• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1221 0

but his good intentions had spiraled into argument and distance. After a moment, he turned and went back to the darkroom. The soft red light was very soothing. He considered what he’d said to Paul—that the world was made of hidden things, of secrets; built of bones that never saw the light. It was true that he’d once sought unity, as if the underlying correspondences between tulips and lungs, veins and trees, flesh and earth, might reveal a pattern he could understand. But they had not. In a few minutes he would go inside and get a drink of water. He would walk upstairs and find Norah already asleep, and he would stand watching her—this mystery, a person he would never really know, curled around her secrets.

David went to the mini refrigerator where he kept his chemicals and film. The envelope was tucked far in the back, behind several bottles. It was full of twenty dollar bills, new and crisp and cold. He counted out ten, then twenty, and put the envelope away, behind the bottles. The bills sat neatly on the counter.

Usually he mailed the money, wrapped in a sheet of blank paper, but tonight, Paul’s anger lingering in the room, his music floating on the air, David sat down and wrote a letter. He wrote swiftly, letting the words pour out, all his regrets about the past, all his hopes for Phoebe. Who was she, this child of his flesh, the girl he had given away? He had not expected that she would live this long, or that she would have the sort of life Caroline wrote him about. He thought of his son, sitting all alone on the stage, and of the loneliness Paul carried with him everywhere. Was it the same for Phoebe? What would it have meant to them to grow up together, like Norah and Bree, different in every way yet intimately connected too? What would it have meant to David if June had not died? I would like very much to meet Phoebe, he wrote. I would like her to know her brother, and for him to know her. Then he folded the letter around the money without rereading it, put it all in an envelope, and addressed it. Sealed it, stamped it. He would mail it tomorrow.

Moonlight poured in through the windows in the gallery space. Paul had stopped playing. David gazed at the moon, higher in the sky now, yet distinct and sharply rendered against the darkness. He’d made a choice, on the beach; he’d left Norah’s clothes lying on the sand, her laughter spilling into the light. He’d gone back to the cottage and worked with the photos, and when she’d come in, an hour or so later, he hadn’t said a thing about Howard. He’d kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.

Now he went back into the darkroom and searched through his most recent roll of film. He’d taken some candid photos during the dinner party: Norah, carrying a tray of glasses, Paul standing by the grill with his cup lifted, various shots of them all relaxing on the porch. It was the final image he wanted; once he found it, he cast it with light onto the paper. In the developing bath, he watched the image emerge slowly, grain by tiny grain, something appearing where nothing had been. This was always, for David, an experience of intense mystery. He watched as the image took shape, Norah and Howard on the porch, lifting their glasses of wine in a toast, laughing. A moment both innocent and charged; a moment when a choice was being made. David took the photograph from the developer, but he didn’t slide it into the fixer. Instead, he went into the gallery room and stood in the moonlight with the wet photo in his hands, looking at his house, darkened now, Paul and Norah inside, dreaming their private dreams, moving in their own orbits, their lives constantly shaped by the gravity of the choice he’d made so many years ago.

In the darkroom again, he hung the photograph of that moment to dry. Unfinished, unfixed, the image wouldn’t last. Over the next hours, light would work on the exposed paper. The picture of Norah laughing with Howard would slowly darken until—within a day or two—it would be completely