Leaving Unknown (11 page)

“I can totally use these for promotional cards.” Tuesday fanned out pictures of herself dancing, and hugged me.

“What are those?” Noah pointed to another folder.

“Oh.” I shrugged, embarrassed. “Nothing.”

I reached for it but he was quicker, flipping it open and spreading the candid photos. Tuesday doing the hula behind the coffee bar when she thought no one was watching. Child snoozing in his armchair. April War Bonnet whispering new dirty words to Lulabell. I worried that they looked invasive. These subjects didn’t know they were being captured.

“Maeve, these are amazing.” Tuesday’s voice was hushed.

Noah paused at one of himself. Beth was talking to him, but he wasn’t listening, he was looking past her, directly at the camera. He looked at me again now.

“You’ve captured the town well.”

I liked that he used my word
capture
. I was grabbing moments. “You can keep things from disappearing,” I said.

“But you’re not in any of them.”

“What?”

“Where are the pictures of you and Tuesday gossiping when you should be working? Or you running down the back roads, braids flying?” I was embarrassed at his awareness. I preferred to stay below the radar. He tapped a photo of Ruby, Bruce, Samuel, and Tuesday walking over to the Wagon Wheel saloon. “You should be in this.”

“How can I take the picture if I’m in it, silly?”

He gave me a look. “That’s exactly it. Why were you behind, taking the picture and not walking with everyone else?”

“I was catching up.”

“Or hanging back?”

I had the same uncomfortable feeling I’d had with Child. Like being rebuked, but I wasn’t sure for what. “I’m a tourist here,” I said breezily. “Strictly observer status.”

“Don’t remind me.” Tuesday groaned. “It feels like you’ve
always been here. You belong in Unknown. I hate the idea that you’ll leave.”

Anxious tickle. California waited. Unknown was a temporary trick of bad luck.

Noah considered me, then said, “We’ll display your pictures in the store. You can sell prints for Elsie.”

“No one’ll want to
buy
my pictures,” I protested.

“I think you’ll be surprised. How much for this one?” He tapped a shot of him and Beth walking, heads bent together. For some reason it made me irritated.

“Five dollars unframed.” I named a ridiculous price.

“Fine.”

“Kill me for vanity, but I’ll take these two.” Tuesday waved two pictures of herself dancing. I felt guilty for overcharging.

They both handed me money and just like that I was Maeve Incorporated.

I
t was my bad luck that Jenny Up decided to buy new cookbooks as soon as the store opened. Some days we sold nothing but lunch, but the day I was late, we had customers at the unlocking of the door. It figured.

Noah smiled pleasantly at Jenny as he rang her up, but his right eyebrow was drawn down so I knew he was steaming. I stepped between him and the register and completed the sale, but he didn’t return to his office. Instead, he loomed until the door closed behind her.

“You’re late.”

“I’m sorry.” I was still breathless. I really was late.

“How am I supposed to finish ten chapters on time if I’m tending customers while you loll about in bed? God help us if someone needs a doctor.”

I was offended. “I was not lolling in bed! I was in the darkroom.” Truth was, I’d barely seen Samuel all week, except for
our daily lunches. And I’d completely neglected my marathon training. I frowned. I had to fix both of those deficiencies.

The previous Monday, Child had not passed me on his way out, as usual, but was waiting.

“Come with me.” He led me out the front door around to the back of the octagonal building. There was a separate entrance, which he unlocked to reveal a small room, painted black, counters covered in trays, machines, filters and bottles.

“This is my darkroom. The photographs you’ve been taking are wasted on automated printing. How would you like to learn to develop negatives and print by hand?”

“I’d love to.” I breathed in a chemical smell that wasn’t offensive.

Clipped to a clothesline were eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white prints of pueblo life. They were flawless, capturing snapping eyes in a wrinkled face, a profile half in shadow, colorfully garbed dancers, a raptor seizing a snake.

“Did you take these?”

“My wife.” His voice was heavy with sadness.

I remembered that Child was a widower. Loss makes you selfish enough to think you alone know what it feels like. You don’t. Child reminded me what we shared. “My best friend died,” I surprised myself by offering. “She loved to draw. The last picture she gave me means the world to me now.”

Child gave a brief nod. I was relieved he didn’t ask how Cameron had died. I hated recalling my last images of her, stretched gaunt by an illness that didn’t understand the rule that the young don’t die. I hadn’t taken any photos then. I didn’t want to preserve the disease. Her drawings were better. I said, “Show me how it works.”

