Chapter 35
thirty-five
THEO
The photo series started by accident. I was sitting on the floor of Julian and Rowan's apartment, reloading a roll of film I'd found in the bottom of my bag, when Julian sat down at the piano and played something I'd never heard before.
It wasn't the melody. It was something loose and unfinished, a sketch of a piece he hadn't written yet, and halfway through he hit a wrong note and laughed.
I raised the camera before I thought about it. The shutter clicked once and Julian opened his eyes and looked at me and said "delete that" and I said "absolutely not" and that was the beginning.
I started carrying the camera differently after that, more like a notebook, something I opened when the moment was already happening instead of something I hid behind to keep the moment from touching me. The difference sounds small. It changed everything.
I photographed Rowan asleep on the couch one Tuesday afternoon, his hair fanned across the cushion, one hand hanging off the edge with his fingers curled like he was holding something in his sleep.
The light was terrible. The composition was wrong.
His mouth was slightly open. It was the most human I'd ever seen him look, and when I showed it to Julian later, Julian stared at it for a long time and said "he's going to kill you for this" and then asked for a print.
I photographed Oleander at the bookshop on Main Street, where he'd taken a part-time job shelving used paperbacks and arguing with the owner about the merits of organizing by author versus by color.
He was standing on a step stool reaching for a high shelf, his dark curls falling into his eyes, his mouth moving because he was talking to himself the way he always did when he was concentrating.
He didn't know I was there. The focus on his face, the careful way he handled each spine like it mattered, made my chest tight in a way I'd stopped trying to photograph and started just feeling.
Oleander's apartment was different now. I spent a lot of time there, all of us did, and the air had changed.
It was lighter. The cold spots were gone.
The cologne smell had faded to nothing, replaced by the coffee Oleander actually made himself and the cedar from Rowan's coat and the soap Julian used.
It smelled like the four of us, which was its own kind of haunting, the good kind, the kind you don't want to exorcise.
The anomalies hadn't stopped entirely. I still caught them sometimes, a shadow slightly too dark in the corner of a frame, a blur near a doorway that could be a figure or could be nothing.
Hollow Vale was still Hollow Vale. The buildings still decayed in spirals.
The fog still sat at knee level on cold mornings.
But the shadows didn't reach anymore. They didn't lean toward Oleander in every frame.
They were just part of the landscape, ambient strangeness that I was learning to live with.
Some towns have traffic noise. Some have tourists. Ours had ghosts. You adjust.
I was editing at my kitchen table one evening, scrolling through the week's shots, when I stopped on one I'd almost forgotten taking.
It was from the previous Sunday. I'd set the camera on a timer and propped it on a stack of books on Julian's piano and run back to the couch where the three of them were sitting.
The photo was slightly blurry because I'd tripped on Rowan's boot on the way back and landed half in Oleander's lap.
Julian was mid-laugh. Rowan was reaching for me with one hand, the other still holding his coffee.
Oleander was looking at the camera with an expression of pure, startled warmth, his hand on my back where he'd caught me.
Nobody was positioned right. The framing was off. The light was flat. By every technical standard I'd spent my career perfecting, it was a failure.
I printed it that night. I pinned it to the wall of my apartment, right in the center of the space where the conspiracy board used to be.
The red twine was gone. The anomaly photos were in a box under my bed, documented and filed and put away.
In their place was this one image, four men caught mid-collision, blurry and imperfect and unmistakably alive.
It was the best thing I'd ever shot.