Hope and Other Punch Lines(47)

After they left, Cat ran up to her room in tears, and I didn’t know if I should follow her or stay downstairs. Parker, who was so little at the time, curled up at Mel’s feet like a dog. He was scared and confused; he had thought police officers in his house would have been cause for celebration. Something fun. Like dress-up come to life.

“Did Cat’s dad die all over again?” Parker asked, because he of course already knew that his father was not Cat’s father, that Cat’s father had died at a time he couldn’t fathom, because none of us can properly picture the time before or after our own existence. What I didn’t understand until that moment is that Parker was right: it turns out people can die twice.

Mel looked at him and started to weep. I scooped Parker up onto my hip and went into the kitchen to get him cookies and milk and called my mom from Cat’s landline and told her what had happened. I remember realizing that this was my very first taste of adulthood. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all.

My mom came straight over. She tucked Mel into bed and put on Dinosaur for us kids, which of course we were way too old for by then, but we watched anyway, until Stewart came home from work earlier than usual and took over.

A week later, and nine years after Cat’s dad died, the Gibson-Henderson family held another funeral. This time there was a casket, though I knew there was only a rib inside.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how lonely that single bone must be in the ground by itself forever.





“Okay, it’s the morning of September eleventh, which was ironically the most gorgeous day of the year—picture a blue sky, like blue, blue, blue. Not a cloud in sight. I walk to Century 21, which is this discount department store downtown. I need a tie for a job interview, not a big deal. Everything is normal. I have my camera; I always do. Then I hear that sound—loud, indescribable, metal to metal—the first plane has hit, and my instincts kick in. I whip out my lens and start running toward the crash.” Vic Dempsey’s speech has a practiced quality, revs up as he gets going, like we should ready ourselves for the punchline. The photographer who took the Baby Hope picture has clearly dined out on this story for a long time, which is both understandable and gross.

Jack and I are standing in his small studio in Maplewood, New Jersey, and Vic is talking while looking at a series of shots laid out on a lit table. In the photos, a tall, thin woman in a business suit carries a baby in a fancy leather handbag. Her hair is wild around her head, like she’s standing in front of a wind machine. I don’t understand the picture at all—she looks simultaneously frazzled and serene, and the baby looks like it might fall out. I assume it’s trying to sell me something but I couldn’t say what.

“There was an explosion, so you went closer, instead of getting the hell out of there. That’s insane,” I say. I’ve thought a lot about what I would have done had I been there. And no matter where I put myself—on the thirtieth floor of the South Tower, on the second floor of the North Tower, or even blocks away—all I can imagine is running. That’s how it looks in my mind: like something in a rearview mirror. Something happening behind my back.

“Epic,” Jack says.

“That’s how I’m wired,” Vic says, all super cool and casual. He’s probably in his late fifties, has a shaved bald head and pouchy eyes. He wears a denim shirt cuffed at the elbows and tucked into stylish, faded blue jeans. He’s handsome, Jack whispered when we first walked in, but I don’t see it. Jack tends to confuse swagger with good looks. “My instinct is to document, and I will put myself wherever I need to be to do it. I couldn’t not take pictures. The world needed to see what I was seeing.”

“Do you happen to know anything about any of the other people in the photograph? Like the guy in the blue Michigan hat, for example?” I ask, and Jack sneeze-mumbles, “Not your dad,” low enough that Vic can’t hear.

Jack has always thought this whole thing was a bad idea. Or a stupid one. He might be right, but it’s too late now.

“Nah. My job is to take the pictures. That’s all. I thought it was what our country needed at the time. Hope. Of course, I didn’t know that was her name! I mean, it was all so fortuitous in its own bizarre way,” Vic says. With his nah, the disappointment settles across my ribs like a blanket.

“Hope is actually her middle name,” Jack says.

“Still. People liked that. A shorthand sentimentality. Simplifies things,” Vic says. “Also the picture totally followed something photographers live by: the rule of thirds.”

“What’s that?” Jack asks.

“It comes from painting during the Renaissance originally. The idea is that the background of the picture tells a story, and you want your viewer’s eyes to roam over the entire canvas. So the focal point should never be the middle. The image should be broken down into thirds, both horizontally and vertically, and the most important parts line up along the resulting axes. Here, look. Baby Hope proves the rule of thirds,” Vic says, and points to a framed version he has hanging on his wall.

He traces lines to turn the picture into a grid and demonstrates how Abbi isn’t in the center but along the right axis. If you had asked me before this minute, I would have sworn she was smack-dab in the middle.

“There’s a rule of thirds in comedy also,” I say.