In Between Frames Read online

  Werner didn’t say anything.

  Miles, getting more and more nervous by the minute, said, “Look, it’s a matter of principle. Some of the photographs were rather intimate—I mean, uh, personal—I just don’t think he meant for these pictures to fall in the hands of a complete stranger. And look, if you want I’ll leave you some of my work you can have—“

  It was the first time he’d looked at the photos he’d shot the day before, and he realized what an idiot he was for not having looked at them earlier: the photographs were all of the woman and the child, now—her standing at a stove, with the girl literally hugging her skirts; typing at the kitchen table with her daughter peering over her shoulder; sitting at a beach, talking with a younger man, while her daughter played in the sand nearby.

  “I’m sorry,” Miles said abruptly. “I’ve brought the wrong roll with me—“

  But it was too late. Deirdre had already seen them. “These are lovely,” she said, her voice scarcely rising above a whisper. “Oh Werner, don’t they look happy?”

  “That was David’s cottage in Greece, somewhere. Loutraki or Latrouki or something.” Werner muttered, turning away.

  Miles thanked them awkwardly, and backed away from their house. As soon as he was clear of the oppressive space, he ran back to the Tube station. Being in that house felt like being swallowed by a malignancy—and even the smog of traffic in the streets was a breath of fresh air. He also realized that this little trip had taken him longer than he’d thought it would, and that he would have to rush to make it to Gatwick in time for his plane to Greece. Even in his rush, he had to wonder what the odds were.

  Part III

  The plane touched down in Greece, and even before he exchanged his pound notes for euros, Miles knew that his camera equipment would be in serious trouble. The blazing sun, the dusty air, the crowds of protesters jostling each other, the Hellenic alphabet and strange language—within moments of getting out of the taxi from the airport (he would have taken the train, but the public transit workers were striking again) he was overwhelmed with the noise, and unable to make sense of any of it because the Greek language was not only written in the Greek alphabet, it was grammatically complicated.

  He made it, eventually, to his hotel, thanking God for the existence of air conditioning and doors with locks on them. He took out the envelope for the eighth time in three hours—they were still of the woman and her daughter, still in the same cottage. But he didn’t remember seeing this one—of her, soaking in a bathtub—it was very well-composed. He would have remembered it. Or the one of her daughter, holding a tiny crab in her cupped hands. He had the sense that none of this would stop until he met the woman in—what did Werner call it, again? Loutraki?

  He dashed off an email to the people he was supposed to meet the next day, telling them that a family emergency had come up and that he needed to be back in the US. He then sent one to Gary, telling him that something had come up while he was in Greece and that he needed to investigate it. Then he called the front desk, and asked them how to get to Loutraki.

  “The bus,” he was told.

  Three hours later, he stepped off the bus, and into the near-perfect silence that was Loutraki on a hot summer afternoon. In the distance, he could hear a soft whispering rush, which might be the ocean or distant traffic. Above him, the apartment windows were open to catch the non-existent breeze that wasn’t blowing in off the ocean.

  Miles asked around for the records building, but all he got were blank stares. “Government” got him a little further—people would point, more or less in the same direction, until they started pointing in the opposite direction, and so, little by little, he ended up in front of a building that had columns rising on either side of the door, and a little plaque on the front that, after a bit of sounding out, translated into, “Government of Loutraki”. Miles groaned inwardly at the thought of trying to explain his mission to the people behind the desks, but at the last moment, he remembered that he still had most of his wad of euros. He’d never actively participated in any sort of petty bribery, and the thought of botching it up almost made him turn away. But then he remembered the three-hour bus trip and the Leica that wouldn’t take photos of what he’d pointed it at, and his idea that maybe it would stop after he met this mysterious woman, and he went inside.

  It was cool, at least, though the air was damp and Miles imagined that he was getting drenched by the water condensing on his clothes. It was also distressingly empty—there was nobody sitting in any of the four booths, nobody sitting in the seats cordoned off in the waiting area. There was a bell in front of one of the booths. Miles rang it, only because he felt stupid, having come all the way here only to find the building closed, but much to his surprise, someone called out something in Greek and a moment later a young woman, dressed in the standard office uniform—white blouse, gray pencil skirt, black pumps—came out from what was apparently a break room. She wiped something from her lacquered lips and sat down across from him. She said something that probably meant, “Can I help you?” and Miles, not knowing what else to do, took out the Leica and the photograph of the woman soaking in the bathtub.

  She frowned, and Miles began with the same story he’d told Deirdre Wilcox: he’d bought the camera, found the roll of film inside, realized that the pictures were rather personal, tracked down the seller who told him where he’d bought it from, and now he was trying to find the woman to whom these pictures belonged, could she help him? He realized that, had he been in the US, this would have sounded irredeemably creepy, but the woman behind the desk didn’t even blink. Quite possibly, she didn’t understand it all.

  “I not understand,” the woman began, “why you look for her in Loutraki?”

  “Her family said she was here,” he said.

