In the Shadow of Blackbirds(92)
“So do you.”
She nearly argued that point, but she closed her mouth and seemed to accept my words.
“Keep eating and resting for now, OK?” I grabbed the handles of my black bag. “Keep getting better and stronger. I need to go fetch something at the post office, and then I’ll put my things away at home and come straight back to be with you again.”
“Don’t tire yourself out.”
“I won’t. I promise to take good care of myself.”
“Ah …” She nodded. “Now that sounds like your mother.”
“My mother took good care of herself?”
“She did. She really did.”
“Then maybe I’ll start giving that a try.” I kissed her forehead. “I love you, Aunt Eva. Thank you for living.” I squeezed her hand, scooped up my bag, and left the hospital to rejoin the world outside.
MY FINGERS SHOOK AS I SLID THE GOLD KEY INSIDE A lock on the austere brass door of Stephen’s safe-deposit box. Inside, I found a black leather case engraved with silver letters that spelled out SEE—Stephen Elias Embers’s initials. A fitting companion to LOOK INSIDE. I slid the case out of the receptacle with care, and right there on the cold post office tiles, I snapped open the latch and met Stephen’s treasures.
In sepia-hued and color-tinted images, his view of the world unfolded for me across glossy photographic paper. Golden clouds rolled in from the ocean’s horizon at the brink of sunset. Sandpipers waded in foamy seawater that looked as frothy as the top of a lemon meringue pie. California missions stood against a backdrop of clear skies, their adobe walls cracked and crumbling and faded with time. Fields of wild poppies brought beauty and life to the dry desert floor. Biplanes glided over the Pacific, casting wrinkled shadows across blue-tinged waves.
I also found his older photographs from Oregon, which didn’t possess the same clarity and skill as his more recent work, but they were beautiful just the same. Mighty Mount Hood with its snow capped triangle of a peak. Portland’s Steel Bridge spanning the Willamette River in the heart of the city. My eleven-year-old head, smothered beneath one of my giant white bows, while I perched on the picket fence at the edge of my front yard. Stephen had written one simple word on the back of my photograph—Shell—as if I didn’t need further explanation. I liked that. It made me feel I wasn’t as confusing and complicated as I thought.
He even included a self-portrait in his collection, taken December 1917, before his dad had died. Stephen sat on the boulders of the seawall across the street from his house and held up a sign that read A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. Strands of his short brown hair blew across his forehead, and I could practically taste the salt on the breeze rustling around him. He smiled in that way of his that revealed the dimple I enjoyed, and his eyes looked peaceful and free.
Glass negatives also awaited inside the case, nestled in protective sleeves, as fragile as if they were his children. I imagined taking his treasures to his mother, laying them in her lap, and coaxing her back to the world through his work.
“You’re not disappearing without a trace,” I said to his face in the photograph. “Not if I can help it. Not a chance.” I ran my finger down the picture’s smooth edge. “I promise to try to stop this world from mucking up everything so badly. And you know I’m good to my word.”
I repacked his case and clicked the lid shut.
With one hand clutching the handles of my mother’s bag and the other gripping Stephen’s treasures, I left the post office and walked home through the swelling celebrations of the war’s end. Model Ts puttered down the streets, their squeaky horns honking like ecstatic ducks. Americans of all ages and sizes and colors crept out of their bolted-up houses and remembered what it was like to smile and laugh and throw their arms around one another for a kiss. Firecrackers popped and shimmered on the sidewalks. “The Star-Spangled Banner” soared out of windows. Drivers tied cans to the backs of cars and wagons, and the air filled with the joyous music of tin clattering against asphalt.
The festivities rose out of the crematorium smoke and the rambling piles of coffins and the black crepes scarring neighborhood doors, which made the bliss of victory all the sweeter. We were all survivors—every last one of us who limped our way out to the sidewalks that afternoon and spit in Death’s cold face.
I tightened my hold on Stephen’s case of photographs and my own treasures and kept plodding forward to my new home on the edge of a city that had sheltered me during the worst of the storm. The weight of the world lifted from my shoulders enough for me to raise my chin and hold my head higher. A warm breeze whispered through my hair. My own restless soul settled farther inside my bones.
I was ready to live.
Ready to come back fighting.
I BECAME INTERESTED IN THE BIZARRE AND DEVASTATING year 1918 around the age of twelve, when I saw an episode of a television show called Ripley’s Believe It or Not! I learned about two girls in England in 1917—sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her ten-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths—who claimed to have photographed fairies. Several investigators, including the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes’s creator) and the photography expert Harold Snelling, deemed the girls’ fairy pictures genuine, and the two cousins became famous. The narrator of Ripley’s explained that people believed in the photographs because World War I was so horrifying. I wondered exactly how atrocious the era had been if grown, educated people were convinced fairies could be caught frolicking in the English countryside.