The Rule of Thirds

by Chantel Guertin

  Something’s welling up. But the tears don’t come. I’m not crying. I’m never crying. I should be crying. But they don’t come, not now, not the last time I was here. Not even the first time I ever stepped foot in St. Christopher’s, with Dad, last spring.

  • • •

  It was a Saturday afternoon in May, and Dad and I had just gone to a photography exhibit at the Train Station. Mom was in New York visiting her younger sister, Aunt Emmy. The Train Station hadn’t been a train station for decades; it had been restored and turned into an event space and art gallery. The exhibit was for a photographer, David Westerly, this guy Dad went to Tisch with. At NYU.

  Westerly’s pretty famous now and most of the pictures in the exhibit were black and white portraits of regular people. They were cool. You saw the photos and you just knew life had slapped these people around. But it hadn’t beat them. They were still fighting. That’s what I liked about them—the defiance in each one of his subjects.

  Dad pointed out how good David was, the way he positioned the light to always hit their faces, to illuminate all the expression lines. And how he always employed the rule of thirds—that photographs turn out better with subjects off-center.

  “Was that hard for you?” I asked as we walked back to the car.

  “Hard? Enjoying photography with my daughter? You kidding me?” he said, and he squeezed me into him, the way he did, where I felt like I was the world’s most special person.

  “Your pictures are as good as David Westerly’s,” I said, getting into the car.

  “You think so?” He rubbed his chin. “Maybe. The problem is it’s hard to get known like that up here.”

  “If you’re not in New York City.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you ever wish you and Mom had stayed?”

  He looked over at me, then returned to the road. “Oh honey,” he said, and he was quiet for a moment. Then he shook his head. “I wouldn’t change anything.”

  Afterward, we went to get ice cream at Scoops. I offered to pay, since I get an employee discount—at least, I did at that point. They were out of Tiger Tail (my go-to), so I got Chocolate Fudge Swirl instead. Dad ordered Pralines ’n’ Cream. We were almost done our cones when Dad put his down on the table and leaned over the edge of his chair, holding his stomach.

  “Dad? Dad?”

  “Dad, what’s wrong?”

  I went behind the counter to get a glass of water.

  My dad just shook his head when I set it down in front of him. The sound of his breathing had changed. There was a raspy quality to it. He struggled up to stand, until he was hunched over, and he leaned on me as we walked out to the car. “Dad, you’re kind of scaring me.”

  His face was gray. “I”—A smear of ice cream was still on his chin. He wiped it off. “I’m—it’s never been this bad.”

  It took him ages to dig his keys out of his pocket, then he passed them to me. I had my learner’s but I’d only practiced, like, five times. All with Dad. We were 10 blocks from our house. I could do that. This was just another practice session. But halfway there, Dad told me to turn left, and then right. I asked him where we were going, but he wouldn’t say, until we turned right on Elm. The hospital was straight ahead, through the intersection. Dad had one hand on his stomach and reached over to put the other on my shoulder.

  “You’re doing great, honey,” he said.

  The parking job I did was the world’s worst—we’d never worked on parking before. By the time the car stopped, my dad was breathing normally. “Ooh,” he said. “Dr. Morgenstern is going to be pissed.”

  Morgenstern was the name on the sign by the curb. I pictured this stuffy doctor rolling up in a Mercedes-Benz and confronting our broken-down Honda in his place and actually giggled. Then my dad’s breathing changed. He winced. Pulling him out of the car seemed impossible—but I did it. He leaned on me all the way in, insisting we go through the main doors, not the ER, and I agreed because it was less scary that way. The concrete stairs up to the main entrance seemed to go on forever, until finally the glass doors slid open, to swallow us whole.

  • • •

  “Hey, are you OK?”

  There’s a hand on my shoulder, startling me out of my thoughts. I open my eyes and focus, and nearly lose my breath again. It’s him. Dylan McCuter. Excuse me, Dylan McCutter. Two t’s. Small detail.

