by Lisa Preston
“911, what is your emergency?”
“Help! My son can’t breathe!” She shouted their address at the telephone, asked them again to send an ambulance, send paramedics, send help.
She told Greer to hang on, she was getting help, hang on, she loved him.
CHAPTER 9
Cries in the night, chortles and soft voices in the garage studio filtered into Gillian’s sleep, ruining the pleasure of unconscious rest. She sat up in bed, sick with the sound, the unmet wants. She remembered her sister as a toddler, crying when Gillian went away to first grade, still crying when Gillian came home.
She smothered herself with a pillow. Her day would be full, the puppy calendar to photograph at various locations, a phone consult on a well-paying wedding shoot coming up on the peninsula, she wanted to show Kevin the old photo of the boys in the woods, and she half expected him to call with a hot journalism idea he’d want her to photograph.
Fitful through the dark hours, she finally fell hard, but forced herself up when she awoke alone and heard Paul in the kitchen. This could not continue. She dressed in a rush and tried not to be too pointed about her agenda.
While he steeped maté, she selected a ruby red Mexican grapefruit, sliced it into sixths, then used the long, thin knife to cut each piece from the rind, keeping most of the pith with the fruit, not minding when some of the tough yellow-orange skin stuck as well. She tossed the works into the blender’s beaker with a glass of water and some ice cubes. Before she could power it up, Rima scrambled away.
Paul followed the dog and tried to massage wilted ears back to semi-erect. “There, there. It will be over in a minute.”
Quiet returned as Gillian killed the blender’s power. An exceptionally high-end model, its jetlike roar had always distressed the dog. Seven years with Paul—not counting the year of early, then serious dating before they married—meant she’d had a dog for years, for most of Rima’s life. She’d never had a dog before. A photographer who might take an assignment to any far-off, war-torn locale couldn’t have a dog and could only have a very understanding husband. Even Paul—the best person she knew—wasn’t so understanding, was he?
She’d been approaching twenty-five when they met and found herself drawn to how he was unlike every other guy she’d known. The others were irresponsible boys, even if they were twenty-five or thirty. Paul was a man, learned, a rocket scientist. He was so fit, she hadn’t realized he was so much older, and once she did, it didn’t seem to matter, because he was so good to her.
She passed her smoothie over when he reached for a taste from her glass.
“Quite a head on it,” Paul said, letting the floating pulp lodge in his neat, gray moustache.
She closed her eyes to force the sudden smile away, then opened them to him stirring his maté. He returned her smoothie, and she chewed a bit of pulp. The four-hundred-fifty-dollar blender did a fabulous job at pulverizing the whole fruits and vegetables she drank, but the whipping added air to the mix, making foam float on every glassful. She’d have bought a blender used at a thrift shop. She had, back in days of taking care of Becky. And when she moved in with Paul, she’d brought the old thing with her. Even with its cracked, yellowed plastic base, it served her.
He earned six digits every year, guaranteed. Of course he could buy a four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar blender, a twenty-five-hundred-dollar fly-wheel rowing machine, a Beamer station wagon with an ultra-fancy sports rack on top.
He told her she didn’t have to scrimp. He didn’t know from scrimping, had no idea. She used to gather extra napkins in fast food joints, stuff her pockets with them, save them for toilet paper at home because her parents wouldn’t bring in household staples. As a kid, she’d saved jelly jars, using them for water glasses and cereal bowls.
Paul saved glass for others’ recycling, depositing the mixed paper, plastics, and cardboard in separate bins every week. He ate meat but was happy to accommodate her vegetarian habit, a move she’d made for economy and stuck with through strictest grit.
She refused to think about why she was contemplating her last crummy little studio apartment, one she’d only shared with Becky and then had all to herself after Becky married Myron. Life hadn’t changed between Paul and Gillian. Every good, decent day was like the last. They had real connections, but a new fear had arisen from an unknown place in her mind: this wasn’t going to be enough to sustain the rest of her life.
