by Lisa Preston
“Gillian, your moon shot won the Hellman award. And I have an idea. Could be a breakthrough opportunity. My office at ten. There’s a guy you have to meet. Call and let me know if you can’t make it. Ciao.”
Her moon photograph won five thousand dollars.
Being married to a rocket scientist aside, Gillian hadn’t much to do with the heavens. And she knew of no other photographer whose portfolio for so long held not a single night sky shot. Puget Sound afforded little time without clouds anyway. Who even knew if the stars still existed above the rain? The wet weather made her nuts, ruining several outdoor shoots she had on the docket, slowing her freelance projects.
But that night, the light, the sky, Gillian captured it all. Her chosen focal length highlighted the texture of moon rocks above craters and seas. Paul told her they were mountains called the Peaks of Eternal Light and she’d gotten lost in the name.
Is five thousand dollars enough to start over, start a new life?
Wait, where did that sharp-clawed thought come from? She felt the heat of a blush over her wild, random idea of running away, starting over, escaping. For someone frugal, someone who once dreamed of a daring life, five thousand dollars could be the opportunity of a lifetime.
She refused to wonder how this notion was conceived. She wasn’t going to leave Paul. People did not leave a pleasant life in a nice city, a comfortable marriage of seven years with a good man. People hung on to that for all they were worth.
Daydreams carried her, just like in childhood. When Rima startled, scrambled to his feet, fur flying at the sound of the front door being unlocked and opened, followed by Paul’s voice, Gillian had no idea how long she’d been lost in thought.
Boiling with enthusiasm, Rima made a sliding run for the entryway.
“Good heavens, good dog.” Paul’s coos to Rima as he swung the door shut did little to calm the wagging, spinning animal.
Gillian unplugged her partially charged cell and left her desk. “Hey.”
Studying man and dog in the entryway, appreciation twisted her face. Him, the average-looking early-fifties guy with the stupendous scientific mind and the killer wit. Paul. Paul with the overgrown sense of decency and ethics, stroking the adoring dog. He smiled up at his wife, one hand on Rima, the unbuckled strap of his cycling helmet dangling around his face. “Hello. Have you used the car?”
“No.”
“Great.” He dropped his rainproof office satchel, kissed her, and headed purposefully out the side door into the garage, leaving her wondering.
She heard the car door open and close, then Paul reappeared at the threshold, eyebrows raised, one hand behind his back. She realized she was supposed to gather a sense of suspense.
“Yes?”
“Coming back from squash the other day, I procured …” he paused, rustling a bag in the hidden hand. Gillian reached halfheartedly for whatever he was hiding. He thrust the medium-size brown paper bag above his head and teased, “Guess.”
“Provisions? Food? I know you didn’t hunt. Did you gather?”
He brought his hands around her so fast, she still could not tell what he hid, and now he had her locked in his arms. Though they were nearly the same height, her delicate build let him bear hug her comfortably. Being a vegetarian without much interest in food kept her tiny, but she had married a shrimp. Paul liked to claim a height of five-six or five-seven, but whatever he said didn’t change the fact that he was no taller than her five feet five.
He dangled the prize, holding the paper bag out of reach, his longer arms defeating her leaps. Paul lowered the bag with care, and she couldn’t decide if he held something fragile or was teasing about the bag’s contents. Then he pulled out two antique cameras, one hooked on a finger by its stiff carrying handle and the other swinging from the strap of a leather case.
Her hands went to the larger one, dusting it, righting it, and bringing the viewfinder to her left eye.
Paul beamed. “My cross and dominant wife.” He put on his reading glasses to inspect the pieces with her. Not long after their marriage, he’d become old enough to succumb to the aids. If he noticed the way she averted her eyes when he peered, old-man-style, over the top of the frames, he never mentioned it.
“Ha ha,” Gillian responded, lost in the camera. Being cross-dominant—a right-handed person who naturally saw distance with her left eye—wasn’t a handicap in her job. The trait of looking through a camera’s lens with her left eye was only noticed by the highly observant. Paul commented on her cross-dominance during an early date when he brought her to enjoy the University’s best telescopes.
