She started in Building 9, in Finishing, after high school. She was seventeen then. And later, just as they began furloughing everyone, she was in the Accumulator. She was almost twenty then. The pay was good; she’d save for school, that’s what she thought. Or meet someone, get married, raise a family. A family would be nice.

          Mother. Around town, they called the factory Mother. Mother had a hundred divisions. Sometimes, when Yvette came home after a shift, her breath smelled like metal. Smelled like the opaque white plumes from the incinerators and the agitating spaces. She’d brush her teeth, she’d eat, but still, yeah, the taste and that smell, they were still there, deep and diffuse behind her nose and eyes.

          Then the lawsuit shut it all down and she was furloughed with mostly everyone else. Except for some of the executives and lawyers. The last ones standing. But really, by then—standing on what? The lawsuit mentioned the factory’s campus by the river. She’d always thought it was a weird word, campus. The empty old red buildings, black ash streaked on their brick, the opaque white plumes—what the lawsuit called Brownfield, the dichloromethane and methylene chloride spilled: their iridescent rainbows churning on the surface of the Genesee River. Then came the warnings on tall chain-link fences, red slashed signs, arch-black No Trespassing where now a strange fertile wilderness had grown blasting out the fences as if desperate to prove that, in fact, life was still possible here. At night, you drove by and the signs’ reflections darted out of the lush dark in bursts of light, like they’d been caught, like they were the trespassers.

          But she moved on. She was young. She got a job at a photo lab. She knew a lot about film from working at the plant, substrates, emulsions, odd words. Everyone in Mother knew the words. But she was young, and the owner of the photo lab said she had a nice smile, a customer service smile.

          She met Michael one night at the Blue Room. And later, when they went back to his place, he took a couple of photos of her with his big wooden camera. She told him she knew a thing about film. She named some of the stock she’d worked on. You were at Mother? he said. Yeah, and now I’m here, she said, sitting there in front of him, staring into the big brass lens of his 8 × 10.

          He shot weddings, he said: For the money. I don’t use this camera. This is a Deardorff. This is for art. I like the weddings, though. The work. It’s nice to see the people so happy. Just starting off, the couples. It’s pretty high pressure, he said. Ready?

          And she looked deeply into where she imagined his eye was.

          Just a bit to the left, he said. Yes, perfect. Some people give off a light, he said. You do.

          She liked the idea of dating an artist.

          But don’t smile, he said. He squeezed this rubber bulb and she heard the shutter, like scissors, snip the light.

They were married now. Her condition wasn’t as bad as some of the others, not exactly. She reminded herself of this, that there was a percentage in her margins. They just needed to pass through this. That was all. And she had him, she had Michael.

          Michael, who took these pictures of her every day, now. Who did his own developing in the darkroom-slash-basement. Prints pinned with safety clips to a line above the wall. The film he used, she remembered it, the substrate, the markings on the bins, though now they made the films in another country. She remembered grains of cellulose compound cascading, tumbling into a hopper, hissing in the bath.

          The first sonogram with the solid mass was so small. It could have been anything. But when she got through all of this, she would get pregnant. Try to. She hadn’t told Mike about that part. But yeah, it was going to happen. She’d be a mother, and they would start a family.

          He had found a decent bed at Goodwill for the living room. For the daytime anyway, during the chemo courses. One week on, three weeks to recuperate. She was fine enough to walk and get around most of the time, except for certain days after the course had built up when it pulled her closer to the teeth of what they were trying to kill. But now she could rest down here when she felt bad. Then, at night, he carried her up the stairs, they passed through the bedroom threshold, and he set her down like a baby. He pulled the pillows into some order. That one on her side, this one under her legs, the sheets now, the blanket—on or off? How’s that? You good? he said. And already, sometimes, she’d be asleep.

          The cisplatin and etoposide made her dreams rude. She lay in the cot he’d bought and put in the living room. Sometimes she imagined herself as she appeared on the back etched glass in Michael’s old camera—hovering reversed and upside down. Six feet above. Her sleeping figure facing down from the ceiling. Her overturned legs tangled in the thin blue microfiber blanket she kicked in dreams. On the glass plate of his camera, kicking away her body’s unfinished rage. Kicking below, kicking from six feet above.

          She was still young. She had been thinking about having kids. When she came out of all of this. Michael, he’d be such a good dad. All the pictures he’d take, all the frozen memories they could look at later.

