There are so many things Lee thinks she’s had to learn the hard way over the years. So many things that hadn’t been delivered in gentle, bite-sized lessons, but had come at her hard and fast, survival dependent on a split second understanding. So many lessons she’s seen those around her fail to learn, or, worse not have the freedom to, second chances and caution something they weren’t given.
Par for the course. Part of the game. Trial by fire. How it works.
All things that Lee has heard. That she’s known. That she’s said.
But in that moment, she can’t bring herself to believe any of them. That lizard-brained sense of caution is something that grows, that is honed in the same way a clever eye and quick finger are, something that, she knows all too well, is stripped out of you before it returns in force. The careless placement of a foot. The wrong word or phrase or a smile to the wrong person. A breath, a hair, a lens too close.
The movement forward, down a hallway that seems empty enough, without calculating what might be ahead, the promise of a threat, the casual command to be careful made by soldiers that can’t be bothered to keep both themselves alive and an intrepid photojournalist.
But Lee can see it all, the quick dart of movement, the inevitably of what comes next. Jessie, breaking away from the safety of the doorway, camera raised. Safety is dull. It doesn’t show up well on film. But the inviting mouth of a hallway, the promise of what might lay at the end of it, who could resist?
Jessie plants herself firmly in the middle of the room, camera raised, and there’s an ease to her posture that suggests that she thinks she has all the time in the world. More than enough time to position herself, to set up the shot, to click the shutter, to move to the next moment, the next horror, the next photo. But Lee can see what she can’t, has spent her entire life seeing what others cannot.
Despite the years of caution, the decades she’s spent keeping herself alive and out of the way, just close enough to always be able to duck away at the last moment, movement is startlingly easy. It’s shocking, really, how easy it is to push past that human instinct to keep itself alive when something else feels more important.
Jessie’s body is surprisingly light against her own, so fully unprepared for both what is ahead and beside that she has left herself completely open. Defenseless. Trusting. Jessie starts to fall backward, her head turning in Lee’s direction, surprise pinching her features but something else too, a hurt that comes from an imagined betrayal. Instinctively, she reaches out a hand, grasping for Lee to keep herself upright, but the momentum is too much and Jessie just pulls her down too, the both of them hitting the ground in a tumble of limbs and the hard, sharp edges of their cameras. Lee grunts as either elbow or lens jams into her stomach, her teeth clicking together as she lands.
The room erupts with the sound of gunfire, so impossibly loud that it threatens to steal the rest of the breath Lee has left, and every time she hears it, that rattle of machinery designed with one purpose, she swears it’s never been this loud. This close. But now, Lee thinks that’s never been more true. She tenses, her body still over Jessie’s, keeping them both pinned into place, certain that any second she’s going to feel the bullet, the one she’s been dodging all her life. She closes her eyes, lowers her head, the sound of Jessie’s breathing hot and fast against the crook of her neck as the sound crashes around her -the bullets, the bombs, the shouted orders, the sounds a man makes while he dies, the deafening finality of a building falling- and the carpet -the sand, the sidewalk, the grit, the rubble- presses into her elbows.
A return barrage of gunfire bursts to life, crowding for space in the already small hallway, and Lee whimpers, trying to tuck herself closer to the ground, and then just as quickly, just as loud, is the silence. The clatter of shells. The command to push forward made by voices that don’t shake. Lee pants, her breath startlingly loud in the sudden quiet, still and unmoving even as the footsteps press forward and away.
Something settles against the small of her back and she tenses, flinching away from the sensation, only to realize it’s a hand, gentle and warm. Jessie. And Lee draws back suddenly as the world comes back into focus again. The two of them, tangled on the White House carpet, alive.
Jessie’s hand slips from her back as Lee sits and their eyes meet for a moment, Jessie wide-eyed and breathless, and Lee can only imagine how she looks in return. How does anyone look after they’ve tried to make themselves small against a hail of bullets, surrounded by people who do not care one way or the other if she makes it to the next moment? There’s no color in Jessie’s face aside from the blue of her eyes, burning a hole into Lee’s own.
“Lee. Lee.” She looks up and there’s Joel, standing over them, his face equal parts stricken and impatient, and she can feel his hand on her shoulder now, certain this is not the first time he’s called her name. “Lee. Let’s go. We’ve got to go.”
