Darkroom Read online

  I don’t want to do this, her sister would say, or could be saying for all she knew. Grace reached for the doorknob and turned it, and for the briefest of heartbeats, she felt the brush of two fingers over the back of her hand, but then the sensation was gone. Perhaps Alice trying to stop her one last time, or perhaps one of the slithering shadows passing over her skin like a snake, and then she opened the door.

  Grace remembered the squeak, now muted by the headphones, how it had sounded whenever she’d sneak out of her room before tiptoeing down the hall to peer around the corner of the living room to spy on her parents. Sometimes she’d catch them eating ice cream, or watching television. Sometimes they’d let her join in for a minute. Sometimes they’d tell her it was way past her bedtime and send her back down the hall.

  Flash.

  Nine, like her sister saying no in German. Let’s go back, Grace. I really don’t want to do this anymore please can we go back please let’s go back!

  Arm linked to arm, Grace pulled her hesitant sister into the room of their childhood. On the left would be Alice’s bed, ten, and on the right her own identical bed, eleven, the room split evenly down the middle by blue tape because they’d always argued about sides and measurements and tape was the only compromise to make it truly even. Grace wound the Nikon, snapped a shot down the center of the room, counted twelve. She hoped the line would split the photo evenly, the sole window in the room directly in the center.

  Half the roll remaining.

  She felt her sister stir, in a way that Grace could only assume Alice had torn the paper she’d taken with her in two and had tossed one half. Grace pointed the camera to the floor, counted thirteen as she felt the shutter of the camera taking another picture. She imagined the torn paper on the left side of the room as she wound the camera.

  They turned out of the room, neither liking their backs to the empty hall. Grace imagined the door squeaking closed, and then felt a quick vibration at her feet and a breeze at her back, as if someone had slammed the door shut from the other side, a sensation startling her trigger-happy finger to take a shot of the floor.

  That was you, wasn’t it? Alice would ask, knowing Grace had reached for the door as well, just as she had, to make sure the door had closed on its own.

  Not on its own.

  She let go of the camera long enough to squeeze Alice’s arm, to let her know everything was okay, to let her know they were almost done.

  Fourteen, she told herself. Ten shots left.

  She and her sister tiptoed down the hall to the living room, and in doing so, brought back memories of late-night Klondike bars and the buttery smell of popcorn and watching movies on the couch, and of course the spying they’d sometimes do on their parents, sometimes one of them venturing out for reconnaissance, sometimes both.

  Ten silent steps, which so long ago used to be twenty.

  At the entrance to the living room, Grace panned the camera blindly from left to right, taking shots and winding on the go: fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, she counted.

  She ran her free hand across the wall, to give her a sense of where she was in the room, her fingers tracing wallpaper textured much like leathery skin. She took a picture of the front entryway: eighteen; she took a picture leading into the kitchen: nineteen. She guided Alice with their baby-slide-steps across the carpet until their feet found linoleum. Flash: twenty. Flash: twenty-one.

  A cold breeze at their backs sent them spinning around, their arms becoming untangled for the briefest of moments. She imagined her sister flailing in the dark, reaching for her, as Grace was doing the same, and then their arms found each other.

  What happens if I lose her before shifting back?

  She’d return with her to the present, she assured herself. Everything always had.

  Flash: twenty-two, she counted, a selfie from as far out as she could reach.

  The sudden brightness, she wondered, why hadn’t it startled Alice?

  Those arms lead her back through the living room the way they’d come as Grace wound the film in the camera, nearly running, Alice leading her this time, through the hallway, tripping over something—twenty-three, an accidental shot of their feet—and hastily making their way to their parents’ bedroom once again.

  Grace imagined they were standing where they’d started, looking over Dad. She imagined her sister softly chanting let’s go back let’s go back please let’s go back and so she took the final shot, twenty-four, and shifted them back to the present.

  “I don’t ever want to do that again!” Alice said, loud enough to be heard through the noise-cancelling headphones as their arms unlinked, and then in a softer voice as both sets of headphones clunked against the table in front of them, “Don’t you ever make me do that again. We were really there, weren’t we? Two thousand four. We were really there.”

  “We were,” Grace said, “as much as we could be.”

  She knew her sister wanted to ask more questions, but also knew she was too afraid to ask—questions she’d asked herself the first time she’d shifted alone. She understood this by the sounds: Alice’s rapid breaths, her sister slamming the bandana hard against the table.

  “Don’t ever make me do that again,” Alice said in a softer voice.

  “You don’t have to, unless you want to.”

  “I kind of do. Go back, I mean.”

  She remembered how she’d felt after returning that first time: the adrenaline rush, the pounding of her heart, the impossibility of not breathing without thinking about breathing, the thought of all the things you couldn’t hear and the things you couldn’t see, and how vividly they stuck with you.

  “The paper’s still here,” Alice said. “Torn in half, but still here. I ripped the paper outside our bedroom door and tossed half to the floor. I kept the other half wadded in my hand. And it’s still here, in my hand. The other half is on the floor.”

  “But you remember the sensation of walking. Through the house, I mean.”

