Emma got up. She walked across the studio the way children walk through a house where someone is sick, carefully, as though the floor might register her weight. At the door to the back room she stopped and looked over her shoulder. Her father gave her a nod. Her mother did not look up. Calvin held the door for her and said something about the glass plates and the chemicals they used to use, how the old photographers had stained their fingers black, and then the door closed and his voice became a murmur, and then nothing.
The softboxes were still on. They hummed faintly. Natalie stood in their light and felt it on her skin like a hand.
"Natalie," Adam said. "Talk to me."
She walked to the monitor. She did it without deciding to. Her legs carried her there the way they had once carried her, at twenty, down a hospital corridor toward a room she did not want to enter. The monitor was still angled away from the bench, toward the wall, and she stood in front of it and looked.
It was exactly as she remembered, and it was nothing like she remembered, because memory had worn the image smooth, like a stone in a pocket, and the photograph had not been worn at all. Every detail was sharp. The girl was so young. That was the first thing, and it went into Natalie like a nail. Her face was rounder, her hair shorter and darker, cut to the jaw by a friend with kitchen scissors. There was a pimple on her chin that someone had not retouched. The sweater was too big in the shoulders. She was holding a newborn in a white hospital blanket, and her mouth was pressed into a line so straight it looked drawn with a ruler, and her eyes were down.
On her left stood a tall woman of about forty with a gray streak in her hair and a face so full of feeling it seemed almost indecent to look at. On her right stood a man in a corduroy jacket, balding, holding his own hands as if he did not know what else to do with them.
At the bottom of the screen, in the studio's filing software, a line of text: PRUETT, N. / HOLLIS — 08/14. Session note: no charge.