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Lee’s fingers brush gently along the bridge of Jessie’s nose, the curve of her cheeks, the soft hollow of her throat. The eye of a photographer, pulling beauty from her subject. The whisper of her breath is warm against Jessie’s lips, collecting in her eyelashes, in the freckles on her cheeks, and Jessie shivers, knows that Lee can feel it.
Beyond them, the world is still, quiet. Deceptively so, maybe, considering that all around there is a war raging. Joel and Sammy are asleep and the night is thick and humid, holding its breath. It seems impossible that no one can hear the pounding of her heart, the rush of blood in her ears. It seems impossible that she can hear Lee’s breathing over the riot of noise in her own body.
Lee smiles, tilting her head, taking her in. Studying her. The sweet spot. “This is a terrible idea.”
“I know.” Jessie swallows, her head buzzing with all the ways that Lee is right, that it is terrible. But it’s her blood that is humming with all the reasons they should be exactly like this, awkwardly fitted together in the dark, with Lee’s hand against the small of her back, keeping her close. “I know. I-”
Lee’s lips on hers are gentle, swallowing up Jessie’s words rather than cutting them off. Jessie breathes her in, knows this is a moment neither of them will bring up in the morning, that this will feel distant and muffled, like it happened to someone else. But for now, it’s happening to her, to them, their breathing a ripple in the darkness.
The sound of exploding concrete and trembling earth wakes her from an admittedly loose sleep and without opening her eyes, she reaches out a hand, placing it on the cool floorboards beside her bed. The world feels still, quiet, and Jessie Cullen opens her eyes and the same hand-painted chest of drawers that she’d seen for the first eighteen years of her life is still there, right where she’d left it months before. No explosions. The air is without the smells of ash, the dry heat of fire searing the insides of her lungs. It had taken her days to wash all the grit from her hair, the blood from beneath her fingernails, the smell of death from her skin.
Here, beneath blankets that smell like summer sunshine and the same detergent from her childhood, Jessie still isn’t sure she’d gotten it all, the rot and coppery smell clinging to the insides of her eyelids.
Everything is quiet, still, the way it can be only in the early morning hours in a place far from war. The sounds of screaming, of concrete bursting beneath the weight of something it could never hope to withstand, fade to the back of her mind and Jessie withdraws her hand, rolling onto her back instead and interlocking her fingers across her chest. She watches the steady rise and fall of her knuckles out of her peripheral vision, eyes tracing the same whorls in the ceiling that she’d memorized in high school as she imagined where else she might go one day, and what she might do.
She’s gone so far just to be back here again.
The Jessie who used to imagine a world behind the farm, beyond Missouri
( The Show Me State. Why do they call it the Show Me State?)
would never be able to imagine the Jessie she is now. The one who has to touch the floor of her childhood bedroom to figure out if the sound of explosions are just in her mind or if they’re really happening.
Below, she can hear the sounds of her mother moving around in the kitchen. The shuddering of the pipes as she turns the kitchen sink on and off. The murmur of the radio. If she closes her eyes, it would be so easy to imagine herself back in time, years and years behind this person that she is now. A Jessie who would hop out of bed to rush down to get pancakes fresh from the skillet. A Jessie boldly, naively, announcing her decision to take her cameras and go do something important. Make a difference.
Now, she’s a Jessie who both dreads staying in bed and can’t imagine getting out of it again. Sleep means the potential for dreams. But being up, a part of the world beyond the closed bedroom door, means the potential for so many other things. A memory. A conversation. Something always worse just around the curve in the road.
Still, it’s the latter that Jessie opts for, swinging her legs out from beneath the quilt that had been made by a great-great grandmother that she’d never known, spread across her bed for longer than she can really remember. She doesn’t bother to change out of the sweats and tank top, ignoring the cameras waiting on the edge of the desk and opening the door to the smells of coffee and toast, the summer wind blowing in through a window open somewhere in the house, the dried grass smell that will always make her think of her father.
It’s the smells that she can’t seem to avoid, most days. The fragrance of her father’s cigarettes, which remind her of Joel. The honeysuckle smell of the lotion that Lee used to rub absently on her hands, an apologetic wince furrowing her brow if she caught Jessie noticing , as though she had to excuse the indulgence. Something dead and rotting carried in by the breeze that reminds her of, well
Everything.
Downstairs, her mother greets her far too loudly, smile stretched far too tightly across her face, and it’s all Jessie can do to avoid wincing at the sound, how the relief makes her mother’s voice shrill and sharp. Jessie can imagine the sight she’d been when she’d turned up days before on the porch because she can see that person in the mirror when she looks at herself
( Jesus when you haven’t seen yourself in the mirror in a few days)
can see the hollow space in the corners of her eyes. The faraway look of someone listening for something on the horizon. It feels ridiculous to be able to run away to a place like this, somewhere so untouched by the war that you have to squint to see it. How easy. How cheap.
Still, Jessie makes herself smile. Sits down at the table. Nods when her mother asks if she wants coffee. Toast. Jam? Things Jessie can do for herself but the heavy indifference in her muscles makes it all too easy to agree when her mother offers to do it for her.
