In Between Frames (2 page)

But the camera was undamaged, sitting neatly in its case, along with the 90 mm lens and the corrective lenses which adjusted for parallax, everything sandwiched between plastic cushions of air.
 
He picked it up, and was surprised at how heavy it was.
 
The metal was smooth and cool in his hands.
 
He pushed the lever to advance the film.
 
It clicked neatly, the precision-milled gears working just the same as they had some sixty-odd years ago, when it was made.
 

God, I love this thing already.
 

Miles fished out a roll of 35 mm black-and-white film from his workbench and loaded the camera, taking a moment to read the manual and fiddle with a few knobs and levers.
 
It took him a moment to figure out where to adjust the ISO values.
 

His coffee mug.
 
The tree outside.
 
His
mudstained
truck.
 
Framing, light metering, shutter speed, focal distance.
 
The viewfinder was indeed huge and bright.
 
He’d never really understood the lust that photographers had over Leica glass, but now he thought he understood—the clarity, the freedom from distortion:
 
this was what you would get on your film (in black and white, with a little bit of fudging due to the parallax).
 
The budding leaves.
 
His pile of firewood.
 
Click. Click. Click.
 
The mechanics felt smooth, indestructible.
 

He shot off twenty-four frames before he knew it.
  
Then he went into his darkroom (really an old shed with all of the cracks blacked out), set up the film developing station, and held his breath as he opened the camera and spooled the film around the cassette, which he would then put into the developer.
 
This step had to be done in complete darkness, and it was always something of a dare for him—even though he knew his darkroom layout so well that he could do everything blindfolded, he always had the distinct feeling that when the images crystallized on the film, it made something of himself permanent.
 
A bad image meant that he had done something wrong in taking the shot, of course—but somehow it also felt like it meant that he was wrong, in some fundamental way.
 

He processed the roll and hung up the film to dry, then checked his watch in the red light.
 
It was only three in the afternoon.
 
I have time, he thought.
 
Just a few frames.
 
After having gotten used to the red light, his light box was unspeakably bright, but he got used to it quickly, and used a magnifying glass to pick out the frames he wanted to develop:
 
his coffee mug, the pile of firewood, the woman sitting in an outdoor café, the budding leaves—

He went back and looked again.
 
Somehow, between the shot of his firewood pile and the picture of the leaf buds just beginning to crack open and reveal their contents, was a frame of a woman sitting at an outdoor café table.
  
From her attitude, she looked like she was reading a book.
 

How the hell?

It was real, all right.
 
The image shining through the enlarger was quite clearly a woman, sitting at an outdoor café.
 
She was, in fact, reading a book.
 
A little girl—presumably her daughter—sat next to her, sipping from a teacup with her
pinky
extended.
 

He made the print and hung it up to dry, feeling vaguely confused and disturbed.
 
He had never seen this woman, or her daughter, and he couldn’t fathom how the image could have gotten onto a fresh roll of film, sandwiched perfectly between two shots.
 
As he cleaned up for the night, he kept glancing over at the dripping print, half-expecting it to vanish at some point, or morph into a photo that he knew he’d taken.
 
A part of him hoped that it would, even though he wouldn’t have known what to make of it.
 
