She texts her parents that she has to run an errand for a group project she is doing and will be thirty minutes late. At the photo place she sits in the car for a few minutes, wondering if these will be the last moments before everything changes. But the shop closes at six, so she doesn’t have a ton of time. She cuts the ignition and goes inside.
The same clerk is at the counter. He doesn’t try to suppress a laugh when he sees her, or ogle her, or raise an eyebrow.
“Hey. Jamie, right?”
“Yeah.” He’s got the envelope on the counter.
“Twenty bucks.”
She pays him, peeling the cash out of her wallet hastily.
“VeryVirgin Suicides,” he says.
“Excuse me?” She thinks he’s making a joke about her being a virgin still. She knows eighteen is a little old, a lot of her friends have done it, but who the hell is this guy to make a crack at her? Perv.
“The movie? I mean, book first. But the vibes. Sophia Coppola?”
“Oh.” She still doesn’t understand what that has to do with anything.
“Never mind. Just… cool pics. They reminded me of the film. The colors. Interesting framing. You get these at a garage sale or something? You know, Vivian Maier was discovered when someone bought a bunch of her negatives at a garage sale. You got more of these?”
She has no idea who Vivian Maier is either. This whole conversation is mortifying, just in a different way than she thought it would be. “Uh. No. At least I don’t think so.”
“Bummer.”
“Yeah.” She takes the envelope and leaves, her face hot.
She drives around the corner and parks on the side of a residential street she’s never been down before, so she might have a chance to look at the pictures away from the clerk, away from her parents.
The first photo is of her mother, but her features are sharper, more pointed. She’s wearing a crop top and Blair can see the arcs of her hip bones, the shadows they create on her skin in the end-of-day light. Her mother is scowling, angry to be caught this way. It’s not an expression she’s ever seen Iris make. Behind her, trees, a dirt path. She feels a rush through her body, her heart beating faster. Is this where her mother grew up? Is this who she used to be? Blair stares at the girl’s expression, the hardness of it. How did this girl become her mother, who folds notes into Iris’s backpack and braids her hair before soccer games?
The second picture is an interior shot. The photographer must be crouching down low, looking up at a window gray with grime, letting in a filtered, tempered sunlight.
The third is of her mother again, standing in front of a mirror. That same scowl, those same skinny forearms. But as she is about to shuffle the picture to the back of the stack, Blair notices something. The starburst of a flash, and the shadow of a figure behind it. Arms and legs. The arm is unmistakable: her mother’s scar.
And so she’s presented with a riddle. Her mother is the subject of the photo, her arm unblemished. Her mother is taking the photo. She is here and she is there. Right in front of Blair’s eyes, and hidden in the corner of the shot.
There are two Irises. Is it some kind of editing technique? Did her mother do this? Or the guy at the photo shop?
Or, are there really two people in the picture?
If her mother is holding the camera, then who the hell is standing in front of the mirror?
A ghost, she thinks, before she can tell herself how foolish she sounds. The word rising unbidden from her mind.
There are threemore images of the girl with her mother’s face. None of the other pictures are head-on, but the harder she looks the more Blair can see the differences between them. A small freckle below her bottom lip, where her mother’s skin is unmarked. The jut of her chinmore defined. And something else, something Blair can’t name, or not without sounding woo-woo. An energy. This girl does not have her mother’s softness. She is all nerve, all angles, all I-fucking-dare-you.
There’s the girl in profile. She must have turned away fast, just before the shutter clicked, because the image captures the blurred lace trim of her nightgown, her hair a fan concealing her features. Another, of her seated at a table, the picture taken from behind. The girl’s foot is tucked up underneath her and she’s leaning with an elbow on the table, her head resting in her palm. A daydreaming pose. She can tell it’s not her mother because the girl is wearing a tank top again, even though goosebumps prickle her arms, and from this angle you would be able to see the scar.
And then there’s one shot from above, maybe out an open window. The girl walking down the driveway, a long dirt path aside a yard heaped with metal odds and ends. Her shoulders are squared, eyes fixed ahead, as though she’s telling the house—or telling Iris—to fuck off. Her hair is long down her back, shiny and straight and bright against the darkness of her surroundings: the woods creeping in at the edge of the picture, her dark clothes, the dirt underneath her feet.
The photo of a group of men surprises her, feels like an intrusion, a stark counterpoint to the dreamy and strange pictures of the girls. All those boots and thick, hairy, crossed arms, the stubble and weighty jaws. None of them notice the camera, save a teenage boy, maybe Blair’s age. Light brown hair, smooth, baby-faced cheeks. He stares out of the side of his eyes, the corner of his mouth pulled down.
None of the other pictures feature people. A creepy abandoned building without a roof, crumbling walls of gray stone. A broken Ball jar in the dirt, the glass a pretty aquamarine with a jagged edge. Bunches of dried herbs hung from twine against another dirty windowpane. Two dolls resting in boxes, their hair mussed and wild. A hand, maybe Iris’s, next to a pressed flower that looks a lot like the delicate, crumbling one she found in her mother’s closet. A pairof men’s boots by the door. A chandelier furred with dust. A wallpapered hallway, stained in places, darker in others where pictures must have hung once.
The girl withthe hard stare would have been her aunt. She has to get used to the idea, run it over in her mind, like learning a word in another language. When she was small she always thought her mother and her father’s sister, Margot, were the ones who were related. Margot and her mother laughing and whispering over coffee at the kitchen island. Margot banging through the front door without knocking, a bottle of wine under her arm, scolding Blair’s cousins to take off their shoes, right away busying herself with making coffee as though she were in her own kitchen. Aunt Margot stayed with Blair when each of her brothers were born, lavished her with breakfasts of chocolate chip pancakes. Iris going over to Margot’s house the time she lost the unborn baby who was almost fully grown—until then, Blair hadn’t even known that such a thing could happen—bringing soups and doing the laundry. One day that spring Blair came downstairs to hear hushed voices in the living room, Margot and her mother sitting close to one another on the sofa.
I just want someone else to know she was real, Margot was saying.These are hers.
