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All it had taken was one encounter with Adam, and I was using my camera to show how much I could hate myself.
I wiped at my eyes. This was why we were bad together, sick and twisted. I remembered Adam telling me we were glorious, beautiful, and all sorts of adjectives that I couldn’t put together with the sickness in my chest. That wasn’t love. I knew that now.
I knew love.
I felt it. Every day with Daniel I felt the clarity, the joy, the honesty of love.
This feeling? Was bullshit.
I stood tall, put my shirt back on, chilled to the bone, and walked back to my car. Turning the heater on full blast, I pulled out my wallet, and gazed at the photos of Daniel I’d tucked inside. He was warm, tender, generous. He never asked me for more than I could give. He always gave as much as he could. I trusted him.
And he trusted me. Enough to have given me a piece of himself, and to have taken a piece of me. Vulnerable and open. The kind of love that I’d always dreamed of.
I noticed a white edge of a photo sticking out from a hidden pocket in my wallet. My stomach dropped again. The last time I’d thought about this compartment was when I’d placed the photo there almost a year ago.
I pulled it out with shaking fingers.
Adam and I smiled, clutching each other, tangled in the rough sheets of a Florida motel room. I remembered the pleasure, the fleeting happiness, the shame.
Rolling down the car window, I held the picture out in the sharp, winter wind. I let go and didn’t bother to watch as it was swept away from me.
I started the car and pointed it toward Daniel’s house.
I had new photos to develop. Not these I’d taken today, but the ones from the week before Daniel had left again. Naked Daniel, laughing Daniel. Bundled-up Daniel wearing a scarf and glowing with cold. Sweet Daniel, half-asleep in bed. And photos of me, too. Laughing, smiling, glowing—with coldandlove.
I wasn’t going to be this person. I didn’t want to be. Tearing the half-used roll of film from the back of the Leica, I ripped it from the spool and exposed the shots to the sun. Light would drive away darkness. It had to.
I drove away from the quarry. It was best to leave it behind, in the past. With Adam.
Now, if only he’d just stay there.
Chapter Thirty-Three
‡
Back home again,I was greeted by a note in my mother’s handwriting saying, “You missed a call from Daniel. He got to Florida safely. There’s a story there. I’d like to hear it.” Then farther down the pad, she wrote. “And you missed a call from an odd man named Harold? He asked that you call him back regarding the pictures. He said you’d know what that meant. Cryptic. Should I even ask?”
The number was written at the bottom of the note, so I made sure Mom was locked away working, and Dad had Milky Way in his office still, before calling Harold back.
“Peter,” he said after we’d exchanged hellos. “It’s good to hear your voice. It reminds me that he really is dead and that the boy in these self-portraits is someone else.”
I’d sent Harold a packet of prints, including a varied selection of some of my best shots. Mostly portraits, since I knew that was his specialty, but also some self-portraits and nature shots, some Tilt-a-Whirl madness, and some of the pictures I’d taken of Renée behind the scenes, getting her face on.
I didn’t quite know what to say, but I decided to go with, “I’m glad to hear from you, sir. I’d hoped I would.”
“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ What a load of paternalistic nonsense, my dear. Just call me Harold. And, yes, it took me some time to get up the courage to open your package. I had a lot of worries about it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. What if you were a terrible photographer with no eye for composition or subject matter? Or what if you were a good photographer, plenty talented, but I hated your work? We can’t all love what we know is good, can we?”
“I guess not.”
“I worried I’d be letting George down if I didn’t look, and I worried I’d be hurting his memory somehow if I did and hated the photos. It was all very fraught.”
“It sounds like it.”
“In the end, I opened the package.”
