With a tumbler in one hand and the Nikon in the other, I settle down in the corner of my study, cupped between the south and west windows, and survey the neighborhood—inventory check, Ed likes to say. There’s Rita Miller, returning from yoga, bright with sweat, a cell phone stuck to one ear. I adjust the lens and zoom in: She’s smiling. I wonder if it’s her contractor on the other end. Or her husband. Or neither.
Next door, outside 214, Mrs. Wasserman and her Henry pick their way down the front steps. Off to spread sweetness and light.
I swing my camera west: Two pedestrians loiter outside the double-wide, one of them pointing at the shutters. “Good bones,” I imagine him saying.
God. I’m inventing conversations now.
Cautiously, as though I don’t want to be caught—and indeed I don’t—I slide my sights across the park, over to the Russells’. The kitchen is dim and vacant, its blinds partly down, like half-shut eyes; but one floor up, in the parlor, captured neatly within the window, I spot Jane and Ethan on a candy-striped love seat. She wears a butter-yellow sweater that exposes a terse slit of cleavage; her locket dangles there, a mountaineer above a gorge.
I twist the lens; the image sharpens. She’s speaking quickly, teeth bared in a grin, her hands a flurry. His eyes are on his lap, but that shy smile skews his lips.
I haven’t mentioned the Russells to Dr. Fielding. I know what he’ll say; I can analyze myself: I’ve located in this nuclear unit—this mother, this father, their only child—an echo of my own. One house away, one door down, there’s the family I had, the life that was mine—a life thought lost, irretrievably, except here it is, right across the park. So what? I think. Maybe I say it; these days I’m not sure.
I sip my wine, wipe my lip, raise the Nikon again. Look through the lens.
She’s looking back at me.
I drop the camera in my lap.
No mistake: Even with my naked eye, I can clearly see her level gaze, her parted lips.
She raises a hand, waves it.
I want to hide.
Should I wave back? Do I look away? Can I blink at her, blankly, as though I’d been aiming the camera at something else, something near her? Didn’t see you there?
No.
I shoot to my feet, the camera tumbling to the floor. “Leave it,” I say—I definitely say it—and I flee the room, into the dark of the stairwell.
No one’s ever caught me before. Not Dr. and Rita Miller, not the Takedas, not the Wassermen, not the gaggle of Grays. Not the Lords before they moved, nor the Motts before they split. Not passing cabs, not passersby. Not even the postman, whom I used to photograph every day, at every door. And for months I’d pore over those pictures, reliving those moments, until at last I could no longer keep up with the world beyond my window. I still make the odd exception, of course—the Millers interest me. Or they did before the Russells arrived.
And that Opteka zoom is better than binoculars.
But now shame live-wires through my body. I think of everyone and everything I’ve caught on camera: the neighbors, the strangers, the kisses, the crises, the chewed nails, the dropped change, the strides, the stumbles. The Takeda boy, his eyes closed, fingers quaking on his cello strings. The Grays, wineglasses aloft in a giddy toast. Mrs. Lord in her living room, lighting candles atop a cake. The young Motts, in the dying days of their marriage, bellowing at each other from opposite ends of their Valentine-red parlor, a vase in ruins on the floor between them.
I think of my hard drive, swollen with stolen images. I think of Jane Russell as she looked at me, unblinking, across the park. I’m not invisible. I’m not dead. I’m alive, and on display, and ashamed.
I think of Dr. Brulov in Spellbound: “My dear girl, you cannot keep bumping your head against reality and saying it is not there.”
Three minutes later, I step back into the study. The Russells’ love seat is empty. I glance at Ethan’s bedroom; he’s in there, crouched over his computer.
Carefully, I pick up the camera. It’s undamaged.
Then the doorbell rings.