The Camera

 

THE CAMERA

 

 

 

Nestled among the towering pines of the Jemez National Forest, the picturesque mountain cabin harbored nostalgic memories for Justin Solomon. He couldn’t have chosen a better place.

Although he’d rented the cabin for two weeks, he was sure his spreading pancreatic cancer would qualify as a bad investment. He smiled. Not that it made much difference, anyway. Like they said, “You can’t take it with you.”

The doctors had discontinued the radiation and chemotherapy treatments. They gave him six months to live, and he’d already maxed that out. Justin was lucid enough to realize that the end was near. He’d been like the walking dead for the last ten years, wandering through the days, months and years like some specter, with only the slightest contact with the world around him. He often wondered if he’d gone insane.

Justin dropped his exhausted, emaciated 6’2” frame into the large, overstuffed chair. Once an athletic 225 pounds, he was now a wheezing 140 and draped in clothing several sizes too large. The doctors encouraged him to check into a hospice facility, but he declined. There was little baggage to carry into the rustic cabin, but limping up the wooden porch stairs with his few possessions completely drained him.

The cabin had been their “retreat,” and now he was there to spend his last days with her. With his memories of her, anyway. He looked down at the cardboard box next to the chair, a box containing their photos and albums, images of their life together, reflections of his memories.

Megan had died ten years before, but Justin continued talking to her as if she had never left. He had aged more than those ten years warranted, his hair graying, his body stooping, his gait and speech hesitant and unsure. People came to think of him as just a crazy old man wandering the streets, vacant-eyed, muttering to himself. It was ironic; the cancer that had ravaged his body over the last year would finally be his means of escape.

Through the open window, he listened to the silence of the forest, broken only by the sighing of the wind in the tall pines surrounding the cabin. They rented the place several times during their marriage to escape the stress of her job at the University of New Mexico. Good memories, but then all of his memories of Megan were good—except at the end.

Justin squeezed his eyes shut to block the tears. He whispered, “I’m so sorry, Megan. Please forgive me.”

The dark images of that last night entwined their terrifying tendrils into his mind. He shook his head and pressed his palms to his eyes, trying to keep the horrific pictures out of his head. Justin gritted his teeth, rose painfully and put away his meager supplies.

“Okay, Megan, let me get a little organized here, then I’ll sort through all those pictures.”

His memory lane had been so well-traveled over the past decade that he needed no prodding to walk down it again. The images, stuck in a closed-circuit, continuous loop in his often faltering mind, made it seem like there wasn’t much room for anything else. But that was okay with him.

Justin had managed to keep down a peanut butter sandwich earlier in the day; he didn’t eat much anymore. He was well stocked with painkillers, morphine and oxy-codeine, drugs that were fighting a losing battle against the painful onslaught on his body. Between the drugs and the spreading disease, his appetite had become a casualty.

It was early evening, and he was tired from the drive, but he wanted to look at a few of the photos. Slumped in the easy chair, he browsed two albums, stopping and commenting to Megan as if she were present. He hesitated with his hand on one, shaking his head, but it made him smile. The two of them were skydiving. “I still don’t know how you got me to do that, Princess.”

The following photograph framed them, waving to the camera from the floor of the Grand Canyon. Then, the two of them, hand in hand, crossing the finish line of the City Half Marathon. There were several at University Arena, Megan in her red University blazer and black slacks and he in his Campus Police uniform. In another, a picture of her, her smile radiant, right after she had received the news of her promotion to Director of Special Events at the University.

He ran his hand over the picture lightly. “I had a crush on you the first time I saw you. It took me a year to get the nerve to ask you out.”

She was the Assistant Director of Special Events when he first met Megan. She was handing out assignments and giving instructions to personnel before a basketball game. He had been on his University Police job for two weeks, a retiree from the Albuquerque Police Department. That twenty-year career there had established a habit that sabotaged his retirement after only a month.

