Rosabel
Part of the 2020 Liturgical Calendar Storywriting Project.
A Lent Story.
cw: some brief mentions of suicide
It was a Tuesday in October the first time I saw her.
Back then, I was still freelancing, coasting that horrifying, chaotic, endless wave of weddings, engagements, and corporate headshots.
The morning, eager and cruel, had woken me far before I’d intended with the beautiful noise of a four-car crash outside my apartment.
Some of the doctors on the floors below me had rushed out in a Hippocratic dash towards the wounded. I’ve never been able to return to sleep once awake, so I grabbed a camera and followed them out, diverging at the crash to head south towards the city.
I dialed in my settings as I walked, and, stuttering my gait, began to snap photos as I went. A section of an apartment building. Martin, sleeping quietly on his bench in the Legion park. The Cirrus clouds that waved in the sky. I ignored the crash as I passed it. I didn’t need that on my cards.
My path on the greenway led me to Dai’s, that Cafe that used to sit on New Jersey across from the theater. The one that looked like a cross between a tarot reader’s parlor and a hair salon and smelled like incinerated mushrooms. Sometimes I still think I can catch a whiff of that stench on my clothes.
“Jesus, what are you doing awake?” A sharp voice called, snapping my view away from my camera.
I snapped back something witty at my sister, who I had forgotten was behind the till that morning. I can’t remember what I said, and I’d rather not make something up, but I remember what happened next.
Slowly, lazily, I sauntered to the register and propped my camera up on the counter.
“Four cars wrecked outside the apartment, Savannah.” I said.
She stared at me, eyes wide, struggling to find words. “ Anybody hurt?”
“Probably not.” I replied. “It’s a crappy intersection, but at least it’s downtown so people are going slow. Either way, John and the guys were out there in a flash, so if anybody did get jacked up, they’re in good hands.”
Savannah plucked off her thick black glasses and ran both of her hands through her hair, letting out one of her signature wall-rattling sighs. Her arms, covered in rings and bracelets, jangled like wind chimes as she moved.
“Seriously, they’re probably fine.” I said. I meant it. John and the residents who lived in the building were loud drunks, and lord only knows that they were probably hungover as hell, but they were brilliant. “Don’t worry about em. It’s right by the hospitals, anyhow.”
“You’re right.” She said, convincing herself, or trying to. “What do you want? Just a drip?”
“Yep. No lewd latte art today.”
“You’re no fun. Go sit.” She commanded. “It’s still brewing, but I’ll bring it out.”
Hands in my pockets, I skulked off to a booth close by, stuffed with mandala-laden throw pillows and a tiny jade Buddha.
I propped my legs up on the seat and rested my head against the wall. With a sigh, I fished my phone out of my pocket as the door clinked open again.
There was murmuring of an order, then something else, a little more spirited, then an excited “MAX!”.
There, in that instant as I looked up in wonder at what could’ve worked my sister up so much, I saw Rosa for the first time.
What I remember most is the way her smile curled up in the corner of her mouth as she heard my name. It was slow and inevitable, like she had heard a joke and was fighting an irrepressible laugh. Her eyes, those eyes that I see even now every night, were the most beautiful, luminous brown, almost hickory. Her hair, that wonderful Cascade of braids that ran down her back, shook as she finally turned to look at me.
She was holding my camera.
Flicking the power on, and fiddling with the dials, she quickly snapped a photo.
I have it in a frame, still, on my desk in the studio. I don’t tell people the story of who shot it or why anymore.
“Pick your stuff up.” Savannah said sternly, focusing on my mug as she filled it. “Nobody’s buying you another one.”
“Yeah, sure, sorry.” I said sheepishly, and scooted to the edge of the bench. “I’m sorry, can I have that back?”
Her smile now fully formed, Rosa walked up to my booth and sat down. “I mean, I could give it back, but I’m not sure it’s in good hands.”
“Oh come on.”
“It’s not the leaving it on the counter. That’s bad, sure.” Rosa said, with a long eyeroll. “Why in the hell would you ever have your ISO up that high on a sunny day like today?”
“I needed more exposure!” I protested “And my shutter speed an f-stops were-”
“In the wrong place, too, I’m sure!” She said, placing my camera down. As I yanked it away, my hand brushed hers. I should’ve been pissed. I was pissed. All of that disappeared when my hand touched hers. Just a simple mistake of a graze when I took the camera from her, and the rest of my life was captured in a moment.
“Look, don’t get mad.” She placed her card on the table. “I’m meeting a girlfriend here, but hang out and let’s go shoot afterward.”
From her bag, she pulled out Bess, her street camera.
“Or just call me. Whatever.”
“You want to go walk around with some rando you just met?”
