She clears her throat and reaches for the remote, shutting off the television. Then she stacks her spine so she’s sitting straight now, no casual slouching anymore. I feel oddly bereft, at sea. Also I want to see how the fruittart turns out.
“Do you mind if we start the lesson?”
“Sure.” Even before I’ve finished with the single syllable she’s up. When she comes back with her camera bag and the shoebox, she sits, setting the bag between our feet and the box on the coffee table, which she opens after an almost imperceptible hesitation.
Inside she’s got a collection of objects, some that immediately remind me of the pink rabbit’s foot she keeps on her keychain. There’s a four-leaf clover that’s suspended, spring green and symmetrical, inside a flat glass oval. A small horseshoe, barely big enough for the palm of your hand. A bright copper penny.
Good luck charms, I guess, but some of the other objects are tiny mysteries about Greer I want the answers to. A scrap of pale blue fabric with small yellow stars printed on it. A silver medallion on a chain, embossed with something I can’t see from here. A never-used pencil, the kind you don’t see all that much anymore—marigold yellow topped with a shiny, aluminum sleeve holding a dark pink eraser. I lean forward to get a better look at what else she’s got, but she passes a piece of pale green printer paper my way, blocking my view.
“That’s the assignment,” she says, reaching into the shoebox. I look down at the paper I’m holding, but feel my eyes stray up again to her busy hands. She takes out the clover and the horseshoe, sets them both on the table. I guess it’s going to be the non-mysterious objects, then. I look down at the assignment sheet, feeling confused and unaccountably disappointed.
“I need to show I understand the arrangement of shapes, using objects related to my theme,” she says, taking a line from the first bullet point on the sheet. “As well as different lighting conditions, and how essential camera functions complement those conditions.”
Bullet, bullet. She has basically memorized the sheet. “Okay,” I say, watching the line of her back, still stiff. I lean forward, set my elbows on my knees. The horseshoe, I guess, that’s maybe an interesting shape. I try to focus on the light from Kit’s window, try to think about the desk lamp she’s got upstairs that we can do something with for a nice sidelight, but it all feels blandly unappealing now that Greer’s shut me out. “Yourtheme is luck?”
“Yes,” she says, the starch still in her voice. “Because of the lottery, obviously.” But something about that box tells me it’s got nothing to do with the lottery.
“What—” I begin, but shespeaks over me.
“I don’t think it’ll take long at all,” she says, and right then I feel like a window opens, a fresh breeze passing over me. Waking me up.
She’s worried I’ll leave. Or worse, that I wantherto leave. Thatit’s probablyboringfor me.
“Greer.” I reach out to still the hand she’s using to dig back into her shoebox full of mysteries. I didn’t think about it, this small touch to the back of her hand, but probably I should have—probably I should have thought about how it’d feel to touch even this small part of her. Soft, delicate skin and the lilting ridge of a vein, a live, lean cushion beneath my fingertips. I clear my throat, draw my hand away from hers. “Thank you.”
She turns her face to the side—not quite looking over her shoulder at me, but acknowledging me. There’s a pretty blush on her cheeks, underneath her freckles. “It was no problem.”
“It was exactly what I needed. The best sick day I ever had.”
Now she does look at me, her blue eyes bright again. A memory from Patricia’s office this morning comes to me, unbidden.Complicated isfine,I’d said.
“Really?”
I nod. “Really.” I pause before this next part, gathering some of my courage. “I’m going back to see Patricia. On Friday.”
A slow smile spreads across her face, a warm, special secret between us. When she speaks, she does so quietly, as though she’s keeping this secret from the house itself. “You won’t regret it.”
I smile back at her, nod my head toward her camera, and borrow some words from my new therapist. “Let’sget started.”
Chapter 7
Greer
No surprise: Alex is a better teacher than Professor Hiltunen.
Last night’s class had been, for the most part, brutally mundane, organized via a thirty-two-slide PowerPoint that was not made more interesting by virtue of Hiltunen’s opening dramatic reading of an excerpt from a Walt Whitman poem that was most memorable for its use of the wordsea-gluten, whatever that is. When he was finished he’d looked out over the ten of us in the class like we were a sea-gluten of adoring followers. “I’m sure you’ve all guessed this week that our focus is”—dramaticpause—“nature.”
For the first hour of class, I’d scribbled notes about Eliot Porter, Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, wondering whether you had to have a penis to do nature photography; for the second hour, I scribbled notes about monopods and tripods and wide angle and normal fixed focal lenses and wondered whether all such things were metaphorical penises.
There’d been some life in the last hour when we’d each shared a photograph from the previous week’s assignment. Two students had chosen family as their theme—one photographing a collection of her daughter’s toys, the other a pair of wedding bands, stacked on top of each other—and Hiltunen had offered vaguely condescending remarks about how “common” themes can still produce interesting photographs. Another student, a man named Gus who had the same model of camera as mine, had picked transportation, sharing an image of the tire of his motorcycle that I’d thought was pretty breathtaking for the way light shone on the black-and-red fender. Hiltunen said it demonstrated “potential.”
Seeing my own photograph projected at the front of the room had made my throat go dry, my palms sweaty. It’d felt strangely intimate to show the class the shot I’d settled on—nearly every one of my good luck charms stacked haphazardly on top of a copy of the newspaper Alex had had there. It’d been my idea, to keep the newspaper, and Alex’s to use everything from the box, not just the obvious things. “You don’t have to tell anyone what they’re about,” he’d said, and I could tell thatanyonehad included himself. “But the shapes are good, distinctive. Enough textures that the light hitting them will teachyou something.”
That’s what I’d tried to say in class—what I’d learned from the photograph. It wasn’t perfect, I knew, but I felt like I’d ticked all the boxes from my assignment sheet. I’d explained each of the settings I’d used, the different types of light I’d tried before settling on sidelighting, encouraged by Alex’s spirit of experimentation. I thought about saying why I’d left the newspaper, how there’d been something I’d liked about all that good luck piled against the columns of bad news, but that seemed too private, too unrelated to the assignment. I’d clasped my hands in front of me and waited for the professor to give me a verdict.
“Now remember, everybody,” he’d said, “Greer joined our class late.”
From the front row, Gus had winced in sympathy.
