“And you thought you’d lost it,” she spoke aloud to herself softly, letting her voice fill the empty space around her. “Well, not lost it,” she muttered as she sighted through the telephoto lens and focused on a huge bison bull backlit by the rosebud-hued sky. “Just lost the peace in it.”
Ironic, really, that the collection of photographs USA Today had called Peace? had made her lose her perspective on the subject.
“Afghanistan will do that.” Isabel clicked off several frames of the bison.
In retrospect she should have known the assignment was going to be a tough one. But she’d gotten cocky. Hell, she’d been a photojournalist—a successful, award-winning photojournalist—for twenty years now. She wasn’t a dewy-eyed twenty-something anymore. She was a fearless forty-two, which was part of her problem. Overconfidence in her ability had blinded her to the realities of what really seeing would do to her.
Of course, it wasn’t like she hadn’t been to war zones before—Bosnia, the Falklands and South Africa had all come before her lens. But something had been different in Afghanistan. I’d been different. Somehow I’d lost perspective and darkness and chaos slithered in, Isabel admitted to herself as she changed the angle of the tripod and shot several frames rapidly, catching a young calf frolicking around its grazing mother.
It had started with the soldier, Curtis Johnson. He’d had kind brown eyes set in a face that was young and more cute than handsome. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, and he’d flirted outrageously with her as he escorted her to the jeep she’d be riding in—the one smack in the middle of the convoy of supplies they were taking from the U.S. airbase to one of the small native settlements just a few miles down the potholed road.
Actually, Curtis had been so cute and clever that she’d been daydreaming about loosening up her rule on not having a fling when she was on assignment. She’d been counting the years between them and had decided that, what the hell, if sexy young Curtis didn’t care that she was almost twenty years his senior, then why the hell should she care?
And that was when the roadside bomb detonated. Isabel had switched to photographer autopilot, and in the middle of the smoke and fire, darkness and horror, she’d captured some of the most profound images of her career—images that had included Curtis Johnson, whose strong right leg and well-muscled right arm had been blown completely off. She’d never meant to capture him. She hadn’t even realized he’d been part of the blast. She’d meant only to do what was instinctive; capture the truth. And then the truth bombed her in the face, and she nearly fell apart.
Curtis’s eyes had still been kind, even as they’d clouded with shock. Before he’d lost consciousness, he’d been worried about her—been warning her to get down . . . get under cover . . . Then he’d bled out on the cracked desert sand and died in her arms. All hell broke loose around her, and all she remembered after that was screaming to keep her camera. She absolutely had to have the pictures of Curtis in life. For his family. For her.
Isabel shivered and realized she’d stopped taking pictures and was standing beside her tripod. She lifted a hand to the chill on her cheeks. They were wet.
“Focus on what you’re doing!” Isabel told herself. “This is your chance to regain your center—your normalcy.” And to get over your grief.
She did the buck-up thing her father had always taught her, got rid of the tears and the memories and focused on her job.
Shaking her head, she returned to the frame of her camera, her smile feeling sarcastic. Her gang of best friends would agree that an Isabel Cantelli norm wasn’t anywhere near most people’s norm. She could almost hear her gang chastising her. Meredith would shrug and say the Isabel norm usually worked for her—it had certainly made her successful. Robin would shake her head and say Isabel needed to find a full-time man, not just a string of attractive lovers. Kim would dissect Isabel’s psyche and eventually agree with Robin that more permanence in her life would help ground her, and Teresa would chime in that whatever made Isabel happy was what she should go for.
Until a month ago and that trip to Afghanistan, Isabel would have laughed, rolled her eyes, poured herself more champagne and said her nomadic life, free of entangling man strings, was exactly what made her happy.
Then Curtis Johnson had happened to her, and Isabel’s view of the world had changed, and in this new, tainted viewpoint she’d realized that she’d been fooling herself for quite a while. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that she’d been searching for herself for quite a while, because somewhere in the middle of her successful career and her group of intelligent, articulate friends and her life that was at once exciting and comfortable, she’d lost herself.
Which is why she was here, on Oklahoma’s Tallgrass Prairie. She was doing the only thing she knew to reground herself—she was viewing life through her camera and searching for her true north again so she could find a way to navigate through the changing landscape of her life. Her plan had seemed to be working, until she’d allowed her mind to wander and her eyes to see the past. And the past had good and bad memories, times of joy and ridiculous fear. If there was an emotion she’d ever not experienced, she wasn’t sure what it would be. She needed something to shock her into enjoyment again. If she could only figure out what it would be. But this, this natural Oklahoma beauty was working right now.
“So focus!” Isabel reminded herself, and was pleased to fall fairly easily back into the zone of framing the lovely land before her.
The next time she moved her tripod, she caught sight of the morning light glistening off the surface of what she realized was water winding through a gully to her right. Intrigued as always by varieties in landscape, she headed in that direction, loving the surprising glimpse of sandy bank and a clear, bubbling stream hidden within the section of cross timbers.
Getting closer to the water, Isabel noticed a single ray of young sunlight had penetrated the green shadows of the trees, so that a small section of the stream was being illuminated, as if by a silver spotlight. That spotlight drew her like a magnet.
She let her instincts guide her, and moved quietly and quickly down the bank, leaving the tripod temporarily behind. As she settled on the sandy ground, kneeling so that she was just above the water, Isabel focused and began clicking picture after picture, changing the angle and distance from the water as she worked. Mesmerized by the unique quality of the light, she let the magic of the lens wash away the sadness thinking of Afghanistan and the fallen soldier had caused. She’d changed position and was lying prone on her stomach, elbows planted in the sand, when the brush on the opposite side of the bank rustled, and accompanied by a massive snapping of twigs, a bison lumbered into view.
Hardly daring to breathe, Isabel kept snapping pictures as the huge beast went to the water. He snorted once at her, probably sensing the scent of an intruder, but then ignored her completely, lowered his black muzzle and drank noisily.
She wondered how she smelled to him. He’d swung his head around until he’d spotted her. She never felt fear, so she didn’t believe that’s what caught his attention. Did she just smell human? She wasn’t wearing perfume, she was lying so still, there was no way he heard her.
What had made him look directly toward her? And why had his eyes seem so ancient and wise? When he backed away from the lake, he shook his head up and down, gave her one more unfathomable look, and then turned and loped away with an agility she’d never have believed of such a huge, amazing beast.
A thrill went through Isabel. She clicked back to glance through the pictures she’d captured of him. The bison had stepped directly into the shaft of light. Morning dew speckled the big bull’s coat so that through Isabel’s lens he appeared to be swathed in diamonds and mist. And he’d nodded at her. As if he were approving the photo shoot. And as he turned and left, her first thought was that every single human male in existence would give anything for that package he was carrying.