“This feels okay,” I tell him finally, once I’ve settled on something—my left hand a more curving, cuplike shape than the one he made, my wrist turned more inward. The fingers on my right hand fit more easily to the camera body once I’ve figured out what my left hand is doing, though my pinky finger feels a little extraneous at the moment. I pay attention to how it feels, a different kind of inventory—not scanning for what I already know about my body, but scanning for how my body feels in anew situation.
“It’ll start to feel more natural after a while. Like an extension of you. Now you’ve got to stand up.”
“Uh,” I say, casting an eye toward the windows beside us. Stand up?
Alex sets his hands on the arms of his chair and stands first. Oh, sure. That’ll keep people from watching us.
“Elbows, they’ve got to be tucked in to your sides, which will keep you sturdy,” he says, and I see what he means by the whole “extension of your body” thing, because when he tucks his own elbows in close, he shapes his hands again, as though he has his camera with him now. I’m convinced that anyone looking out the windows, or walking by, would know exactly what he’s miming. Hedoeslook sturdy, and he’s—he’s so confident in the way he holds himself, the way he doesn’t mind anyone staring. I have a thudding, echoing memory of Alex’s words to me in this café two years ago:I can.
He smiles down at me, something sheepish about it. “Don’t leave me hanging here, now.”
I like that so much, the way he says it. The way it evens things out a little between us.
I stand, mirroring his pose, listen to him tell me about placing my legs slightly apart, one foot in front of the other, my knees slightly bent. This would absolutely be the moment in a movie where he stands behind me, where he uses this as an excuse to touch me, where the male-gaze-obsessed director makes sure to get an angle on my heaving bosom. But neither of us is interested in a movie moment, and I like that too—how seriously he’s taking it, how he lets me figure it out for myself. The most he moves is to step to the side of his chair, to tilt his head at my stance and nod his head in approval before moving back.
He tells me about brow contact, about how some photographers like to put the camera right up against the ridge of their eyebrow, another point of stability, but some keep a thin line of space between. Alex, he’s a brow guy, and he tells me to try it both ways. I tell him brow contact is probably easier without mascara, and he laughs, and for the first time, it feels easy between us, friendly and fun.
He’s still smiling when he pats his flat, firm stomach once and says, “Here matters.” He pats again, a firm clap. “Stable here. Best-case scenario, you breathe out when you take a photo, but if you’re shooting fast, you can’t always. At the very least, you try to be regular about it. In, out.”
In, out. He pauses, drops his hands to his side, and for a few seconds we simply look at each other, both of us aware of another echo this time—not of anything we’ve ever said to each other, but something we did once together, only a few days ago, our hands pressed together and our lungs moving in tandem. This time, Alex’s cheeks flush slightly. He blinks, and then sits, clearing his throat.
“Of course you won’t always be standing when you take a photo.” His hands curl around the arms of his chair, his knuckles briefly going white before helooks up at me.
I set down my camera. For a second, I think about telling him why I wake up at 6:27 every morning. I think about saying,Alex, I know how you feel. I know how it is, when you can’t trust your body to do what youtell it to do.
But just as quickly I think about what it would mean, to tell him. I think about my mom and Ava, my brothers and my dad, sometimes, even Kit and Zoe—how they ask me gently how I’m doing, how I’m feeling. I think about a different kind of brow contact—the lowered brow of concern, thehow’s Greer holding upexpression. I think about how Alex—even though he’s here, offering me help in a desperate situation of my own making—has never looked at me that way at all.
I sit down in my chair, tidy my paperwork. “You’re still going to go to therapy, right?” I keep my eyes down, away from that sea-glass pleading in his.
There’s a long moment of ambient noise—cars passing slowly on the street, the occasionalwhooshof the espresso machine I can hear even from out here, the distanthonk of a horn.
“Yes,” he says finally, a little formally. “That was the deal, after all.”
And that’s lesson one, in the bag.
Chapter 6
Alex
You might think that a person who’s spent the last decade surrounding himself with the unfamiliar, the far flung, the rarely seen and hardly ever acknowledged, would find it difficult to be surprised in a place like Barden, Virginia.
But then you probably haven’t been inside the office of Dr. PatriciaGarrett-Lynch.
It’s Wednesday afternoon, not even a full two days since I made this deal with Greer, not much more than twenty-four hours since we’d sat outside of a café and I’d taught her how to hold her camera. All morning with her, I’d felt the kind of quiet, in-the-moment presence I’ve started to think I’ve lost the capability for. It’s what had made me good at my job, that presence, and as Greer and I had walked side by side to Boneshaker’s, I’d thought—Maybe the easy pace is already making a difference. Maybe I’m getting the rest I need. Maybe I don’t need the therapy.
But one fleeting memory of a panic attack and the noise in my head was back, clanging and ceaseless. I’d thought,Oh, fuck, it’s happening again, and I don’t suppose I was present for much the rest of the day. When I’d left Greer, I’d pulled my phone from my pocket, desperate to check news alerts, but there’d only been two notifications: one message from Kit, asking how I was getting along, and one reminder—for this appointment, the one I’d made with reckless confidence only a few hours before.
Now that I’m in the small, cramped lobby, I’m dealing with a different sort of noise. I’m anxious as fuck, that’s a given, but I’ve also just noticed that the music playing at a low volume out of the mounted speakers is not, in fact, the generic, supposedly soothing stuff you might hear in a spa or in any other doctor’s office—it’s Pink Floyd,The Wall. I’d ask someone about it, but there’s no one out here with me. Instead of the southern-drawl receptionist I’d spoken to yesterday, there’s a piece of printer paper folded in half withOUT TO LUNCHscribbled on it. The paper itself has a sort of pink, glowing quality to it, and that’s because it’s propped against a Himalayan salt lamp. There is stuffeverywhere.
It’s the walls, though, that really get me. I don’t even bother sitting down to wait, because there’s too much to look at. Almost every available inch of space is taken up, no seeming plan other thanwhere will this fit. There’s old cartoons from theNew Yorker, a few framed finger paintings that I have to hope are from kids and not from adult patients who get asked to do bizarre art therapy shit back there with the good doctor, a grand total of ten of those feathered dream catchers, and too many postcards to even count. There is also a poster of David Bowie in his costume fromLabyrinth, and someone has cut out pink paper hearts and stuck them all over it. One of the paper hearts has a lipstick print on it, and it’s not like it’s got clean lines. Someone really went for it on behalfof the Starman.
I almost take out my phone and text Greer:Is this a joke?
“Hey, take a picture. It’ll last longer.”
I startle away from the Bowie poster and turn, and even from across the room I’ve got to look down to meet the eyes of a woman who’s probably four foot nine inches tall with an extra inch made up from the frothy, steel-gray curls rising out of her head. She’s got a thick Brooklyn accent, and when she crosses the room to shake my hand, it’s in a grip so unexpectedly forceful that I’m pretty sure she pulls me forward a step. “Get it?” she says. “Because you’re aphotographer!”
Her smile is as enthusiastic as her handshake, slightly gap toothed and so wide you can’t concentrate on anything else about her face. When she releases my hand and turns away, heading back down the hallway from which she came, I stick a hand in my pocket and extract a piece of gum from the pack I bought on the walk over, shoving it in my mouth as I follow her.
