The Effects Of Light Part 15

David had purchased a double plot for himself and Sarah, counting on his daughters growing to a ripe old age to decide about interment with partners of their own. But when Pru died, there'd been no surrounding plots available, so David had insisted on yielding his place to his daughter.

And so the headstones read, side by side: WOLFE WOLFE.

Prudence May Sarah Rose Beloved Daughter Beloved Wife and Sister and Mother It all sounded so simple. Two distinct categories for each, and Myla was a partic.i.p.ant in the second category for both. She was what made Pru a sister and what made Sarah a mother.

Emma squatted before both graves and placed her hand on Pru's. Myla tried to listen to what she was saying. "And Jake says hi. I wish you could meet him. You have the exact same sense of humor. And I wish you could meet Myla's boyfriend, Samuel. I know you'd approve. I'm really glad she's back." Emma looked over her shoulder at Myla and smiled. "She looks great. I bet you can see her, and I bet you're really proud of her. So, okay. Well. I'm gonna go now. Send another cardinal my way if you want, just so I know you're listening." Emma put a potted flower on each grave and said apologetically to Myla as she stood up, "I never met your mother, so I never say much to her. I just tell her that we want you to come home, and if she can help at all, to send you in our direction. So maybe she listened." Emma pointed toward a tree where Samuel and Jane were standing. "I'll be right over there if you need me."

Myla was left alone with the stones. In her life as Kate Scott, whenever she'd imagined being here, at this cemetery, she'd always thought it would make her profoundly sad. But actually standing here, she was surprised to not feel much of anything. It was as if the place held no meaning. It was strange to hear Emma speaking so matter-of-factly about the reality of the graves. The stones, the actual ground, meant something to her; she relied on them as a place where she might speak to her friend and her friend's mother. They were loci of some kind of faith that the dead were listening, and though Myla knew most of the world believed in something similar, such a concept had always been foreign to her.

She looked at the two names on the headstones, traced them with her eyes. "Hi, Pru," she said. "Hi, Mama. I'm back. I'm finally back." She squatted down and put her hands on the feet of both graves. "I know you're not really here, but I guess I'm supposed to think you are. So I'm just going to try to go with it. I've been reading David's book, and I'm finally getting a glimpse into how much he knew about the way the world is built. I wish you guys could see it." The gra.s.s was cool and wet underneath her hands. The odd thing about graves was you could sit there for hours, or you could simply visit for five minutes. It didn't matter all that much.

"I love you," she said. "I'm doing much better than I was. I'll come visit again much sooner." She rose and went toward the living. They joined her and trekked to the opposite end of the lawn, where, years before, Jane and Steve had found a plot after much wrangling with the manager of the cemetery. Myla remembered Steve on the phone demanding to speak to someone's boss. At that point all she'd felt was a need to blame them. But now she could see that they'd been extraordinary in their handling of David's death. Though she'd turned them away, they'd kept their hands open.

David's grave was cut into a slope. Jane and Emma kept their distance, Emma urging the last pot of geraniums into Samuel's hands. Samuel joined Myla at the headstone. The words on the headstone had been chosen by Jane and Steve, after Myla had told them repeatedly that she "didn't care about that bulls.h.i.+t." So David's stone read differently from Sarah's and Pru's: WOLFE.

David Smithson Extraordinary Father, Brilliant Scholar, Remarkable Friend Myla knew that David would have been embarra.s.sed by such glowing reviews, but she had to admit it had helped with the media. At the time, the photograph of his headstone had appeared on more than one magazine cover, raising the content of conversation in American households to include at least some suggestion that David Smithson Wolfe had been a good father. His death had elevated him to a position of pity in the eyes of the public. But Myla had wanted, and wanted now, as she looked down at his small patch of earth, something more for him. Wanted to award him what he deserved, in his own right.

She leaned down. "I'm reading your book," she said. "Your mind." She shook her head. "G.o.d, I wish I'd known your mind when I had the chance to know you. I wish I'd known what you thought about this world." She used her fingernail to clear some moss from the curve of the first S in his middle name. "I'm back. I'm back and I'm getting better."

She stood. She'd said what there was to say. It didn't make her sad to be here, but it didn't make her happy. She wanted to be back in the car, talking about the book with her family. Samuel was weeding the edge of the headstone. He looked up at her, surprised at her quickness.

"I'm ready to go," she said.

And they went.