Justin remembered his introduction to her. He thought her the prettiest girl he had ever seen, although at age twenty-six, “girl” was a misnomer. Soft-spoken, with dark hair matching her expressive eyes and dark complexion, he discovered later that her mother was a native Hawaiian. Megan’s lineage could be traced back through her mother to former kings and queens of the Islands, but her mother married a U. S. serviceman, so Megan figured that nixed the whole royalty thing.

Justin liked to call her Princess, and on their first anniversary gave her a bracelet inscribed with her full name: Princess Megan Malu Makahilahila Solomon. The inscription cost almost as much as the bracelet. She had laughed in her soft, melodic way, making people smile even though they didn’t know why. He loved to make her happy….

Justin rummaged through the cardboard box and came up with more loose photos. He carefully placed them in the album. He had left instructions to forward these and a few other personal items of Megan’s to her parents in Michigan after his death.

He came across a close-up photo of her, a half-smile on her lips, eyes locked on the camera. Justine grinned and sighed. “Ahhh… my princess… what chance did I have against your beautiful eyes?”

Assigned to various sporting and entertainment events around campus, he had frequent contact with Megan. She was a woman whose eyes mirrored her emotions: confidence and self-assurance most of the time, frustration and anger on the rare occasions when someone disappointed her. But disillusionment and pain also appeared in those brown depths when they bypassed her for a promotion at the University the first time around. Her unexpected and obvious vulnerability was the final push. A day later, stammering and mumbling, he asked her out.

Throwing her head back and laughing, she’d said, “It’s about time!”

That had caught him off guard. “Uh… what do you mean…?”

“You’ve been following me around like a puppy dog for the better part of a year. I’d about given up on you; I didn’t think you would ever go for it.”

He reached the pinnacle of his life with her, a crest that lasted almost five years. Those years outweighed all those that came before; they married six months after their first date. Megan was the last piece of the puzzle, completing his life.

They talked about names for their children. She wanted at least two, a boy and a girl, but felt she needed to earn her M.B.A. Degree and land the Director’s job first. She achieved both, the last coming only two weeks before—he grabbed the morphine and quickly dry-swallowed two tablets.

Justin placed the photo in the album and reached back into the box, pulling out an old digital camera. It took him a minute before he remembered. He’d bought it at a local Wal-Mart a week before that final night at the theater ten years ago. It was a deal Justin couldn’t pass up, a discontinued model, twenty-five percent off. He jumped at the offer but, if he remembered correctly, had only used it once—on their last night together.

He’d purchased AAA batteries on the drive to the cabin and now inserted them in the camera. Still, Justin was mildly surprised when the camera turned on, and the screen lit up.

There were only four pictures in the memory, all from that last night at the theater, all taken outside in the courtyard. His favorite was of Megan standing near the entrance with the night-time crowd, grinning and waving at the camera, proudly preening in a stylish new red dress, a beautiful, white lace shawl draped around her shoulders and trailing down her back. The lights from the antique lamp poles lining the courtyard and walkways highlighted her beauty. She was exquisite. His heart had ached to look at her then, just as it now pined looking at her picture.

Exhaustion gripped Justin, finishing him for the night. He shuffled off to the first bedroom, the one he and Megan always used when they stayed there. It afforded the best view of the forest.

 

The nightmare came as it always did, as it always had. Burned forever into Justin’s mind, etched indelibly into the very fabric of his being. Nothing he had done since that night blurred or dimmed the horror. He moaned in his sleep, echoing the pain deeply embedded in his body and mind.

On their way home from the campus theater and performance of the musical “Cats,” they stopped at a local 7-Eleven store. Megan wanted to pick up milk for the morning, and Justin needed to use the restroom. He had been washing his hands when he heard the yelling outside.

He ran out, and his world forever turned into a ragged, broken film reel, a surrealistic montage of jumpy, disjointed images:

Two wild-eyed meth-heads standing at the counter with guns drawn, aiming at the cashier, screaming almost incoherently for money.

He drew his off-duty gun, aiming at them, yelling for them to freeze and drop their weapons.

They were drugged out of their minds, eyes blazing, turning and firing wildly, a fuselage of bullets, one grazing his shoulder.

Justin returned fire.

