Viewfinder

Liam’s heart was racing. He felt like he’d run a marathon, but all he’d done was stand there. “Do you have a chair? I need to sit,” he asked the store’s manager.

“Yeah… let me grab one from the back.” The manager disappeared into the backroom and reappeared toting a folding chair. He quickly stepped around the counter opening the chair.

Liam’s sister, Stacy, and the manager guided Liam into the chair, and he sat down, still next to the sales counter. His heart was still racing, tears in his eyes. His lips curled as if in pain, but it was joy.

“It worked,” he choked out after a minute.

Stacy leaned in close, hugging her big brother. Tears began to roll down her cheeks as well. “Really?”

“You’ve grown,” Liam grinned.

“Oh my God,” Stacy managed to get out before breaking down into Jim’s arms.

Liam had been born with a degenerative sight condition. Since he was small, he’d slowly been going blind. He could still see… but for the last decade, he couldn’t focus more than a couple of inches from his eye. It had gotten so close he could only use one eye at a time. Lenses and surgery weren’t able to correct it for him.

He was a year older than her, twenty-six. And she couldn’t remember a time when he could really see. As she thought about it, he’d worn goggles or blacked out glasses as long as she could remember. When he took them off, opening his eyes gave him severe headaches. He had such beautiful eyes, she thought.

They fought just like any other brother and sister, but when it mattered, they were there for each other. And for the last few years, they’d had to be. First, the group home Liam had been living in had been closed. Then came the loss of their parents to a drunk driver. Finally, to top it off, Stacy and her fiancé had broken off their engagement days before the wedding. That had been a year before. But this was a victory.

“Can I rent a camera?” Stacy asked. “I want to know how well this works in the real world. We don’t have a lot of money and…”

“Technically, no,” Jim, the camera store manager responded, his statement sounding more like a question the way he said it. “But let me see what I can do. Can you come back in tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Liam said quickly… so fast that Jim had barely finished asking. He turned to his sister, “Please? Anything.”

“Sure,” Stacy said a moment later. “Is there a particular time?”

“I’ll be here all day. So… anytime.”

“Thank you,” Liam said, reaching out to shake Jim’s hand, not sure exactly where it would be.

Jim grasped Liam’s hand and shook it confidently. Stacy smiled at them both.

“Great, we’ll be here around eleven,” she said.

***

Liam tossed and turned all night. He was excited, nervous and restless. It had been so long. Would it work? That question plagued him. Finally, the alarm next to his bed sounded. He reached over and tapped it off. He rolled from under the sheets and started getting ready for his day.

When Stacy made it to the kitchen, there was toast, oatmeal and juice on the table. He didn’t have a deep collection of things he could cook, but he had a few. Cooking breakfast had allowed him to escape for a few minutes from the hopes and fears of what he was about to find out. After breakfast, Stacy read a few pieces of news from the paper to him, Liam doing his best to pay attention, but his mind was elsewhere. He fidgeted.

“I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t say we would go there at seven this evening… you’d go crazy before then,” Stacy joked.

The joke broke the tension, and Liam started to laugh. It only took a few moments for the laugh to turn to tears, not of joy, but of fear. Stacy moved over to the couch next to him to hold him and comfort him as he broke down. All night, it had been the same for him. What if it doesn’t really work? What if it only worked in the camera store, but outside, when things were farther away… She grabbed a tissue for him. Then one for herself.

“I want to marry you, but not your brother, too,” Chad had told her. “We don’t need a burden as we start our lives together. He wasn’t an issue when your parents were around, but since…”

Stacy had stood up in the restaurant and walked out the door. He’d driven, so she was stuck, a cold rain falling beyond the canopy she stood under. She didn’t even want to go back inside to use a phone to call a cab. Instead, she stood there. A few minutes later Chad emerged, and she let him drive her home.

“Look, maybe we can find another group home for him,” he’d said as they pulled up outside the small house.

“No. I don’t think that is anything you need to worry about,” she’d said, stepping from the car and walking into the house.

Inside, Liam had felt the tension and unease the moment his sister stepped through the door. But he’d never questioned her, and never brought it up. What he did was hug her and let her know he was there.

She wanted to resent him, but couldn’t.

Eventually, she came to grips with all that had happened. Chad was an ass, and she was better off without him. But she also learned that not only did her brother have a well of strength that seemed inexhaustible, but that she did too.

As they sat together on the couch, both wiping away their tears, she realized for the first time how close her brother was to plumbing the depth of his ability to shrug off setbacks. He’d been a rock through losing his home and their parents. He’d been her rock when she lost her fiancé. But he wasn’t made of granite, and she was concerned how he would react if this didn’t work.

