“No radio.” She pushed the off button on the console. “We are having a moment of silence,” she finished as she shifted the car into reverse and backed down the drive.
Chapter 2
Eileen
The light was bad. She had tried to tell them at this time of day, on the east side of the lake, that they would be fighting the shadows. But when the client insisted on the location, you gave them what they wanted. Even though you knew ahead of time that it would lead to being unhappy with the results—you did it anyway.
“Okay, Mom and Dad,” Eileen directed from behind her camera. “Let’s try you two facing each other… Not quite that much… There you go.” This whole shoot was turning into a complete disaster. “And we’ll put the two tallest boys right in front of you. And the youngest in front of them, good, good,” Eileen lied and pressed the button of her camera, capturing a series of rapid-fire shots.
“Okay, so,” she started. Their middle child, one of the most sullen, uncooperative children she had ever worked with, refused to do anything but scowl. “I’m wondering if we can get a few with everyone smiling.”
Middle boy narrowed his eyes and deepened the already dark, furrowed creases in his forehead. The father smiled while also looking completely annoyed, while the mother’s eyes gave away her stress. The youngest child, a four-year-old girl in a florescent pink dress that would completely counterbalance every other person in her family wearing jeans and a white shirt, despite Eileen’s explicit instructions to avoid white shirts, wandered away from the shot to inspect a black beetle on a flat, smooth stone nearby.
Only their oldest child, a boy of maybe eight, had enthusiastically smiled for every single shot they had taken so far.
Eileen sighed to herself, careful to do her best to hide her frustration from the clients. “Okay, so far so good. I’m thinking maybe now is a good time for a quick five-, ten-minute break.”
“Sounds good to me,” the father said as he pulled his cell phone from the back pocket of his jeans. The mother nodded and headed for her large purse, which she’d left on a nearby bench.
Eileen turned away from them. It’s money, Eileen. Family portraits helped pay the mortgage—the same way weddings, graduations, promotional and publicity events, and the occasional bar mitzvah did. Landscapes, stills, and every artistic photo she’d ever taken did not.
“You’re lucky to get to do it at all,” Eric had snapped when she had once complained to him about a difficult family. “Would you rather be sitting in a cubicle? Would you rather be chained to a desk working on a spreadsheet, writing reports, watching the clock, and praying for five o’clock?” he had continued.
Because that was exactly what she used to do. And she had hated every minute of it.
Eileen closed her eyes, but she kind of hated this too. Not as much, that was true. At least she got to spend her days with her camera in her hands. And certainly it was miles away from the confinement of the cubicle. But spending her days directing and constructing sullen families into image-worthy poses—it didn’t do much to alleviate that sense of abysmal failure that had begun a slow creep into her own life image lately.
Eileen grabbed a new lens and attached it to the front of her camera as she turned back to her client family. The dad was still on his phone, and the mom was waiting for the youngest to finish drinking from her spill-proof cup. That was when Eileen saw it, the top third barely peeking out from the mom’s purse—Clare Collins, in a large gold font.
She had seen it in the grocery store just yesterday, her sister’s latest hardcover release, A Perfect Life, filling the endcaps in the checkout line. She hadn’t touched it. She had willfully ignored it, and she certainly hadn’t bought it—but here it was, following her, haunting her, reminding her that complete strangers continued to finance and support Clare’s art.
“Do you think we can wrap this up soon?” the dad asked, slipping his phone back into his pocket.
“Yes,” Eileen agreed. “We’ve lost the light,” she said, despite the fact that they had never had the light to begin with. “In fact…I probably already have something I can use.”
Every single one of them looked relieved. Even the middle boy finally smiled, and Eileen, quick with the camera, snapped his picture several times before he could remember to be miserable again.
From the depths of her tote bag, her phone rang. The shrill, old-fashioned ringtone made her put her camera down and race to begin the frantic dig. Her tote was too big, filled with too much crap, and the phone was never, ever in the convenient phone-sized side pocket. By the time she managed to get her hands on it, the ringing had stopped—as usual—and she was left staring at a surprising notification.
Missed call, Simon Reamer
Why was Clare’s husband calling her? When was the last time she had even spoken with him?
Christmas—three years ago? They had invited Eileen, Eric, and the kids to spend Christmas with them, in their huge cliffside mansion, and against Eileen’s better judgment, they had gone. That was the last time Eileen had spoken with Simon Reamer, thanking him for having them and saying goodbye at the grand entrance to his and Clare’s ridiculous house.
Eileen racked her brains. Clare’s birthday was tomorrow, her fortieth. Given that Simon had rented out a ballroom at one of the most expensive hotels in San Francisco to celebrate Clare’s thirty-fifth birthday with five hundred of her closest admirers, and fans, it wasn’t hard to believe that he would be conspiring something completely over the top for her fortieth. Except, her birthday was tomorrow. If Simon were planning something, wouldn’t she have received the ornate invitation by mail months ago? It wasn’t like Simon to try to get away with a last-minute phone-call invite.
“So,” the father interrupted her thinking. “We’re good? What happens next?”
“Um…” Eileen tore her eyes away from the phone and stopped the thoughts that were forming about her mother and her deteriorating health in their tracks. “So I’ll go through everything we were able to get today and send a selection of proofs for you to review. Once you’ve made some choices, I’ll put the order together for you.”
“Sounds good,” the dad said.
“Thank you again,” the mother added, unable to hide the strain in her voice. She shook Eileen’s hand. “We hope there’ll be some good ones.”
Eileen smiled at her and the kids while the dad headed off to his car, presumably to get back to work. “I’m sure there are—you’re such a photogenic family.” There wasn’t a single good photo of them on her camera; Eileen was almost sure of it.
As the mom shuffled her kids away from the lake and toward her own car, Eileen’s phone beeped another notification.