  “Not many foreigners in Loutraki,” she said. “Easy to look up.”

  The pause was expectant enough that even Miles knew to slide a twenty-euro note through the hole in the glass. “She has a child.”

  The woman folded the money and tucked it into a hidden pocket. She tapped the keyboard a few times. “Have you name?” she asked.

  “Wilcox,” Miles said. “Her last name is Wilcox.”

  The woman tapped the keyboard again. “David Wilcox bought cottage,” she said. “I print you address.”

  ~~~

  Sam should have been studying verb conjugations, but she was engrossed in her character. She’d created a woman who was a literature professor who’d taken a dare to write a glowing review about a terrible book. The twist was that the book was written by a famous novelist, who’d written it to show that the world had no standards. She felt as if she couldn’t stop writing, even if she’d wanted to, and it was only with the greatest reluctance that she got up at around five that evening to start dinner. The cottage was a mess—dried laundry still on the racks, breakfast dishes in the sink, the floor furry with crumbs and dust—and even then Sam seriously considered sending Mabel to the McDonald’s by herself with a few euros and letting her buy herself a happy meal, so that she could continue writing.

  But she forced herself to stop, because letting Mabel run wild like a feral child wasn’t good for her, and there were olives and cheese in the refrigerator that needed to be eaten, and she needed to look up the papers in order to fill out some forms that were required from Athens, and the reality of life and all of its petty needs and should-have-dones crowded into her consciousness like commuters cramming onto the last subway car: too many things needed to be done, and of course the most important one got left behind in the general forgetfulness of adult life. Sam groaned softly. All she wanted to do was make herself a cup of tea and call it a night.

  But she couldn’t. Mabel would be hungry, soon. She needed to eat something, as well—her stomach growled. Sam went to the refrigerator—dinner was not so intimidating. She could handle dinner. There was ground beef—she could make meatballs—and they still had yogurt and cucumbers and she could send Mabel clambering
around to find mint. After dinner, the dishes, and then—

  “Excuse me?”

  She whirled around. A man was standing in the doorway of the cottage, gangly, tall, wearing one of those multi-pocketed vests that screamed “OH HI I’M A TOURIST”. “I was going to knock,” he said, “but it was open.”

  “What do you want?” she demanded, fear wrenching her voice down an octave and lending it a savageness that she didn’t know she had. Loutraki was small enough that most of the people she knew so far—Stephan, Evangelis, the man who set up his rods on the beach every morning and came by whenever he’d caught something he thought she’d like, Domitrea, who had an overenthusiastic garden and loved Mabel—would just walk in the front door. But it was unacceptable from a stranger—and an American, at that.

  “I just—I bought your husband’s camera,” he said. “There was a roll of film in it already and I don’t think he intended for these pictures—“

  He’d taken out a cardboard envelope emblazoned with the logo of one of the British photo shops she recognized, and was taking out a picture. “Y’know what, never mind,” he said quickly, stuffing the print back in. “I’m sorry—“

  “What pictures?” she snapped. She strode over to him, and snatched the envelope away from him. He protested and tried, weakly, to get them back, but she got them away from him and sat down at the table, and opened it:

  Pictures of London. Nice pictures, too, she had to admit. He was still standing at the door, his hands hanging awkwardly around him. “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” he said. “I just—I don’t understand. I swear, I had these photos developed and every single one of them turned out to be you, or your daughter, and now that I get here to give them back to you—“

  If he was an axe murderer, she thought, he was either a very bad one, or extremely cunning. “Would you like to come in?” she asked.

  “Yeah, that’d be nice,” he said, without the slightest trace of sarcasm. He followed her inside, and she waved him to a seat at the table. “I don’t mean to be imposing, or anything, but if you have a pitcher of water—I walked here from the bus stop.”

  “That is a long way,” she agreed, as she took out the carafe of water she kept in the refrigerator. He drank it down in a series of long, loud, swallows.

  “Thank you,” he said. “It’s hot here,” he added, and then looked at her sheepishly, as if he were embarrassed at having stated the obvious.

  “What camera was it that you bought?” she asked.

  “This one,” he said, taking out an old-fashioned film camera from one of his many pockets.

  “I never realized real people had a use for all those pockets,” she said, as she took the camera to look at it. It was heavier than it looked, but she’d never seen it before. David, as far as she knew, had only ever used digital cameras. It was 2012, after all. “I don’t even know if it’s his,” she said, rather apologetically. “My late husband was a pretty good photographer, but I’ve never seen this.”

  “Someone bought it at the estate sale and put it up on eBay,” he told her. “I bought it, because Leica is like a Rolex for cameras. And…well, I don’t know how to say this without sounding incredibly creepy, but when I started taking pictures with it—with a new roll of film—I’d get pictures of you being developed, instead.”

  Sam laughed curtly. “And let me guess. Now that you’re here, the pictures of me are now the pictures you remembered taking.”

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “I don’t know what, if anything, I should be getting from that—“

  His stomach growled loudly. He smiled bashfully at her. “Sorry,” he said. “I ordinarily have a little snack in one of my pockets, but for some reason I keep losing them. It doesn’t matter which pocket I put them in. You’d think I’d have noticed a bag of raisins falling out—“

  “I’m sorry, but did you say raisins?”

  “They’re like M&Ms to me,” he said. “Why?”