Sometimes, he used a Packard shutter with the rubber bulb, but lately, he’d been using a hat to cover the lens when he wanted to stop the exposure. Pulled it away and counted, One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand . . . . The long exposures blurred the rise and fall of her skeletal breath in smooth liquid increments. He’d leave the sheet in and later take another exposure over it. The old mahogany Deardorff 8 × 10 pointed at the bed. It looked like a primitive ray gun in the middle of the living room. The lens was an old brass-barreled Petzval from the 1800s, a Dallmeyer 3D, super sharp in the center with a wild chaotic blur swarming the outer edges. The iterations of her illuminated body with each exposure layering on the film so that by the fifth or sixth exposure, she began to look as if a shroud of silk scarves were coursing a halo around her.

          You’d see that downstairs in the basement, under the safelight, the Pyro developer and Dektol for the prints. They made the grain sharp and raw even as the aura on the paper bloomed beneath him. He fixed each like this, fixed each like a dream he could make substantial and durable, then hung it on the wall to dry.

He was driving home from a wedding last week. It was pretty late and he was very tired, as he always was after jobs like these with so much responsibility, so many things that could go wrong, so many missed shots. He drove in the dark. The road was empty in the headlights. The clouds were bright, cutting through the moon and he instinctually took a reading in his mind about the light. On a tripod, maybe a 20-second bulb exposure would capture it. You didn’t want to blow out the moon, but you didn’t want to lose the texture in the clouds. He had a song stuck in his head. It was from the wedding band. It was by that singer, that band, the one he knew all about but couldn’t think of the name of the band or the title. These things he didn’t know were swimming in his head. He was driving pretty fast. He kept thinking, what is that song.

          That’s when the car hit it, a solid cracking thump—big, but soft and hard at once. The thump’s fraction of a second cascaded rippling under the floor of the car and then the car went smooth. He was braking. He hadn’t seen anything run up, had seen nothing in the road. He pulled over. How quickly everything could change. Every second, a chance was being taken, and most of it, you never saw until chance decided you should. This was what he was thinking.

          He walked down the road, glancing over the dark path. He walked far down, beyond where it would have happened. It could have been a dog. It felt big. He didn’t see anything. He came back to the car, and there he got down on his hands and knees. He looked beneath the car. He saw nothing.

          He drove the rest of the way home. Yvette had gone to bed, the one upstairs, in the bedroom. They were in the second week between courses, so she was in a decent place with the chemicals. The bed in the living room, when it was empty like this. It looked accidental, like something that had been blown down, misplaced by some natural disaster.

          He went upstairs. He stood in the doorway. He wanted to tell her about the shape, whatever it was, the thing he hit, or maybe didn’t. What he had felt but didn’t see. He watched her sleep. She began to move a little, kick. She said something. Not words so much as pieces of words. The moon cast on her face.

          You checked, he thought. You looked around. If you’d hit something important or terrible, wouldn’t you have seen it? And he turned from the room and went downstairs.

          The camera standing there in the living room, the shadowed clumsy contours of the empty bed. He slid out the film holder, passed through the kitchen, and at the top of the basement, he flicked on the safelight. He stepped into the dim red below. He passed the padlocked refrigerator and the meat freezer, the file cabinet of vellum-separated sheets of prints. He snapped open the film holder, lifted the sheet from it. He warmed the bath, and tested it with the thermometer, fine. He set the timer, slipped the sheet of film into the Dektol, and agitated it in the tray. Paused and agitated. He moved the sheet into the stop bath. He moved the sheet from bath to bath, holding it in each—the fixer, the hypo-clear—according to the timer and watched her image on the celluloid clarify. The negative of his wife, her image waking slowly under the red cast of the safelight bulb on the wall.

          In the hypo-clear, he noticed it. A shape in the negative. Like the shape of a stranger. It stood there in the developed image. Beside the bed, hovering over Yvette. But how? He heard footsteps cross the floor above—Yvette had come down to the kitchen for tea or some instant soup, a glass of water. The shape in the negative could be explained. A light leak from the Deardorff’s bellows, some kind of flare had seeped in through a pinhole in one of the accordioned corners. He safety-clipped the developed negative up to the stringed line where there hung several other sheets, their light reversed so that dark was light and light was dark, all bearing the same image more or less.

          But the exception, here—the new one with the shape standing there beside his wife. He took it down from the line and threw it away.

She heard someone whispering over the hum of the air cleaner. A prayer or an incantation, maybe. She thought it was the radio, some odd signal rubbing and leaking out. For a moment, she didn’t realize that it was her own voice. It was stress, that was all. There was another CT scan coming up. They were both stressed out.