“I want to walk around with whoever’s got the eye that you’ve got so I can teach ’em to keep their photos from being so freaking grainy.” She said, grabbing my camera and showing me the photo I had taken of the apartment building. “Besides. I can take you.”
I laughed. She didn’t. I looked away. Then she laughed.
With a two fingered wave, she stood. “I’m Rosa. Good to meet you, Max.” She said and left.
Savannah waited a moment, eyes dating from me to Rosa and back again, clearly wondering how anything more becoming than a garden slug could bear a moment of my company, then she brought my coffee, patted my shoulder, and got back to “work”.
Obviously I waited.
I had no clients waiting for shots or for edits, just an empty apartment and a load of laundry.
A beautiful woman, even one who was exclusively wanting to tear apart my work, was definitely worth wasting an hour or so in a booth at my sister’s cafe.
Besides, this is why we have Twitter.
I plugged in my earphones, turned on The Dreaming, and lost myself in my feed.
As those last, wild keens of Get Out of My House closed out the album, I felt someone knock my shoe with their hand.
Rosa stood before me waiting with one hand on her hip and the other on her bag. “Ready?”
I shrugged and stood up. “Sure, yeah.”
She pulled me up with the hand that had rested on her hip, and then headed out the door.
“See ya, Sav.” I shouted to my sister.
She waved back and said gleefully “I hope she leaves you in a dumpster!”
Once I was outside, Rosa pointed left and right. “Which way?”.
I thought for a moment. It didn’t matter, there were enough interesting places in either direction. I made a call. “Left.”
“Downtown! Ok.” Rosa said, and we were off.
There was the statue, that weird brick head that always seemed to be facing a different way whenever you passed it. We shot it from a few different angles — Rosa preferring to be up close, relishing the details, while I stayed back and took in the larger scene.
I missed the stash-crack between the bricks in my shot. She missed the couple, arm-in-arm, sipping coffee and twisted so that it looked like they were watching the head like a tv, or catching up with an old friend.
“Why are you getting all the way up in there?” I called out to her. “ You can’t hardly see what it is that close up!”
She ignored me.
We found a few conventioneers — two couples — stationed on benches across from the missions, and we took a few shots far back, letting them exist as tiny dots within the frame.
“Decent shot.” She said, peering over my shoulder as I reviewed it. “Good highlights, but not great.”
After a few blocks, she stopped us at a corner. Across the street, a homeless man sat huddled in his blankets next to a pair of missionaries who stood vigil at a sign reading “Do you believe God allows evil?”.
Raising up her camera, she turned dials and snapped a few shots.
“Catching hypocrisy in the act, huh?” I asked. “Seems like you might want to be a little more subtle than that. Kind of exploitative, anyway.”
Ignoring me, she called across the street. “Mr. Tony! Mr and Mrs Jay! Is it ok if I take your picture?”
“Just make me look pretty!” Tony shouted from the blankets. The missionaries flashed a coy pair of thumbs-up and then returned to their own affairs.
“They helped him earlier. Mrs Jay left and got him a breakfast sandwich while I kept Mr Jay and Tony company.”
“Oh.” I said sheepishly.
“And do you know what I kept the ISO?” she asked. “100. Because it’s bright.” She answered herself. “Turn it down. No one wants to see a sandy mess.”
Rosa shook her head and carried on down Delaware towards the circle. I followed her closely, and around Market I reached out to gently touch her arm.
“Yeah, ok.” I said, lightly as I could. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. You wanna help me be better, I wanna listen.”
For some reason I thought that showing her my settings would prove that I meant well. She laughed and rubbed her face.
“Why do you do this?” She asked.
“Why do I do what?”
“Photography.” She said plainly. “Why? I have to ask, because you’ve been darting from shot to shot, barely taking the time to think through what each one needs. Your angles have been good, but your shots are blurry because you’re hurrying, or your ISO’s high and you’re sandblasting the picture. So what are you trying to do?”
I looked at her for a moment. People had talked to me like this before, and when they did, I tended to leave. But their eyes didn’t have the warmth of her eyes. Their hands didn’t have the softness, the gentle strength, that hers had.
So I stayed. And I told her.
“When I was a kid, I had a friend who was sick. All the time. Her lungs just didn’t work right. And she always walked around with one of those big polaroid cameras. Her parents told her that she was gonna die someday soon, so she wanted to leave behind pictures for me. That way, whenever I missed her, I could just look at the photos and I could see what she had seen. It’s like I could be with her, I guess. After she died, I started shooting, too.”
“Oh.” Rosa said.
“She just wanted to capture moments. Not perfectly curated moments, not dressed up moments, she called them the blinky moments. The moments that are gone if you blink.”
“Oh.”
