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 pass. 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 censorship. The potentially dangerous art gets put into a dark room, and everyone who passes that dark room knows there’s something bad inside. Passersby 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 rushing 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 sweatshirt. “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 manuscript 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 passed 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 passed 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. Sh
e 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 buttercream 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.
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