Return to the Beach House

by Georgia Bockoven

  Even though she knew Matthew wouldn’t be back from his run for at least an hour, she glanced out the front window anyway. It seemed impossible, but the fog was even thicker than it had been the previous morning. Too dense for anything but close-up shots, maybe some macros of the foam or the moss on the log she’d been leaning against when she saw Abbey.

  There was no sign of Matthew, just as she knew there wouldn’t be. Running was as much escape for him as exercise. Despite his seemingly easy acceptance, he needed time to absorb what she’d told him the night before. Intellectually, he might understand how she’d reacted, but he was creative and imaginative, and there was nothing he could do to keep images of what she’d gone through from insinuating themselves into his thoughts.

  Enough. She would not go there this morning.

  She’d spent two years agonizing over whether or not to tell him about her duel with sanity. Now she had, and there was no going back. He would either accept the lies she’d told him about not being able to meet him, and the reasons for those lies, or he’d add the lies to the list of reasons they were better off separating.

  She grabbed her camera bag and Matthew’s tripod and headed outside, where she stopped to inhale the cold, salty air, taking it deep into her lungs. She could live here, she suddenly realized, feeling a kind of deep bond with what was wild and free that she hadn’t felt since standing on top of Mount Kilimanjaro with Matthew, watching the sunrise, and sharing a hotel-room-size bottle of really bad wine. Slowly, she moved toward the sound of crashing waves, trying to remember where the stairs were. She found them, then almost stumbled over a girl sitting on the top step, tucked tightly into the folds of an oversize gray hoodie and sweatpants, her back pressed to the railing.

  “My fault.” The girl popped up and moved out of the way. “I didn’t hear you coming.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lindsey said, moving to step around her.

  “Hey, wait—are you the photographer?”

  Lindsey studied her, noting the lack of makeup and generous spray of freckles. She had a feeling that somewhere under that wool cap and hood was a shock of deep auburn hair and the stubborn personality to go with it. “I’m a photographer. I don’t know about being the photographer. Are you looking for anyone in particular?”

  “Lindsey Thompson?”

  She didn’t like it when someone she’d never met knew her name. “That’s me,” she said reluctantly.

  The girl brushed the sand off her sweatpants. “I’m not a stalker or anything. Grace told me about you.”

  “Grace?”

  She turned and pointed toward the house behind her. “My sister. She takes care of Julia and Eric’s place when they have renters.”

  “Oh.” Lindsey relaxed. She vaguely remembered Matthew telling her about the girl who lived next door. “I wasn’t the one who made the arrangements so I—”

  “I looked you up,” the girl said. “You’re really good, even if what you do isn’t my thing. I did volunteer work at a free clinic when I was in high school, and I saw enough of the messed-up things people do to each other to last me a lifetime. I can’t imagine taking pictures of it day after day.”

  “You learn to distance yourself.”

  “What about when someone’s shooting at you, like those journalists who just died?”

  Lindsey didn’t want to go there with this girl, still she felt compelled to answer. “It’s hard to explain, but you become so focused on what you’re doing that your world is reduced to the image you see through the viewfinder. You hear the bullets and bombs, but convince yourself they’re not meant for you.” Matthew understood this feeling of invincibility and knew there was nothing he could say or do to change it. The most dangerous thing she could do was to think too much about being cautious. And it wasn’t as if he worked in a zoo.

  “Sorry, still not my thing.”

  Lindsey laughed. She liked Rebecca’s attitude, but especially appreciated her moxie.

  “I looked up your husband too. His stuff blew me away. Not that yours didn’t. It’s just that—”

  “It’s not your thing.”

  “If I could take pictures of animals that were one-tenth as good as his, I’d be camping on the doorstep to National Geographic.”

  The husband part was a natural mistake, but the assumption usually came from someone older. “I’ll let him know he has a fan.”

