In the Shadow of Blackbirds (5 page)

I stopped in my tracks. “My mother and Grandma Ernestine have shown up … in spirit photographs?”

“I think so.” She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “On three separate occasions, Julius captured the images of two glowing figures hovering behind me, but their faces
haven’t yet fully materialized for us. I told him you’re very much like your mother. I explained she named you after Mary Shelley because of her love of electricity and science, and he thinks you may be able to lure her into making a full spirit manifestation.”

“What? No!” I slammed my suitcase to the ground. “Dad would hate it if I posed for Julius Embers. Julius always got caught drinking and smoking at school and wound up in all sorts of fights and trouble.”

Aunt Eva sniffed. “He’s straightened his ways. He’s quite the gentleman now—so tall and handsome, with his dashing black hair. Barely twenty-two years old and already a gifted Spiritualist photographer.”

I gaped at her. “You sound like you’re in love with him.”

“Don’t say that, Mary Shelley. I’m a married woman with a deathly ill husband. I simply admire the man’s work.”

“You’re blushing.”

“Stop it.” She swatted my shoulder with her white-gloved hand. “I scheduled a sitting for you at Julius’s in-home studio in two days, and if you behave yourself, I’m sure you could see his brother directly afterward.”

I rubbed my shoulder and felt an uncomfortable twinge course through my stomach at the thought of posing for wild Julius Embers in close quarters.

However … I possessed a ticket to Stephen’s house—a ticket to Stephen himself—which was exactly what I had wanted when I stepped off that train.

Two mornings later, Aunt Eva whisked me across San Diego Bay to the Emberses’ home on Coronado Island. In Portland, Stephen’s family had lived in a neighborhood exactly like ours, with homes so squished together that if houses could breathe, their sides would knock against one another when they inhaled.

This new residence, though—Stephen’s grandparents’ summerhouse, which the family had inherited in 1914—was an enormous seaside cottage covered in vast windows and thousands of cocoa-brown shingles. The neighboring house, a towering brick monstrosity, could have been Thornfield Hall from
Jane Eyre,
or any other grand estate that ruled over the English moors. I felt like an insignificant speck of Stephen’s former life entering this luxurious new world.

Julius greeted us and made jokes about how tiny and serious I used to look. He took my photograph in his chilly studio in the family’s living room, and, afterward, Mrs. Embers—a robust woman with ink-black hair rolled into two thick sausages at the nape of her neck—served my aunt and me tea in a dining room awash in springtime sunlight. Through the open windows we could hear the crashing of waves from the Pacific Ocean. Thirteen different photographs of Coronado beaches dotted the dark paneled walls.

“Where’s Stephen?” I asked, unable to take a single bite of Mrs. Embers’s lemon cake. The anticipation of finally seeing him again had stolen my appetite.

“I was just wondering the same thing.” Mrs. Embers leaned
back with a squeak of her chair and called toward the dining room’s entrance. “Stephen? Come down and visit your friend, please. Stephen?”

I strained my ears but heard nothing. Sweat broke out across my neck.
Stephen is avoiding me,
I realized.
He hasn’t been writing me since his father’s death because he’s tired of me.

Mrs. Embers sighed and went back to stirring her Earl Grey. “He’s probably upstairs, packing.”

“Packing for what?” I asked.

“Didn’t he tell you in one of his letters?”

“Tell me what?”

“He’s leaving for the army tomorrow.”

It felt as though someone had just socked me in the chest. I clutched the edge of the table.

Aunt Eva grabbed my arm. “Are you all right, Mary Shelley?”

I stared into the depths of my teacup and struggled to catch my breath while Mrs. Embers’s sentence replayed over and over in my head.

He’s leaving for the army tomorrow.

Back in Portland, one of my classmate’s uncles had just lost half his body to a massive shell explosion on a battlefield in France. Only a week earlier, an eighteen-year-old neighbor from back home—Ben Langley—died of pneumonia at his Northern California training camp.

“Mary Shelley?”

I cleared my throat to find my voice. “I didn’t know Stephen
had enlisted. He won’t even turn eighteen until June. What is he doing going over there?”

