10. Ten
Ten
Ledger, North Carolina is a tourist town. Which, to anyone from here, is laughable. There’s nothing—a Main Street with a dozen or so businesses surrounded by quiet neighborhoods that lead to even quieter farms. But it’s the lake that brings them in. Lake Ledger rests like a 765-acre jewel in the middle of the thick forests of the hills that lead to the steeper slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains. To the people from Charlotte and even Atlanta, it’s a getaway. A quiet place to unplug.
While most of the shoreline sits down at water level with a gentle slope, there’s a long section that’s bordered by a slick granite rock face that drops right to the water. At the top, a rock ledge. As if ordained by geographic destiny, the people that settled on the ledge, however many years ago, declared the town Ledger.
When I packed up my gear this morning, I convinced myself that I would wander the familiar landscape and feel inspired. Now, looking at the lake—pristine as it is—nothing.
Climbing the trail along a smooth rock face to a cliff that overlooks the lake, my gear shifts on my back, thighs screaming as I climb. And my lungs? They’re one wheezy breath away from collapsing. This once familiar trail is where I have come to die.
Despite the spring breeze licking my skin, my shirt and backpack cling to me with sweat.
Finally, the summit, and I nearly collapse with relief.
I’m hungry, so I eat a granola bar—fine, I eat two granola bars—then make work of setting up my tripod and organizing my lenses.
Through the viewfinder, I see the familiar lake—the same but different. Boathouses on the water sheltering pontoon boats, skiffs, and a couple of Jet Skis. Kayaks are haphazardly scattered on beaches and one man is swimming, Olympian-esque with a swim cap and eager strokes that cut through the water. I pan my camera around to the trees hugging the shoreline. There’s a deer. Three birds.
It’s quiet.
My heart beats, soft and steady in the cage of my ribs.
I click the shutter.
Once.
Twice.
Framing the lake with the trees, the mountains claim the entirety of the skyline.
One shot with more lake than sky, the next with more sky than lake.
While my heart wasn’t in landscape photography when I first made the switch, I fell in love with it when I figured out a sort of formula of composition and light. As a niche, it’s reliable, patient, and, with the right light, predictable. The subject is completely compliant, standing still, and all the photographer has to do is look, frame, and click. Learn the rules and apply.
A high-pitched squeal cuts through the air, dragging my gaze to a sandy beach. A mom and two young kids sit on the shore, one of them screaming as he smacks his hands against the water.
The mom says something, her voice a muffled echo that I can’t decipher from my distance. I pan my camera to them, a wide-angle lens making them small in the scheme of the bigness of the lake. Sticks in the water.
I take one shot of them, clean and in focus. And, while I know it won’t be a keeper to anyone else, I take another and make it weird. Blurred with a sun flare. When the shutter clicks, there’s an unnamable feeling in my belly.
I eye the beach. The perspective from there would offer a great shot of the rest of the lake and the floating dock in the middle.
I reload my gear into my bag, tripod strapped across the top, and hitch it onto my back.
The air, thick with fragrant pines and celery-green leaves exploding on the trees, is pure. I breathe just to smell it. There’s a sharpness to it, something as familiar as it is new. Two hikers approach, I turn to let them pass, and it strikes me I haven’t been out here in years. Camp and I used to always hike together, but that’s been . . . years. Before the boys were born.
Why did we stop?
Baseball games. Kids. Sleep deprivation. Life.
Other than shuffling the kids around, talking to Scotty’s bodies, and meetings for whatever school events are going on, I haven’t been out of the house like this in years.
Approaching the bottom of the trail, stepping onto the sandy spot of the beach, I see that’s how it happens. We always do something until we don’t. We are who we are until we change. Life erodes us like the waters that formed this lake until we are a completely different shape. One day we hike together, the next we’re strangers.
The two kids—babies really—are splashing at the edge of the water wearing T-shirts and soggy diapers. I wonder how many more times this will happen. How many more visits their mom will bring them here.