She turned the camera over, studying the black, textured body with silver trim. A small button on the bottom begged her right thumb to push and she obliged. The fat square on the front was a magic door that popped open, releasing the lens, pushing it out of the body on a bellows.
This camera had seen some sights, Gillian was certain. “Three feet to infinity.”
“Ah. We can’t see that far with X-ray telescopes.” When she didn’t respond, Paul tried again, gesturing to the little tab on the lens by her right index finger. “Is that the f-stop?”
She murmured negatively and pointed to a tab on the other side. “No, see the cute little f-stop suggestions by the focal length adjustment? Where did you find these?”
“At a penny sale on the way home from squash last weekend.”
Something dark flickered in her mind, but a stronger urge snuffed it. She forced her mind to the old cameras, unwanted by the seller, captivating new treasures for her. Incredible inventions, cameras. Pieces of history marking the development of history. Since she’d turned photography into her life’s passion, she’d become enamored with the idea of old cameras as a timeline. Other photographers were all about new technology, and the bulk of Gillian’s contract and freelance work was admittedly digital, but she loved her profession’s past. Nearly fifty antique cameras adorned the specially installed ledge ringing the office and living room of their vintage home. Thank goodness for the nine-foot ceilings that accommodated the high, wraparound wooden display shelves.
Just like with the construction of the studio over their formerly flat-roofed garage, they’d hired out the shelf-building work because Paul was the least handy man in America.
Her camera collection remained the only thing she bothered to dust and it had just grown by two. She wouldn’t open them until she was safe in the darkroom.
The smaller camera rested in a fitted leather Kodak case. The larger one read: Ensign Selfix 220 Made in England. “These are terrific. How much were they?”
“Pennies.” Paul smiled.
“Really, what did you pay?”
“Fifteen dollars for both.”
His pleasure at finding her gifts was honest and simple. Gillian pinged with guilt over being a more complicated person. She palmed the larger camera, its body about four by six inches, the works not much more than an inch thick. “A six-centimeter Ensign. Do you realize that I know this camera? Not this particular one, of course.” Gillian gently shook it between them. “But the Ensign Selfix … I know it. I’ve wanted one.”
He brightened further, a wide grin splitting his face. “What great luck on my part.”
“And mine.” She smiled, happier and more relaxed than she’d been all day. “Hey, I won the Hellman award, apparently.”
“Your misty spider webs in the sunrise?” Paul threw his head back and woo-hooed enough to get Rima spinning circles.
He was the one who had marveled over her moon shot, identifying by heart the mountains and craters she revealed at the lunar South Pole—he knew the names of countless features of the moonscape as well as stars both living and dead. But last week, the Seattle Times had selected Gillian’s sunrise shot of spider webs as a top five reader’s choice nominee. She told herself it didn’t matter that Paul misremembered which photo she’d submitted for the Hellman award—a juried contest she’d entered at Tilda’s suggestion months ago. He pr
obably hadn’t grabbed onto the fact that Gillian would get what was to her a substantial cash prize.
Flicking a finger over her phone’s screen, she replayed Tilda’s voicemail message for Paul: “Gillian, your moon shot won the Hellman award. And I have an idea. Could be a breakthrough opportunity. My office at ten. There’s a guy you have to meet. Call and let me know if you can’t make it. Ciao.”
“A breakthrough opportunity.” The pleasure in Paul’s voice was clear. “That’s terrific. Ah, have you talked to your sister today?”
She shook her head and tried to flush away thoughts about the tremendous burden, the cloaking responsibility. She’d been five years old when she first realized she didn’t want to babysit a one-year-old. But she had to do it. Had to.
Rima squealed and pawed now in a fashion that reminded Gillian of clingy, needy Becky. She tried to calm the dog. “Shush. Settle down.”
