Chapter 5
Jenna
I wake up warm.
Not the warmth of a sleeping bag or a woodstove or a summer morning. The warmth of a body next to mine, separated by a quilt and six inches of charged air. I can feel him along my back. Not touching. Almost touching.
I don’t move. I don’t open my eyes. I lie in Jasper Jones’s bed and listen to him breathe. I tell myself this is a normal situation that occurred for normal, bear-related reasons. I am a professional woman who shared a bed with a colleague in a survival context. There is nothing to process here.
I am so full of it.
I open my eyes. Turn my head. He’s on his back, one arm at his side, flannel still buttoned, on top of the blanket the way he started. But he’s closer than he started. We both are.
His face in sleep is different. The scowl is gone. Without it, he looks younger and tired and honest. His jaw is still the jaw. That hasn’t changed. But the tension in it has released and what’s left is a face I want to photograph so badly my fist clenches.
I get up. Quietly. My boots are by the bed. His boots are on the floor on his side, placed precisely, the way everything in this cabin is placed precisely. I pull mine on, ease the cabin door open, and step onto the porch.
The morning is cool and clear. The storm that’s going to come later is hours away. Right now the sky is clean and the ridge is catching the early light and the air smells like pine and damp earth. I breathe in so deep my ribs ache.
Day three. The last day. The deal is almost over.
I go back inside. He’s still asleep. I take his mug from the shelf. Then I retrieve my camp stove and make coffee on the porch. I set his mug on the railing, full and steaming. Our system. The system that isn’t a system.
I make myself a cup and sit on the porch step and drink it and watch the light move across the meadow.
~~~
The morning is for shooting. I take the south trail toward the canyon overlook. The light after a clear night is crystalline, every edge sharp, every shadow defined. I shoot for two hours and get frames that would make my art director cry.
When I come back to the clearing for a lens change, there’s a plate on the porch railing. Two biscuits.
I eat standing up because I forgot to eat breakfast, which I realize only now, at ten in the morning, because I’ve been shooting since six and when I’m shooting food doesn’t exist. I eat the biscuits and I think: this is nice. He left food. That’s nice.
I go to my tent for the 70-200. My tent stakes have been reinforced.
Someone drove them deeper into the ground and added a second set of guy lines on the western side.
I didn’t do that. I would have remembered if I’d done that because I’m particular about my tent setup, four years of backcountry camping particular, and someone adjusted my rigging.
I look at the western sky. Clouds building. Still far away, still just a suggestion, but building.
He saw the weather coming. He reinforced my tent.
I go back to the porch for my water bottle.
I left it empty on the railing yesterday when we came back from the farrier.
It’s full. I stare at it. I left it empty the day before, too.
I remember setting it down, empty, and picking it up later, full, and assuming I’d filled it and forgotten.
I didn’t fill it. I never fill it. I have a habit of leaving empty water bottles on flat surfaces and forgetting they exist because I’m looking through a viewfinder and the viewfinder doesn’t include hydration.
He filled it. Yesterday. Maybe the day before that.
I look down at my boots. The boots I abandoned last night, caked with horse barn mud, when I ran from the tent. They’re clean. Not spotless. Not new. But the mud is gone.
I stand in the clearing holding a water bottle I didn’t fill, looking at boots I didn’t clean, next to a tent I didn’t reinforce, and the math hits me all at once.
He’s been taking care of me.
The whole time. Since the first night. The stew he put in front of me without asking.
The bed he gave up without discussion. The food on the porch.
The water. The tent. The boots. The bear, the rifle, the perimeter check, the way he took the outside of the bed so his body was between me and the door.
The way he appears at the edge of whatever trail I’m on when the light starts to go, not telling me to come back, just being there, visible, a fixed point.
I’m the woman who sees everything. I see compositions that other photographers miss. I see light that other people walk through without noticing. I see the grain in a table and the way a man’s hands move on a horse’s hoof and the precise angle of a jaw at sunset.
I missed this. I missed it because it was aimed at me, and nobody aims things at the woman behind the camera. I point the lens outward. I capture everyone else. I see everything in the world except what’s standing right in front of me, reaching out without making a sound.
