“It comes to you.” Kirk smiled as he thought about it. “Not all at once. At first, you just snap anything that moves. After a while, you start to be a little more discriminating.” He glanced at Ethan’s face to see if he understood. The boy’s brow was puckered, as if he were trying hard to make sense out of what was being said. “You start to be picky,” Kirk clarified. He laughed softly, remembering. “Also, having only a certain amount of money to pay for film kind of helps make you pick and choose.”
Restrained by his seat belt, Ethan twisted around in his seat as best he could to look at Kirk. “Is that how you started?”
A pleased feeling filtered through Kirk. The open field, separated from the road by a forbidding length of barbed wire, was still here. Perfect.
“Mostly. I made myself indispensable to this news photographer I was working for. I made sure that I was always one step ahead of him whenever he wanted anything.” It had been a hell of an apprenticeship. The man had been a hard taskmaster. But it had been worth it. “He taught me a lot.”
Ethan stared at Kirk with awestruck eyes. “How come you did this instead of something else? Like being a big-league ball player?”
He’d never had that choice to make, and it amused him that Ethan had thought that much of his abilities.
“Well, for one thing, I wasn’t all that good at baseball.” He saw the doubt rise in Ethan’s eyes. “Not good enough to hope for a career, anyway.”
Kirk slowly eased his vehicle over to the shoulder. The road snaked off toward the campus before him, but for now he was interested in the lone cow that stood on the hillside, like the last bastion of the rural world that had once existed here. She was munching peacefully, while behind her, just barely visible, was the outline of a tall office building peering out of an industrial complex located in Newport Beach. A shadow of the world bearing down on them, Kirk thought.
“There’s something almost mystical about being able to take a photograph. You freeze a piece of time and put it in your pocket, Ethan. It makes you feel powerful, as if you had a hand in creating something.” He looked down at the attentive face. “Or saving it for all time.”
Kirk leaned over and pulled open his glove compartment. The door all but yawned into Ethan’s lap. What Kirk wanted was right on top.
“Here, this is what I mean.” He took out a small hardbound book. It was a collection of stills taken of settlers in the late 1800s. Kirk flipped it open at random. The book was fairly worn. He’d found it in a secondhand store over ten years ago.
“Look at this.” He pointed to a photograph of a group of miners standing before a tent in a mining town long since forgotten. “What do you see?”
Ethan stared for a long moment, wondering what it was that he was expected to answer. It was a photograph of a group of men, all with mustaches and beards. It was kind of fuzzy, too.
He raised his eyes to Kirk’s. “A bunch of old people, looking pretty stiff.”
Some of those men, Kirk guessed, were probably younger than he was. But the facial hair—not to mention the hard life—tended to make them all look older. “What do they all have in common?”
Ethan frowned as he studied the photograph again. “They all have hats?”
He couldn’t help the amusement that rose into his eyes as he looked at Ethan. Kirk closed the book and replaced it in the glove compartment, snapping the door shut. “Yes, and they’re all dead.”
“Oh.” He’d figured that part, Ethan thought.
Kirk slanted a look at Ethan, biting his tongue. “But they’re all alive, too.”
Ethan’s eyes grew wide. He stared at the closed glove compartment as if it were going to pop open at any second. “They’re zombies?”
Kirk had to bite down on his lower lip to keep from laughing out loud. He knew such a reaction would only hurt Ethan’s feelings. Averting his face, Kirk got out of the car. Like an echoing reaction, Ethan quickly followed, jumping down from the van. Kirk waited until he had rounded the hood and joined him.
“No,” he began patiently, hoping he could make this simple enough for Ethan to understand. He wasn’t accustomed to talking to children. “They’ve been captured on film forever. So even when they become really old, even when they die, you can see them the way they had been when they were young and vital. That makes them alive. Forever.”
Kirk gave Ethan some time to think about the idea as he opened the side of his van. He’d brought various lenses with him, and two cameras. The one he favored, and a very simple model he retained for sentimental reasons. It had been his very first camera. He had bought it in a thrift shop in Santa Ana, with money he’d earned doing odd jobs in the neighborhood. It was the perfect camera for Ethan to work with.