Time disappeared as Child taught me to thread negatives onto a spool in the pitch blackness, operating by feel. Light would expose them. I thought it ironic that blindness was es
sential to creating visual images. Once the spools were in the tanks, the film was steeped in carefully mixed chemicals, minutes measured by a faint glow-in-the-dark timer. Developed negatives were hung to dry like snakes in a Taiwanese alley, the dull color a contrast to the vivid pictures they contained.

“Everything about the process camouflages how visual the end result will be,” I said.

“Until this part.” Child smiled, switching on the enlarger. We were now working by the glow of an amber safelight. He cut a strip of dried negatives into smaller sections, and edged one onto the machine like a slide onto a microscope. A sharp black-and-white image of a flower appeared close up, and Child introduced me to the world of filters, dodging, edging and burning the image onto photographic paper. Once exposed, the paper went through a series of three chemical baths to fix the image. First, the image is “stopped” in a stop bath. Next, the image is “fixed” to make it permanent and remove the paper’s sensitivity to light. Child told me that the process extracts silver from the paper.

“After a year of prints you might be able to scrape enough silver for a stud.” He laughed.

Finally, the print went into a water bath to rinse the chemicals, before being hung to dry.

Images fixed, lights on, I studied the five black-and-white prints we’d produced. “How different a single image can look depending on how you print it,” I marveled.

“It is an art.” Child agreed. “Now down there is black-and-white film. I suggest you collect some rolls and explore your own artistry.” He pressed a key into my hand.

For a week, I’d spent every free moment in the darkroom, and the rest of the time in a semi-daze, smelling faintly of chemicals. I didn’t
look
at things anymore; I snapped them with my eyes. I saw everything through the frame of the lens.
I couldn’t admire sunset without itching to photograph leafy shadows. If an image escaped, the loss was palpable. People became subjects. I started to view Samuel as a collection of planes and angles, smooth brown skin a canvas to capture the play of light. I was obsessed with capturing the essence of Tuesday, hinted at in her wide smile but ephemeral. I wanted a still image to portray Ruby’s precise way of moving. Or Ruby’s precise way of informing me that the bareness of the linen cupboard, breakfast bar,
and
refrigerator yesterday was unacceptable.

Which brought me back to my present predicament.

Noah looked mollified to learn I hadn’t been late because of morning delights with Samuel, but not defused. “It is completely unacceptable that you’re over an hour late. I have a deadline
today
.”

I had to laugh.

“You think that’s funny?” His expression devolved to thunderous. I decided not to explain my thing with timing. I had an unpleasant flashback to Joe at the Gin Mill. But this was different. I’d been
working
. I’d popped into the darkroom to drop off film, but the need to see my dawn photo shoot had been too great. Then, I couldn’t leave until the negatives were done.

“I’m sorry, Noah. I really am.” I wasn’t. The man could ring his own register once in a while. I was doing important work. People
valued
it.

“We ran out of John Grisham. He’s number one on the best-seller list and we ran out because you didn’t order more. Part of your job is filing weekly orders.”

“I…”

“We ran out of
napkins
. I had to put paper towels in the café. Beth called us the Little Redneck Truck Stop.” That was kind of funny, but my smile was the wrong answer.

“Stock hasn’t been put out, sales reports never got generated
last week, and you put peanuts in the salad instead of walnuts. We’re lucky no one went into anaphylactic shock.”

“You’re not an infant, you know,” I snapped. “You own the shop. The buck does not stop with your minimum-wage slave. It stops with you. Your shop, your buck. Stopping.” It wasn’t poetry but I was angry.

“Yes, and I’m the one
paying you
to work for me. Forget the basics—this place is a wreck with your half-finished projects. We have shelves in disarray for some imaginary future children’s nook. We have half a vegetarian menu. And now, we have only half the best sellers in stock, and only half the stock on the floor!”

“And the store is half again as appealing as it used to be. I’ve worked hard,” I shouted over the little voice that said he was right.

“Until you lost interest.”

“My career has no value?” I elevated my hobby on the spot. His jab went to my anxious place. “I’m supposed to tiptoe around your creative brilliance and not do anything for myself?”

“Interacting with humans wouldn’t be a bad idea. It beats running away from everyone or hiding in a dark room.”

“Working in the darkroom is
art
! It takes time. I’m doing hired
jobs
, I’ll have you know. I am not
hiding
.” My protest felt oddly like a lie.

“Right. You’re so focused on your
career
that you don’t replace sold prints? There aren’t any left. My store is naked.”

That stopped me. “We sold them all?” I hadn’t noticed. The bookcases now sported only forlorn nails. I felt a pang of guilt.

