How to Be Luminous

by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

  “Jesus, Minnie, are you insane?” Yes, I think, but she’s not done. “Let me guess, dicking over Ash wasn’t good enough, being the only one allowed in the studio wasn’t good enough, you had to destroy it too.” She’s all up in my face, nostrils flaring, emitting steam, shaking her head, slapping her hands. “You really hate us that much?”

  I’m too startled by the question to answer. She thinks I hate them? I try to process this, but I’m fixated on Niko’s coat-flung-over-pajamas outfit. “How did you…?”

  “Emmy-Kate texted me!” she tells me, furious.

  “Weren’t you asleep?”

  She purses her mouth. “I’m always awake.”

  I think of the candlelight seeping from around her door when I left. Emmy-Kate holding solo sleepovers here at the studio. The way Niko manages to find time for SCAD and poetry and her control-freak cleaning schedule. Of course I’m not the only Sloe family insomniac. All these nights, the three of us have been awake together, alone. I could so easily have gone downstairs and shared my burden with them. I can’t believe I didn’t do that.

  “I don’t hate you,” I tell Niko.

  She waves me off, pawing at the floor with her sneaker, trying to find a safe place to step. It reminds me of a horse preparing to trot. Eventually she gives up and stomps straight through the debris to Emmy-Kate’s side, puts her arms around her. I swallow and look away, at the ruins of the studio. Smashed and wrecked pots—smashed and wrecked everything—surround us. Worse than the Blitz. I don’t even recall doing half of this. Perhaps I’m possessed.

  Nothing is fixable; it’s too broken. There are some things that can’t ever be mended. My sisters and I might fit into that category.

  “Emmy-Kate?” I say. “Niko too?” She presses Niko on the arm, indicating me, and the pair of them turn to me, whey-faced.

  “I’m sorry,” I sign for the thousandth time this week. “Really.”

  Emmy-Kate crosses her arms, pressing herself into the kilns. Niko snorts again.

  “You’re sorry?” she repeats, face full of sarcasm. “Sorry?” She’s coming toward me again, shards crunch-crunch-crunching beneath her shoes, face flushed, eyes smoldering, about to blow. “I’m sorry,” she mimics, screwing up her face in imitation of me, even tugging her pajama sleeves over her hands for the full Minnie effect. “Change the record, Min, I’ve heard this one before.”

  Her scorn knocks the wind out of me. This whole night (this whole entire life) knocks the wind out of me. Gravity goes full throttle, pulling me backward as Niko bears down on me, hands flying.

  “What am I, what’s Emmy-Kate, supposed to do with your ‘sorry’? Sorry doesn’t fix this, Min! How could you do this? How could you be so selfish?”

  The first train of the morning comes through overhead, making the walls pulsate. I’m pulsating too, some of my earlier adrenaline making a comeback. Niko is holier-than-thou, but I am not the only selfish one.

  “What about you!” I sign.

  Her eyebrows crawl up, amazed. “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. I told you I didn’t want you to clean up Mum’s room and you did it anyway. It doesn’t even smell like her anymore, and what gives you the right, Niko? What if I wanted to keep her room exactly the way it was?”

  “It wasn’t exactly a shrine,” she counters. “You and Emmy-Kate made sure of that.”

  “I took, like, two books!” Pissed-off tornado Minnie threatens to make a reappearance. “I can’t help it that Emmy-Kate’s been treating Mum’s bedroom like her own personal Topshop, and what about the box—”

  “Hey!” Emmy-Kate interrupts, skittering across the pottery shards, stilettos slip-sliding on the flotsam and jetsam. She yanks at the huge silver hoops in her ears and throws them at me. I’m too surprised to catch them, and they bounce and roll on the floor. “Take them, then, if they’re so important. Take them and go back to not talking to me.”

  “They’re not yours, Emmy—” Niko begins, but Emmy-Kate isn’t done.

  Her hands shake as she signs, “You get to go to SCAD every day, and Minnie’s allowed to come here, but I can’t have anything of hers?” She kicks at a nearby piece of bubble-rubble with her stiletto—Mum’s stiletto. The clay ricochets off my ankle, annoying me.