Lee looks at him, looks over her shoulder, down the hallway, with its dead body in the doorway, the sounds of voices echoing back at them. Go, she wants to say, go where? But she remembers. That other, stronger, sharper part of her, the Lee that has made it this far, that has kept her getting up each morning, that has pushed her onto every plane, into every country, and every moment baked with heat and blood, that Lee remembers. Remembers why they are here.
Joel lets go of her shirt, bunched between his fingers, and steps back, stepping forward but slowly, hesitantly, like a child desperate to get to the tree on Christmas morning but knowing he must wait for his parents. Lee nods, feels her body ache in protest as she stands, untangling herself from Jessie and finding her balance once more. Jessie sits up, blinking and Bambi-like in the dim hallway, and Lee wants to push her back down again, to make her stay. Quiet now, Man is in the forest.
But just as quickly, that startled relief fades away and Jessie is standing, lifting her camera, the same sort of impatience coloring her features. A grim determination. A moment past. A bullet, a brush with death. A memory now and therefore unimportant. And Lee knows they will go on.
And so she follows, Joel leading the way, Jessie between them, and Lee doesn’t bother to reach for her cameras, letting them hang from her shoulders, swaying lifeless as she walks. By the time they reach the Oval Office, the soldiers are already dragging the president from beneath his desk, this sniveling, shaking, pleading man that Lee has seen so often looking back at her from a television screen, trying to sweet talk her into submission. If ever he’d had a silver-tongue, it has certainly deserted him now, his face red and wobbly, tears already making tracks down his cheeks.
Joel steps forward and the man looks at him like a reluctant bride might gaze upon the person who has just interrupted the vows. “Don’t let them kill me.”
Lee swallows, studying the man in front of them, trying to conjure up…something. Empathy or pity? Peace now that the end is here? But there’s nothing. Just a hollow emptiness that she feels is following her everywhere these days, the one thing she can never shake. Nothingness making friends with a cool detachment. There’s not even enough room rattling around inside her for bitter anger.
Joel looks resigned, but satisfied, and looking at him, Lee feels like she’s a million miles away, watching him through the end of a very long, very dark tunnel, unsure of which way is out.
There’s a beat, a moment of hesitation, and then Jessie moves, lifting the camera to her eye. Lee watches her, this girl who either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that she could be dead already, just another body darkening the White House carpet, and finally, finally, Lee feels something.
Relief.
The shutter clicks right as the gun shatters the stillness.
If ever there was a moment Lee thinks would be fitting to record on film, it would be the one that follows the death of the president. When all the soldiers look up, their smiles turning to pinched looks of confusion. How they look toward Joel, to Jessie, to Lee standing among them, as though an answer to this brand new question they hadn’t even considered before might be found there. What do we do now? Lee feels laughter bubbling in the back of her throat, manic and effervescent, and she presses her lips together, looking down at her feet instead of the bemused expressions around her. If she laughs, she’ll never stop.
Jessie walks closer to the body that had brought them all here, squinting as she looks down at the man, studying him with a sort of clinical curiosity. She reaches for her camera, seems to think better of it, co*cking her head instead to study this person at her feet.
“Sergeant.” It’s the older man, gruff and battleworn in a way Lee recognizes from the others like him that she’s spent time around. The ones who call her ma’am but dismiss what she does as easy, even though she’s right beside them when the bombs start going off. “We need to radio in. Make them aware of what’s happened.”
The Black woman who pulled the trigger nods, scratching at her cheek as she studies the president. Jessie is still closely contemplating the body, the way the red spreads across his rumpled white shirt slower now. It’s all too easy to remember the sound of bullets overhead, the certainty that any one of them could be for her. Or, easier still, to imagine Jessie there with her own blossom of blood, those eager and inquisitive eyes dulling as they stared up at the ceiling. It makes Lee feel less like laughing.
“Yeah, all right,” the sergeant says, giving a parting glance toward the body. “We’ll make the report, send the medic in for him.”
The other soldier scoffs, shaking his head. “Little late for that.” It gets a chuckle or two from a few of the men beside him.
“They’ve got the body bags.” These words said with a shrug, dismissive. But the uncertainty has left the woman’s face, replaced with the relief that comes from having a solid plan.
A plan that does not seem to extend toward the journalists they’d brought along with them, summarily dismissed now that everyone had seemingly gotten what they’d come for. The president, dead. The photo, taken. The war…well. Not over, Lee knows better than that. But tomorrow, once the news gets out, the face of it will look different, an ever changing boogieman that is impossible to fully keep up with.