Her mother sets down a cup of coffee in front of her, reaching then to turn off the radio without a somewhat guilty expression creasing the corners of her eyes. The tinny voice of a newscaster disappears quickly, taking with it the truth that Jessie knows her mother thinks she’s protecting her from. Unsurprisingly, the war is not over, even though the president is dead. Unsurprisingly, the Western Forces have splintered and are grappling among each other to find a leader, to divy up the carcass of the United States. Unsurprisingly, everyone has opinions about what that might mean.
Jessie doesn’t need the radio to remind her of this.
She doesn’t need a radio to keep her gaze from shifting upward each night, watching the sky in growing dusk for pops of fire, listening out for the roar of a jet engine.
Her mother puts a hand on her shoulder and Jessie flinches, grateful that she hadn’t yet reached to pick up the coffee cup, otherwise it would be all over the table. Her mother draws back, chigrained. “Sorry sweetie. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No, it’s fine. Sorry. I’m just…” Jessie waves a hand in the direction of herself, her mind, the parts of her that are still back there, back in so many places
( And that’s nothing compared to what we’re heading into)
that she’s been. She doesn’t know how to explain that sometimes she can’t remember where she is now. That those before moments and the ones she is currently living in overlay on one another like coats of paint, though it’s difficult to tell which is obscuring the other.
“You don’t have to explain,” her mother says, no doubt hoping that Jessie will see her rush at reassurance as motherly and not a gesture of fear, of unwillingness to hear what Jessie might have to say. “I’m sure it’s just terrible out there.” She clucks her tongue, shaking her head. “You certainly are brave, going out there.”
Out there. The big bad world, just beyond the safety of their front porch.
Jessie only shakes her head, scoffing. But she doesn’t bother to explain that either, doesn’t bother to point out that she’s not brave at all. After all, if she was, she wouldn’t be hiding here, jumping at memories.
The brush of her fingers against the nape of Lee’s neck make her shiver and Jessie grimaces, pulling her hand back quickly. “Sorry, I guess my hands are cold, I-”
“It’s fine,” Lee says, shaking her head, and the end of her ponytail brushes the spot where Jessie’s touch had been moments before, the twist of hair as utilitarian as it is flattering, so perfectly Lee that Jessie couldn’t imagine anything else. “You’re fine.”
Jessie quickly pulls down the zipper in the back of the emerald green dress that had looked so perfect on Lee that she had immediately regretted suggesting that the other woman try it on because in that moment, Jessie had been certain Lee would be able to read everything so clearly on her face. That bravado and clumsy flirting wouldn’t protect the tiny flicker of flame that had sparked stubbornly despite her best efforts. But if she’d noticed anything at all, Lee had declined to say anything, posing for a photo, letting Jessie coax a smile or two out of her, and, in turn, Jessie hadn’t pointed out the faint dusting of color on Lee’s cheeks, the blush that Jessie imagined that she might have put there. If there was one thing that being around Lee was teaching her, it was that stumbling in half-cocked into every situation like the universe would be grateful for her sudden presence was not always the best way to go.
“Thanks.” Lee turns and they stand that way for a moment, face to face in the dressing room of a store that smells like roses and furniture polish in the middle of a town that looks like a dream. “Let me know if you need help.”
It takes Jessie a beat to understand what it is that Lee is talking about. “Oh.” She looks at the bundle of fabric in her hands, clutched between white knuckles. She loosens her grip before it, too, might give her away. “Oh, yeah, no. It’s just…a shirt.” She shrugs, feeling stupid. “I thought…I dunno.”
Lee lifts an eyebrow, head slightly tilted to take her in. “What? No fancy dresses?”
Sometimes, Lee is a hard person to read.
Okay. Not sometimes.
All the time.
Lee is a hard person to read.
Standing in front of her now, Jessie is pretty sure that Lee hasn’t minded trying on the dress, hasn’t minded Jessie’s insistence, her stubborn bumbling. Hadn’t minded the photograph, the compliments, the smiles she’d given out. Jessie thinks she might know Lee well enough now to understand that she isn’t a woman who does things to placate others. Lee has one hand just below her throat, keeping the bunching fabric in place now that it falls looser around her shoulders, and Jessie can feel it again, that stuttering heat in the center of her chest that makes her feel dizzy and loose, like someone has grabbed her shoulders and spun her around a few times and left her to find her footing.
“I probably couldn’t compete,” Jessie says, the words tripping off her tongue so quick and easy that they can only be completely stupid. Especially when they earn another quirk of an eyebrow. “I figured this would be more practical anyway.” Jessie holds up the shirt bunched in her fist, grateful for the excuse to plow ahead. “I’m just gonna…”
She points toward the changing stall, which is nothing more than a cube of space with a curtain to close it off from everyone else. Lee steps aside and Jessie hurries into the room, grateful to pull the curtain closed between them. She looks at herself in the mirror, narrowing her eyes at the girl looking back at her. Stupid, she mouths, offering an accusatory point toward her reflection. Embarrassing. Childish.
All things Lee already probably thinks about her.
The last thing she needs to add in is a little crush.
“Stupid,” she mumbles, just for good measure, shrugging off the strap of her bag and letting it fall to the ground with a thump.
