with their son, but his mother had died of a coronary when he was in grad school and his brainiac father died young of a massive stroke years before Gillian and Paul met. Paul dedicated several hours per week to his cardiovascular fitness in an effort to forestall the effects of bad genetics.
“My father’s second wife had a daughter,” Paul said. “An adult by the time my father and she married. That wife—Nancy was her name—that wife’s daughter was Elizabeth.”
“Nancy, Elizabeth.”
“Precisely. I met Nancy a couple of times. Nice lady. The daughter, Elizabeth, was an adult, out on her own like I was, when her mother and my father married. I met Elizabeth once on a trip to Houston, years and years ago.”
Gillian thought again about his father, all she’d heard from Paul about him, the poorly composed pictures she’d seen of the man. A physicist like his son, a man of academia. A man who would not have understood the appeal and tension of freelancing. “So, you’re saying …”
“Ah, she’s a stepsister, I suppose. I mean, she is, I just never really thought of her that way. I never really thought about her very much at all before, I suppose.”
“Before? Before now?”
“Indeed, and now she’s looked me up.”
“She’s looked you up?”
He nodded. “Precisely, yes, yesterday. She came to my office.”
“Out of the blue? What was that like?”
“It was fine. She, she asked for help.”
“And you want to give it to her?” Gillian asked, just to be clear.
He brought his head down, chin near his chest in some half gesture of assent. “I do. She used to live in south Texas—remember my father was working in Houston twenty, thirty years ago—but she’s been on the road. She lost everything in one of those hurricanes, and she needs a place to stay.”
Gillian fixed her gaze on the middle distance. “You want to give her the studio apartment.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve never even heard from her before?”
“Just yesterday afternoon. At work. She was waiting outside my office. I was in morning meetings.” He looked at his hands. Callus-free hands with neat fingernails.
“What’s she like?”
“I really don’t know her, Gillian.”
“Is she older or younger?”
“Younger. Quite a few years, I think. Probably late-twenties. She acts even younger, kind of … lost. Maybe a little silly or spacey.”
“Oh, good. You weren’t tormented by an older sister.”
He smiled, put one hand on the s
mall of her back, and shook his head. “We never lived together, never knew each other. It didn’t matter if she was older or younger than me.”
Random thoughts snaked through Gillian’s mind. “An older sister would have done things like make you eat worms.”
“Did you make Becky eat worms?”
“Well, no. I ate the worm.” After that last tequila, she’d crashed at her shitty parents’ shitty apartment, and poor left-behind Becky had freaked. Then Gillian changed everything, became her sister’s mother.
“Gillian?” Paul jostled her arm.
She zeroed in. “So this sort of stepsister of yours, it seems you haven’t got any real connection to her. By the time you were working on your doctorate she’d have been established in some kind of life too, right? What’s her deal?”
“All right then. No contact with her to speak of in years and years. The answer to most of what we both might wonder about her is: I don’t know. But there is a child.”
“A child?” Gillian stopped, wide-eyed, told herself to quell her voice. But really, a child?
“Maybe two.”
“Two children?” She was stunned at the idea of anyone, much less three people, moving into the garage studio. That studio would be a perfect micro-home for her if it were anywhere else in the world, if she weren’t married, if everything were different. Wait, where did those bizarre thoughts come from? She shook her head.
“Ah, no,” Paul said. “I mean, I think the child’s about two years old.”
He was teasing, right? “That’ll be a treat,” Gillian said, trying for lightness, but not getting there.
When they’d walked another block and he said nothing more, she asked, “How long is she staying?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you should find out how long.” Her soft suggestion was interrupted by Paul shooting an arm out to wave at a woman bringing her garbage cans to the street for collection.
“This is the place,” Paul said, before calling out in a louder voice to the woman, then following her to her front door. There, he stood on a stranger’s doorstep, explaining about having bought old cameras at her sale for his talented, beautiful wife.
Furious, high-pitched yapping echoed inside the home while Gillian waited on the sidewalk with a concerned Rima. Paul smiled, rubbed his jaw, and shook hands with the woman, who stood with her front door just half-open.
As the woman relaxed a bit, smiling slowly back at Paul, she peered at the sidewalk. Gillian half waved, unsure what exactly she was supposed to do, wondering if the woman would talk to them about the cameras, wondering how she ever expected to be involved in photojournalism if she couldn’t get up the gumption to talk to a perfect stranger. Photography was a fit for her because she could hide behind the lens in any setting. Coaxing information from someone, getting them to lower the unending, natural human guard—she didn’t try since Paul was willing to do it for her.
Rima wagged and pulled on the leash as Paul returned, happy to have him back from the stranger’s porch, wanting to get on with the walk.
“The lady said she had stuff from all over. She said she was de-cluttering, that some of the stuff was her daughter’s. One camera was in the house a long time, but she has no idea where the other came from or how long she’d had it.”
“How can someone have collector’s pieces like those cameras and not know where they came from?” Gillian snapped.
“A guy gave it to me.”
They turned. A young woman folded her arms across her chest and looked away, standing beside her mother, who was urging her with gestures to give a better answer.
“Can you tell me his name?” Gillian asked. “I developed the film inside one camera.”
“Um, John. I’m not seeing him anymore. He was weird.”
“How so?” Gillian asked.
“He said I was … unclean.” Anger flashed in her eyes.
