In the Shadow of Blackbirds (9 page)

I squinted and pulled other words out of the letters.
Sink. Die. Nod. Skid. Oiled. Link.
But none of the phrases I deciphered struck me as being the name of a photograph of a powerful storm over the Pacific.

Aunt Eva knocked on my open door and breezed into my room. “I think I’ll go pick up Julius’s picture of you early tomorrow morning before work. I can catch the first ferry. I’ll just wear a skirt over my work trousers.”

I stepped away from the images on the wall. “Will the studio be open that early?”

“I assume so. Julius is a hard worker.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“That’s not a good idea. You shouldn’t be out in public air any more than you have to be.”

“I didn’t
have
to go to his house yesterday, but you let me. It’s mainly clean ocean air we’ll be breathing.”

“I’ll think about it.” She spied the mounted photographs. “Are you sure you want those hanging on your wall?”

“Why wouldn’t I? They’re beautiful.”

“Oh, Mary Shelley …” She tutted and took my hand. “Come here. Sit down with me for a moment so we can talk
about something important.” She sat me on my bed and perched beside me on Grandma Ernestine’s old blue and white quilt that served as a bedspread. “I know you’ve never had a mother in your life to teach you the ways of the heart—”

“Don’t bring up that morning I kissed Stephen.”

“I’m not. I just want to say I know you think you’re deeply in love with that boy, but you need to keep in mind you’re still so very young. And … he might never come home.”

“I already know that.” I pulled my hand away from her. “Why would you remind me of such a thing?”

“Because every time his name comes up in conversation, your eyes brighten like he’s about to walk into the room. And now you’re hanging his photos on the wall and further surrounding yourself with him. Did he even ask you to wait for him?”

“He said I didn’t have to wait unless I wanted to. He doesn’t want me to waste my life worrying about him.”

“Oh.” She sounded surprised. “Well … that was kind of him.”

“He’s a kind person.”

She took my hand again and cradled it in her calloused palm. “If he urged you to be free, then let him go. Don’t waste your youth wondering if a boy from your past will ever return to you.”

My throat itched with the threat of tears. “I don’t think you fully comprehend how much Stephen and I mean to each other.”

“Mary—”

“Did I ever tell you how we became friends?”

Her hazel eyes softened behind her glasses. “No, I don’t think you did.”

“I was eight at the time, and he wasn’t yet ten. I’d seen him at school before, but he was always just a nice, quiet boy with an interesting last name, and I mainly played with girls. This one day, though, he brought this little Brownie pocket camera to school.” I used my hands to demonstrate the camera’s width, about eight inches. “It was just a small one with a beautiful deep-red bellows and an imitation leather covering. I was walking home with my friend Nell and two other girls, and I saw him in the distance, taking pictures of a tabby cat lying on the steps of an old church. Well”—my shoulders tensed at the ensuing memory—“these older boys swaggered up to him and teased him about being Julius’s sissy brother. They grabbed his camera and threw it onto the sidewalk. I heard a terrible crack and watched pieces scatter across the cement. And then those boys shoved him in the shoulder and walked away.”

Aunt Eva cringed. “I’m sure their father was furious that a camera got broken.”

“That’s what Stephen shouted after them. He said, ‘My father’s going to call the cops on all of you,’ and then he added some colorful curse words I’d never heard come out of a nice boy’s mouth before. I told my friends to go on home, and then I joined him to help find all the lost pieces. Some screws
had come loose, and part of the wood casing had split apart beneath the fake leather. Stephen said I wouldn’t be able to help him because I was a girl, but I sat right down on the steps of that church and screwed everything back in place with a little spectacle repair kit Dad had given me. I also pulled my ribbon out of my hair and wrapped up the cracked body to avoid any further damage before he could glue the wood back together at home.”

“Ah, yes.” Aunt Eva nodded. “Wasn’t that around the time Uncle Lars decided to buy you a larger tool kit?”

“I think so.”

A smile lit her face. “I’d forgotten all about that.”

