The Calendar of New Beginnings (13 page)

Since Lucy didn’t have more than a couple of suitcases with her, she was able to pull off the move without much fuss. Her mother’s cleaning crew had vacuumed and dusted every available space, making the worn furnishings gleam. The air smelled of lemon, and Lucy sneezed as she wandered through the small home. The carpets and the upholstery on the Victorian couch and armchair all showed vacuum tracks. The windows sparkled in the sunlight, showing a rare streak from the cleaner. It was a gesture she’d happily accepted.

After living in anything from hotels to barracks, huts to compounds, this little cottage made her feel cozy. Even though none of the furnishings were hers, this place was her safe haven for the moment.

She let herself out the French doors into the backyard. The view was one of the things that had drawn her to this cottage. Mountain peaks rose up all around her, dotted with pines and other conifers. A small pond drew her across the lawn—freshly cut, courtesy of her father. She looked into the water and studied her reflection.

She
did
need a haircut, but the world wouldn’t end if she waited a few days. Her face still hadn’t filled in, and the gauntness of her cheeks made them look sunken. Dark circles lay under her somber eyes.

This was the Lucy O’Brien her students would see, but was this really her?

Where was her sparkle, her vitality? Seeing Andy’s pain the other night had made the walls surrounding all of her bottled-up emotions start to crumble. She’d experienced loss too.

And it sucked.

Her hand unconsciously reached up to touch her right eye. She’d always taken her twenty-twenty vision for granted, and without it, she was floundering. Who would she be if she wasn’t able to take photos, to travel around the world and be an award-winning photojournalist again?
 

No one understood the magic, the courage, the technique it took to capture the perfect picture. Sure, Andy was right—if her vision didn’t improve, there were ways she could adjust to her new reality. She could take photos using her left eye, but that would be like asking Michelangelo to paint with his right hand. Would he have been able to paint the Sistine Chapel if his left hand had become useless? She didn’t think so. She could try and switch to taking only black-and-white photos, but again, if Michelangelo had painted the Sistine Chapel in only black and white, would it have been considered a masterpiece?

When she’d agreed to take photos for The Calendar of New Beginnings, she’d told herself the quality wouldn’t have to be up to her usual levels. She could use it as an opportunity to learn how to take photos with her left eye. But that wouldn’t do justice to the project, not considering the depth of loss Andy, Jeff, April, her mother, and all the rest had been through. She felt the pressure to produce perfect photos for the calendar, and something told her these couldn’t simply be playful, risqué photos. Anyone could do hot dogs and cantaloupes.

Her new idea was to capture the truth of loss and the courage it took to keep living after experiencing grief. Maybe each subject could hold a photo of the person they’d lost or a memento from their life.

Today was as good a day as any to see if she could take photos—any photos—since she’d be teaching young minds about photography later in the afternoon. God, her first class. The thought of teaching something she feared she could no longer do made her sick to her stomach. It actually made it worse that her students were so excited to work with her. According to the administrator she’d spoken with at the school, there was a sizable wait list to get into her class.
 

She pulled her phone from her jeans pocket with a trembling hand and brought up the camera function. Maybe it would be best to start out by taking pictures on the simplest mechanism out there.

But even holding the phone made her miss her babies: an old manual Leica for when she didn’t have access to electrical power and the new digital Leica M9 model—the smallest, quietest full-frame camera on the market. She’d scrimped and saved to buy that camera. Her bag of Leica lenses gave her the versatility she needed for any shoot, anywhere in the world.
 

Lucy had bought Leica because her hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson, had talked about the camera brand becoming an extension of his eye in his biography, which Lucy had read hundreds of times. The famous French photojournalist had mastered the art of candid photography, and Lucy had pored over his body of work and everything written about his life to search for the secrets of his success. She loved Ansel Adams’ black-and-white landscapes of the American West, but her very soul was touched by Henri’s photos of world events like Gandhi’s funeral and the last days of the Chinese Civil War.

Henri had claimed his photography style was grounded in the concept of the decisive moment, which was the title of his first book. It was a notion she intrinsically understood. To capture such a moment of pure, uncensored truth, you had to always be present and ready.

The camera phone didn’t feel right in her hands, but she wasn’t ready to take her Leicas out. Since the accident, she hadn’t touched them except to pack. Hadn’t been able to. She’d captured some excellent photos of the attack on the Congolese village before the explosion that had knocked her out, but she couldn’t bear to look at them yet. At least the soldiers hadn’t stolen or destroyed her equipment in the melee.

She raised the camera and sized up the shot. Since it was a flat-screen viewer, she could use both eyes to frame it. Her depth perception wasn’t an issue here, thank heavens, since it only affected her when she tried to pick up the objects closest to her.
 

Sinking to her haunches, she angled the phone until it captured the exposed rock a few feet away in the water. She lowered the camera to look at the scene with her naked eyes, and when she closed her left eye, as she was apt to do out of habit, her vision immediately went blurry. And darn it all to hell, she could hear in her head her doctor telling her not to do that.

She almost lowered her phone in defeat. Taking photos shouldn’t make her feel helpless and weird.

But she was made of sterner stuff than that. Adjusting the camera again, she took a few photos of the sunlight illuminating the water around the rock. Her new inclination to close her right eye like she was some pirate photographer with an eye patch wasn’t a longterm answer. It certainly wasn’t comfortable.
 

It didn’t surprise her that the photos were all wrong. She wasn’t used to the technology and her timing was off. But how was she going to make this calendar happen when she couldn’t even capture a decent photo with a camera phone? Could she back out? But no, despite her initial reluctance, she was determined to see it through. She’d just have to go back to the basics.

