Page 8 of My Darling Girls

The white wagon. The white horse. The girl.

Millie.

When called, come.

Whispers

Her first instinct is to flee this room, this house. Never come back. Never look back.

Of course, she will do no such thing. She’ll stay and earn the twenty dollars that lie like a brick in her pocket. The desire—no, the need—to know more about the girl stirs. Right until this moment, Jo was convinced her mind had conjured the girl in the courtyard. She meant nothing and she was nothing, just a figment of Jo’s warped imagination. But as soon as the bedroom door, an entryway to the unknown, opened, she realized how wrong she was.

“Jo.” Finn looks at her from inside the room, a hint of surprise in his eyes. “Are you coming in?”

She nods, her neck stiff, bones creaking. Standing in the door, wondering about the courtyard, about the girl, is doing her no favors. And so, Jo forces herself to take a step inside the room before she second-guesses herself. One foot in front of the other. One step. Then another. The money in her pocket weighs her down, slows her down. Her steps are awkward, unbalanced. She will focus not on the girl but on the work itself.

Composition—the bed in the middle of the room; the subject in the middle of the bed, a mountain of pillows. A bit crowded to fit it within her Kodak’s frame. But she will have to make it work.

Lighting—dim, with a bit of depth from the shadows but no real dimension. Long shadows stretch across the floor, the bed, and the subject’s face. The candles that are set in all four corners of the room are not bright enough to illuminate the girl. If anything, the candlelight makes Millie look like a doll rather than human.

Finally, timing. Not much can be done with timing. She cannot wait for daylight. Death doesn’t wait for camera shutters to click or for Jo to find better exposure, to subdue the whiteness of the room. Rot will soon set in. She must do her work now.

“I need more light,” Jo says, walking around the bed. “I need lamps to be placed by the head of the bed.”

“No.” Finn’s sister shakes her head. “We can bring more candles but no other light. Her soul must be free to roam in the house. Millie must say her goodbyes.” She regards Jo with a sharp focus. A deep line—like a Chicago river ditch—has formed between her eyebrows. “Too much light will scare her.”

Pinching her lips, Jo stares at the face of the dead girl, forcing her building frustration deeper into her core. Millie’s soul is wandering throughout the house? What nonsense is this? But is it really nonsense? She saw the girl in the courtyard. Millie talked to her.

When called, come.

Jo’s pulse quickens. No, some things cannot be real. Her memory of the girl in her dream must be tainted by the dead girl in front of her. By the superstitious ramblings of the grieving mother. Some things are a product of a broken mind.

A shadow moves in the corner of her eye, and Jo whips around. Her wide-eyed reflection in the darkened window stares back at her. She must be hazy from opium still. Terrified from what she witnessed just moments ago. The thought echoes and rolls around in her mind.

“More candles, then. I need as much light around Millie’s face as possible, or she’ll look . . .” Jo assesses her choice of words. “Unnatural. And I want her to look pretty. Like you asked.” She wants Millie to look less dead. But it’s not something she should say to a grieving mother.

Finn studies her closely as she speaks.

“I see.” Gertrude’s voice is emotionless. There is no sadness in it, no confusion. Just an agreement.

“You think you can make her look alive?” Finn asks. “I’ve seen pictures of the dead before. You can tell they’re dead from miles away.”

The weight of his words is almost tangible in its heaviness. Almost physical. She brought her Kodak to the morgue when the police asked her to identify August. She was so distraught by the state of his body, by the whispers of policemen, their lingering looks, assessing the sanity of her mind, she never managed to capture his face the way she wanted. In all the photos she took, August looked very much dead. A part of his face rotted away. The half-closed mouth a black cavern. The peeling skin around his nose, the white bones. It was not her August. It was a monster.

Her chest tightens, and before she realizes it, she walks over to Millie, to the side of the bed. She gently touches the girl’s face, so shockingly white against the shadows. Her fingers brush over dark curls on Millie’s forehead.

“Have you ever seen painterly images?” Jo asks softly, addressing no one in particular. “They’re still photos, but if I add some watercolor pigment when developing prints, it will look more like a drawing and less like a photo. It will make Millie’s face softer. She’ll look more alive.” Jo will make death look warm and bright and peaceful. “I’d add some red ochre to the emulsion. To allow for her features to fade away softly. Do you think you’d like that?”

No one replies.

The people in this room don’t really know or care about her technique. “What I’m trying to say is that I need more light in here to make Millie look her best.”

“If you can make Millie look alive and beautiful, I’ll get you more candles,” Gertrude says, her voice hoarse. She waves at Jo abstractly, a bit agitated but mostly sad, and leaves the room.

“Where did you learn all of this?” Finn pauses just long enough to shove his hands into his pants pockets. “I’ve never heard about painterly photographic prints.”

So he was listening, after all. “In Paris.” She couldn’t get into any art academy in this country, and, if not for August, she wouldn’t have had a chance to study art altogether. She was twenty years old when they got married, and August—whose dream was to move to France and study art alongside Monet—swept her away to the foreign country where life was so much brighter, so much more colorful. It was August’s idea to get Jo enrolled in the Académie Julian, the Parisian art school for women. They spent two years in Paris—surrounded by raucous artists, staying in furnished lodgings, and drinking wine in the cabarets of Montmartre—but had to move back to Chicago when August’s father passed away. “I learned a lot there.” And not just about photography. August expanded her world. Showed her what her life could really be like. He set no limits for her. No judgment.

The Paris memories don’t feel like hers anymore. They seem to belong to a young girl, one who never lost her husband, one who never found her way to an opium den. One who was blessed in her ignorance.