  “Oh, please,” I tell her, ignoring the fact she recently witnessed me go berserk. “You have everything, everything! E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G. And I’ve seen your wardrobe, it’s full of her things—”

  “That’s right, you went in my room—”

  “I know you went in mine too, dimwit. You stole the studio key—”

  “I didn’t steal it, I borrowed, and—”

  “Tell me, Emmy-Kate, did you come here every night, or only the nights when you didn’t have boys over?”

  The two of us have been circling each other in a slow prowl, teeth bared, hands going at warp speed, but now we stop. I’ve gone too far. Niko’s eyes are wide open—I can tell she doesn’t know this detail.

  “WHAT?” she asks.

  “Big fat hairy deal.” Emmy-Kate pouts. “I’m not having sex with any of them, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m worried about, Emmy-Kate!” I sign, letting my frustration emerge in my hands.

  She cuts me off before I can mention the birth control. “Fine, don’t believe me, just because you’re having sex with Felix and Ash.”

  As soon as she signs this, Emmy-Kate goes from malicious to horrified. She looks at Niko. So do I. Niko is drained, her skin as chalky as the night Mum didn’t come home, the tendons in her neck sticking out. In my mind I’m reading all those hidden-drawer love poems again, seeing his name: the sky burns down, leaving behind nothing but ash. She loves him, and she thinks we’re sleeping together.

  “Niko, we’re not,” I try to tell her.

  But she isn’t looking at me. The floor shifts and grinds beneath my feet as I walk over, touch her arm. She flings away my hand, biting her lip. I have to duck down into a crouch, force my words into her unhappy face. “No. Niko, we’re not having sex.”

  She looks skeptical. “You’re not?”

  I straighten up, shaking my head, and sign, “Never,” thrilled to be the last virgin on earth. If I’d ever been ready to have sex, I might have lost my sister for good.

  “N-E-V-E-R,” I tell her again, fingerspelling it. Her face sags, a look I recognize: relief.

  Niko slides into a seat at the workbench. She starts pulling pieces of pottery toward her, fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. I sit down next to her. After a moment, she drops her head onto my shoulder with a heavy thunk. We breathe in and out.

  With my palm open on the table between us, I finger spell, “I’m sorry. I wish I’d never kissed him in the first place.”

  She shifts toward me. “Well, you shouldn’t have.”

  I bite my lip. She’s wrong, but I’m not sure I want to point that out: The anger in the room isn’t gone, it’s only on hold. But I can’t keep any more secrets.

  “He didn’t belong to you, Niko,” I tell her gently. Her face sours. “Look, perhaps I shouldn’t have kissed him, knowing you liked him … But you never actually told him. You can’t call dibs on a person.”

  Niko presses two fingers to the bridge of her nose for a moment, the same way she does when she gets a headache, then signs, “I wish…” Instead of completing the sentence, she lets her hands fall into her lap, where she forms guitar chords with them.

  “I don’t know what to do now,” I tell her.

  “That makes two of us.”

  We examine each other, hovering at the edge of understanding, then Niko yawns. She makes a pillow of her arms and I do too.

  Night is almost over. Dawn is beginning to creep through the yard, transforming the shadows into misty blue London morning.

  Real blue, a powdery light.

  Nothing weird or faded about it; no watercolor pastels or freaky-deaky neons. In fact, looking back over this entire argument, it’s all bee
n in color. From Emmy-Kate’s red lipstick to Niko’s rusty Hollywood hair. Despite my exhaustion, my heart swells.

  The where and when of the colors’ return is ironic: a concrete yard, an overcast day. But my sisters are as colorful as a pair of parrots.

  When was the last time we were all here together? When we were little, probably. On rainy days, Mum occasionally brought us here to run around and paint and make potato prints and playdough sculptures. Back when art was fun and not a noose around our necks.

  “Niko.” I tap her arm for her attention. “Remember Mum trying to teach you to use the wheel?”

  “Yeah. She kept squashing my hands.”

  “And you flinging her off and signing, ‘Let me sign!’”

  “I miss her.” Niko exhales, blinking rapidly at the ceiling.

  Emmy-Kate gasps. My bones crumble. Unbelievably, this is the first time we’ve signed this.

  “You do?” I ask.

  “God, don’t you?” She sits up, reaching for a pottery shard, spinning it, the shiny red glaze catching the light. It’s a piece from the Rainbow Series I. Words flow like water. “I’ve been going mad,” she signs, and I think, You’re not the only one. “Sometimes I turn my room into a séance, try to channel her. I kept writing poems with my eyes closed, pretending she was there, having a conversation with me. Thinking, okay, well what would she say now, and what would she think about this? Only I can never quite capture what she was truly like, you know?”

