In Between Frames Read online

  In Between Frames

  By: Judy Lin

  Copyright © 2013

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced in any format, electronic or otherwise, without prior consent from the copyright owner and publisher of this book

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Part I

  Miles Garrison was a man of numbers. When he was 7, he memorized the first fifty digits of the numbers of pi, simply because he could. But he never was good at math—trigonometry eluded him, and calculus turned out to be the biggest failure of his high school days. Academically, that is, because had he not taken it, he would never have met the girl who would be his wife for five glorious years before cancer seduced her away from him.

  Nellie died in the spring, seven years ago to the day—April 18—and Miles, who hated spring to begin with, because the new green of fresh foliage offended his color aesthetics, had even less of a reason to love the season. And so he spent every spring since her death in various stages of drunkenness, between “tipsy” and “comatose”. Then one year he’d tried Valium, but he awakened from his stupor with the distinct feeling that Nellie was disappointed with him, and would have never forgiven him had he actually died. Miles hadn’t been trying to kill himself, but he wouldn’t have been entirely displeased had it happened, though how he would have known was a logical flaw that he’d never managed to resolve.

  Since that year, his drunken springs were less drunk, leaning more towards “tipsy”, and he began to write down the ideas he conceived in his maudlin states. Once the trees outside his lakeside cabin matured, he’d take out the legal pad, filled with doodles and notes and random thoughts to himself, and pick out three or four or five ideas he would work on for the rest of the year. He thought of himself as more of a photographer than a writer, but even he would say that he worked harder on his writing than he did on his photography, mostly because to him, photography was numbers rendered into art, and he had always been a man of numbers.

  On this particular April 18, Miles Garrison was concerned with the numbers describing his bank account versus the numbers the eBay seller was using to describe the monetary sum he (or she—but in Miles’s experience the people selling cameras were usually men) wanted for an old Leica M3. “Picked this baby up at an estate sale,” the seller wrote. The reserve had been met, and the numbers were climbing fast. Miles had a nearly-uncontrollable, unquenchable desire to have it, for reasons he couldn’t fathom.

  He had several cameras already—DSLRs which were perfectly adequate for what he called his “work” photography, and his old Pentax that he started on as a geeky fourteen-year-old, when he still dreamed of becoming a photographer for National Geographic. He still took pictures with it when he got too caught up in his projects and couldn’t sleep. Doing the simple things that his DSLR did automatically—adjusting the shutter speed and F-stop values, doing the calculations for the flash angle and the shutter delay, pushing the lever to advance the film—and the slow, methodical development of the images in his darkroom gave him plenty of time to reflect upon his art and the beauty of the confluence of numbers that showed up in the pictures he hung up to dry. He rarely sold any photos he developed this way. These were his personal meditations, or demons, and he stacked them in a shoebox, with sheets of tissue paper between them, as a sort of photographic journal into his state of mind.

  The Leica M3 he was looking at now, on the screen, was the Cadillac of analog cameras, or so he’d always heard. He’d always wanted one, but Leicas—at least, the good ones—were out of his price range when he was starting out, but now…I could afford it, he thought, as he clicked on the “refresh” button again to see what the latest bid was ($2500). If he sniped it, he’d probably have to bid $4000, which would mean that he wouldn’t be able to visit Japan like he’d planned on doing this year. But on the other hand, he’d have a Leica.

  It seemed as if his hand moved on its own accord—or maybe it was the wine hitting his system—but he watched his hand guide the mouse over to the bidding box and his other hand type in $3000 with a studied disinterest. It seemed like his body knew what he wanted, while his mind dithered, weighing the pros and cons. The mouse hovered over the “Place bid” button for a long time.

  Oh what the hell, he thought.