She needed to be his rock.

***

Jim slung the bag onto the counter. He pulled out a small point and shoot camera and placed it in Liam’s hand. He guided the other man’s hand to the grip to hold it, then showed him where each of the buttons were as he explained their function. Stacy watched over the two of them interacting, both enjoying how rapt her brother’s attention was, and doing her best to absorb all of the information he was giving.

“Do you have a manual for the camera?” she asked.

“Maybe somewhere in my apartment, but I don’t remember where. I looked for it last night for a couple of hours.”

“Wait… is this your personal camera?” Liam asked.

“Yeah, it’s one of mine.”

“Jim, I really appreciate that,” Stacy started.

Jim interrupted, “Look, I have a bunch of cameras. I haven’t used this one in a while.” That wasn’t actually true. It was his favorite point and shoot camera. But it also had a beautiful viewfinder, and he really thought it might be perfect for Liam.

“Stacy,” Liam said, almost shouting with excitement, “this is amazing. Even better than the one yesterday.”

She leaned across the counter and hugged Jim. “Thank you,” she whispered in his ear.

“I have something else for you,” Jim said, reaching under the counter and pulling out a box wrapped in brown paper, twine wrapped around it and tied in a bow.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“It’s really for Liam,” Jim smiled, pushing the package into the other man’s hands as he set the camera on the counter.

He felt around it before pulling the string, releasing the twine. A moment later, he picked up one of the cannisters with film in it that filled the box.

“I called a friend of mine at corporate and got permission to give you a few rolls of film to start with. When you are done with it, bring it back and we’ll process it for you.”

Liam’s eyes started to tear up again as he put his hand out to shake Jim’s. As soon as he had his hand in a firm grip, Liam pulled Jim in and hugged him, overcome by the generosity. “Thank you, Jim. You really don’t know what this means to me,” he said quietly, struggling for the words.

“I can’t wait to see the pictures,” Jim said before they packed everything up.

***

It had been almost two weeks since Jim had seen Stacy and Liam. He hadn’t forgotten about them, and while he was worried about his camera, it wasn’t at the top of his mind as he walked into the store late in the morning after a couple of days off.

As soon as he stepped behind the counter, he felt something odd. His sales guy took off almost immediately to have a morning break, but the girl working the lab was uncharacteristically quiet. Normally, she carried on a conversation through her entire shift, unless whomever was working with her was directly involved with a customer. But today, she leaned forward, her head against the printer, concentrating on work.

“Hey, Julie, what’s going on?” he asked.

Quietly she replied, “That guy and his sister came in last night. I’m printing his pictures.”

“Any good?” he asked, not expecting much.

That was when he saw that she was almost in tears. “They are so… raw. They’re beautiful. Emotional. It’s amazing.”

Jim walked over and picked up a stack from the sorter on top of the printer. He skimmed through, doing the normal checks for images that they wouldn’t charge. The roll he picked up had been shot at dinner. Just a dinner at home with his sister. The first twenty pictures were of her, a few with food mixed in. He was amazed by the joy that filled them. Her warm smile. The way she looked when she laughed.

The next roll was a walk in the woods. There were more pictures of his sister, but he was drawn into the story of the walk, the small creek that ran next to the trail. There were half a dozen pictures of a little waterfall, not more than a foot tall. It was something that he’d have walked by without thought, and Liam had laid on the ground and explored it. Roll after roll was the same. Things that everyone else took for granted were like new experiences to him.

That afternoon, Liam and his sister walked into the store. He grabbed the pile of envelopes and laid them out on the counter. Liam clumsily picked one up and opened it. He pulled out a picture and held it to his face. He closed one eye and held the picture no more than a couple of inches from the other, then switched.

“How were the pictures?” Stacy asked, excitement bubbling under the surface. She thought they would be terrible. He brother had wanted to stop at every little thing, thinking it more amazing and wonderful than the last.

“I’ve never seen anything so impactful. Liam, I wish I could take pictures like this,” Jim said.

“They can’t be that good,” Liam laughed.

***

Jim had his arm around Stacy’s waist, Liam holding her arm as they walked through the gallery. They quietly walked into the display room. Liam sat on a bench as Jim and Stacy walked around, looking at Liam’s prints. There was a murmur around the room. They watched as the crowd judged the pictures, and Liam, and the images were sold one by one.

“Will there be more prints released?” a woman asked.

“Now do you believe me, Liam?” Jim whispered.

This was the third in the Summer Fiction Series challenge. Check out #4 below.

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