A string of fine days is all it takes, days where the sun rises early, warm and clear, then refuses to be budged by wind or concealed by cloud, to make a distant memory of the gray rainy fog we have been living in for the last couple of weeks. Finn and I start sleeping with the window open, lulled by street sounds and early-morning birdsong into a state of dazed bliss. It’s chemical, I’m sure, our bodies recalled to their umbilical link with the physical world, something I am more conscious of than he is, being tethered already to the cycles of the moon.
At the back of the house, right outside the kitchen door, we have a tiny wooden deck just large enough for a hand-me-down wrought-iron bistro table and some outdoor chairs. Finn built the platform one weekend after tearing out the charming, trellised nook that had been there before, promising something bigger and better. He left the project unfinished—the steps down to the minuscule patch of yard and the fence separating us from the house to our rear consist only of precariously stacked cinder blocks—but now that the weather has turned, it’s a perfect spot to catch the morning sun, so we fall into the habit of having breakfast outside.
I see this deck differently now. I see the bathroom tile differently. As well as the gouges on the floor in Aunt Bel’s room.
I come downstairs most days to find freshly ground coffee brewing and Finn at the stove, cooking omelets in the skillet. Aunt Bel, also an early riser, will already be outside, still in her robe with her legs tucked under her, smoking a cigarette and drinking orange juice. “Breakfast of Champions,” I’ll say, or something in that vein, and she’ll give the cigarette an appraising look—not a twinge of guilt—before saying good morning and raising it to her lips for another drag. Her fingers are always covered in dry paint now, especially around the nails, as if she’s been scratching at her canvas with her bare hands.
She smells of linseed oil too. I like that.
She hasn’t opened up to me since Daddy’s surprise visit. When I ask about the past, she’s every bit as evasive as before. But we have become closer somehow. I like to come home and see what she’s been doing down in the basement, to sit on the steps and watch her make an ugly mess on the canvas. She doesn’t know how to draw, doesn’t know how to create the visual abstractions with brush or knife that read to the eye as convincing detail. She isn’t interested in learning either. One Sunday night after the Microchurch broke up, I mentioned her painting to Rick, who offered to introduce her to his painter friend, the one who’d created the mural in the church. Aunt Bel shut this down straightaway and seemed miffed that I would even mention something so private as her painting to Rick. Whatever drives her, it certainly isn’t the desire to learn or improve. And recognition? Not even a little bit.
Maybe that’s why I find the process so soothing to be around. It’s the physical embodiment of white noise, affecting me just like the change of seasons. Some evenings I take my Autocord downstairs with me, and when she’s not too absorbed in the process, she tells me how during her first years in Kazakhstan she snapped hundreds of photos with the 35mm camera my grandfather had bought her for a high school photography class. Since my chat with the photographer at the Wedding Expo, I’ve been taking a lot of photos, using my digital SLR along with the light meter app on my phone, trying to get the hang of manual settings. Aunt Bel, however, is as uninterested in the technical minutia of photography as she is in the technique of painting. For her the process is, from first to last, one of emotion.
The question I want to ask is about the little boy in the photo on her dresser. Did she take that picture? Who is the boy? I never quite bring myself to ask, though, because I’m afraid of pushing. Let her open up at her own pace. There’s no rush, I tell myself. She will talk about the past when she’s ready, and not before. Still, I do wish she would open up.
And she never talks about God either. That seems kind of strange for a missionary. If that’s what she was. I don’t even know that anymore.
One night, while Finn is working late at the studio with Huey, trying to rebuild the used motor he bought to replace the Iron Maiden’s treadle, I realize that maybe I haven’t opened up to her either. Maybe somebody’s got to be the one to start that in a relationship. I mean, that makes sense, right? So I talk to Aunt Bel about Finn’s desire to start having babies.
“Where does that even come from?” I say.
