The Girl Next Door

Chapters 33-35

-33-

Emma worked feverishly the next two days, spending her daylight hours taking pictures, then working late into the night at George's editing and retouching the digital photos and churning out prints. Both Finn and George were excited as her work began to take shape, but Emma was just pushing through, doing what needed doing so she shouldn't let George down.

"There's no joy in it," Emma complained to Caro during their Wednesday night session.

"Joy will come," Caro promised. "For now, it's enough just to do the work, even if you feel like you're just going through the motions. There is comfort in activity, even if it feels rote. Maybe all the more so, actually."

She was right. Being busy was what Emma needed. Whenever she tried to settle down to sleep, or when she had a quiet moment in the truck or while waiting from prints to dry, her mind clamored with fear and anxiety, but so long as she was busy, she could focus. She could keep moving. If she stopped, she feared her anxieties would catch up and overwhelm her. She worried what would happen after the Festival. Without that project looming, how would she find the motivation to get out of bed?

****

Thursday, while Emma was at George's making prints, Finn knocked on Phoebe's door. He'd seen Gina, the mail carrier, deliver several packages that morning, and it was time to make sure his surprise was coming together.

Phoebe held open the door and waved toward a small collection of flat, cardboard wrapped packages in varying sizes, nearly a dozen in all.

"Not bad, considering you only had a few days to collect them," Phoebe noted, impressed.

"Have you opened them?"

She shook her head and went to the kitchen. She brought back a paring knife. "That honor is yours."

Finn had spent hours this week online, trying to track down former clients of Emma's photography business in Georgia. She'd had a website which she hadn't updated in months, but it had samples of photos from weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, family portraits, baptisms, and the like. The photos on the website were saved in small file sizes, and were watermarked with Emma's brand logo, so she couldn't have run new prints from the web photos. But the website had offered enough clues that he was able to track down several clients on social media platforms, and then he'd sent them urgent messages and emails explaining Emma's situation: how she'd lost her portfolio in a fire and was trying to rebuild it.

Finn implored these clients to send discs and thumb drives with digital copies of her work, and to consider sending any framed 8x10 or larger prints to be displayed at the Harvest Festival. These framed photos were on loan: Finn offered to pay shipping both ways, plus $50 per photo for the privilege of the loan. There were a lot of people he couldn't track down, and many to whom he'd reached out hadn't responded, but a handful of people had been happy to help.

The packages contained the requested portraits, discs, and thumb drives, as well as notes of encouragement praising Emma's work and wishing her well.

Finn and Phoebe lined the framed prints along the porch floor in a line, studying the images. The frames were mismatched, of course, but most were fairly minimalist: Finn thought Emma would be able to display them without the frames detracting from her work.

"She's really good," Phoebe noticed. "She's got a gift for capturing the emotion in the shot, while still keeping it natural."

Finn nodded in agreement. He'd seen a lot of Emma's landscapes and nature photographs, as that was what she'd been doing lately, but her portrait work was new to him. She'd mentioned that portraiture was the bread-and-butter of her business, and she'd worried that the lack of portraits was the main shortcoming of her show, which had inspired Finn to try to collect these for her. He didn't consider himself an art critic, and he had no objective sense of what made a picture 'good' or 'bad' over than his own subjective experience in viewing it, but he suspected Phoebe was onto something when she described these portraits as 'natural.' They didn't seem posed, the way wedding photos often did: no bridal party neatly arranged on the church steps, no bride and groom staging a kiss with perfect hair and makeup. Finn's favorite photo was of a couple in their wedding finery, kissing passionately in a soaking rain while the groom held his sodden suit jacket over their heads. The background was fuzzy, diffused by a dreary, green-grey light, but the couple was in sharp focus, and the raindrops around them were lit up like diamonds. They looked happy and beautiful and blissfully in love. It was raw. Sexy. Finn felt his pulse kick with lust, not for the people in the photo, but for the woman who had captured this moment on film.