Chapter 7
Early the next morning, while Tom is still sleeping, I slip downstairs to the darkroom and pull the door closed behind me.
I woke thinking I may have captured the couple on film, in one of my wider party shots, and was eager to see the pictures anyway—not the stiff, posed ones I took for Samantha, but the real ones.
My lingering anxiety—after the party, then the dream—fades quickly as I set to work.
Fishing out the rolls from my camera bag, I begin with one, carefully threading the film onto the reel before dunking it in the first tank, then into the fixer.
The work clears my head and grounds me with purpose; I move through the steps automatically, in a contented trance, washing the reel, then trimming and hanging the negatives to dry.
Later in the day, once I’ve prepared and eaten an early dinner with Tom, I head downstairs again.
I love how the dark swallows me as I descend the steps.
It’s a good dark down here, a private, soothing dark.
My heart beats quickly as I take down the negatives and begin to print.
If I could hurry the process, I would—but it isn’t until after ten o’clock, after I’ve fiddled with the cropping and exposure, that my pictures are ready to hang on the line.
I’m tired, and Tom is confused by my working so late—I’m not usually in such a hurry—but I told him over dinner that Samantha wants her prints ready tomorrow.
It isn’t like she’s paying you, he said, and then returned to his food with that slight grimace I’ve learned is just part of his aging face.
I tell myself to leave it alone, to step back from this wearying task and just review the pictures, starting with the portraits of Samantha and Hal.
I think they’ll be pleased with how vibrant and happy they look—Samantha with her shining black hair and Hal with his straight white teeth and crisp blue button-down shirt, their faces close together.
Thriving after twenty-five years with each other, it seems.
No sign of that grimace I captured in the later hours.
I move on to the “real” pictures and linger over one of our neighbor Janet, a loud and plain-faced divorcée who’s buxom and wears enough bright lipstick to muster a dull suburban glamour.
I’ve caught her with a wide-open mouth, roaring with laughter.
She looks ready to eat the trio of men who lean in as if offering themselves up for consumption.
Like Saturn, about to devour his child—though hers is a careless and sensual devouring.
Will Paul like it? I wonder, which makes me realize: I will show these to Paul.
The hesitation I’ve felt these past few days has vanished.
I will show him. Will I share the one of Tom, too?
It turned out so well, so brutally revealing.
My stomach sinks to think of Paul seeing my husband this way, but if I don’t tell him who Tom is, and if Tom himself never knows, the harm is practically nonexistent, isn’t it?
I can’t answer my own question so I leave the party pictures behind for the prints I took of myself in the toy store window.
I study the first image with a hitch in my breath, remembering the odd sensation that passed through me.
Will I see some phantom version of myself?
But it’s me. I see my solid, unsmiling face, the familiar shape of my body.
The sky around me, and the sad teddy bear inside the dark outline of my reflected skirt.
There’s something odd in the background, though, reflected faintly behind me: a human-shaped smudge or shadow near the top right-hand corner of the print.
I bring it closer to try to make it out.
An imperfection, or a person? It’s hard to tell.
If someone was standing behind me, watching, I didn’t notice at the time, but they would have been so far away—across the street, in a space between two houses—I could have easily missed them.
Missed him.
The more I look, the more certain I am that it’s a man. I can’t see any details of his heavily shadowed body or face, but I can tell he’s looking toward my reflection in the window.
It’s him. It must be him. Cold spreads through my body like liquid.
It can’t be him, but the sudden spike of pain in my side says otherwise.
Before last night, I rarely thought of him, about the fact of my long-ago attacker.
The long, placid surface of my adult life had made the past seem implausible—made him seem implausible.
But now, this hellish jolt: a sign of his existence in every version of my toy store self-portrait.
It doesn’t appear in the party pictures taken with the same roll of film, so I’m fairly certain it isn’t an impurity—though the party backgrounds are darker, less visible.
Maybe it’s there, and I’ve missed it? I feel a slight surge of hope that fades quickly.
I return to the pictures I took in town.
It can’t be him; it simply can’t. They never caught him, but even if he were still alive, why and how would he find me now, halfway across the country, over thirty years later?
The figure was more likely a random passerby, someone who paused to watch me taking photographs.
I tell myself this, but my body rejects it.
Staring at that ominous shape, I think of Grandmother reading aloud from the news article about the search for my attacker over dinner one night, as nonchalantly as if it had nothing to do with me.
I sat there shaking violently until the fork in my hand clattered to my plate, which earned me a scolding.
Soon after, my father disappeared. Or—he took a job in Montana and never returned.
Grandmother blamed me—for his leaving, for getting attacked.
For not recalling the man’s face, which led to the police department’s long, futile search.
For becoming strange and withdrawn, an object of both pity and curiosity in our town.
Around this time, I found my father’s Kodak 35, bought on a whim and abandoned in a desk drawer with rolls of unused film.
Nearly housebound, except for school—which was a torment after the attack—I started taking pictures: of gleaming doorknobs, sunlit windows, the gloomy staircase leading to the attic.
I loved the heft of the camera in my hands, the sound it made when I advanced the film, and the neat click of the button.
I loved how the camera rendered everything I saw precise and comprehensible.
It made me feel safe, warming to my hand and showing me wonders in the world—even in my own tainted corner of it.
The more I used the camera, the more nuanced my photographs became.
I felt intense anticipation and delight whenever I went to pick up my prints from the shop.
I’d keep the pictures hidden away in old shoeboxes on the top shelf of my closet and sit cross-legged on the floor of my room to flip through them, seeing how I’d captured and remade the world in each small rectangle, how I’d controlled the wild edges of things.
It flooded me with relief: proof of this small power I had.
Soon enough, I finished high school and was able to move far away.
After Tom and I met at a cousin’s wedding, we married and settled in Harrington, New Jersey, and for many years I used the camera the way a good wife and mother should: to capture birthdays, school plays, graduations, vacations.
I felt proud of myself, living the way Grandmother would have liked, leaving the past in the past, moving forward, always forward.
People forget all kinds of things. People live by forgetting, I once read in a book.
It soothed and consoled me, told me I was doing well.
I was fine. When I touched my scars, the past would bubble up, but I’d smother it quickly, move on.
Maybe that’s why I hear Grandmother now, sense her disgust like hot breath on the back of my neck.
What are you doing, Judith? Awake in the night, worrying over this nothing, this smudge?
I quickly gather the prints into a neat pile, store them in a kitchen drawer, and pour myself a cup of cold water.
Drinking it clears my head but when I look down I expect to see Rosie, her little tail wagging. I choke back a sob, hold it in with a hand pressed to my mouth. Grandmother’s voice tells me to go back upstairs, and I will, I will. If only I believed that sleep would change what I’ve seen.