Chapter 28

Chapter 28

Frank arrived home and checked his messages. He had received only one from a travel magazine in desperate need of an Antarctic photograph for an upcoming issue. He erased the message and dropped his bags next to his desk.

No word yet about Anna. She could have gone anywhere, but he knew she would go to Los Angeles, to Hollywood. Where else would an aspiring actress go? But in a city of millions, finding one girl was like the proverbial needle in the haystack. He would have a better chance discovering alien artifacts in Marshall’s Crater than locating Anna.

He looked at the telephone and considered his options. Anna was legally an adult and had left of her own free will; the police could do nothing for him. A private investigator might be able to find her, given enough time and money. Such a search could take years and do little more than eat up his savings.

The obvious solution would be to contact as many casting directors as possible. One of them was bound to see her at some point. What would he tell them? He wasn’t Anna’s relative, husband, fiancé, or even boyfriend. He was the almost-fiancé of her dead mother who’d known her for less than a week in New Mexico. Anyone he told would think him a stalker.

What would he tell her even if he somehow managed to find her among the millions of Los Angelinos? She’d left him with a cryptic note at the Rio Rancho. After he told her how much he loved her and made love to her. If she could leave after that, it should be pretty obvious she had no interest in finding him.

He could still have hope, though. Hope that she would change her mind and try to find him. His address was listed in the phone book, the only F Hemsky in all of Los Angeles. She needed only to look and ask someone for directions. Not an impossible feat, even for a small town girl in the big city. If he waited long enough, he might not have to look for her at all.

In the meantime, he went to his lightbox in the living room, where several packages of processed film waited. The film was from his trip to Colorado a month ago. After turning on the lightbox, he placed each roll of film on the lighted surface and sat down to begin evaluating the photographs.

He studied each frame with a loupe, magnifying the image to pick up any flaws. One of a stream grown fat from the spring thaw was little more than a blur. Another of a field of wildflowers was too dark, so that the flowers looked black instead of purple. For another image he’d meant to capture a moose drinking from a river, but something spooked it so he only caught its backside in the shot.

The imperfect images he gathered into a pile and threw into the trash. He always felt a pang of remorse for discarding photographs, but imperfect ones were no use to him. Yet each slide recorded a moment in time. He remembered standing along the edge of that stream, listening to the rush of water. He had bent down to touch the soft petals of those wildflowers. He’d watched the moose as it drank, radiating power with its muscular frame and stately antlers.

It didn’t matter that he had other images of the stream, the wildflowers, and the moose; those flawed slides depicted a unique moment in time he could never recover. But if he kept every image, no matter how imperfect, he would need to rent a warehouse to house them. Some things you had to let go.

He worked for hours at the lightbox until he heard a noise down the hallway. He bolted from the chair at the thought that Anna might have somehow gotten inside before he arrived. Like a modern-day Goldilocks, maybe she’d fallen asleep in his bed while waiting for him to show up. He threw open the bedroom door and then put a hand to his nose to block out the smell.

The room smelled like dog shit and piss. Frosty lay on Frank’s bed, almost camouflaged against the white sheets. A bowl overrun with food and another half-filled with water were tucked into the corner, surrounded by stained newspapers. “Jesus Christ,” Frank said. He scooped up Frosty and took the dog into the other bedroom, where he stored his pictures.

He took out his cell phone and called his old house, hoping Tracy was still there. As soon as she answered, he shouted, “How long did you leave him in here?”

“Four days I think.”

“This is animal cruelty. I should call the cops.”

“I’m cruel? You hardly even see that dog anymore.”

“Why didn’t you put him in a kennel? He could have died.”

“I’m sorry, Frank. I meant to just leave him there while we had the realtor over, but there’s been so much going on the last couple days, I forgot.. Is he all right?”

“We’ll see. Jesus, Tracy, you were supposed to watch him. How could you leave him here all alone?”

“Frank, stop being so melodramatic. He’s just a dog.” After a long pause, she said, “I’m pregnant. I found out two days ago.” She hung up the phone and when he redialed the number, she refused to answer.

“I’m going to take the vet bill off your alimony,” he said to her answering machine and then hung up to call the vet. He arranged an appointment for tomorrow morning, but until then he would have to keep an eye on the ancient bulldog. He patted Frosty’s head and let the dog nuzzle his cheek. “You wait here while I go clean up Mom’s mess.”

As he went into the kitchen for cleaning supplies, he thought it odd that even ten years after the divorce he still referred to Tracy as Mom to Frosty. He supposed the dog was the closest to a child they’d ever had. Now she and Rocky were going to have a baby.