On the other side of the curtain, Jessie can hear Lee stepping out of the dress, the rustle of fabric as it falls to the floor, can see the movement of Lee’s feet through the gap between the curtain and the door. It’s embarrassing, the way her heart is thumping in her chest, all things considered. She’s seen men on death’s door, dripping blood onto the concrete floor of a car wash. She’s listened to children crying throughout the middle of the night while their parents try to soothe them from the marshy ground of a refugee camp. She’s watched men with hoods over their heads jerk long past the moments when their hearts have stopped beating. And yet this, too, has her heart racing.
Jessie pulls her shirt off and it hits her between the eyes, Lee’s comment from earlier about not seeing yourself in the mirror for a while. Except with Lee, it had been ridiculous, the same type of awkward put-down that girls in her high school used to do even after they’d spent hours getting ready each morning, unable to simply accept a compliment. But Jesus with her it’s true. Jessie can see the streaks of dirt and sweat across her ribs, the way the sweat has discolored the fabric of her bra, how it’s suddenly so painfully obvious that she hasn’t taken nearly enough time to try and take care of herself, that the gas station paper towel sink bath she’d given herself yesterday morning had been embarrassingly pathetic. “Jesus.”
“Everything okay?”
Lee’s tone is teasing and curious and Jessie can imagine a sort of amused smile on her face, balancing there on her lips as she toes her boots back on.
“Oh, yeah,” Jessie says quickly, glaring at her reflection. “It just…I almost feel bad, you know?”
“No, I don’t,” Lee says, the lilt in her voice suggesting she is still wearing that exasperated sort of smile.
“Just…trying something on,” Jessie supplies, wishing she hadn’t said anything at all. “All this stuff is so clean. And I’m just…”
“Disgusting?” Lee supplies and then adds quickly, “I mean not you specifically. But…I definitely know the feeling. I’m living that feeling right now, actually.”
Jessie nods even though Lee can’t see her, relief and embarrassment making strange friends in the center of her chest. “Yeah. Pretty gross.”
“Eh, try it on anyway,” Lee says. “Let them deal with a little discomfort like the rest of us.”
Jessie smiles and the girl smiling back at her could almost be a stranger, if not for the same pattern of freckles, the same thumb press of a dimple at the corner of her mouth. This girl looks older, unkempt and feral, and her heart beats wild in spite of seeing men die and knowing what blood smells like as it dries on hot concrete.
Jessie tugs the shirt over her head, black and without frills, and it sticks to her like an itchy second skin, too clean, too new. Still, Jessie smooths her hands down her sides, likes the way this, too, makes her look older, makes her look like someone who might know what they’re doing, who might be capable. Confident. Someone who might be able to keep up.
She changes out of the shirt once more, and it feels almost worse to put back on what she’s been wearing, the fabric that smells like sweat and cigarettes and the inside of a car that doesn’t feel quite like home or quite like prison but something in between. She wants a real shower, a real bed, someplace she isn’t afraid to take off her socks, and all that just makes her feel childish and deflated all over again.
Stupid.
Jessie pushes the curtain aside, surprised to see Lee still standing there, looking like herself again in her own tee shirt and jeans.
“What? Don’t I get to take your picture?”
Lee smiles almost like she means it. Almost like she wishes she could.
Tell him Jessie.
Tell him Jessie.
“Missouri.”
“Huh?”
Jessie blinks and it comes into focus again. The barn. The bales of hay half torn apart and ready to be scattered. Her father, looking at her curiously, confused, like a stranger has wandered into the room with him and he isn’t quite sure he wants them there.
At her silence, her father presses again, “What?”
She can still taste it on her tongue. The stink of it all, blood and softening flesh and lye. Even here, it mingles with the smell of dust and dirt, of hay and sunshine and of the animals. Jessie is almost afraid to turn around, certain that what she’s going to see behind her is the open mouth of the Earth, ready to swallow her whole.
Jessie just looks at her father instead. “Nothing. Sorry.”
Her father does a better job of looking at her like she isn’t some strange being that has materialized into his life. Likely because he’s had more practice with this. The type of salt of the earth, weathered farmer who wanted a son, who loved his daughter but didn’t quite know what to do with her, who never calls her Jessica, who clearly wanted a boy and never quite moved on from that disappointment. Now, the man smiles at her, tight-lipped and uncertain, and pulls off his gloves. “Let’s take a break.”
It’s generous, this suggestion, considering that Jessie doesn’t think she’s actually done anything since stepping into the barn.
The quiet, the smells of earth and the soft sounds of her father working, had made it hard to remember where she was, and so much easier to hear Lee’s voice in the silence.
Still, Jessie follows suit, going to sit next to her father on one of the bales of hay still bound together by twine. He takes a drink from his water bottle, offers it to her half-heartedly, and doesn’t press when Jessie shakes her head.
“We never talked about it much,” her father says finally, glancing through the square of the open barn door toward the pastel blue of the sky, the afternoon sunshine. They’d been in the barn when Jessie had told her father she wanted to leave, to become a photojournalist, to document what was going on around the country, and he’d done exactly this, glanced out toward the sky like it might give him an answer, finally, on what he’s supposed to do with his child. “But you know I served in the army for a bit. Before I met your mom. Iraq.”
The inside of Jessie’s cheek is raw from how often she’s chewed it between her teeth, the hollow taste of blood familiar and jarring. “I know.”
Her father nods, rubs at the growing stubble on his cheeks. He’ll shave tonight, but it’ll be back tomorrow. “I know it can be hard, thinking about what you’ve seen. Not knowing how to talk about it.”
