Pictures of You

by Caroline Leavitt

  You never knew who might be in it.

  ELEVEN

  It was blustery and cold, and Charlie stood outside the school, looking for Sam, thinking he might surprise him. Like April, he thought, then brushed the thought away. The kids spilled out, shouting and jumping around, their winter coats flung open, their heads without hats. They ran to their parents’ waiting cars or headed for the park. He scanned the crowd for Sam, but he knew he had time because Sam always came out last, and he was almost always alone.

  “Hey, Dad!” Charlie looked to the sound, and to his surprise, there was Sam, and miracle of miracles, he was grinning. The sturdy little used Canon was slung around his neck, and when he saw Charlie, he lifted the camera and took Charlie’s photo. “F-eight and be there!” Sam said. “That’s photographer talk about the f-stop, Daddy!”

  Charlie hugged Sam to him, leading him to the car. “I got sixty chips because my homework was so good,” Sam told him. “I used half for free time while everyone else had to practice their cursive.”

  “That calls for extra dessert tonight.”

  “Cool.”

  Charlie was glad he had bought Sam the camera, which seemed to focus him. Sam seemed happier. His homework was now done on time. So he didn’t have a lot of play dates. Who did, when you thought about it?

  “I was wondering,” Charlie said, “if you’d like to take a photography class.”

  “Maybe,” Sam said.

  As soon as they got home, Sam ran to get his collection of photographs. He sat in the center of the living room, his legs splayed out, his whole body hunched over. Sam was so intent, he didn’t even see Charlie, not until his dad stooped to get a better look, and then he started.

  “Did I surprise you?” Charlie asked, and then he moved to the other side of Sam where he could get a better look, and he felt himself reeling. Sam had taken pictures of cars moving away, of empty, winding roads. Just like the ones that April had been killed on. Every shot looked like the newspaper accident scene. All that was missing was a white chalk line for the body. Charlie felt like crying.

  “Why do you keep taking pictures like that?” he asked quietly.

  Sam stared at him, not moving. Charlie bent down, and that was when he saw the photo Sam was trying to hide under one of his legs. That was when he saw Isabelle’s face. Her coat flying out behind her, her features in shadows.

  Charlie pulled the photo free.

  “That’s mine!” Sam cried, grabbing for it.

  “What’s this?” Charlie said sharply, holding it away from Sam.

  “I took it.” Charlie noticed how Sam’s eyes began to fill with light. “It’s mine.”

  “When?”

  Sam hesitated. “Last week. I saw Isabelle in the park.”

  Charlie stared at the photo. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing, what he was hearing.

  Sam stood up, shifting his weight from one untied sneaker to the other. “Don’t you like them? Don’t you think I’m good at this? I can do this. I can do this really well.” He lifted his chin. “Isabelle thinks I have talent. She taught me things. She developed them for me—and there’s even one she took herself.” He lifted up one of the bigger prints that had a brown tone, a shot of Sam in profile. “It’s called sepia,” Sam said. “I like that word, sepia.”

  “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from her? Next time, you give the film to me.”

  “But you don’t know anything about photography!” Sam stabbed a finger at a picture. “You don’t know that that’s called perspective!”

  “Look, I’m glad you’re taking pictures. That’s not the point. I’m thrilled you love photography. I really am. But I don’t want you dealing with Isabelle! If you like taking pictures so much, do it on your own. Or maybe we can find you a class.”

  Sam shook his head, confused. “But I don’t want to take a class!”

  “I thought you said you did!”

  “I said maybe! That’s not the same as saying yes!”

  “A class can help you get better,” Charlie said. His head suddenly hurt and he wanted to sit down. “They can show you how to fix those blurry spots there.”

  “That’s the best part of the pictures!”

  “A class can help you photograph lots of different things besides roads and cars.”

  “You’re supposed to snap what catches your eye!” Sam cried. “You take what you want to take, not what someone else tells you to take!”

  Charlie looked down at the photographs again. The long, empty roads. The cars. The sense of yearning in the photographs, made all the stronger by what he knew wasn’t there.