  “We were there,” Alice said.

  “We were,” Grace said, smiling, and she could feel her sister smiling, too.

  “How do we know I didn’t simply tear the paper here, in the present?”

  “I guess we don’t. And I guess you probably did.”

  How funny would it be for someone to walk in on them while shifted? Two older women sitting next to each other on a couch in front of a coffee table, arms interlinked, eyes covered with bandanas, both wearing headphones, as if experiencing some sort of horrific virtual reality game without proper equipment.

  Grace wound the film in the camera to the end of the roll and popped off the back cover of the camera. She pinched the roll of Fuji film between her index finger and thumb and removed her bandana as well and the room lightened with only the gauze taped over her eyes. She probably wasn’t the most pleasant person to look at, she knew, like someone who’d recently recovered from Lasik, not yet ready to remove the bandages to see the world anew.

  “Want to see?” Grace asked.

  “What, now?”

  “Of course now. Let’s process these downstairs and you can take a look.”

  “Why don’t you take those things off?” Alice said, a question but not really a question. “You look ridiculous,” she said, the voice nearer.

  She felt her sister’s fingers at her face and batted them away.

  “Not until we’re in the darkroom.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  You wouldn’t understand, Grace thought. She’d only ever taken off the gauze while in the darkroom, and only after she’d made sure the room was as dark as it could be.

  She led her sister to the basement. The blind leading the sighted as her fingers traced the walls of the hallway, as they had following so many previous shifts, until they reached the door to the basement, which was ajar. Grace flipped the switch for the amber light, for Alice’s sake, and together they walked down the stairs, Grace guided by the handrail.

  “My word!” Alice s
aid, apparently taking in the room. “You’ve been busy.”

  Grace had lined the boxes against the wall so they wouldn’t be in the way, each filled with photographs from their labeled years. Sixty boxes, the last of which was empty.

  Alice slipped and nearly took Grace down the stairs with her, but Grace kept them upright and asked if she was all right.

  “I’m still shaky from before, but I’m okay.”

  “Can you shut the door behind us?” she asked, and waited until she heard it. Even with the door closed, she knew there’d be white light leaking through its edges, and so they made their way down the stairs and around the corner where light would be most absent.

  Another five steps and they were at the developing station.

  “You really do look ridiculous,” Alice said.

  Grace held her hands outward like a tired zombie until they met the table, where she’d setup a makeshift desk and sink with a wet area on the left and a dry area on the right. Only there did she take off the gauze bandages covering her eyes. The darkroom glowed deep amber as her eyes adjusted to the yellow light. Even the smallest of illuminations was difficult to let in.

  Above the wet area was a light-proof extraction fan to keep the room properly ventilated for chemical fumes—with ductwork leading outside—which was much like a range-hood extraction over an oven. The dry area had the Bessler enlarger with a 35mm Nikon lens, a timer, as well as sealed photographic paper, unused developer tanks, folded towels, and a few sets of tongs. On a shelf below were various chemicals. She’d installed a water filter under the sink after the first few photographs she’d developed were tainted by sediment. To the right of the station ran three wires strung all the way to the far most wall, with clips to hang photos so they could dry over water runnels. It was quite the setup.

  Alice watched her through the various steps of exposing the film, the enlargement, and then the print processing.

  “I want to watch all of these develop,” Grace said, placing the first image into the stop bath. The first, her unfinished father, stared up at her, sleeping in a 1.5% solution of acetic acid.

  “Yeah?”

  “I think I’m ready for that, with you here.”

  Even after so much experience developing film these last two months, it still took procedural time for each picture: three minutes with constant agitation in a developer solution of 50/50 Dektol and water to bring out the image, thirty seconds rocking her sleeping father in a solution of acetic acid to stop the development, another sixty seconds in a fixer solution of sodium thiosulfate to make the photographic image insensitive to light, a few minutes holding Dad under a tap water rinse, ten minutes in an Zonal Pro archival rinse, and finally moving him into a water holding bath until the other twenty-three images were there with him, at which time she’d give each of the twenty-four photographs their final wash and hang them to dry.

  “It’s really Dad,” Alice said, staring into the water, “Dad from two thousand four.”

  “He’s half as old as we are now,” Grace said.

  They stood silently for a while, Grace holding her father’s image by a small set of tongs. He lay in bed, mouth open, caught amidst a snore, mid-sleep. If anything, he looked fake asleep, like when she and her sister would pretend to sleep when he’d check on them.

  “He looks like he does in the others,” Alice said, “from the book, only younger.”

  She decided not to leave this one in the holding bath, and instead gave it its final wash, hanging the black-and-white picture of Dad from a clip on one of the wires.

  Twenty-three remaining, Grace thought, assigning each a number.

  1. Their father sleeping in the early hours of the morning, or pretending to sleep, his body under the covers, head tilted back on his pillow, mouth open. Mom’s hand in the frame, reaching to him. The rest of the bed out of focus, dark clouds of black around the edges, as if from underexposure.

