Look
Mira found the box in her grandmother’s apartment in Astoria the week after the funeral. Inside: contact sheets, a Leica with a sticky shutter, and one print of a woman on a New York sidewalk. The woman was a stranger. The back of the print said Eleni, March 1994, in handwriting Mira did not recognize. Her grandmother had never mentioned anyone named Eleni. Mira put the box in her car and drove home.
Hold
The print sat on her desk for three days before she really looked. Eleni walking toward the camera at dusk, Times Square dissolving behind her into smeared light. A long dark coat. A cigarette held near her mouth, not yet lit, her other hand resting flat against her chest as if checking for something. A yellow cab caught mid-turn, already softening at its edges. Eleni was the only thing in focus. Around her the city was moving and she was not. Mira held the print under the lamp. The paper smelled faintly of basement.
Blur
The contact sheets had no names, only dates. Mira began at the earliest, February 1994, and worked forward with a loupe. On the third sheet she found a frame she could not stop returning to. A face caught turning. The hair had moved faster than the shutter and lay smeared across the cheekbone like wet ink. The mouth was almost there. The eyes were not. Mira could not tell if it was Eleni. She marked the frame with a red grease pencil and moved on, then came back, then moved on again.
Frame
She laid six sheets in a column on the kitchen table. Kodak 400-2TMY along every edge, the frame numbers ticking down the perforations like a small careful clock. The scenes repeated and shifted. A young woman at the base of a tree in what looked like Tompkins Square. Candles arranged on a floor in the dark. The uptown platform at 14th Street. Someone holding a camera up to their own face, hiding behind it. A single rose on a windowsill. Mira understood, looking down at all of it, that whoever had shot these had loved the woman in them.
Crop
She started cutting. Enlargements of single frames, blown up past the grain. The tree. The rose. The hand holding the camera. She wanted to find the photographer’s face in a reflection, a window, a kettle, anything. She found nothing. The photographer had been careful. Mira had been a wedding photographer for six years and she recognized it.
Distance
She found the answer on a sheet she had skipped. Three frames in sequence. A fashion shot, evidently a job: an enormous pair of trousers and a polished shoe in the foreground, and between the legs, far back on a white seamless, a tiny woman in a long coat and hat walking away with a bag. Then a figure against a gray wall, one hand reaching into a single column of light, the body already half gone into shadow. Then fingertips in extreme macro, the whorls of the prints stained black with developer. Mira recognized the hands. They were her grandmother’s.
Light
She turned off the kitchen lamp and sat in the dark with the prints. Outside her own window the streetlight came through the panes and fell onto the floorboards in a clean rectangle, the grid of the glass laid down in pale shapes on the wood. Two windows in the room, she thought. One up there and one down here. Her grandmother had photographed Eleni for what looked like two years and had never once said her name. Mira sat on the floor inside the rectangle of light until it moved off her and onto the wall.
Quiet
In the morning she called her mother. Her mother was quiet for a while and then said, Eleni went back to Athens at the end of ’95. Your grandmother stopped taking pictures after that. Mira asked why no one had ever mentioned her. Her mother said, She did mention her. You weren’t listening.
Trace
At the bottom of the box, beneath the sleeves, Mira found one more photograph. Not a contact print. A small faded snapshot, the paper scuffed soft at the corners, the emulsion gone slightly warm at the edges from years of being kept somewhere. A woman sat at the edge of a lake, her back mostly to the camera, mountains hazed behind her. The figure was small in the frame. The handwriting on the reverse was different from the rest. For K — I made it home. E.Her grandmother’s name had been Katerina.
Leave
Mira put the snapshot in her wallet and the rest of the box back in the closet. She did not look for Eleni. She thought about it on a Tuesday in late October, walking home from the subway, and decided against it. Some afternoons she took the snapshot out at her desk and looked at the small distant figure by the water. The photograph was getting older in her wallet. She let it.