The Undaunted

Easter Sunday

***
When Jenny woke the next morning, it was to find Natalia curled up in bed beside her, staring at her, obviously willing her to wake.

"You came back too!" Natalia cried and Jenny realized it was what she said every time she saw Jack, and now Jenny. As if the little girl could never quite believe that anyone would return, as if being passed by her mother to a convoy of medics, never to meet again, was trapped in her psyche like a leaf fossil in rock, barely visible to anyone who didn't know what they were looking for.

Jenny hugged Natalia tightly. "Yes, I did."

They climbed out of bed, even though it was before sun-up, and the mundane tasks of the morning were transformed, by both the marvelous lack of rain and Natalia's assistance into something more delightful than collecting water in her helmet to wash her face and eating a breakfast K-ration of egg yolk mixed with Spam.

They were walking through the tents to visit Leah when Jenny heard a familiar voice say, "I thought I'd better take you somewhere this morning before you leave so that you have your own set of pictures to show Warren Moore."

She spun around just in time to see Natalia leap into Jack's arms.

"I will come too," Natalia announced but Jenny knew that wasn't going to happen. The hospital was dangerous enough, let alone going anywhere else.

"Oh, but I have a job for you," Jenny said quickly. "Come with me."

She retrieved a stack of Vogue magazines from her tent. "There are pictures of you in here," Jenny said to Natalia, "and pictures of Leah and some of the soldiers. And one of Jack," she added. "Can you show the magazines to Leah and the men in the convalescent tent?"

Natalia hopped up and down with excitement. "Yes!" she cried.

Jenny opened up the magazines and showed Natalia the photograph of the little girl in Jack's arms. Natalia's smile was infinite now, carved onto her face in black and white by Jenny's camera, this one moment of immense love unable to ever be destroyed. Jack's face in profile was unguarded and Jenny had had to close the covers the first time she had seen it because it made her realize that he was vulnerable; that, without him, Natalia had nobody. Jenny wanted to shout at him, Don't you damn well die!

She wondered now if he'd be able to look at himself. She understood all too well, because it had been done to her, that a photograph could trap a person in an incarnation unknown to them, but seeing such an image could feel like nakedness, bringing with it the revelation that the photographer had exposed a part of them that would ordinarily be hidden from the world. Jenny hadn't comprehended just what she had caught, and it was only seeing the print that she realized it was a one-in-a-million shot, that she might never photograph anything quite as poignant again.

Jack's head jerked back as Natalia held the magazine aloft and awareness hit him. Then the nurses crowded around, and Jenny said, "Let's go," wanting to get him away from seeing what Jenny had seen: evidence of the fracture in his armor.

Jenny knew now that everything Andre had told her about photography, her entire experience of it as both her parents' child photographer and as a model before the lens was wrong. The chance moment was what mattered out here, that and the premonition before the moment happened so that one was ready. Not the careful positioning of a person or an object or a light source, not the fully imagined outcome of what would be caught after aligning the camera and pressing the button. Her job was to extemporize, not to plan, and thus expose the reality that had been obscured by the reduction of everything around them into three letters in one simple word: War.

And that's what she'd do once again on this outing with Jack. "Where we going?" she asked as they neared the jeep.

"It's Easter," Jack said as if that explained everything.