by Lisa Preston
Well, the woman’s obsequious talk and behavior disturbed, left Gillian uneasy.
Had Paul said anything about charging rent to this stepsister? Gillian couldn’t remember. Probably not. Money was not a big deal to him, and the woman was family, however removed and unknown. She was in need. And Paul was exactly the kind of person who helped wholly, who knew what the right thing to do was and did it.
An epiphany of sorts washed over Gillian. Really, she’d been trying to decide what kind of person she was back in high school, even before she’d made the pact with then-fifteen-year-old Becky. This realization that stopped her was rear-ended by the thought that passing her thirty-third birthday meant nothing more than she should know by now what she wanted. Or she did know, but she should live with things the way they were.
In the alley, Gillian saw a nondescript older sedan. Frost crystallized on the last shaded section of the car’s hood. She squinted at the frost patterns and reached for her Canon. One snapshot of the car behind their back gate to log the photo for her memory, then minute focus at different angles on the icy, spider-stars of cold condensation.
A camera did more than provide a shield between her and whatever gathering or still life threatened her fragile peace. There was usually something worth preserving; her eye found and her shutter salvaged.
On her shortcut to the bus stop, Gillian reflected that she was the kind of person who took public transportation whenever possible. It had been a necessity when she was younger and poor. After she met Paul, she found not only was there no shame in taking the bus instead of a car, there was a certain honor to commuting friendly. In the seven years they’d been married, Paul biked to his fellowship almost every workday, and Gillian knew the buses well. With just one transfer, she could get within two and a half blocks of Tilda’s home office.
The last uphill block from the final bus stop made her gear feel heavier. She’d doubled up on cameras, unsure what her meeting with Tilda would hold. A purveyor of custom digital photography, black and white development, and film restoration, as her card read, had to be ready.
The stone steps jutting from the north side of the brown brick building, the lower floor of which served as Tilda’s office, were slick with green moss, and cold. Gillian pressed her weight carefully on her toes to avoid slipping on the slime.
“Grab that, will you?” she said to someone inside Tilda’s doorway as she swung her bag over the threshold and saw her portfolio slipping from the large pocket of her black canvas bag. She leaned her bags into the wall to trap the escaping folder, both hands supporting the gear bag.
“Not a chance.”
She glanced over. He was about her age, giving a crooked grin and no quarter. Tall, powerfully built, with a face handsome enough to look godlike in all sorts of light or shadows, even under the fluorescent lights on Tilda’s threshold that never saw the sun.
“You the shooter?” he asked.
Gillian wondered who the man was and why he was at Tilda’s office when she’d been requested to come to talk about the award and more work. It somehow felt like she was being set up on a blind date without having been forewarned.
“I see you’ve met,” Tilda said, clattering on her stilettoes to the coffee station she kept on the hip-high, narrow table in the stone-floored foyer.
An over-slender smoker who always wore black and a grown-out shag, Tilda had taken Gillian under her wing a year earlier, pushing her to go for prestigious work. She chided Gillian with a three-syllable “wha-a-at?” whenever Gillian was tentative about a job, and she did it now as she turned back to them.
“Kevin Zebrist, Gillian Trett.” Tilda waved one hand back and forth then clattered to her office, with Gillian and Kevin following. When she swung into her desk chair, Gillian took an anticipatory breath, ready to hear more about her five-thousand-dollar win of the Hellman award.
“So,” Tilda said, “Kevin is a features writer who hunts up the best, and he’s gracing Seattle with his presence for a few months.”
Kevin gave a faux-humble shrug. “It’s a living.”
Gillian looked away from Kevin’s charming smile with determination. A Rolling Stones tune began. She tried to place it as Kevin stopped the music with a check of his cell phone. “Excuse me, I must take this.”
While he took his call in the foyer, Tilda stage-whispered, “He’s a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer in feature writing. Has his eyes on the prize. Did a stint embedded with troops in the Middle East. Just finished a terrific piece on elephants and said that if he’d had a good shooter—” she swept an underlining finger toward Gillian and lowered her voice further, “the photographer could have been Pulitzer-nominated for best feature photography.”
