“Same as you used to be, every firstday of school.”
She smiles, probably remembering the same thing I am—how she’d fidget with her backpack straps, her lunchbox handle, the hem of her shirt, whatever—at the thought of walking up the steps to whatever new school she was starting. But every time, she did fine. Better than fine. She’d always needed me less than she thought.
She looks down, fidgets with the ribbon around her bouquet. “Alex.” It’s so quiet I have to tip my head down to hear her better. “You gave me every good thing in my life when we were kids, you know. You don’t know what it means to me, having you here to do this.”
I clear my tight throat—too many times for it to be anything other than what it is, which is my attempt to keep this from getting messy—and crook my arm for her to take. No panic now, not even a trace of it, and I thank all the gods in the universe for that—that I’m exactly who I need to befor her today.
“Tool Kit,” I say to her now, using her old nickname, my voice in the patient, steady register I recognize from years of practice, years of practice at being her calm in the eye of whatever storm our childhood inflicted upon us. “Let’s go get youmarried, huh?”
And I take the first step togive her away.
* * * *
I’d like to say it lasts.
I make it through the ceremony; I sit in my front row seat and keep my hands clasped loosely in my lap, watch my sister and Ben exchange tearful vows and a kiss that makes me drop my eyes. I stand from my seat and clap with all the other guests, walk behind the wedding party when it’s time to file out, my hands tucked in my pockets, my smile feeling easy and natural on my face, my breath even and relieved at having made it through the mostimportant part.
But soon enough I feel the tension inside me rise again. Before we head to the large, peaked white tent for the reception, the photographer Kit’s hired—barely in his twenties, by my estimate, with pants cut to show his dress socks and a shitty Sony and too-busy hands on his lens—gathers us for various posed pictures, and my palms start to sweat. Part of it is garden-variety professional judgment—I’m probably going to think every one of these pictures is garbage, especially since this guy doesn’t seem to understand how the actual sun works—but most of it is all toofamiliar fear.
I’m trapped here. I’ll panic, and everyone will see.
If there’s a bright spot, it’s when I’m standing with Kit for a picture, Greer beside me and Zoe beside Kit, and Ben’s stepmother Sharon loudly announces that she’ll never wear a pair of Spanx again while reaching a hand into her waistband and snapping the fabric against her skin. I feel the tremor of Greer’s soft laugh all along the left side of my body, and for a second, my mind goes quiet.
But it’s short lived, that quiet, and by the time we’re into the dancing portion of the evening, I feel like I’ve spent most of this wedding in a state of clenched-teeth, white-knuckled preparation for the worst. At the most strained moments, I think longingly about my camera, about the heavy weight of it in my hands. I think about the pictures I could be taking—Henry Tucker at the end of his toast, the glow from a candle winking off the very edge of his glasses, a small, stunning highlight of the tear in his eye. Kit and Zoe laughing their way through the Electric Slide, Zoe’s updo listing a little to the right and her boyfriend Aiden watching her from the corner of the dance floor, his crooked smile a charming visual parallel. Candace seated at a round table near the wedding party’s, still touching her corsage, her head inclined toward my dad and one of the Tucker cousins, all three of them dappled with light from an arc of water glasses sitting infront of them.
Twice I’d almost approached the kid with the Sony to ask if I could take over. But both times, as if she’d had a homing device on my ambition, my obsession with work, Kit had cut me a quelling glance across the room.
Almost as if it’s mocking me, my phone vibrates from where it rests inside my jacket pocket, pressed right up against my heart. I tell myself I can’t take a work call at a wedding, atthiswedding especially, but the vibration there is a buzzy reminder of the panic lingering under my skin, and I tuck my hand inside to pull it out, promising myself I’ll simply shut it off, not lookat the screen.
But there’s that saying about old habits, I guess, and when I glimpse my agent’s name, I get a familiar pulse of curiosity, more comfortable than almost any other feeling I’ve had today. Before I’ve even thought about it, I’ve slid my finger across the screen, ducking out from under the tent to find a quiet spot in the fading twilight.
“Jae,” I say, once I’ve raised the phone to my ear, already wincing at what I’ve done, tonight of all nights. “I can’t take any workthis weekend.”
“Shit, I didn’t even think you’d answer.” I know Jae-Sung Shin’s voice so well, know it even better than his face, since I don’t think we’ve been in a room together more than a dozen times since he started representing me six years ago, after I’d had a feature in theTimesmagazine that’d broken my career wide open. If it were up to Jae, I’d give up chasing breaking news shit entirely and start getting all my work directly from him—commissions that news agencies or magazines or nonprofits want for editorial spreads, longer-form stuff where the photos are going to be a centerpiece. In his mind, it’d be a win-win: he makes more money from his cut, and I stay saferand work less.
“Aren’t you at your sister’s wedding?”
“Yes,” I say, and it’s clipped. Because I am a fucking dirtbag for answering this phone.
“I’m not calling with a job.” For the first time I notice his voice sounds a little slurred, like he’s been out drinking. I take a look at my watch—8:15, Saturday night. Not outside the realm of possibility, though it’s early. Jae likes a party, is always trying to drag me to something whenever I’m in the city for longer than two days. “I ran into Deidre Gaskell tonight.”
Fuck. Heat spreads up my neck—part panic, part foreboding. Deidre Gaskell does publicity for UNHCR, giving me some of my most regular work over the last few years photographing various refugee crises. I’d seen her last week at one of the largest camps on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
And I hadn’t been in good shape. I’d been in back alley shape, same as I had been last night.
“She said you—” Jae breaks off, and I hear the clink of ice in a glass. When he continues, he sounds sober as a judge. “She said you had some trouble shooting one day.”
“Conditions were rough.I had a fever.”
I didn’t have a fever. I’d had shaky hands and a pounding heart rate and an inability to focus on anything except for how I could calm the fuck down, how I could keep everyone from seeing what was happening to me. I open my mouth to say that I’d shot six days in a row, that I’d sent Deidre a set of photos that were as good as anything I’ve ever done. So what if I’d had trouble one day? Who’d blame anyone for having a bad day with a job like this?You would,my conscience nudges, remembering all the times I’d snapped at young, green reporters, telling them to get their shit together, to focus,to do the job.
“Listen, Alex,” Jae says, before I can speak. “She’s going to send someone else out to Turkey next week.”
“Not an issue.” I’m hoping my quick response covers the sick feeling of embarrassment I have. “I’ve been needing a change from the longer-term stuff. Let’s see what they’ve got at theTimes.” Somewhere behind me, a new bass rhythm starts up from the sound system, and a cheer goes up from the crowd. It’s probably some widely recognized pop song that I’m unlikely to have ever heard if it’s come out in thelast ten years.
“Alex.” I can tell already I’m not going to like what he says next. “I’m not sending any more work for a while.”
“You don’t pick where I go.” My voice is sharp, overloud. I take another few steps away from the tent. “I can check the feeds. I can be on a plane tomorrow. I can pick the story.”