Joel looks at her, a question in his face, and Lee wonders when it was that she started being able to read him, to understand the things he didn’t say. When they’d managed to communicate this way, stripped bare. Her throat feels dry and raw with the dust from the crumbling city and from the way she’d screamed, unable to keep herself knotted together anymore, weak and scared and mourning for Sammy, for herself, for all of them going into this place where death was the desired outcome. It had swept over her with the suddenness of a riptide and it had felt too, she imagines, exactly how drowning must feel, particularly the moment when you realize how powerless you really are. Joel’s hand at her collar, the weight of him propelling her forward, had been the only thing to anchor her to that moment, the only thing to remind her where she was, how this hell was different from the dozens of others crashing through her mind in a cacophony of bombs and blood and other people screaming, wrapped in the knowledge that none of it was ever going to stop, not really. No matter how many pictures she took.
And when she looks at Joel, Lee can see a little bit of worry lingering beneath that question in his eyes, can see him remembering, too, the way the sound of her screams had vibrated against his hand. So she answers honestly. “I’m really f*cking tired.”
Joel smiles, the chuckle dry. “Bet you never thought you’d get to spend the night in the White House, huh?”
Jessie looks between them, her curiosity finally distracting her from the death covering the room. “Wait…really?” Her gaze settles on Lee, as though to confirm. “Stay here?”
That need to laugh is back, the exhaustion of the day, of the past several days -weeks, months, years, if she’s being honest- making her feel light headed and loopy, the way all-nighters used to do when she was in college and things like that were fun. “Sure, why not?” Lee shrugs, palms up. “It’s not like we’re going to find anything else out there.”
And it’s not like they’ve been offered an invitation to join the soldiers back at their barracks, or in the back of their bullet-ridden Jeeps. At least there are likely beds here, hopefully clean enough.
Though Lee isn’t sure she’s going to split hairs over it at the moment.
Jessie grins, nodding. “Sick.” And she sounds, for just a moment, like that kid Lee thinks she still is, underneath the person who would run out in front of bullets for a good photograph.
Prior to leaving, the sergeant had posted a single guard to stand vigil over the body of the president, a job Lee does not begrudge him, and the man doesn’t argue or protest their decision to stay, doesn’t attempt to chase them off. He seems just as exhausted as the rest of them, relieved to be able to ease himself into the chair that had once been positioned in front of the most famous desk in America, even if it means his company for the night will be a dead man.
Not that there seem to be any shortage of dead bodies to keep the lot of them company. They litter the ground like breadcrumbs, a reminder of the path they’d taken to make it this far. Lee steps around the body of the man that could’ve so easily shot her and Jessie both and it’s all too easy to imagine herself in another life, switching places with him, dead and forgotten on the floor. She pulls her gaze upward, focusing on Jessie in front of her, the way one elbow stays curved in a loose right angle as she holds her camera at the ready. There’s sweat and grit on the back of her neck, the press vest that she’s wearing hanging crooked, and it startles Lee how quickly she’s imagining something else, that other life where she reaches forward to brush aside the grime, to straighten the vest, to settle her hand against Jessie’s back to reassure herself of the heart beating in her chest. Lee swallows, firmly pushing the thought aside, trying to stamp down the flutter of longing that had come with it, another flash of emotion to cut through the crater in the center of her.
Back in the open room where they’d come in, Joel surveys the off-shoot of hallways, the mess of people hunkering down to prepare for the end. Jessie walks over to one of the tables, bypassing the scattering of paperwork to pick up a plate instead. “Bet there’s still plenty of food in the kitchen.”
The rumble of Lee’s stomach, right on cue, fights a war of its own against her exhaustion.
They find the kitchen easily enough despite the warren of rooms and stairways, pushing their way through the swinging doors to the sterile expanse of cabinets and freezers, hanging pots and stoves. Lee brushes her fingers along the shiny surface of one of the tables while Joel makes a beeline for the fridge, yanking open the doors and rooting around inside until he emerges victorious, a bottle of wine in hand. “Now we’re talking.”