Still wearing pink goo above his upper lip, Paul tried a crooked grin and she smiled back, close-lipped, before reaching for a towel and handing it to him.
She held the grapefruit knife, fiddling, then asked, “Have you talked to her much?”
“Who?” Paul looked up, puzzled.
She pointed up, in the direction of the studio. Her hearing was much more acute than his. He wouldn’t have been disturbed in the night by Liz’s child.
“Oh. No, not at all, not really.”
She kept her voice casual. “What do you know about her?”
“How do you mean?” He looked startled, blank.
Her question had been under her skin and now he was, too. Her voice became sharp. “Well, really, she shows up from … where? Where did she live? What does she do for money? We don’t know anything about her.” The woman was nearly living in their house and had no explanations. Why didn’t he find it as odd and off-putting as she did?
He zipped up his neon cycling jacket. “When it comes to it, how well do you know anyone?”
Ready to retort what she thought to be true—I know everything about you—Gillian stopped because the corollary wasn’t true and that was her choice. Her inability to come clean with him made her look away and shut her mouth. She’d come clean with herself in recent weeks, acknowledging a longing for a different life, its call undeniable, but a game changer. She’d have to tell him. She’d have to hurt him.
They went outside together, she handing him the black nylon pannier with his work folders. He fit the pannier hooks onto the bike’s rear rack. The road bike cost nearly three thousand dollars, and he hadn’t blinked when he bought it last summer. Gillian blinked now, over and over. As he buckled his helmet, he touched her arm, and that’s when she realized he’d been speaking to her.
“If you want to know more about her, go talk to her.” He nudged his chin upward, where they could see Liz in the window above the garage, casting a look down at them as she bounced the baby on her hip.
Apple weather is the last harbinger of hope. Gillian escaped into her work, feeling blue with the coming dark of winter’s shorter days. She wanted to love the scents, the wetness, and the slow mulching of crisp fallen leaves on earth. If only she could grow things like Becky could. But then again, she’d never tried. Her sister did enough homemaking for both of them, tending her little yard, dabbling in every craft, raising her son, snipping fresh rosemary for the lamb she served her laughing Greek husband. The relief she’d felt when Becky and Myron married ranked as the high point of Gillian’s twenties.
After returning to the shelter with the puppies she’d photographed in the snow—Gillian had found some wild Oregon grape with spiny leaves in glorious red for the December shot, stuck with conifers for the November close-up with a Lab mix, and a snow-crusted ridge in the background of the January photo—Gillian pulled the Beamer over to check a text. Kevin: still thinking. She smiled and almost teased him with a name: Alexandru Istok.
Instead, she googled the foreign-sounding name, stopping the thought. What was foreign in this country? She found a Seattle address, then directions. Instinct told her not to let her first contact be a cold call. If she phoned ahead, she could be put off, misjudged. But a stranger coming to the house might not be a good thing either. Such an arrival would test her, test everyone there. Bravery floated by as she drove to the Istok address.
Please let him be there, a man who scratched his name in the camera’s hidden spot, perhaps more than half a century ago, a man who took the photo of a half dozen boys. Let there b
e a history worth telling.
An ivy-covered rock pillar protected the mailbox and bore the right numbers in a mortar hollow among the stones. The house was set back on the lot, giving it a grander appearance than other old homes on the block. A winding stone path brought her past overgrown hedges and various plants that might have been an ordered garden of ornamentals in its day but looked uncared-for now.
There was no doorbell or weighted metal knocker. She rapped her bony knuckles on the cold door and steadied her breathing. Shuffling and a voice or voices roused within. Then the door opened so fast, she startled.
“Yeah?” He was about twenty, dark-eyed with black hair, needing a shave and a clean shirt. The hems of his filthy jeans stuck into the tongues of his enormous high-tops, and he stepped onto the worn rubber doormat as he swung the door shut, causing Gillian to step back when his body brushed within inches of hers. He rubbed his hands against opposite forearms, one hand smearing black grease and the other covering then uncovering a blurry tattoo. And he steadfastly didn’t look behind him when she glanced uncertainly at the doorway he body-blocked.