Taking them both out, he closed the sliding door. “Did you know that there were certain Indian tribes who used to believe that if you took their photograph, you stole their spirit, their soul?”
Ethan wondered if Kirk was just teasing him, then decided that Kirk didn’t do things like that. “Really?”
“Really.” Kirk looked through the viewfinder as he aimed the camera at the cow. The animal obligingly remained in one spot. He lowered the camera to adjust the aperture. “Maybe they had the right idea. You don’t steal anyone’s soul, but you do get a bit of their spirit, a bit of their immortality.”
Ethan dramatically blew out a breath. “Wow.”
“My sentiment exactly.”
Kirk took a few shots, adjusting the range on his telephoto lens after each shot. The building behind the cow loomed larger and larger. Finished, he glanced at Ethan and then handed him the other camera.
He slid the strap over his neck. “Here, let’s get to work.”
Ethan stared down at the camera as if it were a huge magical medallion. “You’re giving this to me?”
“I’m lending it to you,” Kirk told him. “Like with the hammer, you have to prove to me that you can handle it.”
“Sure!”
Ethan looked around quickly. There was nothing before them except the field. On the other side of the road was a small shopping center with all the essentials, including a supermarket, gas station and restaurant.
The boy’s expression was uncertain. “Here?”
“Why not? Your mother passes here every day on her way to the college. I thought she might like to see a few photographs of it in the album.” For variety, he aimed the telephoto lens at the supermarket. A woman with a small child attached to each hand as if they had been born that way was hurrying into the store.
“You making an album for her?”
It was a very innocently voiced question. Kirk took a moment before answering. “Yes.”
Ethan fingered the camera in his hands reverently, not quite ready to use it just yet. “You like her, huh?”
Kirk thought of several qualifying words to use in place of Ethan’s simple one, but decided that simple was best. And most accurate.
“Yes.” He took one last photograph of the cow alone. “Don’t you?”
“Sure,” Ethan mumbled into his chin. “A guy’s gotta like his mother.”
Kirk slowly lowered his camera and studied the boy’s face. He removed the lens without looking at it. He could switch lenses in his sleep. Setting it aside, he put on the macro lens and aimed it at Ethan.
“There’s no ‘gotta’ about it. But from what I saw, I’d say that your mother treats you pretty well.”
Ethan’s head jerked up at the sound of the click. He seemed surprised at being the subject of a photograph, and he quickly lowered his eyes.
“Yeah, she does. I guess.”
Kirk set his camera in the cab of the minivan and looked down at the troubled boy beside him. “So, why do you always seem to be so angry with her when she’s around?”
Ethan sighed. A lone car drove by, and he pretended to be interested in that. “I’m not angry with her,” he mumbled. “I’m angry with me.”
That sounded almost too familiar to Kirk. “You w
ant to talk about it?”
Ethan toed the dirt with his sneaker. His hands were still wrapped around the camera. “Maybe.”
Only the soft moan of the wind through the dried grasses was heard. It created a sense of isolation, even with civilization a stone’s throw away. It made him feel lonely and yet secure. The security of familiarity.
Kirk knew what pushing would do. “I’m here, if you do.”
He turned and selected another lens from his case.
Ethan stared at Kirk’s back, hesitating. “You’re not gonna make me tell you?”
“You’ll talk when you need to.” New lens in place, Kirk shut the door and turned to look at Ethan. “Do you need to?”
“Maybe.” It hurt his chest, keeping all this in. Maybe if he let it out, it would stop hurting so much. Ethan said the words to the camera, not to Kirk. He couldn’t look at anyone when he spoke. “I’m not mad at Mom, I’m mad at me,” he repeated.
“Why?” Kirk asked softly.
“‘Cause it’s my fault.”
Kirk heard the tears in the boy’s voice. He proceeded carefully, like a man crossing a chasm on a bridge made of eggshells. “What’s your fault?”
