Page 220 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

I sighed. It was true. Mamá would not allow such easy amends, and most

certainly not if it involved money.
Thalia rose to her feet and beat the dust from her behind. “Let me ask you, do
you have a box at home?”

Madaline was sipping wine with Mamá in the kitchen, and Thalia
and I were upstairs, using black markers on a shoe box. The shoe box belonged
to Madaline and contained a new pair of lime green leather pumps with high
heels, still wrapped in tissue paper.
“Where was she planning on wearing those?” I asked.
I could hear Madaline downstairs, talking about an acting class she had once
taken where the instructor had asked her, as an exercise, to pretend she was a
lizard sitting motionless on a rock. A swell of laughter—hers—followed.

We finished the second coat, and Thalia said we should put on a third, to
make sure we hadn’t missed any spots. The black had to be uniform and
flawless.
“That’s all a camera is,” she said, “a black box with a hole to let in the light
and something to absorb the light. Give me the needle.”
I passed her a sewing needle of Mamá’s. I was skeptical, to say the least,
about the prospects of this homemade camera, of it doing anything at all—a shoe
box and a needle? But Thalia had attacked the project with such faith and self-

assured confidence that I had to leave room for the unlikely possibility that it just
might work. She made me think she knew things I did not.
“I’ve made some calculations,” she said, carefully piercing the box with the
needle. “Without a lens, we can’t set the pinhole on the small face, the box is too
long. But the width is just about right. The key is to make the correct-sized
pinhole. I figure point-six millimeter, roughly. There. Now we need a shutter.”
Downstairs, Madaline’s voice had dropped to a low, urgent murmur. I
couldn’t hear what she was saying but I could tell that she was speaking more

slowly than before, enunciating well, and I pictured her leaning forward, elbows
on knees, making eye contact, not blinking. Over the years, I have come to know
this tone of voice intimately. When people speak this way, they’re likely
disclosing, revealing, confessing some catastrophe, beseeching the listener. It’s a
staple of the military’s casualty notification teams knocking on doors, lawyers
touting the merits of plea deals to clients, policemen stopping cars at 3 A.M.,