Jessie looks at her feet, the toe of her boot pressed into the dirt as though to keep her rooted in place. “I didn’t go to war.” Her voice is terse, flat. “I’m not a soldier.”
“I know that.” Her father looks at her and it’s easy to pretend she doesn’t notice. “I know. But you were still there. You saw some things that-”
Jessie shakes her head, stands before she even really understands what she’s doing. “It’s not the same. It’s fine. I’m going to get back to…” She points in the direction of where she’d been, back when she hadn’t remembered where she was. “Thanks, though.”
Her father doesn’t protest and for that Jessie is glad. At his insistence, it might be harder to push aside his words, to ignore that she had seen war, even if she hadn’t been holding a gun. She figures people die the same, regardless of whether you’ve got a weapon or not.
The silence guarantees, too, that she doesn’t have to tell her father how good it had felt to hold the camera, to know that she was capturing this moment even as a man’s life leaked out onto the skin of his companion
(That’s a great photo, Jessie)
and how noble it had seemed at the time to take a photo of a man’s death and claim it was so that he would be remembered. How she had smiled as a city fell to ash around her. How someone had died so she could live. How she would’ve deserved it, those bullets, because she had felt invincible.
The stars seem to spin overhead, a galaxy swirl that reminds her of the planetarium from grade school, how everything seemed to blur together until she was half dizzy, half in love with the universe and everything in it.
But it’s probably just the weed.
The sound of footsteps against soft ground makes Jessie bring her gaze back down to Earth, her head following seconds later, and Lee is walking toward her, arms wrapped around herself to either brace against the hint of a chill in the June night or to hold herself against the darkness. At the sight of her, Jessie’s heart stutters, surprised, panicked, thrilled all in one.
Some things never change.
She’s still that nervous high school girl, stumbling into lockers at the sight of a pretty girl.
“Hey.” Lee comes to stand in front of her, fingers cupping her elbows. “I thought I saw you wander over here.”
“Oh, yeah.” Jessie shrugs, fidgeting, unsure of what she’s supposed to be doing with her own hands. In an effort to avoid mimicking Lee, she slides her hands into her back pockets. The knees of her jeans feel damp from where she’d knelt earlier on the soft, wet ground of the football field, rolling out a second hand sleeping bag, settling her bag the head to use as a pillow. Between the day before and now, she feels like she’s lived a dozen lives, traveled far more than a few hundred miles, and that she has to look like it too. “Just…looking at the stars.”
“Ah.” Lee moves around to stand beside her, tipping her head back, imitating Jessie’s posture from before. Jessie braves a glance at her while Lee’s attention is otherwise occupied: the worn look to Lee’s features, the way the exhaustion and sadness seems to crinkle the corners of her eyes. How no part of Lee has seemed surprised by anything they’ve seen so far, while Jessie can’t seem to stop thinking about it all. When Lee shifts, Jessie quickly lifts her gaze too, squinting at the stars instead.
“I forget about stuff like this,” Lee says, “I can’t remember the last time I even thought about looking at the stars.”
Lee shakes her head, grimacing at the sky, at herself. “It’s probably stupid. I just…couldn’t really sleep and…”
“It’s not stupid,” Lee assures her. “It’s hard to sleep in places like this…so many people, so much noise…” Her laugh is more of a scoff, an exhale. “People don’t seem to realize how much noise they make when they’re sleeping.”
Jessie can’t help but smile, can’t help but add, “Yeah I’m pretty sure they can hear Joel snoring all the way in California.”
Lee laughs, the sound as quick and sharp as the rest of her. “Yeah, no kidding.” She shakes her head. “It’s probably a good thing that you can’t sleep anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re still new to all this.” A shrug. “You aren’t so hard that you can sleep through anything.”
Jessie frowns and Lee is quick to jump in. “That’s meant to be a compliment.” When her words are met with silence, she adds, “I know you’re not just some dumb kid, Jessie. You’re tough. You’re good.”
“I want to be great.” The words leave Jessie’s mouth before she can think about them, how they might sound. There had been a version of her, once, that had imagined what it might be like to be in a conversation with Lee Smith, to be able to show off her photographs, to have Lee impart some great wisdom of photographers who have come before them, to induct Jessie into their ranks. Reality, as always, is starker than any vision could ever be: overlit and out of focus. After all, she’d had her chance, she’d had Lee beside her while she’d been so proud to go through her photos, and look how they had turned out.
Strike rate; one in thirty.
Lee nods, like she doesn’t hold the words against her. Like she even understands them. “You will be. You’ll get there.”
More optimistic, Jessie thinks, than Lee assuring her that she fully intends to photograph her inevitable death.
“You don’t have to like…babysit me, or whatever,” Jessie says. “I’m not tagging along to force you to teach me your ways or…make me a better photographer or anything. I’m not going to bother you.”
There’s a silence in which Jessie worries she’s said too much, that Lee will assure her quickly that she is bothering her, just by being here at all. But Lee reaches out, putting a hand against the soft inside of Jessie’s elbow. The touch is both reassuring and incendiary. “It’s a good thing,” she says again, “that you aren’t hard like the rest of us.”
“I don’t think you’re as hard as you think you are,” Jessie blurts out. “I think that’s exactly what all of this is. You’re just worried. You care too much.”