“Unclean? He said that?” Gillian took a sharp breath, shaking her head, and saw Paul do the same thing. If she had a camera in hand, Gillian could have photographed the frustration in the girl’s voice, the resentment.
The girl’s stilted complaints continued. “And he said we were dirty because we have Moo and Scratches. Our dog and cat. Because we have them inside. He said that’s even worse. And he said my skirts are too short.” Here she shot a sideways look at her mother, who apparently shared this final opinion.
Paul’s suggestion came immediately. “This gentleman, this … John, can find someone with a longer skirt and you can find someone with a longer mind.”
“We don’t want no trouble,” her mother said.
Gillian pointed to Paul, smart, considerate, reliable, kind Paul. “It isn’t him. It’s not,” she said, trying to keep her voice from rising, aware of Paul looking oddly at her.
“So, this picture that’s captured your interest,” Paul began as they came home and he bustled about, readying for his ride to work.
Her cell phone buzzed and she turned away. A new picture of Becky appeared, this one without her toddler son, but with a pouty face. Could she really not respond to her sister? Holding her breath, Gillian tapped the ignore icon. Becky’s image vanished and Gillian felt a naughty, otherworldly new freedom.
Paul hurried to the garage with his rainproof bag, grabbed his helmet and bike. Gillian pushed the button to open the garage for him. He paused in wheeling his bike outside to respond to his chiming cell phone.
“Ah, Becky’s asking if you got a new phone or something. Is yours dead? She says she can’t reach you.” He was looking at the screen and tapped, muttering, “Same phone, she’ll call you.”
Gillian was glad he didn’t see her face. Glad he didn’t know the darkness of her heart, that she’d about decided her ability to do the right thing was finite, and she’d met the end.
He tapped some more on his phone, slowly pushing his bike outside. “Since you’re okay with it, I’m texting Elizabeth that she can come stay in the studio. Letting her know where the key’s hidden.”
Gillian held her breath and thought, thought, thought. Kept her tongue, and closed her eyes, opening them when he called her name. His left foot clicked onto the bike’s pedal and he asked, “Working this weekend?”
Gillian nodded and made a face. “I hate weddings.”
He responded with the same comment he always made when she said this. “Except for one,” and his hopeful tone asked for a response.
She gave in to his kind, insistent face and agreed with used words. “Except for ours.”
He stepped onto the pedal, satisfied, mounting as his bike rolled away.
Gillian replayed the voicemail Tilda left the day before, reveled in the glow of the Hellman award, and wondered how soon she’d get to collect the prize. Five thousand dollars was a serious chunk of money. Flushed with the thought of talking to Tilda in a post-award glow and eager for a new lead, Gillian loaded two cameras, a slim portfolio, and her notebook. A breakthrough opportunity. She realized she’d wanted to determine what kind of person she was, what kind of photographer. This could be the day when she moved from shooting weddings and senior portraits to the real deal of current events with deep human interest.
She shot out of the garage’s back door, heading for the alley shortcut to the nearest bus stop, and ran into a woman and child making for the exterior studio stairs.
“Oh!” the woman gasped, more startled than Gillian. She carried two white plastic bags in one hand, held her barely walking child’s hand with the other. Both mother and child were bundled in many more layers of clothes than Gillian, who was struck speechless.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman entreated, raising one burdened hand. Between her thumb and index finger was the key she’d apparently just retrieved from under the backyard bird feeder. “I didn’t see you. Paul said it was okay to come.”
Gillian gaped anew around the yard, at a loss.
“It’s Gillian, right? Thank you. Thank you so much for letting us stay.
”
Gillian blinked. “I … I’m just heading out for the day. Paul’s gone to work already.”
“Do you know what it takes to start over? Besides courage?” The woman—Paul’s stepsister, Gillian reminded herself—looked down and swayed, peppering nervous glances back and forth. The toddler tugged on her hand, spluttering incomprehensible sounds.
“Five thousand dollars?” Gillian suggested, feeling half-crazy as the words slipped out.
The woman eyed her strangely and responded, “It takes kindness from others. Thank you so much. Thank you.”
“Oh, yes, well …” Gillian started to say something to or about the kid but failed, wholly out of her element. Their child-free life was a given; it had never borne discussion. Taken aback that the woman was already moving in, she thought, Did Paul and I really talk about this? She struggled to identify what about the woman—Ellen, was it?—was wrong. Something was wrong.
“Thank you. You won’t even notice us, I promise. We’ll be no bother, not any more, not at all.” The woman fled with her child up the back steps to the studio. More thanks echoed down, and the door up there clicked lightly as she snicked it shut.
Considering Paul’s original plan of making an entrance to the apartment accessible only from inside the garage, Gillian thought about their reasoning. If she wanted the studio for photography, she wouldn’t want to go outside in the rain, but if she wanted clients coming for photo sessions, outside stairs might be better, more separate and professional. She had tried to look to the future. An entrance from inside the garage was cozier for anyone inside the house to use the studio. The thought of renting it out made her want the stairs outside of the garage, as separate as possible from their domain.
They picked both, the long staircase outside and the tiny circular steps that dropped into the garage. The studio had exits from both ends, and now they had a shirttail relative with a little kid above their garage, able to walk into the house from the vehicle bay. They’d never before locked the door from the garage into the house. She tried to remember if it required a separate lock from the studio key. Not that she disliked the woman on sight, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off.