I sit down on the porch step. I put the water bottle between my knees. I stare at the meadow and I feel something crack open in my chest that I didn’t know was sealed.
The storm builds all afternoon.
By two o’clock the clouds have stacked over the western ridge, dark and heavy at the bottom. The air has that weighted stillness that comes before mountain storms, everything holding its breath.
I’m near the east ridge. I know I’m pressing Rule 1.
I don’t care. Storm light is the best light in photography and I will fight anyone who disagrees.
The clouds are layering in formations that look painted and the light underneath them is purple and gold and the ridge is catching the last of the direct sun while the sky behind it goes dark.
The contrast is extraordinary. I drop to one knee and shoot the ridge against the storm.
The frame is so good I make a small sound, the exhale I always make before the shutter clicks.
Lightning cracks. Not distant. Close enough that the thunder is simultaneous, a crack and a boom that shakes the air. I should move. The ridge is exposed and I’m on high ground and I’m holding a metal tripod. Every piece of backcountry training I’ve ever had is screaming at me.
I take two more frames.
Then his hand is on my arm.
He’s there. On the trail. I didn’t hear him coming because of the wind and the thunder and the focus on the shot. His grip is firm. I know what it means.
I don’t argue. Not because I can’t. Because his hand is on my arm and his stride is long and certain and I am suddenly, completely tired of being the person who always walks herself back.
It’s exhausting, being your own rescue. I didn’t know how tired I was of it until someone showed up and made it unnecessary.
We get to the cabin. My camera gear is on the porch.
I stop walking. He stops because I stopped. I’m looking at my lenses, my battery packs, my tripod case. All of it. Stacked neatly on the dry porch under the roof overhang. Moved from my tent. Organized in the order I’d organize them, heaviest on the bottom, glass on top, caps on.
“You moved my gear.”
“It is going to rain.”
“You knew what to grab.”
He looks at me. The rain starts. Montana mountain rain, full commitment, a wall of water that hits the roof like applause. We’re on the porch and the world disappears behind the downpour.
“You knew what to grab,” I say again, quieter this time, because the first time was a statement and this time is something else. A question. An accusation. An admission.
“You always grab the camera bag first,” he says. “And the lenses. Then the batteries. The tripod last.”
He watched me pack. He watched me unpack. He learned the order. And when the storm came, he replicated it.
I don’t have a joke for this. I always have a joke.
I am a woman who has deflected every vulnerable moment of her adult life with a well-timed observation or a self-deprecating comment and right now I have nothing.
I’m standing on a porch in a rainstorm looking at a man who arranged my camera lenses in the correct order and I have absolutely nothing.
“Thank you,” I say. My voice does something I don’t authorize. It cracks. Barely. Just a fracture. I clear my throat. “For the gear. And the water. And the tent stakes. And my boots.”
His jaw works. Once. “You noticed.”
“I notice everything. It just took me too long to notice this.”
The rain hammers the roof. He opens the cabin door and we go inside.
The cabin in a rainstorm is a different place. Smaller. Warmer. The sound of water on the roof fills every corner and the light through the windows is gray and soft and intimate.
He goes to the workbench. The cherry chair. His hands find the wood the way they always do, automatically, the same way mine find the camera. He starts working a joint, testing the fit, adjusting with a chisel. I watch him from the kitchen.
I’ve looked at the workbench for days. I’ve seen the cherry chair. But I haven’t really looked. Not the way I look at things when I’m working.
I’m looking now.
The chair is beautiful. The joints are hand-cut, precise, fitted without glue or nails.
The wood is dark red-brown, the grain tight and figured.
Next to it on the bench is a box with dovetail corners so clean they look machined.
Against the wall there’s a shelf I hadn’t noticed with smaller pieces: a cutting board with an inlaid stripe of walnut, a set of wooden spoons on pegs, a picture frame with mitered corners.
Everything he makes is honest. That’s the word. Not decorative. Not showy. Honest. Made with the kind of attention that says: this matters. The joint matters. The grain matters. The choice matters.
The same attention he’s been aiming at me.
“Can I photograph your hands?”
He looks up from the cherry wood. Chisel in one hand.