RUTH AND I RETURN TO THE stream where we used to go to all the time with Myla, the one that has a lagoon if you walk far enough. It's the first time I've been here without Myla, and I miss her, but not just because I have to carry the film coolers all by myself. I asked if she wanted to come along, and she almost said yes, I could see it. But then she remembered she had plans with her friends and told me she hoped I had a good time. So Ruth and I came here alone.

It's sunny in this little patch of water, and I stand in between two big rocks, and Ruth starts taking pictures. It doesn't feel right this way, to be here without Myla, even though it's beautiful and warm and I can't wait to go swimming in the deepest part of the water.

Ruth notices I'm distracted. She asks, "What's wrong?" And I say nothing. I don't want her to feel bad, but I can't lie.

Then she stands up from underneath her dark-cloth and says, "Come here."

"What?" I ask.

"Come here." So I come. And she has me stand next to her to look at the outside world the way she sees it. It's different from over here. When I was little, I used to try to identify everything through the gla.s.s; now I want to loosen my seeing. It's all smudges of colors and lines, circles and ripples of light in the water, the curve of branches echoing the curves in the clouds. Color. I squint and notice the light and dark, the shadows from the boulders that hint down on the river, and the s.h.i.+mmer from the water that glimmers on the boulders in turn. I love the way it's almost too much. So much to see. And then she says it. The thing I've been wanting her to say. "Take a picture," she says.

We move under the dark-cloth together. Together we look at the upside-down world, smaller and more manageable in this darkness. She can tell I'm afraid I might do something wrong. She says, "There's no one I'd rather trust with this camera."

"But I'm just a kid," I say.

"You're more mature at eleven than most people ever are. I trust you. Take a picture."

So I act like a photographer. I say, "I need a subject."

Ruth smiles. "Uh-oh. The torturer becomes the victim."

"Get out there," I say, and so she helps me do a light reading and reminds me how to focus the lens and how to c.o.c.k the b.u.t.ton that makes the shutter work. She goes and stands out where I was standing, and I move back and forth between the front of the camera and the back, trying to remember all the different things to do as I've seen her do them all these years. Ruth gives me little hints, but she lets me fix it on my own.

Then I tell her I'm ready. I go to the cooler and get a film holder from the front, with the tab pushed up, so I know it's unexposed. And then I close the lens and slip the holder into the back of the camera, and I pull out the slide. I notice Ruth standing there, and I see she's not comfortable standing there, and it's something I never even imagined. So right before I take the picture, I say, "Say cheese," and that makes her laugh.

Afterward, she comes over to me and says, "William Henry Fox Talbot, who invented the photograph, called it 'The Pencil of Nature.'" It seems like the perfect thing to say right then, to comfort me, because it sounds like something Myla would know. I need someone to tell me I can see the world and make it look my own way. I look out at the world from this perspective, and it's wide and wild and lovely. I want to see it this way from now on. And then we take more pictures.

THEY WERE IN THE CAR AGAIN. This time just the two of them. Samuel turned on the radio, and they listened to oldie fading into oldie, until the signal faded as they ventured first east and then up the mountain. It was early morning. Myla had fretted about leaving Emma, but Jane a.s.sured her that left to her own devices, Emma would sleep until noon. Jane had practically pushed them out the door, unable to hide her relief that Myla and Samuel seemed to be thriving.

Myla slowed down, trying to make out the small unmarked road to turn onto. It had been fifteen years or so since she'd been here, but she thought Samuel would appreciate the gesture. She'd told him she was going to be honest, and that honesty had to include her past, the life she'd left behind. This place was also incredibly beautiful, and she wanted him to see it.

"Is this where those pictures of the lake were taken? You know, the one of you in the water, with your arms spread out on either side of you, and your hands resting on it. And what about the photograph of Pru standing on the other side of the lake?"

"Those were taken at Elk Lake. It's a four-hour drive from here, down by the town of Bend, on Mount Bachelor. No, this is where that picture of us was taken . . . you may have never seen it, actually. I don't know if it was ever published. But it's me in the foreground, looking, I don't know, sullen and fifteen. And Pru on a rock behind me, crouching."

"She's this bright ball of light in the background?"

"Yeah. That's the one. It was taken here. If I can ever find where 'here' is." She steered the car down the gravel road, and eventually into a small dusty parking area.

As they walked down the path, Myla recognized its details. Her conscious mind had forgotten the path's idiosyncrasies, but she walked down it often in her dreams. First she glimpsed the stream, and then it curved into full view, bringing both its glimmer and its gurgle. Here was the boulder on which she and Ruth and Pru had taken their water breaks as they made their way down the path. As Myla walked, her back remembered the excruciating weight of Ruth's gear: the coolers filled with film holders, the backpack filled with reflectors and the lens. Everything they'd needed had to be carried in.

