“No change. I’m sorry.” He motions to the camera I am clutching. “You’re a photographer.”
My camera is top of the line. Having saved for months to buy this particular model, I was thrilled when I could finally afford it. But even with the tools of a professional, I am hesitant to call myself one. My photographs in national magazines make no difference. I am still fighting for approval, though I am no longer sure whose. “I like to take pictures.” In hopes of ending the conversation, I try to stuff the camera into my bag, but it proves difficult.
“What kind of pictures do you take?”
There must be patients he needs to see. Something should be more important than wasting time talking to me. My hesitancy in answering must have revealed my thoughts because he says, “I’m giving myself a much-needed break. When you work in a hospital, talking about something other than medicine is the only option for entertainment.”
“Oh.” The camera finally squeezes into the bag. Sitting while he stands makes me feel like a child. When I rise, I realize he is taller than I thought. I still have to look up at him. “Of anything. People, things, places. Whatever wants to be taken a picture of.” When he smiles at my response, the beauty of it takes me aback. I smile back without meaning to.
“Things tell you they want to be photographed?”
It sounds silly put that way, I know. Never have I bothered to explain why I take the pictures I do. It’s possible no one has ever asked before. “There’s an energy around the piece.” I glance out the window that forms one wall. The nurses opened the shades earlier in the day. Searching for words that make sense, I motion him closer to the window. “See that tree. The one in the middle, among the larger ones?” As we stand side by side, our arms touch. “It’s the smallest one.” The Stanford hospital is set among acres of trees. “The others are blowing in the wind, but the smaller one is protected. It’s standing perfectly still, a haven for all the animals whose homes on the larger trees may be destroyed by nature’s hand.”
“But it doesn’t see itself that way,” David says.
“No,” I say, surprised he follows my thoughts. “It believes itself weak because it is smaller. Less powerful. Maybe nature doesn’t trust it to stand up against its wrath and therefore demands others protect it.”
“But your picture shows the truth.”
I nod. The picture shows what the tree itself cannot see. “Its role as a shelter makes it the most powerful tree of all.”
Suddenly, I am embarrassed, though I have no reason to be. But some sense of shame stays with me always. An article I read once said abused children always feel it was a mistake for them to have been born. I don’t think the feeling is limited only to those who have been abused. In South Africa I was contracted to do a series of pictures for a news magazine. When I started to take photographs of a man in the town square, he asked me not to. I offered him payment for the photograph, but he still refused. Curious about the reason, I asked him. He answered his skin was too dark. It would shame him to see what he looked like.
“But I was supposed to be a lawyer,” I tell David. I glance at my father, who lies interminably still.
“Really?” When the IV machine begins to beep, David pushes a few buttons to silence it. Coolness invades the space where he stood. “Just a warning that the fluid bag needs to be changed soon. The nurses will be in shortly.” He is assuring me that my father is receiving the best care possible. I wonder what he would say if I asked him not to change the bag. “Lawyer and photographer—those are two very different professions.”
“A lawyer is smarter,” I say, my father’s voice echoing in my ear.