Pictures of You

by Caroline Leavitt

  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.

  NINETEEN

  ISABELLE 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.

  What she did love about New York was her classes. Imagine, going to school to learn the thing she loved! The light here was different, somehow sharper and more complex. She shot black and white because it seemed more real to her, all those shades of gray, like moving through a fog.

  She had wanted to keep her world small, but it kept expanding on her. She was busier than she thought she’d be, and she made a point of taking her camera everywhere. She looked at the sky, something Dora told her never to do because it would mark you as a tourist and present you like a blinking green light to all the hucksters prowling about. Isabelle didn’t care. Nothing could have made her stop looking. Even with all the clouds and the dimming sky, it was still a beauty of a night. Everywhere you looked there were these huge, busy buildings and throngs of people, and they all looked interesting to her. She wanted to photograph nearly every face she saw.

  She turned up the collar of her jacket against the nip in the evening air. Thinking about the boy at the party, she dug her hands deeper into her pockets.

  Isabelle had never stopped aching for Sam. She remembered the feel of him on her lap, the silk of his hair, the lilt of his voice. She sent Sam photographs of the city, and books, and though they never came back, she never heard back, either. She had called a few times and Charlie told her that Sam couldn’t come to the phone, that he was in and out of the hospital with serious asthma, and even though Charlie never said so, she felt that he blamed her somehow. When she missed Sam most, she went to Central Park Lake and skipped stones, just the way he had taught her. A million times she thought about visiting, just showing up, but her course workload was so heavy and her bankbook so light, she couldn’t get away. And more than that, Charlie never asked her to come.

  She knew that Sam came to visit his grandparents twice a year, at Thanksgiving and spring break, and she was always wondering if she’d run into him. “My ex lives a block away and in five years, I’ve never seen him,” Dora had told her, meaning to be consoling. Isabelle had never met Charlie’s parents. She had certainly seen enough photographs to be able to pick them out, and though she knew it was nuts, she kept looking for them in the city, running over in her mind what she might say if she did. Yes, I’m doing fine. How are you? How is Charlie? How is Sam? Sometimes, she imagined they would be sympathetic to her, that Charlie’s mother would pat her hand. Other times, she thought they’d be dismissive, that they’d still somehow consider her a murderess, though Charlie had told her they had been cool to April, too, that perhaps they’d be frosty to any woman he chose. She knew they lived on the Upper East Side, and one day, when she felt especially lonely, she had taken the uptown train to their block, walking past their apartment building, a huge limestone structure with gargoyles carved in the side, a doorman in a uniform stationed in the front. She took her time walking by, she pretended to be admiring the building, which was certainly beautiful. She wondered if they’d come out and if they’d know who she was, or if she’d recognize them. Of course, all that happened was that she hovered in front of the building so long that the doorman asked, “Are you lost, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I am.” And then she walked away and never went back.

  Isabelle leaned against a building now and shut her eyes for a moment. She shouldn’t have had the wine. Maybe she shouldn’t have gone to the party. She was drunk and lonely and felt as if everything she wanted were a thousand miles away. A knot of tears formed in her stomach, and she wrenched herself away from the building.

  The day she had left the Cape, sitting beside Michelle in the car, she had felt numb with grief. Her first few weeks in New York had been chaotic. There were a million things to do. She had to set up her apartment, get Nelson settled, and get a phone. She had to register at the school, find a darkroom, and change her address, sending the cards to everyone, even her mother, who sent her a card with a big cross on it and the inscription Faith Will Find the Way. She had
cried all the time. Once, on the street right in front of Macy’s, on a bright, sunny day, she had been unable to stop crying. No one even turned to acknowledge her. People calmly walked by as if she were invisible, and to her surprise, that made her feel better. She began to feel that New York was just what she needed.

  When the phone didn’t ring with a call from Charlie or Sam, when no letters came for her, she told herself that maybe it was for the best. Sometimes she dreamed different versions of her life: Charlie would call and tell her that he was free of his demons, that all he wanted was for her to come home and marry him; Charlie and Sam would show up on her doorstep, saying, “We can’t live without you.” Or even just Charlie, finding her to say, “We have to talk our way through this. We have to figure this out. We can do this, I know we can.”

  Now a headache was forming, as small and hard as a Brazil nut. Alcohol was supposed to wear off, but instead, Isabelle seemed to be feeling drunker. She tried to walk a straight line and wobbled. She didn’t want to go back to her empty apartment or call a friend who would look at her with rich sympathy, and in any case, most of the friends she had now were still at parties. She felt in her purse for her cell phone. Her heart was racing and she felt sick, but she dialed.