Chapter 75 THE WALL

Chapter 75 THE WALL

POV: Reese Calloway

I printed it the morning after moving day and pinned it first. Before the magazine work and before the documentary arrangement and before anything else went on the fourteen feet of south wall, I pinned the photograph from day one in the center of the space where everything else would eventually build around it.

Cole kneeling at ice level at Mercy Row. The seven-year-old beside him. Both of them laughing, Cole's face completely open, the overhead lights catching him from the left in the specific way that only happened when someone wasn't thinking about where the light was coming from.

Cole came out of the kitchen with coffee and stopped when he saw it on the wall.

He stood in front of it.

I stood behind him and waited.

He looked at it for a long time, the way he looked at things that required full attention, working through it from the left edge to the right and back again.

"You saw this on day one," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"Before I let you see anything."

"You showed me." I looked at the photograph over his shoulder. "You just didn't know you were doing it."

He stood there for another moment. Then he turned and looked at me and didn't say anything else about it and went back to the kitchen.

I started building the wall around it.

The apartment filled up across two weekends.

Cole's belongings occupied a corner of the bedroom and a section of the closet and the space beside the door where his equipment case lived. His jacket went on the hook by the entrance on the first day and stayed there, which was not a conversation we had, just something that happened and remained.

The darkroom took both weekends.

Cole surrendered the second bathroom without complaint and spent Saturday of the first weekend helping me seal the window and run the electrical for the safelight while I set up the counter and the drainage. Sunday we built the drying line across the ceiling length, the specific wire that didn't rust, measured twice and secured properly.

The second weekend we finished the ventilation and I ran the first test with the developer trays and the safelight and stood in the red light with everything working and said nothing for a minute.

Cole leaned in the doorway behind me.

"Good?" he said.

"Good," I said.

Dana came on a Sunday afternoon three weeks after we moved in.

She walked through every room slowly, the main room with the east windows and the wall and the morning light that had already become the thing I scheduled my shooting around, the bedroom, the kitchen, and then the darkroom last.

I turned the safelight on and she stood in the red light and looked at the drying line and the counter and the trays in sequence and the photographs I'd already developed and pinned to the wall beside the sink.

She stood there for a long time.

"This is perfect, Reese," she said.

She said it the way she said things she meant on multiple levels simultaneously, the specific Dana register of a sentence that was about more than what it was about.

I looked at the photographs on the darkroom wall.

"Yeah," I said. "It is."

Tommy's voice memo arrived on a Tuesday.

He'd forwarded it from DeShawn via the Mercy Row thread, a twenty-second recording of a nine-year-old explaining carefully and in great detail that he had made a drawing of the picture lady's camera and wanted to know if she had a new address where he could send it because Tommy had said she'd moved.

Cole read the forwarded message over my shoulder and put his hand over his mouth.

I typed back to Tommy with our address and told him to pass it along.

Cole looked at the address I'd typed and then at me. "A nine-year-old knows where we live now."

"Yes," I said.

"Is that a problem?"

I looked at him. "No," I said. "That's just how it is now."

He looked at the address again and then back at the message and then at the ceiling, which was what he did when he was deciding whether to say the thing he was thinking or let it go. He let it go.

I went back to the portrait series I was editing.

The profile published on a Thursday morning.

Six pages. Three written, three photographic, the layout the editor and I had worked through across four separate rounds of revisions until every image sat where it needed to sit and the written sections breathed around the photographs rather than competing with them.

My name on every page.

The self-portrait on page four, me in the bathroom mirror with the camera at my side and my eyes on the lens. The documentary images on page five, Cole at ice level and Tommy at the edge of the ice and DeShawn in the stands with both hands on the railing. The final image on page six, the one Cole had taken without me knowing, me at the wall looking at my prints with the east light coming through the window behind me.

The photo essay in order, the story in the images, my name under every one.

I read it once at the kitchen table while Cole was at morning skate and the apartment was quiet and the east light was on the floor in the way it was every morning.

Then I put my phone down on the table and looked at the wall.

The notification count was already moving when I picked it back up.

By the time Cole came home it hadn't stopped.