The couch bed and the table and chairs were delivered by two tired-looking men with packs of cigarettes sticking out of their shirt pockets. Despite my attempt to make friendly conversation, they said very little, as if they’d been warned by some superior not to talk to customers. Still, they left a lingering odor of sweat in my room. I unfolded the sheets and put them on the thin mattress. Out the window, the sight of Mary Rae in her heavy coat, the ice in her hair that refused to melt, surprised me. This was unusual—the dead never remained once I left their presence. A breeze slashed at the elm, thunder rumbled in the distance, and I smelled ozone. I went out with my camera and took Mary Rae’s photograph.
I’d never told even Del what I saw. At one point, after I stopped believing the writings of “A Student,” I stumbled onto Occult Phenomena in the Light of Theology, by Abbot Alois Weisinger—a theologian who claimed that in Paradise Adam and Eve possessed powers that were afterward lost to them, though some of these powers might have remained, weakened, latent in the gene pool, waiting to be revived. In the Spiritualists by the Sea camp, the mediums gave card readings, group readings in which attendees held hands and a medium summoned a personal spirit guide who might have a message for someone in the audience; I read about the Victorian spiritualist heyday that prompted the proliferation of these mediums. And I read about the popularity of spirit photographs in those days—Mrs. French of Boston, with Spirit Son, 1868, and Moses A. Dow, Editor of Waverly Magazine, with the Spirit of Mabel Warren, 1871—silly images taken by charlatans and tricksters—and this added to my unease about my own photography.
In my art class in high school, the year that Del went into the hospital, we’d been instructed to take the camera with us everywhere, and the first good image I captured was Mrs. Harrington at the Big Y. It was at night, and I’d gone there to buy spice drops—one of Del’s old cravings. I used a 35 mm camera for class, and when I started down the soup aisle and saw Mrs. Harrington I’d hesitated, curious about what the image would reveal if I captured it on film, worried that even an attempt at photographing her would further prove my instability. But like my great-grandfather, who’d sketched what he’d seen, I felt the need to take that photograph, and the next day I developed the film in the lab at school. On the negative I could see the image, but I wasn’t sure what would happen once I printed it.
Mr. Krauss, our teacher, squat and shaggy, leaned over my shoulder as I placed the paper in the bath. The image appeared, and he said it was excellent. He liked the surreal nature of it, the rows of soup cans, the strange saturated light that was arresting and eerie. He made no mention of Mrs. Harrington in her London Fog, her bruised neck, her bouffant hair flattened on one side. Just of the light, its quality. I’d felt a sharp disappointment.
“Unusual,” he said, “this shimmer here,” his pudgy index finger hovering over Mrs. Harrington’s figure.
He liked the absence of people, he told me. I’d captured the loneliness of the place. But when I looked at the image, Mrs. Harrington was there, confused, as if she’d lost her cart in one of the aisles and as if the lost cart had been the only familiar thing in a strange land. Mrs. Harrington had had a daughter, a girl with long, thin appendages who sat in the junior high cafeteria alone during lunch, scribbling verse on lined paper, refusing invitations to join other tables. The printed image of Mrs. Harrington was the first I knew of what I had to do, like a calling. It didn’t matter that I was capturing only absence—an empty supermarket aisle, a deserted, leaf-riddled road. I understood that lost love did that—uprooted you and left you abandoned.
While I’d been taking Mary Rae’s photograph, Geoff came up the sidewalk with Suzie on her leash and smiled at me, hesitantly.
“Taking shots of the house?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Geoff laughed. “I’ve got some stories about this place, if you’re ever interested. It’s got a history, you know.”
“Ghosts?” I said, raising the camera to set Mary Rae in my sights.
Geoff put his hand on my shoulder, and I felt a flash of discomfort, then wondered if I was wrong to feel it. Avuncular, I told myself, an old high school vocabulary word I’d never thought I’d use.
“No, don’t worry about that,” he said. “I wouldn’t have any renters if that were the case, eh?”