After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and discovered that both prints were webbed over with peculiar yellow blotches.
He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the photographs as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed a modicum of cooperation from the world of objects.
Outside, the weather was curdling. There was a trickle in the gutters, a rooftop percussion of drops from overhanging trees. Through the walls of the garage, while he shot a second pair of enlargements, Gary could hear Caroline and the boys playing soccer in the back yard. He heard footfalls and punting sounds, less frequent shouts, the seismic whump of ball colliding with garage.
When the second set of prints emerged from the fixer with the same yellow blotches, Gary knew he ought to quit. But there came a tapping on the outside door, and his youngest son, Jonah, slipped through the blackout curtain.
“Are you printing pictures?” Jonah said.
Gary hastily folded the failed prints into quarters and buried them in the trash. “Just starting,” he said.
He remixed his solutions and opened a fresh box of paper. Jonah sat down by a safe light and whispered as he turned the pages of one of the Narnia books, Prince Caspian, that Gary’s sister, Denise, had given him. Jonah was in second grade but was already reading at a fifth-grade level. Often he spoke aloud the written words in an articulate whisper that was of a piece with his general Narnian dearness as a person. He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy.
Caroline did not entirely approve of Narnia — C. S. Lewis was a known Catholic propagandist, and the Narnian hero, Aslan, was a furry, four-pawed Christ figure — but Gary had enjoyed reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a boy, and he had not, it was safe to say, grown up to be a religious nut. (In fact he was a strict materialist.)
“So they kill a bear,” Jonah reported, “but it’s not a talking bear, and Asian comes back, but only Lucy sees him and the others don’t believe her.”
Gary tweezed the prints into the stop bath. “Why don’t they believe her?”
“Because she’s the youngest,” Jonah said.
Outside, in the rain, Caroline laughed and shouted. She had a habit of running herself ragged to keep up with the boys. In the early years of their marriage she’d worked full-time as a lawyer, but after Caleb was born she’d come into family money and now she worked half days only, at a phil-anthropically low salary, for the Children’s Defense Fund. Her real life centered on the boys. She called them her best friends.
Six months ago, on the eve of Gary’s forty-third birthday, while he and Jonah were visiting his parents in St. Jude, a pair of local contractors had come and rewired, replumbed, and re-outfitted the second floor of the garage as a surprise birthday gift from Caroline. Gary had occasionally spoken of reprinting his favorite old family photos and collecting them in a leather-bound album, an All-Time Lambert Two Hundred. But commercial printing would have sufficed for that, and meanwhile the boys were teaching him computer pixel-processing, and if he’d still needed a lab he could have rented one by the hour. His impulse on his birthday, therefore — after Caroline had led him out to the garage and presented him with a darkroom that he didn’t need or want — was to weep. From certain pop-psychology books on Caroline’s nightstand, however, he’d learned to recognize the Warning Signs of clinical depression, and one of these Warning Signs, the authorities all agreed, was a proclivity to inappropriate weeping, and so he’d swallowed the lump in his throat and bounded around the expensive new darkroom and exclaimed to Caroline (who was experiencing both buyer’s remorse and gift-giver’s anxiety) that he was utterly delighted with the gift! And then, to reassure himself that he wasn’t clinically depressed and to make sure that Caroline never suspected anything of the kind, he’d resolved to work in the darkroom twice a week until the All-Time Lambert Two Hundred album was complete.
The suspicion that Caroline, consciously or not, had tried to exile him from the house by putting the darkroom in the garage was another key index of paranoia.
When the timer pealed, he transferred the third set of prints to the fixer bath and raised the lights again.
“What are those white blobs?” Jonah said, peering into the tray.
“Jonah, I don’t know!”
“They look like clouds,” Jonah said.
The soccer ball slammed into the side of the garage.
Gary left Enid scowling and Alfred grinning in the fixative and opened shutters. His monkey puzzle tree and the bamboo thicket next to it were glossy with rain. In the middle of the back yard, in soaked soiled jerseys that stuck to their shoulder blades, Caroline and Aaron were gulping air while Caleb tied a shoe. Caroline at forty-five had the legs of a college girl. Her hair was nearly as blond as when Gary had first met her, twenty years earlier, at a Bob Seger concert at the Spectrum. Gary was still substantially attracted to his wife, still excited by her effortless good looks and by her Quaker bloodlines. By ancient reflex, he reached for a camera and trained the zoom telephoto on her.
The look on Caroline’s face dismayed him. There was a pinch in her brow, a groove of distress around her mouth. She was limping as she pursued the ball again.
Gary turned the camera on his oldest son, Aaron, who was best photographed unawares, before he could position his head at the self-conscious angle that he believed most flattered him. Aaron’s face was flushed and mud-flecked in the drizzle, and Gary worked the zoom to frame a handsome shot. But resentment of Caroline was overwhelming his neurochemical defenses.
The soccer had stopped now and she was running and limping toward the house.
Lucy buried her head in his mane to hide from his face, Jonah whispered.
There came a screaming from the house.
Caleb and Aaron reacted instantly, galloping across the yard like action-picture heroes and disappearing inside. A moment later Aaron reemerged and shouted, in his newly crack-prone voice, “Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!”
The hysteria of others made Gary methodical and calm. He left the darkroom and descended the rain-slick stairway slowly. In the open space above the commuter-rail tracks, behind the garage, a kind of spring-shower self-improvement of the light was working through the humid air.
“Dad, Grandma’s on the phone!”
Gary ambled across the yard, pausing to examine and regret the injuries that the soccer had visited on the grass. The surrounding neighborhood, Chestnut Hill, was not un-Narnian. Century-old maples and ginkgos and sycamores, many of them mutilated to accommodate power lines, grew in giant riot over patched and repatched city streets bearing the names of decimated tribes. Seminole and Cherokee, Navajo and Shawnee. For miles in every direction, despite high population densities and large household incomes, there were no fast roads and few useful stores. The Land That Time Forgot, Gary called it. Most of the houses here, including his own, were made of a schist that resembled raw tin and was exactly the color of his hair.
“Dad!”
“Thank you, Aaron, I heard you the first time.”
“Grandma’s on the phone!”
“I know that, Aaron. You just told me.”
In the slate-floored kitchen he found Caroline slumped in a chair with both hands pressed to her lower back.
“She called this morning,” Caroline said. “I forgot to tell you. The phone’s been ringing every five minutes, and finally I was running—”