Wish You Were Here

by Stewart O'Nan

  “I will. Right now I’ve got to go get that light.”

  “I understand,” Grandma said, and let him go. Rufus stood at the door, wagging his tail as he watched him cross the yard.

  She turned back to Sam and smiled, and Sam smiled too, happy to have her all to himself again.

  “Now,” she said, “tell me what else is new with you.”

  2

  He expected getting out of the house would feel like a jailbreak, but walking down the road in the cool, heavy air, Ken thought it was the opposite; he knew that this escape was temporary, that he’d have to come back and tell his mother everything.

  It wasn’t Sam’s fault, and he hoped he wouldn’t hold it against him. Sam had enough troubles.

  She would accuse him of shutting her out or, worse, of misleading her, letting her believe he was teaching at B.U. (when in fact he’d only filled in for Morgan the week he was out in Berkeley for the opening of his show). He’d have to admit he wasn’t working part-time at Merck either, that that had just been an old project they needed him to reconstruct, and not because he was indispensable but because he’d mislabeled his negatives. Instead of the twin professional and academic successes he knew she wanted from him, he’d have to admit that he was making $8.50 an hour developing overexposed birthday party and graduation photos.

  After that, the conversation would spread and accelerate, sweep like an avalanche across his life, dredging up the ridiculous choices he’d made and their consequences—for the children, she’d say, as if he’d let Ella and Sam down, doomed them to shame and starvation. He knew she thought he was a fool and feared the world would crush him, and yet her worry never felt protective, more like a lack of faith in him. He’d just have to sit there and listen to her tear him down, without his father to soften the blows, to reassure him that she was only concerned about him, that they all knew what a tough profession he was in.

  Crows called, mocking. The canopy of trees blocked out the sky so only a low band of white light filtered in from the lake, sneaking between the houses. Squirrels were out. One froze, then skittered up the far side of a tree as if Ken were a hunter. In the driveways, the Volvo wagons and Cadillacs sat with rocklike patience, windshields beaded with dew, and he remembered the ludicrous bulk of his father’s 98, waiting, he supposed, in their dim garage in Pittsburgh, the concrete beneath it stained with the blood of its predecessors. He saw the backyard with its old basketball pole, and the steel garbage cans tucked under the porch stairs. That’s what he should be shooting—their dented, mottled sides and knocking handles, the porch rail his father fashioned from pipe. He’d have to visit before his mother sold the house.

  He had the Holga and a small tripod in his bag. The light was grainy, too much water in the air, as if it might rain. He’d do a few rolls of black and white. Already the prospect bored him. The Holga was too simple, took too many tools out of his hands. Morgan had made Ken promise to leave it alone, not swaddle the box in black gaffer’s tape to stop the light leaks. The plastic lenses were notorious for their distortion. Even if you thought you had a shot, you had no idea how the prints would come out. “That’s the whole idea,” Morgan said.

  He knew how it was supposed to work, he just didn’t think it would. But he agreed that he had to do something. Looking over Morgan’s shoulder as he picked through his portfolio (rejected, again), he saw how polished and mediocre he’d become. The images told him nothing. Anyone could have taken these stark trees and benches and street signs—an undergrad or retiree with an eye for light—and anyone could have printed them so crisply they would look striking on a wall, but they were empty, all composition; as Morgan said, no gut.

  “Talent is great,” Morgan said. “Talent and technique are absolutely necessary, but they’re not enough. At some point you’re going to have to fish or cut bait.”

  It seemed to Ken an ultimatum, a test of their student-mentor friendship, and so here he was, creeping between the sleeping cottages at first light, hoping to save himself with what was meant to be a child’s toy, heading for the fishery. It was no comfort that around the world, as the sun seemed to move westward, thousands of photographers were doing the same thing, dragging themselves out of bed to see the world in its freshness. He should have at least gotten a coffee.

  Maybe, his mother would say, you weren’t cut out to be that kind of photographer. She’d said this before, and now, in his doubt, he was inclined to agree with her. Maybe he should put his pretensions away and take baby pictures, portraits of normal families for Christmas cards. That would make her happy.