  He’s tall (but not too tall), thin (but muscular) and as he bends down, his caramel-colored hair falls forward. It’s all brown with golden highlights from the summer. Stubble darkens his face and there’s the dimple he gets in his left cheek when he smiles. He’s wearing a long-sleeved gray jersey, dark jeans faded over the knees and gray Converse high-tops. And those green eyes . . .

  His hand moves to my slightly sweaty panic-attack back as he sits down beside me on the steps. “Philadelphia Greene.”

  He. Knows. My. Real. Name.

  I blink in disbelief. The only people who know my real name are in my classes, since they hear it when the teachers read out the attendance at the start of the term. But Dylan was two years ahead of me when I was a sophomore, so we never had any classes together.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asks.

  “Oh, um . . .”

  What am I doing out here?

  The volunteer meeting! Crap. I grab my phone from the front of my bag. It’s already 5:15. I’ve taken my own future into my hands by missing more than half the meeting. They probably won’t even let me volunteer now. Problem solved. Except . . .

  “Are you a volunteer?” I ask. Maybe Dylan’s the motivation I need to actually go through with this. I can do this. Sure, I had a panic attack just standing at the front doors, but so what? Maybe this huge building of nightmares isn’t the, uh, huge building of nightmares that I think it is. Maybe it’s about true love. I mean, helping people. I’m so lost in my own thoughts I miss what Dylan replies about being a volunteer.

  “I think I’ve pretty much totally missed the volunteer meeting,” I say to cover up. “Where are you headed?”

  “Uh . . . was just playing music for the patients . . .”

  “Are you a volunteer?” I risk asking again.

  He shakes his head. “Not exactly. Me and a couple guys play music for some of the patients. So it’s not, like, being a full-on volunteer.”

  Why couldn’t I do that, instead of being a front-line candystriper? Oh, because I have zero musical talent, that’s why. “Cool,” I say.

  Dylan’s phone buzzes and he checks it. “I gotta split. You sure you’re OK?”

  I nod.

  “All right then. So I guess I’ll be seeing you around, Philadelphia Greene,” Dylan says, standing up. He gives me a smile, his dimple disappearing under his stubble, and then he turns and walks down the steps.

  I quickly grab my vintage Nikon from my bag, focus and snap a pic of him. Yeah, the best subjects get the film treatment.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 15 DAYS UNTIL VANTAGE POINT

  The first thing I see when I wake up every morning are my dad’s photos. For my 16th birthday, my dad gave me wallpaper. Weird gift, right? Before I saw it, when it was still all rolled up, I was like, Seriously? I ask for an iPhone and I get wallpaper? But then I unrolled it. He had taken hundreds of his photos—some of his favorites and my own, pics of me and him, my mom and him, all three of us together, and ones of he and my mom before I was born—and collaged them in black and white and then had it turned into wallpaper. We spent the weekend of my birthday wallpapering my room. Now, I see him right before I close my eyes, and as soon as I wake up. A constant.

  I pull on my jeans and favorite hoodie—my dad’s, light gray with purple lettering, from when he went to Tisch. It’s only two years till I’ll be going there too—at least, I hope so.

  Mom’s door is still closed and it’s dark in her room so I tiptoe downstairs.
Who knows what time she finally came home from work last night. She cares about the animals, sure, but she gets paid more to work overtime, and we need the money. In the kitchen I grab an apple from the bowl on the counter, pull on my broken-in black boots and slip out the front door. It’s my favorite time of day to shoot, when there’s just enough light, but the world isn’t entirely awake.

  I walk to the end of our street where there are usually signs for garage sales stapled to the wooden lamppost. I started shooting garage-sale finds this past summer. I like how random it can be: old typewriters with missing keys, or wooden chests that may have held love letters. I take a picture of the garage sale signs so I’ll have the addresses stored, then turn right onto Waverly, left onto Calcutta and then left again onto Peabody, to the first sale. Within a few minutes, I can see there’s a ton of old stuff—like they’ve lived in the house forever and are finally clearing out all the boxes in the basement they don’t want to take with them. Vintage jars and records and dusty hardcover books. There’s an old desk with a hole cut in its top. I look around and see a balding guy taking a sip of a coffee from a mug that’s shaped like a football.