“I didn’t really want to have kids,” she says. “But as for Finn, maybe you can simply chalk it up to instinct. It is a natural desire for men to want to reproduce, Sara.” Aunt Bel is working on something she started earlier, a crude face built on top of a gold-and-black checkerboard, a primitive asymmetrical grid of muddy gilt and grime. She runs her finger thoughtfully along the dried ridge of clumped paint that forms the chin. “You don’t want to have children?”
I pause before answering. It’s a complicated question. “I’m fine with it, in theory. But no. Not yet. Babies are fragile, Aunt Bel. I don’t trust myself with a baby. And Finn, as apt as he would be to care for our kids at least fifty-fifty . . . I mean, you can’t send them back, right? If you’re not the parent you’d hoped you’d be, you’re pretty much stuck with it, you know?”
Her finger pauses, and I can tell she doesn’t like what I’ve said. The same thing happens when I’m too blunt with friends who have children. You speak in less-than-fawning ways about the reality of kids and they react like you’ve uttered blasphemy. Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe I’ve revealed too much.
“ ‘Stuck with it’ is too harsh,” I say. “But what I mean is, your whole life is changed.” I was about to say, Your whole life is turned upside down, but maybe that’s too honest for my aunt too. “Maybe it was different before you left, but these days, if you have kids, people think your whole life should revolve around them—especially if you’re the mom. I mean, I have friends I can’t even talk to anymore, can’t have a serious conversation with, because they can’t think anymore except in baby talk. They’re choking for air, spread way too thin, no time to get together, and I’m the bad guy.”
“Tell me,” Aunt Bel says, still pondering her painting. “Why do you think you’d be such a terrible mother?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve just never trusted myself around kids. I don’t even like to hold babies.”
“Did you drop one sometime or something?” Her eyes bore into mine.
I shake my head. “No. Not that I can remember. There’s nothing like that.”
She picks up a paintbrush and points it at me. “Then you’re just like ninety-nine percent of all women. You just admit it.”
“Maybe. But it feels different.”
“How would you know?”
She has a point.
“This isn’t criticism,” she says. “Only an observation. I look back at my parents, the things they thought were important, and I wonder if my choices—which I thought at the time were my own—were shaped too much by a reaction to them. To all the family, really. Coming home, it’s been on my mind a lot. Why did I go, Sara?” She shakes her head. “But this conversation isn’t about me. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You’ll make a wonderful mother.”
“You really think I’m hard on myself?”
“You seem very sure you’re not worthy to have a baby.”
Worthy.
Huh.
“But who’s worthy to do anything, if you think about it?” she says. “You can only try. And even then, you may think you’re doing the right thing, and it’s so far off the mark. But yet, what else could you have done?”
My conversations with Aunt Bel often go this way—tentative observations put forward only to die the death of a thousand qualifications—but this is different. She’s not just hinting at something now, she’s saying it.
“My father mentioned something about an accident. Something that happened before you left for the field.”
She stares at me, unblinking.
So we’re going that route again. “Never mind. Forget I brought that up.”
“Sure.” The left side of her mouth rises. “If you say so, Sara.”
I can’t help but smile back.
Still, I might as well go for broke.
“Aunt Bel,” I ask, “who is the boy in the photo, the one you keep on the dresser in your room?”
“Just a little boy,” she says, “from a long time ago.”
“What was his name?”
She thinks about this, but doesn’t answer.
“Tell me about him.”
“Well,” she says, walking to the worktable, absently turning the pages of her sketchbook. “Like you said. Everything changes, and then . . . you’re stuck with it.”
“Was he yours? You never said you’d had a child.”
Now she’s reaching for her cigarettes, her hands shaking. She puts the pack to her lips, pulls it away with one stick between her teeth, then lets out a deep sigh and snatches it away.
“Oh, Sara,” she says, “there are so many things I never want to think about again. But not him. I can’t forget him, but it hurts me to remember.”
To my dismay, her eyes shine with tears. Her shoulders slump and I go to her, enfolding her in my arms. She feels fragile and slight to the touch.
“Where is he now, Aunt Bel?” I whisper.
