For some time, people continued to tell her they’d find her mom, that things were going to be okay. But after a while no one talked about it, about Mona. The gallery closed.
The lady vanishes, Gretchen thought. Just like that. And now here she was six years later, maybe closer than she’d ever been to knowing what Mona might have been doing those last days. She was almost an adult herself. She was inheriting a house, and had more freedom and access to information than she’d ever had. If she could find Mona she could tell her how she felt. And some part of her knew that she also just wanted to see her again. To have a mom.
She looked right at Esther. “Let’s solve this.”
“Hell yeah,” Esther said, raising her glass. “That’s the plan!”
Sometime after midnight Esther thought the woodland creatures would be done scavenging and safely back up in the attic. “They come down around dusk and then go back up to their place,” she explained.
“How can you live with squirrels or raccoons or whatever those are?” Gretchen asked. “Also, doesn’t the cat keep them away?”
Esther laughed. “Used to be three cats,” she said, not needing to explain more.
“Why don’t you call someone to come and take them out of here?”
“Not a bad idea,” Esther said, her speech languid from drink. “Let’s add it to the list.”
Gretchen laughed and shook her head. It was hard to fathom this woman. In one sense she was so put together—the way she dressed, her intelligence, her down-to-earth sophistication. And at the same time she was just so crazy. The nonsense about the house, her obsession with family history, but then not doing anything to care for the journals and artifacts, the fact that she looked like she was a million years old and Gretchen had just watched her drink a fifth of gin and smoke a half a pack of cigarettes in the course of a few hours. The woman was a force of nature. Or a force of chaos.
When Esther asked if she wanted to see her studio, Gretchen paused for a few seconds and reluctantly said yes.
“There are no animals in it, are there?” Gretchen asked.
“How the hell would I know?” Esther said. “There might be. C’mon.”
The room was just above Gretchen’s but twice the size. When Esther opened the door, Gretchen’s jaw dropped.
Every inch of wall space was covered in photographs, so many photographs it would take a month to get a good look at every one. Some were only a square inch in size, and some were larger, glossy prints. A few appeared to be portraits, but most were landscapes, and figures. Gretchen could see nothing distinctly, only the hundreds and thousands of images becoming a single impression; people and places, history, time, the blur of life distilled into a series of moments. This display was the result of either a highly disordered or a highly meticulous mind.
Then Gretchen’s gaze fell on the camera at the center of the room. It sat on a tripod, and its lens was pointed in the direction of the window, out onto the woods behind the estate. A Nikon F2AS Photomic. She stepped over to it, and had to restrain herself from reaching out and touching it. She’d never seen one in real life, but had talked about it plenty. Janine had had a friend who was a war reporter in the eighties in Central America and he still shot with nothing other than his Nikon.
It might have been the most sensitive camera ever invented. And only the surest photographer could manage the F2AS.
“Oh my God,” Gretchen whispered. “You’re a professional.”
Esther laughed at her. “No shit.”
“That camera . . .”
“That camera respects light,” Esther said, taking it off the tripod and holding it easily in her strong knobby hands. “Lots of folks think it’s the subject of the photograph that matters, but some of us still understand that photography is capturing light, and this camera can see all that fast light for you.”
She held it up to her eye and shot Gretchen’s astonished face, in the room full of photographs.
“I always felt like this camera understood,” she said, snapping two more pictures of her great-niece, “that light wasn’t always what could be seen, but also what could be felt—temperature, and pressure. I felt like a hunter when I was working with this thing. A hunter stalking hunters.”
Gretchen looked closely at her aunt. And something began to shift and fit together in her mind. Axton. Their family name. Esther Axton. E. E. Axton. The war reporter. She’d never even thought to ask her mother if E. E. Axton was a relative—probably because she was ten the last time she talked to her. And she’d always thought that E. E. Axton was a man.