“It’s my storyboard. My map of the day.”
He smiles again. It’s the first thing I remember about him, how he smiled and told me it was going to be all right when he had no way of knowing if that was true. But there was something about him that made me want to believe him, and so I did.
“It’s what I do for every film,” he says. “It’s a way to set out the narrative.”
“But it’s a documentary.”
“It still has to tell a story. Have a beginning, middle, and end. A protagonist and an antagonist.” His hand shifts from one column to the next, tapping the cards so they pop. “A hero.”
His hand comes to land on the card he just wrote on.
“I’m not the hero, Teo.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
A year ago, Teo had been scouting locations with his assistant for a commercial he’d agreed to shoot to pay his bills. He was photographing some of the homeless who hang out at Quincy Station when the world turned sideways. He was another person who stood still that day, photographing Chicago as it changed irrevocably, taking a more careful catalog than the crowds who captured what they could on their cell phones. When the fire started to spread up Adams Street, he knew they had to get out of there. But first he decided to take one last shot.
He caught me in a whirlwind of debris with the river glinting in the background. When I look at it now, the image seems staged, like a scene in a movie where the heroine’s been through hell and is waiting for her final showdown with a bad man who’s almost impossible to kill. My clothes are covered in grime, but my face is unmarred, and I’m staring fixedly at the building. If you look closely enough, the fireball it’s become is reflected in my eyes.
He got his shots—click, click, click—and then he grabbed my hand and pulled me to safety.
While we waited in Washington Station like Londoners during the Blitz, Teo uploaded that picture to a website freelance photographers use to sell their photos. It became the shot of the day, the image everyone associated with October tenth, and for the next month, two, three, wherever I went, my own face stared back at me.
Somehow, I’d become the poster child for a tragedy that killed 513 people and injured more than 2,000, including Teo’s assistant, who ended up with second-degree burns on his arms and torso.
I didn’t want the recognition, the notoriety, the fame. When Teo asked for my permission to upload the picture as we waited for the all clear in the station, I didn’t think of the consequences; I just said yes to the man who’d saved my life. By the time I thought to revoke my consent, it was too late. So instead, I’ve tried to pass it off, to play it down, to let it pass me by.
But I’ve learned that you don’t get to choose what becomes an enduring image, even when you’re the subject of it.
A couple of months ago, Teo was hired by the Initiative to make a documentary about what’s become known as Triple Ten, because the explosion occurred at precisely ten a.m. on October tenth. His approach, he told me in the series of e-mails he used to persuade me to participate in his film, is to follow three families a year later.
My family—the Graysons—is the “lucky” family. Though my husband, Tom, was killed instantly in the blast (one hopes, and one will never tell our children otherwise), we were able to recover his body; bury him; and, ostensibly, through the generous support of the Initiative, move on. One of the “unlucky” families—the Rings, who are fighting for their compensation—is the flip side of the coin. And then there’s Franny Maycombe.
But more about her later.
“I’m not sure I want to do this,” I tell Teo as his hand rests on the index card that’s supposed to represent me. His nails are short but neat, in contrast to my own, chewed down by my worry.
“Why not?”
“Isn’t it someone else’s turn in the spotlight? We aren’t the only family who’s been compensated. Why not use one of the others?”
I turn from him and catch my reflection in the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows. I’m wearing black slacks and a simple gray sweater. My blonde hair’s two months past a cut, but I’ve been told to leave it as is till we finish filming, “For continuity,” Teo’s production assistant told me. As if a couple of inches of hair could make me unrecognizable from the woman in that photograph. If only.
“I understand how you feel,” Teo says. “But we need you in this film.”
I inch over to the glass, getting as close as I can to see if panic sets in. Another side effect: ever since I missed that meeting, whenever I’m at any height above a few feet, I feel as if I’m standing on a cliff and there’s a hand on my shoulder waiting for an opportune moment to shove me off. And sometimes, even, as if I might jump.
“Why, exactly? And don’t say because I’m the face of this tragedy. Please.”
I touch the pane. It’s cold today, and the glass burns my fingers. I pull my hand away. My fingers have marred its clear surface, which now holds a perfect print of my index and middle finger. If I jumped, floating down like the lazy flakes that have started to fall from the dark clouds gathering above, they’d have something to identify me by.
Teo moves behind me.
“Because you’re the heart of this story, Lily. I can’t imagine telling it without you.”
Lily. It’s what Tom used to call me. Had I told Teo that, or did I just look like a Lily to him? A placid flower floating in a pond, providing a counterpoint to the bullfrogs?
“I’m not the heart of anything,” I say. My voice is wavering, unconvincing.
I need to work on that, too, my therapist says. I shouldn’t live with so much uncertainty, or project it, either.
“I wish you could see what I see,” Teo says, resting his hand on my shoulder.
I lean against it, letting him hold my weight for a moment.
“Ahem.”
His hand’s gone so suddenly I almost fall.
“Yes, Maggie?”
Maggie is Teo’s production assistant. Twenty-five, slender, and dressed in an outfit my fifteen-year-old daughter, Cassie, would beg me for if she saw it, she looks at Teo territorially, even though, at forty-two, he’s technically old enough to be her father. I wonder, not for the first time, whether something’s going on between them or if he’s just the object of her fantasies.
“Franny Maycombe’s arrived,” she says.
I guess we’re getting to Franny faster than I’d planned.
I catch Teo’s eye and shake my head.
“Can you ask her to wait?” he says. “We’re not quite done here.”
“Of course,” Maggie says. “I’ll let her know.”
“I thought you were close with Franny?” Teo says when Maggie’s out of earshot. “What’s up?”
“I’m just tired. It’s a lot right now with the memorial and everything, and Franny . . .”
“Can be needy?”
“Yes, frankly. Not that I blame her.”
I turn back to the window. Teo lets me take a minute. A beat.
“Are you still okay to do your first interview tomorrow? After the memorial?”
“I suppose you’ll be filming all that, too?”
“I will.”
My eyes meet his in the glass. What does he see when he looks at me? I don’t feel like the woman on the cover of all those magazines. What’s that song? “Pretty on the Inside.” I used to feel that way. Now . . .
“And after,” I say. “You’ll come to the house?”
“Yes.”
I guess there’s nothing left to do but face it.
I nod my agreement. “Is there a back way out of here?”
Chapter 2
A Farther Shore
Kate