"Just up here," she said, and Samuel stepped aside to let her pa.s.s. They walked up the small hill, and then below them opened the lagoon, or the ravine, or whatever it was. Myla felt a small tremor of again being fifteen, when her mind had been looser. She didn't care what it was called. She didn't care how they'd gotten here. She simply longed to slip off her clothes and dip herself in the water, to cool herself after their hike.

She took off her shoes, stepping onto the smooth stones lining the stream bank, and then into the stream itself. The water was a shock, melted snow that ached her arches. And still she stood there, numbing her feet, looking at the rock where Pru had crouched all those years ago. "Why do I keep moving?" she asked, forgetting even Samuel.

But he was there. He'd taken off his shoes too. He was standing beside her.

"All I want to do is drive," she said. "All I want to do is walk. This is the first place I've felt I could stand still. And even here I want to swim."

"Maybe you think that if you move fast enough, or far enough, you'll stumble across the answer. Maybe that's why you're racing through your father's book."

"Yeah," she said, "but I don't want the journey to be over." She couldn't feel her feet anymore, and when she looked down at her toes, layered underwater, she barely knew they belonged to her. "Have you reached the stuff about Rubens and Rembrandt yet? You know, their work with nudes? It's in the second section."

He cleared his throat and looked out across the river.

"What?" she asked after a second.

"I just-" He looked at her. "I don't want you to take this the wrong way. I'm glad you're reading David's book, and I'm glad you love it. But it seems to be consuming you. I mean, I'm as intrigued by his ideas and theories as you are. But after all, that is what they are: just theories. I hate seeing you get diverted from your own search for the truth about your past-"

"I don't know what you mean," said Myla, folding her arms around herself. "What do you mean by that?"

He stepped closer to her and tried to put his hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. "Myla," he said. "Please listen to me the way I listened to you at the Hillcrest Hotel the other day. Please?"

She nodded, silent, looking out across the water and not at him.

"I think I need to get at this another way," he said. "So humor me while I try to get my bearings. I've been thinking a lot about what you did and what you said when we were together at the Hillcrest. And I agree with a lot of it. I've read all sorts of stuff about Ruth's photographs. There are some people who look at the pictures of you and Pru and see innocent little girls who've been put in a precarious spot by the adult capturing their image. Then there are others who look at you two and see girls who're worldly, who know a thing or two, who might even have been tempting something bad. The other night you showed me that both of these opinions are irrelevant. They're irrelevant if you believe that every single human being, no matter their age, gets to be in charge of their own body. I have no doubt that was what your father and Ruth and you girls all believed. And I admire that belief, because it's so simple. But it's also something we as a culture seem to have completely disregarded. We don't think of that as a basic human right. We think of it as out of left field."

He cleared his throat. "But I'm a man who wants to protect children. Just as I want to protect that tree over there. I don't want anything to hurt it, and I don't want anything to hurt you."

"We can talk about this if you want to," she said. "We can really talk about it."

"I don't want this to be a fight," he replied. "I'm trying to get to the bottom of what we both believe. I think we can agree to disagree."

"But it isn't even about that, Samuel," she said, her voice loud in the cathedral of trees. "You said yourself that you don't think there's anything erotic about the photographs of Pru and me. And yet you want to protect us. Why do you think you have to?"

"Well, because someone else might look at those pictures and misinterpret them. Like the man who-"

Myla put up her hand and silenced Samuel. She wasn't going to let him say what she knew was coming next. "No," she said. "I know you're a good man. I know you want to protect children. But such 'protection,' the kind that labels some art as safe and other art as potentially dangerous, is a subtle, dark form of censors.h.i.+p. The potentially dangerous art gets put into a dark room, and everyone who pa.s.ses that dark room knows there's something bad inside. Pa.s.sersby don't get any chance to see the art for themselves, don't get to figure out what they believe on their own. Someone, you, who wants to protect children, has made the decision for them."

Samuel lifted one foot and swooped it back and forth in the water. "That's a good point," he said, raising an eyebrow. He shook his head. "It's just so much to think about. It's hard to find the right words."

This was something they could agree on. "I know what you mean," she said. She let herself smile at the surprise on his face. "I do. I don't have the language to talk about this huge cultural controversy surrounding my baby sister's life and death. And it seems to me that to bring speakable words into the conversation about the photographs is to destroy the conversation itself. The pictures have their own language: the language of the visual. That language is undeniable. It doesn't lie. And I can't even describe that, because it's too essential. It's too embedded in me.