“I’m Gillian Trett. I’m researching a photograph I developed from film inside an antique camera and came to this address because of the name inscribed inside.”
He looked at her, unmoving, without comprehension. She remembered now that the woman had one camera in her house a long time and the daughter acquired the other from a guy named John.
His gaze narrowed and his arms folded across his chest as he half turned to go back inside. “You’re researching a photo?”
Gillian cleared her throat and looked up at the kid again, thinking this was the worst thing about being petite, tipping her head back to address her juniors towering over her. “Yes, that’s it. I’m a photographer and I develop forgotten film in old cameras. I’ve made a print from film that was in a Bantam Anastigmat that has the name Alexandru Istok scratched inside.”
“Alex. That’s my grandfather.”
“Wonderful. Could I talk to him?” She nodded, trying to will him to cooperation.
He frowned and scuffed one foot on the doormat, chancing a quick glance over his shoulder. “Look, I didn’t exactly ask about the camera.”
“You didn’t ask about it,” she echoed. His unease was contagious. She lifted her chin. “How did it come to be at someone else’s garage sale?”
He looked away as he spoke. “I gave it to a girl.”
You gave it to her to get laid, Gillian thought, depreciating him on a mental balance sheet. He hadn’t bought the girl a gift, he’d swiped an old relic from his grandfather’s possessions. She thought of legacies, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities to share, to learn, to love. The camera had meant little to the girl who’d been the object of his so-called affection.
He gave half a head shake, ending with his lower jaw thrust forward. “I sort of forgot about it. She’s not really my girlfriend anymore anyway.”
“So the camera …” Gillian prompted. But nothing came back from the young man, no effort. “Is he going to want it returned?”
He hesitated. “I can ask him.”
Of course you can ask him, Gillian thought, feeling her teeth clench and telling herself to keep her face impassive. Now was a fine time for him to ask about taking the camera. He was not trying to right a wrong. His quandary wasn’t how to get the camera back, but how not to expose his theft. Whether or not Grandfather Alexandru wanted his camera back, wanted the old picture that he’d never developed, was not this young man’s concern. Gillian shook her head, trying to choose her words.
He cleared his throat. “He’s not here right now. He’s at work.”
“Where does he work?” Gillian asked, thinking that Alexandru Istok could be no spring chicken, that the kid was the one who should be at work somewhere.
He told her the name of the business—the Sartineau Shop—and she repeated it, eyeing the grease on his arm again with the mention of a shop.
“What does your grandfather do?”
“He’s a bow maker.”
Intrigued, Gillian asked, “Like, archery bows?”
“Like music bows. For violins and cellos and stuff.” The kid waved his left arm in a vague bowing motion.
Early in their relationship, Paul took Gillian to a few concerts, symphonies, and operas. Though she’d never developed an interest in live performances and knew precious little about musical instruments, her photographer’s eye knew the right hand bowed and the left hand fingered stringed instruments. When a photographic composition was not quite what she wanted, she sometimes flipped a slide, negative, or digital image to change the perspective, but she had to be mindful not to misrepresent things. She could not show a left-handed mayor signing a document with his right hand. She would not have developed a photograph that showed a musician bowing backward as the kid had pantomimed. She considered the young man before her. Did he ever dance around and play air guitar? Did he know to strum with his right hand when he did?
“Music bows.” She savored the words, thinking of wood and hair drawing sound from wood and gut. Whatever she thought about performances, she knew the tools of music were eminently good photographic studies, and she was delighted to find a craftsman secreted away in this odd neighborhood, linked to the antique camera and its mysterious photo of boys in the woods.