  He passed the Cartwrights’ and the A-frame owned by the new people from Erie and turned up the crumbling access road, the woods dark on both sides. At the far end where it T-boned the marina road, a van hauling a bass boat rattled past, chains clanking. His father had loved to fish, loved to sit in the reeds in the early morning, the water calm as oil. In one of Ken’s favorite pictures of him he was clamping lead sinkers onto his line with his teeth, a cigarette burning on the edge of his workbench. Maybe tomorrow he’d take Sam out before breakfast, just the two of them. He thought of a whole book of fishing shots, the total subculture—men and their sons, their boats and gear—done in that flat style like Bill Owens’s Suburbia.

  It was precisely this kind of abstract thinking that got him into trouble. The Holga was supposed to make him feel the shot, not just see it.

  And he’d never taken Sam fishing, not once.

  He turned onto the marina road and the trees opened up, giving him a half-mile view across the raised plain of the fishery to the highway. Vapor rose off the ponds, caught in the pasty gray tree line like gun smoke, a Michael Kenna effect, majestic and fake. He wanted something homely and real. He hoped there would be herons, and that the Holga could get him close enough.

  He hadn’t expected anyone to be in yet, but a game-service pickup stood by the front doors of the main building, and from experience he knew he should get permission before he started shooting.

  The inside was alive with the thrum of compressors and the bubbly rush of water through pipes. It was warm, and smelled not of fish but mud, the richness of silt. Posters identifying the different species hung on the cinder-block walls. In the center of the poured floor was a well in which several fish nosed the curved sides. He was admiring the speckled skin of a pike, its ice-cream spoon of a snout, when a ranger in blue came in.

  Ken pushed his bag back on his shoulder and extended a hand. “Hi,” he said, “I’m a photographer,” and gave him his pitch, showed him a photocopied release form.

  It was no problem.

  Outside again, walking between the blank tablets of the pools, he wondered why that wasn’t enough for his mother.

  There were no herons that he could see, only some sleepy gulls nestled against the banks, their legs tucked under them. The light was fine, not soft but not dramatic yet, a nice in-between, promising the rich middle grays he liked. Water bugs zipped across the surface, leaving rippling silver trails. There, he thought—not even a thought, really, just the recognition, in a blink, of something interesting. He didn’t stop to think about what the print would look like. He set his bag on the ground and scrounged around for a roll of Tri-X, loaded the Holga and got to work.

  3

  Just waking up made her tired, her brain incredibly heavy, a cloud filled with rain. Ken and Lise were already gone, their made bed a challenge. Meg groped for her watch, hoping the hour was unreasonable. Her wrist bumped her water but it didn’t spill.

  Nine o’clock.

  “Fuck,” she exhaled, and let her head fall back into the pillow.

  She could have easily slept another hour but she didn’t want her mother getting on her case, not the first day. There was no rush, they’d get into it eventually—probably today, after she told her. She could hear her mother’s measured response, just short of an I-told-you-so, and then the pause, her mother waiting for her to say she was wrong, that all of this was her fault for n
ot being the daughter she wanted, for defying her as a teenager, dropping out of college, leaving home. She was supposed to admit she’d earned her mother’s disapproval, that after twenty years she’d finally realized her mother was right and she was ready to change her life, maybe even move back to Pittsburgh with the kids so they could be closer. From there, who knew where it would go—her ungratefulness, her mess of a life.

  This was what she was waking up for.

  The air was dry up here, her nose glued shut. The room was familiar without being welcoming—the same banished furniture of her grandparents that haunted her childhood, except, like the cedar chest and dresser, it seemed to have been miniaturized. The angles of the ceiling reminded her of months spent listening to AM radio and writing in her diary, the lonely stretches of vacation relieved only by camp, and then, more crushing, returning with her footlocker full of mildewed clothes and mementos: the decoupaged rock, the macramé ankle bracelet, the second-place ribbon for the breaststroke.

