* * *
I’m still standing on the corner of Full Moon Lane like this—unraveled—when a bus pulls up to the stop ten yards away. Impulsively, I run to catch it and collapse into a seat on the top deck, resting my heavy head against the window.
I’ve no idea what route number this is, but it doesn’t matter. I used to do this all the time: take any bus at random and ride it across London, watching the city flow from neighborhood to neighborhood. Crossing the river transformed my town into an entirely different place, making me feel like I’d fallen down a rabbit hole.
My breath mists the window and I squeak my finger through it, writing:
DID YOU KNOW IT WAS FOREVER?
Then huff on the words and rub them out with my fist. Beyond the erased sentence, brittle sun shines on rapidly emptying trees. It’s six days until October, over three months since the goodbye letter fragmented our lives, and winter is sending out feelers. Stretching ahead are foggy mornings. Snow. Bare trees, icy sidewalks, empty skies. In a month it will be half term. Then Diwali, Bonfire Night, Advent, Hanukkah, Christmas. Niko’s birthday, then mine. New Year. Always.
Year after year after year, days will roll on and on. I will leave school, become an artist or fail, fall in love, travel and, ultimately, become a completely different person. And she will always be the same.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to survive each of these minutes without her.
If I so much as deadhead a rose or cut my hair or break up with the boyfriend she knew or go somewhere other than SCAD, I will change the world in some small, incremental way. I’ll make it into a place she won’t recognize and can’t come back to. She’ll never know about any of these new choices, and that is unacceptable to me.
By some cosmic coincidence, the bus route I’ve chosen is trundling around the outskirts of the SCAD campus. There’s my future.
I hunch down in my seat, turning my back on the buildings, and text Ash: Hey.
Three little dots appear, then nothing.
I swipe out of my texts and punch in Mum’s number, hoping against all odds and judgment she’ll answer, say, “Honey! I’m at the studio. Come on over, let’s open the kiln.”
But instead she climbs the stairs of the bus and sits next to me, dressed in the summer outfit she disappeared in. Smock bestrewn in ten thousand glaze colors, bare legs, yellow sandals, pink toenails. Clothes too cold for late September. I know, I know: Her clothes don’t matter, because she’s not coming back. But why is it so wrong to want her to?
No one answers the phone, but next to me, imaginary Mum says, “What’s up, Minnie?”
With the phone still pressed to my ear, I ask, “Why did you do it?”
She makes a game-show buzzing sound. “Wrong question. You should be asking … why did I think I could come back from that?”
“Okay, so why—?”
She leans her face in front of mine, rolling back her irises to show the whites of her eyes and waggling her tongue grotesquely, like a medieval lunatic. “Because I’m craaaazy. That’s what you believe, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” I mutter. The passenger ahead glances over their shoulder; I scowl back at them.
Then I hear Mum’s voice mail cut in, and her melodious voice sings in my ear—literally—ten times as real as the one in my imagination:
“This is Rachael Sloe—fast talker, fifth Beatle. Don’t let me down: For commissions, please contact my agent; we can work it out. For everything else, love me do.”
When it beeps, I croak: “If I’m as crazy as you are, what happens to me at the end of the story? After years of this—do I end up going over Beachy Head too?” Then I hang up, pressing both hands across my face, trying to hold in the howl of outrage that’s been building in me ever since the colors disappeared.
“That’s your question?” Mum shakes her head, peering over my hedgehogged body to press her face to the window. The bus is still noodling around SCAD, shadowed by its squat square buildings. They look like kilns.
“I noticed you haven’t applied yet,” she says. “How come? You’re a shoo-in.”
“Why are you so sure about that?” I mutter into my hands, squeezing my eyes shut.
“Duh, Minnie. Because you’re my daughter.”
“That’s the only reason?”
No reply. I peep through my fingers. Mum is swinging from the seat, ringing the bell, and dashing down the stairs. I leap up and follow her off the bus, trying to figure out why I’m imagining her all wrong. My mother was, is, a thousand things—suicidal, mad, gifted, obsessive, focused and vague all at once, messy, starlit, a terrible cook—but never cruel.
