Blair
“Can I help you?”
“I want to develop this.”
“Cool.” He palms the canister. “Vintage.” She nods, pretends to study the cameras and lenses on display in a glass case to her right. “What’s your name?”
“Jamie.” The lie slips out of her mouth, but she doesn’t like the way the guy is looking at her. Doesn’t want to give him any part of herself. He scribbles it onto a yellow pad on the countertop, rips a sheet off and hands it to her.
“I’ll call you in a few days.”
She hopes her mother won’t be there when she gets home but Iris’s car is in the driveway. She’s in the kitchen when Blair steps into the hall. She can hear her stirring something, the clang of the wooden spoon against a pan, onions simmering.
“Blair? Come in here! I have something for you.”
Iris has her apron on, gestures at Blair to sit at the island.
Her mother beams at her. It’s a feeling Blair has had before, that it can be painful, to be so loved, just for existing.
On a day like today, when she knows she hasn’t acted her best, it can feel like a kind of burden.
She wonders what it would be like to have grown up the way her mother did—or at least what she’s been able to piece together from her father.
Unsupervised, unloved, untethered. Her father always says how hard Iris had it, but Blair wonders if there must have been some freedom in that.
“We had some extras of these from the library bake sale fundraiser. I thought you’d want some.” She tosses Blair a cellophane bag stamped with snowflakes. Inside, chocolate cherry cookies. Iris’s specialty. Blair’s favorite.
“Thanks,” Blair says. She doesn’t take one out yet. She is torn between flares of guilt and anger. I don’t deserve this. I’m a traitor. And: Who are you, and what have you done?
“Of course.” Iris turns to the stove, turns down the heat, walks to the island and puts a hand on Blair’s shoulder. “You okay?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“You’re so busy lately, with soccer and school. I feel like we hardly got to talk this week. Nothing’s on your mind? You look like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
She wants to crumble before Iris. Beg her to explain what she’s found, what she’s seen.
But she can’t form her mouth into the shape of the words.
The possibilities she’s come up with seem wild and silly out loud.
Are you having an affair? Are you leaving us?
Instead she leans into her mother, her warmth.
The material of Iris’s blouse is thin and Blair can feel the scar underneath her sleeve, where her mother was bit by a dog as a girl.
When Blair was young she used to trace her fingers over the ridged, raised skin.
She didn’t understand what a scar was, confused by an injury that didn’t heal completely but also didn’t hurt anymore.
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
“Okay. Everything good with your friends? With Henry?”
“Yeah.”
“You promise nothing is wrong?” Iris holds her gaze.
“I promise I’m going to do some homework. Calculus.”
“Okay. Dinner at seven.”
Blair turns the corner when she hears her mother call out for her again. She turns around, expecting her mother to proffer a box of tissues to restock the upstairs powder room, a laundry basket to heave up.
“Listen to your gut, okay? With Henry. If it doesn’t feel right …
it probably isn’t right for you. If it makes you happy …
well. Happy is a good sign. I know you have a good head on your shoulders.
But I just wish someone had told me that when I was younger.
To trust myself and to ask for help if I needed it. ”
“Okay,” Blair says, a little taken aback. Iris never talks about being a teenager. The timeline of her mother’s stories, references, memories, all seem to start after she met Blair’s dad.
Henry is the easy thing in her life right now. What feels murky and confusing is Iris, and whatever secret she is tending to just beyond Blair’s view.
A voicemail, Thursday, in the middle of AP World History. She checks it in the bathroom—the photo guy. Um, yeah. I’m looking for Jamie? This is the number I have for you. Your pictures are ready.
She listens three times, trying to discern some kind of reaction in his voice. Is he titillated? Disgusted? But his affect gives nothing away. Most of all he sounds confused that the name on her voicemail doesn’t match the one she gave. Rookie mistake. But who even leaves voicemails anyway?
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.
“Very Virgin 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 three more 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 chin more 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.