“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.
I didn’t think about what spending so much time with Bryce would mean for the two of us. In fact, I wasn’t really thinking about him much at all. For most of that period, he was just there, like my aunt Linda or my family back home, or even the air I breathed. Once I’d picked up the camera or studied photographs or played around with Photoshop, I wasn’t sure I even noticed his dimples anymore. I don’t think I realized how important he’d become to me until shortly before the storm rolled in. He was standing on the porch after another long day together when he finally handed me his camera, the light meter, and a new roll of black-and-white film.
“What’s this for?” I asked, taking it.
“In case you want to practice tomorrow.”
“Without you? I still don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You know more than you think you do. You’ll be fine. And I’m going to be pretty busy the next couple of days.”
As soon as he said it, I felt an unexpected pang of sadness at the thought of not seeing him. “Where are you going?”
“I’ll be here, but I have to help my dad get things ready for the nor’easter.”
Although I’d heard my aunt mention it, I figured the storm wouldn’t be much different from what we’d experienced on and off since I’d been in Ocracoke. “What’s a nor’easter?”