2
PHIL AINSWORTH DEVELOPED photographs in the darkroom at the back of the house. It was late early spring, and outside in the darkness it was raining. He often worked at night, especially on nights when his sleep was troubled, and he had a premonition that this would be that kind of night. He could hear the occasional rising of the wind like a drawn-out sigh, and the sound of the rain rose and fell, beating insistently against the windows and then diminishing to a blurry rush. He found the rain comforting. There was an element of isolation in it that he liked, although it made photographic travel into the back country difficult and sometimes impossible, especially during winters such as this one, when the rains were more or less continual.
That was really the only problem with the rain—that it impeded travel on unpaved country roads. His roof didn’t leak, the property drained well, and even if the power went out and didn’t come back on for a month, he had enough firewood for heat and enough oil lamps to brighten any room in the house. He wasn’t a hermit, but he had found it increasingly easy to live alone, out here on the edge of things—a way to stay out of emotional debt, looking out at the world through a veil of rain. Living alone, his needs were so few that he was almost never interrupted. The world was less necessary to him, and the result was that he had become equally unnecessary, which suited him.
He looked around the darkroom, which was almost cozy in the amber glow of the safelight. The long stainless steel counter and sink, the rows of chemical bottles, the enlarger, the drying racks, and the rest of the equipment and cabinets that crowded the narrow room were sepia-toned in the perpetual semidarkness, where there was no difference between noon and midnight. He had built his own drying racks out of wood and screen, and right now those racks were layered with photos of Irvine Park, a nearby regional county park, which, in this rainy winter, was cut by the waters of Santiago Creek, the same creek that ran along the back of Phil’s property. As the storm fronts moved through coastal southern California, the cloudy skies over the park and the deep shadows of its wooded hillsides kept so constantly changing that the landscape seemed almost alive with darkness and light and the on and off haze of rain.
Yesterday he had spent a moodily lonesome day out there in the park, from dawn until sunset, wandering along the mesas and through the dense foliage of the arroyo, shooting black and white film, mostly of cloud formations and flowing creek water and the slow, ghostly dance of shadow beneath the oaks and sycamores and willow. He had planned on going back earlier today, but the renewed rain kept him home.
He picked up his mug from the top of the paper safe and drank cold coffee, thought about putting on a fresh pot, and immediately abandoned the idea. He realized he was worn out, but what he wanted was sleep, and not a second wind. It was usually time to pack it in when none of his work looked any good to him, and he had pretty clearly reached that point tonight. He looked at the last print that had come out of the chemicals—a vast sky with clouds and shafts of sunlight like the end of the world above an enormous heavy-limbed oak silhouetted against the gray horizon. It was starkly spectacular, but there was something about the tone of the photo that bothered him. …
The telephone rang, a startling intrusion on a night like this. He glanced at the clock. It was late enough so that the call was either a wrong number or bad news, so he let the answering machine in the kitchen pick it up, only half listening while he looked for a different filter to darken the image. A man’s voice spoke, and Phil stopped to listen, holding his breath, recalling the man’s name at the same moment that his mind took in the message: that Phil’s sister, Marianne, was dead of a stroke.
He pushed through the darkroom door, went out through the workroom and into the kitchen, grabbing the phone and switching off the recorder.
“Yeah,” Phil said.
“Mr. Ainsworth? George Benner. Sorry to be calling so late.”
“I’m a night owl,” Phil said, his heart hammering. The wind blew rain against the kitchen windows. He saw that water was pooled up on one of the sills, and he had the strangely foolish impulse to find a towel in order to wipe it off. Marianne was his twin sister, his only living relative aside from her daughter Betsy, who was ten. He sat down in the kitchen chair and leaned against the table to steady himself. “You said a stroke?”
“Yes. I apologize for being blunt, but I assumed it would be worse to be timid, under the circumstances. I knew you’d want to know as soon as possible.”
Phil nodded his head, realized what he was doing, and asked, “When?”
“This afternoon. I just heard, though. I didn’t think it could wait until morning.”
“Of course not,” Phil said, having to think hard in order to come up with the words. He felt empty-headed and slow. “Thanks for calling.”
“I felt I had to,” Benner said. “Especially in light of Marianne’s will. I don’t know how you feel about the will, but since it names you as Betsy’s guardian, I thought you’d want to fly out here as soon as possible.”
“Yeah,” Phil said. “In the morning.” He realized with a vague dread and guilt that the news of Marianne’s death didn’t surprise him. She had been taking antidepressants off and on for years. “This wasn’t…”
“Suicide?” Benner asked. There had been no hesitation, which was troubling.
“Yeah.”
“Apparently there’s no real indication of that. They’re calling it a simple stroke, which isn’t remarkable, given her medical history. Her condition might have been aggravated by medication, but there’s no reason to suppose it was suicide.”
Lightning flashed out in the night, illuminating the rain-streaked window glass, but it seemed like a long time before he heard a distant rumble of thunder. The assurance struck him as unconvincing. “Where was Betsy when it happened?” he asked.
“At a friend’s house, apparently.”
“Thank God.”
“A neighbor’s with her now. Hannah. Darwin … ?”
“I know her,” Phil said.
“Even so, the sooner you can get a flight out here, the better. It would be good for Betsy to be on something like solid ground again.”
A minute later, after Phil had hung up the phone, he stood for a time in the kitchen, watching the rain slant past the window, illuminated by the yellow bulb of the back porch lamp. His mind was agitated but empty. He was struck with the futile desire to tell someone else, to talk to someone, but he could think of no one, and it was too late at night anyway to start making phone calls. Abruptly he thought of his father, a man whom he had never even known. There was some chance that his father was alive somewhere in the world … but then there had always been that chance, and Phil had never pursued it, and neither had Marianne.
Had he seen Marianne’s death coming? The antidepressants she had taken in the years following her husband’s death hadn’t helped her much. Phil hadn’t been able to help much, either. Because Marianne lived in Austin and he lived in California, he had been comfortably far removed from his sister’s troubles, although there was no comfort in that now.
Just last year, when Marianne and Betsy had come out to California for a visit, and Phil had agreed to let Marianne put his name in the will, his sister had seemed optimistic for the first time in years: Betsy was playing the piano and pitching softball. Marianne had a new job. Things were looking up for them. Still, she had seemed distracted by the idea of planning for Betsy. She’d had a horror of Betsy’s living with strangers, of the government deciding Betsy’s fate, and Phil was happy enough to be named her potential guardian, although he hadn’t really thought it would matter anyway. It had seemed to him to be a formality, the kind of thing a single mother would do as a matter of course, and so he had agreed to it without thinking about it for more than fifteen seconds. Now, in an instant, everything had changed.
He opened the white pages, picked up the receiver, punched in the number of Southwest Airlines, and booked an early-morning flight into Austin. When he walked back into the darkroom it was only to turn out the light. He looked at the photo on the top rack again. It needed something human, he saw now, something to balance the dark enormity of the cloudy sky and the morbid age of the drooping oaks.