Pictures of You (34 page)

One day, Sam was staring out at the front window when he noticed a cat sunning itself on the sidewalk, and he couldn’t help it; like instinct, he drew his hands up and framed a shot. He made a clicking sound with his tongue, like the snap of a camera, and suddenly, he knew what he wanted to do that day.

He went to the hall closet and rummaged behind the winter coats, separating them until he saw the shelf. There it was. The Canon, glinting out at him, and behind it was the zoom lens Isabelle had given him. He pulled them both out. There was a fresh
roll of film in the camera, and he took off the old lens and fit the new one on easily. It was just a camera. Just glass and metal and mirrors and shutters. All the magic of it was gone. If he wanted, he could take the camera and take pictures again. He could become a famous photographer and then Isabelle might see his photos and wish she had been kinder to him. Looking at his photos, she would see all that she was missing.

Sam held up the camera and went out onto the front porch. He must have taken pictures of this road a thousand times, but now, with the new lens, everything looked different, bigger somehow and more important. He pointed the camera at the cat, which was still lazily lolling on the sidewalk. As soon as he took the picture, he felt something spark inside of him. All that afternoon, Sam took shots of the neighborhood. He snapped the park where Isabelle loved to walk, the gourmet grocery where she’d sometimes bought them yogurt-covered raisins to share, and the beach where he had taught her how to skip stones. He used up almost the entire roll of film. When his father came home, Sam was sitting on the front porch, waiting with the camera. “You’re taking pictures again!” his dad said, brightening. Just to prove how happy his dad was without Isabelle, Sam lifted up the camera to his eye and took his father’s picture. “Got you,” Sam said, and for the first time in weeks, his father smiled.

The next day, Sam was in the park with his camera, trying to frame a shot of kids on the swing sets, when he felt a little wheezy. He didn’t want to stop to get his inhaler, to miss the shot, so he snapped it, and to his surprise, as soon as he did, his lungs seemed to clear. How could this be? He took another shot of the swings, and then of the trees bordering the park, and the more pictures he took, the easier his breathing became.

He watched kids playing basketball on one of the courts and took a photo of them, too. He had never been able to play with other kids, running like that, jumping so high, not without wheezing so hard he had to go to the school nurse, not without the other
kids mocking him, clutching their chests dramatically and making little gasping noises. He kept thinking about what it would be like to move so fast, so freely, and he began to walk really fast toward home, and then he was running, the camera banging against his chest, his arms pumping.

His lungs stayed clear and he ran a little faster, exhilarated by the way the houses seemed to be smearing past him. When he got to his house, he felt buoyant. He had run all this way without wheezing! He was so excited, he laughed out loud.

Sam didn’t know whether he should be exhilarated or terrified, but he kept his seemingly asthma-free existence to himself, studying his breathing the way a scientist would. He wasn’t a total fool. He took his Pulmicort inhaled steroid every morning, sucking out the powder, waiting for his heart to race, which meant it was working. He popped a theophylline tablet even though he hated how jittery it made him feel. He still carried his rescue inhaler in his pocket just in case.

Every day Sam carried the camera, he seemed to get better. His photographs got better, too, sharper and richer. On his birthday, his dad took him to Aruba, and when he developed those shots, they were so good, he put them in a special album.

One day, Sam stopped taking his Pulmicort. When he had gone a week without once using any medicines, when he was sleeping through the night and waking with clear lungs, he was certain that something had happened to him that couldn’t be taken away, sure that it was some kind of miracle. He dumped his pills out so his dad wouldn’t know he wasn’t taking them. He let his dad go get the refills, too. It was September, right before school started, when he finally told his dad that he had stopped taking his meds.

Charlie stood completely still. “That’s not a good idea,” he said.

It didn’t do any good to argue with his father, to tell him he didn’t need the medicine anymore. Sam knew his father was remembering all the times they had had to rush him to the ER, the
times he had gotten so sick he had to sleep at the hospital. “That was then, this is now,” Sam insisted.

“We can’t be sure of that.” Charlie rubbed his temple.

“Yes, we can! I’m the proof!” Sam insisted.

