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When Jamie buys a camera, she isn’t really thinking about it. They’re driving through Virginia, stopped off at a little gas station; Dani’s outside filling the rental Jeep, which puts Jamie on snack-duty. At the counter, she spots a display of disposable cameras and, almost without thinking, adds one to the pile of sugar and caffeine. It isn’t a plan. Isn’t for any particular reason.
Dani, pawing through the plastic bag of their spoils, raises it from a mess of M&Ms and Pringles and says, “You like photography?” She asks it the way she asks everything, like every little detail she learns about Jamie is another brand-new color added to the shine of the world. Jamie shrugs.
“Never was much for it, but this brave new land is pretty enough. Don’t mind keeping track of it for later.”
It’s more than that, she thinks as Dani raises the viewfinder to her eye and clicks a photo of Jamie behind the wheel, one hand steering, the other stretching across the center console to rest on Dani’s knee. I almost lost you once, Poppins. Wouldn’t have had anything but my own memory to remember you by. This...this will help.
Later, much later, years later, Jamie will look back on that moment as one of her wisest. Later, on a bed she can no longer sleep in, holding a thick album between shaking hands, she’ll think some of the most important choices you ever make are split-second recklessness. A camera, tossed in at the last second. A habit, built on nothing more than needing Dani’s smile immortalized.
Open the album. Take a breath. Flip the page.
***
A photo: Dani sprawled on a red-and-white beach towel, chin propped on folded arms, gazing out away from the camera as though she has no idea anyone is watching.
They’re with Henry and the kids--the first time they’ve seen the Wingrave family since the events at the house, and, though they don’t know it, one of the last times they’ll see them all together--in Florida. It’s strange, Jamie reflects, watching Miles chase Flora across an endless strip of sand. Strange how much world can fit into one country. England was green, rolling with hill and fog and haunted by things older than any of them can imagine. Florida feels...young, somehow. Too warm, too bright, too perfect on a Saturday afternoon.
She’s hugging her knees, seated on a blanket with Dani sitting just an inch further away than she’d like. It’s the safe thing, the smart thing, but she misses her--misses the way they sit in hotel rooms and empty bars, knees touching, pinkies overlapping. Dani, in a sundress that matches the blue of her right eye, is laughing as Miles grabs Flora around the middle and tries with all his ten-year-old strength to hoist her off the ground.
“Miles,” Henry calls, his voice laden with the anxiety of a man who has only just begun learning how to parent. “Miles, be careful--”
“They’re all right,” Jamie interrupts, tossing a handful of warm sand toward Henry’s precarious perch on a plastic chair. "Have you been wound this tight the whole fucking time?”
He looks pained. “You’ll excuse me for never having raised two children before. They’ve been a bit...”
“Precocious?” Dani suggests brightly.
“Demonic?” Jamie says at the same time. Henry sighs.
“Adventurous, shall we say, to meet in the middle.”
“They haven’t been...” Dani’s smiling, the way Jamie has grown accustomed to over the last few months: a beautiful smile that never entirely reaches her eyes. It’s the way she smiles when she thinks she needs to wear a mask of stability, when she needs everyone to think she’s doing all right.
Henry frowns. “Haven’t been what?”
Dani shrugs, looking uncomfortable. “Scared? Having nightmares? I don’t know...”
She’s asking-not-asking about that night, like she told Jamie she wasn’t going to do. They don’t need me bringing it up, she’d said back at the hotel, holding tight to Jamie in a way that said she very much needed to talk about this against her own will. They deserve to just live their lives.
Henry looks puzzled. “Strange, but no. No nightmares. Flora had a few at the very start, before we left London, but...no. Not since arriving here.”
Dani nods like this is all she wants to hear, and rubs her cheek with one slightly-sunburnt hand, the moment passing into obscurity as Flora shrieks and Miles trips directly into an oncoming wave. It’s all good here, all sunshine and ease of temper, and Jamie watches Henry stand. Brush off shorts that look truly insane set against his pale legs. Go awkward-jogging into the surf to lift a giggling Flora heavenward.
“They make a fine little family,” she says, pitching her voice so only Dani can hear. Dani nods. There’s a tightness to her mouth that says she’s only half here, only half able to let the sun bake away the shadows. Jamie touches her ankle lightly, wishing they were somewhere less requiring of distance.