Gillian felt like a small child at the grown-ups’ table. Turning away, she watched Kevin tuck his cell in a chest pocket and help himself to the coffee and accoutrements. He tipped his cup at them with a grin, then strolled over and threw himself back into the chair beside Gillian. “Sorry ’bout that. Deadlines, you know.”
“Kids, can we get on track here?” Tilda looked from one to the other in a way that made her pointy nose seem like a finger. Gillian and Kevin shot each other final glances before turning back to their host like scolded schoolchildren.
“Kevin here is after a killer photojournalism piece,” Tilda said. “Gillian, how busy are you in the next few weeks or so?”
“Two weddings, so inflexible dates there. And I’ve got a calendar to do, puppies. Replacing someone else where the contract had a snafu. It’s due in a couple of weeks and I can work on it whenever.”
“A calendar?” Tilda frowned. “Work for hire?”
Gillian nodded, flitting her gaze to the window to avoid her mentor’s eyes and the tut-tut that came from Kevin Zebrist.
“No rights, no credits.” Tilda sighed.
Gillian shrugged. “It’s a living.”
“A calendar producer lost a photographer and they came to you?” Kevin asked.
Tilda frowned. “How are you going to shoot twelve months’ worth of scenes right now?”
Gillian ran through her ideas, pleased to have gotten the project assignment as much as having figured out how to pull it off. “We’re getting a sunny afternoon the latter part of next week and there are still some beautiful blooms in the better parks. I can get up to the Cascades for snow in an hour and a half. There are still some maples with their foliage in good fall colors. Believe me, I didn’t take the job without thinking about it.”
Kevin tipped his head sideways and raised his eyebrows. “And the puppies?”
“My sister volunteers at the shelter.”
He laughed. “No models’ releases needed.”
“Exactly.”
Waving hands interrupted them again. “Gillian, you know of Kevin’s work?”
She did now. She nodded.
“Oh, go on,” Kevin said, stretching his long legs forward, then relaxing, allowing his knees to spread wide.
“You go on,” Tilda demanded. “Find something. A legacy. It’s out there.” She pointed her fingers at them in turn. “You’re a writer. You’re a photographer. There’s a story out there. It’s speculative, but I know you two are going to poke around and come up with something fabulous.”
That was it. Gillian followed Kevin back to the foyer.
“So.” He pointed over his shoulder to Tilda’s office as he opened the door. “She says you’ve won some local prizes. Good job.”
Gillian wanted no to-do about the Hellman award now. Kevin Zebrist had been featured, had done the kind of travel and journalism she’d only dreamed about. Oh, how she used to picture herself in faraway countries, in sandals while snapping camels, in cotton capris seeing wild cats through a long lens, her camera bags forever slung around her shoulders. Oh, how that wasn’t the life that photography gave her, not even close.
Becky would have hated her traveling, incommunicado for months. And there was Paul, stable, and at home. So stable. Probably sevent
een years older than Kevin, who looked to be about Gillian’s age, twice her size, grinning down at her with his lips pursed.
“Do you have a card?” she asked.
“I’ll just scribble your digits down.” He pulled out his cell and she gave him everything—her email, the house phone, her cell—as they walked down the stone steps of Tilda’s office. He didn’t reciprocate, but said he’d call.
“What do you think? Any ideas?” Gillian asked. She wanted to leave. She wanted to tug on his sleeve and ask him about photojournalism opportunities.
“It’s early days.” He flashed another winning grin. “But we’ll find several somethings.”
The initial guardedness in his voice meant more, she decided, eyeing him sideways with renewed curiosity. He means he’ll find it, she thought.
“So, let’s go tie one on,” he said, his voice as jokey as his expression.
