Trust the Focus (3 page)

When I told him I made varsity as a left-handed pitcher.

When I told him I won a scholarship to play at Brackett, and Landry was following me because the school had a good graphic designer program.

When I had hoped to tell him who I was and how I felt about Landry. But never got the chance.

As I threw, my left shoulder burned a little, but I didn’t care because now my head was clear, my skin smooth and calm over my bones.

The game soothed me, but at the same time, it had been my prison. In high school, I was still confused. Or maybe just in denial, but I hadn’t been ready to come out. And then when I earned my scholarship to play Division 1 at Brackett, being out as a part of a sports team seemed like a bad idea—the comments from coaches and teammates and opponents. I didn’t want to hurt my chances of losing my scholarship or my place on the team, so I’d kept my mouth shut. Scribbled my signature on an unspoken contract with baseball assuring it I’d play straight. If I lost my scholarship, I would either have to take out mountains of school loans—neither Mom nor Dad had the cash for Brackett tuition—or go back home and live under my mom’s roof and attend the local state school.

And other than taking pictures, baseball was all I had that was mine. My mom decided my life and my major. I didn’t want to come out and lose baseball.

I’d wanted to get away from her, so I’d played straight and kept my scholarship. I hadn’t realized her control stretched all the way from Pennsylvania to California.

I thought I could bust free come graduation, rip those bars apart. But then Dad died sophomore year and mom wrapped her manicured hands around my throat, and I couldn’t figure out how to tear up the contract.

I heard a scuffle and turned to see Landry. He was watching me, head tilted, holding a paper bag in one hand and a two-foot-long Twizzlers in the other, munching away. I couldn’t see his eyes, because they were covered by cheap black sunglasses with pink neon sides.

“What in the hell are you wearing?”

He lowered his head so I could see his blue eyes over the rim of his glasses. He waggled his brows. “I wanted something to remember this glorious rest stop that smells like feet.”

I laughed and stepped toward him, holding out my hand. I couldn’t see his eyes now, but I imagined he rolled them as he dug in the bag and pulled out a Butterfinger.

“That’s my boy,” I said, peeling back the crinkly wrapper.

He chewed a bite of Twizzlers and then swallowed before saying, “Yeah.”

***

We drove onto 505 and then reached the Charles W. Bingham Forest Learning Center at Mount St. Helens late morning. We cruised the learning center, which focused on the recovery of the area after the 1980 volcanic eruption. Then we hiked down one of the paths until we found a decent view of the mountain.

I stopped on the path and scanned the area as Landry handed me my dad’s calendar. I flipped to March, and lined myself up to mirror his shot the best I could. I remembered when he told me about this shoot. It was freezing, but he wore fingerless gloves. He’d been so caught up in taking pictures that he hadn’t realized a bold squirrel had dug through his pack and stole a bag of trail mix.

I pulled out my dad’s Nikon D3, fingering the worn camouflage strap and the dent on the bottom right where I’d dropped it on our garage floor. He’d taught me the basics and I had my own simple Nikon D40 at home. But this trip was about Dad. And so his camera was essential.

I opened up the aperture as wide as it could go, because I wanted a limited depth of field, the urn in focus in the foreground, the mountain blurred behind it. I squinted through the viewfinder. A crook in a tree to my left showed perfectly in the lower left point of focus. I remembered the rule of thirds lesson my father taught me. Separate the subject with two vertical lines and two horizontal lines and place the subject of focus anywhere the lines intersect.

I motioned to Landry. “Can you put it in the tree over there? Wedged on top of the big branch?”

Landry paused, the urn held firmly in his hands. He pressed his lips together.

“What?”

“Him.”

“Huh?”

Landry shifted his weight. “Him. This is him.”

I squinted my eyes at the canister. “Uh, actually, no it’s not. It’s a pile of ashes.”

“Jus—”

“Fine. Him. I’ll say it for you, now go put him in the fucking tree.”

Landry walked in a huff to the tree, and it made me smile. He had loved my dad and the feeling was mutual. Dad always said he was glad I had Landry.
That boy would walk through fire for you, asking nothing in return.

