Chapter 70 HER OWN STORY
Chapter 70 HER OWN STORY
POV: Reese Calloway
Five days. Day one I talked to Dana, who listened to the whole thing and asked two questions and then said what she always said when she'd already formed an opinion and was letting me arrive at it myself, which was nothing. Just sat on the other end of the line and let me talk until I stopped.
Day two I called June, who was in the middle of something at the firm but stepped out to take it because I'd told her it was about the profile and June understood immediately what kind of decision that was. She asked about the publication, the editor, the framing parameters, and then said: "Reese. It's your story. You've been letting other people hold it for three years. This is you taking it back."
Day three I texted Tommy, who called back instead of texting because Tommy had started doing that, calling rather than texting when something mattered. He said: "You already know what you're going to do." I said maybe. He said: "You called me on day three. You called Dana on day one and June on day two. You're not asking any of us. You're thinking out loud." He wasn't wrong.
Day four I didn't call anyone.
I sat at the kitchen table in the morning light and thought about the minor-viral post from day one of the production, my name attached to Cole's worst reputation before I'd done anything publicly, and the sixty seconds I'd spent sitting on the edge of my bed deciding whether to stay or walk away clean. I'd stayed because walking away would have made the post the whole story and I'd decided I was going to build something bigger than the post with my name on it that nobody could take.
A profile was the same decision in a different form.
Telling the Marcus story publicly, with my name on it, as the person it had happened to rather than as a complaint or a legal document or a piece of evidence in someone else's review. My actual life, in my own framing, under my name.
Day five I called the editor.
"Yes," I said. "I want to write some of it myself. Not the whole piece. A photo essay to run alongside the written profile. My images, my framing, my selection."
The editor said yes before I finished the sentence.
I hung up and sat at the kitchen table and looked at the east window.
The morning light came through it the way it always came through it and moved across the floor in the slow shift I'd been watching every morning for months. The apartment was quiet and the photographs were on the wall and the darkroom door was open behind me and I sat there and thought about what photographs I would take for my own story.
I started with the darkroom.
The red safelight on. The trays set up, developer and stop bath and fixer in sequence, the specific smell of the room that I'd been working in since I converted the bathroom two years ago and that meant something different now than it had then. I set the camera on the edge of the sink and stepped back and looked at the room.
Then I looked at the camera and picked it up and photographed the room from the doorway, the drying line running across the ceiling, the trays in sequence on the counter, the red light making everything the same warm color.
The apartment wall next.
The full arrangement, magazine prints and documentary work side by side, June's note and Helena's note beside the kitchen doorway, the trumpet player in the corner. I photographed it straight on and then from the left and then from the kitchen doorway looking through into the living room, the wall visible in the background behind the kitchen table where I'd sat for five mornings deciding what to do.
Then I put the camera on the tripod and stood in front of the bathroom mirror.
Camera down. Not raised, not framing anything. Just standing there with the camera at my side and my face in the mirror looking at itself. I set the timer and stepped into position and let it run.
The self-portrait came out different from what I'd been building toward without knowing it. Not the photographer behind the camera, the familiar position, the glass between herself and everything she was looking at. Just a person in a bathroom mirror with a camera at her side and her eyes on the lens.
I looked at it on the small screen for a long time.
The photo essay took two weeks to build.
I shot throughout both weeks, new images alongside the ones I already had, the specific photographs that belonged to the story of the past three years and what had happened inside them. The camera bag, worn at the strap, sitting by the door the way it always sat. The confirmation slip from the ethics board, pinned to the darkroom wall where I'd put it the morning it arrived. The kitchen table where I'd built the Cole-investigation floor map and where I'd read the formal ruling and where I ate actual breakfast now every morning.
The final image I needed I didn't have yet.
I knew what was missing but not how to get it, the image that showed what the story looked like from outside when I was inside it and couldn't see the outside of it.
One evening Cole was at the apartment and I was looking at the wall and I handed him the camera without explaining why.
He took it and looked at it and then looked at me.
"Just see what you get," I said.
He held it for twenty minutes. I went back to looking at the wall and forgot he was there with it the way I forgot cameras were there when I was absorbed in something else.
When I looked at what he'd taken the next morning I sat at the kitchen table for a long time.
One frame.
Me at the wall, looking at the prints, my back to the camera, my hands loose at my sides. The light from the east window catching the left side of the frame and the photographs on the wall and my face in partial profile, not posed, not arranged, not aware.
I didn't know I looked like that.
Like someone who had come back from something and was standing in the room they'd come back to and knowing it was theirs.
I put it at the end of the essay.