  She remembered her father calling up the stairs, “Are you going to come outside with us?” and herself sitting on the rug, the sunlight a slice across her knee. She watched the motes drift as if suspended, sea horses shifting with the current. “Margaret?” She said nothing. “Okay,” her father said, “but you know you’re welcome to.”

  He had to say that.

  So many times he’d taken her side, yet it didn’t matter because in the end he always gave in to her mother. He was a weak ally, and ultimately— again, a teenager, brave and unforgiving—she shamed him with it, and the two of them were never the same, like Jeff after her rehab. She would never understand why men were so brittle. For all their posturing they didn’t know how to fight, how to win or lose without letting it wreck them.

  Ken’s funky 7UP bottle, the broken TV. It was amazing how all this crap had survived when so many other things closer to her had been destroyed. It didn’t seem fair. But if she’d hidden up here for thirty years, she’d be fine too, covered with dust but miraculously intact, her belief in love untested.

  The boys were long gone, but Sarah was still asleep. Since turning thirteen she despised getting up for school. Ella lay beside her, reading one of Sarah’s fantasy trilogies. Though they were only a couple of months apart, Ella idolized Sarah, trailed in her wake the same way Ken had tagged after her.

  Ella smiled when she saw her, and Meg knelt down and gave her a clumsy hug. She was shy and polite, like Ken. It was a shame she had his long jaw, not Lise’s pretty chin. And thin, a breastless thirteen. Sarah already had a boyfriend and was turning heads at the mall—husbands in their thirties, their eyes like rifles. Meg wondered if this plainness was worse, if Ken was worried for her.

  “How are your braces?” she whispered.

  “They’re okay.” Ella opened up to show her.

  “I remember when I got mine, my teeth hurt for a week. These look like a different kind though. Mine had a key the orthodontist turned every time I visited. He used to have to hold my face like this and turn it.”

  “Ow.”

  “Yeah—ow. But look.” She smiled, giving her both profiles, and Ella was kind enough not to mention the subtle yellow Meg had noticed a few weeks ago. Jeff’s dental no longer covered them, so she hadn’t had them cleaned in a while. The kids’ checkups were nervewracking enough. “Yours will look even better when you’re done.”

  “They better. Will Sarah have to have them?”

  “So far, no—knock wood.” She tapped Ella’s part with a knuckle. “But it looks like Justin will.”

  She left her to her book and used the bathroom. Sitting on the john, she could see only the top half of her face in the mirror, a tired Kilroy. She settled her hair with her hands and looked at the ruts under her eyes. In two weeks she would officially be divorced. She was too old to be starting over again, but that was exactly what she would have to do.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Try downstairs,” she said.

  They knocked again.

  “Yes?”

  “I need to brush my teeth,” Sam said, in that blank voice of his.

  “Just a minute,” she said, and sighed at the lack of privacy. She knew it was uncharitable of her, but sometimes it seemed to her that Sam wasn’t all there. There was something odd about him, the way he stood there looking with his mouth open, his eyes stuck, as if he couldn’t actually see you. Glazed, like a sleepwalker. Even when he was doing things, he seemed to be in his own little world, playing with toys designed for younger children. But a lot of boys were like that. She wondered if they’d ever had him tested.

  She wrapped a towel around her waist before she opened the door, then gave him a hug. He suffered it, stepped back when she let go.

  “And how are you?”

  “Good,” he said.

  “Did you find Justin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you two playing something?”

  “Yeah.”

  He was like a man, she thought, defying her with silence. At least Sarah let her know what a pain she was.

  She couldn’t resist needling him as he placed his toothbrush bristles up on the sink and squeezed the tube with both hands.

  “What are you playing?”

  “Croquet.”

  “Who’s winning?”

  “I am.”

  “Are you tired of me asking you questions?”

  This struck him as funny, and he stopped brushing to smile at her.

  “No,” he said through the foam. He seemed so genuinely tickled that she wondered if his blankness was unconscious, not Sarah’s practiced act. She would have to ask Lise—politically, of course—and then get the real story from Ken.