Lee works her jaw, quickly looking away, throat bobbing as she swallows. “Sorry. Sorry, I don’t know what I-” The words almost trip themselves as Jessie hurries to get them out.
“No, it’s fine,” Lee says quietly, but she doesn’t look at her again. “It’s nice. For you to see me like that.”
Jessie isn’t sure how else she’s supposed to see her, but this time she keeps her mouth shut.
He finds her and somehow Jessie isn’t at all surprised. It’s almost like she’s been waiting for him, expecting it, for how little she reacts to seeing his car driving up the path toward the front of the house. It’s different from the one they’d spent so much time in and that isn’t a surprise either. The old car is probably full of blood, of ghosts.
Jessie waits in the same spot she’d been when she’d first noticed the swirl of dust that meant someone was coming, sitting on the top step with a book beside her that she’d had no intention of reading even when she’d plucked it from the shelf, but she’d taken it anyway, a sort of talisman against the thoughts that would come crowding to the forefront before too long anyway.
And now here they are, so insistent that they’ve conjured a ghost of their own.
Joel somehow looks exactly as she remembers: weathered, hung over, and smiling. He slams the door, squinting over the hood at her in the setting sun. “I always pictured you as a big city girl.”
“Sorry to shatter the illusion.” Jessie studies him, trying to understand how she feels. When she’d said good bye to Joel, it hadn’t felt like much of anything. Just a rush of explanation that she hadn’t let him argue with (I can’t do this now, I need to go home) and he hadn’t bothered to fight her once she’d pressed the roll of film against his palm, either too surprised to or because arguing would’ve been unnecessary with that canister in his hand. It had been easy then to fool herself into believing that was all he cared about anyway, that she was secondary to the camera in her hands.
Easier, too, to pass the film over to him anyway, to give him the burden of developing the pictures she knew would be there in black and white. Inarguable proof of what she’d done.
Looking at him now, she feels a little like she had then, like nothing at all. But there’s a hint of joy. Relief to see the smile still on his face. The lightness in her chest that comes from letting out a held breath after waking up from a nightmare.
He knows what she does. What she’s seen. All that and more, too. The cigarette smoke and rot smell seems stronger with him in front of her.
But it’s easier to breathe, too.
Joel stands for a moment, letting his fingers drum against the hood of the car. Always busy. “You look good.”
Jessie smirks. “Liar.”
This gets a grin out of him and Jessie feels like she’s closer to smiling than she has been since that night, since before. “How do I look?”
Jessie ignores the question. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.” Joel shrugs. “What else?”
The impulse to smile tucks itself away again, where it’s been lurking ever since she’d pushed herself to her feet in that White House hallway. “Why?”
Joel is still smiling, but it’s stretched and strained, weary. “There’s still some stuff going down. WF has all gone to shit, fighting going on down near San Antonio. Thought you might want to take a look.”
Jessie tilts her head, not sure if she’s exasperated or curious. “Take a look.”
Joel mimics taking a picture, the exaggerated cluck of tongue against teeth. “Come be my photographer.”
There’s an empty spot beside him. An empty passenger seat. The rest of the car is empty too. Ghosts.
Jessie stares for a beat, a breath, two, three, until she realizes that she isn’t staring at Joel at all but at that space beside him, where she can almost see a shape in the dusk.
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Joel doesn’t really wait for her to answer. “Just buy some more film. Get back out there.”
The front door squeaks when it opens, the way it always has, a few rusty hinges that her father refused to fix on the off chance that his relatively boring daughter would ever try to sneak out. Apparently she’d saved all her rebellious, wild streaks for later, when she could swap going off to high school parities for creeping around active war zones.
Her father steps outside, trying to imitate indifference so strongly that it comes off as anything but casual. He goes to light a cigarette, cupping one hand over the flickering flame as he eyes Joel. “Evening.”
Joel looks at Jessie, pantomiming the grimace of a naughty boyfriend and earning himself another smile. “Sir.”
Jessie bites at the inside of her cheek again, the raw copper flesh no stranger to the sensation. She felt like she’d only just barely started putting together the puzzle pieces of the people she was with, all the many moving parts of Sammy, equally quick with a grandfatherly smile or a raunchy joke to get the whole car to dissolve into laughter. And Lee.
Lee. All the broken parts of her that fit together into something Jessie thought she might have longer to understand.
And Joel, deceptively simple, the affable rogue doing his oafish impression of a smooth charmer, who had pulled her from a pit of dead bodies and screamed his throat raw, the anguish making Jessie want to cover her ears with her hands and close her eyes like that might make it all go away.
Her father looks between them and Jessie wonders if the man realizes how easy he is to read. How he seems to be working to put these pieces together: this older man, his young daughter who has come back faraway and foggy, full of things she won’t say. She wants to tell him not to bother, that he could never put that puzzle together even if all the pieces were together and right in front of him.
“And you are?”
“This is Joel.” Jessie gets to her feet, using the banister to pull herself upright. “We…worked together.”
It feels good to look at someone and feel like they might understand it too
(These guys, they’re colleagues of mine)
what she sees in her mind, the way the wood of the railing feels as real under her palm as the feeling of dirt digging into her knees.
Her father grunts, expression blurred by a cloud of smoke. Joel clears his throat, gestures toward Jessie. “I just wanted to-”
“You can join us for dinner,” her father says, and there’s no room for argument in his tone.