It feels like second nature, glancing toward Jessie, meeting her gaze so they can roll their eyes in tandem. When had it become so easy, so effortless, to look for this other person, to expect her to be there and to know exactly what she was thinking. Joel rummages around in the drawers while she and Jessie make a small pile on the tabletop of cereals and cheeses, lunch meats and softening fruits. Joel gets the bottle open and they pass it around, eating with a silent determination that seems more about the results than the enjoyment of the thing, washing down browning fruit and stale cereal with swallows of wine until Lee thinks she might be able to fall asleep and not worry about the gnaw of an empty stomach. All of it -the wine, the exhaustion, the absurdity of where they are- goes to Lee’s head, making her warm and loose as they finally call it quits, abandoning the saddest feast in the history of the White House in order to find the bedrooms instead.
As they leave, Jessie stops, turning around to take a photo of the kitchen, the mostly empty bottle of wine and the crumbs left behind, and it occurs to Lee that she didn’t even think about taking that shot, or any, since they’d gotten up from the ground earlier.
“I’m finding the president’s room,” Joel announces, a grin splitting across his face, as they come to the top of the staircase, the parts of the White House so few people ever really get to see. The carpet is plush, the whole place smelling of the same stale air Lee had noticed downstairs, the way a house gets after being shut up for too long, full of too many exhales and not enough fresh air. It’s eerily quiet, especially after everything. There’s still the occasional pop of gunfire or heavier artillery from somewhere outside, but it feels faraway and muffled, part of another life. Here, there’s just soft carpets and heavy drapes. Centuries old paintings on the wall. Dead bodies down below.
Jessie grins but it’s wan, more than a little forced. “Good luck. I’m finding the first room I can and passing out immediately.”
“Now that sounds like a great idea.”
Joel waves a hand, dismissing them. “You two are no fun.”
He continues on and Lee heads for the first door, pushing it open and flicking on the light. It’s a bedroom all right, far larger than anything Lee thinks she’s slept in in ages, a king bed set right in the center of the room. Everything is soft blues and grays, polished mahogany and high thread counts. There’s a large flat-screen TV sitting on a long dresser, both things covered with a layer of dust that suggests no one has bothered with this room in quite some time and from the doorway, Lee can see the adjoining bathroom, the blue towels that still hang carefully folded on the racks.
She turns back toward Jessie. “Here you go. Technically this is the first room, so…all yours.”
Jessie slips past her and into the room, letting out a sigh so deep Lee is certain she can feel it in her own chest, can feel the exhaustion that goes to the very marrow. Jessie rubs at her eyes, a heaviness seeming to weigh her shoulders down so suddenly that Lee is actually worried her cameras might slip right to the floor. “I’m probably not in the right headspace to really judge but that looks like the most comfortable f*cking bed in the world.”
Lee laughs, surprised not just at the sound but how genuine it feels, as loose in her chest as the wine. “Yeah, honestly, it really does.”
Whatever Jessie had intended to say next dies immediately on her lips as she spies the bathroom, eyes widening and shoulder hitching up toward her ears. “Okay, f*ck the bed. I think I might just shower for the next three hours.”
“Go for it.” Lee gestures unnecessarily toward the door, blaming the sudden twinge of uncertainty that she feels on her exhaustion. She shifts back toward the hall, still in the doorway, but stays mostly in the same spot, a strange shuffling limbo.
Jessie hesitates, the smile on her face faltering somewhat. It softens into something else, a subtle, hopeful thing. “Do you…do you just want to stay in here? I mean the bed is pretty big and…it kinda seems stupid for one person to have all this space.”
Lee doesn’t bother to point out that’s exactly what bedrooms are for, that if ever there was a time for foolish indulgence, it would probably be now.
“Sure.”
She’ll blame her quick agreement on her exhaustion, how the idea of walking a few more steps to find another bedroom suddenly seems far too much to handle.
But it might have something to do with the smile she gets in response. Or the relief in being able to keep her eye on Jessie, to assure herself that she’s fine and whole. Not another body in a mass grave. Not dead in the downstairs hallway. Not another causality no one will remember when all this is over.
Or maybe it’s the reassurance of not having to fall asleep alone in the dark tonight.
Jessie nods. “Okay. Cool.”
Still, they both remain rooted in place, what feels like a gulf of space between them. Jessie worries at her bottom lip for a moment before exhaling, straightening up her shoulders. “I…thank you.”
Lee blinks, confused by the words. “Oh, I-”
“For saving my life,” Jessie clarifies quickly. “I…I don’t think I really put it all together at the time but you…I’m pretty sure you saved my life. And I’m sorry I didn’t say thanks earlier.”
