What the Dead Want(19)

When Esther asked if she wanted to see her studio, Gretchen paused for a few seconds and reluctantly said yes.

“There are no animals in it, are there?” Gretchen asked.

“How the hell would I know?” Esther said. “There might be. C’mon.”

The room was just above Gretchen’s but twice the size. When Esther opened the door, Gretchen’s jaw dropped.

Every inch of wall space was covered in photographs, so many photographs it would take a month to get a good look at every one. Some were only a square inch in size, and some were larger, glossy prints. A few appeared to be portraits, but most were landscapes, and figures. Gretchen could see nothing distinctly, only the hundreds and thousands of images becoming a single impression; people and places, history, time, the blur of life distilled into a series of moments. This display was the result of either a highly disordered or a highly meticulous mind.

Then Gretchen’s gaze fell on the camera at the center of the room. It sat on a tripod, and its lens was pointed in the direction of the window, out onto the woods behind the estate. A Nikon F2AS Photomic. She stepped over to it, and had to restrain herself from reaching out and touching it. She’d never seen one in real life, but had talked about it plenty. Janine had had a friend who was a war reporter in the eighties in Central America and he still shot with nothing other than his Nikon.

It might have been the most sensitive camera ever invented. And only the surest photographer could manage the F2AS.

“Oh my God,” Gretchen whispered. “You’re a professional.”

Esther laughed at her. “No shit.”

“That camera . . .”

“That camera respects light,” Esther said, taking it off the tripod and holding it easily in her strong knobby hands. “Lots of folks think it’s the subject of the photograph that matters, but some of us still understand that photography is capturing light, and this camera can see all that fast light for you.”

She held it up to her eye and shot Gretchen’s astonished face, in the room full of photographs.

“I always felt like this camera understood,” she said, snapping two more pictures of her great-niece, “that light wasn’t always what could be seen, but also what could be felt—temperature, and pressure. I felt like a hunter when I was working with this thing. A hunter stalking hunters.”

Gretchen looked closely at her aunt. And something began to shift and fit together in her mind. Axton. Their family name. Esther Axton. E. E. Axton. The war reporter. She’d never even thought to ask her mother if E. E. Axton was a relative—probably because she was ten the last time she talked to her. And she’d always thought that E. E. Axton was a man.

Esther looked at her face and started laughing. She walked over to the small desk in the corner of her room and pulled out an old Life magazine. Gretchen had seen tons of these magazines in thrift stores sold for twenty cents apiece, dusty boring rags from the sixties. Esther handed it to her niece and Gretchen opened it to a bookmarked page.

There, in a quarter-page black-and-white photograph, was a woman crouching down, holding a Nikon, this Nikon, while a tank drove behind her and thick black smoke rose in the distance. She appeared to be maybe forty years old, with little round glasses, dressed in combat fatigues.

A WILL OF STEEL:

E. E. AXTON PHOTOGRAPHS ANOTHER WAR

Gretchen looked from the page to her aunt, whose eyes were dark and bright. It couldn’t be. Her heart was pounding hard. How had she never even considered the last name and the possibility of being related to E. E. Axton? Even if she was only a kid, how had her mother neglected to tell her they were related to E. E. freaking AXTON? This seemed the biggest omission, maybe the biggest lie of her childhood. What else didn’t she know about her own life?

“Another war,” Gretchen whispered, looking at the article.

“Yeah,” Esther said. “Vietnam. Before that I was in Poland,” she said, “then Japan.”

Gretchen was stunned. E. E. Axton had photographed Auschwitz, Hiroshima. No wonder she’d been holed up in this house for decades, drinking, acting crazy. No wonder she wasn’t all that bothered living near the site of a mass murder.



Who knew what she’d seen in Vietnam—or in World War II. Gretchen looked around again at the photographs on the wall. She could now see that some of them were very old.

Esther just never knew how to come home, Gretchen thought. And this place must have been as good as any.

Her aunt gave her a look of wry recognition, then held out the camera and said, “You want it?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I’m not kidding you,” Esther said gravely. “There’s a new roll of film in there and a few dozen more rolls in the darkroom. It’s yours. Right now. Here.” Gretchen reached for it but Esther pulled it away quickly and said, “On one condition.”

“Anything.” Gretchen was in such awe of this woman and her work she couldn’t believe she was standing in the same room with her, let alone related.

“You stay,” Aunt Esther said. “The whole summer or until the work is done. You stay and you continue the work. You’ll see,” she said. “Take the camera. You’ll see. There’s such a short time left. Only days until the anniversary. You’ve got to get out there and capture the light. Document it. But be careful. Very careful. You’re a smart girl or I wouldn’t do this.” Then in a lower voice, almost a whisper, she said, “When they realize I’m gone, they’ll take the house. So don’t leave the house.” She trailed off, and her eyes went blank and hollow.