Not that Joel looks like he’s going to be doing any complaining, no doubt reassured by the fact that he isn’t being quickly shut down and banished by the person he’d come to curry favor from. And Jessie….well.
Jessie isn’t sure how she feels about it.
What word is there for being relieved to see the person that reminds you of some of the worst things you’ve ever done?
Joel, personable as always, joins her father for a cigarette and neither seem to notice or mind when Jessie goes back into the house, bypassing the kitchen and taking the stairs up to her room two at a time, a familiar action that her muscles remember without effort. She closes the door behind her, kneels down beside her bed, withdraws the messenger bag that she’d tucked carefully beneath the frame upon returning home. She’s taken everything else out but the cameras.
Even now, Jessie isn’t sure what had made her take them. After she’d taken the photographs of the WF with the very dead and bleeding president, she’d turned back around, silent. A ghost. The room for all its bloodshed was full of exuberant relief, a celebration that she didn’t know how to take part in, and not just because there was a man dead there on the ground that was the source of the suddenly outpouring of joy, but because she hadn’t really felt anything at all. Empty.
Her feet had taken her backward, down the hall, toward the body still laying motionless on the carpet. Foolishly, childishly, there had been a part of her that had hoped maybe, maybe something would be different. A Lazarus that rose again when everyone’s attention was otherwise occupied.
Stupid.
But Lee had still been there, the carpet dark and damp around her, eyes still closed, half curled fingers resting against her motionless stomach. Jessie had knelt, empty. Lee’s cheek had still been warm when she’d reached a hand out to touch her skin.
And Joel had called for her in the same questioning tone that someone might use to call out a hello in an empty house, like they weren’t entirely expecting an answer. She had leaned forward, carefully pulling the straps of Lee’s cameras from around her neck, gently moving her hair aside, careful, now, not to let herself touch Lee. She’d tucked the cameras into her bag, even if it had meant leaving behind crumpled and dirty shirts on the White House floor. It had been harder this time to turn her back. To leave Lee behind. Harder, still, not to ask Joel why they were walking away, or what was going to become of her, because Jessie was certain she didn’t want the answer.
She means to develop the film. To check the SD card. To see what Lee saw before the end. But she hasn’t been able to do that, not yet. Photos of dead men, taken by a dead woman.
More ghosts.
Jessie stands, carefully settling the cameras onto her dresser before her own now unused cameras. A quartet of sightless eyes, blinded by a lens cap.
The gentle knocking on her door is more polite than necessary, especially since the door swings open beneath the pressure, and when Joel steps in and sees the cameras there, he doesn’t say anything. Jessie speaks before he can find the words. “I don’t think I can go with you.”
Joel presses his lips together. “We should eat.”
And neither of them, she knows, are saying what they want to be.
* * *
“It’s nice out here,” Joel says around an exhale of smoke, a clearing of the throat, “peaceful.”
Jessie nods, arms wrapped around herself even though there’s hardly a chill in the air to speak of. The air is sticky with summer humidity, buzzing with the sounds of cicadas. “Yeah, it is.”
Joel looks pleased, as though she’s walked into a trap he’d so expertly laid. “Doesn’t seem like your speed.”
“And what do you know about my speed?”
Again, that smile. “I seem to have a pretty good memory of a pretty big grin back in D.C.” The words are punctuated with another exhale, the acrid smell burning Jessie’s nose and taking her back to that car, the refugee camp, gunfire in the middle of the night, a hotel lobby full of chatter and the offer to sit, stay, have a drink.
Jessie grits her teeth, relishing the ache of her jaw. “I think that’s exactly the problem.”
Joel nods, dropping the butt carefully beneath the toe of his shoe, putting it out long before it can think of smoldering in the hay. “I thought that might be it.”
Jessie’s eyes narrow, though the wariness feels like an act. “What?”
“Lee. That’s what this is about, right? What happened to Lee.”
“How can you just say it like that?” In the time she’s been home, she thinks her voice hasn’t risen about a whisper, her tone an even keel no matter what the topic of conversation, but now she thinks she might scream, the pitch sharp and foreign. “What happened to Lee. Just like…it was nothing.”
Joel’s laugh is sharp and brittle, lacking mirth as he shakes another cigarette from the pack and sticks it between his teeth. “It wasn’t nothing, but it’s the way it is some-”
“It’s all I think about,” Jessie interjects, desperate to have someone understand, finally. “I feel like I can’t stop thinking about it. Like I’m still there all the time, even when I’m right here and I just…”
Nothing compared to what we’re heading into.
Tell him Jessie.
There were plenty of worse ways for Sammy to go.
He’s not in there.
“I feel like I can’t stop.” Jessie heaves a breath, the inside of her mouth tangy with blood from the cheek she hadn’t even realized she was biting into. “I don’t know where I am half the time.”
Joel pockets the cigarette, steps toward her, extending his arm in a sort of hug that looks both brotherly and far too awkward. “Come here, just-”
Jessie steps back, shaking her head, turning away. She isn’t sure where she’s going, where she wants to go, so she just ends up pacing a sort of loopy half circle, coming back to face him. “No. Just…sorry.” An exhale, a desperate attempt to catch the breath rattling around in her chest. “Sorry.”
