Page 97 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

Testing it, she raised her head and looked at the scene, just holding the camera. She still liked looking at the vividly blue wall, the pots placed just so against it, but the sense of quiet bled away. She ducked back into the camera, and there it was.

“Wow,” she said aloud, shaking her head. “I didn’t know it would feel so different to use a real camera.”

Henry smiled. “Now I want you to see how the depth of field works. Turn this and look at the difference in the background. It goes from being totally in focus to blurring out.”

“That is cool,” Mariah said, and shot several photos at different depths, then moved to a cactus against a tiled wall. She shot it in clear focus, the spines crisp, the background of the garden bed behind it blurring out. She turned the dial, made the background clear, changed it back to soft. Raised her head at different levels, and then found herself focusing on the square wall with the round edge of the pots.

“Good one,” Henry said.

She raised the camera to his face, his long chin, his thick eyebrows. He waited for her to click the shutter a few times, and then nudged her gently to focus on Veronica, who was kneeling with a tiger-striped cat beside a trio of giant cacti. She hadn’t bothered to do anything with her hair, and it was wavy, loose, shining. She held her hand out to the cat, who arched against her palm. Mariah took the photo.

And suddenly, she had a sense of herself now, shooting the photo, and sometime in the future, looking at the photo she’d just taken. She had a sense of time weaving over itself, both of those moments standing side by side, connected only by Mariah’s part in both. It made her a little dizzy, and she straightened.

If all of time folded over itself, the past and the future and the present touching at certain places, that meant her mother still existed somewhere, and in some places, Mariah wasn’t even born, and in somethreads, the unhappy boy who’d marched into the store that day was also somewhere before he did that terrible thing, and—

Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. Hand to her throat, she found herself suspended in a flashback of that moment, that singular moment when she knew but didn’t know what was happening, what that noise was. Hanging there, that moment, seeing her mom, standing beside her with an avocado in her hand, then not standing there and Mariah was eye level with her on the floor, the cool tile floor and there was so much blood—

“Ugh.” She reached for Henry, and he caught her arm.

“You’re okay,” he said. “Take a breath. In, out.”

She gripped his arm hard, but the scene didn’t leave her, and it was so loud, so present, that she squeezed her eyes closed, smelling oranges and something disgusting, coppery, so awful. Blood, which was under her face and there was something wrong with—

She slammed her hands over her ears, trying to get away from the roar in her head, curled her body protectively, feeling her shoulder bang against something hard. Time stopped, got lost, became something else, not minutes lining up in a row, but circling, folding, flashing memories, a blue box of macaroni and cheese on the floor, changing color as the cardboard soaked up blood, a visual of her foot at an impossible angle, the sudden recognition that her leg was exploding with pain, the hands of a person—what person?—tying a tourniquet made of a belt around her thigh.

Twisting, flashing, noise.

She came back to herself twisted up against the wall, the camera caught between her legs and belly, Mariah and Henry creating a human curtain to guard her from prying eyes.

“I’m okay,” she said.

They turned, each reaching out a hand to help her, but neither hand belonged to her mother, who had been holding an avocado, round and green. A blistering sense of anger rose through her. She slapped their hands away and stood, yanking Henry’s camera off her neck.“Leave me alone,” she growled, and stalked away. The blond woman with her braids had a selfie stick and was filming herself against the blue wall. “You’re a fucking idiot,” she said. “Put some clothes on, brush your hair.”

The woman lowered her phone and smirked. “Jealous much?”

Mariah started toward her, filled with a kind of violent lust that wanted to knock the woman down, break her phone, end her fatuousness spilling out into the world, distracting from all the things that were genuinely wrong, like—

A body caught her from behind, hard, and brought her up short. “Leave her,” Henry said. “Let’s go.” She tried to shake out of his grip, but he held her unmercifully hard, and he was a big man, a strong man.

“She’s a fucking idiot!” Mariah repeated.

Of course the woman turned the camera and filmed it, the tempest in the courtyard of the Jardin Majorelle, and Mariah roared with impotent rage. An official in a uniform approached them and spoke in quiet French, “Please come with me, mademoiselle.”

She would have broken free of Henry, gone back for the girl, since she was in trouble, anyway, but he didn’t ease up at all until they were outside the gates. “Sit down,” he said. “I’ll get a cab.”

The fight went out of her, and she sank down on a bench, trembling with the aftermath of her blinding rage. She bent her head into her hands. “Oh my God, what’s wrong with me?”

Veronica sat down beside her and offered a bottle of water. She said nothing. Mariah grabbed the bottle and chugged it, and the water cooled her throat, then her belly, and it radiated outward. After a minute, she raised her eyes. Veronica simply waited, her expression calm. “What’s wrong with me?” she asked again.

“You’re angry. With good reason.”

Mariah collapsed backward against the wall, a sense of helplessness welling in her eyes, her throat.

Veronica said, “I once had such a bout of rage that I ended up getting arrested.”

“You? Were you a teenager?”

“Nope.” She laughed a little. “It was less than two years ago.”