          Here was what she kept telling herself: that even low odds, percentages, meant Hope. It wasn’t hopeless, it wasn’t incurable. Incurable erased all the odds, but the doctors had never said that. They still had numbers for her. Here’s another thing she was thinking a lot about: that clouds covering the sun and the blue sky didn’t mean there was no longer a sun or sky. The clouds passed. The sky and the sun would always be there, above. Her eyes were closed. She was thinking of these beautiful clouds passing over, nearly glowing. The whispering voice had stopped.

          What bothered her most about the idea of dying wasn’t so much that you left everything. So what was it? She’d thought about it, and it—what bothered her, what terrified her really—was the idea of losing all of your memories. The memories gathered like a sea of people and things that had happened. That every single moment and person that had ever happened to you left, too. It seemed like the greatest loss, the only loss, really, because there were so many other people living in these strands of your past, going with you, folding under the covers of time. And she saw that every moment, now, was a possible good memory. She was glad there were odds. That the light was in her favor. Every moment was a memory as soon as it had passed. And you could look back and say, Oh God, wow, remember that? And she whispered what she was learning never to take for granted: These are the good old days.

It returned, the strange aberration of light, appearing now on other negatives, and in different places. And it was hard to understand because if it was a light leak in the bellows—the halo, whatever it was, now showing in different parts of the frame. The camera hadn’t moved, and the position of the leak wouldn’t move. It didn’t make sense.

          The white shape. As if standing over her body. A strange, pure, and dense white. Like a plume, that’s what he thought. He heard her voice upstairs, through the ceiling where the floor of the kitchen was. She was awake now. He couldn’t make out the words, just a murmured rise and fall. Through the floor, she was singing a song that was familiar, but he couldn’t quite name it.

Michael had a wedding tonight, though he said he might be back early. How are you? he asked, and she said, I’m fine, I’ll be fine. She didn’t want him to think she wasn’t. I mean, you couldn’t just cancel a wedding. But in truth, she was a little worried that she wasn’t fine. And the house was so still and quiet when he was gone. So dark that even when she turned on all the lights in the house, she sometimes couldn’t stop imagining that she was no longer there. That she was a spirit now.

          And tonight, after Michael left, this was what she was worried about. She felt it now, and she thought about taking all of the memories with her. She turned on all the lights. She breathed. She touched the bellows of the old camera in the middle of the living room, ran her finger along the accordioned black edges. She gently ran her finger over the feather in the hat, poised covering the lens. If the hat fell from the glass, it might ruin the film inside. It was all so precarious. Back in the Accumulator, there were sealed rooms, entire wings and hallways where the light was a deep infrared.

          She turned most of the lights back off, and the room felt like a home. She went upstairs.

          She was tired. She arranged the pillows, shook one that had gone flat out a bit, then set it back in the right place. She just needed to sleep, tonight. She lay there for a time and the whispering came. It was in the room or maybe coming from beyond the bedroom. It was her voice, again, her voice whispering. But her mouth was closed. She opened her mouth, closed it. Opened it again, closed it. The whispering continued. Shadow patterns from the trees out on the street danced through the window and played out on the wall above her. She closed her eyes and everything was quieter and then everything was gone.

          She was walking past Building 9. They hadn’t demolished it yet. But they had—she knew this. She passed through other buildings that were no longer there. Or maybe they were, but they probably weren’t called what they had been called. She recognized Building 50, but it had a plaque on it at the door that said YVETTE, and so she passed into it. The room was making the familiar noises she’d probably not remember so clearly if she were awake, chattering and a chemical hum. She was barefoot, wearing a paper gown, a hospital gown. She passed into an unfamiliar section of Building 50—there were trays of plastic beads to be melted down for substrate. A woman asked her to lie down on a pallet and she did. They administered an IV—contrast, saline. You’ll probably feel something warm enter you. It’s okay, the woman said. She rolled Yvette into the machine. The woman left the room. Now, Yvette saw her behind a glass observation wall. The machine was calming. It pulled her slowly in. She held her breath as the woman’s voice on the intercom told her to do. Now, let it out. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand. Okay, take a deep breath in, and hold—again.

          She passed out of the campus and was walking away from the factory buildings. It was dark out now, chilled. She was cold in the paper gown. She was embarrassed because the paper gown was open at the back and she wasn’t wearing anything under it. She worried that she couldn’t get home to Michael in time to put something else on before he saw her like this. It didn’t seem to matter that anyone else might see her because, at the moment, there didn’t seem to be anyone else. She had that abstract sense—that she had news to tell him, but just what it was she wasn’t sure of.

