For You I Will
Donna Hill
Contents
The air over Sag Harbor was charged and ready to joust with the storm that loomed on the horizon. A blanket of gray and white hung over the treetops and roofs of the homes that dotted the landscape. The residents of Sag Harbor were accustomed to the sudden spring storms and after two years away from the frenetic pace of New York City, Dr. Kai Randall had gotten used to them, as well. So well in fact that she no longer closed herself inside her quaint home during these outbursts but welcomed them, capturing nature’s power from behind the lens of her camera.
For Kai, picking up stakes and leaving New York Presbyterian Hospital wasn’t a matter of a simple getaway; it was to save her own sanity. The bureaucratic pressure, the fourteen-hour days, and being a constant witness to pain and suffering had begun to take its toll on her physical and mental well-being. And after ten years on the front lines as chief of the E.R., she packed her stethoscope, her skills as a surgeon and returned to her ancestral home on Sag Harbor in the neighborhood known as Azurest. Kai’s great-great-grandfather Isaiah Randall had fought side-by-side with Warren M. Cuffee, a soldier in the black regiment of the Union Army who championed the liberation of blacks from slavery. Isaiah built his home on Azurest when he married Kai Seneca, a Native American who was said to have stolen Isaiah’s heart with one look from her luminous black eyes. Decades later, Kai was named after her great-great-grandmother whose name means “willow tree.”
Kai had visited the two-story family home with the wraparound porch that faced the water off and on during her childhood and fewer than a dozen times as an adult. Her hectic schedule didn’t allow for much downtime. And even then, she could never be too far away from the hospital in the event of an emergency. Finally deciding she needed a better quality of life, Kai sold her condo on the Upper East Side, traded in her Lexus for a Ford Explorer, her scrubs for jeans and flip-flops, and planted new roots in Sag Harbor Village. It took her a while to grow accustomed to the quiet and the slower pace, to realize that businesses closed at dusk and all the residents knew each other by first name and they didn’t text all day long but actually had conversations and made phone calls.
Now, more than two years later, Kai Randall was a fixture in Sag Harbor Village. With the urging of Melanie and her own restless need to “fix things,” Kai had converted her detached garage into a small medical office, complete with state-of-the-art equipment, from X-ray machines to nebulizers to sonogram machines. She ran the place herself. There wasn’t much need for a staff. Actually, most of her doctoring was done in house calls. That was Melanie’s doing as well. She referred all of her clients, family and guests to Kai, who was more than happy to pay them a visit when they were under the weather.
It was a good life. Easy. And for the first time in longer than she could remember, she was able to pursue her other passion of photography. She took real pictures, the old-fashioned way, and developed them herself in the attic that she had converted into a darkroom. She’d even donated a few to the Grenning Gallery in town, and Desiree Armstrong, a renowned artist in her own right, had suggested that Kai put up a show of her own.
But Kai hadn’t left the demands of the big city to get caught up in the demands of a small town. She liked things the way they were. No complications. No deadlines. No demands on her time or ability. Besides, most of the pictures that she took were of the people in the Village. She couldn’t begin to imagine the headache that would come as a result of needing people’s permissions to use their images. No thanks. Life was fine just the way it was.
Kai stood in the archway of her front door, her eyes lifted to the darkening sky. She estimated that she had an hour, maybe two, before the rains came. She hurried up to her attic studio and gathered up her equipment.
It was a great day for shooting. While many photographers preferred sunshine and blue heavens, Kai did some of her best work during storms and overcast skies, capturing scenes in stark black and white juxtaposed against the silhouettes of buildings or crashing waves. Today was one of those days.
She