The road finally straightened when we came off the mountain. I looked at Ben and his eyes were barely open, his lashes flickering, and I suddenly knew certain as anything in my life that if he did close his eyes he’d never open them again. “Don’t close your eyes, Ben,” I said, and his eyes looked back at me but unfocused, like I’d just woken him up. I kept telling him to keep his eyes open even as the hospital orderlies lifted him and me out of the cab and they took him toward one room and me to another, Daddy going with Ben and leaving me alone until Momma got there. The doctor had my arm and leg bandaged by then and Momma thanked him and took me not home but to the waiting room. “I’ve got to see how Ben is doing,” she told me.

“I want to go too,” I said, but Momma just shook her head. Grown-ups I did not know sat in the chairs that lined the walls, dressed as though in a church, and as quiet. Not one of them looked like they wanted to be there. The woman across from me stared at the bandages on my arm. She whispered something to the man next to her and he stared at the bandages as well. They did not smile at me or look sad or sympathetic. They just stared. To be left in this room is part of your punishment, I said to myself.

I rode back with Daddy because Momma was staying with Ben. Once home I walked alone out to the far pasture, my arm gauzed, no blazing pain now, just a low simmer. I looked at the mountains and felt at ten what I would find a word for only years later—claustrophobic. Because it felt as though the mountains had moved closer together since we’d been at the hospital, and would keep on moving closer until they finally suffocated me.

CHAPTER 6

Under a darkroom safelight everything is gray. Your hands are drained of life. Stop bath settles in your nostrils and stomach like formaldehyde. Maybe that’s the way it should be, because what a photograph does is embalm something or someone into a boxed and stilled forever.

A darkroom is a place where your failures come to light: a wrong combination of f-stop and shutter speed, a misjudgment of depth of field or right exposure. Or you make new errors. You don’t check the temperature of the chemicals; something spills; you turn the white light on too soon.

But sometimes, everything happens just as it should. You rinse the print in the darkroom’s gray light, and there in your hands is the photograph you hoped for.