He was yelling now. “You aren’t doing even the basics of your job. You show up for film money and it’s my privilege to pay you for coming in late and leaving early. You’ve become
unreliable, and customers don’t want to shop where staff radiates the desire to be elsewhere.” His arm flung wide.

My bravado left me. He couldn’t see me as that girl. I wasn’t careless Maeve. I was reliable Maeve. Talented Maeve. Desirable Maeve. New Maeve. I needed Noah to see that.

“I…”

At my expression, he stopped, his own face becoming stricken. He plowed a hand through his hair and dropped into a chair.

“Damn, I’m sorry. I should not be taking my stress out on you.” He rested his forehead in his hands. He looked exhausted.

I fidgeted, but he didn’t say anything. “Have you eaten?” Was the closest I could come to “sorry.”

“Forgetting my morning coffee is no excuse to be rude. I’m a grown man. It’s not your job to fill my bottle.”

“We could both use some.” I set about making a pot.

“I like having you around the shop,” he said as he watched me. “And you have good ideas.” I felt awful.

“You have good ideas too,” I said.

“I live in Arizona.” His smile was rueful. “What do I know about humidity?”

“I
am
sorry.” This time it was easier to use the word. I meant it. “I like being here too. I’m not sure why I got so obsessed with the photography. Maybe it’s because I never had a passion before.”

“No punk rock or poetry phase in college?” he joked. I made a noncommittal noise. He raked his hair again. “Who am I to talk? You’ve seen me work. A lot of being able to create is stepping out of your life into someone else’s. I love it, but I’m no good at straddling two worlds. When I’m in the not-real one, it makes me dependent. You make it easy to count on you.”

“You
should
count on me,” I protested. “As long as this is my job. I should be doing what I’m paid for.”

“Your photography is beautiful, Maeve. I don’t want you to stop that.”

I squelched my flush of pride. The admiration
had
been like a drug, my darkroom mania the actions of a junkie.

I poured two cups of coffee and pulled up a chair. “Been playing with your toys?”

He rose to my bait. “They are
not toys
. They’re…”

“I know, I know—‘creative visualization devices,’” I teased, glad to have redirected the conversation. “What’s the problem?”

He sighed. “I think it’s wrong to have an environment where everyone coexists happily. That doesn’t happen. My setting is bordering on Disney, full of joyful frolicking sea creatures. There needs to be threat within the society. I don’t want to be Uncle Remus, bluefish singing on my shoulder.”

“More like Uncle Sea-mus,” I joked, but he didn’t smile. I considered, “Make an evil sea creature.” The answer seemed logical.

“It’s not that simple. I’m afraid to characterize anything as a ‘bad element.’ You should see the angry letters from third graders I received when I painted warthogs in a negative light.” He grinned. “One offended reader demanded an apology, but informed me that I was not to reply in cursive because he couldn’t read it yet.”

“Crayon hate mail?” I laughed.

“My editor stopped forwarding the letters when I tried to respond to every one with long-winded justifications and apologies at a
See Spot Run
language level. I was so upset. It was worse than the time someone called me a bigot on Amazon because I made a joke about Frenchmen fleeing a battle. I hate to offend anyone.”

I thought a minute. “How about jellyfish? No one likes jel
lyfish. The Boy can’t communicate with them because they’re non-thinking creatures. They drift without cerebral activity, and harm whatever they touch.”

We talked until the lunch crowd arrived. Afterward, I spent the afternoon catching up on my paperwork, surreptitiously slipping to Up Market to buy the toilet paper I’d also forgotten to order (paper towels would
not
do), and diagramming how I wanted Bruce to rearrange the tall shelves, currently in disarray from my insufficient efforts. I was shamed by how much I’d let slide. I had to put limits on my darkroom time.

When Helen came in, I decided not to disturb Noah, and was able to deflect her interest in torture devices of the Middle Ages to a nice history of Charlemagne.

“You’re looking fatter,” she grunted, as I rang her up.

“Hey thanks!” I looked up with a smile. Samuel’s attention to my diet must have been working. My genuine pleasure took her aback. And disappointed her. She trundled out without another word.

I felt good about what I’d accomplished in a day, and was humming as I flipped the sign to
CLOSED
. When I went to say good night, I saw Noah framed, head in hands in the semi-darkness, screen saver dancing. I took a mental picture. I appreciated how he’d opened up earlier. It occurred to me that he had no idea how many mistakes I made in the darkroom, the discarded prints the world would never see, the number of times I consulted Child for advice. It wasn’t only writers who struggled for perfect tone and content.

I made a decision.

“Hey,” I said.

He looked up.

“Want to come to the darkroom and see what I do?”