He threw the soiled newspapers into a garbage bag, mopped the floor, and sprayed an entire can of air freshener to eliminate the smell. Then he opened the window and stuffed the sheets into the washer. The bedroom no longer smelled of dog shit, but the overpowering sent of potpourri made his head spin. He staggered into the other bedroom, where Frosty wheezed contentedly as he slept.

Frank patted the dog’s head and leaned against one of the cabinets. Tracy getting pregnant signaled the real end of their marriage. With a new husband and soon a child, she’d started a new life, one without Frank. Meanwhile, what did he have? An old dog and file cabinets full of memories.

He went to a fireproof black cabinet and unlocked it before opening the bottom drawer. Inside he kept an album of pictures from his time with Vera. In the first one, Vera stood in front of Portland harbor at sunset. That was the first night after filming the movie, when they wound up getting drunk on champagne he bought with a fake ID and they woke up behind a warehouse, smelling like fish. Another showed her at the top of Portland Head Light at dawn with hair blowing across her face. He’d needed to bribe a security guard to allow them up there. Right after he snapped the picture, she fell into his arms and they kissed. He could still smell the perfume in her hair and taste spearmint gum on her breath. In another picture, Vera held the steering wheel of a sailboat with one hand and saluted to the camera with the other. The boat belonged to a professor at the University of Southern Maine. Vera met him on campus while waiting for Frank and that weekend they were both invited to spend the day on the professor’s boat. After Frank took that picture, Vera leaned over the edge and threw up; she’d never ridden on a boat before. He put an arm around her shoulders and held her until they reached the harbor. As soon as they reached land, she smiled and said, “That was fun. We’ll have to do it again some time.”

This was all he had left of Vera now, the memories of their year in Maine. In the same way the people of Little Mesa had their memories of Vera. In time, memories would fade and all that would remain would be pictures and a park named in her honor. To the future generations in Little Mesa she would become a legend as vague and one-dimensional as Ewan Marshall.

At least there were tangible reminders of Vera. Memories were all he had of Anna, not even a picture to remind him of their week in Little Mesa. Why hadn’t he taken a picture of her standing by the edge of Marshall’s Crater at sundown or at sunrise in Vera’s park? He could have taken her out to the emu farm and gotten a shot of her with one of the animals. So many opportunities he’d let slip away because every time he’d held the camera reminded him of Vera.

He went into the living room and opened his camera bag. The weight of the Nikon’s body in his hands felt familiar, as though designed with him in mind. Symbiosis: the process where two entities fed off each other, needed each other for survival. The flower and the bee; the caribou and the wolf; Frank and the camera. They all depended on each other for survival.

Through the constant moving around of his youth, through his disastrous relationships with Vera, Tracy, Anna, and a host of others, he could always count on the camera. This apartment, Frosty, and the camera were all he had left now. Everything else was gone.

He opened the living room curtains to look out over the street below. In the distance, the towers of Los Angeles rose against the sun like the farmer’s silo in Little Mesa. Frank didn’t bother to line up his shot or check the lighting; he simply pushed the button to take the picture. The reflex came naturally. He’d been doing this his whole life, after all.

Then he put the camera away again and checked the clock on the wall. Too early for bed and the bedroom probably hadn’t aired out yet anyway. In the corner of the room he had a 13-inch television, the kind with a built-in VCR. One of his comrades in the photography business had given him the television after his divorce as a way to cheer him up. Frank didn’t watch much TV and so it gathered dust in the corner.

He owned only one movie, Vera and Anna’s favorite. After collecting Frosty from the storage room, he popped in the tape. The two of them lay on a carpet in the center of the room to watch the movie. He must have seen this with Vera two hundred times, enough to repeat almost every line the way Anna recited Casa Verde at Marshall’s Crater.

During the last scene at the fog-shrouded airport, Frank imagined himself and Anna standing in place of Rick and Ilsa. But he couldn’t recite Bogart’s lines because he didn’t believe them, not for Anna. They could have been happy together. They could have shared the apartment and maybe gotten married someday. The only thing stopping them was a simple quirk of fate that he was born too soon or she was born too late.

As he looked into the screen, imagining Anna there, he coined one line. “We’ll always have Little Mesa.”

He let the tape run until it ran out and began rewinding automatically. Frosty lay with his head in Frank’s lap, drool staining Frank’s pants. Frank scratched the bulldog behind the ears until Frosty’s head lifted and he licked Frank’s hand. “‘This could be the start of a beautiful friendship,’” Frank said. He and the dog had grown old together and now they only had each other.