I never told Dad I’d do the same.

Landry situated the urn where I had gestured, jiggling it to make sure it was stuck firm and wouldn’t fall. It would kind of ruin our whole plan if all the ashes spilled at our first stop.

He turned to me and I nodded. He smiled and walked toward me, standing close enough that our elbows touched. I raised the camera, focused on the urn, and with the majestic, snow-covered rise of Mount St. Helens in the background, pressed the shutter.

Click.

I repositioned the zoom.

Click.

Click. Click. Click.

Again and again. I must have taken twenty-five shots of a fucking urn in a tree. But I couldn’t stop. It was like I needed this moment to last forever, the click of the shutter, the feel of the grip in my hands matching the worn spots from my father’s fingers, Landry’s silent and comforting presence at my side—it blanked my mind until all I felt was peace. I even turned and took a couple of Landry in profile, until he laughed and shoved the lens aside.

I had minored in photography in college, and I felt close to my dad every time the camera strap tightened on the back of my neck. In class, I used a 35mm SLR camera with black-and-white film. I shut myself in the darkroom on sunny afternoons, learning how to use the enlarger to transfer the film to paper, while the smell of developer chemicals burned the inside of my nose.

I loved using film. It was taken for granted now to see a photograph right after it was taken. But there was something about snapping that shutter with no certainty of the image until it appeared in a chemical bath under red-tinted lights.

I used a DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera on a regular basis because it was faster and easier. But if I was taking photos for fun, I never looked at the LCD screen on the back. I forced myself to trust my eye and knowledge of lighting and composition.
Trust your focus
, my dad would always say.

And in photography, I could control every aspect. The rest of my life was on the auto-focus setting as designated by my mother or my coach. But when my camera was in my hand, I could set the focus to manual and control everything—the aperture, shutter speed, ISO—to make that photograph look how I wanted it to look. I controlled the camera and I owned that photo. No one but me.

As my shutter fell silent, nothing symbolic happened. No elk with golden antlers arrived to peer at us majestically and no bushes rustled mysteriously.

A hawk screeched overhead and Landry jerked to face me, eyes wide, like that meant something. And I just shrugged with a small smile, because Dad wasn’t a hawk in the sky or a breeze in my hair. He was in a canister nestled on a tree branch, a pile of ash I didn’t want to believe represented the man who meant everything to me.

If his soul was anywhere, it was in my Saint Christopher’s medallion around my neck, or hanging out in Sally, laughing as Lan and I fought over directions.

I was the product of a high school graduation party, an excess of wine coolers, and an expired condom. My dad spent his life proving to me that I wasn’t a mistake. My mom spent her life proving to herself she hadn’t made one. Their young marriage lasted three years while my dad was the manager at a mall photography studio. But the strain of a little kid and a bad match caused my mom to file divorce papers before I turned four years old.

My dad took classes and practiced and eventually could make enough money freelancing, taking pictures of nature and beautiful landscapes. I wasn’t a stupid kid; I realized my mom had been forced into the “bad parent” role, the one who had to discipline and tell me no, I couldn’t have another cupcake, and no, I couldn’t wear my space pajamas with the glow-in-the-dark stars to kindergarten. My dad could swoop in for a weekend and be the “cool parent,” take me to the zoo and allow me to eat ice cream a half hour before bedtime and let me get away without flossing.

But it wasn’t my fault. And my mom’s heavy sighs and under-the-breath mutters made me feel like it was.

Still, I looked forward to every visit with my father, even when I noticed the increasing weight in his chest and waist. When I noticed he couldn’t walk nearly as long without a red face and heaving breaths.

Yet when I got the news sophomore year that he’d suffered a heart attack on location in Maine and died before the first responders reached him, I hadn’t been prepared. I’d been in the locker room after practice, laughing with the guys over a bad slide our second baseman had taken. I almost didn’t hear my phone, buzzing in the pocket of my book bag, but I pulled it out midlaugh, mumbled a “hey” in the phone, and then collapsed on my ass, head between my bent knees as my mom’s voice rattled on from the phone resting on the ground by my untied right shoe.