“It’s no excuse. I need to get better, you’re right. It’s just, that always stuck with me.”
Then Rosa, my Rosa with the beautiful hickory eyes, hugged me for the first time.
“What was her name?” Rosa asked.
“Jenny.” I said into her hair.
“I think she’d be proud of your work.” Rosa said, and I held her tightly as the tears fell down onto her braids.
It was sappy, but whenever Jenny came up, tears came out. It was a rule.
We walked together over to the ice cream place on the circle and found a seat outside, going on about shots, clients we had unknowingly sniped from each other, the whole nine yards, while our ice cream slowly turned into soup.
After I finished mine, I returned the question. “Why’d you start doing this?”
Rosa, in the first of a painfully finite number of times, considered the question by looking away, showing me her proud profile as she turned.
“Ten years ago I could barely see.” She began, staring straight into my eyes. “I had these big, nasty cataracts on my eyes” — her hands gestured wildly as she emphasized them — “You seen water lilies?”
I nodded, memories flooding with the gauzy painting and the meal I had eaten afterwards.
“It was like that. Everything was like that. Shapeless and blobby. Then, one day, a doctor took out the cataracts, and the world was completely different. I just wanted to show people what I was seeing, but one thing led to another and now they pay me to do it.”
“Of course they do.” I said. “You’re amazing at it.”
She cocked her head and said “Damn straight.”
Something about the gesture made me laugh, and I took a shot just before the moment faded.
“Let me see.” She said, grabbing the camera. She clicked the wheels and zoomed in close, and, with a raised eyebrow said, “Oh no. Nope. We gotta delete this.”
“You kidding me?” I asked, grabbing the camera back, “No way! That’s an awesome shot!”
“I look weird!”
“You look confident! You look proud! You look how you sound!” I said, cradling the camera with both hands. Slowly I added “You look beautiful.”
She smiled with a confidence that told me she knew full well that she was beautiful, but welcomed the compliment nevertheless.
“Thanks. You’re pretty cute, yourself.” She said.
“Thanks.” I said.
I remember how hard I blushed. I remember looking away.
Her grin returned to that devious curled up smirk I had seen in Dai’s, and she stood quickly. “Come on. We’ve still got some shooting to do, and I’ve got a 10:30 in the mall.”
I stammered something and took her outstretched hand, and the two of us scurried off towards Georgia Street.
When we took a photo of that creepy statue of the man crouching among the disembodied legs, she brushed my arm and made a joke about how he must’ve been an axe murderer or something, and I laughed and leaned in close enough to leave my arm touching hers as I got approval for my settings.
Halfway toward the convention center, she grabbed me and stationed me between the pylons of the heating system, framing up a shot with those lead-lines that only she could see.
When she came back to show me the shot, I waited until she had shown me her work, then I turned and kissed her. My eyes were closed, but I’m sure her eyes, those wide wonders, must’ve looked like they were ready to pop out of her head.
For a brief, horrible moment, I wondered if I had made a mistake and misread the situation. Then I felt her hands curl through my hair, fingers twisting through locks as her elbows slowly made their way onto my shoulders.
“Sorry, I-“ I began.
“Did just fine.” She said. Then she looked at her watch, swore, and ran off.
“Well at least I’ve got her card.” I said to myself, and I sat down on a bench.
Things moved fast after that.
There was the first real date, tacos and a few too many margaritas at the bougie fusion place on Maryland. There was the night in Fort Ben where I learned never to touch her hair — ever — unless there had been expressed and explicit consent ahead of time. A few miles outside of Terre Haute we had the night with our first fight, and the morning, when, with eyes half closed and smelling like death but still reaching and yearning for each other, desperate to repair what we had broken, we had our first make-up sex. Or any sex, for that matter.
We went into business together not long after the first of the year, and the next fall, we paid for a wedding and a honeymoon in cash.
On the first night in Tijuana, we laid in the uncovered bed, fingers intertwined, but loose, and I hit play on The Dreaming on my phone while the sun set over the waves and the baby boomer tourists raided the buffet.
It wasn’t the first time we had listened to it together — that was back on the Denver trip where she swore she saw a fire whirl — but this time, after the end of Houdini, she rolled over and looked up into my eyes.
“Babe?” She asked.
“Yeah?”
“You know how Houdini had that Rosabel code for his wife to listen for at mediums if he died first? What would our code be?”
I looked at her for a moment. Every part of me wanted to make some joke and brush the moment aside, but I didn’t. It had to be bad luck to talk to your new wife about how you’d tell a medium to tell her you were floating in the room.
“Tangerine?”
“No. That’s dumb.”
“ISO?”
She looked at me, and, mouth drawn tight, nodded. “ISO. I’d come back just to make sure you weren’t ruining your photos, so that works for me.”