A fond glance at the unkempt front garden showed, on second thought, clumps of herbs, intentional plantings that told a story. She knew the photos captured here would support the piece. There was a green metal chair amid the overgrowth in the west end of the front yard. Mint and oregano wafted, and now she realized this was an herb garden, not weeds. Sun would streak through the tall cedars on the neighbor’s lot at the end of the day, cast an orange glow on the foliage, on the skin of someone seated in the chair under her watchful lens. She could breathe life into an old man’s story.
Gillian wanted to rush to the Sartineau Shop and meet Alexandru Istok, but it was time for her phone consult on the big wedding. She put on a chipper voice, dug out her notebook, and spent as much time talking about colors and lighting and shots and packages as the client wanted, happy to finally schedule the shoot scouting date. After, the day was shot.
Drawn up the studio steps after she pulled the Beamer into the garage, Gillian was surprised when the door opened and she was ushered into what was now someone else’s apartment.
“Hello. Come in, come in.” The woman turned and sat on the floor, kissing the baby, pointing. “Look, it’s Gillian. It’s Uncle Paul’s wife. So, she’s your auntie. It’s Aunt Gillian. She’s come to see us. Yay!”
“Hello,” Gillian said, looking from mother to baby and back again. “Sorry but we’ve never been introduced, really.”
“Liz. I’m Liz.” She rose from the floor in greeting, then sank back down beside her baby again. “Thank you so much for letting us stay. It’s so kind of you. We really appreciate it, don’t we, sweetie?” She kissed the baby’s head and it chortled, patted her face, then reached for the table.
A beat-up stuffed toy, possibly a puppy, flopped below the perfect square table Gillian had picked out for the studio. The baby—Was it a toddler? At what age did a baby turn into a toddler?—waddled off its butt and propped itself up on chubby hands, struggling to balance on one arm and reach for the puppy. Liz clapped and showered the child with encouragement that turned to glee.
“Was that your car in the alley before? The first day you came?” Gillian asked. The pictures she shot of the frost patterns on that shaded car hood had come out well.
“Hmm?”
“That first day you came, there was a car in the alley. I thought it was yours.”
“Oh, that old junker went away, parted out or to the crusher,” Liz said. “Wow. You look really nice.”
Pausing, surprised, Gillian considered her clothes, compared everything she could see. They both wore sweaters, slacks, and plain shoes. Gillian’s clothes were knockoff designer stuff, sleek-fitting
and black with good blends of wool and Spandex, and she’d dressed up her outfit with the addition of a light, draping scarf. Liz’s royal blue pants and drab purple sweater of slubby yarn full of pulls had stains, baby wear. And the baby touched Liz’s hair and face, leaving stickiness, mussing the hair from the plain barrettes. Gillian made a note to not let the baby get at her hair, which looked tony with ease, down or in a ponytail.
The beautiful studio was still neat, but every used item newly there stood out to Gillian, the pacifier in the sink, the clothes tucked on the shelves, the plastic bags folded neatly on top of the fridge under an iPhone with credit cards rubber-banded around it.
Liz helped the baby stand and Gillian sank to her knees to engage. The motion made her scarf fly and the child keyed on the scarf, teetering in uncertain steps toward the prize. Gillian flapped one end of her scarf. The baby giggled.
Removing the scarf, a painted silk featherweight beauty of night sky tones that Becky had made, Gillian noticed the baby watching her fingers as she undid the light knot and shook out the fabric. The soft flutter, like wings in slow motion, drew the eye.
Gillian opened her mouth to speak, but only shook her head. The baby’s smile and shining eyes were enchanting. It was in love with the scarf. Was it the motion? The color? The newness? She wanted to capture that expression, and one hand slid for her mirrorless Olympus camera ever dangling on her neck, its strap cutting into her skin after she removed the scarf.
Draping the silky fabric around the child, lulled by its delight, Gillian looked up to see Liz beaming. Gillian frowned, realizing she didn’t know if the baby was a boy or girl. There was so much they didn’t know about this woman who was in the moment, clapping and praising her baby and the scarf.