  Sam grabbed the photographs, glaring at Charlie. “You don’t know anything!” he said.

  Sam ran to his room, slamming the door. Charlie heard the music going on, then the pop pop pop of Sam’s video game on his computer, and he put his head in his hands. Sam was right. He didn’t know anything. He didn’t know how his life had unraveled so completely. He didn’t know how to live without April or how to be a single father or what to do with the roiling helplessness he felt each and every day.

  THE NEXT MORNING, after Sam had left for school, Charlie felt tense and restless. He didn’t have to work today and he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He walked into the living room. No matter how many times he told Sam, that kid never put anything away, and even when he did, things always ended up in the wrong place. He put away some books. He put Sam’s writing notebook on the table where he wouldn’t forget it, and then he saw the big yellow envelope of Sam’s photos.

  Charlie sat down and pulled out the pictures. He never would have thought of photography for Sam. April used to buy kits—tie dye and pottery—for both her and Sam, but nine times out of ten, Sam would make a gallant try and then give up. “Not your thing, huh?” April would tease, and she’d let it go. But photography was something that Sam seemed to truly love, and if Charlie were going to thank someone for it, he would have to thank Isabelle Stein.

  Still, the photos were unnerving. The empty roads! Charlie sighed and pulled out the photo Isabelle had taken of Sam. It was good, he had to admit. He looked at another photo, and when the picture began to tremble, it took him a minute to realize that his hands were shaking.

  It was the photo of Isabelle. He shut his eyes for a moment, as if to clear his vision. The wrong woman was in Sam’s photo. It should have been April there, with Sam beside her. He left the photo on the table, feeling himself unraveling. Let Sam put away his own things.

  Time stretched out in front of him like an endless roll of blank paper. He glanced at his watch. Eight in the morning. He grabbed his car keys. Sam was staying after school today to finish a project and wouldn’t be home until four. He had eight more hours before Sam would be back. He’d take a drive.

  CHARLIE HAD BEEN driving two hours when he began to feel like a shadow behind the wheel. His stomach was hot and tense and his hands were clammy. There were a thousand things he could be doing today other than this fool’s mission—working, doing laundry, cleaning. Everything inside him told him to turn back and head home, but he kept going, as if the car were propelling him forward, as if he had no control. When he got to the turnoff road, he was sweating, and when he made the turn, he felt as if someone had stapled his heart. He pulled over to one shoulder and parked, waiting a minute for his pulse to slow down. He took deep, long gulps of air.

  He got out of the car. It was just an ordinary road, black top, yellow lines slashing the center. It had been almost four months now. The white chalk lines were long gone, the stars of blood. The road was clear and empty. You wouldn’t know anything terrible had happened here. You wouldn’t know that this was where his wife had died.

  Charlie breathed in more deeply. The sky looked hard and bright. He could feel a chill of wind on his back. “Come back,” he said, his voice cracking, and then he started to cry because he knew instantly then that he shouldn’t have come here, that it wasn’t going to make anything better, that April
was never coming back.

  He was still crying when he got back into the car, wiping at his eyes, digging in his pocket for a tissue to blow his nose. He couldn’t think straight enough to drive all the way home, but he couldn’t sit here in the car, on this road, a second longer.

  Charlie started the car and drove slowly. There was really nothing around here for miles, nothing except an old Ready Diner, the lights glowing even in the daylight. Ready, ready. Ready for what?

  There were only a few cars in the lot. As he pulled up in front, he leaned over the steering wheel and glanced up at the windows. It seemed bright and cheerful inside, and he started to look forward to going in. He noticed a woman sitting at a booth, right by the window, her hands covering her face. When she lifted her face, Charlie saw, to his shock, that it was Isabelle Stein and she was crying.

  He couldn’t move for a moment. Then he shrank down in his seat, not wanting her to see him. He watched Isabelle rising, putting money down. Her face was raw with grief and she looked dazed and exhausted. There were shadows under her eyes, and he felt his heart plummet. The front door of the diner opened and Isabelle walked out, stumbling slightly, never seeing him. She headed for a car, got inside, and said something to the driver, who was young. As soon as the car was gone, he parked his car and went inside the diner.