  This is astonishing: her story so closely resembling my own, both of us trying to bring Mum back to life, any way we can. Emmy-Kate too, with her clothes and perfume. We’ve all been searching for her.

  Niko adds, “Well. I suppose you do know. You had to read every single one of my poems?”

  “Sorry.” The sign is thumping your hand to your chest, rubbing it in a circle. I’m going to erode my boobs if I have to say the word much more, but I’d do it. I’d say sorry a thousand times if I could.

  Niko stands up, kicking her way toward a huge piece of ceramic that somehow missed the tempest and only got pulverized into two, not smithereens. A concave curve like a shallow saucer, which she pokes with her toe. It rocks gently back and forth.

  She bends down and lifts it up, high above her head. I understand right before she does it: launches it at the ground, where it explodes.

  Emmy-Kate’s gasp echoes in the silence.

  “Sloe sisters,” Niko signs, turning to us with a semi-apologetic shrug. “Hive mind. God!” She gazes round, taking in the destruction again. “I feel like we cleansed this place of evil spirits.”

  I’m reminded of all the paraphernalia in her drawer. “Yeah, about your new religious experimentation … I think you’ve been hanging around with the Professor too much.”

  Niko smiles mysteriously. “Oh, if only you knew … Now. I’m going to go and get coffee. Then we’re going to talk. Really talk. No more secrets, Min. I mean it, okay?” She glances down at her pajamas. “Going out like this feels like such a Mum thing to do.”

  “It does,” I agree. We smile at each other.

  After she leaves, I watch Emmy-Kate. She’s tottering around the studio, examining the remains. Every now and then she bends over, hair trailing in the dust, and picks up a piece of pottery. She encloses each one in her palm before putting it back, as if she’s found the very last seahorse in the world.

  With her makeup streaked off from tears and laughter, she’s back to looking about twelve years old. It makes me think we did the right thing, not telling her about the goodbye letter. The only trouble is, we can never tell her the truth. She can’t ever know.

  When Niko arrives back laden with recyclable coffee cups and pastries, she reads my mind. She slides into the seat next to me, hands me coffee and a cinnamon roll, and says telepathically, bossy even inside my own head: We can’t tell her. Can we?

  I say back, silently: I don’t know.

  “Why are you two doing eyes?” Emmy-Kate stops sliding around and scuttles over, grabbing her food then putting it down again to sign, “Well?”

  “Nothing,” Niko signs, concentrating on blowing through the lid of her coffee.

  “Mum,” I admit, using our Sloe-sister shorthand sign.

  Emmy-Kate nibbles on her pink-polished thumbnail instead of the pastry. She perches on the table, starts unpeeling the roll into a long, sticky rope of dough.

  “I know she’s not coming back,” she signs eventually, not looking at us. “I listened to Minnie’s voice mail. But don’t tell me any more, okay?”

  “Minnie’s voice mail?” Niko asks, glancing between the two of us. “Do I want to know?”

  “Probably not,” I tell her. “Em. I’m sorry. Did you … did you take her box?”

  I don’t have to specify what I mean. She nods. “I haven’t opened it yet. It’s under one of my floorboards. I just wanted something…”

  Her hands falter and Niko reaches out, squeezing them. She lets go and signs, “It’s okay.” Then she shakes her head, standing up and kicking a path to the kitchenette. When she returns, she’s carrying the broom.

  “You don’t always have to be clearing up, you know,” I tell her.

  She hands it to me. “I know. You’re going to do it.”

  Dawn makes way for true morning as I start sweeping up, thinking what a stupid end to my mother’s story this is. Or perhaps it’s the perfect one. The sun is shining down on the cacophony of colors, tiny droplets of white and purple and pink glaze, making them look like one badass flower bed—blossoming into thickly scented hibiscus and buddleia and geraniums.

  This is what Blue and Green Music sounds like. It’s a symphony for a mother.

  Red

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost Found)

  Emmy-Kate’s underwear and clown lipstick, matching Niko’s cheekbones when they’re splotched with annoyance. The original, very first Rainbow Series I test piece. Priceless. Invaluable. Worth way more than a crummy pair of magic sunglasses (debt still outstanding). And now nothing left of it but dust.