“So there I was,” I continued, “piecing Stephen’s camera together like a puzzle, fastening the nickel lens board back in place, chatting about the book poking out of his satchel—Jack London’s
White Fang.
And all the while Stephen stared at me as if I were something magical. Not the ugly way other people sometimes stare at me, like I’m a circus freak. But with respect and recognition, like he was meeting someone in a foreign country who spoke his language when no one else could. That’s how it’s been between us ever since. We understand each other, even when we astound each other.”

Her eyes dampened. “I just don’t want you to get hurt. I hope you’ll be able to move on and find other things in life that make you happy.”

“Just let me keep hope in my heart for him for now, all right? Let me leave his photographs hanging on my wall to
remind me that something beautiful once happened in the middle of all the year’s horrors.”

She pulled me against her side and sniffed back tears. “All right. But keep your heart guarded. I know what it’s like to have love turn agonizing. There’s nothing more painful in the world.”

NO ONE ANSWERED THE STUDIO DOOR AT DAWN. WE
stood outside the Emberses’ house in a fog so thick we couldn’t see the Pacific across the street.

I tugged my coat around me. “Should we knock on the front door?”

“I don’t know.” Aunt Eva waddled down the side staircase and peered through the mist toward the main entrance. She wore a blue plaid skirt over her work trousers to disguise her uniform, and the pants beneath produced so much bulk that she looked like a giant handbell—skinny torso, bulbous hips. “I don’t want to disturb his mother. She seemed ill the other day.”

“You can’t be late for work, though.”

“I’m not sure what to do.” She trekked back up the stairs and knocked again.

The sound of an automobile motor sped our way. We both craned our necks to see the approaching vehicle through the fog: a plain black Model T. The car careened around the corner, clipped the curb with its carriage-sized wheels, and squealed to a jerking stop on the side street next to the house.

A man with uncombed black hair spilled out of the passenger seat.

Aunt Eva rubbed her throat and asked in a whisper, “Is that Julius?”

I squinted through the fog. “I think so.”

“You going to be OK, Julius?” asked the driver, a solid-looking, bespectacled fellow who appeared to be closer to my age than Julius’s. “You sure you don’t want me running the studio instead of closing it for the day?”

Julius ignored the driver and stumbled up to the house, his shirt untucked, his chin dark with whiskers. His face resembled Uncle Wilfred’s in the throes of tuberculosis: gray, clammy, sunken. His red-rimmed eyes caught sight of us standing on the steps. “Why are you here?” He didn’t sound pleased.

“We came for Mary Shelley’s photograph. Are you unwell, Julius?”

He blustered past us, smelling of cologne and something sweet, even though he looked like he could use a bath. “Come in and take it quickly. Then please go. I’m not feeling well.”

Aunt Eva jumped out of the way. “It’s not the flu, is it?”

“No, it’s not the damn flu.” He fumbled to open the door and reached around to a switch that lit a quartet of electric wall lamps. “Wait here. I’ll get it.” He went in.

Behind us, the Model T rumbled away.

I stepped a foot inside the studio and watched Julius disappear through a doorway next to the dark background curtain.
I’d always assumed the door led to a closet, but it appeared to be the entrance to an office in which photographs hung on a string to dry like laundry on a clothesline.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

Aunt Eva still massaged her throat. “I have no idea. I’ve never seen him like this.”

“Is it the opium?”

“Mary Shelley!”

Julius walked back into the studio with a brown folder. “Here, take it.” He held out the concealed picture in the tips of his fingers.

I approached and took it from him, feeling my stomach dip with nervousness as I did so.

His red eyes watered. “Now go. Please.”

“I’d like to see the photograph first.”

“Go.”

I held my breath and flipped the folder open. There I was, in black and white, seated on the velvet-cushioned chair with my camphor pouch and clock-gear necklace strung around my neck. My pale eyes peered at the camera above my flu mask.

A transparent figure stood behind me—a handsome brown-haired boy in a dress shirt and tie.

