Clutching her big camera with one hand, like a pistol, in a park near Lake Michigan, Barwick found an old tree with thick and twisted leafless limbs. Martha and Justin had been following by a dozen thoroughbred lengths and when they caught up with her she was already framing the shot through her eyepiece.
“Here,” Sally said. “Here is perfect.”
Every few months, Martha Finn would call Barwick and have her drive up Sheridan Road to Northwood so she could take photos of growing and changing Justin, often posed in idyllic settings in the yard or here in the park or on some decorated impromptu stage in the Finn home. Once, he was dressed in a red bow tie and black shorts; another time he wore the orange and white of Terry’s alma mater, the University of Tennessee. Today, Martha called his look young, casual chic: new blue jeans, white dress shirt, clean deck shoes, brushed hair, face scrubbed to an ivory matte finish with pink accents.
Every fall, Scott Colleran would call Big Rob and ask for a recent photo of Justin for his anonymous client, which Barwick would reluctantly provide from the digital backup of her one-on-one photo sessions with the boy. She’d get paid twice for the same job, and in her dreams, Justin would allay her guilt.
“We are just instruments,” he’d say.
Barwick had the dreams about three times a month. They were set in different places: her high school, her apartment, Mrs. Lundquist’s parlor, Big Rob’s office (or at least in locales she understood to be those places, even if they didn’t physically resemble them). One took place at a departure gate at O’Hare. In most of them, Justin, in Eric Lundquist’s grown body, wearing Eric Lundquist’s face, wanted to talk about duty.
“Fulfilling responsibility,” he’d say, “is the most important thing.”
“You sound like Big Rob,” she’d say.
“Big Rob is a wide man,” Justin would say.
“But what if those responsibilities are in service of a cause that’s unjust?” Even while she was saying things like that in her dreams, she recognized it wasn’t anything like the manner in which she – or probably anybody – really talked.
“You and I are instruments,” Justin would say. “Instruments don’t have causes.”
“Who has causes, then?”
Justin didn’t seem to care. “Other people.”
When she handed over the photos, Big Rob would always say to her, “You’re like a double agent,” which only deepened her ambivalence. She had betrayed one friend to earn the trust of another. This is what it takes, she told herself. You need to be willing to go where other detectives are not. Her angst was mitigated by the satisfaction Big Rob and Scott Colleran expressed in her work. The client was very pleased, Colleran said. Very pleased.
“Hop up in the tree, Justin,” Sally said. He surveyed the waist-high place where the old trunk separated, forming a flat area like the palm of an upturned, three-fingered hand. He obeyed and, turning toward the camera, froze his expression in a broad grin. When he realized the photo was some minutes from being snapped, he relaxed his face and stared at some kids, kids with fewer obligations, playing on a jungle gym in the distance.
Martha stood at Sally’s side, trying to approximate the shot in her mind. “I like this.”
Remotely, Sally arranged Justin’s posture and put the camera to her eye. “Smile,” she said, and he did. She clicked the shutter seven or eight times, producing that many identical exposures. Justin’s expression never changed even slightly – sunny and adorable in every one. When she pulled the camera away the real Justin seemed like a portrait, as well – an idealized version of a little boy. Even the surface of the lake in the distance seemed not to be moving.
“Stay there,” Barwick said. She adjusted the lens and took several close-ups of Justin’s face. She would offer these to Martha, but they were really for Gold Badge’s client. Through the lens, Justin looked surreal, hyperfocused. The horizon fell away around his blond curls. His smile was unwavering. His eyes, active and blue and deep, were like galaxies.
His eyes.
She pushed the camera aside. Justin was maybe fifteen feet away. Without the camera his eyes were like many others – heavy-lidded dots in a boy’s tiny head. Through the lens, though, they were intimate. Seductive. Familiar.
They were the eyes that romanced her in dreams. The eyes Eric Lundquist wore when he came to her as Justin. She looked through the eyepiece again, turning the zoom until only Justin’s jewel-like right iris filled the frame. These were not a seven-year-old’s eyes.
She took a picture of his eye. This one for herself.
Hours later, with Justin on a playdate, across a wrought-iron table at a Northwood wine bar, Martha said, “It’s lovely having a friend I can call for this.”
“I like coming up here,” Barwick said. Noting that this was a nice place in a wealthy town, not the Wild Hare, a reggae bar on Clark Street where she spent most of her free evenings, she tried not to gulp the twelve-dollar glass of Oregon Pinot Noir Martha had ordered for her, and measured the meniscus of her glass against Martha’s every few minutes. “Justin’s a great kid.”
Martha demurred with a gracious smile and an uncertain squint. “Yeah. Gosh. Yeah, he is. I think he’s got a crush on you.” Sally flushed. “He’s got a good heart, you know. Last week, I was making dinner and he just, you know, he just started setting the table. All by himself. Without me asking. It was so cute. At this age, he wants my approval so much.”