“You think I don’t think about it?” It’s not really a question, the way that Joel says it. “That I don’t think about all that shit? Everything before that?” That scoff, as dry and without humor as before. “I think about it.”
“How do you stop it?”
Joel only shakes his head. “I’m not the one you want to ask. Don’t do what I do.”
“Thanks,” Jessie grumbles. “That’s helpful.”
Joel offers her a shrug and nothing more.
Jessie studies him, but all she can see is that empty space between them. “Do you miss her?” She doesn’t give him the chance to answer; it’s not really the point. “I miss her. Is that weird? I know it was only a few days but I feel…I feel like I can’t be the same anymore, not after what happened. I miss her and Sammy and you and I miss that stupid fucking car and I just…” She runs her hands through her hair, pushing it back away from her face. “Christ, I don’t know.”
“Yeah, that happens,” Joel says, like it might be the most normal thing in the world, this conversation they’re having. He retrieves the cigarette, tilting his head as he goes to light it. “It’s war. That fucking car,” he grins, though it doesn’t meet his eyes, “it’s all we’ve got.”
“I liked it, you know,” Jessie says softly, a nearest thing to truth that she’s let herself say in days. Her second best kept secret
(And I’ve never felt more alive)
that weighs down her tongue even as she says it out loud. “And I feel like an idiot. But I liked it. Being there…everything…”
Joel nods, the tip of the cigarette crackling to a pinprick of light as he inhales. “Yeah. Yeah.” He looks at her. “Which is exactly my point. What are you doing here?”
“It’s my fault, you know.”
And he knows. Of course he does. He was there. He saw.
“What happened to Lee.”
Sometimes she can still feel the grip of his hand against the collar of her shirt, pulling her back. The rough hand of a solider shoving her out of the way. Lee’s body pushing her down.
“I should’ve been more careful.”
First, she’d been annoyed. Confused. Frustrated because Lee had ruined her shot.
“I should’ve been paying attention.”
And then she had seen Lee through the camera, bold and striking above her, wearing her annoyance and her relief so easily on her face.
“After everything I thought…it couldn’t happen to me. Like I was…untouchable.”
And the surprise. The pain. The understanding. The accidental push of her finger on the shutter.
And then it was over.
Faster than she could even exhale.
“It’s my fault.”
“No.” Joel exhales, shaking his head. “No, not your fault. It was Lee’s choice.”
Jessie works her jaw, reaching up a hand to swipe at the hint of wetness she can feel against her cheek. Thankfully, it seems to be a lone invader, easy to dismiss like she’s done for days. For longer. “So you’re saying she’d be glad she died for me? That it would be worth it?”
The idea feels almost laughable, hollow and ridiculous. She wishes she could ask Lee would you take it back? Would you do it differently? And she wouldn’t even hold it against her if she said yes. Wouldn’t blame her. Because what else does one moment of thoughtlessness get you if not shot? Or, if not you, someone else.
“It all sounds like bullshit.” Joel shrugs, contemplating her through a curl of cigarette smoke. “All I know is that she did what she did. And now we live with it.”
Jessie opens her mouth, only to close it again, a soundless fish floundering on a dock. Finally, she snorts, shrugging, palms open and entreating. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to do that.”
“Yeah. Me neither.” Joel puts out his cigarette, sliding his hands into his pockets. “But you’re probably not going to figure it out hanging around here.”
“Oh yeah? That’s what Lee would want, huh? Me to get back out there, take some more pictures of people killing each other?”
“Fuck if I know.” Joel grins, and Jessie rolls her eyes. “It’s probably the opposite of what she’d want, actually.”
That’s a great photo, Jessie.
“Yeah. Probably…” Even as she says the words, Jessie can feel the idea starting to take root, rolling around in her chest in a way she hadn’t let it before. Before, when she’d thought about leaving, getting out there, taking pictures, it had only felt thrilling. Exciting.
Now, it feels terrifying.
And somehow that makes it feel all the more like something she should do.
Joel grins, nodding. “Sweet.”
“I didn’t say I was going to go with you,” Jessie points out and again her teeth find the soft inside of her cheek, this time in an attempt to keep herself from smiling in return.
“Yeah. But you’re going to.”
It’s impressive, the eyeroll she gives him in return.
But that doesn’t change the inevitable.
From her bedroom back in Missouri, it had been impossible to hear any indications that there was a war going on at all. Occasionally some militiaman from a neighboring farm would get a little too enthusiastic after a night of drinking beers on his front porch and start firing rounds off at the stars but otherwise it was quiet, deceptive, idyllic. Since the last semester of her last year away at school had been shifted online, a fallback to a system that had been implemented years before during the last time America had failed to come together in the face of a crisis, she’d been back home with a determinedly positive mother and her tunnel-vision father and the sounds of birdsong and lowing cows drifting in through open windows.
Now Jessie is trying to sleep while the sounds of gunfire pop in the distance, only it doesn’t feel very distant. It feels extremely close, far too close, enticingly close in fact, like the people on the other end of the guns could so easily stumble across a press van parked in an empty lot with only a half-drunk journalist, a veteran photojournalist, an old man, and a stupid girl to defend it. Even with her eyes closed, Jessie can see the streaks of light, how they might even be mistaken for fireworks if someone was particularly optimistic, the constant rattle of gunfire feeling almost comical in some ways. Like how much ammunition can one person possibly have?
