Free Listen! (9780062213358) by Stephanie S. Tolan Page A

remember. Her mother would pull the canoe against his trunk, touch him, talk to him.
    Charley picks up the book on top of the stack, opens it, and leafs through the pages. Like most of the books her mother took photographs for, this one has more pictures than words. Across from each photo is a short poem or a quotation. On the title page is the rest of the title quotation: “‘Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.’—St. Bernard of Clairvaux.”
    Charley looks at the cover photo again. Tree stands out against the green shrubs of the hillside, his trunk centered between the deep red of his autumn leaves above and their reflection in the water from which he grows. Survivor. How can a tree live in water more than seventy years and the human who loved and admired him vanish in an instant half a world away from home?
    Charley turns out the light and leaves the studio, carefully closing the door behind her. She shouldn’t have come, she thinks. But she takes the book with her.

12
Photographs
    C harley takes the book to her room and drops it on her bed. Then she stands, listening to the rain, aware of the emptiness around her, thinking about going back to her chair in the lake room, finding a funny movie to watch on television—a movie that will take her away from Eagle Lake, make her laugh. But she doesn’t go. The book, its doubled image of Tree in autumn, holds her like a magnet. Colleen Morgan, award-winning nature photographer. Where is she now? How can it be that her mother just isn’t anymore?
    Finally she settles onto the bed, fluffs her pillow behind her, switches on her reading light, and begins to turn the pages slowly, looking at the photographs, reading the quotations. Colleen Morgan might be gone, but her work, the last work she finished, is here.
    As often as Charley went into the woods with her mother while she was working, the pictures she took there were always a surprise. It was as though the camera saw a different world than Charley did. Small things got bigger. Or big things got smaller. Edges blurred in the mist, colors sharpened in the slant of late afternoon sun, shadows deepened, the sun sparked individual diamonds and streaks of brilliant light on the surface of the water where there had been only ripple and glitter.
    The stillness of the picture caught a moment that would have been different for Charley even if she had been sitting exactly where the camera was at exactly the same moment, looking at exactly the same thing. For her the bird would have moved its head, the leaf would have shifted in the wind, the spider would have walked along the strand of its web. She never understood how her mother could know what the camera would hold in place, how she even saw the image she wanted to catch. One of the photos in the book shows a cedar waxwing on a bare winter branch, leaning to place a dogwood berry into the beak of another cedar waxwing. How had she caught that moment? How had she even known to have her camera ready?
    It is a question Charley never thought to ask when her mother was there. She was too young to wonder then, too young to care about the work her mother did. She had expected her mother to be there, in her world, in her life, as long as she needed her.
    Now, this minute, Charley wants more than anything to ask her mother this question. How did she do what she did? That isn’t all she wants to know. She wants to know why. Why photography? Why nature?
    And why did she change her mind and go off to take pictures of the rainforest?
    Charley looks at the copyright date in the book. It came out after her mother was gone. This is the book Colleen Morgan was talking about, working on, finding quotations and choosing photos for, just before she left for Brazil. She never saw the finished book. Would she have been satisfied with it? Would she have liked it?
    Charley wonders which she chose first, the photos or the words. On