"It's like when I began reading about sightings of the Virgin Mary. I knew I couldn't write a book about the sightings if I didn't believe the sincerity of the people who'd experienced them. And so I read account after account, looking for truth. And do you know what convinced me? The blue. Just knowing that when Mary came, everyone saw her blue robes. No one who'd seen her could describe the color of her blue accurately, and that confirmed it for me further. Everyone was seeing a color that didn't exist in our world. It was the color of truth."

She looked down at the clear water rus.h.i.+ng over her feet. She breathed in. She looked up at the blue sky above them, tossing clouds toward the mountain. Then she remembered. "But wait a sec. You had a point to make, didn't you? We were headed somewhere before we got diverted by this never-ending debate about the photographs."

"Yeah," said Samuel, smiling. "I did. But I don't want it to offend you."

"I know I get huffy," she said. "I'm sorry I get so defensive. I've just spent a lot of time having to protect my father's decisions."

"Funny. That's what I want to ask you about."

"Okay," she said. "Ask away."

"Tell me why you're so eager to read David's book."

"Because," she said, shrugging. "What else would I do? It's all I have left of him. I need to know what he was thinking. I need to know what mattered to him."

"Exactly." Samuel nodded. "But I don't think you're going to find out what you need to know by reading the book. I think you're asking the wrong question."

"And what, pray tell, is the right question, Professor Blake?" Myla tried to make the teasing in her voice obvious, but for a moment she thought he was offended.

Then he stepped toward her. He put his hand back on her shoulder. He squeezed her there, and his palm was warm through her sweats.h.i.+rt. "What you need to know is not so much what David was thinking about art, but what he was thinking about the photographs of you and Pru. Your dad loved you, adored you, never would have done anything to hurt you. But what did the pictures mean to him? Why were they so important? It can't just have been only because they were important to you girls and Ruth. There was something about them that mattered to him. And I don't think his ma.n.u.script is going to tell you why."

Myla searched Samuel's face. "But how am I supposed to answer that question? All I have left of him is his book. He's dead, Samuel."

"I know," he said. "I know. But I think you have more of the answer inside of you than you think." He pulled her to him, and his breath was warm against her. "You've got a lot more inside than you think," he said. She closed her eyes and smelled the clean air.

WHEN HELAINE FIRST WALKS into the house, she hasn't seen Myla's hair yet. I can tell when she sees it that David hasn't warned her and she's mad. But she hides it under her smile. "Why, Myla, what a change!" She whisks off her coat and hangs it in the coat closet. She always uses the coat closet, ignoring all the coats that sleep on the floor in the closet's general direction.

Now at dinner, one of Helaine's long-chewed meals, she asks Myla if the dye job's permanent. She asks in a way that isn't really asking anything. She's asking David if he thinks he's a good parent.

Myla rolls her eyes. "It's Manic Panic."

"Oh my, what's that?"

Myla looks at her for a while. "The name of the company that makes the dye. It stays in for a month or something." Then Myla stands up to clear the plates. I help her. I want to get away from Helaine's eyes.

After we're done clearing, we only have the choice to go upstairs. Otherwise we'll have to watch TV all together or something. So we end up in Myla's room. She has Christmas lights up around the ceiling, so it's all glowy in there. I sit on the bed, and she throws stuff off her chair and sits there and looks at me. She turns on music, kind of rocky, but also quiet. "Lord," she says. "That woman." The way she says "that woman" makes me laugh. I look around her room. There are posters on the walls, and ripped-out pages from magazines. But bits of the room are the same as they've always been, especially the wallpaper, which has tiny blue bows on it. The room smells like Myla too. Even under all the new parts, it's familiar with her.

Myla looks at me and suddenly seems excited. "I have an idea," she says. "How about you do my makeup?"

I look at her like she's crazy. I don't know anything about putting on makeup, and I tell her so.

"That's stupid," she says. "Of course you know about makeup, because you know about painting. It doesn't matter what we end up looking like. All my friends ditched me tonight, anyway. Let's just paint our faces. For fun." She goes to her desk and opens it up and pulls out handfuls of eyeshadows and blushes and powders and lipsticks.

"Where'd you get these?" I ask.

"Around," she said. "When Ruth gets bored with a color, she gives me her leftovers. And if you buy something at the beauty counter at Nordstrom, sometimes they give you freebies." I want to ask her when was the last time she bought something at a beauty counter, but I don't want her to get grumpy. So I tell her to sit back down, and we take the makeup over to the bed and spread it out.