One robber fell to the floor by the counter, the other firing over his shoulder as he staggered towards the door before finally collapsing.

Walking forward, gun trained on their immobile bodies, glancing down the aisles, yelling for Megan.

Saw her crumpled on the floor, a growing blossom of blood staining the front of her dress a darker red.

Yelling and screaming from far away. Coming from him.

Holding Megan in his arms, one hand frantically trying to stem the blood seeping from her chest.

Her breathing was loud and labored as her punctured lung struggled for air.

Her lips were unnaturally red from blood.

Her panicked, beseeching eyes wide in fear and pain. Looking at him. Pleading with him.

Now, blood on the floor.

Coughing, more blood on her lips.

Struggling to breathe.

Another ragged breath, gasping, choking.

Then another.

Her eyes were frantic, begging.

Her hand clutched his arm.

Finally, a rasping exhale, and then—

No more.

Her hand fell away.

Crying. Screaming. Welling up from deep within him.

When the police arrived minutes later, Justin was still on the floor, holding and rocking her, talking to her, begging her not to go. They had to pull him away.

He never stopped screaming inside.

 

The next morning he drank his coffee on the covered front porch and even managed to walk down the road to get a better view of the mountains. The autumn air was cool and crisp, the scent of pines sharp and fresh, and the silence complete, except for the occasional falling pine cones dislodged by the fluffy-tailed, furry grey and white squirrels that frequented the forest. By the time he returned to the cabin, exhaustion had claimed him, and he slept well into the afternoon.

He managed to keep down a small bowl of vegetable soup that evening before slumping onto a padded rocking chair to travel his and Megan’s memory lane again. “Well, Princess, where shall we revisit tonight? Maybe the Grand Canyon? How about the white water rafting trip on the Animas River in Colorado?”

While reminiscing, he absently turned on the little silver camera and skimmed through the four pictures. “Well, Megan, I vote for the—” He stopped mid-sentence, staring at the fourth picture on the camera. Something was different.

He scanned back, figuring he had missed it the night before—there must have been a fifth one. But no, there were only four. Justin stared at the picture. He remembered she had been in the crowd, smiling and waving at the camera. Justin was sure of it. But in the photo he was now looking at, she was apart from the crowd, no longer smiling and running towards him, towards the camera.

Maybe he was taking too much morphine. Maybe cancer had leeched into his brain. He shuddered, shut off the camera, closed his eyes and laid his head back. “I don’t think it will be long now. Please be there, Megan.”

He let his mind drift…. They were hiking down into the Grand Canyon, where they would spend the night on the floor of the Canyon in each other’s arms, looking at the stars, listening to the sounds of the Colorado River, musing on the ageless carving of the Canyon’s walls….

 

It was almost noon before he managed to get out of bed. Justin sat on the porch for a while but was too weak to make the trek down to the road. He tried a sandwich for lunch but threw it back up. He limped into the living room and looked at the photo albums, the cardboard box and the camera sitting on the table.

Finally, licking his lips with apprehension, he picked it up and turned it on. He scanned through to the fourth picture, a gasping, choking sound escaping his throat. Justin dropped the camera. Staggering, he reeled back, fell to the floor, and sat there, his breath rasping in his chest and his heart racing.

Justin crawled back, picked it up with trembling hands and looked again at the image. In the picture, Megan was no longer outside the theater—she wasn’t even on the University campus anymore—but he recognized where she was.

The pine-strewn land to the front of the cabin sloped down for about a hundred yards to the dirt road, Horseshoe Loop. Across the street was an open, grassy field that stretched approximately a half mile before the trees started again, sloping upward into the forested foothills of the mountains.

Megan was on the field’s far side in the picture, running towards the cabin. She was still wearing her red dress, although she had lost her white shawl somewhere.

He groaned, pulled himself up on the arm of the couch, and peered through the picture window towards the open field; there was a clear view from this vantage point. It was near sundown, but he could see no one in the area.

He looked back at the camera image of the running Megan. He knew he was hallucinating. “Megan, I’m sorry. I wanted to spend my last days and hours with you remembering everything. Now I can’t even seem to do that.”