But maybe she’s just delirious.
Jessie’s shoulder aches from the way she’s laying against it, a musty blanket pulled up around her, head pillowed against a bag that feels unyielding and stiff at every angle. It doesn’t matter anyway. Joel hadn’t been wrong when he’d told her not to expect to sleep. Her body is weary but her mind feels like it hasn’t stopped running since yesterday, when she’d shown up at that scene downtown and gotten a baton to the face and nearly blown up for her troubles. But she had come across Lee, had ended up here, so maybe it had all been worth it, in the end.
Jessie opens her eyes, the bursts of gunfire becoming more than just smudges on the other side of her eyelids, and sighs, resigned. She shifts, trying to relieve some of the pressure on her shoulder, but trying not to rock the car too much, hoping not to disturb Sammy in the front seat. And then there’s Joel, stretched out in a sleeping bag just inches away, snoring and seemingly lost to whatever things he sees in his subconscious.
Lee is nowhere in sight, hasn’t been for a while, and there’s a twinge of disappointment in the center of her chest at the realization that Lee still hasn’t returned. That feeling of responsibility, too, that the reason Lee isn’t here is because of her. Feeling unwelcome isn’t entirely a new sensation, not as the only child of a woman who didn’t finish college because she was got pregnant before her senior year and a man who always wanted a house full of sons, but there’s something that stings worse because it comes now from people she had thought might be colleagues of sorts. Who might understand her and what she’s doing here. Who might not think that she’s crazy for wanting to rush into the middle of a war zone with only a camera in her hands.
The sky brightens with a new arc of gunfire, as though reminding her that, whether people get it or not, a war zone is exactly where she’s found herself.
Ask and you shall receive.
Jessie sits up, running a hand through her hair, grateful she’d had the foresight to cut it shorter before she’d left. One thing she hadn’t accounted for was how difficult it would be to find a spot to wash up, to even brush her teeth or splash water against her cheeks, let alone actually wash her hair or change her clothes. Now she’s trying to fall asleep in the back of a car that smells like cigarette smoke and gasoline and stale recycled air. There’s a thrill that comes with the disorienting discomfort, the realization that she’s in it now.
The continued pop of gunfire seems to second this notion.
Footsteps crunch across the cracked asphalt and broken glass and there’s Lee, the watery orange of the streetlights catching the shine of sweat on her forehead, the purple under her eyes. She glances first a Joel and then her eyes lift toward Jessie and Jessie can’t tell if she’s surprised or not to find her awake, to meet her gaze.
Lee gives Joel another glance, shaking her head with a sort of affection, before walking around him to come to settle herself against the back of the car. Jessie pulls the blanket further out of the way, unnecessarily maybe, willing the gesture not to look as desperately hopeful as it feels.
Lee sits, letting the heels of her sneakers press into the concrete. “I bet you think I’m such a hypocrite.”
“No,” Jessie says quickly, despite the flicker of confusion and the whisper the says yes traitorously in the back of her mind.
Lee looks at her like she doesn’t entirely believe her, tired and resigned.
Jessie has already apologized once, has offered her penance as best she knows how, but still the words threaten to crawl back up her throat once more, and she does her best to shift them into something else. “Thanks again. For earlier, back with the…” She doesn’t know what to say exactly, how to put it into words. “And with letting me tag along.”
“I’m not…” Lee doesn’t bother to finish, lifting her face toward the lines of fire in the sky, the heat and insipid lights making her cheeks ruddy. “I really wasn’t much older than you were, when I started all this. I was lucky, there was plenty out there to take pictures of…though it was a lot farther from home for a while. I wanted to document it all, so I just got my cameras and I…I did it. I went out. Right into the thick of everything.” She looks at Jessie, lifting an eyebrow. “Still don’t think I’m a hypocrite?”
“No.” This time it’s a lot easier for Jessie to say the word, and a lot more genuine. “I just think you’ve probably seen a lot of things. You know a lot.”
She doesn’t mean for it to sound complimentary, like she’s just some sycophant desperate for Lee’s attention and praise. And thankfully it doesn’t seem like Lee takes the words that way. Honestly, Jessie isn’t even sure they sound like a compliment at all. More like an expression of sympathy.
“Yeah. Yeah.” Jessie can only see Lee’s face in profile, how much softer her face looks like this, how open. Vulnerable. “I know it’s pointless to think that I could protect you or…anyone from any of this…” She sweeps a hand out toward the parking lot, the empty city beyond them, the firefight in the distance. “I mean, that’s kinda the opposite of what I do anyway. I take pictures specifically so people can’t pretend that they don’t know what’s going on. But still I…I don’t know.” Her head turns, her eyes find Jessie, taking her in, raking her over in a way that leaves Jessie’s skin prickling after with heat. “I don’t want you to know what I know.”
Jessie swallows and there’s a part of her that does want that. Exactly that. That wants to pull those words apart until she can look at every possible meaning of them, to drape them over herself until she knows and feels and sees.
“Do you regret it? If you could…go back…would you?”
Lee looks almost sad when she says, “No. No, I wouldn’t.”
Jessie nods, pulls the blanket around her shoulders once more, and turns back to study the bursts of gunfire in the distance. They sit there together in silence, listening as the resulting pops echo throughout the night.