  “Do you think he’d talk to me? No one around here knows anything about what it’s like to be a real photographer. My teachers keep telling me I need to be practical and learn how to shoot weddings and babies as a backup. Oh, and let’s not forget ‘architecture,’ which is a euphemism for real estate brochures and websites. Can you imagine anything more boring?

  “My freshman counselor even tried to get me interested in fashion by telling me I could meet celebrities. Who in their right mind would want to take a picture of Kim Kardashian when they could go to Canada for Spirit Bears or Sumatra for tigers?”

  Obviously, the girl had done her homework. Both stories had been award-winners for Matthew, the Sumatra-tigers piece winning the Veolla Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award. “Do you want me to ask him or would you rather do it yourself? He should be back from his run in an hour or so.”

  The girl hesitated and then smiled. “To be honest, I’d rather you did it. But what kind of photographer am I going to be if I can’t be a little pushy when I need to be?”

  A seagull walked past Lindsey, almost stepping on her foot. “I think I’ve just witnessed a new way to describe fog.”

  “It usually doesn’t hang around too long, at least not this dense and not this time of year.” She nodded toward the tripod. “If you wait, it should start clearing in a couple of hours.”

  “Which leads to lesson number one—sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

  “Rebecca—actually Becky,” she sheepishly admitted. “Rebecca just sounds a little more the way I like to think of myself now that I’m pushing twenty-one.”

  Lindsey raised an eyebrow.

  “Okay, so I just turned nineteen a couple of weeks ago. It’s the ‘teen’ part that drives me nuts.”

  “Doesn’t matter what age you are. The photograph is all anyone cares about.” The more Lindsey traveled, the more people she met, the more she’d come to believe the old cliché: age doesn’t matter. A starving two-year-old looks at the world through ancient eyes, while the centenarians of Okinawa seem childlike in their joie de vivre. “So, Rebecca it is.”

  “You were saying something about lesson number one?”

  Lindsey laughed. “Lesson one is that you never let the weather dictate the shoot. Animals still have to feed and drink and mate and take care of their young, whether it’s raining or snowing or so foggy you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Think of the emotional response to a picture of a puppy left out in the rain. Or an elephant looking for water in a burned-out, dust-filled landscape.” The images were hers from her early career. Remembering them gave her a surprisingly bittersweet yearning for that all-too-brief time before she joined the crusade to change the world.

  “I thought you took pictures of people.”

  “But as you know, I live with someone who is one of the world’s best nature photographers. Some of that is bound to rub off.”

  Rebecca grinned. “Want another roommate?”

  “First we’d have to have a house.”

  “Everyone talks about being footloose and free, but I’ve never actually met anyone who is. Do you have any idea how exciting that sounds to someone like me? What’s it like when Matthew is getting ready to go out on a story? Has he always been as good as he is now? Was he born that way? I know there are prodigies in everything, so I would imagine photography has them too.”

  “I didn’t know him when he was a kid, but I’m sure he always had potential.” Lindsey finger-combed her hair out of her eyes, wishing she’d thought to bring a cap. “I don’t think he’d be all that excited about
the prodigy thing. He works hard to get those ‘lucky’ once-in-a-lifetime shots.”

  “I love hearing that.”

  Lindsey knew there had to have been a time when she was this young and enthusiastic, but the memory was buried too deep to easily summon. Impulsively, she asked, “I’m exploring this morning. Want to come along?”

  “Are you kidding?” Moving backward, Rebecca held up her hand. “Give me just one minute. I’ll get my camera. It’s right by the back door.” Even in the gray of the fog, Lindsey could see Rebecca blush. “I was hoping you’d ask,” she admitted. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  Lindsey shook her head and waved her on. She hadn’t believed for a second that their meeting was accidental. “Bring a tripod if you have one.”

  She was back in the promised minute, and they started down the stairs. Rebecca had to work to keep up with Lindsey’s long stride as they crossed the beach, following the sound of the ocean to the packed sand where the walking was easier. Lindsey unerringly wound up at the log she had been leaning against the morning she’d photographed Abbey. There were times her life depended on such instincts, and she never took her sense of direction for granted.