She pulls away from me, covering her mouth with one of her paint-stained hands, eyes bulging with grief. Shaking her head in a gesture of forlorn negation. Saying no to me, no to the idea of the boy, to his very existence. Maybe no to the world too, and to its maker above. Staring at my aunt, I gaze into a pit of inconceivable loss and find that I cannot sustain this gaze, not even for a moment. I have to look away, my heart swelling with kindred shame.
After that night in the basement, I treat Aunt Bel like a fresh wound. Leave her to heal, I tell myself. Don’t pick at the scab, or else. I tell myself this is for her benefit, though it is probably for mine as well.
Is the boy her child? Her failure to deny my assumption seems to confirm it. And was the boy left behind in Kazakhstan? No, surely not. The distance between them, judging by the shattering effect of his memory, must be more than geographic. Bel had a child, I tell myself, and that child died. And there I was, complaining to her about my fear of motherhood cramping my personal style.
So I see her at breakfast each morning and make my flippant remark about her combination of orange juice and cigarettes. And when I visit my aunt in her basement studio, I am careful not to prod her anymore.
But we are linked. I know this now because in her eyes, I see something I put there. She ran away because of me.
I can’t even talk to Finn about this one.
I’ve never believed in ESP or even highly developed intuition. I think most things are as you see them if you care enough to cut to the heart of the matter. And perhaps this isn’t any different. Perhaps once I get the nerve up to talk to my mother . . .
But I know Aunt Bel came to my house for a reason. I am the reason. And she is the reason. You can call it ESP, intuition, or whatever else you’d like. But I know this to be true.
“Guess who’s in town?” Finn asks, leaning against my desk.
“I don’t know. Tell me.”
“You have to guess,” he says.
“I love you, baby, but you’re working my last nerve.” I’ve just sent the e-mail to Holly with a link to the website we’ve spent the last three weeks building from the ground up. What I want to do at this moment is sit quietly at my computer, hitting the Refresh button every few seconds for Holly’s reply. I hit Refresh for good measure. “Just spit it out,” I say.
“You’re not going to at least try? Okay, okay. Ethan and Dora called. They want to meet up. They’re over at the Walters Art Gallery and want us to join them.”
“You mean right now?”
“Yeah, right now. Let’s get out of here. You could use the break—besides, it’s Ethan and Dora, so you can’t say no.”
And of course he’s right. I smile and offer him my hand and we whisk away as if suddenly invited to the coolest party of the year. Which, in a way, we have been.
Dora Katz and Ethan Lime own a Brooklyn lifestyle store, one of those über-curated bastions of taste that sells everything from high-end designer furniture and coffee table books to imported European toothpaste. When they decided to add a section of paper goods, instead of flipping through the Kikkerland catalog they went out and made their own discoveries, including an obscure line of letterpress posters and greeting cards created here at the Firehouse. It was only once our work showed up at Katz Lime that the retail side of the business became viable. Though it’s still small—supplementing the income from local clients without threatening to replace it anytime soon—I have high hopes, thanks in part to the way Dora and Ethan have embraced us.
You don’t meet the couple behind Katz Lime in the ordinary way for lunch or dinner. They don’t show up at the office for a meeting. Instead, Finn will get a call from Ethan out of the blue, saying they’re in Baltimore unexpectedly and inviting us to meet them at some artist’s warehouse space, or at Edgar Allan Poe’s house, or at the Walters, where we find them side by side on one of the brown leather sofas, looking at a nineteenth-century Spanish painting of a bunch of shawled women huddled in the rain on the steps of a church as a black-clad minister approaches beneath an umbrella. The doors of the church are framed in dark green wood, the baroque ornamentation of the tiny window beside them in stark contrast to the building’s gray-white stucco plainness. Dora and Ethan watch the painting with rapt attention, the way people sit and watch movies, as if the figures might suddenly move and the scene change.
