The Girl Who Kept Shooting

The parking lot

I left at seven the next morning, before anyone else was up but Bridget. She was sitting on the deck rail with her knees pulled up, watching the sun come up over the water.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Charleston,” I said. “I’ll be back by lunch.”

She looked at me, and she knew. She did not ask anything else. She just nodded and turned back to the water.

It is an hour and ten minutes from Edisto to the Best Buy on Rivers Avenue in North Charleston. Highway 174 through the marsh, the live oaks with moss hanging down, the farm stands with boiled peanuts and tomatoes. I cried most of the way there.

I sat in the parking lot for ten minutes before I went in. The asphalt was already hot. A man in a truck next to me was eating a sausage biscuit with the windows down and the radio on a gospel station.

Inside, a young man named Marcus helped me. I told him I needed a camera a teenager could take into the ocean. A real camera, not a toy. He walked me straight to the case.

It was an Olympus Tough, the TG-7. Waterproof to fifty feet, shockproof if you dropped it, crushproof if you sat on it. It was five hundred and forty-nine dollars plus tax.

I put Mama’s four hundred on the counter and the rest on my card. Marcus asked if it was a gift. I told him it was a replacement. He did not ask for what.

I came back out into that hot parking lot and sat in my car with the bag on my lap, and I thought about my daughter sitting on that deck rail with nothing in her hands.

What Bridget did with it

I gave it to her on the beach, not in the house. I walked down to where she was sitting in the sand and set the box next to her without a word.

She opened it slowly. She took the camera out and turned it over in her hands. She read every word on the side, out loud, like she was reading a letter.

“Waterproof to fifty feet,” she said. Then she looked up at me. “Mom, this is too much.”

“It’s from your grandmother,” I said. “Mostly. I just drove.”

She put the strap around her neck. Then she stood up, walked straight down to the water, and waded in up to her waist in her shorts and her T-shirt, holding that camera under the surface.

I watched her from the beach. Every few minutes she would come up out of a wave laughing and look at the screen. Then she would go right back under.

She shot all week. I mean all of it, from the first light to the last. I have never seen anybody so busy.

She got up at five-thirty to catch the shrimp boats coming in to Big Bay Creek with the gulls screaming behind them. She shot pelicans in a line over the breakers, so low their wings nearly touched the water.

She shot her grandmother asleep in a beach chair under the umbrella with a paperback open on her chest. She shot her little brother, Gideon, burying himself up to the neck. She shot the ghost crabs at night with a flashlight.

She shot her cousin Katie, Eldon’s daughter, who was twenty-three and working at a bank in Greenwood. Katie was laughing in the surf, her hair stuck to her face, holding a boogie board over her head.

And she never once pointed that camera at Eldon.

Not once. Not when he was frying fish behind the house. Not when he was walking the waterline in the evening in that navy polo. She just turned and found something else to shoot.