Already resigning myself—I only have one pair of pants left, so this is a good idea, regardless—I peek at the display behind Arthur, expecting piles of slouchy clothing that somehow look perfect, like the stuff he always wears. Because that’s what boyfriends do in my experience, real or fake. The second you get close, they paint you and remake you and half a decade later, you’re what they want you to be, until they don’t want you at all.
Instead, a vintage camera sits in the window. And another. There are rows of them, small and black and silver, stacked next to piles of lenses and film canisters.
Speechless, I gesture at my chest. “Where are the shirts?”
“You lost your other cameras today. With your suitcase?” Arthur rolls his lip between his teeth, looks at me, then looks at the store. “Least I can do.”
My hands press against the window like two moths skittering toward a lamp. I recognize the vintage video cameras the way you do old friends—oh my gosh, there’s her, and him, and how has it been so long? There’s a thick square Sony Mavica that I’m pretty sure uses floppy disks next to a stout Handycam, round like a soda can, and then I spot the same Panasonic camcorder that I used to own, and I’m tripped by the memory. The black plastic under my palm, the click of the viewfinder flicking around, my birth mom smiling as I recorded her. And earlier than that—my birthday dinner, one of the only good ones. Her glittery nail polish sparkling as she passed a pink-wrapped gift to me. “For my little storyteller,” she’d said. “Make happy movies for me.”
The world goes quiet.
How could I have forgotten that? My birth mom had given me my first camera. I’d tried to save up myself, serious about cookiesales and lawn-mowing, but she’d been so thrilled that I wanted to makemoviesthat she’d scoured every thrift store aisle for a working camera. It still smelled like lemon Pine-Sol from her deep clean; it’s a wonder that she didn’t accidentally soak the electronics and bust it.
“Those things are beasts,” I whisper, my voice threatening to crack.
Arthur’s standing next to me, watching me. “Those cameras?”
“That camcorder. You could probably run over it and it’d be fine.” I clear my throat. “I only have my one personal camera. And all the Ignition ones have a separate check-in process. Batteries and stuff.”
His smile fades at the edges. “Ah, hell. Should we—?”
“No,” I cut him off. “I want that one. The Panasonic.”
Before he can say anything else, or anyone can interrupt, or I lose this newfound need to be a person instead of a moral compass or a camera or a brain in a jar, I grab Arthur’s hand and pull him to the tall wooden door leading into the inexplicably placed camera store. And when the door opens with a wave of ancient leather and musty metal parts, the only smell worth maxing out a credit card for, I feel Arthur’s fingers tighten and loop with mine.
The rest of Monte Carlo slams by in a daze. Days turn into seconds—filming Arthur getting filmed by someone else, filming Arthur nodding his way through virtual meetings, buying myself the cheapest new clothes I can find, getting Delaney to help me refill my meds, avoiding Max, avoiding Sarah. Nobody else rushes to my hotel door, demanding to know what happened between Arthur and me on the plane. No one asks why Arthur was spotted buying me cameras, or why we go out to dinner, or why my interviewsof him veer between his childhood and mine and his dreams and mine and the weather, what he’s been reading, his memories. And I start to worry that maybe it’s going to take something more extreme to get the team’s attention. On the outside, it looks like I’m making a documentary about him. But on the inside?
I can’t stop thinking about what Delaney said.
I’ve had time to sit with it. Process. And feel completely spooked and stupid. Probably an appropriate reaction to being told, out loud, by someone you respect, that you’re making a wildly inappropriate decision by “dating” a Formula 1 reserve driver who’s now unreserved and back in the spotlight. When I can’t sleep, I pop into the hotel hallways and walk the floors like a ’90s-era ghost—glasses on, striped pajama pants, freshly purchased Cranberries shirt—and think about Delaney’s warning.
It would be ten times worse if he was caught in a public relations nightmare with you.Multiples! Amazing.
The media would eat both of you alive, and I think you know that.Apparently, not enough.
I think you don’t care.
I care so much.
All my life, I’ve been someone who cares. Too sensitive, too deep of emotions, sentimental, nostalgic, reactive. You don’t become a person who hides behind a camera when your feelings make sense to other people. I care about Delaney’s sideways glance when I decline Arthur’s invite to the Monte Carlo casino, about the whispers her and Cameron exchange on the flight to Hungary, about her eyes on me when I grab a muffin from the morning snack table after I paced for too long the night before and look suspiciously bedraggled. I care about all of it.
Most of all, I care about that camera.
Make happy movies for me.
After my parents adopted me, my birth mom left town and changed her phone number. You know, mom stuff. I heard from a cousin that she moved closer to Ohio, following a boyfriend she met up north, though I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now. She hadn’t been able to stomach living in the same town as me, without me, and rather than occasionally bump into each other at a grocery store, she’d vanished. Again. A most spectacular finale.
All I have left is my silver locket and half of my genetic makeup. But having the camcorder around makes me think about her in ways I haven’t in a long time. Her, her happy endings, her hope. The scripts I used to write before I found documentaries, splayed out on the nubby beige carpet of the family room while she burned CDs for the car on her clunky computer.Lilah, Girl Detectivewas the longest-running series; I solved sixteen cold-case murders before she accidentally spilled orange juice on my scripts.
That’s how it always ended.
Promises to make her happy. Her changing her number.
Me here, her somewhere.
I turn these facts over in my mind until the fabric of them starts to thin.
Chapter FourteenHungary