          Ahead were many parts of the burned-out city. At the river, she passed through one of the lots where the incinerators had been. She stepped through the weeds and brambles. The branches pulled at her paper gown and tore at it, but parts of it remained. She was by the banks of the Genesee. The water was gurgling and splashing and brown. Now she leaned over to the water, got on her knees.

          She pressed her hands into the muddy banks. She reached into a rainbow.

          There, she said. Now. As if something had been accomplished.

          She looked up and that’s when she saw it, the shape. A deep-black solid mass on the water. Standing, then wading toward her. When she lifted her hands from the mud, her imprints were a bright, luminous white. And in her mind she thought, Twins, and their light filled her with warmth.

The wedding tonight had all gone pretty well. He’d shot 20 rolls of 35 mm, but also, the 120 rolls had some good light behind them. The setting sun cast an autumn blue into the golden hour that complemented them all, made everything look cinematic. The bride and groom stood by the river where it opened up clean by the park on the shore of the country club. The backdrop of the skyline that hadn’t fallen. Nice smiles. He snuck in a couple of shots when their smiles shifted, and they were not smiling. These would be the real photographs, though he knew they wouldn’t choose them. People preferred the false smiles over the real expressions. This couple seemed so young to him today. He had shot many young couples, couples their same age. Why did this one seem so much younger? Just at the golden hour. Maybe it was just a mood he had. She’d been turning in her sleep a lot. Yvette. He hadn’t slept much.

          The wedding started early and finished by late afternoon. Maybe the couple had a flight to catch, or the families were of some quiet orthodoxy, and this had to do with the early hour, but Michael didn’t ask. The reception was outside at the country club. One ice sculpture was shaped like a motorcycle, another like a bear standing upright—some personal story. The band was decent. The cake shots were good, the dance was fine, and then he was done. He’d seen the sister of the bride or a cousin through an archway at the club strung with lights. They could be related, they could have been twins, really. She was pregnant, and through the arch, there was a small grass lot where she leaned against a wall with her hands pressed into it. Behind her was her husband. Mike didn’t know why he assumed they were married, except for the way he stood behind her like that. She pressed the wall with both hands, and he could hear, just barely, one of them moan. He had turned away almost as soon as he understood what he was seeing and left them alone.

          As he was packing up, the mother checked in. He let her know he’d have some proofs within the week. The father of the bride approached and handed him the check. And that was it.

          If only more weddings could go like this, he thought. It was one of those times when it was so easy you might wonder, What did I forget? While he was driving, he thought about this. He drove for a few minutes. He stopped by the river, pulled over. He got out. He felt anxious from the night. He didn’t know why he thought he’d forgotten something. They were so young and happy. They didn’t have any of the odds he and Yvette were dealing with. They were living in a state of no percentages, no need for certainties. Tonight, thankfully, nothing was telling them that something could go wrong. The evening had gone dark now. He was walking down to the water. There was a nice stone walkway here. It flooded when the waters swelled but you wouldn’t know that right now. It was just nice. He saw farther down by the shore something luminescent. He came closer and saw that it was a flashlight just sitting there lit. It freaked him out. Like it was a setup. He backed away. He got into the car and drove. He approached the spell of the road where he’d hit whatever he’d hit a couple of weeks ago, and that’s when he remembered it all, but nothing happened but this memory now, here, and he drove the rest of the way home.

There were a few sheets of film he’d develop before he went up to bed. But he wanted to check in on her. Upstairs, Yvette’s eyes were closed. Her breathing had gone beelike, her lungs push-pulling, a sound Michael hadn’t heard before, or not like this, not so pronounced. Her breath, as if rising from her body and passing through the threshold of the doorway, passed into him. Then it calmed. He came in and stood beside the bed. He poured a glass of water from the filtered decanter on the bed table.

          Hey, he said. Hey. Her breath hitched and calmed, but her sleep was deeper. He left the glass next to her paperback there. The room smelled like metal, the way breath can taste like metal. The cisplatin a chromium smell. Now, she was breathing just fine. She began dreaming again in little fits and kicks. He thought of an animal dreaming. He thought of the camera, of catching this with the camera. But there was always tomorrow. She would always dream.

          Out the bedroom window light from a street lamp caught in the vase of chrysanthemums by the bed. A figure like a crescent, a wiry hook, shone out of the glass onto the wall.

          The reflection began to tremble. Michael felt the tremor now in the floor, so faint he wouldn’t have noticed it had he not seen it animated in the strange slip of light reflected onto the wall. Then the reflection calmed. It was all of a moment. What was the magnitude? He thought he would remember this. He wanted to. He would. He pulled the curtains over the window, and in the withdrawn light, the reflected shape, now still, vanished.