Lee watches the nervous twisting of Jessie’s hands, how they flutter together only to take flight again just as quickly, settling on the strap her bag, her wrists, each other once again.
“It was stupid…I wasn’t paying attention but…you were and…thanks.”
Lee nods, certain that the expression on her face does little to betray the fissure cracking through the center of her chest. Jessie is looking at her, face open and awash with gratitude, and there’s something more to the shine of her eyes, more than just the awe she’d had the first time they’d really spoken, more than the desperate need to please. More, too, than the fiery spark that had no doubt set her on this journey in the first place. It’s terrifying, how easily Lee thinks she could fall into an openness like that, how Jessie seems to be inviting her to throw herself in.
You should always be paying attention.
Don’t think you’ll be so lucky next time.
Words that could easily widen that chasm between them. That could remind Jessie to shutter that openness in herself, if only for her own protection.
Words Lee knows that she should say, just in case she isn’t fast enough next time to save Jessie from herself.
But instead she nods, lips flexing briefly into a smile. “You’re welcome.”
It’s the right thing to say, she knows, because it only makes Jessie’s smile widen, makes her nod. “I’m just gonna…” Jessie points behind her, toward the bathroom. “If I’m not back in two hours, send the search party.”
“You got it.”
The door squeaks as Jessie pulls it closed and Lee can hear the thump of Jessie’s bag hitting the floor and then the quieter click of cameras set down on the counter top. Moments later, the sound of the shower, followed immediately by Jessie’s “oh my god” that makes Lee both laugh and shiver, just a little. She steps further into the room, closing the bedroom door behind her and then, after a moment’s deliberation, turning the lock. Just in case.
Her own cameras hang, heavy and awkward, for the first time that Lee can remember, from her neck like a yoke she suddenly can’t wait to be rid of. She settles them on the dresser, letting her hand linger on the curve of the telephoto lens. For so long, all she’s thought about is this moment. Her, here, in the White House. Taking a photo of the president, doing something no one else has managed for so long. And now she’s here and the president is dead and she didn’t even reach for her camera.
Lee turns away, as though some physical distance between herself and her continual companions will make it easier to leave that line of thinking behind too. Instead, she walks toward the window, pushing aside the sheer curtains and looking out at Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s quiet, inhabited only by shadows and the shells of abandoned cars, barricades, twists of barbed wire. The sky brightens with the occasional burst of fire, followed by the dull thud of contact, but for the moment D.C. seems to be sleeping. Tomorrow, someone else will show up to take control, to begin to assert themselves into this same seat of power they just cut the rot from. The fighting will continue, because that’s what it always does. An always propagating virus that has mastered the art of survival.
It all makes Lee very, very tired.
But the idea of a shower, now planted, makes the concept of getting into bed in her current state feel like blasphemy and so she waits, staring out the window, past her own reflection, trying not to think anything at all.
In far less time than Lee would’ve predicted, the shower cuts off and eventually the door opens and Lee turns from the window to see Jessie emerge, hair still wet, cheeks flushed pink from the water. She’s wearing a tanktop and flannel pants and Lee’s heart twists at the thought of Jessie, maybe somewhere back in Missouri, carefully packing them away not understanding what she was getting into, that there wouldn’t exactly be a time or place for changing into pajamas each night. There’s a tattoo on the curve of her shoulder, the sight of it strangely jarring considering all the other things Lee has seen just tonight. Irrefutable proof of Jessie in a life other than this one.
“I highly recommend that,” Jessie says, running a towel over her hair. “Not to be totally callous but…I feel like my entire outlook on life is different now.”
This is logic Lee can’t exactly refute.
Which is how she, too, finds herself in the bathroom, studying her reflection in the mirror as it starts to steam over, the water heating behind her. She’s only day away from the person she was the last time she studied her reflection, standing in the middle of a store that smelt of roses and cleaning spray, trying to meet the eyes of the person staring back at her and understand how she’d gotten to that point. But still, she feels even more like a stranger now she had then: the bags under her eyes, the creases that seem to have deepened at the corners of her lips, the sadness that works in tandem with her exhaustion to give her a hollowed out look. She can still taste her screams and the sulfur in the back of her throat, still has Sammy’s blood in the creases of her palms. Still, she can’t pull her eyes away, even as the steam continues to obscure her reflection.
Lee?