For two years, things were good.
Wedding season in the spring and summer, and convention work kept us busy and paid the bills. We moved into her place, right above Dai’s, and in the free mornings we’d stumble downstairs to hang out with Savannah and John or Marley, or whoever else happened to be passing through. When the coffee got old, we’d go to work, or bum around town and shoot until our SD cards filled up.
We told each other every day what we meant to each other. We fought, but never cruelly. I’m happier — relatively speaking — when I remind myself of those two things.
The pains started after Dai’s closed.
We were shooting headshots at an office building, one of those easy jobs to help fill the calendar and the bank account.
She had been tired, but it was fall, and I even found myself a little more tired than usual.
It was on the third subject, that it started. She put a hand on her stomach gently, like a mother feeling a baby kick, and she kept shooting. I asked her if she was ok — not that she would tell me if she wasn’t, but at least I knew when she was lying — and she lied and said she was fine.
On the sixth subject, the flash went off early. When I looked over, Rosa was on the ground.
The ovarian cancer worked fast. Faster than our love grew. Faster than our bank account could handle.
She was dead and buried in March, and the black-laden well-wishers came from every corner of our lives to give me words they wanted to hear themselves say.
Savannah was out of the country when Rosa died. It couldn’t be helped, it was work. Besides, I knew she loved Rosa. Her presence or absence beside Rosa’s body couldn’t have changed that.
Rosa’s brothers got me so drunk over the next nine nights that I don’t remember a single thing that happened. There was a priest, there was chalk, a mattress. It seemed important.
For a while after we put her in the ground, I had these romantic notions of traveling for a year, then finding a nice, shady spot in the tropics and killing myself. The idea, more or less, was that I had had a good life story — I had found love, I had married, and it was over now. So, life was over now.
When Savannah came back to the states and hugged me in the airport, that plan died too.
Shiftless and alone, I kept living.
I expected to cave in. I expected my whole life to come crashing down. I expected self-destruction. In that, too, my expectations were romanticized far more than reality could ever be.
It was a quiet life. I went to work most days. I came back. I listened to the music I already knew well, and I went to Savannah’s once a week for a mandated check-in dinner. Every night I touched Rosa’s bonnet, still sitting on her nightstand from before the chemo took her hair. Every morning I moved her robe off of the hook by our shower. When I had dried myself off, I set it back in its place, and then I’d leave the apartment to go shoot.
It was an October afternoon when I came back to an unlocked door.
Nothing was missing. Nothing was dislocated.
I chalked it up to lack of sleep. Which was funny, because sleep seemed to be just about my only extracurricular by that point.
In November, a website reminded me that four years ago that day we had been in a café in Madison. It did it by showing me a picture of her, head cradled in her hands, staring up and to the right like a silent movie star.
I shut my computer, drank enough to pass out, and woke up tucked in in my bed as a soft hand brushed my face, but the door was locked. I was alone.
In December, I saw her shoes at my parent’s house during the Christmas dinner. Savannah had brought her boyfriend. He was nice enough, but I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t be around him, or his love for my sister, or my parents’ love for me, so I took off. No one tried to stop me, and if anyone noticed the look on my face as I picked up the black flats I swore my wife was buried in, they didn’t let on.
Her parents were good to me, too. They’d call me every other Sunday, and we’d spin our wheels conversationally for a few minutes. None of us wanted to talk about her, but all of us wanted to feel like we could. Like we could rest in the mutually understood absence.
As the new year rang in, I was alone on the New York bridge. I was just walking, don’t worry. When I reached the spot where I had proposed, I turned and looked at the city. It was beautiful, lit up like Christmas, lit up like any other day of the year, and I plucked my camera out of my bag to take a picture.
I shoot in Manual. I always have, on this camera at least.
I dialed in the settings. I focused the shot. My ISO changed.
I dialed it back in.
It changed again — lowered by 200.
I shot. The ISO lowered.
I changed it. I shot. It lowered.
There are those times when you’re aware you’re being watched. Sometimes it’s horrifying, like a cold breath on the back of your neck. This was comforting. Like Rosa was staring at me from across the room, beaming the need to look towards her into my mind. I remembered our honeymoon and I smiled as I turned around.
In the white of her wedding dress, Rosa stood. Her face was like a stained-glass window, and the light that shone through was like the light that creeps through the curtains just as dawn begins. Even as a ghost, she protected her highlights.
I blinked, trying to capture the moment in my eyes, and she was gone.
I crossed back in towards town, back towards home, and as I climbed into bed that night, I slept on her side, holding her bonnet tight and breathing in the last scents of my Rosabel.
© Phil Lofton, 2020, all rights reserved. Republished with permission from porchlightcollective.com