Charlie looked thoughtfully at Sam. “Okay, look,” he said. “Let’s do this. I want you to go see Pete, tell him what you told me. You do that and then I’ll relax.”

Pete, the same pulmonologist he’d had since he was a baby, frowned when Sam told him he hadn’t taken meds in months, hadn’t even felt a tightness in his lungs, let alone a wheeze. He made Sam take a lung function test, clipping Sam’s nose, making him breathe into a special and complicated machine.

“I don’t think I need to come here anymore,” Sam said proudly.

“When did you go to medical school?” Pete said. “Let’s take a listen.”

The stethoscope was warm. Pete tapped Sam’s chest and then listened. Sam was exhilarated, the way he was when he took a math exam and knew he had just aced it. “Gone, right?” Sam said.

“Get dressed, come into my office, and we’ll all talk,” Pete told him.

Sitting in Pete’s office, his dad beside him on the leather sofa, Sam smiled expectantly.

Pete tapped his pen. “Your asthma’s not gone,” Pete told him, folding his arms across his chest. “That’s the thing with asthma. Even if you don’t see it, it’s still there. It’s in the structure of your lungs, which, whether you know it or not, are damaged. You think you’re breathing just fine, but the machine tells us something different.” He pushed a piece of paper across the desk at Sam and tapped his pen on the sloping lines. “See? The blue line is normal, the red line is yours. They don’t quite match up.”

“I grew out of my asthma,” Sam said.

Pete waved his hand. “Well, that can happen, but usually to kids who aren’t as sick as you’ve been. You can’t go thinking you don’t
need your maintenance medicine. Those are the people who
die
.” He raised his hand when he said the word “die,” all the while looking at Sam, and Sam felt his father flinch beside him.

“So, what should we do?” his dad asked Pete.

Pete scribbled something on a piece of paper. “I want you, Sam, to still take your meds. And I want you to breathe every morning into the peak-flow meter. Any time it goes below four, you call me. Deal? And don’t you dare not follow my instructions.”

Sam nodded but he wasn’t really listening. Already he was a million miles away. He was already thinking of pants without pockets, of what it would be like to walk outside and not have to carry anything else but a house key.

A week later, Sam was back in school, and though he carried his inhaler in his pocket, he didn’t use it. He marked off months on his calendar. All of September, he didn’t have to use it. October he was okay. November. By December, even Sam’s father noticed how healthy Sam was. “Asthma’s gone,” Sam said.

His father knocked on wood. “It seems that way. I can’t believe how healthy you are.”

“Maybe I’m a superhero,” he told his father.

“What’s your super power?”

Sam thought of the photos, of how Isabelle had faded from them. He thought of how he used to hear the beating of wings, and now there was only deafening silence.

“I survive things,” he said.

I
SABELLE WAS IN
SoHo, crushed in a too small borrowed party dress, in the middle of a New Year’s Eve party she hadn’t really wanted to go to. A year and a half in New York City and she still wasn’t used to the pop and zing of the city, the way everything seemed to be speeding past her. She was surrounded by people all the time, and still she was lonely. “Everything you could ever want is here,” her New York friends told her. They pointed out the all-night diners, the twenty-four-hour gyms, the gurus and the clubs, but finding what Isabelle wanted was far more complicated.

She stood by the food table, between a woman in red high heels and black jeans and a man with a bald head and a silver earring. She took another sip of her wine, looking around her. The air smelled like burned popcorn, cigarette smoke, and too much perfume.

The party was thrown by Michelle’s friend Dora, who had provided the illegal sublet. The apartment was better than Isabelle had expected, a huge loft in Hell’s Kitchen that Dora had gotten way back in the sixties and was now worth the price of a small country. Dora was the one, too, who had found Isabelle a job as a night-shift proofreader at a law office, who had even helped her with the proofreading test, so that she could make enough money to live on while she went to school.

Isabelle finished her wine. Dora grabbed her arm and tapped the bald guy. “Stan, Isabelle,” she said. “Painter. Photographer.” Dora nodded at Isabelle encouragingly and then slid back into the crowd. Stan smiled at Isabelle. “Dora told me all about you,” he said, and Isabelle sipped her wine.