You’re pretty when you smile.
It shouldn’t matter. But it does.
By the time Lee emerges from the shower, the water has run cold but she finally feels like she isn’t covered in dust and blood and sweat. Her fingernails are clean, the past several days scrubbed from her skin, and she doesn’t even mind having to change into a new pair of jeans and a clean albeit wrinkled t-shirt because it’s been quite a while since she’s thought about packing away a pair of pajamas into her messenger bag. The old shirt, damp with sweat and stained with blood, she leaves crumpled on the bathroom floor to deal with tomorrow. Or not at all. It doesn’t exactly seem like a tragedy, the idea of leaving it behind for some future historian to wonder about.
When Lee opens the bathroom door, the first thing she sees is Jessie, already sprawled out on her stomach in the bed, breathing deeply with her still wet hair stuck to the side of her face. Even with Jessie’s best starfish impression, there’s still plenty of room for Lee to climb in unnoticed beside her and she can’t decide if it’s somehow more intimate with Jessie already asleep, or if it would’ve been harder if they’d had to look at each other, squinting through the darkness as they’d shuffled and adjusted and maybe even shared a hushed, nervous giggle like kids at a slumber party, shy and uncertain in this new situation. Thankfully, Lee is too tired to do too much soul-searching. Instead, she just flips off the light and crosses the room in the dark, marveling at the softness of the pillows even as sleep drags her downward.
In her dreams, Sammy dies. Endlessly. Over and over again. She listens to the breath as it wheezes in and out, as he tries to minimize the sounds of his own pain, face ashen every time she turns back to look at him. She watches, helpless, from the front seat, as he dies. Over and over again, she thinks, this is it, just a little further as they take the next curve only to find another endless stretch of road. Over and over, she looks at her shaking hands and tries to bargain with a god she’d stopped believing in years ago. Over and over, she turns back to see the look on Jessie’s face, somber and still, and knows he’s gone.
In her dreams, men burn.
People scream.
They entreat a camera lens that stares back dispassionately.
In her dreams, she waits for the buildings to fall.
For the bullet that will find her heart, lodge in bone, leave her bleeding in the dirt.
She waits for fist, for fire, for something she can’t see coming.
In her dreams, it’s Joel who dies.
Jessie who gets into someone else’s car and disappears forever out of her reach.
Sammy, over and over, her hands somehow sticky with his blood even as she watches him labor for each breath, as though she’s stuck in the Sisyphean loop of cleaning up after he’s gone and watching him die all at the same time.
Sammy squints at her, tries to muster a smile, a reassurance. Opens his mouth to speak.
“Lee.”
It isn’t Sammy’s voice she hears, isn’t his hand on her shoulder. But Lee jerks awake all the same, certain there will be a ghost reaching for her. In the dark, everything is lost in shadow, even, momentarily, the figure in front of her, and she draws back, a low keen in the back of her throat.
“Lee.” There’s a steadiness to the voice, not a ghost at all, just a warm whisper of breath between them, a gentle hand still on her forearm. Solid and real.
Lee exhales, closing her eyes and lifting a hand to cover her face. Her skin smells clean, a sweet floral that she never would’ve picked out for herself, and the rest of the pieces fall into place around her. She’s not in a car, not trying to get comfortable on the ground of a refugee camp, or wondering if the roof over her will cave in at any moment.
And she’s not alone; the endless loop of images in her mind are not her only company. When Lee opens her eyes, it’s easier to see Jessie in the dim light of the bedroom, to see and not just feel those eyes studying her.
“Sorry.” Lee’s voice is cracked, brittle, and she swallows, her throat too dry to do much good. “Sorry.”
“Are you okay?”
It’s the kind of stupid, useless question that Lee has always hated. Pointless, meaningless, the thing old friends had said to her when she’d come home after months away, falling out of touch after too many lunches spent with a ghost as their companion. But Jessie says the words like they matter, like she understands the answer already and wants to hear what it is that Lee has seen that has woken them both in the middle of the night.
“No,” Lee says simply, the answer that she’d always wanted to give whenever her mother asked her that question over the phone, when her old friends clucked their tongues and patted her hand and tried to figure out what on earth would make someone go across the world to take pictures like that. The answer she’d pretended not to know, even when she asked herself that question staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night.