  ~~~

  They laughed about it that night, over a dinner at the local McDonald’s—he had been unsettled that he couldn’t get a Big Mac. “I don’t even like them that much,” he told them, as they sat down and divided the food. “I just think it’s ridiculous to go to McDonald’s and try to be healthy.” A quarter-pounder, though, was apparently the same no matter where in the world you were. But the amount of food on their tray shocked them all—for Sam and Mabel, McDonald’s had never been a habit. For Miles, it’d been a few years, and he’d forgotten that the portions were as huge as they were. “The scary thing is,” he said, “they must be smaller than the American-sized ones.”

  Mabel had appraised him seriously when Sam called her back inside. She seemed to sense that Miles was somehow different from Stephan, “Our Greek teacher,” Sam explained. Miles nodded amicably at that, and Sam didn’t realize how relieved she was that Miles didn’t seem to mind until she sighed.

  As they walked there, Miles told Sam about his studio, and his book project; Sam found herself telling him the horrible manner in which David had died, something that not even his family had known. “They didn’t want to know,” she said, “and I didn’t yet understand how I could tell them these things.” Mabel told them both about the shells she’d found that day, and then skipped ahead of them to pick some wild purslane. “She knows all of the wild plants,” Sam had told him. “It really saves us from having to buy fresh produce.”

  “I can’t imagine that would be too expensive, though,” Miles had said.

  “Some days it is, some days it’s not,” Sam told him. “With the economy being the way it is, you really never know.”

  The cashier gave them the stink-eye as he slid their tray of food at them. Miles chalked it up to the protests and the austerity measures that made McDonald’s a luxury, but didn’t mention it to Sam as they chose a table. The playground—he was amused to find that, even here, in the middle of some tiny village in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Greece, there were playgrounds at the McDonald’s—was closed, but she was too tired to play. “She goes out all day,” Sam told him as they sat down, “and runs around and plays on the beach.”

  Mabel was disappointed to discover that her Happy Meal didn’t have a toy, or French fries. Just four chicken nuggets, a small cup of yogurt, and apple slices. Miles was faintly amused by it—he told them about another project he was planning, about morbidly obese children. “But nobody does anything about it,” he told their aghast faces, “because people have this religiosity when it comes to the free market, and they will cling to their right to shove greasy, lard-filled crap down their throats, and down their children’s throats, rather than submit to any regulations about how much lard-filled crap they can eat.”

  “To freedom,” Sam said, raising her paper cup filled with Coke.

  “To freedom,” Miles agreed.

  They were a little family in that moment, cups raised in unity. On his way back to Athens later in the evening, Miles was fidgety, almost agitated. He couldn’t figure out why—he’d had a Sprite, not a Coke, and McDonald’s food usually put him to sleep faster than most sleeping pills. He found himself obsessing over Sam and Mabel, remembering every gesture of Sam’s delicate hands, the measured way with which Mabel watched him when he asked her what she wanted, the surprise he felt when she acquiesced to his insistence that he be allowed to pay for it—she did not strike him as being bound by the rules of chivalry. He found himself wondering what it would have been like if he and Nellie had had children. Would they have had a girl? Would she be like Mabel?

  It wasn’t until he got back to his hotel that he realized why he couldn’t stop thinking about Sam and Mabel: he was lonely (maybe in love, too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves there, Miles my man). He hadn’t realized this because it had been so long since Nellie died, and she’d given him plenty of time to adjust to the idea of living alone, as bit by bit their lives together slipped away until it became his life. The idea of sharing a life with someone again—someone as be
autiful as Sam was, and as fun as Mabel—didn’t terrify him, the way it did when he first proposed to Nellie. He actually wanted to do this.

  The red glow of the alarm clock on the hotel dresser counted up the minutes and hours as he tried to dismiss the idea of being in love again after all these years, with a woman he just met. But the idea wouldn’t dismiss him. Sometime between two and three in the morning, his stomach stopped churning from the overly-greasy McDonald’s fare and started growling properly again, and he reached reflexively for a snack—and this time, he found his bag of raisins.

  ~~~

  “I don’t know,” Mabel said.

  Sam blinked in surprise. She’d asked her daughter, the next morning, if she liked Miles. Sam liked Miles—with him (as with all Yanks) there was a forthrightness in his manner, where he said what he meant and meant what he said. She didn’t have to wonder if he thought she was hitting on him, or worry that she was being “too flirty”. Mabel had liked Stephan instantly. Why didn’t she like Miles? Sam felt a twinge of doubt tugging at the corner of her newfound happiness. If Mabel didn’t like Miles, could she?