Swallowing didn’t make the lump in his throat go away. “That they divorced.” His lower lip trembled as he looked at the yellow dividing line down the long road. “That Dad got killed.”
Kirk set his camera aside and fixed his entire attention on the boy. “How do you figure that?”
The camera now swung free, hanging about his neck from the black strap Kirk had fastened to it years ago. Ethan was twisting the edge of his T-shirt.
“Well, if they didn’t divorce, then he wouldn’t be driving to his house after seeing me. And if he wasn’t driving to his house, he wouldn’t have gotten killed.” Ethan’s voice hitched badly in his throat. “So it’s all my fault.”
How had he ever gotten tangled up in that idea? Kirk wondered. He knew it hadn’t come from Rachel or Cameron. “And how was the divorce your fault?”
Tears shone in Ethan’s eyes as he raised them to Kirk’s face. “She left him after she saw him beating me.”
His own past rose up before him in vivid colors. “Did he do that a lot?”
Ethan looked away.
Kirk gently placed his hands on the small shoulders. “Did he, Ethan?”
Ethan bit his lower lip. Only babies cried. “Just sometimes when he got to thinking how much he wanted to be somebody and he wasn’t.” Ethan was echoing his father’s words as best he could. “He got hurt before he could do that.”
For a second, Kirk was at a loss as to how to begin untangling Ethan’s statement. Anger welled up inside him, anger against Don, and against his own father, for creating these pockets of guilt and pain because of their own shortcomings.
“He didn’t have to hurt you, Ethan. Lots of people don’t get to do what they want to, and somehow they manage to work things through. They don’t take it out on others. It wasn’t your fault that you father hurt his leg.” His voice became sterner as he tried to break through the resistance he saw clouding the boy’s face. “And it wasn’t your fault that he beat you. That was his fault, not yours. Your mother was right to leave him.”
Ethan shook his head fiercely from side to side. “But—”
His hands still on the slender shoulders, Kirk crouched down beside Ethan. “Ethan, none of this was ever your fault. Your dad was frustrated. He was angry. There are ways to cope with that,” Kirk insisted. “None of them involved beating up a little boy, or his mother. Real men—real people,“ he amended, “don’t do that. They find a way around obstacles. They don’t take out their anger on everyone around them. That’s not right.”
“I know that. But—”
“But what?”
Ethan drew away and turned from Kirk, as if ashamed to let him see his tears.
Kirk could tell by the set of his shoulders that the boy was crying. For a moment, he allowed him to have his privacy and his dignity.
Finally, in a broken voice, Ethan said, “On the day he was killed...”
“Yes?” Kirk prodded.
Ethan drew in a ragged breath and rubbed the heel of his hand hard against his eyes. “When he left, I wished he was dead. He hit me again. Mom didn’t see,” he added quickly. “I hated him so much, I just wanted him dead. And then...he died.”
He swung around, the horror of what he believed to be his fault evident in his eyes. “I did it. It was me. I killed my father.”
Damn, the guilt that must have been tearing him up all this time, Kirk thought, numbed.
Kirk drew Ethan into his arms and held him tight, attempting to form a barrier and shut out all the boy’s pain.
“It wasn’t you, Ethan,” he said fiercely. “God’s very busy.” Kirk sat back on his heels. He took out his handkerchief and offered it to Ethan. “Blow,” he instructed. Ethan did. “God doesn’t do away with people on a little boy’s say-so.”
Ethan wiped his nose, his eyes never leaving Kirk’s. “But he died.”
Kirk took back his handkerchief, tucking it into his pocket. He remained crouched at Ethan’s level. “Your father died because someone lost control of their car and ran into him.”
Ethan remained unconvinced as he shook his head again. “But I wished it.”
Kirk took another approach. “Have you ever wished for anything else?”
The boy shrugged. “Sure.”
Kirk arched a brow. “Did you always get it?”
Ethan thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No.”