Lee turns her head so that she’s face to face with Jessie once more, a mirror of earlier -hours? Days? Weeks? It all feels both so long ago and like it has just happened, or is happening now, somewhere, another loop she can’t get out of- when they’d been a tangle of limbs and beating hearts. Only now the world around them is soft, the comforter a cocoon over their shoulders, and Lee is surprised by how close they are, how in their sleep they’d drawn together. Her eyes fall once again to Jessie’s tattoo, a butterfly she can see clearly now, and she’s struck with the urge to press her thumb to it, to leave a mark of her own behind on the skin.
“Were you dreaming about Sammy?”
Lee lifts her eyes back to Jessie’s but doesn’t answer the question, isn’t sure that she needs to. Especially not when Jessie just nods, pressing her lips together. “I keep thinking about him…if I hadn’t…I never should’ve gotten into that car. I was so stupid.”
“It doesn’t matter, Jessie. It wasn’t your fault,” Lee says simply and it occurs to her then that Jessie’s hand is still resting in the crook of her elbow, that it would be easy to reach up her own hand and twine her fingers around Jessie’s. “Nothing that’s happened is your fault.”
“I keep thinking about it,” Jessie says about, and she’s the person Lee sees in her dreams, behind her eyelids every time she blinks, that solemn-faced girl who had reached out to hold Sammy’s hand as he died. “About all of it.”
Lee swallows, nodding. “Sometimes it feels like everything is just…behind this wall. I have to spend so much time putting up the bricks, keeping it together, keeping everything else behind it.”
It’s the closest she’s ever gotten to telling anyone the truth, to admitting out loud the hollowed out feeling that she carries around with her always. Joel, for all his understanding of her, doesn’t get it, mostly because he doesn’t want to. She builds her wall, he dulls everything into a fuzzy background noise that is easy to brush aside. Though she thinks it’s not entirely fair to dismiss his ignorance; she’s never bothered to try to talk to him about it. Never bothered to talk to anyone. Because that’s not the point of what she does, not the point of what any of them are out there doing. The story is never her. She’s never the one in the photo.
“And that works?”
How exactly is she supposed to answer that? Is there an answer? It’s the thing Lee had wanted to save Jessie from: this life, the wall, the endless loop of people who have died in front of you. Ghosts and fuzzy memories. But it’s too late. Good or bad…it doesn’t matter. Jessie is in it now.
“Earlier,” Jessie says, “when we were outside the White House. You were…” She stops, and Lee can see the uncertainty in her eyes, how the question she wants to ask might betray Lee. The idea of her. The truth.
Lee decides to spare her the struggle of trying to find the right words and answers as honestly as she can. “Sometimes the wall cracks.”
This is the reason that it is so much easier to keep people at bay. To resist the pull to get close. The closer someone is, the harder it is to keep them seeing what they want to. The tough-as-nails wunderkind photographer, who has captured some of the most powerful images of the past twenty years. Who keeps getting back up over and over again, putting herself right where she needs to be, taking the photos, forcing everyone else to confront the truth of what she has seen. When people are looking at the images, they aren’t paying attention to her. But this close…Lee isn’t sure Jessie can see anything else.
But there isn’t disappointment in Jessie’s eyes. Condemnation. There’s just understanding. That same openness that makes Lee’s teeth ache, that takes all the hollow emptiness inside of her and fills it with something clawing and hot. This need she never admits to, to be seen.
“What do you think is going to happen next?” Jessie asks and there’s something in her gaze, a desperation, like she so badly wants an answer. A real one. A reassurance.
But Lee knows better than to try and give that to her. “I don’t know.”
Jessie blinks, nodding, brow furrowing as she seems to consider this, to consider the morning in a few hours and what it might bring. How they will have to leave this moment, this warmth, the softness around them, and go back outside to what remains.
And maybe that’s why Lee adds, “But maybe it’ll be something good.”
“Something good,” Jessie says quietly, turning the idea over. “Yeah.”
Their gazes meet and Lee can feel Jessie’s soft exhales, the warmth of Jessie’s hand still on her skin. If she tries, the world shrinks to just this moment, this space, them.
“Lee?”
“Yes.”
Jessie moves forward, the distance between them small enough to cross easily, and she presses her lips softly to the corner of Lee’s mouth, the kiss a breath, a brush, a whisper. Still, Lee closes her eyes. She breathes in the smell of Jessie, floral and clean, the smells of sleep and the heat of her body. Jessie pulls back just enough that their noses brush together, and Lee feels like it would be impossible to focus on anything but Jessie’s eyes and what they are reflecting back at her.