Kevin’s usual charm, Gillian imagined. He was that kind. Probably, it usually worked, she thought. When she didn’t respond, he tried again, touching her arm briefly with two fingers before gesturing down the street to a pseudo-Irish pub.
“Come on, I’ll teach you all I know.”
Gillian gave her frostiest glare. “I taught myself.”
Kevin moved directly in front of her, forcing her to stand still. “So are you the go-get-a-drink kind?”
“It’s barely eleven in the morning.” She stepped around him, ready to walk away.
“Not in Bangkok.”
Gillian turned. “You’ve been to Thailand?”
CHAPTER 5
Gillian stopped dead in her backyard, struck by the realization that she recalled little of the journey home. How could she have been at a bus stop, waited, paid, gotten off at the right stop, transferred, and walked the blocks home in a Northwest mist with little memory of the event? Like I’d been drunk, she thought. Blacked-out drunk, unable to remember what she’d done and who she’d done it with.
Her earliest memories were of her old-before-their-time parents, wrinkled and reeking of poor hygiene, disappointing their daughters with an inability to keep the two-bedroom apartment clean or stocked with decent food, with the electricity being shut off every summer, a loss of water service, too. They never had trash removal service. Gillian sneaked her parents’ empties into neighbors’ dumpsters.
The girls ducked when the slapping started, when bottles were thrown. They hid under their cots or under junk in their little closet when it got uglier, but they did not turn on each other in the madness. They did not. And they never mumbled at each other like their stinking mother and father did. Sometimes Gillian thought it amazing she and her sister had learned to talk at all in a home with two drunks who usually grunted—uhhnn, mmm, aah, yee—for their wants, approvals, and unhappiness.
In middle school, the cool kids introduced Gillian to the easy way a kid can buy legal liquor in any drugstore or supermarket. The cap of the plastic bottles served as a shot glass. Teachers could only smell an interest in oral hygiene on her breath. The intoxication was guaranteed in a few mighty swallows. When Becky bawled and begged for her sister to stay sober, Gillian drank bigger swallows.
Even before graduating high school, Gillian didn’t come home on weekends. She couch surfed. The week before her eighteenth birthday, she moved in with a bunch of half friends who liked to party. She remembered little of the next year, just a series of bad roommates, bad boyfriends, bad jobs, bad hangovers.
Nineteen. Gillian hadn’t been blind drunk since she was nineteen. She’d been out on her own, scraping by with a couple of part-time jobs—one in a drugstore, the other in a clothing boutique. One night, she got plowed at a party near the old neighborhood, so she crashed at her parents’ apartment rather than trying for her shared hovel across the city.
Gillian stared at her reflection in the glass of the back door to the garage, and remembered Becky at fifteen, waking in the middle of the night to her big sister puking in the bathroom. Then Becky freaked. She had cried and pleaded before, but that one drunk night when Gillian staggered into her room, her pleas forced Gillian to sobriety in a gross minute.
Her little sister’s chin dimpled and quivered. Becky’s voice was so choked with hiccupping start-up sobs that she was hard to understand, but when she managed those words, the meaning lasted.
“Gillian? Gillian, please don’t be like them. Please. They … they don’t even like us. They don’t like me. Please like me. Please be like me. Oh, Gillian! Here, you can have my bed. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
Becky slid off her cot and crumpled on the worn, smelly carpet, her hands clasped, praying to a God she didn’t believe in, begging for comfort from a sister she shouldn’t believe in. A sister who’d abandoned her utterly, moving out more than a year before, with an attitude that it was every woman for herself.
That was the last time Gillian got hammered, and her fast track to sobriety. The look on her then-fifteen-year-old sister’s face remained the worst thing Gillian had ever caused. The low point in life, before her twentieth birthday.
I betrayed the one innocent who deserved commitment.
She’d decided then never to risk repeating her parents’ mistakes, knew then she’d never have kids. Her chin set, her determination, too, as her baby sister wailed. Gillian Trett decided she’d never get drunk on anything again, and the next afternoon, she met her sister at the end of the school day, walked home with her, told her she’d take care of her. The naked relief in Becky’s eyes made the hangover worth it.
