Chapter 67 EXHALE
Chapter 67 EXHALE
POV: Reese Calloway
The breakfast thing started somewhere in week three after the documentary aired and had become, without any formal decision on my part, just what mornings looked like now.
Actual food. Eggs or toast or both, eaten at the kitchen table while the coffee was still hot, before I opened the laptop or picked up the camera or started moving through the day at the pace I'd been moving through days for three years. Dana had noticed on her second Saturday visit and had said nothing for approximately four minutes before saying something, which for Dana was extraordinary restraint.
"You're eating breakfast," she'd said.
"People eat breakfast," I'd said.
"You didn't," she'd said, with the particular satisfaction of someone whose observation has been confirmed rather than deflected.
Seven editorial pieces published in two months. Four assigned by the magazine, subjects and locations provided, my framing and my execution. Three that I'd brought to the editor myself, people I'd seen and photographed without a commission attached, the kind of work that started with me raising the camera because something was worth seeing and ended with a piece that had my name on it and existed because I'd decided it should.
The ceramicist. A retired postal worker in Bronzeville who had been painting murals in his garage for forty years without showing them to anyone. A twelve-year-old on the south side who had started a neighborhood tool-lending library out of her front porch.
None of them assigned. All of them mine.
Cole had won six of the last eight.
I knew this because I went to the home games when the schedule allowed, which was more often than I'd predicted when the season started, and because the sports coverage had shifted in the way coverage shifted when a narrative stopped being sustainable. It was difficult to maintain the unhinged liability story when the person the story was about was scoring goals and the coach who had built the story was on administrative leave pending a league investigation that had expanded to include three additional former players.
Sports media moved on. New stories, new cycles.
I went to four home games in two months. I brought the camera to two of them and left it in the bag for the other two and watched with both hands free and found that watching without framing was its own thing, different and good in a way I was still figuring out how to describe.
Cole found me in the crowd after every game without appearing to look for me.
I stopped being surprised by this somewhere around the third game.
June's note arrived with a bottle of wine on a Tuesday.
Handwritten, short, her name at the bottom in the decisive script she used for everything. We did something good. No elaboration. No list of what specifically. Just the thing itself, stated plainly, from someone who had sat in the corner of a screening room with her notebook in her lap and her pen not moving and had made a decision about whose side she was on before I'd finished understanding there were sides.
I put the note on the wall.
Not with the photographs. On the small section of bare wall beside the kitchen doorway where I'd started putting things that didn't belong in the main arrangement but needed to be somewhere visible.
Helena's note went beside it.
She'd sent it the week her first investigative piece published, a long-form piece about institutional accountability in professional sports that didn't name Hollis directly because the investigation was still active but built the framework around a pattern that anyone paying attention could place. Her note was one sentence. Thank you for making the room big enough for this.
I read it once and pinned it next to June's.
Two notes on the wall beside the kitchen doorway. People who had been in rooms with Hollis and had made their choices and were now on the other side of those choices doing the work they'd been waiting to do.
The call came on a Wednesday afternoon.
A documentary festival, the coordinator introducing herself and the festival and the selection committee's decision in the organized way of someone who made these calls regularly and had learned to move through the information efficiently.
The Stand had been selected for competition. Social Impact Documentary category. Screening date in April. Would the primary creative be in attendance.
I sat at my kitchen table and looked at the response form she'd emailed while we were still on the call.
Primary creative. My name in the field at the top of the form, already populated from the submission.
I thanked the coordinator and hung up and looked at the form on my screen.
April. Four months out. Cole's season ran through April if the Vanguards made the playoffs, which based on the last eight games was a reasonable possibility.
I picked up my phone.
Opened the thread with Cole, the one that had short factual texts from training camp mornings and occasionally something that made me laugh at the kitchen table, the thread that had It's working and It was always going to sitting in it from two months ago.
I typed: Are you free in April?
Sent it.
Put the phone down on the table beside the response form and looked at both of them, the form with my name at the top and the phone with the message sent and the festival date sitting in the middle of a month I didn't know yet what it held.