I held the photograph of the little girl in pigtails in one hand and the wet rock under my boot in the other, so to speak, with the cold spray on my face, and I turned the picture over to read the pencil on the back again. 1,486. Not a name, not a date. A number, in the careful hand of a man who counted everything. Leslie stood there on the rocks with the cap of the Leica in her fingers and tears running down her cheeks. “It is the number of pictures he took of me,” she said. “Every Thursday, for thirty years. He kept the negatives himself.”
She told it quietly, with the lake slapping at the stones. In 1973, before I ever met him, Stan had a brief friendship with a woman who worked in the advertising office at the paper. It ended. He never knew she was expecting. When Leslie was seven, her mother wrote him a letter, and in the spring of 1982 he drove forty miles to Rogers City on a Thursday afternoon and knocked on a door. “He sat on our porch step for an hour without saying a word,” she said. “Then he asked if he could take my picture. I was wearing pigtails.”
Gary stood on the rock behind her with his jaw working. “Ma,” he said, “I did not know. I swear on the grave of Dad. Leslie called me last week and told me, and I thought she was some kind of crank. I came here because I wanted to see her face.” His voice broke. “I have a sister, Ma. I am forty three years old and I have a sister.” I looked at his face, so like his father, and I said, in a voice that surprised me, “I did not know either. We seem to have missed a good deal.”
I sat down on a flat stone and opened the envelope. It was written in the block capitals of the newspaper. NOREEN, NOT BEFORE. If you are reading this, you have picked up my camera and gone out alone to shoot the bridge, which is the one thing I always hoped you would do. I should have told you in 1982. I was a coward, and every year I waited made it harder. She is the best of me. Please let her be yours as much as she can be. The negatives are in the blue trunk in the cellar. You are the only person alive who knows how to print them right. Stan.
It is no small thing to be handed a secret by the dead and to be trusted to make something kind of it.
I had expected to feel betrayed. For forty four years I had been certain I knew every corner of that man. And yes, something sharp rose in me for the space of a breath, as it will. But then I looked at the woman before me, at her gray green eyes with the little brown fleck in the left one, and the sharpness went soft and left me with something I had no word for. I stood up, which took some doing, and I held out both my hands. “Come back to the house,” I said. “I will make coffee. I would like to hear about the Thursdays.”
She sat in my kitchen for four hours. She touched the camera bag on its hook, and the green knit hat, and the chair of Stan, though she did not sit in it. She told me that he had taught her to hold a camera at nine, and to wait for the light, and to love the long gray hours before dawn. I told her that I had mixed the chemicals at the paper for twenty six years and had never once held a camera in my life. We laughed at the same time. It was an uncanny sound, like one of us echoing the other.
The blue trunk was just where he said. We carried it up from the cellar together, Leslie at one handle and Gary at the other, and unlocked the hasp. Inside lay fourteen hundred and eighty six negatives in glassine sleeves, each one labeled with a date in the pencil of Stan. Nothing else. Not a single sentimental letter. I turned the first sleeve to the window and saw a little girl on a porch step, squinting into the sun with her hair in two crooked braids. “We are going to print them,” I said. “All of them.”
I turned the spare bathroom into a darkroom that October. I taped black plastic over the window and bought an enlarger at an estate sale in Hillman and mixed the old chemicals by feel, the vinegar and the sharp sweet smell coming back to me like a song I had forgotten. Leslie stood beside me in the red light. We watched the first image rise in the tray, slow and ghostly, a girl of twelve on a blue bicycle, grinning with a gap in her teeth. She put her hand over her mouth. I slid the print into the stop bath with a pair of tongs.
All winter we worked. Gary came on Sundays and learned to dodge a print with his hands. We saw her at the Mackinac Bridge overlook in pigtails, at a graduation, at a wedding, with a child on her hip. In forty of them, you could see the long thin shadow of a man in a knit hat, cast across the grass, just at the edge of the frame. He had never once taken a picture of himself. He had left himself there, again and again, in the only way he knew how, in the corner of the light.
In June we hung forty of them at the library gallery in Alpena, under the title Thursdays. The mother of Leslie came, a small white haired woman of seventy seven in a lavender sweater, leaning on a cane. She stood in front of a picture of her young daughter on a bicycle for a long time. Then she turned and looked at me. I held out my arms, and she walked into them without a word, and we stood there rocking, two old women who had loved the same stubborn man in two different decades. Brittani, in the corner, wiped her eyes.
On Thursdays, now, before sunrise, Leslie and I drive out to Presque Isle together in her little blue car with a thermos between us. The green hat of Stan is on her head, and the Leica is around my neck, and the lake lies out in front of us flat and pearl gray, waiting for the light. We do not talk much. When the sun comes over the lighthouse, I lift the camera and shoot, and from somewhere in the cold I hear him say it, as he said it every week of our marriage. Out shooting the bridge, Nor.
