Thank goodness I had enough cash stashed away, I could afford to sit on my ass with her for the summer. Neither of us was in any shape to detail a life plan more complicated than dinner and the TV guide. But I’d told her from the beginning that couldn’t last. Besides the money, I needed to work. It kept me in circulation.
It kept me from going insane.
Jenny finally tossed her head at me,
“Guess we should get you a key or something,” I offered. “So this doesn’t happen again.”
“Kids aren’t supposed to have keys,” she mumbled to her shoe laces. “Kids are supposed to have somebody.”
“Right.”
Our after-school routine was loosely based on her mother’s plan of operation. We ate a snack, watched cartoons together, then she tackled homework while I ran through my weight program. Today, I scrapped routine. I threw the kid a bag of chips and went straight down to my darkroom to work, eager to see how my shots would develop.
I had turned a portion of the basement into a work area as soon as I’d arrived. One small window had to be blocked off, but there was running water and plenty of space to hang prints to dry. I tied lines to plumbing pipes, bought myself some heavy-duty shelves and a shop table at the local hardware store. Boom, I was in business.
Jenny hung around the first time I printed a roll. But she didn’t like the smell of the chemicals, which meant I usually had my privacy in the darkroom. Another bonus. Sometimes the hardest thing about coming to live with Jenny was simply having her around all the time.
People are funny. If somebody said go into a damp, smelly basement and sit around for a couple of hours, it’d sound unpleasant to most, but I always felt refreshed after time in the darkroom. There’s a certain level of concentration that must be maintained, steps that happen in a certain order, and in the end if you do it right, you get something beautiful.
Some people do yoga. I do photography.
Photographing a death scene is a special challenge. There are very few shots that will play as acceptable for prime time, although the boundaries of acceptable have expanded in the last few years. I got everything through two baths and hung to dry when I heard a knock. The shot with the firefighter was a beauty.
“Come on in.” I was hunched over the table, checking a wide shot with a jeweler’s loupe. There was a flare showing up in some of the shots that irritated me.
“I’m hungry, Aunt Maddy.”
“Oh, right.” I pulled myself away from the flare problem and cracked my neck. “What time is it?”
“Almost eight. You missed Scooby-Doo and SpongeBob.”
“How many commercials?” I asked.
“Forty-two. Thirty-six promos.”
If the kid was going to watch television, she’d better know what she was watching. Whenever she watched regular TV, I made her count. “That’s a lot of commercial time.”
“Old Navy is having a sale.”
“Ah.”
Jenny slid in next to me as I hunched over proof sheets searching for flares. She looked up at the drying prints. “What is that?”
I jerked upright and had one of those
“Is that guy dead?”
“Yeah.”
She stepped close enough to the photo I thought her nose would touch the paper. “Did he kill himself?”
“Yeah, he did.” The guy had a rope as thick as my wrist hanging from around his neck; what else could I say?
“Why?” she whispered.
I guess I’d been holding my breath because the first sound I made was a whoosh of air. “I don’t know. I guess he was sad.” I knew that wasn’t right, wasn’t enough, so I tried adding, “Very, very sad.”
She turned her nose toward me and stared long enough I counted three blinks.
“Hey Jen, I need to run these downtown to a guy.” I tried diversionary tactics. “Wanna get a hot dog for dinner?”
“Chili dog?”
“Sure.” I gave her my best happy chuck on the arm, feeling like I’d dodged a bullet. “Be right up-you go grab my bag.”
With a snap, I grabbed the picture Jenny had nearly pressed her nose against. It showed the flare as well, but not in the same spot. I set two prints beside each other and realized the flare wasn’t crap on my lens. It was something in the photo, something catching light in the open second-story window of the barn.
Making pictures is a fairly complex operation. A million tiny details, a million choices that contribute to the final product. Most of the choices are things I don’t even think about any more, things happening so fast I don’t remember half of what I see. I crouch to shift the horizon. I frame so the picture will fit into a TV screen’s rectangle. I put the light behind me.
With the sun slanting in above the van’s roof, the lens recorded something my eye had missed-the flare of light on glass in a tiny, double comma. Because I’d spent plenty of time over the last five years taking pictures of soldiers on the job, it happened to be just the sort of flare I’d recognize.
Binoculars.
Somebody had been watching from the barn.
By the time her aunt was asleep, it was really dark everywhere. But Jenny didn’t mind.
Lots of other kids were afraid of the dark.
Jenny knew for a fact that Lindsay still slept with a light on, because she’d slept over once last year when they were still friends. That was a long time ago.
Jenny didn’t need a night light anymore. Night wasn’t bad. In fact, she liked it.
She stood in her doorway and listened. Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt to swallow.
Before the summer, before everything was different, she’d loved her house: the chair she always sat in to watch TV, the wall where her mom hung her pictures from school, even the bathroom, where the heater vent was right beside the toilet and in the winter it blew warm air on her cold feet when she woke up. Whenever Jenny walked in the door of her house, she always felt right.
Everything was different now. Her chair was lumpy. Aunt Maddy had put her stuff in Jenny’s bathroom, like her toothbrush and this thing called a tongue scraper that was double weird and totally gross. Jenny never had time to warm her feet anymore. She had to hurry up, so her aunt could have her turn. The house didn’t even smell the same, because her aunt hated the smell of Pine-Sol and bought new cleaner that smelled like oranges and made Jenny sneeze.
Jenny looked up and down. The hall returned nothing but a long, black silence. The pounding in her chest began to pass. Here in the dark, she felt safe. Invisible, she could breathe. She could finally do the thing she most wanted to do, the thing she craved through the whole long, bright day.
She tip-toed up the hall, sticking close to the wall where the floor didn’t creak. Outside the guest bedroom where her aunt slept, she stopped again to listen.
Quiet.
Jenny held her breath as she passed the door. Her aunt’s bare foot hung off the bed, her face turned away toward the wall.
