“The tree was for me, honestly.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
He turned to face her. “Was that Christmas in Ocracoke your favorite?”
In the background, she could still hear the music Mark had selected drifting from the speaker.
“In Ocracoke, as you know, I was in the middle of a very hard time. And of course all the childhood wonder about the holiday was gone. But…Christmas that year felt so real to me. The flotilla, decorating the tree with Bryce, volunteering on Christmas Eve, and going to midnight mass, and then, of course, Christmas itself. I loved it then, but over time, the memory has become even more special. It’s the one Christmas I wish I could experience again.”
Mark smiled. “I like that you have that memory.”
“Me too. And I still have that print of the lighthouse, by the way. It’s hanging on the wall of the bedroom I use as a studio.”
“Did the two of you ever end up making the biscuits?”
“I suppose that’s your way of asking what comes next in the story. Or am I wrong?”
“I’m dying to know what happened next.”
“I suppose I could tell you a bit more. But only on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to need some more eggnog.”
“You got it,” he said. Grabbing both glasses, he went to the back, returning with the eggnog. Remarkably, the thick, sweet concoction was proving to be both easy on her stomach and strangely filling, something she hadn’t felt in weeks. She took another swallow.
“Did I tell you about the storm?”
“You mean the one on Christmas? When it was raining?”
“No,” she said. “A different storm. The one in January.”
Mark shook his head. “You told me about the week after Christmas, when you powered through your schoolwork and Bryce began teaching you the basics of photography.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “That’s right.” She studied the ceiling as if scanning the exposed pipes for her lost memories. When she returned her gaze to Mark, she commented, “My grades were actually pretty good by the end of that first semester, by the way. For me, anyway. A couple of A’s and the rest were B’s. It ended up being my best semester in high school.”
“Even better than the spring semester?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Why? Because photography took over?”
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t that. I think…” She adjusted her scarf, buying time to figure out how best to pick up the thread where she’d left off.
“For Bryce and me, I think everything began to change right around the time that the nor’easter smashed into Ocracoke…”
The Second Trimester
Ocracoke
1996
The nor’easter arrived the second week of January, after three days in a row of higher-than-normal temperatures and sunny days that felt unfamiliar after the grayish gloom of December. I could never have predicted that a gigantic storm was in the offing.
Nor could I have seen the changes ahead in my relationship with Bryce. On New Year’s Eve, I still considered him nothing more than a friend, even though he’d chosen to spend the evening at my house while the rest of his family went out of town. Gwen brought over her television and we tuned in to Dick Clark’s show live from Times Square; as midnight approached, we counted down with the rest of America. When the ball dropped, Bryce set off a couple of bottle rockets from the porch that exploded over the water with loud bangs and tails of sparkles. The neighbors on their porches clanked pots with spoons as well, but within minutes, the town reverted to sleepy mode and lights in the nearby houses began to blink out. I called my parents to wish them a happy New Year, and they reminded me that they would be coming to visit me later in the month.
Despite the holiday, Bryce was back less than eight hours later, this time with Daisy, which was the first time he’d brought her over. He helped my aunt and me take down the tree—which was a definite fire hazard by then—and dragged it out to the road. After I repacked the decorations and swept up the needles, we took our places at the table for schoolwork. Daisy was sniffing around in the kitchen; when he called her over, she promptly lay down near his chair.
“Linda said it was okay to bring her when I asked her about it last night,” he explained. “My mom says she still wanders too much.”
I glanced at Daisy, who stared back at me with innocence and contentment, tail thumping.
“She seems fine to me. And look at her cute face.”
Sure enough, Daisy seemed to know we were talking about her, and she sat up, poking her nose at Bryce’s hand. When he ignored her, she moseyed toward the kitchen again. “See? This is exactly what I’m talking about,” he said. “Daisy? Come.”
Daisy pretended not to hear him. It wasn’t until the second command that she finally returned to his side and lay down with a groan. Daisy, I noticed, was sometimes stubborn, and when she tried to wander off again, he ended up putting her on a leash and attaching it to the chair, a vantage point from which she watched us, looking glum.
That week or so was pretty similar to the previous week: schoolwork and photography. In addition to letting me take a lot of pictures, Bryce hauled over a file box filled with photos that he and his mother had taken over the years. On the back of every photo were notes on the technical aspects of the shot—time of day, lighting, aperture, film speed—and little by little, I began to anticipate how changing a single element could alter the image entirely. I also spent my first afternoon in the darkroom, watching Bryce and his mom develop twelve black-and-white photos I’d taken downtown. They walked me through the process of how to get the chemical baths just right—the developer, the stop bath, the fixer—and how to clean the negative. They showed me how to use the enlarger, and the way to create just the right balance of light and dark I wanted. Even though most of it went over my head, when I watched the ghostly images emerge, it seemed like magic.
What was interesting was that even though I was still a novice at taking pictures and developing prints, it turned out I was a bit of a natural when it came to Photoshop. Loading the images required a high-end scanner and a Mac computer, and Porter had purchased both for his wife a year earlier. Since then, Bryce’s mom had edited a bunch of her favorite photographs, and for me, reviewing her work was the perfect way to be introduced to the program because I could see both the before and after images…and then try to replicate them myself. Now, I’m not saying that I was the kind of computer wizard that Richard was, nor did I have the experience with the program that Bryce and his mom did, but once I learned one of the tools, it stuck with me. I also had a pretty good sense of what aspects of a photo needed editing in the first place, a sort of intuitive understanding that surprised them both.
The point is, between the holidays and tutoring and all things photography, Bryce and I were together from early in the morning until evening, pretty much every day from Christmas until the big storm hit. With Daisy our constant companion once January arrived—she loved nothing more than to follow us when we were practicing with the camera—my life began to feel almost abnormally normal, if that makes any sense. I had Bryce and a dog and a newfound passion; thoughts of home seemed far away, and I was actually excited to get out of bed in the mornings. It was a new feeling for me but also kind of scary in an I hope it keeps going kind of way.