  “Do you know many of the people who live around here?” Lindsey asked, adjusting the tripod legs for a low shot of two fishermen working the waves with long, heavy poles.

  “Everyone but the renters. I’ve baby-sat or house-sat for most of them.”

  “What about a little girl named Abbey?”

  “Her parents are renters, but they come for a couple of months every year. I think the house belongs to a relative, or maybe a friend. Someone told them I baby-sit, so I got to know them fairly well last year.”

  “What’s Abbey like?”

  Rebecca gave her a puzzled look, but didn’t question how Lindsey would know someone’s name and not know anything about her. “She’s really smart and really curious. Loves to play games and dress up in this box of costumes her mother bought at an after-Halloween sale.”

  “So she has a good imagination?” It was a question that implied Abbey had been the only one to see the couple on the beach. If they had been figments of Abbey’s imagination, where did that leave Lindsey?

  She checked her camera settings and passed them on to Rebecca, with quick explanations about the reasons for the adjustments. Rebecca’s Canon was five or six years old but had been the top of the line for entry-level 35mm cameras at the time. “I saw her on the beach yesterday morning. She had an older man and woman with her.”

  Rebecca eyed her warily. “You mean really old, like in their eighties, but they act like they just started dating? He’s a head taller, and she does most of the talking? He wears one of those European hats. And she always wears a blue-and-white scarf.”

  “That’s them.”

  “Yeah, I see them every once in a while, but I’ve never known anyone else who did. I tried talking to my dad about them, but I could see it made him sad, so I never brought it up again. I figured the way he acted, something weird must have happened.”

  “Do you have any idea who they are?”

  “Yeah—Joe and Maggie. They’re the people who used to own the house where you’re staying.”

  “Why do you suppose no one believes you when you talk about seeing them?” Lindsey tried to sound casual, but could see by Rebecca’s reaction that she’d failed.

  Rebecca hesitated. “Maybe because they died like five or six years ago?”

  This Lindsey hadn’t anticipated. It left her slack-jawed. “I don’t believe in ghosts or apparitions—or anything I can’t actually touch,” she said. “There has to be some other explanation.”

  “Let me know when you figure it out, because I don’t believe in ghosts either. Makes it kind of hard when you actually see them, though, doesn’t it?”

  The images Lindsey had captured of Abbey handing her shell to someone and her obvious delight in what turned out to be her invisible companions wasn’t something she was ready to share with anyone but Matthew. “We do seem to be an odd threesome to share the same delusion—you, me, and Abbey.”

  “Maybe it’s a girl thing.” Rebecca toed the sand into a mound. “It seems they only come around when someone needs them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Abbey was headed for trouble that morning. She thinks she’s going to grow up to be Wonder Woman and isn’t afraid of anything, including things she should be, like the ocean.”

  “What about you?”

  Rebecca was slow to answer. “I had a hard time going with the idea that my mom chose cocaine over me. It’s a common story for kids like me and my stepsister Grace. Joe and Maggie helped me see my anger was really screwing up my life. I had no room for the people who loved me and wanted to take care of me. What about you?”

  “I’m going to save that for another time.”

  “Fair enough. You never know, I could be some tabloid spy.”

  Lindsey laughed for the second time that morning. It felt . . . good, like something normal people did.

  Rebecca rechecked the settings on her camera. “Why is it that I can never get my pictures to turn out the way I see them in my head?”

  “You have to become so familiar with your camera that it becomes a part of you. When that happens, you take pictures intuitively. You even look at the world differently. Your curiosity is heightened by little things, like seeing a broken spiderweb and wondering what it would look like with the sun behind it, or whether to bring in the barn at the back of the property. You try to arrange happy accidents where something happens, like catching a hummingbird stealing the silken threads for its nest.”