It is kind of like painting. At first her face is blank, plain. I think it's beautiful, but I know that's not what makeup is about. Myla can tell I don't know what to do, so she grabs an eyeshadow and says, "Dip your finger in it and rub it around. And then put some on my eyelid."

It's a blue, and I start with that, and then I layer a green over it and above it. Pretty soon I like the feel of smoothing the colors over her skin. I add some red to her cheeks, and then she gives me eyeliner and I draw Egyptian eyes for her. She puts a mustache on me, and lipstick, and mascara. We talk about all sorts of things, like my painting, and where she thinks she wants to go to college, and whether we think David and Helaine will get married. We both hope they won't. After a while, we get tired and move over to the bed. We lie on our sides, and the glowing lights make us drowsy.

Myla puts her arm around my stomach and holds me to her. It's warm. I wake up sometime later and she's gone. But the lights are out, and her pillow smells like her hair. When I wake up the next morning, she's there again, her face a smudge of colors that I painted. Like we never stopped being here together.

chapter seventeen.

emma asked, "Are you sure you want to do this? We don't have to."

"I know," said Myla. "But I think it's a good idea."

Jane was fixing Emma a snack-pack for her drive back down to California, and Myla could tell she was eavesdropping and pleased. Jane turned and said, "Emma, your laundry's in a basket by the front door. Give Jake a big hug. And you're going to leave right after this errand, right? I don't want you to get caught in traffic." She looked back and forth between their faces, and Myla could tell she was about to cry. "It's so good to have you both in this house," she said.

Emma put her arms around her mother. "I love you, Mom. Have a great day at work. I'll see you soon." Myla recognized Emma's desire to comfort her mother, but a bit of Steve also came through, the unindulgent part of him. It seemed Emma had little patience with Jane's sentimental streak.

After Jane left, Samuel descended from his shower, smelling fresh. Myla felt herself drawn to him, and she blushed when Emma rolled her eyes and said, "Get a room, people."

"Let's go," said Myla. "We've been waiting."

Samuel put his hands on Myla's shoulders. "I'm going to let you two do this one on your own," he said.

And then she and Emma were alone in the car heading toward Myla's childhood home. Myla remembered hearing kids from college talk about growing up in suburbia, but their depictions of overwhelming blandness had been far from her experience. For one thing, her neighborhood was one of the first of its kind, designed in the 1930s, before contractors got greedy. The streets curved and swayed, wide like avenues, and the houses-sweet wooden bungalows-were positioned on large lots. There were trees, broad and arching over the lanes, making each road lush.

When they drove up the intersecting street, Myla knew what the air should smell like. They pa.s.sed under the wide branches of the old oak perched on the corner. It was ancient, had done all its growing even before she was a child, which was an odd comfort. No change there. Perhaps not as much time had pa.s.sed as she believed. Then she clicked on the blinker and they turned left.

The house was two lots in, on the right. It nestled on the top of the hill, so she had to strain through the trees to see it, but there it was, all right. Something in her chest let go. She could breathe again, slowly. She pulled up in front and turned off the engine. She opened her door and stood up to see.

The house was the wrong color. The new people had painted it gray. Green shutters. Green trim. Myla envisioned what the house had looked like when she and Pru and David had lived here: a b.u.t.tercream yellow, with white trim. She'd been afraid that just one touch of memory while standing here in front of this house would be enough to send her over the edge. Afraid the past might consume her.

She held her breath, but no wave of sorrow loomed. She looked at her old home and still held on to the present. What she felt, surprisingly, was no more than nostalgia. She looked at the house and thought: "Living in this house happened ages ago." She'd left this house long before she'd really left it. Looking up at her childhood home, she remembered that it had always felt like David's, his own place where he opened doors and typed papers and turned lamps off and on. When she was a young child, that life had tantalized her; she'd sneak downstairs in the night just to make sure he'd turned off the lights she'd left on for him. But something had changed in her now, something simple: she'd grown up. She would have abandoned this house anyway. And that was the natural thing to do; it was what Emma and Samuel and everyone else who'd grown up had done. They'd left home.

Myla felt her limbs buzzing in relief; they'd braced themselves for sorrow, but it hadn't come. Emma pointed out places they remembered: the rhododendron bush where she and Pru, and later, Emma and Pru, had built their forts. The swings, on which she and Pru had draped themselves for hours. The roses in the side yard that David had tended methodically. Myla counted the steps that ran up through the middle of the driveway, and realized for the first time how strange it was to have grown up thinking that a driveway with steps in the middle was normal.

Emma was behind her. "I think it's good for you. Just to see it's still standing."