  CHAPTER 31

  One Hundred and Twenty Crayola Colors

  Minutes later we catch the bus home. I lean my head against the window, nonstop marveling at every color we pass and thinking what a dumbass Mum was to miss out on all this. Orange-brick Victorian houses forming a parade route along Full Moon Lane, pink-cream-yellow-lilac roses foaming in gardens, front doors standing to attention in mustard and black. Zingy red pillar boxes dot the gray sidewalks, pedestrians wear navy-blue winter coats.

  When we tumble off at our stop, the early-morning air has bite. So does this thought: You can undo monochrome, but you can’t undo death. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop rewinding her split-second decision, watch her fly up through the sky instead of down. It kills me that it didn’t have to end this way.

  If only she had said something. To us, to the Professor, to anyone. Called her doctor, or the help lines that came up when I googled, gone to the ER. I wish when we opened the shoebox we’d kept it open, instead of stuffing it out of sight. I wish she had made any other choice but the one she did.

  I don’t blame her, but, quietly, I’m beginning to understand I have a choice too. Mum and I might share a brain, but that doesn’t mean our stories are the same, with the same ending. And it’s not as though I’m completely out of my mind. I started thinking about this the moment I saw Emmy-Kate at the studio and realized I was never being haunted by Mum. Grief made me a crappy detective: I interpreted the clues all wrong. So perhaps it’s as the Professor said: Madness is simply behavior people don’t understand.

  Niko elbows me out of my thoughts. “Minnie … what is this?”

  She’s staring aghast at my street poem, gloriously garish in daylight. Rich blue apologies are scribbled all over the sidewalk, crawling up the brick walls of the railway line. It puts the blue right back into the Bible. Commuters queuing to enter Poets Corner station are taking photos; Felix’s dad is mopping orange fro
m the table outside the pub.

  Okay, maybe I’m a little nuts.

  Emmy-Kate is overjoyed. She grabs hold of a citrine lamppost and twirls around it, then jumps down to sign, enormously, “What a totally Toulouse-Lautrec thing to do!”

  “You didn’t stop to look at this when you came running to the studio?” I ask Niko.

  She shakes her head. “You and Emmy-Kate were in trouble: I didn’t stop to check for traffic.”

  I think we’re having a moment, here, but then she moans. “But did you have to write your name on it? Your full name … You’re going to be in so much trouble…”

  Her face is paling rapidly—quite a feat for a Sloe; our skin can’t get much whiter.

  “In trouble with whom?” I ask. “You’re in charge of me. You love bossing me about; this should be like a treat for you. You could ground me! You should tell me to go to school right now.”

  “Minnie—” Emmy-Kate objects.

  “You don’t have to go today if you don’t want to,” Niko signs, then breaks off, yawning. “I’ll write you a note.”

  “Yes!” I crow, knowing I can fudge the dates on her note, get away with this whole week of absence. Every now and then, the universe surprises me. Niko frowns and I sign more calmly, “I mean, yes, please, and thank you.”

  She nods, vaguely, staring across the road. The Professor is joining the queue for the train station, shuffling along with his nose in a book. Another exciting trip to the Boring Library clearly beckons. He hasn’t even noticed the graffiti.

  I nudge Niko. “Is this why you keep asking the Professor round?”

  Niko shakes her head and nods at the same time. “He’s actually been helpful with all the legal stuff,” she signs. “And, I don’t know, I kind of like him. He’s quirky. It’s a lot, being your guardian. I thought about asking the Professor to take over…”

  “Omigod.” Emmy-Kate detaches herself from the lamppost, flailing her arms like a Muppet. “Do not let him adopt me!”

  The Professor lifts his head from the queue, finally spotting the colorful landscape. He wobbles with confusion, looking around and noticing us. We must make a ridiculous sight: Niko in her pajamas, Emmy-Kate in cocktail wear, me paint-stained. Not one of us on our way to school or SCAD the way we should be. But rather than lift his hand in a wave, he darts his head around unconvincingly, as if he’s being bothered by a bee. Then he ducks away: Pretending not to see us, he pushes past the crowd and scurries into the station, clearly refusing to be associated with our eccentricity. I’m definitely warming to him: He is human, after all.