My teammates didn’t know what to do. My coach circled like a hawk. Until my best friend on the team, our catcher, Tomás Reyes, called Landry.

He showed up five minutes later, having left in the middle of a philosophy class. Just got up and walked right fucking out. He didn’t say a word, just called my mother, listened to her news, explained I was fine (lie), and then hung up.

Landry shooed everyone out. He bought the
Greatest Hits
album by Eric Clapton—my dad’s favorite musician—on iTunes and played it on his phone. And we sat in silence on the concrete floor, listening to one of the greatest songwriters croon.

I still couldn’t hear a Clapton song without getting transported to that moment, my ass cold from the floor, my neck cricked, Landry’s humming in my ear. His whispered “I’m sorry” and his hands pulling me up, forcing me to get dressed, and then encouraging me to go on.

Just like now. Despite the barrier between us the last couple of years. He was here now. For me.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Me too.”

He didn’t ask me if I wanted to say something. I didn’t. I wanted to pretend Dad was here, rumbling his husky laugh, his boots crunching the layer of snow still on the ground.

Landry sank onto the ground and pulled out his sketchbook. The front was dog-eared and covered in stickers—a rainbow flag and an equal sign and Munch’s
The Scream
. Doodles covered the spaces in between Landry’s signature hard-edged style. He opened up the book and the colors of the tattoos on his left arm blurred as his hand arced and skittered across the page, directing the pencil to dictate the image he held in his brain. Watching him draw, the systematic rendering of something out of nothing calmed me. And my eyes were always drawn to his tattoo sleeve. I knew all of the tattoos by heart—like the Fall Out Boy lyrics and the paintbrush and palette and his parents’ anniversary date. And I knew he bore a pitcher’s glove for me on the inside of his bicep—inked as a get-well wish when I hurt my shoulder junior year. It was the year he’d started to drift away from me, so I was surprised he’d had it done. And surprised at how much it meant to me.

I dropped down beside him. “You don’t usually draw scenery.” He drew action, like my arm as I threw a baseball, or his dog as he jumped in the air to catch a Frisbee.

His hand stalled, then sped up again. “Trying something different.”

I peeked over his arm as he sketched the clouds above the mountain—so vivid and fluffy I thought they moved across the page with the slight breeze.

He scooted closer so that his knee brushed my leg. The tension seeped out of his muscles and a contented sigh slipped from his lips as he continued to sketch.

Like always, I allowed the closeness, the touch. Because Landry thrived on it. In fact, he needed it—touch from those he loved and trusted. Because he hadn’t had it for the first twelve years of his life.

He’d been left at a hospital as a baby under the state’s Safe Haven law. He’d been premature, jaundiced, and malnourished. So by the time he’d been released from the hospital, he’d been hard to place in a foster home because of his lingering health issues. So he spent most of his childhood in a group home for boys.

He was placed in a foster home right before junior high and later adopted by his parents. At that point he was a little wild, a little unruly, and out of control.

His parents hugged him and were physically affectionate, but they couldn’t seem to ground him, to tether his brain to his body in the way he needed.

And then he met me. I was a quiet sixth grader and he was an unfocused prepubescent. Even then, Landry couldn’t hide who he was—he spoke a little too loud, his hips cocked a little too much, his eyes lingered on other boys a little too long.

We were on the playground at school and some of the kids were giving him a hard time. They weren’t quite sure yet what was so different about Landry, but it was clear he wasn’t like them. I didn’t know either. I thought I liked girls, but something about Landry drew me to him. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. And when his pale skin flushed red, those eyes flashed sparks, and he bobbed on his toes, I knew the skinny guy was going to blow his top and get into something he would regret.

My father was a physically affectionate guy, so I reacted on instinct and grabbed Landry’s hair, pressing our foreheads together while I clamped my other hand where his neck met his shoulder. I stared into his eyes and willed his breath to match mine.

He gripped my wrist and locked onto my stare. I didn’t say anything, but kept myself present in order to bring him back from the brink, anchor him to the ground before he took flight. The taunts from the kids faded into the background until the words were white noise, and the only sounds were our breaths.