She was going to have to relearn her craft until she was surer of the fate of her right eye. God, she was going to have to investigate buying a new camera model; one with an electronic view finder. It sucked, but Lucy knew better than to rail at fate. That wasn’t who she was. And she wasn’t a quitter either. She was an award-winning photojournalist, and she was going to continue to be one. Somehow. And dammit, she was going to be a freaking awesome teacher too.

As she deleted the photos of the pond, her phone chimed. It was from Andy.

Good luck with your first class today. You’re going to knock them on their butts.

Nice of him to send her a text when he was working. Sharing their ice creams had cemented their bond in a whole new way. There’d been some unexpected intimacy, but Lucy knew that was from Andy’s vulnerability. Still, the way he’d looked at her a few times…

But they were just getting used to looking at each other again, right? That was normal.

She texted him back.
I’m a little nervous, but I have decided to be the best photography teacher they could ever find in Dare Valley.

I don’t have any doubts,
he responded.
We’ll have to huddle again later so you can tell me all about it.

Huddle. Friend talk. Her mind flashed back to the awkward look that had crossed his face after she strong-armed the bill for their ice creams.

You’ll have to see my new digs. It’s like Strawberry Shortcake meets Jane Austen.

Her phone immediately buzzed.
No kidding. I’m almost afraid to cross the threshold. Gotta run. A nurse just buzzed me. Good luck!

Good luck indeed. She went inside to prepare for her first class. Again. She might not be able to take the kind of photos she wanted to right now, but by God, she could teach others how to take their own.
 

By the time Lucy drove to the university later that afternoon, she felt calmer and more decisive. The faculty parking lot was easy to find, and she’d snuck into enough journalism classes as a teenager to remember the path to her new department. If only Arthur Hale had still been teaching at the time—back in the eighties, he used to teach one coveted class every year.
 

The administrative assistant to the dean showed her to her new office, leaving her with a warm welcome and a shiny brass key to the lock on the door. The office had one lone window, and Lucy was happy for the light.

“I was hoping I might catch you before class,” she heard a man say from behind her.

Turning, she smiled. “Hi, Tanner.”

“Hi, Lucy,” he responded, leaning against the doorframe. “I remember my first day as a teacher, so I thought I’d pass along the best advice anyone has ever given me. It comes from my sister-in-law Jill.”

It was impossible to keep her mouth from twitching. Jill Hale had been making waves since childhood, and Lucy had always enjoyed running into her on her trips home. “Knowing Jill, I’m sure it’s a doozy.”

“She told me not to be boring,” he said with a slow grin. “And Meredith reminded me most kids here want to be like us, so we’ll have a cult following, like it or not.”

She sat on the edge of the desk. “Do they follow you around and hang on your every word?”

He shrugged. “Most of the time. Unless I’ve given them a bad grade on an assignment. Then they try and work their way back into my good graces.”

She laughed. “Well, that’s going to be weird. I might ask for some tips on handling that kind of adulation. I’m not used to it.”

His brow knit then, and she stilled. He was easing into something, and Lucy feared she knew what it might be.

“How much do you know about why I’m back?” she asked boldly. “Because I’m happy to hear your pointers about how to deal with a cult following, but that’s not the only reason you’re here.”

He ran his tongue across his front teeth. “My wife might be a little younger than you, but she’s always looked up to you. And then there’s Arthur… They’re worried, and since we all have black ink in our veins, as the Hales say, I made some calls.”

Lucy tapped her foot on the carpet. “I knew it was possible Arthur might look into things, but I underestimated your connections. I…didn’t think.” She’d been too busy worrying about everything from healing to the future of her career to returning to Dare Valley.

“I didn’t come here to get into your business, and you can tell me to buzz off.” He pushed off the doorway and walked toward her. “I might have come to Dare Valley for different reasons initially, but I was burned out too. I didn’t know anyone when I arrived—unlike you—but I lucked my way into the best family around. The Hales and O’Briens are close. And you and me…we’ve been in some of the same places, same situations.”

She nodded, feeling her chest grow tight.
 

“I’m here as a friend if you want to talk about what happened with someone who knows what it’s like to work in war zones.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Being here taught me not to do everything alone. And that’s what I came here to say.”

He was more than sweet to extend that offer. She knew it couldn’t have been easy for him. The journalists who covered wars tended toward a lone-wolf mentality—she needed to look no further than herself to see evidence of that. But sharing her story with Andy had soothed her. Perhaps sharing it with Tanner would do the same.

“They’re not sure I’ll regain full sight in my right eye,” she began, clenching her hands together. “I don’t have to tell you what that might mean for my career.”

He didn’t move. Didn’t say anything. Just waited for her to continue. And so everything she’d been through simply flowed out. At one point during her telling, he helped her into her black chair and grabbed the empty one in front of her desk for himself, positioning it closer to her. How he’d sensed that her legs were trembling, she would never know. When she finished, she felt messy and vulnerable and hollow. But she also felt
heard
.

Since she’d listened to hundreds of people talk about the tragedies they’d suffered, she knew it wasn’t easy. Not everyone was capable of listening to the hardships of others. Tanner was most certainly one of the prize few, which had no doubt helped him become the successful international correspondent he had been.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked. “I know you’re taking care of everything, but is there anything you need? A drive to the eye doctor in Denver? You tell me, and it’s done. Mere might be close to having our baby, but we’re here for you, Lucy. Arthur is too. You know how he is. He likes to poke and prod as much as any salty journalist, but that man would give you the shirt off his back if you needed it.”