She smiled. “That’s where all the heat is—the bricks trap it all in. So, very carefully, my father would circle the house, spraying the water onto every inch, until the bricks steamed from the combination of hot and cold.” She stopped, and in her silence I imagined it, conjuring up the image of a tiny brick house, a father who cared for his daughter enough that he lingered on the bricks surrounding her bedroom window, making sure they were properly glistening before moving on.
“Did it really help?” I asked, my voice softer than it had been. I looked at Lucy and I wondered what she was thinking—if she was also imagining that small house in the middle of nowhere New England, or if she was thinking of somewhere else altogether.
“It did,” Lucy said, in a tone that I suspected was meant to assure me, to calm me. “I remember lying on my bed, listening to the water as it sprayed against my bedroom wall. And I could feel it. As I lay there, my eyes closed, the curtains drawn to keep out the sun, so the room was entirely lost in darkness, I could feel the moment the water hit, the instant relief it provided. As if someone had turned on a fan and placed it directly in front of me. Sometimes I would get goose bumps, it was so cold.”
I was quiet for a moment, thinking, imagining the cool breeze on my skin. I felt strangely calm, surrounded by the love of a father for his daughter, by the cool draft he had sweated and worked to provide for her. Something tugged at my memory. I remembered that day in Jennings Hall, all those years ago, and turning to Lucy, I lowered my sunglasses and said, “I thought you didn’t remember your father.”
A moment passed by, and another still, so that I wondered if she would ignore my words altogether. And then, she did not turn to me, did not take off her own sunglasses; instead she remained facing the ocean, her face as sturdy as the stone we had just stood upon. “I remember that,” she said, her tone a warning, a threat.
I turned away from her and remained silent.
IT HAD BEEN SNOWING HEAVILY that night. Of course, it was the Green Mountains, and in the heart of winter it seemed like it was always either snowing or threatening to snow, a blanket of ghostly white providing a permanent coat on the ground. But that night had been different. The snow stuck not only to the pavement but also to the lights, to one’s own person, so that everything passed by in a swirl as you fought and struggled to make your way through it.
Lucy and I had been fighting.
I had returned, earlier in the day, before the snow began, from a trip to New York. I had told everyone that it was an assignment for my photography class, but really it had been a chance for escape, a respite from the suffocating unease that had steadily crept between Lucy and me over the last year, so that it was suddenly all that existed between us. My aunt had not even been in town that weekend. I had arranged to stay at a boardinghouse in the city, one that I had passed numerous times and had deemed safe enough. I had thought, for a moment, of inviting Tom to join me, to make it a mini break rather than an escape, but in the end, I knew what I needed most was to be alone, from both of them, from the constant back-and-forth that I had begun to experience each and every day. As if I could actually feel it—my bones, my skin, being pulled between them, taut and threatening to break.
In New York, unlike Vermont, the air was neither clean nor crisp.
Instead it was heavy, laden with dust and grease and smoke. It seemed to hang, damp and thick, clinging to my skin. Stepping off the bus and into the city, I had smiled in relief. I spent the next two days roaming the streets, taking pictures. I finished all the rolls of film I had brought with me and ended up stopping into a camera shop to buy half a dozen more. Those, I finished too. There was something relaxing about being alone—finally alone—among a sea of people that I did not know and who did not know me. I lost myself in the facelessness of it all, thrilled to find myself surrounded by strangers. I sat on park benches, listening to the conversations that took place around me. I explored the stainless steel diners of the city, sitting at the counters, eating grilled cheese and sipping burned coffee, enjoying the weighty feel of the porcelain mug in my hand. And while rations were now a thing of the past, the notices still hung, fading and colored with grease—DO NOT ASK FOR BUTTER TODAY. NO HAMBURGERS, IT’S TUESDAY—an enduring reminder.
Returning to campus Sunday evening, I went straight to the darkroom to begin developing, not yet ready to shed the feeling of calm, of peace, that I had managed to summon amid the chaos of the city. I hummed quietly to myself as I removed the film in the darkened room, my hands moving with quick, memorized movements as I wound it around the spool, feeling for that little groove where the film would catch. I placed each one, gingerly, inside the canister, and once developed, hung them carefully on the line. Almost an hour later, the chemicals returned to the correct shelves, the negatives dry, I made a contact sheet of each, eager to see whether I had managed to capture anything worthwhile during my short stay.
It was then that I noticed her.
At first I thought it was only my imagination, or a trick of the light. Perhaps my eyes were simply tired. I told myself that there was any number of explanations for what I was seeing, that it was not real. That the evidence of her—the back of her coat, the profile of her face—could not in fact belong to her.
But then I found it: the one photograph where she hadn’t managed to step completely out of the way, where not only a glimpse of her could be seen but also the entirety of her face. It was her. It was Lucy. And she was there, following me—stalking me—present in each and every frame I had taken in New York.
It was easy to miss, if I hadn’t been familiar with her long, tangled hair, if I hadn’t seen her peacoat draped over the chair in our room, day after day. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have noticed it. She was only in the background, after all, only in the corner of the photograph. She was never the focus, never in the forefront.
But then, there was the one where she had not managed to avoid my lens, where her face stared up at me, her eyes large and unblinking. Watching me, always watching.
I clasped the photograph in my hand, which was now trembling, and left the darkroom, not bothering to clean up, not bothering to switch off the lights, but walking out into the dark, out into the snow, the steady throb of it making even the short walk between the darkroom and our house nearly impossible. I kept the photograph, the evidence, hidden inside my coat. An effort to keep it protected from the elements, so that when I produced it, when I placed it in front of her at last, there would only be a streak here or there where it had been distorted by the snow.
She had been sitting at her desk, head bent over a book, and made no move to rise at my abrupt entrance. She was silent for a moment, looking down at the photograph, a strange stillness to her movements as she raised her eyes and asked, “What is this?” Her face closed and unreadable.
“Look,” I said, my hand shaking as I pushed the photograph closer to her. When I was met with the same stony silence, I thrust my finger toward the figure displayed before us. “I know it’s you, Lucy,” I said, doing my best to make my voice hard. “The photograph may be a bit grainy, but I know it’s you.”
She did not speak, and in the absence of words, my eyes traveled to the photograph. I was struck, then, by just how grainy the photograph actually was. I scanned it again. Everything was just as I remembered, but it was as if the focus was off, just a tiny amount, so that the distinct lines of each face—her face, in particular—were blurry rather than sharp. Shadows.
She frowned, standing now. “You saw me in New York?”
No, that wasn’t what I had meant. I shook my head. “No, in the picture,” I said, fumbling for words. “You were there, I know you were.”
“Alice, I’ve been here the entire weekend.”
Her hands were on my shoulders, her fingers pressing into my skin. It was meant as a gesture of comfort, of concern, I knew, but instead I felt as though her fingertips were burning into my flesh.
I had to get out.
My heart had begun to beat, fast and unsteady. My throat felt as though it were closing up, and each breath was a struggle, a strain. I felt my skin begin to flush, and I wrenched myself free, desperate to put space between us, to remove myself from her touch. “You’re lying,” I said, heading toward the door, the words strangled in my throat.