“About a month ago he started insisting he wanted to get out of this house.” Mrs. Embers blotted a drop of tea before it could stain the tablecloth. “He’ll be training at Camp Kearny, just up north, but he says he doesn’t even want to come back home to visit if he gets a weekend pass. His father’s death hit him hard.”

“That’s very sad to hear,” said my aunt. “Hasn’t Julius ever helped Stephen through his grief? Perhaps if their father’s spirit showed up in a photograph—”

“No, that’s never going to happen.” Mrs. Embers smiled, but her brown eyes moistened. “My two boys couldn’t be any more different from each other. They’re like a volcanic eruption whenever they’re together.”

I couldn’t keep my legs still. I had to hunt down Stephen. “May I use your washroom, Mrs. Embers?”

“Certainly. Go past the bottom of the staircase. It’ll be the first door on your right before the study.”

“Take those silly goggles off your neck first,” said Aunt Eva, with a tug at my leather straps.

Mrs. Embers chuckled. “I was wondering about those goggles. It seems like you were always wearing some sort of new contraption whenever I saw you in the old days, Mary Shelley.”

“I bought them for her yesterday at the Liberty Loan drive.” Aunt Eva shook her head at me. “Some salesman with
yellow mule teeth tried to convince her they’d let her see the future, and I think she half believes him.”

“I’m hoping they’ll be my good-luck charm.” I rose with as much grace as a person defending quasi-magical goggles could muster. “You know I’ve always admired aviatrixes.”

“But you don’t need to wear them all the time.” My aunt sighed. “Boys were giving her the oddest looks when she walked around Horton Plaza Park with those things over her eyes. You should have seen their faces.”

“I wasn’t trying to impress boys at a Liberty Loan drive.” I gripped the back of my chair. “I was desperate to see if there’s anything in my future besides a war. Thank you for the tea, Mrs. Embers.”

“You’re welcome, dear.”

As I made my way to the heart of the house, I overheard Aunt Eva explaining my obsession with aviatrixes, electricity, anatomy, and machinery, as though I were some sort of bizarre species—the rare
Female scientificus, North American.
“I don’t know if you remember, but my older sister, her mother, was a physician,” she said in a voice she probably assumed I couldn’t hear. “Mary Shelley seems to be channeling Amelia’s love of exploration and technology. That girl has always been passionate and headstrong about everything.”

Dark, knotty wood lined every wall, ceiling, and floor in the Emberses’ entry hall—an immense space that reminded me of the belly of a ship. A brass lantern hung overhead. I almost expected the floor to roll with the swell of a wave.

The soles of my shoes pattered across the floorboards to the rhythm of a beast of a grandfather clock that rose to the ceiling at the opposite end of the hall. I slowed my pace, placed my goggles over my eyes, and approached the clock with interest. The minute hand ticked its shadowy finger toward the twelve on a face painted to look like the moon, with eyes and a mouth and pockmark craters. The metallic gears spun and clicked deep inside, all those shiny pieces fitting into just the precise positions to make the contraption work. The pendulum swung back and forth, back and forth, hypnotizing with its gleaming brass.

“The boys who gave you odd looks don’t appreciate originality.”

I jumped backward a foot at the unexpected voice.

Through my lenses, I viewed a stunning boy who looked to be an older version of the Stephen I remembered, with hair a rich brown and deep, dark eyes that watched me with interest. He sat toward the bottom of the staircase, a book in hand, with one of his long legs stretched down to the floor. A black band of mourning encircled his white shirtsleeve. A gray silken tie hung down to his stomach and made him look so grown up, so distinguished, compared to my Portland childhood friend.

I caught my breath. “The Stephen Embers I knew wasn’t an eavesdropper.”

“Did a man really try to convince you those goggles would let you see the future?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And what do you see?”

“Only a person who lurks in the backs of houses instead of coming to see his long-lost friend.”

He grinned and revealed a dimple I’d long forgotten.

I smiled and pulled the goggles down below my chin. “You’re not as gentlemanly as you used to be, Stephen. I remember you used to jump to your feet whenever a lady entered the room.”

“I’m far too stunned by the fact that you are a lady now.” He scanned me down to my toes. “You used to be so small and scrawny.”

“And you used to wear short pants that showed off your knobby knees and drooping socks. Plus you always had that scuffed-up old camera satchel hanging off your shoulder.”