Dora wears black leggings and an amorphous dolman-sleeved top that’s part dress and part cape, the loud pop-art print rather striking in a gallery full of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century paintings with their fancy gilded frames. Not my kind of thing, but it works for Dora Katz. Bright red lipstick, big smoky eyes, Dora’s face is more of a mask than a face, as much an accessory as her hoof-like ankle boots or her black leather clutch. Small and squarish, without the advantages of height or natural beauty, Dora is one of those women who dresses for other women without reference to the taste of men, her look every bit as curated as her famous store. None of her attraction is inherited or genetic. It is entirely earned. I am in awe of her and always have been, because she is so utterly self-made.
Ethan, on the other hand, always looks like he’s walked out of the Katz Lime look book, dressed in whatever the store is selling at the moment—in this case, the American workwear look, which his slight frame lends an innate irony. An immaculately tailored plaid shirt with snap buttons, Japanese selvedge jeans rolled at the ankle to reveal very expensive-looking shell cordovan work boots, the kind no actual workman would dream of wearing to a construction site. He gazes at the painting through clear plastic-framed glasses I’d bet a thousand dollars were handmade by a luxury craftsman.
Their respective looks sum up their personalities well: Ethan is always on trend, and Dora is a trend unto herself. Ethan’s money comes from Wall Street, though he had the good sense to retire early and pursue his true love. I’m not sure about Dora’s background. She probably sprang fully formed from the forehead of Zeus, or emerged out of a bedazzled seashell.
“Isn’t it magnificent?” Ethan says, motioning us over to see the painting.
We sit beside them, quietly observing. Finn gives me a subtle nudge, and I can imagine him regaling Huey and Diana with the whole story afterward: “We barely said hello, we just sat and looked at this painting! Talk about eccentric!”
After a few minutes, Ethan leans over and thanks us for coming.
“We thought you two would enjoy this,” he says. “It’s called Coming Out of Church, and it’s not normally on display, so this is a treat.”
“Did you drive down just for this?” Finn asks.
Ethan shakes his head pleasantly, as if the thought of doing anything for just one purpose seems baffling to him.
Dora reaches across for my hand, a stack of chunky bracelets shifting on her wrist, squeezes, then lets go. “Don’t you just love it?”
I nod my head. I do. After spending so many hours watching Aunt Bel’s idea of art, it’s nice to see a picture again, with recognizable shapes and colors.
We take a stroll through the rest of the gallery, the four of us advancing and pausing based on Dora’s whims, while Ethan murmurs about an idea he’s just thought of. Suppose he were to put together a line of Field Notes–style notebooks exclusively for Katz Lime? Would printing the covers be something we could do for him, or would it be too much? This inspires Finn to give a blow-by-blow account of the Iron Maiden’s restoration, implying that our capacity for large print jobs is ever-expanding. I stay out of the conversation for the most part, knowing that only a fraction of the ideas Ethan throws out ever come to fruition. His success, I suppose, is the result of thinking of everything, but only doing what makes the best sense. If I leave Finn alone with him long enough, perhaps the magic might rub off.
“You know what I like about you two,” Dora says to me, taking my arm in hers. “You and Finn are young entrepreneurs. We’re the same, though maybe not so young. Do you know how rare that’s becoming, people your age or younger wanting to go into business? Our daughter goes to college in the fall, and you know what she wants to do? She wants to work for a nonprofit. When I was her age, I don’t even remember that being a thing.”
“It’s a big thing now,” I say.
“Right. This is going to date me, but I think it’s the problem with the younger generation. I wanted to get out from under authority, be my own authority—but them, they’re happy to go on taking money from authority and resenting it at the same time, just like they do their parents.”
I’m not sure I follow this, but I smile and nod anyway.
“Which got me thinking, Sara. They need role models. That’s what’s missing. And when I told Ethan, he realized, ‘We have the role models right here,’ meaning the shop is full of them, Katz Lime is full of them. They’re people like you and Finn, the ones that design and make all the beautiful things we sell.”
“Ah,” I say with what I hope is an encouraging tone.