Down the sandy beach from them, I set up my tripod, screw my camera into the fitting on the top, adjust my settings, and frame the view. From here, with the angle of the sun, the water shows two scenes: one real, one reflective. Hills of trees pointing in both directions. One skyward, one to the depths of the lake. Lake Ledger is a mirror of itself.
I take a shot, tack sharp and perfect. And another.
I switch my lens, take one more.
Face behind the camera, something hits my leg. I look down— mud? Mud.
One of the babies, just over a year, has discovered me and has his mud-covered fingers wrapped around my jeans. With a mop of blond curls, gigantic blue eyes, and now only wearing a water-swollen diaper and amber beads around his neck, he’s adorable. “Hey, little guy,” I say in a soft voice. I smile, and he returns it, gummy and drooly.
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry!” The mom rushes over, hooks a hand around his wrist. “Henry, no!” she says, apologetic look in her eyes. “I didn’t see him come over here. He loves strangers.” She groans when her gaze drops. “Your jeans!”
I laugh softly and wave it off. “Don’t worry about it.”
She’s younger than me, maybe thirty, but she’s familiar. Not in that I know her, but that I’ve been her—maybe still am. When she smiles, it’s tired, and the way I understand is visceral. Exhaustion, overwhelm, and loneliness all wrapped into one simple expression. I take in her leggings and oversized shirt and almost laugh. How I must look to everyone around me.
Unfashion, indeed.
I kneel and scoop up some of the mud around us, holding it out to Henry. “I have a few at home. I get it. They can be . . . unpredictable.”
She laughs, relieved, and Henry pokes a finger into the watery sand in my hands.
“Cherish it before it’s gone, right?” she says ironically with a shake of her head, adjusting the baby on her hip.
The cliché rips a roaring laugh straight from my chest. “If I had a dollar for every time someone said that to me in a grocery store as my boys were bringing down an entire shelf of food, I’d be rich!”
Next to me, she laughs, only when I stop, she doesn’t. Her laugh turns to a shoulder-shaking sob. Tears fall down her face as an unkempt braid hangs sadly over one shoulder.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, swatting at her cheeks. “I don’t know why I’m crying.”
I stay quiet, simply letting her tears fall as I crouch next to her son, mud in my hands. She might not know why she’s crying, but even without knowing her, I most definitely do.
“My husband is military. Deployed.” She sniffs, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “And just, some days you know . . .” Another sniff. Another sob. “Some days are awful.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, I just mean—”
“That some days having your face screamed in after three hours of sleep doesn’t feel all warm and fuzzy?” I fill in for her, knowing smile pulling at my lips.
She laughs, relieved, wiping her face again. “Yeah, something like that.” Another sniff, then she studies the calm lake. “Does it get easier?”
“I wish I could say yes.” Her expression crashes, like this is the worst news of her day. “But it gets different,” I add. “The diapers go away. There’s more sleep. But my boys are four . . . there’s still a lot of mud.” She smiles weakly at my words. “And my teenager”—my eyes widen—“that’s a whole different ballgame.”
Finally, she laughs—a true one—then looks at my camera.
“You a photographer?”
I make an acknowledging sound as I wipe my muddy hands on my jeans and stand. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
She nods, as if she understands what I’m saying even though it makes absolutely no sense.
“Anyway, sorry again. We have to get going. Thanks for . . . thanks.”
I smile. “No problem.”
She shuffles away, fumbling with diaper bags and babies, then disappears down the short trail that leads to the parking lot. It’s not until the sound of her voice and car doors opening and closing fade that I turn back to my camera and the lake.
Alone again, I take a few more shots before pointing my camera toward the ground, taking a close-up of the shore. The blurry line where water meets land. The spot babies sit and toes tingle.
I sit, prying my shoes off, letting the water lap against my feet. The air is cool; the water is cold.
By summer, this small beach will be packed, and the lake will be covered in people, but now, it’s just me, the birds, and a slight breeze.
My parents used to bring my brothers and me here. We’d rent a boat a couple times a year and spend entire Saturdays under the sun. In high school, my friends and I overtook this beach. Scotty and I in string bikinis and covered in tanning oil with boy bands playing on the stereo. And Camp and me . . . Camp and me. In canoes. On Jet Skis. In the bar that overlooks the water sharing French fries. I look across the shore, and when my eyes land on a small opening in the trees where we used to go camping, my chest hurts.