Frank looked towards the bedroom but didn’t want to go to sleep. When he closed his eyes, he would probably dream of Anna and then have to wake to the reality that she was gone. He flipped through the channels on the TV, but only a handful came in, none of them showing anything of interest. There was one other movie he could watch.

He went back to the storage room and from the same drawer where he kept Vera’s photo album, he took out a metal lockbox. Inside was the original copy of the movie he, Avery, and Vera had shot in Portland. Docks of the Damned, the label read. An idiotic title for an idiotic project, but if not for the movie he wouldn’t have met Vera.

He ran the tape into an old projector and played the movie on the living room wall. Vera looked so beautiful no matter how out-of-focus or grainy the film. Instead of watching the movie, his eyes fixed on her and he felt the same joy as that first night when she’d walked into the warehouse.

At some point he fell asleep and woke hearing the telephone. He pushed Frosty’s head away from his lap and stood in the bright light coming from the projector as he snatched the receiver. There was no one on the other end. He’d imagined the sound, dreaming Anna was calling.

He turned off the projector, scooped up Frosty, and limped back to the bedroom. The potpourri smell had faded to a tolerable level, enough so that he could shut the window. There were no sheets on the bed, so he spread out a blanket to make a nest for he and Frosty. Then he fell asleep again. In one dream, he saw himself on the runway in Casablanca, watching Anna’s plane disappear into the night.

He woke up the next morning feeling as though he hadn’t slept at all. Downstairs there was a coffee shop on the corner he’d visited a few times for coffee or sandwiches while he worked. When he opened the door, he expected to see Zeke behind the counter and the old regulars sipping their coffee. Instead, he saw only strangers. The waitress showed him to a seat, but said nothing to him except to ask for his order. Every time Frank came in here there was a new group of waitresses, probably all girls like Anna hoping to become an actress. How many of them made it in anything except B-movies and pornography?

After a cup of coffee and western omelet, he took Frosty to the vet. The woman examining the albino bulldog took Frank into her office while Frosty waited on the examination table. “There isn’t a lot we can do for a dog his age,” the vet said. “He has serious arthritis in his hind legs. It’s only getting worse. Have you considered putting Frosty to sleep?”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Mr. Hemsky, I know it’s hard letting go—” Frank didn’t listen to the rest of her sentence. The last two words echoed what Tracy had told him when he called from Alaska. She was wrong. He’d spent his whole life letting things go. He’d spent forty-four years moving from place to place with nothing to call his own. All he had to show for his travels were memories of places he’d visited, but didn’t know. He was a visitor everywhere in the world, searching the globe for something when he’d had it all along with Vera in Maine.

As he took Frosty and left the veterinarian’s, he hoped Anna would someday come to the same conclusion. All the wonder and adventure in the world meant nothing without people to share it with. There was only one place on earth he could go.

He took his suitcase, camera bag, and Frosty and went to rent a car. He had to drive an entire day, stopping to let the dog do his business, before arriving at Little Mesa once again. He drove down Marshall Street with its now-familiar row of eyesores and pulled into the parking lot of the Rio Rancho. JJ looked ready to faint when Frank entered the office. “You’re back! Did you forget something?”

“I decided to stay a little longer. Do you have a room?”

“For you, of course.”

“By the way, what’s your policy on pets?”

“I’m flexible as long as they aren’t chewing up the furniture or making a mess on the carpets.”

“I brought my dog with me. Maybe if I’m gone during the day you could keep an eye on him? He doesn’t do much anymore.”

“No problem. It’ll be nice to have some company.”

“Thanks.” After Frank got a room key and left Frosty to get acquainted with JJ, he drove to Perfect Memories. Esther stood behind the counter and masked any surprise behind a look of contempt.

“What are you doing here? I haven’t heard from Anna.”

“I know.” He cleared his throat and searched for the right words. “I’m staying here. I thought maybe you could use a little help around the shop.”

Esther put a hand to her cheek and tried to say something, but couldn’t. She finally nodded. “I guess it’s settled then,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

As he reached the door, she asked, “Would you like to go out to dinner later? We got off to such a bad start, maybe we can start over.”

“I’d like that.”

Before heading back to the Rio Rancho to unpack, Frank went into Zeke’s. “You’re back?” Zeke said.

“I’m back,” Frank said. Then he took his place among the regulars at the counter.