The hand went up, his thumb smoothing my bangs across my forehead, revealing my eyes, smoothing my hair back behind one ear and then leaving his hand there while I fell asleep, my cheek against his warm palm. One of the few ways I could ever fall asleep in the camper, with the strange noises that seemed as if they were right on the other side of the wall and the way it would bounce gently in the wind, no shocks left, bald wheels and a rusty hitch lending it all the credibility it was ever going to have.
Cole called it the have-not years. Bridget's hedonism. Ironic because Cole and I never had two nickels to rub together until Batman saw one of Cole's photographs of me and introduced him to people who made a sport out of art, and Cole was exposed to enough high-profile, wealthy people that suddenly his work was in such demand he couldn't keep up and he became an overnight success in such an incredibly strange and esoteric niche that life flew by in an instant and suddenly we were moving and then we were drowning in Cole's madness and the pressure was too much for him and for every dollar they gave him he broke off a piece of his soul and handed it, crumbling, back to them.
Batman had opened the floodgates but he had no idea that blessings are curses too. He was too busy, anyway. When he wasn't flying in and out of town, he was pretending he didn't need to check up on me more than once a year by having Caleb do it on his behalf, only Caleb fed him a steady stream of lies and Batman finally cut him out of the picture and they became adversaries, both siding with Cole, both jockeying for credit for Cole's success.
Cole's success belonged to Cole and Cole alone because whatever Cole saw through his viewfinder he could transfer to print and it stunned me to a fault. It's why I laugh when I look at the Ferris wheel picture Lochlan took and cry when I see the candids that Sam took of me at the first Mother's Day brunch that Jacob held at the church. They can't do with a camera what Cole could do and that's okay because they have other equally significant gifts.
My hedonism was an invention. I was simply a girl afraid of the dark and I knew where to go to feel safer.