  “Can I take some pics?” I ask, holding up my camera.

  “Doesn’t bother me. Stuff’s just sitting here collecting dust anyway,” he says, then nods at the desk. “That’s a sewing machine. My grandmother’s. She had 17 kids, and she used to make all their clothes,” he says. “We’re moving my mother into a nursing home, so this stuff’s got to go.”

  After taking a few pictures of the sewing table, I pay 50 cents for an old milk bottle that says Bencher’s in half-scratched-off letters. I imagine it came from a milk delivery company ages ago, back when the blue-uniformed delivery guy used to leave the bottle on your doorstep every few days. In a few weeks this purple wildflower that I love will show up in the ravine, and I’ll put some in the Bencher’s bottle.

  The next garage sale has tons of collections: records, stamps, baseball cards. There’s a box of old photo albums. All the pictures have been removed, the white squares where they used to be visible against the yellowed paper. The acetate no longer sticks. I flip the pages and discover one photo left. It’s a square picture, shot in black and white with a white border, from the ’50s, maybe earlier. A young boy, two or three years old, stands in the middle of a snowy front yard at night, a streetlamp glowing overhead. He’s holding a shovel that’s taller than him, and I can barely see his face beneath the furry trim on the hood of his one-piece snowsuit. I lay the album down and take a close-up of the lone photo on the page, the crinkled acetate making the photo look even older than it is. It could work well for my Vantage Point theme: memories.

  Then I spot it: The Catcher in the Rye. The cover is shiny silver, with black lettering at the top. I don’t have this edition. It probably seems like a cliché, but The Catcher in the Rye is my favorite book. I thought I’d hate it when it was assigned last year in English class because the main character is a 17-year-old boy—and I didn’t think I’d be able to relate—but Dad convinced me to give it a shot, telling me how much he loved it, how Holden goes to New York, and how he read it when he first moved to the city. Anyway, there’s this part where Holden explains how, when he’s worrying about something, he has to go to the bathroom, only he doesn’t go, because he’s too worried to go and doesn’t want to interrupt his worrying to go. Like how I get with the panic attacks. Anyway, it’s the last book Dad and I read together. Whenever I see a copy, I buy it.

  After the third garage sale, I head home. We’ve lived in the same house at 42 Catalina Drive since I was three. It used to belong to Grandma Anne and Grandpa Frank, my mom’s parents, but then they moved into a nursing home and gave the house to Mom and Dad, who didn’t have the money to buy their own. It’s a short walk from the Cherokee River, which runs through Spalding and connects all the little towns in the area. Most of Spalding’s original houses (which were more like cottages) were torn down and replaced or renovated beyond recognition. But ours is still the original cottage. It’s the only one on the street like it. I used to wish we had a big new house, like Dace’s, but now I like that ours is different from all the others. Dark brick with faded gray wood trim amid houses with that plasticky siding or blah concrete look. Our house looks like a Swiss Alps chalet. The roof goes right down, almost to the ground, and the front windows have these big red wooden shutters.

  Inside the house is quiet—the only sign of Mom is a note on the pad of lined yellow paper, on the kitchen counter.

  Pipsqueak—

  At clinic till 3. Got you appt w/ Dr. Judy at 1. Please go. Not convinced hospital placement is good idea. Call me after you talk to her & let me know what she says. Love you.

  Mom

  I tear the page off the pad, crumple it and toss it in the recycling under the sink. Little does she know not volunteering there may be the real problem, given how I missed the meeting and all.

  “Catcher in the Rye,” I say to Dad when I get to my room, focusing on the pic I usually do: he’s 17, standing by the stoop of his apartment on Christopher Street in the West Village. Hands in the pockets of his jeans, camera around his neck.

  The milk bottle just fits on my windowsill. I drag my desk chair over to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in the corner beside my desk and slip the book onto the top shelf, next to the other copies. This one makes eight.

