“What…” My voice hitches oddly. “If that’s the travel guide version, what’s your version?”
“Arkenos is the only place in the world where I can take a deep breath.”
An unexpected envy rustles inside me, as if he’s found something I want. Something I don’t have. Something I might never have.
“When was the last time you were there?” I ask.
“About ten years ago.”
“You haven’t taken a deep breath in ten years?”
He shrugs and gives me a half smile. “Guess not.”
As he turns the SUV onto Dearborne Street, I have the sudden hope that maybe he’ll discover he can also take a deep breath here—in a ramshackle old house on the outskirts of the town that’s the only home I’ve ever known. The place I suspect I’ll never leave.
CHAPTER 8
Darius
Henry has a photo of Katherine and Nell displayed in a wooden frame on the living room bookshelf. I’d taken the photo one weekend when the four of us had been at Volkov Bay. Nell had been about seven or eight. They’re sitting outside—an elegant blond woman and a dark-haired girl in pigtails.
Nell has always been so different from Katherine. Katherine had become my stepsister when I was ten—the daughter of my father’s second wife—but Conrad Hawke had either not known about her illness or, more likely, he’d ignored it until he could no longer pretend it didn’t exist.
Katherine was eleven when her mother Odette, a former Russian model, married my father. She and I bonded quickly, which was strange for two children who’d grown up alone in different ways. But we became allies in the vast emptiness of the Hawke mansion, competitors with video games and board games, and co-conspirators in skipping school, avoiding our parents when they fought, and contending with my father.
But with every passing birthday, Katherine became increasingly volatile and prone to taking risks. She ran away from home, experimented with drugs, and ended up in the hospital multiple times after she’d gone too long without eating. Everyone attributed her wild mood swings and poor academics to her being “precocious,” but Conrad Hawke hated sugarcoating.
Even more, he’d hated her eventual diagnosis, the blight it would leave on his name, his reputation. For him, any hint of illness was merely inexcusable weakness. And weak people were both useless and expendable.
As my mother…and I…had discovered.
I shake my head, pushing that thought back down. When I was seven, I hadn’t known why my mother was suffering. And when I was a teenager, I hadn’t known anything about whatever was misfiring in Katherine’s brain. I only knew that she’d been gripped by something over which she had no control. Maybe because of my own rebelliousness and desire to be on the move, I understood.
Odette always said that Katherine was calmer, quieter, when she was with me—not that that stopped my father from sending me to “wilderness training” camps and eventually boarding school. But I knew Conrad Hawke, and I returned home often for Katherine and Odette’s sake—to see them and to let them know I’d still be there when Conrad decided they no longer served a purpose and got rid of them.
Which, of course, he did—eight years after marrying Odette.
Conrad’s prenup agreement had been sufficient but not generous, and it hadn’t taken long for Odette to blow through the money on treatment plans that didn’t work and a desperate need to give her daughter material things to compensate for the flaw in her genetics.
By then, I’d started off on my photojournalism career, which had also inspired Conrad’s wrath, but I’d sent whatever money I could to Odette and Katherine, and I visited them whenever I was home from an assignment. Though I was partly trying to make up for my father’s abandonment, Odette and Katherine had become more my family than my blood relatives.
Things had gotten stranger and more complicated after Katherine and Henry hooked up, but Henry had made it clear that he would take care of his family. And he had, even when he’d been forced to divide his attention between his wife and his daughter.
Though sweet, quiet Nell had been baffled by her volatile mother, she’d also been a grounding force. A constant reminder of what was good in the world.
It’s another reason I don’t like seeing her so closed off. Based on what Hannah has said and what I’ve seen of Nell’s work, she does seem to have a powerful voice in her art. I just wonder if she knows it.
On Monday morning in the art room, she helps me unpack the boxes containing copies of Patrick’s book. The students are all gratifyingly appreciative and surprised by the gift. Chatter rises as they leaf through the pages and point out photos to each other. Does me good to see these tech-oriented kids so enthused about a physical book.
As it turns out, being in a classroom is doing me good too. Though I’ve only been teaching for a couple of weeks, it’s easier than I’d expected, especially Nell’s class.
The second-year photography students are engaged and attentive, and it’s a pleasure to talk to them about light and composition and to hear their ideas about point of view. It’s also a relief to discover that I haven’t lost my academic knowledge and appreciation for photography, even if my personal relationship with it is complicated.
Some students are more vocal than others. Nell, not surprisingly, is the quietest student in the class, but every time I glance at her, she’s either listening intently to whatever I’m talking about, or she’s studying the photograph projected onto the screen.
As a class, we continue to discuss the works of iconic photographers—Lange, Avedon, McCullin, Bourke-White, Dosineau, Salgado—all of whom were my heroes. They were the reason I got into photography in the first place. And while I don’t know if they can bring me back to it—I don’t know if anything can—talking about their work with interested students still inspires awe.
Before giving them their own cameras to get started, I show them more of my own work. Though I try to stay detached, seeing the large-scale images in the darkened classroom brings up a chaos of old memories and emotions. Anger, helplessness, excitement, and—as always—the blistering disbelief that I’m still alive.
I advance the slides to an image of a man and woman, eyes and mouths open in horror, clothes tattered, flee from a burning building. Rubble and smoke fill the street. Flames leap behind them.
“This is one of my photographs.” I still feel the heat of the flames, the smoke filling my lungs, the screams. Things a photo will never capture. “I was staying in a town in Afghanistan. A bomb detonated in a marketplace, and I got to the scene before the police shut it down. It was total devastation, chaos, terror. And my job was to document it. I managed to get several shots, but I knew the second I took this one that it was powerful. This woman had been in the building that was going up in flames, and the man ran in after her. Part of the roof collapsed about two seconds after they got out. Three seconds before I snapped the shutter.”
Silence falls. Anne, a girl in the front row, raises her hand.
“Do you know what happened to them?”
I shake my head slowly. “I left the area right after I took the shot. Filed it with my agency half an hour later.”