Little Fires Everywhere(57)

“My Wren,” she’d called him, not only because Warren had been too long to pronounce, but because it suited him. Even in those early days, he’d looked like a vigilant chick, head tipped to one side, two impossibly bright and focused eyes, searching the room for her. When he cried, she knew which toy would calm him. When he wouldn’t nap, Mia lay next to him in the center of their parents’ bed, blankets heaped around them in a chenille nest, singing him songs and patting his cheek until he dozed. When he fell skinning the cat on the monkey bars, it was Mia he ran crying for, and Mia who dabbed the gash on his temple with iodine and stuck a bandage across it.

“You’d think she was the mother,” their mother had said once, half in tones of complaint, half in admiration.

They had their own words for things, a jargon of obscure origin: for reasons even they had forgotten, they referred to butter as cheese; they called the grackles that perched in the treetops icklebirds. It was a circle they drew around the two of them like a canopy. “Don’t tell anyone from France,” Mia would begin, before whispering a secret, and Warren’s reply was always, “Wild giraffes couldn’t drag it out of me.”

And then, at eleven—almost twelve—Mia discovered photography.

Warren, just turned ten, had himself discovered not only sports but that he was good at them. Baseball in the summer, football in the fall, hockey in the winter, basketball in all the spaces in between. He and Mia were still close, but there were long afternoons at the baseball diamond in the park, long hours practicing passes and practicing layups. So it was natural that Mia, too, would find a passion of her own.

At the junk shop in town she spotted an old Brownie Starflex sitting in the corner of the front window. The camera had lost its flash and neck strap, but the shop owner assured her it would work, and as soon as Mia flipped up the little silver hood and saw the junk shop reflected in blurry miniature in the lens, she wanted it immensely. She dipped into the cat-shaped bank where she saved her allowance and began to carry the camera everywhere. She ignored the manual’s suggestion that she write the Kodak Company for its helpful book How to Make Good Pictures and went by instinct alone. With the camera dangling from two of her mother’s old silk scarves knotted together, she began to take photos—odd photos, to her parents’ eyes: run-down houses, rusted-out cars, objects discarded on the side of the road. “Funny thing to be taking a picture of,” the clerk at the Fotomat remarked as he handed over an envelope of prints. That set had contained three images, taken over successive days, of a bird’s corpse on the sidewalk, and he wondered briefly, not for the first time, if the Wright girl was a little touched in the head.

For Mia, however, the photographs were only a vague approximation of what she wanted to express, and she soon found herself not only altering the prints—with everything from ballpoint pen to splashes of laundry detergent—but experimenting with the camera itself, bending its limited range to her desires. The Starflex, like all Brownies, allowed no focusing. The shuttle cocked automatically to avoid double exposures—which the manual billed as a convenience for the amateur. All you had to do was all that you could do: peek into the viewfinder and press the shutter. Instead of holding the camera level against her chest, per the instructions, Mia tipped it at different angles, knotted her makeshift straps higher or lower. She draped silk scarves and wax paper over the lens; she tried shooting in fog, in heavy rain, in the smoke-filled lounge of the bowling alley.

“Waste of money,” her mother sniffed, when Mia brought home yet another envelope of blurred and grainy photos.

With each roll of film, however, she began to understand more and more how a photograph was put together, what it could do and what it could not, just how far you could stretch and twist it. Though she did not know it at the time, all of this was training her to be the photographer she would become. With only twelve exposures on a roll, she learned to be careful in composing her shots. And with no controls—no aperture control, no focus—she learned to be creative in the ways she manipulated her camera and her scene.

At this moment, fortuitously, their neighbor Mr. Wilkinson intervened. He lived up the hill from them, and for some time he’d seen Mia with her Brownie wandering the neighborhood, snapping pictures of this and that. Mia and Warren know only one thing about Mr. Wilkinson: he was a toy buyer and spent most of his time traveling to toy shows, perusing merchandise, sending reports to headquarters on which toys to stock. Every few months, Mrs. Wilkinson would round up the neighborhood children and distribute the sample toys Mr. Wilkinson had accumulated. Marvelous toys they were: a set of molds that you filled with plaster to cast Christmas ornaments; a Saturn-shaped ball on which you could bounce, pogo-style; a giant doll’s head with hair of gold to coif; a box of perfumes to blend and pinkie-sized vials to hold your concoctions. “I need my basement back,” she’d said, laughing, making sure each child got something, even if only a yo-yo. The Wilkinsons’ son was grown by then, living somewhere in Maryland, and no longer needed toys.

For a long time, this was the only image Mia had of Mr. Wilkinson, a mysterious cross between Marco Polo and Santa Claus who filled his home with treasures. But one afternoon, just after her thirteenth birthday, Mr. Wilkinson had called to her sternly from his front porch.

“I’ve been seeing you traipsing around for a year now,” he’d said. “I want to see what you’ve been up to.”