Dead Ringer

43

I called Clarissa on the way home and endured her wrath when I arrived. Thirty minutes later, I was thoroughly chastised and she was still fuming, but she left me to think about my actions with the promise that she'd be watching from the end of the driveway, rather than delegating to one of her subordinates.

I didn't think about what I'd done. I thought about Ciar. The warmth of his hand. His eyes, piercing, like he knew something about me that I didn't even know about myself. I wondered what it was.

Maybe it was something about her.

And Donovan—last night—the way he'd looked at me, like I was the only other living thing in his universe. It was simultaneously too much and not enough, and I felt guilty for taking and worse for giving.

Finally, I trudged upstairs and into the darkroom. I sorted through the prints I'd made from that dreaded roll of film and stopped when I came to the one of Ciar at the lake.

She's not worth it, he'd said that night.

Was he trying to convince me, or himself?

My temples had started to pound, so I moved on. The photos from the night I'd gotten drunk weren't worth anything—half of them were unsteady, blurred, out of focus, or had uninteresting subjects. I flipped through them quickly, coming back to the Tobin Bridge.

What?

I fanned the prints out, scanning them all at once. The bridge had been the first on the roll. I'd inserted the mysterious photo of myself at the end of the stack, but it was nowhere to be found now.

I snatched the roll of film off the counter, searching through the negatives from that night. When I got to the blank, ruined expanse of exposure, I still hadn't found it. I ran the ribbon through my fingers, wondering whether I'd imagined the whole thing, when I finally noticed the little square at the very end.

There it was. All by itself, like my state that night had been so offensive that the other photos couldn't stand to be near me. Hood up, head tilted toward the sky, lips slightly parted as if I'd been in the middle of saying something. To whom? Had they taken me home after this picture was taken? Where had we been?

I slipped the film into the enlarger and projected the image onto the baseboard. It gave away nothing, so I turned off the light and started snatching unused photo paper from the drawer. I poured chemicals out into trays and set them aside and clipped the first paper in place.

I printed one after the next, until they marched across the twine overhead looking like something from Tilda's closet—a bizarre collection, the same image over and over and over again, as if it would make more sense the tenth or the fifteenth time around.

My face in profile, again and again. But who was behind the camera? I made big prints, small ones, overexposed and underexposed ones, ones blown up so large that they started to become fuzzy. Nothing hinted at the identity of the photographer.

I flipped one over, as if I could simply go back to that night and turn the camera around, and whispered, "Who are you?"

Then I heard it again: A tiny creak, but enough to pull me out of my focus. Had I closed the window downstairs? I couldn't remember.

I froze, listening for the telltale squeak-squeak combination of those two noisy steps. They came, one right after the other, just like they should have if someone was walking up the stairs.

I stopped breathing. I wasn't imagining this anymore. The wind wasn't blowing things around out there. Someone else was in the house with me.

Stop. There's a perfectly good reason. Maybe Clarissa had knocked at the door but gotten no answer, and now she was creeping around like a monster out there, waiting to drag me by the ankle for another parental lecture.