He laughed. “I still have that satchel.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear not everything’s changed.” I stepped closer to him, my heart beating at twice its normal rate. My skin burned as if with fever. “Why are you hiding back here instead of coming out to see me?”

“Because …” His dimple faded. “I got the impression you came to see my brother instead of me.”

“That’s a silly thing to assume. The only way my aunt would let me come over here was if I sat for a photograph. She’s madly in love with your brother’s work.”

Stephen closed his book—Jules Verne’s
The Mysterious Island.
“Julius is a fraud, Shell. He’ll scam you out of your
money faster than that goggles salesman. Did you let him take your picture?”

“I think he’s working on developing it right now.”

“Then you’re hooked.” He glanced over his shoulder, through the balusters of the stair rail, and then returned his attention to me. “Why’d you let him do that? I thought you of all people wouldn’t be gullible.”

“I didn’t say I believed in his photos.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“What makes you so certain he’s a fraud?”

He sat up straighter. “My father told me how Julius is creating his ghosts—doctoring the plates, creating double exposures, damaging his brain with too much opium until he convinces himself the mistakes he makes while developing the plates are spirit images.”

“Julius is an opium fiend?”

“Are you really that surprised?”

“Well …” I had heard tales of artists and depraved gentlemen who frequented dark opium dens, smoking the drug from long pipes until they hallucinated and passed out. But never in my life had I known anyone who tried it. I closed my gaping mouth. “I suppose your brother would enjoy something like that.”

Stephen stretched out his other leg. “He also runs a fan over ice blocks in between sittings to cool the air in there. He tries to make everyone feel like phantoms are hovering around the studio.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I’ve caught him doing it. And he leaves the windows open all night to capture the chill from the sea. He locks the doors to the studio to keep me from getting in, but I’ve crawled through the windows and closed the panes to save the equipment. He’s contemplating installing bars to keep me out.”

A lump of disappointment settled in my stomach, even though I had started off so skeptical about the spirit images. “My poor aunt. She’s convinced Julius will find my mother and grandmother for her.”

“Tell her the truth. I hate seeing people so desperate for proof of the afterlife they’ll sacrifice just about anything to communicate with the dead.” Stephen pursed his lips and rubbed his thumb across
The Mysterious Island’s
leather cover. “I hear them crying when they receive their finished photographs. It’s heartbreaking. They react to Julius’s photos like rummies chasing bottles.”

I thought I heard a moan in a floorboard down the hall. My eyes darted toward the sunbeam-hazy front entrance to make sure no one was listening.

Aunt Eva and Mrs. Embers tittered over some shared anecdote in the dining room.

Nothing else stirred.

I turned back to Stephen and asked in a lowered voice, “Why is Julius doing this to people? I didn’t think he ever wanted to have anything to do with photography.”

“He didn’t, but an odd, ghostly image appeared in one of Dad’s photographs last Christmas, and Julius showed it around the hangouts of rich tourists. He claimed he was saving Dad’s business by finally bringing some solid money to it. Dad hated having his studio turned into a theatrical exhibit. It could be one of the reasons his heart failed.”

“I’m so sorry.” I wrapped my arm around the slick newel post at the end of the stair rail, so close to Stephen that the citrus and spices of his bay rum aftershave filled my nose. “I know you were close to your dad.”

He turned his head so I could see only the side of his face. His eyelashes fluttered like mad, and I could tell he was fighting off tears. “You always told me …” His voice cracked with emotion. “You always said you feel like a piece of you is permanently missing.”

I bit my lip and nodded. I’d often told him part of me was missing because my mother died the day I was born. “Yes.”

“Now I know what that feels like.” He cleared his throat and regained control of his breathing. “It’s agonizing.”

“It’ll get better over time. You’ll always feel that missing piece, but it will get easier.”

His eyes, now bloodshot, traveled back to mine. He took hold of the baluster closest to my hand. “It’s really good seeing you again, Shell. I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, too.” A lump caught in my throat. “You know, you’re still the only boy who hasn’t ever made fun of my science experiments and machinery obsessions.”

“I’m sure that’s changed, now that you’re looking”—a grin awakened in the corners of his mouth—“older.”