Like everything else in Ledger, this place holds a million stories, most of them tied to Camp.
The pinecone-sized lump in my throat is accompanied with a burn that pricks my eyes. Even alone with the expanse of the lake, in an instant, I’m trapped. Drowning above ground.
Clothes suddenly tight as skin, I jerk to a stand.
I can’t breathe.
I tug at the neck of my shirt.
My heart pounds.
Every breath feels like it’s through a cocktail straw.
I can’t do this.
I can’t sit here.
I just . . . can’t.
I claw my jeans off.
Run into the water.
And despite the frigid pain, I dive under.
Underwater, ice-cold shock seizes my entire body for a split second wrapping me in painful aliveness.
At the surface, I gasp for air as I tread water.
And then, in the middle of a Sunday in April in a T-shirt and underwear, I swim, blue shirt swirling around me as my strokes cut through the water until I flip to float on my back.
Alone and freezing, a laugh bubbles out of me, echoing off the water like every mother’s anthem.
It doesn’t stop, the laugh, I can’t stop, and it hurts. Burns. Because I’m not laughing. Like the woman that was just with me moments ago, the sound I make is pained. Face to sky, for the first time since I told Camp we were over, I let myself cry.
Tears for me, my marriage, and the life I thought I’d have fall into the water that surrounds me. The water that watched me grow up and fall in love is now the place I fall apart.
The wet shirt clings to my chest, dripping, as I load my gear into the back seat and move in some kind of post-cathartic cryfest haze. Someone could tell me I cried for twelve seconds or twelve hours and I’d believe them both.
“June?”
I turn. Confusion morphing to a muddled sort of embarrassed disbelief.
“Reed?” My gaze darts around. “What are you doing here?”
He holds up a camera bag as his eyes drop to my chest—my very cold, very wet, very cold —chest. My nipples, now some kind of weapons of mass destruction, point directly at his amused face. “Shooting.” A smirk pulls at one side of his lips. “You?”
“Same,” I croak, pulling my shirt from my chest with a loud shleck . To my dismay, it does nothing to hide my situation—to dull the headlights. With the grace of a forty-year-old, soaking-wet woman, I cross my arms over my chest, pretending it’s fine. I’m fine. “And swimming. I was shooting”—I nod toward my gear—“and then had some kind of . . . swimming urge.”
A breeze blows and freezes me to the bone while sending a fresh shot of heat up my neck. I don’t dare move my arms for fear of a nipple poking out someone’s eye. Reed’s eye. Not that his eye and my nipples have anything to do with anything.
He leans against the minivan, dark hair tousled from his helmet. “Get any good shots?”
I clear my throat. “You know film, it doesn’t tell you right away. But there’s a good lab here in town, surprisingly. Even in this modern age of digital, Ledger still has a film lab. Probably is fitting. Slow, sleepy town and all. Maybe everyone uses film now that I think of it. But that will be a couple days, I guess and—”
“June.” He laughs my name out, runs a hand through his hair and takes a step closer to me, bringing a wave of cloves and soap with him. Blue eyes, playful and sincere, latch onto mine. “Relax. It’s just me.”
“Sorry . . .” I say on an exhale. “I’m wet.”
His eyebrows raise.
A laugh puffs out of me despite my skin melting off my bones. I tighten my grip around myself. “No. Right.” I want to die . “I didn’t expect to see anyone here is all. More shocking than the minivan I drive is that I now swim fully clothed. Ta-da! Adulthood!” I laugh at my expense; he shakes his head with a chuckle.
Please, God, let Reed Simmons be a serial killer and murder me right now.
Silence follows, two seconds or years; time is hard to measure in moments of self-destruction.
“Well.” His tongue darts out and swipes his bottom lip before he taps his knuckles on the hood of the van and tilts his head. “Can’t wait to see what you shot.”
“Right.”
With a smirk and a wink, he hoists his camera bag onto his shoulder, and he’s gone. Leaving me cold and wet.