I again shift my focus to the light, to the shadows and the play of shadows, and ready myself to shoot. The father attempts a dignified smile, but of course goes too broadly with it. The mother holds the child a bit too tightly. And I trigger the camera once, then twice, the baby looking as if she were merely sleeping. The baby looking. Then I take a shot for the photographer, a shot I will never show the parents, an image to add to the growing collection I keep hidden in a file drawer at home, the one in which the baby opens its eyes and fixes its gaze upon me.
I should explain, I suppose, that I’ve never had much talent for photography. I have the interest, sometimes I’ve had the enthusiasm, but I’ve never had the eye. I got this volunteer position because my next-door neighbor is a nurse, and she used to see me in my back yard with camera and tripod shooting birds, trash, leaves, whatever happened to land in front of me. Inconsequential subjects, but I was afraid I’d screw up a more significant one, which would have broken my heart, maybe even have prevented me from ever taking another photograph. I didn’t want to risk that.
Not that I wanted to risk taking such an important photograph in a family’s life, either. But Liz had talked about how temporary this was, how they just needed someone to man the camera now, and every time I tried to tell her I really wasn’t that good at it, she said I didn’t have to be — the families just wanted the photograph — having it was the idea and they wouldn’t care how good it was, technically.
But I told her no anyway. Even unpaid, I would have felt like an impostor. Not only was I not that good as a photographer, but I wasn’t that good with kids.
Maybe that sounds terrible under the circumstances. It seemed to me at the time that the appropriate person for this kind of sensitive task would be someone with a strong empathy and dedication to and involvement with children. And I didn’t have that. Of course I used to be a child, and my sister Janice and I had pretty good parents, but I don’t remember childhood as being a particularly happy time. I could hardly wait for it to be over so I could be out on my own. And I can’t say that I’ve ever enjoyed children. I’ve never particularly liked spending time with them. My nephews are okay — I’ve taken them to ball-games and movies and such and I think they’re great kids now that they’re older. When they were little I didn’t know what to say to them and, frankly, they scared me a little. They seemed so needy and fragile and that was pretty much the extent of their personalities.
As far as other kids go, I’d have to say I’ve basically ignored them. Their concerns are not my concerns. Most of the time I haven’t even been aware they were there.
That weekend I was in the city park taking bad pictures. I tried shooting couples, failing — everything looked fuzzy and poorly framed. Composition was eccentric at best, whatever I tried. A number of families were barbecuing. I noticed one small group in particular: really young parents, kids themselves, with a huge, dish-shaped barbecue looking hundreds of years old.
Suddenly there was an explosion of shouts, barking, shapes racing through the crowd. Then several large dogs burst from the wall of people to my right, followed by a half-dozen teenage boys, red-faced, barking like hyenas, and all of them converging on that young family.
I shouted a warning, but too late. One of the dogs knocked the unwieldy barbecue over, and several others a few feet away. The little kids started screaming, the mother and father running toward them, but the air was full of thick, white, choking smoke. The mother grabbed up two of their kids and folded them into her. But the little one… “Jose!” the young father screamed. “Jose!”
I could not breathe in the smoke, but I could not close my eyes. And almost as if to protect my eyes I raised my camera in front of my face and started taking pictures of the turmoil and the panic, the father gesturing as if mad, and I’m wondering how could this be, all this over some kids and their pets, but these poor people, their lives changing forever. And then the little boy appears out of the smoke like some apparition from the mists, some ghost back to rejoin his family because the taking of him had been a mistake, arms reaching up for his daddy, crying and sobbing and the father sobbing as well.
It was at that moment I decided to say yes to my neighbor, and became the hospital’s bereavement photographer. Even before I saw the photographs I had taken: the looks on the young couple’s faces on their rapid descent into despair, and that small boy appearing out of the clouds like a tragedy retrieved from the fierce and unforgiving eddies of time.
“Oh, Johnny, those poor people!” Janice is my older sister, my confessor, and, I’m a little embarrassed to say, my barometer as to what’s normal or abnormal, what’s okay and what’s not okay.
The day after I’d made that decision to volunteer my photographic services she had a barbecue of her own. (Would I have changed my mind if she’d responded negatively? I still don’t know.) I was invited, of course. With no family or even regular girlfriend, I usually ate at her house three, four times a week. Tom didn’t seem to mind, but of course you never really know when you visit married couples. They might have been fighting for hours before you got there, but when they open the front door they’re like a glossy advertisement for the connubial life.
“Sounds like pretty sad work to me,” Tom said morosely.
“Tom!”
“I’m not criticizing him, Janice. It just sounds like it’d be pretty grim stuff, and he’s not even being paid to do it.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be doing it every day,” I said, somewhat off the point. I just wanted them both to believe that, contrary to appearances, I lead a pretty balanced life. Despite the fact that I had no girlfriend, spent most of my spare time at their house, and obsessively took photographs even I didn’t think were very good.
Janice snorted. “Don’t listen to him, Johnny. It’s a noble way to spend your time. We should all do at least one activity like that.”
The subject mercifully disappeared into a conversational salad of new movies, music, old friends recently seen, what my twin nephews were doing (now fifteen, athletic, and a deadly combination with an alarmingly broad age range of females), and, of course, the pregnancy.
“You should have one of your own, sometime,” Janice said, smiling and rubbing her belly as if it were silk.
“Wrong equipment, sis.”
“I meant with a girl.”
“Oh, duh, I didn’t understand.”
“You guys.” Tom, an only child, didn’t get it.
“Actually I think I would, even have it myself, if it made me half as happy as you look every time you’re pregnant.”
“Every time? Two times, little brother.”
“Could be more,” Tom said, and ducked when she tossed the ketchup squeeze-bottle at his head.
I looked around. The angle of the light had changed, deepening some colors, brightening others. There had always been an intensity and vividness about my sister’s life. It was almost unnatural the way the environment shifted its spectrum to suit her. The bright blue stucco house, the grass green as Astroturf, the red-and white-checkered cloth over the redwood table, laden with matching yellow plates and cups and a rainbow of food. A few feet away the tanned blond boys passing the football through the jeweled spray from the sprinkler. Unexpectedly, the sight made me hold my breath. My beautiful nephews. I could have been a better uncle. But perhaps for the first time, their connection to me seemed sharp and undeniable, and it didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t understand them most of the time.