Since then, Gillian’s pact never faltered. They never competed, they always shared, they damn well watched out for each other. They made themselves into two good, functional people, phoenixed from the home of two pickled parents. Gillian stayed, and they weathered Becky’s remaining adolescence under their parents’ roof, under the stench of alcohol. Right before Becky’s graduation, Gillian found a roommating situation. She and Becky moved out, cut the cord. It was done. They never talked to or about their parents.
They held hands as they walked those days and sometimes, they still did, Becky’s son or husband holding her other hand.
And Gillian still mentally apologized to Becky—I’m sorry, Becky-Bird—for scaring her at fifteen, for leaving her alone that first year after graduation, for getting shit-faced and coming home to an unliked girl with no one in her corner, no one sober.
“Hello,” Paul said, smiling from across the kitchen when Gillian kicked the door open, hurting her toe. Then his tone wrenched with concern. “Are you crying?”
“No, my contacts were bothering me, that’s all. Sorry, I’ve got to work.” She rushed past him to the darkroom, flicking on the switch that lit a red warning light in the hallway to deny anyone else entry to her space.
She didn’t cry for long. She got it together and turned to the dry negative she’d made in the wee hours that morning.
With the strip cut and the neg fit into her enlarger, Gillian hand-cranked the knobs and considered the shot on a larger scale, the light and dark areas of the image reversed. She changed the enlarger’s aperture then selected a cheap resin-coated paper to make a test print that would be striped by varying seconds of light. As soon as the solutions in the four baths were ready, she exposed the negative and began the cycles of timing and sloshing.
Ghostly images appeared, solidifying as she stared. Absorbed in the red light of her darkroom, Gillian wondered in what decade the film had been loaded and shot. She used tongs to lift the wet enlargement from the last bath, squeegeed the paper, and placed it on the drying screen.
The only background visible was undeveloped land. No cityscape. A woodsy scene. The people were definitely young, all boys. The two on the extreme left and right were the oldest, with four younger boys in between them. They had lived their lives, fulfilled their promise to whatever extent. But the day this old shot was taken, they were ratty, scrawny, in front of scrubby trees. These children looked old in youth.
Their tattered clothes, colla
rs and pockets dangling, harked to a time long past. The trouser hems were rolled up on some of the kids, while others wore too-small clothes that left their ankles exposed. Oh, those children. Some of them were probably dead if her guess about the time frame—forties? fifties?—was correct. Some of them had gone on to make meaning out of their lives, surely. They had a story for having been standing in a clearing, looking dirty and whipped and somehow brave.
She was surprised to find she’d stood there thinking about dead people long enough for the print to dry. She wanted to make a better print—twenty-two seconds would be the best overall exposure, she could see that now from the test stripes—but Paul knocked on the darkroom door.
“Is it safe? You have a call on the house phone.”
She flicked off the red warning light to the hallway and came out, giving him an apologetic smile and a quick kiss before going to find the phone by the living room loveseat.
Kevin’s phone voice, unknown yet familiar, was startlingly sexy, dark like his hair, bringing to mind his strong, stubbled jaw and his bulk. “Thought I was calling your cell. Got your numbers mixed up.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “What’s up? Do you have a story idea?”
“The notion of environmental memory,” he said slowly. “How about you, got anything?”
“One possibility, but …” she faltered, wondering what magic might exist in that old photograph. Remembering his hand on her arm, she basked as he encouraged her to try whatever seed might be germinating.
“Birds of a feather,” he said. “Maybe a piece on street people who are, by choice, gleaners. Dysfunctional families, their world. Nothing touristy. No lighthouses or ferries or Mount Rainier.”
“Right. No Cascade or Olympic Mountains. No waterfalls for that matter.” She spoke with a decisiveness that surprised her, even as she knew the legacy concept they sought was not in those clichéd images of the Pacific Northwest.