Elizabeth Hand - Generation Loss

“I really want to go down to Florida to see my mom.”

“They won’t let you?”

“No, they will. In a few days, I think. It’s just boring.”

“You have a high threshold for excitement.”

She pointed at my eyepatch. “Does that hurt?”

“Not really.”

“Are you blind?”

“Nah. They just don’t want the stitches under it to tear. The skin there’s really sensitive.”

She smiled that sweet kid’s smile. “It looks really, really cool.”

“Yeah?” I touched the corner of the patch gingerly. “Maybe I should keep it.”

“You should.”

She stared at her knees. I reached for the CD case and began flipping through it. “Shit. Is this what you listen to?”

“Pretty much. My mom says she’s going to get me an iPod when I’m down there.”

I read some of the CD titles and grimaced. “Jesus. Well, these are okay—” I tapped Fire of Love and volume two of the Ramones Anthology .

“I like their early stuff better.”

“Yeah, me too.” I stared at the case for another moment then handed it back to her. “Listen, when I get back to the city I’ll send you some CDs to rip. You like Patti Smith?”

“I love her! ‘Dancing Barefoot’…”

“Forget that. Her first album, you have that one? No? I’ll send it to you. You’re online, right? Give me your email address, I’ll write and tell you some other stuff you should be listening to.”

“Really? That would be so great.”

I stood. “I better get back. Toby’s truck, it doesn’t do too good in the snow.”

I stepped to the door of the bedroom. Kenzie followed, hands shoved in the pockets of her cargo pants.

“Here,” she said. She withdrew her hand from her pocket and handed me something. “I made this for you.”

It was a bracelet of braided string and fishing line and seaglass, beertabs and red glass beads.

“Thanks.” I looked at her and smiled. “It’s beautiful. Really.”

She hesitated, then said, “They said you did a book? Like, photographs of stuff? I’d like to read it.”

“I would’ve thought you had enough of photography.”

“No. I mean, yeah, but not this kind. I’m going to get a digital camera. My father said I could, with the money we get from the article.”

“Yeah? That’s really cool. You do that. Send me your stuff. I’d like to see what you come up with.”

She walked me to the front door. Toby got up, and we walked outside.

“Thanks, Cass,” Kenzie called as we picked our way through the snow.

“I’ll send you those CDs,” I said and got into the pickup.

Toby backed into the road. I stared at the house. Kenzie had followed us out into the darkness and stood there, snow swirling around her pale face and settling onto her black hair. I rolled down the window.

“Bye Kenzie,” I said. She waved as we drove back to Burnt Harbor.

The next afternoon there was a memorial service for Aphrodite at the Burnt Harbor Congregational Church. I didn’t go, though Toby thought I should. He’d returned to the island after dropping me off the night before, and spent the night with Gryffin. Now it was two-thirty in the afternoon.

“You really should come to the service. You should say good-bye to Gryffin, at least.” Toby stood in the door of my cabin, wearing dark wool pants and a pinstriped jacket that smelled of mothballs. He’d trimmed his beard and rebraided his pigtail. “We’re going to dinner afterward at the Good Tern. You should come. You need closure.”

“Closure? I’ve had enough closure to last a lifetime.” I shook my head. “I already feel like the bad fairy at the christening. I need to get on the road.”

My car remained parked down in Burnt Harbor. I still hadn’t been back to it. I’d been sleeping way too much—I had a sleep deficit going back at least a week—but I figured if I left before dark I could get as far as Bangor, find another motel, then hit the road again first thing next morning.

This time tomorrow I’d be in the city again. It felt like I’d been gone a year.

Toby’s face creased. “Can’t you wait till after the service? So we can at least say good-bye? You’ll need a ride down to get your car at the harbor, anyway.”

I sighed. “Yeah, sure. Whatever.”

“Good.” He brightened and stepped back outside. “We’ll come by afterward. See you then.”

“Toby.” He stopped, and I said, “I—well, just thanks, that’s all. For everything.”

“Oh, sure.” He stared at his feet, reached down to wipe snow from his boots, then with a sigh straightened. “Jesus. What a horrible week. Poor Gryffin. Poor Aphrodite. And Denny…”

“Poor everyone.”

He looked at the sky. “It’s supposed to snow later. A big storm. I heard eighteen inches,” he added. He waved at me and left.

It was almost three o’clock. It had been a flawless day, new snow glittering like broken glass and the evergreens green as malachite against the cloudless sky.

But already the light was failing. I didn’t believe it was going to snow—there was a thin ridge of clouds to the west, but otherwise it was the nicest day I’d seen since arriving in Maine. I watched through my cabin window until Toby drove off. Then I sat on the bed and stared at my camera bag. Finally I withdrew the copy of Deceptio Visus and opened it.

Our gaze changes all that it falls upon …

Denny’s gaze certainly had changed things. Aphrodite’s too, I supposed; though as I looked through Deceptio Visus now, her photos seemed calculated and overdone.

And too easy. She’d photographed beautiful things—islands, clouds, the rising sun—and made them more beautiful. Whereas Denny had striven to capture something horrifying and make it beautiful, beautiful and eternal. For him, Hannah Meadows had never really died. Or maybe it was that she had never stopped dying. In all the years since he’d found her drowned corpse by that quarry, he’d never been able to look away.

I found the stolen photograph of Gryffin.

“I see you,” I whispered.

I closed the book and put it in the bottom of my bag. Then I got my camera, removed the exposed film and loaded it with my last roll of Tri-X, and went outside.

The dying light sent long, thin shadows across the snow. The pines were still sheathed in white. I walked into the woods that bordered my cabin, found a small clearing, and began to shoot.

I wasn’t trying for anything special. I just wanted to feel myself behind the camera. I wanted to see if my eye, injured or not, had changed.

And I guess I wanted to see if the world had changed as well. I shot most of the roll before I lost the light, black branches and the shadows between fallen leaves, a pile of punctured acorns like tiny skulls, gaps in the underbrush where it seemed that small faces stared back at me. Once I thought I heard something moving in the crotch of a tree overhead, and I stumbled backward and nearly fell.

But when I looked up there was nothing there, only a flickering shadow that might have been a squirrel or crow, or maybe something larger.

The light was gone when I walked back to my cabin. I went into my cabin and cleaned up for the last time and replaced my bandage. I checked to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind, then sat to wait for Toby.

It was past five when someone knocked at the door. I stood and opened it.

“Cass. Hi.”

It was Gryffin. He looked down at me, his face pale and eyes red. “Toby’s got Suze and Ray and Robert all crammed into his truck. So I said I’d get you. You have everything?”

“I think so.” I struggled to keep my voice calm as I put on my jacket, wincing as I stuck my bad arm through the sleeve. I picked up my bag and my camera. “This is it.”