She endlessly encouraged us, right from when we were little kids and our portfolios were finger painting and potato printing, macaroni art and toilet paper roll angels on the Christmas tree. She would never tell me I could coast on being a Sloe: She wanted us to earn it, live and breathe it.
I’m no longer imagining her; I’m haunting myself.
When I step from the bus Mum is nowhere to be seen, and I’m a couple of streets from the studio, so I walk there and find the porcelain still splashed across the floor.
It looks like the sea roared its way up the Thames and threw a rave in here. The kind of wild party Emmy-Kate sneaks off to each night, where she kicks off her shoes and shakes out her hair.
I wish my sisters could see this.
Actually, Niko would flip her lid if I brought her here and it wasn’t cleaned up. But when I fetch the mop and bucket from the kitchenette, her coffee cup is back in the sink, filled with water. I close my eyes, gripping the edge of the counter, losing my stupid mind. Did I do that, or was she here?
Don’t go crazy, Minnie, I tell myself. At least, not yet. Not until you have some answers …
I need to talk to Mum. Need to hold her hand, hear her voice, be hugged by her, be told that everything is going to be okay. The unrequited want convulses through me.
I abandon the mop and try to invoke her, rubbing glycerin hand cream into my palms, hitting PLAY on the stereo. There’s a CD in there already and as the Beatles song “I Saw Her Standing There” rings out, I tie on one of her smocks over my dress, exchange my boots for her clogs, start the wheel spinning out of pure habit. The whole time, there’s a rat-a-tat-tat of fear and heartbreak breaking out all over my skin, because no visions of Mum appear. I don’t think I’m going to see her, not ever again, whatever I do.
Blown by the motion of the wheel, a scrap of paper goes fluttering across the floor. It’s Felix’s instructions on how to make porcelain. The only evidence that he and I once had a beginning. But I don’t want to make porcelain, or clay for that matter.
I want to think about the time Mum first decided to bring me here to the studio, the year after she returned to full-time art. It was the end of the Christmas holidays, a few days after my thirteenth birthday. We were all in the kitchen, going stir-crazy from being cooped up with weeks of rain—especially Emmy-Kate, who was practically bouncing off the walls.
“Dare me to go to the pool,” she challenged, making her signs supersized.
Niko shook her head. She was scissoring at a piece of paper, sending tiny flurries into the air. I watched them through a brain fog.
“Not on your own,” Mum told Emmy-Kate.
“Minnie, come with me?”
“I’ve got my period.” Truth. Not that it stopped me swimming—the fact that it was January stopped me swimming. But ever since getting my first period a few months earlier, I’d had these fuzzy moods. I was in one now—it felt like someone had switched my brain for molasses. My signs came out in slow motion.
“It’s going to be reeeaaally cold,” Emmy-Kate taunted. When no one answered, she threw her hands up with a “Whatever!” then stomped out into the garden under the angry winter sky. Through the window, she immediately came to life, jumping about on the sodden grass.
Niko dropped her scissors and announced, “I’m going to clean out Sal
vador Dalí’s hutch.” She clomped outside to boss Em about.
I put my head down on the table. My skull was so heavy, it seemed as if it should sink right through the wood. For no reason and every reason, I wanted to cry.
“Quick, while they’re all gone,” Mum hissed, her hand stroking my brow.
I tried to answer. But words weighed so much, and my mouth and hands didn’t move.
“Honey, when did you last wash your hair?” she asked, taking her hand from my head. “Never mind: I’ve been waiting for this moment. Minnie.” She hauled me upright like a sack of potatoes. “We’re going to the studio. You and me.”
This drew a word from me: “What?”
The Alpha Centauri gleam in her eye told me she’d throw me over her shoulder and drag me there if she had to. Also: seriously? She was taking me to the studio now? This was on par with announcing we were going to visit Aladdin’s cave or Disneyland. But in my sludgeville state, I couldn’t understand it.
When I thought about it later, I assumed she’d plucked the concept from the night sky like any other of her whims—buying Salvador Dalí, returning to art in the first place, painting the floorboards pink, befriending the Professor.