“I’m all right,” Dani says. Not a lie of intent, at least, though Jamie suspects it’s more that she wants to be all right. She watches Dani roll onto her front, eyes on the endless ocean, the children tumbling around in its gentle grasp, the man doing his best to keep up.
Could watch her forever, Jamie thinks, knowing it’s far too early to say something so catastrophically huge. She’s been having these thoughts more and more, wild notions of turning this brand-new adventure with Dani into a lifetime event. It turns a key somewhere deep within her chest, some far-off engine making a deep rumbling sound that sends her tripping toward a very real, very powerful feeling of terror.
Her hand slips toward the bag of sunscreen, paperback novels, sliced oranges. A camera, small and yellow and used mainly in moments like this one, emerges. Dani never notices as she brings it to her eye, frames Dani’s blonde ponytail and sun-pink skin, snaps a photo.
Later, when the pictures are developed and spread out across a hotel bedspread, shots of Miles with an orange-peel grin and Flora standing before a monster of a sandcastle intercut with Dani’s far-off pensive expression, Dani will touch the print. Lingeringly, fingers trembling just the slightest bit.
“Why this one?”
Because I loved you more than words could capture, Jamie will know it’s far too early to say. It’d be reckless. It’d be testing the bounds of something still fragile, still one-day-at-a-time hopeful.
“Why not?” she’ll say, and tuck the photo safely back into its sleeve.
***
A photo: Jamie and Dani, backs to the freshly painted Leafling sign, standing carefully apart with shoulders back and a small bouquet of flowers clutched in Dani’s hands.
They keep to themselves, mainly, but some of the nearby shopkeepers have been kind as The Leafling goes from mad late-night concept to brick-and-mortar reality. They bring welcome-to-the-block plants and casseroles that are mostly-edible, and Dani accepts each one with true Midwestern courtesy. Jamie leans back, watches the art of neighborly behavior being painted before her eyes: older women who compliment Dani on her earrings, young men bullied into helping move heavy boxes into storage by their mothers. Dani, in the middle of it all, wearing a soft pastel sweater and a smile that has finally remembered its own strength.
She wasn’t sure how this would go, if Jamie’s honest about it. She’s been telling Dani not to worry for weeks, telling Dani they don’t need to know much about a business to run this one. I grow, you arrange, we make out like bandits with all the nice Americans who value pretty things. It’ll be perfect, Poppins. She’s been saying it, and she thinks she even believes her own words most of the time, but there have been dreams. Anxiety running its red thread through her sleep, telling her she has no skill in this arena, no education to speak of, no idea how to survive in American business while hiding her relationship with her “business partner”.
The day the shop finally opens, Jamie has been saying “it’s going to be great” for so long, she almost surprises herself by rushing into the bathroom and vomiting into the toilet. Dani, expression warm and just the tiniest bit teasing, leans against the doorframe.
“You all right?”
“Perfect,” Jamie gasps, staggering to the sink and thrusting a toothbrush into her mouth. “Jus’ great.”
“Too late to turn back now,” Dani points out. “What would we do with all the business cards?”
Jamie groans, spitting mint foam and rinsing out her mouth. “You could show just the slightest bit less glee, Poppins. I’ve just run us into a brick wall of imminent failure.”
Dani laughs, coming up behind her to hug her tight around the middle. “We should probably at least unlock the doors for the first time before you decide it’s time to shutter them again.”
She’s good today, Jamie senses--not the fake-good where she tries her best to pretend she isn’t listening for some deep-down movement Jamie can’t register, but truly happy. Her body is relaxed, her hands certain as she tips Jamie’s cheek and kisses her calm.
“How,” Jamie gasps when they break, “are you not out of your bloody mind right now?”
Dani shrugs. “It’s like the first day of school. Spend all summer planning and worrying, but now it’s happening. Just gotta jump in.”
There are already people waiting when they arrive, to Jamie’s mingled horror and delight. Most of them are their fellow shopkeepers, waiting with the brilliant smiles of people who have already lived this particular nightmare themselves, and just want to pay forward the relief of customers actually turning up. They’re kind, these people--they don’t know Jamie in the least, don’t have the first idea what shadows lurk behind Dani’s eyes, but they take their hands, squeeze, and congratulate them all the same. Jamie thinks they even mean it, most of them. Americans are complicated, boisterous, scandalous people--but they can have such heart.