  Charlie slid into a clean booth, and the waitress came over, a bouncy young blonde slapping down a glossy menu. “That woman who was crying—” Charlie said.

  “What am I, a dating service?” the waitress said. “What’ll you have?”

  Charlie scanned the menu. Nothing looked good to him, but he ordered an omelet and coffee. “The woman—” Charlie said again, and the waitress sighed.

  Charlie shook his head. “It’s not what you think. I know her already,” he said. “I’m—I’m just concerned. I just want to make sure she’s all right.”

  The waitress studied Charlie, as if she were deciding something about him. “She’s been here a few times,” she finally said. “She always comes and goes in the same car and the kid always waits for her. Always orders pie and coffee and never touches it. She tips big and she always cries. And that’s all I know. Now, you want anything else?”

  Charlie shook his head and the waitress whisked away. Charlie dropped his head in his hands. He couldn’t get rid of the image of Isabelle weeping, her face haunted. He wondered if he went back to the road if he’d see her there, too. She couldn’t let go of it. Like him, she just couldn’t let go.

  The waitress set down the plate of eggs, steaming, flecked with parsley, and Charlie’s stomach clenched. He pushed the plate away. “Just the check,” he said.

  “You’re just like her,” the waitress said, shaking her head. “The both of you. You come in here like ghosts and you don’t eat a thing.”

  When Charlie got home, Sam was in the living room, surrounded by his photos. Sam started to push them into an envelope, but Charlie crouched down and stopped him. “I know you love taking photos, and you keep doing it,” Charlie said. “And you can look at these all you want and you don’t have to take a class.” Sam lifted his face to Charlie. “I missed you,” Charlie said, and held him close.

  ISABELLE CRIED IN the back of the car, holding a tissue to her nose, her breath coming in small skips. She’d taken a Valium, which made her so tired she could hardly hold her head up. Her legs felt like noodles. Her panic was muted, and the strange, strong grief now felt distant, like it wasn’t quite her own. This all felt like too much of a dream.

  She pinched at the skin over her wrist, trying to reclaim herself. She sat hard against the seat, pushing to feel the fake leather against her back.

  The driver, a college kid with dreadlocks, kept sneaking worried glances at her in the rearview mirror, and when she blew her nose yet again, he stretched his arm back and handed her a brand new handkerchief. “You can keep it,” he said.

  She took the handkerchief. “Thank you, Dirk.”

  This was only the third time she had asked him to drive her here, and after today, she knew it was her last. She had thought she needed to come back to the scene to pay her respects. Or maybe she had really thought that, coming here, she might sense April, a sudden warm shiver of air that might mean forgiveness, a ghost waving at her to let go.

  When Isabelle had blurted to Lora that she wanted to come here, Lora hadn’t been pleased. “Is this wise, Isabelle?” she said. “It’s a very long way and what’s to be gained by it? Why would you want to torture yourself with this?”

  “I think I’ll feel better,” Isabelle said.

  “Better? By blaming yourself? You’re acting like a murderer returning to the scene of the crime. And how will you be a passenger in a car for that long? You need to start out slow, with little local trips, not three hours away. Think about what you’re doing.”

  Isabelle did think. She couldn’t afford a cab, couldn’t ask her friends to drive her, but then she found a flyer on one of the kiosks in town: DRIVER! CHEAP! it said, and there were five tags with a phone number fluttering underneath and a nice simple name: dirk. Surely, this could be considered a sign, couldn’t it?

  She had called Dirk, who said he’d do it for just a hundred dollars a pop.

  Three times she had been here, and every time she’d thought it would be different, but it never was. Instead, it brought that day back to her, a thousand times worse.

  No more, she told herself. No more. If there were ghosts, they weren’t speaking with her. If there was forgiveness, it wasn’t here on this muddy patch of road.

  AFTER THAT, ISABELLE kept busy. She kept her appointments with Lora every week, and she even walked into a church one evening, to talk to a priest, but as soon as she told him about the accident, she saw his face change. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said finally, but she could see how his eyebrow was twitching when he said it.