“And Finn was telling Ethan about your photography.”
My what?
I’ve been to museums with Dora and Ethan before, so I am not surprised when we end up in the gift shop, where they buy an armful of trinkets to haul into the café, where we have an afternoon snack and discuss how a Katz Lime gift shop would differ from what we’ve just seen. “That’s what we should do,” Dora says, “open a museum gift shop. We’d need a museum first.” Across the table, Ethan starts daydreaming about the sort of museum that would suit them best, while Finn looks anxiously for a way to help, perhaps not realizing the castles being built here are in the clouds. I tap his shin under the table, and he responds with a wink. Maybe he does realize and is only having fun.
When a gap opens in the conversation, I hoist my shoulder bag onto the table and pull out the proofs Huey made of the new card line—the trash-talk literature greeting cards. I spread them out on the table without explanation. Sometimes it’s best not to preface the experience with words: just let the client look at the work and have a natural reaction, good or bad.
“Oh, these are wicked!” Dora says.
She and Ethan take turns opening cards, handing them back and forth. I can tell they’re charmed. The more sarcastic the lines inside get, the more Dora keeps glancing at me, as if to say, I didn’t know you had it in you to be so catty. Oh yes, sister. I do.
“Did you tell Sara about our idea?” Ethan asks. Then he turns to me, staring very intently through his clear plastic glasses. “The thing is, we think you should be the one to do it. There would be some travel involved, obviously, because we need to capture each individual in his or her natural habitat. I like the idea of those classic portraits, you know? Where some navigator or explorer is standing there in his ruffled collar, with his finger pointing to the spot on the globe that we wouldn’t even know about except for him. Literal and symbolic at the same time. But I don’t want to box you in too much. The point is, they have to have layers, pictures you can look at more than once and find additional meaning.”
I glance at Dora, then Finn. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
They all laugh, then it dawns on them that I’m serious.
“He’s talking about the portraits,” Dora says. “We want you to do them.”
“What portraits?”
Finn clears his throat.
“The young entrepreneurs! I want to see them at their printing presses and their computer screens. In their offices or their garages or their bedrooms—some of them are pretty small enterprises, intentionally. There’s a woman who makes our candles, and you should see how she does everything—”
“You want me to take people’s pictures,” I say.
Ethan nods. “Not just for the website either. This is going to be a display in the shop. We’re going to blow them up, some of them wall-sized, and make a storewide theme out of it. Promoting the artisans behind Katz Lime, that kind of thing.”
“I’m not sure if I’m the right person. I’m not a photographer, really.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Finn says. “She would be perfect for this. She has the eye.”
Under the table I give him another tap, this time much firmer. A warning blow.
“She really does,” he says anyway.
“I know she’s the one,” Dora says.
“It’s like Holly said,” Finn continues. “You have the talent for making things beautiful. That’s what this needs.”
I curse myself for making Holly’s words a personal mantra—or at least for confiding that mantra to Finn. The approval is wonderful, and the idea of taking on something like this, having my work showcased so prominently inside Katz Lime, is truly exciting. But that excitement gives way almost immediately to fear. They must know plenty of photographers much better than me. What if I agree to the job and can’t deliver? What if my work doesn’t measure up? The same doubts that plagued me after Holly Ringwald’s commission recur again, as they always do. I’m not sure how much affirmation it would take for me to believe in myself without reservation. I only know I’ve never come close.
“This is for real?” I ask, hoping it isn’t, hoping it’s another of Ethan’s blue sky ruminations that will never get off the ground.
“When we get back to Brooklyn, I’ll have our girl e-mail you the list. There are twenty-odd names—all of our artisans. Obviously, we’re just talking about the artisan lines, but that’s still a good portion of the business. A lot of them are on the East Coast, but you’ll have to travel farther afield for a few.”
“We love to travel,” Finn says, which surprises me. Since we put out our shingle, I don’t think I’ve traveled more than two hours outside Baltimore. The last time was Antigua, for our honeymoon in the sun.