  “How would you do that?”

  “Go somewhere with lots of hummingbirds during breeding season, find a good web, and wait.

  “I went to an autograph party for a writer I know, and during the question-and-answer part of the program someone said something about writers being born, not made. My friend said that every writer he knew had served an apprenticeship of writing a million words. I feel that way about photography. If you want to be a good photographer, go on a couple of trips a year to fabulous places. If you want to be a great photographer, go out in your own backyard every day. Eventually, you will have taken enough pictures to know what works and why and you’ll be able to set up your shots as naturally and effortlessly as you blink.”

  “I can’t even imagine what that must be like.”

  “You stop seeing the world the way you do now and realize how powerful a single image, frozen in time, can be. There isn’t a video, no matter how dramatic, that can compare to a still shot that has captured human emotion at its peak. What makes a great photographer is the ability to anticipate those moments, to set yourself up so that you’re ready when the action takes place. You develop a sixth sense of sorts.

  “This kind of shot is a given at sporting events, but the truly great images are rarely, if ever, taken by an amateur, unless it’s an accident. You have to know what’s going on to anticipate what’s going to happen.

  “Sometimes the best pictures are off the field. Fans and parents of athletes are great human-interest subjects, especially at nonprofessional games.

  “If you can capture someone sleeping through a political speech or yawning in a Batman movie or a soldier standing guard over a friend who died and waiting for a medevac helicopter, you can tell your story with one image.”

  “I want to see the world the way you do.”

  “First you have to train your mind to go there without conscious thought. Then you have to accept that you don’t see the world around you the way others do. There will be times you feel like you’re speaking a language from a country no one knows exists.” Lindsey laughed. “That’s when you start looking for another photographer to talk to just to prove to yourself that you’re not going crazy.”

  “I had a teacher in high school who singled me out to tell me that my pictures suck. I know I have a long way to go, but there’s no way I’m going to let someone like that walk all
over my dream.”

  Lindsey had a theory about people who put themselves in the position of crushing budding talent rather than nurturing it. She laid it off to unrestrained jealousy on one side of the coin and frustration on the other. Someone or something had walked on that person’s dreams, and it was impossible to resist the urge to pass it on by doing the same to someone else.

  Rather than haul out the soapbox, Lindsey changed the subject. “Another thing—don’t let yourself get caught up in having to have the latest camera or lens or whatever. There’s always going to be something coming out that’s bigger and better and more expensive. More than anything, it’s the photographer who makes a great picture, not the camera.”

  She’d carried a camera that was little more than a point-and-shoot into every conflict she’d ever covered, using it as a backup because she could hide it in her “working” bra—one a full cup size larger than she normally wore and padded to hold not only the camera but batteries and memory cards when the temperature was below freezing. Without it, she would have come out of the Kunar Province in 2010 with nothing to show for two months’ work.

  A tribal leader she and Asa had gone to for safe passage out of the mountains had taken them to a village where he demanded her cameras and equipment as payment. She’d tried to bargain with him, offering her insulated boots in exchange for his sandals and the memory cards in her pack. He could keep the cameras. All she wanted were the cards. Afraid to show how angry she was over the shakedown, she turned to Asa and saw the silent plea to let it go. She realized then that she wasn’t bargaining for her images but for their lives.

  “What you have now is more than you need for the shooting you want to do. It will teach you how to get in close and not rely on a long lens for everything,” Lindsey told the girl. “Great photographs have been taken with a lot less.”

  Rebecca took the cloth Lindsey had given her and wiped the moisture off of her camera. “I want this so much, I get ahead of myself.”

  Lindsey had driven her mother and father crazy with her hunger to leave the farm and see the world—at fifteen. There was no way she was going to reel in the string that let Rebecca’s kite soar. Especially not today. Today it seemed fitting, a tribute in a way, to nurture Rebecca’s dreams for all the dreams that had died with her friends.