Rima was having none of that. With Paul home and animated, a walk had to happen. Gillian’s protests were futile. Paul bundled them out the door for an obligatory wet tromp around long city blocks with a protracted sniffing-stop at the park. Gillian wiped gloss over pursed lips, knowing they’d turn scarlet in the cold wet evening just as her skin got paler and her hair spiraled. She expected she looked like a ghost.
Sometimes, she felt old parts of the city harbored remnants of spirits. Might the antique cameras have ghosts?
“I’ve got to clean them up, give them a try.” She thought it as they walked, said it as they came back in the house, where she picked up the bigger camera, releasing the lens feature to admire the bellows.
Paul lifted his chin toward the antique in her hands. “Give them a try? Surely you can’t get film for those old cameras anymore, can you?”
“The six-centimeter Ensign uses regular two-and-a-half-inch format.”
His mouth stayed open a beat as he considered that and wrinkled his brow. “Film like your Hasselblad uses? The two-and-a-half-inch people must have based their format on this earlier work.”
Gillian knew his musing came in angst over the Mars Climate Orbiter project, fouled by the use of two different measurement systems. Millions were wasted and the satellite disintegrated. Gillian smiled at how he cringed at such mistakes, imperial versus metric, old versus new. When his group of dreamers and number-crunchers worked on theoretical possibilities of human flight to Mars, they made a joking pact of mass suicide if ever they pulled a major miscommunication boner.
“Just how antique are these?” Paul asked, scanning the gifts and then some truly ancient pinhole box cameras the living room shelf displayed.
Gillian looked up from her two new old cameras. “The Ensign is from the sixties, maybe the fifties.”
Paul made a regretful snap of his fingers. “That would preclude it from having taken World War II pictures.”
She gave a wry smile. His love of history in general and the Second World War in particular was huge. For relaxation at home, when he wasn’t reading or working out, he watched the History Channel. Gillian had come to call it the Hitler Channel for all of its war coverage.
Bringing both cameras under the light for more careful study, she took in the features and wear. The second camera, a Kodak Bantam Anastigmat F-6.3, 53-millimeter, was adorable in its own way, in wonderfully good shape for an apparatus from the thirties. The leather case, with its hardened protector over the little lens, had saved it from casual knocks. Further, the old camera’s design of a smooth, hard shell meant it was built to survive. Its viewfinder folded neatly, and the lens withdrew into the body on a full bellows. She knew she’d not likely find the film—x828 or f828—available now. No matter, because it was merely a novelty, not a piece she would use in her work. Unless the inside held a spent cartridge of salvageable film with a worthy shot, this little Bantam would simply go up on the display shelf by the Brownies and vintage movie cameras and the humongous early Polaroid Land camera. They were objects she considered and dusted and not much else.
“I developed the film out of the Exakta that Tilda and I found at Pike Place last week.”
“Exakta,” he repeated slowly. “Ah, the one with water damage? You brought it home a couple of weeks ago with those orange peppers?”
“That one,” she agreed. She worked the Bantam’s film advance mechanism but could feel no pull of film on the roller. To be safe, she still wanted to open it in her darkroom. She wondered when it had last been opened and who had looked through its viewfinder. In all likelihood, if it held spent film, the silver would not give up its photos. Decades-old film lost images due to heat damage and other factors that took a toll over time. She’d be careful and slow, but developing truly aged film was often unproductive.
“Was it a waste, like you guessed?”
“The Exakta?” Gillian nodded. “Mostly it was a mottled mess, but there were a few shots you could make out. Old Seattle.”
“Really? Anything interesting?”
She shook her head. The goal with appealing photography was originality fused with universality. A picture had to mean something and represent something. Each shot had to be interesting and well-composed and … sold. This was her calling and her daily challenge, to scrape together an assignment and to find more for her portfolio, shots to sell. Freelancing meant always looking for an edge, a way to gain notice, jobs. She hadn’t found a niche, not here.