I missed the obvious. Mum hadn’t spied some latent ceramics ability I had, or singled me out as the heir to her talent. She was keeping an eye on me, keeping me close, studying my moods.
She saw the sinkholes in me before I did.
Almond
(An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)
Bisque-fired porcelain, not quite white yet. Marzipan. Flaked and toasted slivers on top of the perfect croissant from Felix. The pale, strained look on his face when I walked away from him.
CHAPTER 24
The Color of Shrouds
I race home from the studio through thick velvet air. The clouds seem close enough to brush against my skin, justifying my decision to skip school. (Again.) This is the kind of day made for lying on your back at the top of Meadow Park, swimming in the sky. But first, I’m going to ransack Mum’s room once and for all. Open the box, face up to her medical diagnosis, stop calling it sinkholes and starlight, determine why she dived into the sea. Summon her one last time and have a real conversation.
The house is empty. With Emmy-Kate still at school and Niko at SCAD, it’s desolate as dirt. The distinct unearthly absence of anything living or breathing—with apologies to Salvador Dalí, who emerges from under the sofa as I close the curtains against the Professor’s prying eyes. He—the rabbit, not our neighbor—hops slowly behind me as I wander from room to room, finally winding up in Mum’s doorway.
The emptiness is infinite. Niko hasn’t emptied the place, but she’s stripped the life from it. There are vacuum marks striping the rug, and the mirror shines spotlessly. Even Mum’s fingerprints have been wiped out. I open the wardrobe and gather her dresses and smocks into my arms, inhaling and inhaling and inhaling, but Niko has hung them with a lavender sachet and propped the window open, vanishing Mum’s scent.
Every day, she’s really, truly gone a little bit more.
I sink to my knees, peering under the bed. Salvador Dalí blinks back at me from the vacant space. The shoebox isn’t there. WTF?
“Mum?” My voice echoes, but she doesn’t show.
I stand up, unsure what to do, and my eye falls on the empty surface of the dressing table. When I open the bottom drawer, it’s filled with neatly rolled sweaters, wrapped in tissue paper and tucked beneath mothballs. No room for a box. I leave the drawer open, like a burglar, and pull out the middle one, then the top two. Nothing but her cosmetics and an almost-empty bowl of broken earrings.
I think about Emmy-Kate plundering Mum’s shoes, wearing her jewelry, smoking …
Back out in the hall, I peep through Emmy-Kate’s keyhole. Her window is wide open. Next to it is a huge canvas propped on an easel, covered in handprints. She really has been painting with her fingers. The door opens with a soft click.
Pact, schmact: Stepping over this threshold feels revelatory. I’m rediscovering my sister, like an art historian scraping back years and centuries of paint and varnish and dirt, breaking down these walls between us. No more secrets.
“No more secrets!” I yell out of the window, then remember the Professor working on his magnum opus next door, and duck back. When he doesn’t appear, I poke my head out into the morning again and breathe in whopping great lungfuls of the garden, my chest filling with the pine smell of the sun, as if Poets Corner has landed on the beach.
Then I turn to Emmy-Kate’s desk.
It has more in common with mine than Niko’s: The drawers are half-open, overflowing with dried-up felt-tips—minus their caps—train tickets, makeup, old birthday cards, candy wrappers, notepads, an empty vitamin bottle. I sift through it all, find nothing but glitter. The wardrobe reveals little except that most of Mum’s most glamorous clothes have migrated here. I bury my face in these sequined dresses too, but they now smell of Emmy-Kate—cherry-vanilla perfume and malevolence.
The medicine box isn’t hidden in any of the places you might expect, like under the bed or in the wardrobe. It’s not under a heap of shoes or in the rank-smelling laundry basket. But when I slide my hand under her mattress, my fingers land on something. I pull it out.
A condom packet.
Unused.
Oh my God.
I sweep my arm underneath the mattress again, as far as it will go, and retrieve more condoms, a foil packet of birth control. I think of all the times I saw Emmy-Kate creeping from the garden in a teeny-tiny dress, or sneaking a boy from her room, or blinking at me, desperate to talk—and I didn’t say a word to her.
