“Now your turn,” Gregory said, his voice low, as if to leave the peace undisturbed. “Tell me about you. Have you figured out yet why you’re here at Halcyon?”
“Not really. Maybe my epiphany is still coming.”
“Okay. Well, tell me about your photography then, what you do with it at home.”
She shook her head. “I don’t do much with it at home. I don’t have time.”
“Sure you do.”
“What? How do you know?”
“We make time for things that are important.”
“But isn’t that what this place is about? Time to connect to our art—time and space that’s not in our regular lives? It’s all I’ve heard about since I got here.”
“Sure, sure, that’s what we say.” He reached down and flicked water into a school of minnows. “And it’s true to an extent. But I stand by the idea that if something is important enough, you’ll squeeze it in. In the margins. Here, the margins are stretched, but when you get back home, everything goes back to normal. The passion, the drive has to be there. You get it?”
She nodded. He didn’t know anything about her life. Of course a man would think it was as easy as just picking up the camera. But it was never that simple.
Then he reached over and lifted her camera from around her neck. She grabbed on to the strap. “What are you doing?”
“May I?”
She let go and averted her eyes. She didn’t want to see his expression as he scrolled through the images she’d captured over the last handful of days.
After a moment, with her eyes still on the water, she sensed rather than saw him shake his head. “These are crap,” he murmured.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re taking shots you think you need to take.” He scrolled through her images. “Sun shining on the water, palm branches, a pretty little mound of wildflowers. This is amateur. I’m just guessing here, but I’d say there’s more to you than this.”
“And what makes you say that?” She forgot about trying to be careful. “You haven’t been around long enough to find out anything about me. I’ve been floundering, trying to figure out what I’m doing here. I thought I was supposed to have a mentor to offer some guidance.”
“Having a mentor, especially one like me, isn’t going to help you find your muse, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
She stood and took her camera back.
“Go ahead. Get mad. Use it. Put it in here.” He reached up and tapped her camera.
She turned and crossed back over the rocks the way they’d come, trying not to slip and embarrass herself as she made her exit.
“You’re gonna need thicker skin to work with me.”
She stopped and spun around, almost losing her footing in the process. She reached out and grabbed a low-hanging limb for balance. “If you remember, I didn’t ask to work with you. And since it sounds like you aren’t that excited to be working with me, why are you here? Why didn’t you just go the other way when you saw me back there on the bridge?”
“A couple reasons. One, I’m the photography mentor at Halcyon. Seeing as you’re the only other photographer here, you are my job. Two, Max asked me to watch out for you.”
“He did what? When?”
“He called me up and told me a friend of his was coming and asked me to . . . well, just to make sure you were okay.”
Unable to wrap her head around Max and Gregory working together to keep tabs on her, Jenna just stared.
“Don’t be mad at him. I could tell he cares a lot about you. I told him I’d keep my eye on you.”
“That’s just perfect.” Still holding the limb, she stepped carefully down the rocks to the firm ground.
“You have to find your creative eye on your own,” he called. She resisted the urge to turn and toss another barb his way. “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s there already and you just need to uncover it. That’s why you’re here, right?”
seventeen
Jenna
On Monday of the second week at Halcyon, Jenna squatted low among broken, stripped pine trees and thin saplings struggling to push themselves through the thick underbrush of The Bottoms. She’d heard of the place that morning at breakfast. Another artist had mentioned it, an area of the retreat where, a couple of years before, a tornado had ripped through during a summer storm.
“Everything else around here is so lush and alive,” Mark, a painter sitting at her table, had said. “I don’t know why they don’t just clean it up. Or clear-cut it to get rid of the broken tree trunks and let everything start over.”
“They can’t do that,” a woman said. “It’s a nature preserve. They have to let Mother Nature do her thing.”
Over the woman’s left shoulder, Jenna saw Gregory filling his coffee mug a few paces away. His back was to them, but Jenna sensed he was listening. Or maybe he was just taking way too long to fill up that mug.
“Yeah, well, nature hasn’t done its thing yet. It’s a wasteland.”
Jenna rose and picked up her tray. Gregory said her images were amateur. Too pretty. A wasteland should be perfect.
Outside, she’d almost made it to the start of the path when he called to her. She turned slowly, unsure of what to say—or what he’d say—after how they parted at the waterfall a few days before.
“Do me a favor,” he said in place of a greeting. He set his coffee down and pulled a camera from his bag. “Play around with this today.”
She gasped. “Is that a Rollei?”
He nodded.
She took the camera from him, her fingers finding the familiar crevices and notches. A photographer out in Wyoming had let her use his Rollei and she’d fallen a little bit in love. “Why are you giving me this?”
“Just trying something different.” He shrugged. “Have fun with it. See what you think.”
She tried to hand it back
