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Broken Things
Jodi Picoult
When I was a kid, it seemed to me that everyone knew my mother better than I did.
That’s a Hannah O’Toole, people would say, pointing at one of her famous photographs, reprinted in a book or framed on a museum wall.
On television, in a Jeopardy! clue: This American is the only woman to win both an International Photography Award and a Pulitzer.
Who is Hannah O’Toole?, Alex.
My mother was an icon, a legend who used her visual arts skills to document catastrophes and suffering so that those who saw her pictures from their safe, first-world homes could find the empathy （and cash） to mend the other parts of the world. She was most often described as if her Leica was a natural extension of her body, an adaptation to a limb that somehow gave her the superpowers of insight and recording. What people didn’t see was what happened when she put that camera down. Without that prosthetic, she faltered.
My father was a conservator, an artist who colored within someone else’s lines. Unlike my mother, who created art, he claimed he didn’t have the eye to tell his own story. Instead, he meticulously painted over chipped plaster on the frescoed ceilings of Newport mansions; he used Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste to mend tears in watercolor paper; he repaired water damage and smoke damage and insect damage to the canvases of Old Masters. His jobs lasted from months to years, depending on who was hiring him and how deep the wounds he was repairing. He was also the one who patched together the ceramic pig I made at summer camp when it fell off my dresser; who could stitch an invisible seam when my favorite dress got caught on a fence and tore; who could rewire the old Tinker Bell lamp we found at a thrift store so that it worked again. He could fix anything that was broken.
Except, maybe, my mother.
In April 2000, just before I was about to turn ten years old, my mother was headed off on assignment, shooting pictures of a nine-month drought in Ochelata, Oklahoma, to accompany a Washington Post feature on climate change. She had been away for more of my birthdays than she had been present. In fact, I probably would have been surprised had she rearranged her work schedule to be home in New York City with us.
The truth was, I had grown accustomed to my mother missing huge chunks of my life—both the ordinary ones and the milestones. When I was in first grade and parents had to sign up to bring a snack for the whole class each Friday, my father was the only dad who came in. When everyone else had a mother at the Nutcracker recital last Christmas, I did not. Even Alistair’s mother, who was on a television show about detectives, managed to come in and talk about her work during Career Day. My mom was in Myanmar.
For this reason, or maybe because I was a masochist at heart, I clung to her like a shadow when she was home, counting down silently the moments before she went away again. This time, I sat cross-legged on her bed, doing a word search puzzle while she packed. She had a gift for filling every square inch of her carry-on suitcase efficiently; I suppose that’s what comes of practice. “It hasn’t rained in Oklahoma in eight months,” she told me.
“Oklahoma,” I repeated. “That’s the one that looks like a pot with a handle.” We had been doing timed quizzes in school, where we had to fill in the names of states on an empty map of the United States. The square ones all looked the same to me, but Oklahoma I could find easily.
“I guess it does,” she considered. “Anyway, that’s why I’m going there. To shoot a drought.”
“How do you take pictures of no rain?”
“You take pictures of what happens in its absence,” she said. “How the land is changed.”
She leaned across me to pick up her hairbrush and jam it into the spine of her suitcase. She smelled like lavender. Even now, years later, when I catch a whiff of that scent, I look for her. Her chin paused, notched over my shoulder, looking down at the word search. “I’m missing one,” I told her.
She knew that I would not be able to go to sleep until I finished it, crossing off each word on the list neatly and decisively. She pointed to a reverse diagonal, the last word in the puzzle. “SUNBATHE,” she traced, letter by letter. “People always forget to look in that direction.”
I circled the word with my red pen and crossed it off the list. My mother folded up the clamshell of her suitcase.
“Will the drought ever end? In Oklahoma?”
With a grunt, she zipped it shut. “Of course, Diana,” she told me. “Nothing lasts forever.”