He took several more morphine pills and, sobbing quietly, fell asleep on the couch.

 

Justin awakened late in the afternoon of the next day. He was too weak to get off the sofa or to eat. Justin stared at the little silver camera on the table until it was almost dark. Then he picked it up and turned it on.

He focused his eyes and stared at the small screen without emotion. Megan had made it to the road near the dirt driveway. Her hair, which she had worn pulled back and tied with a pearl clasp that last night, had come undone and was flying loose around her head. Her red dress was flowing out behind her. It appeared she was crying.

Justin didn’t bother looking out the window. He knew she wasn’t there. She had been dead for ten years and had died in his arms. He knew his mind, his sanity—what remained of it—was slipping away. Justin knew he would not make it through the night. The pain had become very bad in both body and mind.

He took several more oxy-codeine pills, rolled off the couch onto his hands and knees, crawled to the bedroom and made it onto the bed. One last time. “Please be there, Princess… please be there….”

Justin dreamed his last dreams. A kaleidoscope of memories slowly unreeled through his mind. Somewhere he imagined he heard a door shut and tried to rouse himself to consciousness but couldn’t. He slowly began to fade.

He could smell Megan’s perfume, the warmth of her body against his, the faint sensation of her breath on his neck—like the caress of a subtle breeze on the leaves of a tree. And her voice in his ear, the fading, faintest of sighs, “I’m here. I’ve been waiting for you. It’s time to come home now.”

 

“Hey, Jodi, wait up.” Where his girlfriend got all her energy, Mark had no idea. They must have trudged over a mile up Horseshoe Loop, a dirt road that led higher into the mountains. Now she was running across an open field, whooping and yelling like a young kid. Mark had to admit the reds and yellows of the turning autumn leaves were beautiful in the brilliant afternoon sunshine and crisp mountain air. Still, he would rather have been back at their cabin with Paul and Maryanne having a beer on the front porch, firing up the barbeque, and readying themselves for an evening of party time.

They rented the cabin for the weekend, a final charging of their collegiate batteries before the fall semester at the University got into full swing. He and Paul were juniors, and both Jodi and Maryanne were sophomores. It had been hard enough for them to coordinate their schedules, and now Jodi was running around the countryside like some eighteenth-century explorer. He would have much preferred being back at the cabin “spooning,” a quaint term he remembered his grandmother using, a forerunner of his parents’ “necking” terminology.

Mark picked up his pace to a slow trot in the brown, mid-shin high grass. Thirty feet ahead of him, Jodi had stopped and was looking down at something on the ground. He huffed up next to her. “What did you find this time, babe?”

“It’s beautiful,” she replied, more to herself than Mark. “It almost glows.”

The stunning white lace shawl was lying in the grass like a delicate spray of snow. A gentle breeze wafted across the field, ruffling the fabric and sending wavelike ripples through it.

Jodi knelt and picked it up cautiously as if she thought it might disintegrate in her hands. When it didn’t, she shook it slightly to dislodge several stray pieces of grass stuck to it. “I wonder what something this nice is doing out in the middle of nowhere?” she said.

“Especially since we’ve only seen a few cabins this far up Horseshoe Loop,” Mark added.

Jodi swung the shawl out and around like a wave, draping it over her shoulders. “How do I look?” she asked.

She wore an old red sweatshirt with the slogan ‘Women Who Behave Rarely Make History’ emblazoned across the front. Even so, Mark thought the elegant wrap somehow made her look even more beautiful. He shook his head. “Jodi, you could wear a burlap sack and still look gorgeous.”

Jodi took his hand, stood on her toes and kissed him. “That’s my Sir Galahad.” Hand in hand, they started back across the meadow, happy and carefree. “No more exploring. Finding this has made my day,” she said, beaming. “There’s no telling where it came from, so I’ll just call it a ‘gift from heaven.’”

 

 

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Impressum

Texte: John C. Laird
Bildmaterialien: istockphoto.com
Lektorat: Alexandra Laird
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 15.04.2012

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