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Jake knew his dad loved him, but, until the divorce, he never spent the kind of time with them that he now did. Even now when he took them out, he sometimes wasn’t really
with
them.

Jake knew that his dad was fun and creative and cool. His photographs took Jake’s breath away. And the stuff on the television with that Johansen guy… . Jake always knew his dad was a hero but now all his friends knew it, too.

But when his dad picked up a camera, Jake could suddenly feel unimportant, not even there.

So Jake knew that Mom and Kurt might actually be right. Kurt talked a lot about moving to a new home and starting from the beginning. Jake could tell that Kurt wanted to be his father.

But Jake also knew that yesterday, his
real
dad had looked even more tired and beaten than when he had first moved out of the house.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” Jake said.

“No it’s
not
.” Lainnie burst into tears.

When Jake went to put his arms around her, he surprised himself as much as her by joining right in.

CHAPTER 6

PETER ARRIVED JUST AS BEN WAS FINISHING LOADING HIS JEEP. “What’s this?”

“This is good-bye for a few days. Maybe a week.”

Peter gestured toward Ben’s face. “Barely recognized you.”

Ben rubbed his bare chin. He’d shaved his beard off last night. “I’m in sort of a change mode these days. Besides, my face was getting a little too familiar with all this television coverage.”

Peter looked in at the camping gear, the tent, the cooler. “You’ve got a shoot?”

Ben shook his head. “Going up to our place in Maine.”
 

“Going to have to stop calling it ‘ours.’ It’s yours alone, isn’t it?”
 

Ben nodded. His father had left it to him. Not much more than a big rambling shack, but it was on a spectacular lake about two hours north of Portland. In his heart, it was home. Andi hadn’t tried to gain any possession of it during the divorce and he had given her a lifelong promise to let her use it. Now he supposed that meant Kurt would be resting up in the Harris family cabin.
 

Suggesting improvements, no doubt.
 

Ben said, “Do you know about Kurt and Andi?”
 

“Yeah, he called me this morning. Romantic bastard, keeping up with his workload on his wedding day. The way I read it, he jumped so fast when Andi said yes that he forgot he’s got an issue to get out this week. He said you might be in the market for some work yourself right now, join me on a little surveillance.”

Ben slung his duffel bag into the Jeep. “I told him last night when I dropped the kids off that I’d be taking a week. Who the hell does he think he is?”

Peter looked at Ben like he was an idiot. “He’s your
editor.
Besides, what makes you think you’re so special? With three out of five marriages ending in divorce, and a lot of them remarrying with kids in between, plenty of guys are locked in with some bastard.”

Ben closed the tailgate. “Well, I’m going to try to forget that for a few days.”

“You’re going to leave me to chase these nuts by myself?”

“God knows there are enough hungry kids out there who would be thrilled to work with the famous Peter Gallagher.”

Ben started to get into the Jeep when Peter grabbed his arm. “None of them are my old drinking buddies. Look, the
work
is what keeps you going. And the work you and I’ve done together is the best of our careers, and you know it. You going to let this new situation ruin
everything?”

“I’m coming back. Just need some time away.”

Peter shook his head. “These stories won’t wait.”

Ben laughed. “Nothing I hate more than a goddamn pushy reporter. Listen, ask Kurt for another photographer. He’ll assign one.”

Peter shook his head. “You know I wouldn’t trust anyone else this early in the story. Give me a camera, I’ll do it myself.”

“You’d put your thumb in front of the lens.”

“C’mon,” Peter said. “Stay and shoot. Keep your mind on your work, the rest of this shit will fade away.”

Ben just looked at Peter, who kept his face sincere for a couple of beats before giving up and smiling sheepishly. “Hell, that’s what I tell myself, anyhow. Sometimes I’ll go a whole hour or two without thinking about Sarah or Cindy.”

Ben smiled slowly and got out of the truck. “Come here.” He opened the tailgate and pulled out a camera bag. He mounted a four-hundred millimeter lens onto an autofocus camera body, switched on the camera, and made sure it was set to the simplest programmed exposure mode. “This is where you turn it on. You press this button, and the lens will focus. You press it a little harder and it’ll take the picture. There are thirty-six shots of fast film in there and there’s plenty more in the bag. You know where I keep the key to the van.” He pointed to his old Ford, painted a nondescript gray. “That’ll give you room to shoot, a tripod, and a little urban camouflage. But stick to the horny senator, if you think you’ve got to do that story. Don’t go after that gangland boy on your own. Some of them are pretty camera shy.”

Ben switched the camera off and put it back into the bag. He draped the strap over Peter’s shoulder.

“I think you’re missing the point,” Peter said.

“So are you. Whether or not I quit
Insider,
and how I’ll learn to live with Kurt playing daddy to my kids are things that I need to think about long and hard—and on my own. I’d also like to do it without spying on someone through that hunk of metal, plastic, and glass. All right?”

Peter smiled ruefully. “Just took me so long to break you in, I don’t want to have to start from scratch with some Jimmy Olson.”

Ben shook Peter’s hand. “I appreciate the concern.”

He got in the Jeep and turned it around. Peter was bowed under the heavy weight of the bag. Ben rolled down the window. “All that said, don’t leave that camera out in the rain. I’ll need it when I get back.”

“It’ll all be here,” Peter said. “Safe and sound.”

Ben almost turned around several times on the five-hour drive north. It was one thing to pack and take off with the intention of being alone with your thoughts. It was quite another to actually be alone with them.

He stopped to pick up groceries and continued on to reach the lake just as the sun was falling behind the mountains. It was a marvelous sunset, the sky and water turning first scarlet, and then deep gold. A part of him ached for a camera to record it; a part of him felt relief that he had nothing to do but observe it.