  “Can’t you give me something to say or do? Aren’t there novenas you say?”

  “Novenas?” He looked at her curiously.

  “I’m sorry, I’m Jewish, I don’t know the right term.”

  “You’re Jewish?” he said, quickly standing up. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  She called a rabbi who told her he’d be happy to talk with her but she had to join the temple first. Isabelle hung up.

  Every time she was working at home, she half expected Sam to show up. She kept her place clean. When she went shopping at the Thrift-T-Mart, she bought cookies and grapes and vanilla soda, kid food. She poured herself a glass of the soda and drank it herself. One Saturday afternoon, she got the cookies and watched Blade Runner on TV and when Sean Young found out she was a replicant and not human at all, that everything she had believed about herself and her world was now turned on its head, Isabelle began to cry. “I know how you feel,” she wept, and reached for another cookie.

  She couldn’t just stay here eating cookies. She’d get up and walk on the beach. She’d clear her head, and then she’d come home and work.

  THE BEACH WAS COLD and empty, the thin, late-afternoon light barely skimming the water, but Isabelle wasn’t ready to go home yet. Somehow, walking the bumpy sand relaxed her. She bundled into her jacket, lifting up the collar.

  “Hey!”

  She turned around and there was Sam, a scarf bundled over his face, running toward her, his hair flying under his hat, a camera around his neck. Stay away from him, Charlie had told her, but here he was again, his eyes like stars, his face expectant and happy, and she felt something tugging at her heart.

  “What are you doing here?” she said. She glanced at the camera and whistled. “A Canon! That’s pretty special.”

  Sam beamed. “It’s a film camera! Like yours!” He lowered his scarf a bit. “I’m not cold at all and if I breathe through this, it’s really warm. You should try it.”

  Isabelle smiled at him. “You’re taking pictures of the beach?” She lifted his camera to her eyes. “I’d ramp up the shutter speed. If you wanted to catch one o
f those gulls in flight, you could.”

  Sam peered down and then moved the shutter dial up. He lifted the camera to his face, pointing it at the ocean, and took a shot of one of the gray gulls skimming over the whitecaps.

  “There you go!” Isabelle said enthusiastically, and Sam beamed.

  “I come here to skip stones, too.” Sam picked up one of the flat stones in the sand. “I come here all the time.”

  He drew back his arm and flung the stone over the choppy water, bouncing it over the surface. “Look at that! Four times! You really need a smooth lake for it to make ripples, but I like to do it here, anyway. It’s more of a challenge.”

  “I have a confession. I’m a terrible stone-skipper,” Isabelle said.

  “No, no, don’t say that! I’ll teach you.” He scanned the ground. “I have to find the perfect stones for you,” he said, his voice so clear and earnest that she wanted to hug him.

  He handed her two smooth white stones, and then he demonstrated how she should move her arm. “Some people just throw the stone any which way, but that’s not right. You have to aim. You have to see the skips before you even make them. I’m up to ten, but the world record is fifty-one skips.”

  “That’s amazing,” she said.

  “Yes, it is. People can get good at it just the way they do at soccer. And it’s a sport, too. A real sport.” He looked at her hopefully.

  “Of course it is,” she said.

  “Come on. We’ll do it together,” he assured her, and then Isabelle drew back her arm, the way he showed her, and the stones skimmed along the water one, two, three, and then stopped, making her feel embarrassed. “Oh, that wasn’t so hot, was it?” she said.

  “No, no, that was a really great start! And you can do even better!”

  It killed her the way he helped her, how he would reposition her arm gently or urge her on, how he’d clap when her stones actually made a skip. Sometimes he said, “There you go!” the way she had to him when he took the photo of the gulls. She couldn’t hide how happy she felt to be with him. Occasionally, he’d skip a stone, too, and they’d both stop and watch it leap over the water. “What a thing of beauty,” Isabelle said, and Sam flushed, pleased. They must have gone through twenty stones, and then she noticed how dark it was getting.