Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar (superbooks4u .TXT) 📕

“You’re back,” a voice says. Mr. Mosley’s secretary.

“Let us know if you need anything,” someone else adds.

A bit later, she finds herself in the break room, deep in her mind. A timer sounds. Lunch. She takes her bag from inside the refrigerator and on her way out sees that the notice for the contest is still taped on the door. The roll of film under her bed. She thinks of it, the only one she didn’t develop while in Washington. The rest she developed and printed, an activity that oddly kept her mind off the very subjects she was studying, as if reducing what pained her to a rote activity, containing everything within the context of work—ultimately facing what happened in a safer way. There were, of course, a few times she lost her train of thought and simply felt. Hewar smiling at the bird, the lines in his face and his ears undid her. That glimpse of Delan’s valley, as she thinks of it, when they’d pulled over by the hawthorn tree, a moment of pure before. Lailan in the garden, doing her art, the bend of her wrist and those fine, tiny bones as she positioned a stone, scolding it when it didn’t stay in place. And the brothers at Shanidar Cave. Delan facing her but turned away. Olivia stared at the cuff of Soran’s shirt, his hand in his pocket, then hung the photo to dry and felt her way to the corner of the darkroom where she sank and stared into the reddened black.

But that one roll. That will live under her bed until one day she moves, and then it will move with her. No one needs to see those images.

She’s thinking this, feeling protective of its secret, wanting to contain it as if it were a seed that should never be planted, when she notices that Kyle Rudger—whose father is LAPD—and Trevor Miller—whose grandmother should be dead by now—are also in the room and watching her, observing her as if at any moment she could blow. Still, she can’t look away from the damn flyer, and so she doesn’t see when Peter Darrow, the photo editor, walks in.

He stops when he sees her, then notices the object of her study. “I heard you were there taking photos.”

He’s never spoken to her. Not once. Has he ever even seen her till now? Red, blonde, brunette, the women in the bullpen must be a long-haired calico blur. She looks him dead in the eye, and he must see that she’s about to cry, which upsets her more. He tilts his head, and his mouth parts with something he’s about to say, and his eyes are a kindness, a light amber like the color of just-poured tea, and with this thought, she has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep her here, in this moment, and not there, in that moment. When she speaks, she speaks the truth.

“I was. I took more photos than I ever had a right to.”

Always get the shot, Delan said. If only he knew.

CHAPTER 15

June 1, 1979

Time’s passage feels wrong. A betrayal with every trip to the grocery store, every TV show she watches, every tank of gas she puts in her car, standing by the pump as lights at the intersection change and people stop and start, stop and start. To go on. To do the little things, they’re the worst. To indulge in the mundane, in the face of what’s monumental. You move with. You move with, but you move. That’s the point. You cannot stop. She reminds herself of this during the day, but at night it’s different. A full devastation. The emptiness beside her a depression she can’t help find herself in. A comfort, really, to swim inside this hurt.

Driving to work, she’s got an envelope with Peter Darrow’s name on one side and a number that corresponds to her on the back of the three photographs within. Photographs he will surely identify as hers, given the location and that he knows where she went. As she parks her car, she tells herself that what she’s doing is okay, that she should still submit to the contest because the photos are good, and what happened does not take away from that fact, but by the time she’s at her desk, she’s found her apprehension again and leans the envelope against her dictionary, forgetting about it until a voice serves as the reminder.

“These them?”

Peter Darrow stands before her, on a pacing mission with his hockey stick. There is a coffee stain in the shape of Africa on his striped shirt, and it takes a moment for Olivia to look away, to realize he must have spotted his name on the envelope. Behind him, a few faces have turned, curious.

She shrugs, and the gesture makes her think of Delan. “What I can handle looking at.”

“You haven’t seen everything?”

“One roll, I haven’t.”

“You know, then—that’s the one you should be looking at.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t. But it doesn’t matter. The winning photo isn’t there.”

He picks up the envelope. “It’s here?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe that doesn’t matter either.”

He looks out at the bullpen, over to Mr. Hensley’s office. Behind his glass wall, Olivia’s boss watches them, craning his head to see what Peter Darrow has in his hand.

“You know it matters,” Peter says. “I know you do. And at some point, we need to talk. Because whether you can do it or not is one thing, but what you saw when you took the shot is a whole other beast.”

When he leaves, he takes the envelope with him, and it feels as if she’s given away something like a baby tooth or a lock of hair, something whose value only she could understand.

And then she is wearing her sneakers, dusty from the hike into the mountains, and the day beats beautiful around her. Birds sing as if