  Then in the bottom of my bag I find the paper —totally crumpled—with the volunteer coordinator’s name on it, and punch the hospital number into my phone. Probably a futile attempt given it’s Saturday, but I go through the 17 prompts until I’m connected to Glenys Grange. Shock of all shockers, she answers. Maybe the volunteer gods are on my side.

  “Why weren’t you at the candystriper orientation yesterday afternoon?” she asks, her voice high-pitched.

  Oh that? I was busy having a panic attack. I consider confiding in her, thinking she might take pity on me, but who would want a volunteer who is likely to spontaneously collapse and have a freak-out session in the middle of the hospital?

  Instead, I tell her I had a small scheduling conflict, but that I’m ready to get going on being St. Christopher’s best volunteer ever.

  She makes a mmm-ing noise for longer than necessary and then rustles some papers for what seems like forever. “We already created the schedule and handed out the uniforms. I’ll have to see if there are any left, and I can’t promise there’ll be one in your size. This really is a hassle . . .”

  “Please?”

  She sighs. “We’ve been understaffed since the layoffs last summer anyway, so I suppose we can use the extra help. Fine—you can start Monday after school. Just wear khakis, a white shirt and non-marking soled shoes. I’ll put you on for Mondays and Tuesdays.”

  “Oh well, um . . .”

  “Is there a problem?” Glenys puffs.

  I want to ask what day the music team works. Dylan works Fridays. What’s the point of volunteering if I’m on totally opposite to Dylan? That’s the whole point of volunteering. Oh, and getting in my mandatory-to-graduate hours. And helping people.

  “No. I just would love to work Fridays,” I say.

  “Fine. Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Be here at 3:30, sharp.”

  What? Three days instead of two? That was not in the plan.

  • • •

  Dr. Judy’s is nothing like what I pictured a shrink’s office would be like before I started coming to see her three months ago. She’s not a psychiatrist, she’s a psychologist, which is supposed to be more about talking through your feelings and less about popping pills and masking your feelings. But you’d think that the space would be more conducive for blathering on and on, more like what you see in the movies or on TV shows: mahogany paneling, dark carpeting, a massive couch that you can stretch out on with your head on one arm rest and your feet not even touching the other side. And the tables would have Tiffany lamps or
those banker lights that give a yellow glow, and the psychologist would sit in a high-backed leather chair that swivels, taking notes on a yellow steno pad.

  Yeah, well. Dr. Judy’s office is the exact opposite. The waiting room is all white walls and hard plastic white chairs. Even the coffee table is bare—not even a magazine. It looks like she just moved in, but apparently she’s been here for years, which sort of makes it seem like she’s running a front for a drug-smuggling operation or the Mafia. But she hasn’t been busted yet, so it’s probably unlikely.

  Inside her office, the furniture is super modern and super uncomfortable. There’s no couch, but instead those wide pleather chairs that slope backwards so you either have to perch uncomfortably on the edge, or sink back into it and let your feet come off the floor, so it’s like you’re trapped in the chair. It’s the worst.

  And even though the walls are lined with bookcases, they’re white, just like the walls, and they’re totally empty except for three books. Seriously, rows and rows of bookshelves, and only three books, leaning up against each other in one of the shelves in the middle. They’re some sort of psychology books, but three books that barely fill one of the cubbyholes, and the other 11 empty? It’s bizarre.

  Dr. Judy is also totally atypical. Not at all warm and fuzzy in wool sweaters and corduroy skirts. Her go-to outfit is a black suit with a colored silk shirt underneath. Pink, purple, teal, coral—I’ve seen them all. Black pumps, black stockings. And hair pulled back in a tight bun. Instead of a steno pad, she types on her laptop. She says it helps her keep all her notes easily filed, but it’s really quite distracting because when I’m talking, I feel like it should be quiet and soothing. But instead, she’s clacking away. I bet she’s online shopping.

  I take a sip of water, moving the glass from the table with the box of tissue to the floor beside me and wait for her to say something. Eventually she looks up.

  “Do you think this is a good idea?”