But I’m totally out of my depth!
There’s no one to tell about the condoms and the pills. So I put them back under my baby sister’s mattress and burst out of her room like I’m being pursued by spiders, crash straight into Niko’s—ignoring the invisible sign on her door saying KEEP OUT, MINNIE—because if Emmy-Kate’s having underage sex, what the heck is Niko hiding?
My pulse drums in my ears. Niko’s bedroom is neat as ever. No dust bunnies or eight thousand half-drunk glasses of water or underwear on the floor here. Only dozens of candles, burnt to stumps. There are no clues, and no box—in light of the Emmy-Kate discovery, I’ve almost forgotten about the original purpose of my search.
Her chest of drawers reveals nothing but T-shirts, ironed and folded into stacks, headscarves wedged into neat triangles. A rail holds identikit dungarees. The desk drawer holds scissors and scalpels and knives, all safety-capped and bundled together with elastic bands. I brush them aside, and something shiny beneath them catches my eye.
It turns out to be a stack of glossy brochures for non-London art schools—the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford, Glasgow School of Art—and normal universities, faraway options like Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Edinburgh.
What the heck? Niko never told us she’d thought about applying anywhere but SCAD.
I never even knew it was an option. Going somewhere else. Not going to art school at all, studying English or history instead. There are artists who don’t have art degrees: Frida Kahlo, Basquiat, Yoko Ono … And she married a Beatle! I could go to—
I slam the drawer on the brochures and that thought simultaneously, stomach churning. Clench and unclench my fists, open the next one.
It holds a mystifying selection of religious and superstitious stuff. An actual rabbit’s foot—this, despite vegetarianism and love of Salvador Dalí; a plastic light-up Jesus figurine; rosaries; a maneki-neko lucky cat; joss sticks; a tiny Ganesh idol. This is stuff I’d expect to see in the Professor’s home office, not here.
Turns out, I don’t know either of my sisters half as well as I thought.
The next drawer proves it. It’s overflowing with watercolor paper, pages fluttering out to the floor.
Instead of being cut into pieces, the paper is covered in words. Niko’s handwriting, in ordinary ink pen, front and back, upside-down an
d all over. Inky lines crisscross each other, scrawled up the margins. Niko is writing with
Bone-chilling fragments leap out at me: Mum and SCAD and the dark is not what I am afraid of and coffin is the smallest word.
I’m standing in her room, but in my mind, I see her at the kitchen table, scribbling these frantic essays, flipping shut the pad whenever I walk in. I see her locked in this solitary room for hours, writing inexplicable Sylvia Plath–meets–e. e. cummings poetry with her eyes closed and all these candles aglow. Forget Emmy-Kate’s condoms—this is definitely not what I expected.
I can’t be in the house for another minute. Not with the walls closing in on me, secrets rattling like skeletons. No longer caring about the pact, I take Niko’s poems from the drawer, gathering them in my arms and racing to the Rainbow Series I, where I coil like a snake under my favorite bubble, and start reading. Start making my way home to my sister.
Hello
Listen. Not even light can escape.
I went to church, temple, mosque,
synagogue, monastery, looking for
the answer. It was somewhere else.
Niko has inked out a reflection of the words, backward, as if there’s a mirror on the page.
I forget about the reality of what I’m doing—reading my sister’s diary!—and instead fall in love with her poetry. Hours of afternoon go by, the sun growing longer and later as I let Niko’s bleak words envelop me, mingling and jumbling together.
And the surprises keep coming: Niko hates SCAAAAAD. She’s as jealous of Emmy-Kate’s beauty as I am. And losing Mum has made her more desperately miss a father. She resents being our guardian. That’s why she keeps inviting the Professor around, hoping he’ll discipline us so she can give up.
It’s early afternoon by the time I read the last poem, and stop breathing.
Confession
My sisters are not the only ones with secrets.
I watch Minnie and Felix through my window,
suspended between orange lampposts.
How to Be Luminous Page 15