He carried his supplies into the cabin quickly, feeling a bittersweet nostalgia for the place. The vacation excitement as a kid. Coming in and seeing his grandparents waiting. Swimming with his mother and father. His mother had thick black hair that would float against Ben’s arm when his dad towed them side by side on their backs.

“Harris family train,” his dad would say, his hand cupped under their chins.

Then as an adult, there were so many good memories embedded in the place with him and Andi. Even when they lived in San Francisco, they made it back to the cabin for vacations most years. Visit the old man, give the kids a sense of home. The kids on the braided rug in their bathing suits as Ben’s father told them one of his hunting stories.

“Will you take us sometime?” Jake would ask. “I’d use my dad’s gun.”

“That old thing?” Ben’s dad would jerk his thumb at the shotgun hanging over the mantelpiece. “It’d blow us all up.”

Ben’s father and grandfather had built the cabin themselves in the early fifties, several years before Ben was born. The image of his dad as a young veteran back from Europe felling trees alongside his own father had been alive in Ben ever since he was first old enough to hear the story.

The cabin was simple: a living area with the kitchen off to one side. Fireplace, to the left. Two small rooms in the back: one with a double bed, the other, bunks.

In the past few years, Ben felt the only thing he had managed to accomplish himself with the property was to keep up with the taxes and do minor repairs. Though his father had been dead for almost three years, and his grandfather twelve, Ben always felt as if the two of them were with him in the cabin.

And although neither had been judgmental men, now he felt ashamed in their presence.

Divorced man. Lost his children.

Ben’s mother was killed by a drunk behind the wheel of a logging truck when Ben was eleven. She was just a few weeks past her thirtieth birthday. As an adult, Ben could look back and see that his dad must have gone through what was a clinical depression. He lost his asphalt paving business by failing to show up at jobs. For days at a time, he didn’t leave the house. He just sat in front of the television. Face stubbled, gaunt. Smoking cigarette after cigarette.

Finally, Grandfather Harris came by late one night and said, “C’mon, deer season opens tomorrow. Dog’s in the truck.”

“No,” Ben’s dad said.

“I didn’t ask you. Just move your butt. You, too, Ben.”

Ben’s dad had been only an occasional hunter before his wife’s death. However, on that trip, Ben could still remember the color beginning to come back into his dad’s face. A sense of purpose, if not happiness, as he made his way through the woods with Grandfather Harris’s old Remington shotgun broken over his arm, loaded with deer slugs. They found nothing that day, nor the next two. But on their last morning out, he led Ben and Grandfather Harris into the woods and shot a buck.

Although Ben was sickened by the blood and the deer’s lolling head, the grim satisfaction on his father’s face was better than the crushing hopelessness he had been seeing.

Ben asked his father to teach him to hunt like that.

“If you want,” his dad said. “What else have we got to do?”

For the next two years, Ben hunted with his father and grandfather after whatever was in season. Duck, deer, coons, even bear. Ben’s father built up an impressive array of racks and mounted trophies, including the head of a four-hundred-fifty-pound black bear.

He also got a job at the Bath Iron Works, and forced himself through the motions of taking care of Ben. At night, Ben’s dad still spent hours in front of the television, smoking cigarettes. Not talking.

Ben learned to track, he learned how to control the dogs, he learned how to keep upwind of the animal he was stalking. He learned patience. The old Remington became his, and his father told him if he bagged a deer by his thirteenth birthday, he would give him a rifle.

But it wasn’t until a few weeks before that birthday that Ben fully realized how completely he had conned himself for the sake of his father. They were waiting in a stand the first week of deer season. It was a crisp, cold day with the sun just beginning to lower. A buck emerged from a thicket to drink from the stream. The deer picked its way along a carpet of red maple leaves, sniffing the wind cautiously, before splaying its legs wide to put its muzzle into the water.

Ben’s dad gestured for him to make the shot. Ben braced himself carefully, took aim … and realized that he had no desire to kill that deer.

To pull the trigger, yes.

To capture it, yes.

To somehow
own
what he was seeing before him, the liquid brown eyes, the arch of the deer’s powerful neck.

But to kill it, no.

And he didn’t want his dad to do it either.

Ben pointed the barrel off to the left and pulled the trigger. The deer wheeled away and was gone.

Anger flashed in his dad’s eyes. “What the hell happened?”

Ben slid down from the stand and walked back to the cabin alone.

Three weeks later, Ben caught what he believed was the same deer on film. It was a wet, raw November morning. His dad was in another stand about a mile away, unwilling to be part of “this nonsense.”

Truthfully, the shot was barely a success as a photo. Ben was using his mother’s old Brownie and from the distance away with the relatively wide lens, the deer was just a thumbnail-sized shape on the first prints. He had a camera store in Portland blow the shot up, crop it. He hung it on the wall in his bedroom. The shot was so soft after all the enlargement that it was more symbolic of the deer than representative. Ben knew that most people would find the shot nothing special.

But he kept coming back to it. The breathless feeling was there for him. The tension in his legs from the long wait. The cold. The soft sunlight filtering through a heavy cloud cover. The pressure to simply
take the shot
competing against the desire to get the composition right, to wait until the deer turned his way, cocked that rack of antlers in silhouette against the mountain stream.

Throughout that winter, Ben’s father moved from anger to confusion as Ben turned from hunting magazines to studying the work of Ansel Adams. That spring, the day before bear hunting season, his father told Ben that he would buy him the rifle even though Ben hadn’t bagged the deer.

Ben told him what he really wanted.

His dad looked at him silently, then said, “We’ll talk about it.”