Chapter 2 — Seventy-Three Photos

Three weeks later, Maya knew these things about Daniel Ward:He took his coffee black. He'd lived in six cities in four years. He was thirty years old, a travel photographer whose work had appeared in magazines she'd actually read. He had a sister named Caroline in Portland who called him too often and he always answered. He could not, under any circumstances, correctly estimate how long anything would take. He once spent forty-five minutes in conversation with a stranger about the migratory patterns of Arctic terns.She knew these things because she kept showing up at Birch & Brew on Tuesdays and he kept being there. She had stopped examining whether this was coincidence.On this particular Tuesday, he was waiting for her with his laptop open."Can I show you something?" he asked before she'd even sat down."Hello to you too.""Hello." He turned the laptop to face her. "Can I show you something?"She laughed and sat. On the screen was a photograph — a market in Morocco, judging by the colours. Stall after stall of spices in terracotta bowls, a woman in blue laughing at something off-camera, a child reaching for a bright orange.It was extraordinary. Not because the composition was perfect, though it was — but because it felt like she could hear the noise of the place. Like the photograph had sound."This is yours?" she asked, though she already knew.He nodded, watching her face instead of the screen."It's incredible.""That one's from three years ago. Marrakesh." He scrolled. "This is Vietnam. The Mekong Delta." Another. "Iceland." Then: "Oaxaca. Cape Town. Kerala."She leaned forward. Each photograph was doing something different — the Iceland one was almost painfully quiet, all silver and white and a single fishing boat. The Kerala one was dense with green and gold. She spent the longest time on a photograph from somewhere she didn't recognize: a narrow street at dawn, blue-grey light, an old man sitting outside a closed bakery with a small dog, neither of them looking at the camera."Where is this?""Lisbon." He was quiet for a moment. "That man had been sitting there every morning for twenty years, he told me. His wife used to work at that bakery. She died four years before I met him. He still comes."Maya sat back. Something in her chest had gone quiet."How many photos do you have?""On this laptop? Seventy-three thousand, give or take.""And they're all like this?"He made a face. "God, no. Most of them are terrible. The ratio of good ones is embarrassing.""How many good ones?"He thought about it with the same seriousness he seemed to bring to everything. "Seventy-three."She looked at him. "Out of seventy-three thousand.""More or less."She should have thought that was absurd. Instead she thought: that is the most honest thing anyone has said to me in years.They stayed until the coffee shop closed, which was the first time that had happened. When they stepped outside, the evening was warm and smelled of the city after a long day."Walk?" he offered.She pulled out the red umbrella out of habit. The sky was clear."You don't need that," he said."I know." She held it anyway. "Habit."They walked. She told him about teaching art to eight-year-olds who drew the sky every colour except blue. He told her about a morning in Iceland where the Northern Lights appeared and his camera battery died and it was the best thing that ever happened to him."Why?" she asked."Because I just stood there and watched it. No lens between me and the thing itself." A pause. "Sometimes the best way to see something is to stop trying to capture it."She filed that away in the place where she kept things she wanted to remember.At the corner where their routes diverged, they stopped."Same time next week?" he asked.She said yes without hesitating.