Her cell phone chimed and her sister’s picture—holding her smiling two-year-old son—appeared on the screen. Feeling bad and brave, Gillian turned the phone off. Off.
Paul was uncharacteristically still, watchful, as Gillian finished her thirty minutes of pre-sleep yoga on the floor. She paid an inkling’s more attention, glancing sideways across the bed. He sat at his writing desk, a book abandoned on his lap.
“Our room over the garage,” he began, looking uncomfortable.
She blinked. “Yes? What about it?”
“If, well, if …” He measured his words. “If we didn’t rent it out right away …”
“We weren’t going to.” A sense of him having hidden something, or waited overlong to speak about what was on his mind, jumped at her. Has he been keeping something from me? Why did I not see it before?
She tried to put aside thoughts of the room above the garage—he’d imagined when he bought the home a dozen years back that the space might become his private office, but he proved to have plenty of space in the living room alcove. Seven years ago, when she moved in, he’d thought she might like a darkroom over the garage, but instead they did away with having a guest room and converted the spare bedroom to her darkroom. Slowly, he’d hired contractors and now the studio apartment above the garage was complete. They expected to start renting it out after the New Year.
And she’d made it perfect. It was space she coveted, though it didn’t fit her life. Just the life she dreamed of.
“Right, so if we didn’t rent it out now—”
“Paul.” Gillian took a breath and wondered what was eating on her nerves.
He froze, casting about the master bedroom and its resplendent furniture. She waited, waited for her annoyance to dissipate.
He swung to the edge of the bed. “Before my father died, his second wife died. Technically, she was my stepmother.”
“Would this be a warmer conversation under the covers?” Gillian rubbed her arms, always surprised at how cold the floor was at night. Her size-two body often left her a little cool. And she hated being cold.
“Sure. Let’s go to bed,” Paul said.
Did he want sex? Did she? She knew she’d be pleased once they started, she ought to get her mind in the moment. It would be fine.
It was. She got warm enough to throw back the sheets and they changed positions often enough to make a real mess out of the bed. Afterward, his arms slipped from her shoulders as he settled into sleep. It was contagious and she yawned too, taking great, shuddering gasps of air as she stretched. Sleep wanted her. The alternative was to let her mind wander, rehas
h, race. She replayed the seductive fantasy of the studio, a life apart from the one she’d fallen into.
And she was going to get manna from heaven, five thousand dollars.
If she let her imagination go, it might go too far.
Her senses sharpened at night, every creak of the house disrupted. She thought she heard a child’s faint cry, which made no sense in her world. Frowning, Gillian slipped out of bed, walked through the unlit house, and took the two cameras into her darkroom. In the absolute blackness, she opened them, one at a time. The Ensign was empty. The Bantam held one roll that was completely rewound, not even a tab of film protruding. She unshelved her notebook of film rescue numbers, found suggestions for the old Bantam Anastigmat, noting the times she’d use and the best solution strengths. She improved the dilution of all four, her developer, stop-bath, fixer, and the hypo-clearing agent, then set the jugs in the big sink to warm, adding water and a thermometer.
A drawer under the countertop yielded the bottle opener she used to crack open film rolls. She opened her developing tank to remove the reel, then killed the lights again. A whiff of ancient silver gelatin emanated as soon as she broke open the Bantam’s old film roll. Loading the exposed film onto the developing reel brought peace in the rhythmic back and forth of her wrists. Done, she dropped the reel into the canister and sealed it. Then she flipped on her red lights with the foot pedal and poured water into the canister for a good wetting.
The decisive move of letting the warmed developer solution slosh through the canister felt brave. Cycles of timing, pausing, and agitating the solution in the canister heightened her anticipation, as did the seconds ticking by as she worked through the following solutions, but when she could finally unwind the long negative strip she frowned. Blank, blank, blank. Was this film all unexposed? Someone had wound up an unshot roll? Fingertips on the edges of the wet strip, she paused at the other end—the beginning of the strip—where one shot had waited, perhaps for decades.