“Not your face. Just your hands on the wood.”
He looks at his hands. He looks at me. The rain drums the roof. He doesn’t say no.
I pick up the camera. I shoot his hands on the cherry. The grain, the calluses, the way his fingers test the joint. Close, then closer. The light in the cabin is low and warm from the woodstove and the storm-filtered windows and it’s the most intimate thing I’ve ever photographed.
I step back. Lower the camera. Look at him.
“Can I take your photo?”
Same question. Same woman. The bar at The Burning Tree, three weeks ago, walking up to a stranger’s booth because his bone structure was a composition I couldn’t resist. He said no. One word. I walked away.
Everything is different now.
He doesn’t say no. He doesn’t say yes. He stands there with sawdust on his forearms and rain on the roof and his hands on the cherry chair and he looks at me. The scowl is thinner. There’s something behind it I haven’t seen before.
I take one frame. His face in the warm light. His hands on the wood. The workshop wall behind him.
I lower the camera and look at the screen.
The photo is devastating. Not because of the composition, though it’s good.
Because of what’s underneath. A man who has been hiding for years is looking directly at the lens with an expression I’ve never captured in any portrait of any person in any country.
The expression of a man who is tired of hiding and didn’t know he was tired until someone aimed a camera at him and said: I see you.
I turn the screen toward him. He leans in. Looks at it.
His face changes. I watch it happen. Something behind the scowl loosens. He’s seeing himself the way I see him. Maybe for the first time.
He looks at the photo for a long time. Then he looks at me.
“You do that sound,” he says.
“What?”
“Before you take a photo. You exhale. Small. Like you’re letting something go before you let the shutter go.” He pauses. “You did it the first morning. On the porch. I was inside and I heard it through the window.”
He heard me breathe. Through a window. On the first morning. He’s been listening to me exhale before the shutter click for days and he never said a word.
Nobody sees the woman behind the camera. Nobody has ever seen me. My friends love me and they see the photographer who forgets to eat. My family sees the career. The magazine sees the portfolio.
This man heard me breathe.
He reaches out and takes the camera from my hands. Gently. He sets it on the workbench beside the chair. Carefully, the way he handles the wood. Because he knows what the camera means to me and he’s placing it where it’s safe.
He just took the thing I hide behind and set it aside. Not taking it from me. Making room.
I let him. I let him take the camera. I, Jenna Reeves, who sleeps with one hand on the strap and grabs the bag before the boots. Who hasn’t been without a lens between herself and the world since she was nineteen. I let a man take the camera out of my hands.
He looks at me. I look at him. The rain is loud and the cabin is warm and the camera is on the workbench and there’s nothing between us.
He kisses me.
His hands are on my face. Both of them. Big, rough, calloused from the axe and the chisel and the rasp. His mouth finds mine and it’s not sweet. It’s not gentle. It’s the kiss of a man who has been fighting this since I climbed through his fence and just stopped fighting.
I kiss him back. My hands go to his chest and underneath the flannel he’s warm and solid and his heartbeat is fast. The man who controls everything has a heartbeat he can’t control and I can feel it against my palms.
He pulls me closer. His hands slide from my face to my hair, my neck, down to the curve of my waist. My back meets the workbench edge and I don’t care. His body is against mine and he’s big and warm and everywhere and I stop thinking. I stop composing. I stop seeing the world through a frame.
For the first time since I picked up a camera, I am not observing. I am inside the moment. The rain on the roof and his hands in my hair and his mouth on mine and no lens, no distance, no frame. Just this.
He pulls back. Not far. Forehead against mine. Breathing hard. His hands are still on me. Mine are still on him.
The rain eases. The light through the window shifts from gray to something warmer. The storm is passing.
“That wasn’t in the rules,” I say. Quiet.
“No,” he says. “It wasn’t.”
Neither of us moves. The rain is slowing to a murmur on the roof.
The man who said no to my camera in a bar is standing in his cabin with his forehead against mine and his hands on my waist. The scowl is gone.
What’s underneath it is something I want to photograph and also never photograph.
Because some things should exist only where they happen, in the space between two people who finally stopped hiding from each other.
I don’t reach for the camera.
I stay right here.