  They repeated the steps for each of the photos they’d taken. Developer / stop / fixer / water rinse / archival rinse. They didn’t spend much time looking at the photos, but simply making sure they were processed correctly. I don’t know if this one turned out okay, Alice would say now and then, or Does this look right to you? or What’s this black smudge? she’d say, thinking she’d done something wrong. They took turns moving the images from one tray to the next, through the rinses, and stacked each in the tray marked archival rinse until the rest of the were ready for their final rinse and could be hung to dry. They were careful with every photograph, handling them from the corners with tongs, and clipping each onto the wires where they could drip to the floor in the dark amber light.

  2. Their mother sleeping, or pretending to sleep, her body under the covers, head tilted away from their father, mouth closed. A silver or gold necklace. Beautiful, even in slumber. Dad, next to her, streaked in black smudges, as if fingers of a giant hand were holding him down.

  “That was my first attempt,” Alice said, “I dropped the tongs in the tray while you were rinsing the picture of Dad. The tongs went under the photo so I tweezed out the paper with my fingers. How old was Mom in this one?”

  “Thirty-one, three years younger than Dad. Which tray?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, and then, “the second one.”

  “Did you wash your hands? It’s acetic acid, only 1.5%, but you should still wash your hands. Treat this like a clean room.”

  Alice washed her hands while Grace clipped the next photograph. She remembered this one by its blurriness. She’d felt a coldness behind them after taking the two photos of their parents—which they’d both felt as they pivoted, the photo taken mid-turn.

  3. Like the Edvard Munch painting, The Scream, their father’s sleeping form stretches impossibly, as if he too were painted in oils and pastels, those giant fingers from before pulling him apart, filling the photograph with his agony. His eyes, terribly white, stretch like imperfect pearls. Mouth caught in a scream.

  4. An empty hallway, a door in the distance.

  5. The same hallway, focused on the left wall where multi-photo picture frames of the past are caught within this photograph of the past: four-year-old Alice in a bathing suit, holding a pale of sand and a plastic shovel; five-year-old Grace standing next to her, holding a too-heavy bucket of water; a family portrait taken at K-mart with a fake spring background; other picture frames line the wall, out of focus. The door to their bathroom, farther down the hall and to the left, open like a maw and seeping darkness over shag carpet.

  6. The same hallway, focused on the right wall, with more picture-framed photographs: Mom and Dad—always Mom and Dad and never the other way around—on their wedding day. Mom wearing a white dress and Dad wearing a black suit and bowtie; Uncle James holding a version of Grace still in diapers; a black lab they’d adopted named Charlie; other picture frames line the wall, out of focus.

  New pictures of old pictures, Grace thought again, but somehow not nearly as time-distant as they should be.

  7. A round flash of light from the camera, reflected from the bathroom mirror / medicine cabinet. In the darkness, behind and between the points of the blinding star-like flash: seventy-year-old Grace and sixty-nine-year-old Alice, both blindfolded, the black around them seemingly trying to swallow them whole; reflections of their older selves.

  “This proves we were there!” Alice said, standing next to her. “I mean, I know we were there, because we were there, but this is proof! What’s that behind you?”

  Behind Grace, in the photo, was a blurry, eyeless, demonic face, like something a child would draw with a black crayon while angry; albeit the face was completely out of focus and not a face at all, but perhaps shadows contorted by the reflection of the camera flash in the mirror, or from the corner of one of the multi-photo picture frames behind them.

  “I don’t think it’s anything,” Grace said, although she remembered a feeling of having someone or something following them down the hall. Someone or something cold.

&nb
sp; 8. The end of the hall. The door to their bedroom, cracked open, with a sign taped to the front reading keep out in childish handwriting, with Crayoned flowers sprouting from the edges.

  This photo seemed like a warning to not go on.

  “I’m not sure I want to do this anymore,” her sister said, just as she’d imagined Alice saying before they’d opened the door to their childhood bedroom.

  The brush of two fingers over the back of her hand.

  The amber bulb above them flickered.

  Let’s go back, Grace. I really don’t want to do this anymore please can we go back please let’s go back!

  But Grace had opened the door anyway.

  9. The toy-cluttered room they’d shared as children, on the left Alice’s bed, and on the right Grace’s. A line of tape splits the room in two, leading from the door to window. They’d again captured their reflections in the glass, the flash of camera dull from the distance and creating an effect of a third person—a child made of darkness and light—standing between them, their old interlocked arms and the absence of light centering them creating arms and legs. To the far left: half of Alice under the covers; to the far right: a mass of blankets and stuffed animals covering half of a child-like mound.

  “Who—?” Alice started to ask, but Grace had hung two more pictures to dry.

  10. Alice’s side of the room. Alice in bed, but not sleeping. Alice sitting upright, staring wide-eyed straight ahead, her body a perfect ninety degree angle.

  11. Grace’s side of the room. Grace’s bed empty save for a mess of plush animals and a disrupted pillow.

  “Where am I?” Grace asked, just as Alice asked, “Where are you?”

  12. The same shot as #9, but with reflected older versions of Alice and Grace gone, the third child made of darkness and light gone, the window completely black. Tape down the center of the room creating a mirrored effect of the identical furniture.