Kirk rose. “What makes you think it was different this time?” His mouth curved slightly as he looked at the boy. “You’re special, Ethan, but you’re not magical. You had nothing to do with your father’s death, just like you didn’t make your parents get a divorce. Your father was responsible for that.”
Kirk spoke slowly, hoping the boy would finally understand and find some peace. “If he hadn’t hit your mother and you, she would have never left him. You mother’s a very loyal lady. She sticks by people she loves.” He brushed a hand over the boy’s hair. “Like you.” His expression grew more serious. “Your father was just reaping what he sowed.”
Ethan squinted as he looked up. The sun seemed to be directly behind Kirk now. “What does that mean?”
Kirk searched for a metaphor Ethan could relate to. “It means he swung too hard at the pitches and struck out.”
Ethan studied his sneakers again. “Then I didn’t kill him?”
“No.” He hugged the boy to him one more time. “You didn’t kill him.” Kirk released Ethan, then straightened the camera around his neck. “Okay—are you ready to get down to some real work now?”
Ethan gave a sharp nod of his head. “Anything you say, Kirk.”
Kirk laughed, and prayed that the headway they’d made would take. Ethan’s all-consuming guilt had been Don’s final revenge against his son. “That’s what I like to hear from an assistant.”
“Am I really?” Ethan’s voice was filled with all the enthusiasm an eight-year-old was capable of. “Am I really your assistant?”
Kirk pretended to look at him as if that were an unnecessary question. “You’re here, and you’re assisting. That makes you my assistant.” He looked across the road. The shopping center had an outdoor restaurant. There was one lone man having breakfast there, sharing it with a sparrow. The scene looked rather poetic. “Think you’re up to carrying that case of lenses?” He jerked a thumb behind him at the front seat of the minivan.
“Sure.”
Kirk eyed him. “You’ll have to be careful.”
Ethan couldn’t have been more solemn if he was taking a pledge. “I’ll be real careful.”
Kirk couldn’t resist tousling the boy’s hair. “I know you will.”
He took out his camera again and handed the case, with only one lens in it this time, to Ethan. They’d take a few shots here, he decided, then head for the campus. Saturday should be a good tim
e to roam around without running across students.
As an afterthought, Kirk took Ethan’s hand, and they hurried across the road, though there were no cars on the road yet. “I could have used someone like you on my last assignment.”
“Tell me about it,” Ethan begged him as they reached the other side.
Kirk hesitated. Almost all the things he had experienced were things that a young boy couldn’t hear. But then, Kirk decided, Ethan was probably a great deal older than his years. Guilt aged a person, no matter how young. He knew that firsthand.
The service station attendant was watching them curiously. Kirk nodded toward the man before turning his attention to Ethan. “All right, but don’t blame me if you get bored.”
“I’d never get bored listening to you, Kirk.” He said it so sincerely, Kirk was moved. “Do you think I could come with you next time?”
The restaurant he was looking for was just off to the side. Kirk remained where he was and raised his camera. The older man sitting nursing his coffee as he read his newspaper was completely oblivious of them. What a contrast this was to the scenes he had captured in his viewfinder two months ago, Kirk thought.
“Sure, if it’s after school.”
Ethan rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet as he watched Kirk work. “No, I mean next time you leave Bedford.”
Kirk took his photograph, then looked at Ethan. “We’ll talk about it.”
“Great. Now tell me about the last assignment, like you said.”
There was a sparrow patiently waiting by the man’s table, unaware that there was no food on the man’s dish to throw. Kirk snapped another photograph. “You drive a hard bargain.”
As he worked, Kirk talked, censoring himself as he went along, making it a story that was suitable for a boy Ethan’s age.
The day went by very fast, and before Kirk realized it, he and Ethan had gone to more than half a dozen different locations and Ethan had urged approximately a dozen different recollections from him. They had stopped and eaten at a local fast-food place and topped the day off with a box of a dozen doughnuts. It sat between them in the van, steadily becoming depleted, as they headed home.
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