But it remained stubbornly there, like an open question.

~~~

Greece was a bit of a train wreck.
 
Literally.
 

She’d read about the economic situation, and the striking public sector workers, so it didn’t surprise her to hear that the roads to and from the little town of
Loutraki
were closed off.
 
But it still annoyed her, to have to find a hotel for herself and Mabel on short notice.
 
After an hour waiting in the tourism office, and then another half an hour while the official behind the desk painstakingly described every single feature of every single hotel before he bothered to see if there were any vacancies and whether it was in her price range, she and Mabel were finally, temporarily, housed in a small bed-and-breakfast type place.
 
It was run by a retired couple who were quite eager to explain every last detail of the economic crisis to her.
  
It was only after Mabel started pitching a fit that they were able to get out of there, and find a small café.
 
She ordered a bottle of Diet Coke, and for Mabel, a cup of tea.
 
The waiter smiled pleasantly at her—she was spending money, after all, not like everybody who actually lived here—and brought them their drinks.
 
“Food?” he asked.

She declined—she wasn’t hungry, and anyway the old couple they were staying with had promised her dinner.
 
“You will like it,” the woman had promised.
 
“I make salad, and we have bread.
 
Also olives.
 
And
moussaka
, but it is cold.”

“The salad will be fine,” Sam had told her.
 

She studied the phrase book while Mabel pretended to be a princess, drinking her tea with her
pinky
sticking out.
 
“I’m Lady Catherine,” she said proudly.
 

“Lady Catherine sits up straight,” Sam said.
 

Mabel
straighted
up, tucked her elbows in, and assumed a haughty expression.
 
She had been in love with the Duchess of Cambridge ever since she saw the wedding ceremony on the telly.
 
“I want to be a princess,” she’d told her mother.
 
“Well, you’d better start acting like someone a prince would marry,” Sam had replied.
 
Incredibly, it worked—gone were the tantrums (mostly—she still had trouble behaving when she was tired or hungry) and the shrieking demands, replaced by well-mannered requests for certain things, and if she cried, she at least did it quietly.
 
Sam couldn’t decide whether or not to tell her daughter that the odds of marrying a prince were miniscule.
 

“Do you suppose there’s a prince in Greece, mummy?” Mabel asked.
 

“I suppose,” Sam said.
 
“Greece doesn’t have a royal family, like England, but perhaps there are princes who come and visit.”

“Can we see one?”

“Well, first we have to see if there are any,” she said.
 

Mabel began kicking her feet under the table.
 
She picked up the menu, carefully sounding out the Greek letters until the words clicked.
 
Sam tried to concentrate on her phrase book, but she couldn’t help but be a little jealous at the ease with which her daughter was reading the language.
 
And then she wondered,
What the hell am I doing here, in a place where I don’t speak the language, don’t know a single person, probably can’t even send my daughter to school?
 
And after another moment,
Am I completely daft, that I didn’t even think about this beforehand?

And she was suddenly acutely aware of the fact that she had no plans that she could follow.
 
She’d wanted to get a typewriter and write that novel she’d been planning and plotting intermittently for several years—but that wasn’t a plan.
 
She didn’t know the first thing about what to do to convert her tourist visa into a resident’s visa, for instance.
 
And how would she feel if she needed her daughter to help her understand Greek?
 
And would Mabel even be able to make friends here?
 

In an instant, all of the self-assurance that she’d felt on the flight here became undone, and the clear light that she’d so admired about the Greek climate suddenly seemed smoggy.
 
For the first time, she was overwhelmed by the strange letters on the sides of the buildings, the constant shouting in the streets, the insane manner in which cars avoided each other.
 
Oh God, what have I done?
 
She took a moment to marvel at her idiocy, because otherwise the sheer hopelessness of her situation would overwhelm her and she could not cry in front of Mabel, not here.
 

At that moment, she heard something—a click.
 
It didn’t seem to come from any particular direction, but she found herself looking around anyway, wondering what had made that noise.
 
Maybe it’s me, she thought, and then decided that it had to be her, because the hopelessness that had threatened to drown her had vanished.
 
She could look things up online.
 
The British embassy in London would be able to help her.
 
She had the papers to prove that David had bought the little cottage.
 
It would be all right.
 

“Come on, Mabel,” she said, leaving her money on the table.
 
“We’re going to go back to the house, and then tomorrow we’ll head to
Loutraki
.
 
And everything will work out, you’ll see.”

They stood up to go.
 
For a moment, her step faltered, as the seeds of doubt attempted to attain a firmer grasp.
 
But she shook her head, refusing to let them sway her resolve.
 
The words “Keep calm and carry on” came to her mind.
 
If her grandmother could rebuild her life from the rubble, there was no reason why she, Samantha Wilcox, who had more than rubble, couldn’t do the same.
 

~~~

Gary came over the next morning.
 
Miles was doing his breakfast dishes when he heard the car crunch over the fallen branches on his driveway.
 
Gary Milner was his publishing agent—eternally hyperactive, the kind of guy who had to be reminded that calls at 2 a.m.
were
not okay, even if they were really good ideas.
 
Still, he was a good guy, and good at finding obscure publishing houses that were open to Miles’s ideas, like a book about what immigrants cooked, complete with recipes.

Miles hadn’t gone back to his darkroom since he left it yesterday.
 
He was actually, strangely, afraid of the strange picture he’d printed—what if it were still there?
 
What if it had changed back to the picture of the budding leaves?
 
He was still trying to convince himself that he’d imagined the whole thing.
 

“Hey man,” Gary said, as he let himself in.
 

“Morning,” Miles replied.
 
“Coffee?”

“Nah, I stopped at this cute little joint in Amherst.
  
They make the bitching-
est
cappuccino ever.
 
I swear.
 
You really
oughta
go try it,” Gary said, as he plunked himself down on Miles’s sofa.
 
Miles poured the remaining coffee of the morning into two mugs anyway, and looked in the bread box.
 
One stale cinnamon roll left.
 
He picked it up and put everything on a tray, and went to join him.