One woman, old enough to be Jamie’s grandmother, presses a bouquet of peonies against Dani’s chest. “For luck,” she says croakily, patting Dani’s cheek like she’s known her since Dani was three feet tall. “Dry ‘em, hang ‘em somewhere in the back. Remember we’re all rooting for you.”
“Rooting,” a man who owns a nearby pizzeria hoots. “Good one, Carol!”
Jamie almost rolls her eyes, but Dani is beaming. When the others make flapping get in front of the sign gestures, they can’t help but obey, standing with a perfectly-maintained half-person between their shoulders. She wants so badly to reach over, to take Dani’s hand, to kiss her with all the terror and relief she’d never known she could feel at once. Instead, she smiles as professionally as she knows how for the camera someone produces. It’s enough.
Later, tapping a finger against the print the photographer drops on their counter, Jamie says, “Look like I want to pass out.”
Dani glances toward the window, takes note of the empty street, presses a quick kiss to her cheek. “I’d have caught you.”
***
A photo: Jamie, sitting just behind Dani on a plush couch, arm wrapped around her waist, cheek pressed to flyaway blonde hair. Dani, grinning her widest, cheesiest grin, leaning back like she knows there is no world in which Jamie would ever let her fall.
There are parties, occasionally--usually thrown by other under-the-radar couples they get along with well enough for drinks, not so much that they truly build relationships. They like the quiet life, the two-person road trips, the easy silence after a long day. But, sometimes, life is grand and big and loud, and on those nights, they venture out into the world.
There are a pair of men maybe five years their senior who have been together for “a decade”, if you ask Mike, “a century”, if it’s Paul telling the tale. They’re good people, and their home is a safe space Jamie doesn’t anticipate finding.
Friends are hard, she thinks. Always were, but they’re so much harder once you’ve lost a couple.
Still: when Mike and Paul are set to celebrate a round ten years together (”An eternity,” Paul clarifies, leaning against the Leafling counter to invite them over), they go. Dani wants to, and it’s good seeing Dani want things like this. It’s been almost a year together, almost a year of exploring the map and one another, and Dani’s been getting softer around the edges, less prone to jumping at shadows. The Dani Clayton of a year ago wouldn’t want to attend parties, lest the beast inside leap while her guard is lowered; the Dani Clayton of tonight is holding up a dark green dress, brow furrowed.
“Too much?”
Jamie hums a moment to buy herself time. “Depends.”
“On?”
“Whether you’d like to actually leave the house tonight.” Jamie wiggles her eyebrows, buttoning a black shirt and searching for a good pair of suspenders. Dani laughs.
“I think you can keep your hands to yourself for a few hours.”
“You,” Jamie points out, sidling up behind her and kissing her neck, “have always had entirely too much faith in me, Poppins.”
Dani is, however, a woman of her word when it comes to accepting social invitations, and soon they’re sitting on an exceptionally soft couch in an exceptionally loud living room. Jamie glances around, reading the environment, registering the two women holding hands by the coffee table, the men dancing near the kitchen, the way even the male-female pairs seem not to see anything odd. Mike and Paul have been doing this a long time. This is as safe a space as their own home.
She likes the way Dani relaxes, a little more with every drink tucked into her hand, a little more with a lit cigarette pulled from Jamie’s, a little more still when Mike nudges her and mutters, “Your girl looks good tonight, Clayton.”
She likes, most of all, the way Dani doesn’t flinch away when a Polaroid comes out. These are good people, brave people, smart people. If there are photos taken tonight, they will be pressed straight into the hands of their subjects, gifted away before the chemicals have even processed.
Dani presses back against her, seated on her lap, laughing at some joke Jamie hasn’t really been paying attention to. She’s too busy watching Dani’s profile, the way her head tips back when she’s really laughing, too hard to care what she looks like. Too busy reveling in how it feels to hold Dani in a setting so much more public than usual, her fingers stroking the soft material of Dani’s dress, her body burning and the most comfortable it’s ever been.
Later, with the Polaroid on the nightstand, the green dress on the floor, and a sheet tucked up against the fall chill, Dani says, “We should do that more.”