“That’s great,” Barwick said.
“And he’s so smart. Ninety-ninth percentile on all the tests.” She blushed, the percentile scale being such an inflated and meaningless cliche (but irresistible nonetheless). “He has little moments, of course.”
“Yeah? Like all kids, I imagine.”
“Like all kids. Right. That’s what I mean. You know, he uses bad language sometimes.”
Barwick grunted. “Oh. Well. Shit.”
Martha spasmed, choking wine back into her glass. “God, Sally, you make me laugh. I don’t have friends like you up here. I mean, I have friends, but not like I used to. Not the kind of friends I used to have in the city.”
“What happened to your old friends?”
“Eh. You move. You get married. You have a kid.” Martha took a long sip. “You have a kid and it becomes hard. When you’re single you can drop everything. You’re flexible. If you live in the city, even after you’re married, you can still make dinner or a play or a last-minute happy hour on a whim. When you have a child it’s harder. Impossible, in fact. Most of the time friends don’t even call, and you know what? You’re glad when they don’t ’cause you’re so goddamn tired.”
“Yeah,” Barwick said, although she really had no idea. She curled her fingers around the thin crystal stem – her smallest opposite the others, it and her ring finger forming a dull scissors. A pretty young couple about her age sat at a nearby table and leaned their heads close above their glasses, whispering things too private for Sally to hear. Barwick usually felt superior to twenty-somethings who lived in the suburbs. Not today.
“And kids. Lordy.” Martha took another sip, bringing the level in her glass below Barwick’s. “Were you ever in trouble, Sally? When you were little?”
“Oh God, yes,” Sally said. “I was a terrible kid. Really drawn to the bad boys, you know? In tenth grade, I was suspended for six weeks. I was almost expelled, but my parents got me back in somehow.”
Martha made a shocked circle with her lips, indicating that she found this gossip both delightful and scandalous. “Really? What did you do?”
“It was stupid. Some friends of mine and I had sat at the same table at lunch for two years and we were determined that no one else would sit at it when we moved to the other campus as juniors. So we broke into the school on a Saturday, stole it, and drove it in this guy’s truck to the Indiana Dunes, where we got drunk and smashed it to bits with shovels and hammers. The cops showed up and we were arrested and because the theft was committed on school property, they weren’t going to let us come back.”
“Doesn’t sound like such a big deal.”
“Like I said. Stupid.”
“I was such a Goody Two-Shoes,” Martha said. “Never in trouble. Student council. Yearbook.” She rolled her eyes. “That’s why I’m so nervous about Justin, I’m sure. When people don’t follow the rules, it makes me very anxious.” She paused. “Justin’s been setting fires. Nothing big. No damage yet. He keeps finding matches. Lighting candles. He lit a bunch of newspapers in the fireplace.”
“A little scary.”
“He’s been stealing from me, too. I find jewelry in his room. You say something and he just says he’s sorry. Does it again.” She took a long breath and disposed of it in a long sigh. “It’s so bad that I start to get paranoid. The neighbor’s dog dies and I wonder if he didn’t have something to do with it.” She laughed to shake the horror from the thought.
“The neighbor’s dog?”
“You read where serial killers, when they’re young, like to set fires, torture animals, that sort of thing. I mean, I know Justin didn’t, really. I’m sure he didn’t. There are just those moments in the middle of the night when you can’t think about anything but the worst things possible. Terry tells me I’m being paranoid. He says all boys are fascinated by fire. On the other hand, I think Terry’s less concerned about Justin stealing jewelry than whether he might be gay.”
“Yeah.”
“Of course, Terry’s a whole other problem.”
Unsure whether Martha wanted her to ask about Terry or not, Sally chose to say nothing.
“I’m sorry to talk so much about him…”
“About Terry?”
“No, Justin.”
“Not at all.”
“Terry just doesn’t want to hear how much I’ve been thinking about it.”
The second mention is deliberate, Barwick thought. “Men don’t like to think too much about anything, in my experience.”
“I even dream about Justin,” Martha said. “Horrible, violent nightmares. I mean, what sort of mother am I that I can imagine my son doing such terrible things?”
“You’re just concerned. The way you should be. Parents are supposed to worry. Worried parents are critical to the survival of the species.”
“You’re sweet, Sally.” Martha paused, as if she might change the subject. Then she did. Sort of. “So what do you dream about?”
Barwick put a startled palm to her sternum, like she was trying to shut a damper in there on heartburn. She wished Martha could see the older Justin – handsome, confident, and wise – who came to her at night. “What do I dream about?” Barwick repeated. “Boys,” she said.