“What did she tell you?” she asked.

“That you’re in photography school. That you have one of the all-time great sublets. And that you have a tortoise.” He smiled at her and she relaxed. People were always interested in her tortoise, which always struck her as funny. Still, he didn’t say, “Oh, the woman from the accident,” or give her a look of pity.

“I just got out of rehab,” he said, and Isabelle’s wine glass tipped in her hand, sloshing a starry splash of red on her skirt. He turned and began talking to a woman with platinum spiked hair.

In fact, as the party wore on, as she began to talk with more and more people—“Connect!” Dora had urged her—she began to realize that everyone she met seemed to have stories of their own, most of which were just as complicated as hers. The only difference that Isabelle could perceive between herself and these other people was that they wanted to tell her their stories and she could barely bring herself to think about her own.

No one would have batted an eye if Isabelle had told them she had accidentally killed a woman, that fool that she was, she had even fallen in love with the survivors, a husband and son she had foolishly dared to consider her own. In fact, she suspected that telling her story might have actually made her more interesting to this crowd. The party was filled with couples, and watching a man cup a woman’s face for a kiss made Isabelle realize how lonely she was, how she still missed Charlie.

For weeks after she’d left the Cape, she’d had to stop herself from picking up the phone and calling him. She had torn up a letter and returned a gift she had bought for Sam, because what was the point? When was enough enough? She had done damage to them.
She had thought she could redeem herself but ended up making things worse for everyone.

She tried to heal. She went to three therapists in three months, but as soon as she walked into their offices, she wanted to leave again. One doctor peppered her with questions, another told her to get over it in a kind of tough-love therapy, and none of it mattered. She left each office feeling as terrible as she had when she arrived. If anything, talking about what had happened made her feel worse.

I killed a woman. It was an accident. I love the victims. It was an accident.

After a while, she stopped going altogether. Instead, she buried herself in work. Her friends fixed her up, but they didn’t really have to. Men stopped her in the supermarket and on the street, teasing and playful, wanting her number, and most times she gave it. Although all the men were perfectly nice, nothing seemed to take. They liked her, she thought, for her mystery, for the part of her she kept hidden. They thought there was something dramatic about her and that they’d be the ones who could unlock her. And if they could, she thought, maybe all they’d find would be an empty room. It was as if love was this season that had already passed her by.

She moved toward the door, glancing at her watch. It was only 11:30 and she didn’t know if she wanted to wait around for the New Year, for the kisses from strangers. She glanced at a woman by the window, who had brought her child with her, a sunny little boy with a shock of red hair, and she felt pierced by sadness. The two of them were dancing, holding hands and laughing so hard, the woman had her head thrown back. Happy as clams, Nora would say.

Isabelle knew this phenomenon. Be tortured by something and the world was sure to serve it up to you. Since she had moved to New York, she saw mothers and sons everywhere on the street. She could be in an empty movie theater and a parent with a child was
sure to sit in the row right next to her. In the Korean greengrocers, little boys would whisk ahead of her in line to grab for candy, and sometimes, she’d just abandon her groceries and walk out. She missed Sam so much, every little bit hurt her.

She must have been staring, because the woman and the child at the party suddenly stopped dancing and looked at her. The woman smiled and waved, and then her little boy waved, too. Isabelle waved back, and then drained the last of her wine, set her glass down, and headed for the door. Good-bye. Good-bye.

Outside, the air was thick and heavy, the sky carpeted with clouds. Isabelle walked west on Prince Street, buzzed from the wine. She stumbled a bit, righting herself by bracing her hand on the building wall. Low tolerance. “The perfect wife for the owner of a bar,” Luke used to joke, and sometimes he’d brag about it to his customers, even though it always made Isabelle vaguely uncomfortable.

People crowded the streets, some of them in party hats, a few blowing paper horns. All around her the city hummed, giving off a vibration she swore was a message, if only you could learn to read it. Well, she hadn’t been here very long. She’d figure it out.