Jamie chuckles against her shoulder, kissing a patch of freckles. “This?”
“Yes.” Dani wriggles a little, giggling. “But also that.” She’s gesturing to the photo, propped between a lamp and copy of some old Shirley Jackson novel. “It was nice, wasn’t it? Not...”
“Hiding,” Jamie supplies. Dani makes a humming noise soft in her throat.
“I like not hiding you.”
***
A photo: Dani, eyes dark with a smolder only Jamie ever sees, a cigarette between her lips, hair loose around her shoulders.
Nights spent home with Dani, nights where there are no groceries to pick up, no accounting to be done, no errands waiting to be noticed, are Jamie’s absolute favorite thing in the world. There’s just something about this sense of home they’ve been building together, this sense of locked door and secured window and no one else invited to partake that gets Jamie the way nothing else does.
Especially Dani. Dani at home is less reserved, less careful. With every month that passes quietly, no sign of anything but her own mind, Dani gets a little less tight. A little less prone to gazing off into the middle distance. A little less likely to disappear from an otherwise-normal conversation, emerging several minutes later like she’s pulling herself out of a dream.
And, some nights, she’s not just here--she’s utterly present, every atom of her tuned to Jamie like they have no need of space between them, no need of separation. These nights, the nights where Dani strides into the room on a mission, are Jamie’s favorite of all.
“Why,” Dani says, leaning back in a kitchen chair with legs spread and head tilted to exhale smoke toward the ceiling, “are you looking at me like that?”
“Me?” Jamie teases. “You’re the one gazing at me like I’m some terribly interesting new buffet.”
She’s half-joking, but there’s something about the way Dani looks at her on this very particular sort of night, with every line of her body tuned toward Jamie’s, that makes her feel a stupid kind of brave. A reckless kind of excitement unwinds outward, until her fingertips itch to grab at Dani’s hair, her knees weak with the desire to pull Dani close.
She’s doing it now, smoking that cigarette with all the languid energy of a woman perfectly at home, watching Jamie with a faint smirk playing around her lips. No one else sees that smirk, Jamie understands, and it makes her a little faint every time she thinks it. To have something of Dani, some integral comfortable part of Dani that belongs solely to their apartment, their life together, is still a good fortune Jamie can’t entirely parse out.
Her hand moves toward the camera, small and plastic and containing some of the best memories of Dani she desperately needs to keep. Dani lets her snap off a shot, shakes her head when Jamie lowers the camera.
“That’s going to be one of yours.”
She says it every time Jamie tries to capture the white-hot energy of this kind of evening. Dani doesn’t like to see herself through this particular lens, gets fidgety and embarrassed at the sight of her own face etched with such a confident hunger. Jamie asked the first time if Dani wanted her to stop taking the photos altogether, and Dani had shaken her head.
“I don’t mind. But they’re yours, okay?”
She sets the camera aside, moving to take the cigarette out of Dani’s hand, taking a long drag and dropping it in an ashtray. The rest doesn’t need anything in the way--no lens, no embarrassment, nothing but the way Dani’s mouth opens beneath hers, hands already roaming. The rest is not Jamie’s, but theirs, a joint ownership of soft moans and soft skin and soft assurances that this is still, always, home.
Later, with Dani asleep, one hand thrown loosely over Jamie’s hip, Jamie will look at the photos that are hers and hers alone. Dani, mouth wet and swollen from a night spent confined to their bedroom around their anniversary. Dani, grinning and half-asleep, glancing over her shoulder to coax Jamie into putting the camera down, joining her among the blankets. Dani, smoke-haze around her face, wine glass in her hand, looking just past the camera at Jamie’s own desire.
Dani’s choice to share a life with her, Dani’s decision to share every inch of herself with Jamie, is more than Jamie feels anyone deserves.
***
A photo: Dani in front of the Eiffel Tower, sunglasses on, arms spread wide.
A photo: Dani kneeling at the Grand Canyon, gesturing bewilderment at the sheer scope of the place.
A photo: Dani standing before the alleged largest ball of twine in the world, looking rather like she regrets letting Jamie pick the destination this time.