  And he clicked.

  ~~~

  David’s death must have made her go mad, she could imagine them whispering. She tried not to smile as she handed their boarding passes to the flight attendant—Mabel was still grieving, and didn’t take kindly to seeing her mother smile. She wasn’t yet old enough to realize that not all smiles meant anything.

  “No,” she wanted to tell them. “I’ve simply had enough of England.”

  Three years ago, David Wilcox was working in the emergency room at King’s Crossing. He was called to attend to a drug user, who had taken a bit too much PCP and while he was pushing haldol, to take her out of her psychosis, she bit him, tearing through the skin, the fat, the muscle, ripping deep into one of his arteries.

  He’d gotten it sewn up, but a day later the wound was black and he was in agony and they all held their breaths as the doctors dripped penicillin into him, then cut and scraped away the dead flesh, then cut off his arm, and had him transferred to Charing Cross, where they had a hyperbaric chamber.

  They were racing gas gangrene, they told her, and five days later they lost. He left behind his wife and daughter, and at first Samantha Wilcox had tried to stay, because she loved David and David loved England. But the life insurance policy finally cleared, which gave her £500,000, and the local newsroom where she’d been working shutting down—if ever there was a signal to get out of England, this would be it.

  She’d gathered all of David’s friends and family together, and told them to go through his things, take what they wanted, because everything else would be sold. There went his collection of Fair Isle sweaters, someone else took his collection of fountain pens. She kept his stethoscope and his medical paraphernalia in his doctor’s bag (which David used as an overnight bag for short conferences), because Mabel, five years old, had said that she was going to be a doctor one day and Sam thought she might one day like to be connected to her father in that way. Then someone cracked open the bottle of the distillery-special 18-year Glenfidditch that he’d never opened, and they all drank a toast. The rest of his things went to the auction house.

  In the end, she received an additional £10,000 for the miscellaneous odds and ends of the life that David had shared with her. There was probably some gold jewellery in there, she supposed, perhaps a nice picture frame or a semi-valuable piece of art. She hadn’t looked too closely. She just wanted everything to be over and done with. She had what she wanted to keep of her life with him—a daughter to love; the pictures that she’d snapped of David, studying a journal while sitting under their gnarled apple tree, caught mid-laugh with his face covered in cake, kissing his daughter; the love letter he’d written her, the first engagement ring he’d bought her, a £2 tin thing with a glass stone, when they were broke—and there was a sense that everything else—things—didn’t matter. She and Mabel took an apartment in London, where she worked as a secretary while the inheritance and visa issues sorted themselves out. “We’re moving to Greece,” she’d told his family. “David bought a cottage there, and that’s where we’ll be living.”

  So let the whispers begin.

  As she seated herself and her daughter, she supposed she ought to have felt
guilty about moving to Greece, but she didn’t. It made financial sense, she’d said—costs of living were much lower in Greece. It made emotional sense—nothing like a clean break from England to help her close off her soul from the hole his death had left in it. Everywhere she went in England, she was reminded of him—his favorite toy store where he always took Mabel, which sweets he liked best, his habit of always putting the bananas in the bottom of the shopping basket, how he liked to measure distances by streetlight, the way he wore his hat. “Staying here is like trying to quit smoking while working at a tobacconist’s,” she told his family, and they nodded understandingly, but their condescending look said it all. Girl’s lost her mind, moving to Greece.

  And, of course, there was the sun. She’d grown up in the south of France, where the sun was golden and liquid and the heat slid over everything like an invisible coat of paint. But she loved Greece—the ocean’s deceptively cool blueness, the cucumbers bursting with cool liquid, the old woman who sold them bread and always gave Mabel a sticky honey roll—all of it lit by a clear, white light. It was like taking off a pair of sunglasses she didn’t know she had been wearing. She wanted her daughter to grow up knowing warmth, not cold, and far away from the things she saw on the telly. Mabel was already starting to become a bit of a couch potato, and it worried Samantha that her daughter refused to eat anything she cooked, and only liked fast food and take out, and how pale and sickly her coloring was.

  And who knows, she thought, leaning back in her seat. Maybe I’ll find love again. She took out her compact and looked at the reflection: not bad, she decided. Large liquid eyes, round face with a disconcertingly pointed jaw, hair drawn up into a youthful ponytail. Her skin was tanned, her hair a fading shade of tawny gold. She wasn’t happy with her hips—but then, she’d never been happy with her hips, so that probably wasn’t going to change. She was only thirty—that was too young to be a widow forever. But she doubted she’d ever find someone she’d loved as intensely as she did David. There was only one David Wilcox, and he is dead.

  ~~~

  The package arrived in the middle of a baby shoot, which made up about a third of his paying customers, so Miles quickly signed for it and left it sitting next to the door because the baby, a six-month-old cherub named Davy belonging to Mrs. Fern, was starting to squall under the lights, and they still had two more shots left to do. Miles wore his hair long-ish—the ends were even with his jawbone—for two reasons: the first was that he lived too far away from the town of Amherst to visit the barber regularly, and the second was that babies, at least, couldn’t seem to decide if he was a man or a woman with his long hair and this confusion and the indecision as to whether to start bawling usually bought him a few extra shots. He had rather feminine features, which annoyed him—mournful eyes, narrow face, delicate but pointed nose—rather like the photographs he’d seen of Liszt. His only redeeming feature was his eye color, an odd shade of bluish gray that seemed to change color depending on where he was.

  Two hours later, Mrs. Fern had chosen the shots she wanted, and he sent her on her way with a folder full of preserved adorability. He closed down the photo program and opened his bookkeeping software, grumbling all the while—this was the curse of entrepreneurship. Even a man of numbers dreaded filling in the forms with all of the numbers in the right slots. And God help him if he missed a decimal point.

  So it wasn’t until he came across the entry “LEICA” that he remembered the package by the door, and was smacked with a sense of guilt for the careless way he’d tossed it aside. Or had he tossed it? He didn’t think so—he hadn’t been overly gentle with it—but then again, the seller had to have packaged it carefully—or so he hoped. By the time he retrieved the package and set it on the workbench, his stomach was awash with the sour juices of guilt for having been so cavalier about it.

  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 afte
r 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.