  He spat but didn’t rinse, stuck the brush in the chrome holder.

  “Are you all done?” she asked. “Because I have to take my shower.”

  “I’m all done,” he echoed, and headed downstairs.

  “Yikes,” she said when she had the door closed and the water going.

  The plastic insert of the shower head was stained the color of rust. In the middle of shampooing her hair, the water turned freezing and she ducked away, shielding her front. The house—she’d forgotten its tricks. The hot came back and she hurried to rinse off before it disappeared again. A whole week like this. It was bad enough that the water smelled.

  She got out, shivering, fists clenched, only to discover the towels were all wet. For a minute she thought it was a joke, a gag Sam had played on her, but then she checked the cupboard, and there was the threadbare collection she knew from her girlhood, the obsolete burnt-orange and dark avocado sets, the striped beach towels bleached white, the patterned washcloths. The cupboard smelled of mothballs and latex paint with an undercurrent of strong cheese, even a dead mouse, all of it scenting the towels.

  She noticed she was taking her time, being thorough, as if getting ready for a wedding or a formal dinner. A press conference, she thought. She should have prepared a statement. She could read it off notecards in front of them, then deflect their questions.

  As she was rolling her deodorant on, Sarah opened the door, groggy in her nightshirt.

  “I gotta go.”

  “Can you wait?”

  “No,” she said, hesitating.

  “Go then,” Meg said, “you’re already here,” and moved over so she could squeeze by. “When you’re done I want you to take a shower and get some breakfast.”

  “What about Ella?”

  “I’m not in charge of Ella.” She could almost hear Sarah answer in her head: You’re not in charge of me either. “We’re going to the flea market.”

  “Great,” Sarah said, deadpan, tinkling.

  “You can stay here if you want.”

  “Who else is going?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been downstairs yet.”

  She ceded the bathroom to her, and the cold hit her skin. She unzipped her green bag and grabbed some underwear off the top. She wasn’t sure how warm
it was outside, so she hedged and went with jeans.

  There were no outlets in the bathroom. She had to hunt behind the low wardrobe for one, then blow-dry her hair kneeling in front of the mirror. Doubled, Ken’s 7UP bottle seemed even stranger, sadder. Whose idea was it to bend the neck like that, and why was it considered a prize, something to be won? And yet the bottle with its deep green glass and old-style writing—both long obsolete, the domain of collectors—contained more of her feelings for the world than the ugly rug or the ridiculous dresser or even the decent-looking wardrobe. The heat roared and stiffened her hair, and as she turned her head (seeing Ella still reading) she noted all the other junk up here—the daybed and the chairless ottoman, the clothes tree that looked like a stork, the dusty beanbag chair—and wondered what they were going to do with all of it. The only thing she wanted was the set of tumblers they used for orange juice in the morning and that her father drank his scotch from at night. Each had an antique car embossed on it, a Buick or an Olds with an anonymous couple in goggles and dusters sitting on what appeared to be an upholstered loveseat. The glasses weren’t rare or even good-looking but, like Ken’s bottle, were charged, brought back the years and meals like a talisman, the laughter in kitchens.

  Sarah came out of the bathroom and lay down again.

  “Take your shower and get dressed,” Meg said in her direction, but didn’t press it. It was her vacation too. She dropped her flip-flops on the rug and pointed her toes into them. “You’re responsible for your own breakfast,” she said, but only Ella looked up.

  Downstairs she was relieved to find her mother wasn’t there. The boys were on the couch in the living room playing their Game Boys, and through the corner window she could see Lise reading on the porch. She decided to walk past the door normally; when she did, nothing happened.

  The coffeemaker still had a few cups in it. Getting a mug from the cupboard, she noticed some of her father’s glasses, stacked upside down on the red-checked contact paper so bugs and dust didn’t settle in them. She counted four. She thought there were six and stood on tiptoe to look in back, then checked the top rack of the dishwasher—always a horror, the aqua rubber of the prongs worn off.