They travel until Dani can’t stomach it anymore, can’t take the uncertainty of unknown roads and unmapped hotel beds--but, first, years of travel. Years of postcards and rental cars, of Jamie turning maps upside down and Dani being shockingly savvy in small-town situations.
These photos, more than any other, feel like they have to be taken for someone else’s idea of posterity, and Jamie feels a little strange, at first. Dani’s already seen much of Europe by the time they meet, and has no photos whatsoever to show for it. Jamie, who started turning up in photos for the first time as an adult, says, “It’ll be good to show ‘em off,” while never quite bringing herself to the edge of an unspoken follow-up question: to whom, exactly? It isn’t as though she and Dani are having children, isn’t as though there will be grandkids tottering around down the line to tune out their stories. Who, exactly, are these mementos for?
Dani is far too kind, far too pragmatic, to put the question to her. Dani only poses, grins, lets Jamie take all the pictures she wants, and then--camera tucked safely away once more--grabs Jamie’s hands and leads her into living it: the food, the outdoor markets, the snowstorms, the sun-kissed hikes. As the years go by, Jamie takes more and more photos, never quite able to explain to herself why it’s so critical. Never quite able to look away when Dani finally covers the lens with one hand and brings her close, kissing her like it’s the first time.
They stop looking at these photos together, after a while. Stop trying so hard to go back, as the days grow shorter and the exhaustion begins to steal the warmth from Dani’s smile. At first, it’s about moving forward--always one foot in front of the other. At first, every photo taken is set aside as a gift to another life. And then, finally, it’s about the moment they’re in, nothing more. Jamie sets the camera on a shelf. Refuses to look at Dani through any barrier but her own two eyes. Dani doesn’t like the snap-click of the camera anymore, anyway--each time, she flinches, like Jamie is about to show her a glimpse of whatever horror she’s been seeing in the mirror.
I only see you, Jamie promises, the ache in her chest so great, she’s sure it will swallow them both. But Dani can’t bring herself to look. Can’t bring herself, just in case Jamie is wrong.
Later--so much later, with eyes stinging and arms empty--she flips through the album and remembers Spain, California, Minnesota, Greece. Later, she finds Dani sticking her tongue out, spinning like a deranged nun out of musical, sitting quietly in a cafe with a small cup of coffee warming her hands. Dani, stiff-shouldered and trying not to laugh as Jamie made faces the one time they ever ventured back to Iowa. Dani, hair blowing back into her face, arms looped around Jamie at a terrifying, exhilarating first Pride parade.
And, in the back, the photos of Dani as only Jamie knew her. The sly grin a second before pinning Jamie to the couch. The sweet surprise from Jamie coming home early with dinner. Shot after shot of no make-up, or smudged eyeliner, or ruined lipstick, of Dani in pajamas on Christmas, or Dani in bed after a shower, or Dani laughing herself silly at nothing Jamie can remember now.
They’re all here, and they’re all Dani--all of Dani Jamie’s got left now--and still, they’re wrong. They sit, plastic and unyielding, beneath flimsy protective sheets, and they don’t laugh like Dani, don’t breathe out against her skin like Dani, don’t smell like Dani’s shampoo or swear like Dani tripping over a shoe in the dark or look at her with that solid, palpable love like Dani did and should still and never will again.
Jamie sits, album in her lap, staring down at Dani with paint smudged on her cheek and their then-new bedroom behind her, and suddenly can’t remember how to breathe. Had she known? Somewhere in the back of her mind that day in a gas station, picking up a little yellow disposable camera, had she known that one day, this would be all she had left of Dani? Surely not. Surely, she hadn’t believed it would go this way, all the way back then. Surely, it was one day at a time, and we’ll have time, and any day with you, Poppins.
Had she known? No. No, of course she hadn’t.
And yet, the idea of not having these in front of her--the idea of Dani’s face slowly, surely, washing away over time as Jamie fails to find her in a world so uncompromisingly cruel...
She touches a shot of Dani with her left hand covering her mouth, her ring gleaming gold against her smile, the day the state had legalized civil unions. Dani as gold as sunshine, in one of the last truly clean moments, before old ghost stories dug rotting fingers into their life. Her vision grays, her head suddenly too heavy to hold up.
She hadn’t known. But she’s glad. She’s glad she has, at least, this much to hang on to.