“Then it’s settled,” Dora declares. “I’m so excited about this.”
“Me too,” I admit finally. “And a little scared.”
“Sara, there’s fear and then there’s the desire to do as well as your standards are good. Don’t confuse the two. You can do this.”
Ethan leans forward. “I can’t tell you not to doubt yourself, but don’t doubt Dora. She’s got the instincts of a newborn colt.”
“What a lovely thing to say, darling!” Dora grins.
And I do feel a little better.
When we leave the Walters, I expect them to say good-bye, but instead Dora and Ethan express an interest in visiting the Firehouse. Dora in particular wants to see the “funky old camera” Finn told her about, the birthday present that takes such incredible portraits. They follow us in their car, and on the way back I unload all my doubts on Finn, who brushes them aside.
“You’ll do great,” he keeps saying. “In fact, you know what would be interesting? What if you brought Bel into this? She might enjoy working with you, and you remember those pictures she took of you? She’s got an eye for it too.”
I remember the photos. The one of me sleeping is pinned up in Finn’s cubicle, which makes me feel flattered and vulnerable at the same time.
“I don’t think this would be Aunt Bel’s thing,” I say.
“Try her and see. You never know.”
So I call Aunt Bel from the car to ask if she’ll bring the Autocord from the house to the studio so Dora can see it. “I left it on the nightstand, I think.”
“All right,” she says.
“We’ll be about ten minutes.”
“I’ll beat you there.”
When we arrive, the twin-lens camera is sitting on the counter next to Diana, who is just finishing up a consultation with one of the brides we scheduled at the Expo.
“Where’s my aunt?” I ask.
Diana gives me a funny look. “I’ll tell you later.”
While Finn shows off the Iron Maiden to a fascinated Ethan, I show Dora the camera and a few of the photos I’ve printed out from the scanned negatives. I did one of Diana leaning against the Vandercook with her arms crossed to reveal her inked sleeves, the focus razor sharp against the blurred background. Dora exclaims right away that this is just what she has in mind.
“You’re a role model, you know that?” she says to Diana, who, despite having received plenty of compliments in life, may just have experienced a first.
When Dora and Ethan leave, Diana’s portrait goes with them. They promise to send the list by e-mail and to confer with me on the schedule, then they’re gone.
The studio is quiet in their absence, everyone pleasantly shellshocked.
“Wow,” Diana says. “She’s something.”
“Yeah. So what happened to Aunt Bel? Did she just drop off the camera and go? Finn was thinking she might want to help with the portraits, so I wanted to introduce her to Dora and Ethan.”
“It’s kind of weird,” she says, leaning over the counter and lowering her voice. “I think maybe something’s wrong.”
“What happened?”
“She came in while I was with the client, so she went and sat at your desk to wait. While she was back there, a man came in. He was foreign, with a thick accent. A loud-talker, you know? I met him at the door. He wanted to see you, Sara.” She laughs. “It was funny the way he asked. He said, were you the one who made the bird that goes ‘tweet-tweet’? I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. I could tell he was making the bride a little nervous—he was a scruffy-looking guy, kind of burly, with a big mustache, like out of a Bourne movie, and like I said, he talked too loud. So I told him you weren’t here, and he wrote a message for you on a slip of paper. I could have told him to wait, but I had my hands full and really, I just wanted to get rid of him, you know? Anyway, he left the note and then he was gone.”
“And Aunt Bel was at my desk the whole time?”
She nods. “I was kind of hoping she would come and talk to him, so I could focus on the client. But she stayed hidden until he was gone. Then she left the camera on the counter and snatched his note. She read it, then crumpled it up and took off.”
“You said this guy had a foreign accent? What kind of accent, exactly?”
Diana glances at the ceiling, trying to capture the words in her memory. “I can’t do a good impression,” she says, “but kind of Russian-sounding. Eastern European, I guess.”
“And he didn’t say what he wanted?”
“You’ll have to ask Bel. She’s the only one who read the note.”