Stephen.

Stephen was the ghost in my photograph.

Aunt Eva took the folder from my hand. “Oh no, Julius. Is that your brother?”

The words cut deep. I realized what they implied.

“Is he …” Aunt Eva’s lips failed to shape the word.

Julius cleared his throat. “We just learned he died in battle. The telegram said it was a ferocious fight at the beginning of October. He went heroically.”

All the oxygen left that room. I held my stomach and heard the warning signs of unconsciousness buzz inside my eardrums. My vision dimmed. My legs started to give way.

Aunt Eva took hold of my arm to steady me. “Mary Shelley, are you all right?”

Julius turned his back on me. “Take her outside.”

A scream from upstairs jolted me to my senses. We all peered toward the ceiling.

“Stephen!” cried Mrs. Embers, as if someone were tearing her heart to shreds. “Stephen!”

Julius grabbed my arms and turned me around. “I said take her out of here. Both of you, get outside. Go far, far away. My brother’s childhood sweetheart is the last person we need to see right now.”

My feet tripped from the reckless way he steered me across the floor. Before I could regain my balance, Aunt Eva and I were back outside in the fog. The door slammed behind us. We could still hear Mrs. Embers’s screams beyond the walls, even over the thunder of the waves.

“Let’s go.” My aunt took my hand and guided me down the steps. “We need to let them mourn. What a terrible, terrible thing to lose a loved one clear across the world.”

My body felt out of control. I couldn’t walk or breathe right. Pain squeezed my lungs so hard that Aunt Eva had to shoulder my weight to help me move.

“I warned you not to long for him.” She put her hand around my waist to better support me. “I knew he’d break your heart.”

“I want—” I choked and sputtered as if I were crying, but no tears wet my eyes. “I want you to throw that photograph in the bay when we’re on the ferry. Stephen … he would have hated seeing it.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea with the way you’re acting. I’ll keep it for you in case you change your mind.”

“No.”

“You may want it in the future.”

“No.”

“Shh. Just concentrate on walking. You’ll feel better when you get back home.”

“My home’s in Portland. I’ll never get back there. I’ll never feel better.”

We continued to hear Mrs. Embers’s screams, even as we made our way past the house next door, before the crash of waves swallowed up her cries.

WE PARTED AT THE FERRY LANDING ON THE SAN DIEGO
side of the harbor. I could tell from Aunt Eva’s pinched eyebrows she regretted sending me off alone, but she had to go to work. I staggered away without looking back at her. The photograph floated somewhere halfway across the bay, ripped from its protective folder and thrown in the corrosive salt water.

The quarantine had silenced the heart of downtown. A stray newspaper page scuttled down the sidewalk on the wings of a southerly wind. Overhead a pair of seagulls cried to each other as they soared toward the ocean, eager to escape civilization. I didn’t blame them. A handful of men and women departed a yellow electric streetcar near Marston’s Department
Store at Fifth and C. Like me, they were all dressed in dark clothing and masks, heads bent down with the weight of the world, eyes on the watch for death.

We all looked like bad luck.

The word
CLOSED
hung from every other shop door, and the stores that did stay open lacked customers. I passed a barbershop in which the barber stooped in front of his mirror and trimmed his own hair, probably out of boredom. The tobacco shop next door displayed a poster with a bloody German handprint.
THE HUN—HIS MARK
, it said.
BLOT IT OUT WITH LIBERTY BONDS.

The Hun—Stephen’s Killer,
was all I could think.

“No, he’s not dead,” I murmured. “He’s not dead. He’s supposed to come home. He’s supposed to send me another letter.”

A man in a derby hat with a sandwich board slung over his shoulders crossed the street on the other side of the intersection. “Sin is the root of all evil in the world,” he yelled to no one in particular. “God is punishing us with pestilence, war, famine, and death.” The sign around his neck read
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE HAVE ARRIVED! YE WHO HAVE SINNED SHALL BE STRICKEN DOWN.