Lee lifts her hand, letting it rest briefly against the nape of Jessie’s neck, letting her thumb brush the curve of her throat. Jessie smiles, turning her head so that she can press her lips to Lee’s palm and the sight of her, with her messy twists of still damp hair, the strap of her tanktop slipping past her shoulder, the brush of shadows over her face, is enough to push away the emptiness inside of her and replace it with something more. A hope, a longing. An impulse that makes her move forward, pressing her mouth to Jessie’s in a more substantial kiss, and, as she does, she can feel Jessie smile.
The room is flooded with light, rich and beautiful and enough to forget, for just a moment, that just beyond the window is a torn and broken city in the midst of a torn and broken country. Lee closes her eyes, pulling the blankets back around herself, trying to nestle herself back among their softness for a little while longer. She’s never been one for denial, but it does feel nice to pretend for a moment.
Even if it does occur to her just as quickly that she’s in bed alone, that she can draw the blankets around herself without the resistance of the other body that had spent the majority of the night pressed against hers, a forehead between her shoulders, an arm over her waist.
Lee sits up, glancing around the room. Jessie’s bag and cameras are gone, the only proof of her presence is the memory of her body beside Lee’s. Briefly, Lee considers returning to the blankets and letting the day pass her by, but that has never been her way and she isn’t sure she understands how to start now. And so she gets up, collecting her own things and leaving the room without bothering to make the bed. One tiny indulgence.
She finds Joel and Jessie downstairs in the kitchen, Joel lounging in a chair with his feet propped up on a silver-topped table, a cigarette in one hand and a box of cereal resting in his lap. Jessie is sitting perched on the edge of the table opposite of where he’s sitting, smiling and shaking her head no doubt at something he’s said, dipping slices of a browning apple into a jar of peanut butter.
For a second, just the amount of time it takes her to inhale, Lee is able to watch them without them noticing her presence. How alive they both look, how they can both still manage to smile. Something Lee feels like she’s allowed herself to forget how to do.
And then the moment passes, and Joel’s eyes lift, Jessie’s head turns, and her grin widens, shoulders straightening. If Lee isn’t mistaken, the faintest dusting of color appears beneath those freckles, that smile suddenly shy.
“Bout time,” Joel says, blowing out a stream of smoke. “I wanted to wake you up, but she wouldn’t let me.” His tone is teasing, the annoyance all for show, pouting for Jessie’s benefit.
Lee runs her hand through her hair, pulling it back from her face. “What time is it?”
“Who cares,” Joel says dismissively, even as Jessie turns her slender wrist to study the watchface. “Where else do we need to be?”
This is a point Lee can’t really argue with.
Jessie picks up another apple slice, swirling it through the peanut butter and handing it out to Lee. Jessie’s eyes look especially blue beneath the curl of her lashes and she meets Lee’s gaze, the pink most definitely in her cheeks.
“Thanks.” Lee takes the apple piece, unable to keep a smile of her own from dancing, tentative, across her lips. That feeling that had settled over her last night is still firmly in place in the center of her chest, the same flutter of warmth she’d felt when she’d told Jessie that maybe the next thing that happened would be good after all.
Jessie nods. “Sure.”
“Ah, I get it,” Joel says, nodding as he puts his cigarette out on the floor in the White House’s kitchen.
Jessie cuts her eyes at him. “What are you talking about?”
Joel quirks an eyebrow. “Now I know why you weren’t interested back at the hotel.”
Lee coughs around the piece of apple in her throat but Jessie just rolls her eyes. “Maybe you’re just really bad at flirting.”
But Joel only grins, shaking his head. “Nah, that’s definitely not it.”
Jessie tosses a piece of apple at him and Joel picks it off the front of his shirt, grinning as he bites into it. As it had been earlier, it’s easy, simple, to turn her head back toward Jessie, to expect her to be there to match her eye roll, her indulgent smile, to understand this shared moment of levity between the three of them. Jessie only shakes her head, smirking as she offers Lee another piece of apple.
“So,” Joel says, looking between them, “what now?”
It feels strange not to have an immediate answer. A destination. A goal. Something waiting on the other end of the camera. But, for the moment, Lee just allows herself to shrug, to shake her head, to focus on the sweetness of the apple as it dances across her tongue.
