But that was only part of it. Another part was strange, almost uncanny. As she’d begun to feel more and more like her old self, relaxing into this comforting life, into her known body, David’s words and arguments had come to seem more and more familiar, predictable. Not because they’d lost their originality. No, not that at all. It was stranger than that. It was as if she already knew what her father was going to say even before he said it. Like hearing a familiar music, a music that had been humming in her bones silently for years and was audible once again.
She knew, for instance, what David would conclude about art, its role, its moral power. He would say that art isn’t just something made by artists; it has a life of its own, independent of the people who make it and the people who see it. Kind of like a cultural agent that exists to contribute to the evolution of society. Artists don’t just represent what’s already there; they make what’s coming look so familiar that when it arrives, it looks natural. Art is like some sort of oracle.
And tampering with that oracular force, by silencing it or condemning it or banning it, will never work. It’s no more possible than trying to stop a hurricane or volcano. Art is a force of nature, of human nature. Art is what we make and what makes us. Art is what makes us human.
As Myla gazed across Samuel’s features, she felt a tremendous tenderness. He’d asked her the right question: why were the pictures so important to her father? Samuel had realized that the answer didn’t lie inside David’s pages; it lay inside Myla herself. And here, in the darkened room spilling with light, she knew that she’d always known the reason, but until now had been too young, too sad, too small to let herself know.
Love. Love was the reason. Once, when she was little, she’d come upon her father sitting on the floor of the study, with what looked like all the proofs Ruth had ever printed of her and Pru spread around him. She couldn’t even enter the room, what with all the pictures on the floor. What had surprised her at the time wasn’t that her tidy father had made such a big mess, but rather what he’d said when he’d seen her standing in the doorway. He’d smiled a broad, silly grin and said, “I was just thinking of your mom.”
That was it. “I was just thinking of your mom.” Sarah. Sarah was the answer. The photographs had been a way to seize moments as they raced by in the flood of time, and by seizing them and stopping them, a way to expand them into broad planes of light and dark and shadow in which Sarah’s two little naked babies could be seen growing into beautiful strong girls and young women. And in that place of stillness, of time out of time, Sarah could enter too. They could all come together once again, in the act of art, defying the relentless passage of time.
Myla looked at Samuel’s strong jaw, lax in sleep, his delicate long lashes dark against his cheeks. She felt such tenderness, witnessing this offering of vulnerability. She left her cold stance by the window and, slipping her body between the covers, curled next to him. In the morning, after a good sleep, she knew what she’d do. It was time now. She would take him there.
WE’RE DRIVING IN A CAR AND I ask him where we’re going and he won’t tell me. He doesn’t like me or he likes me too much, I don’t know which. He has my hands tied. He calls me Poor Sweet Lamb and says he won’t hurt me the way my father does. He listens to the radio, turning it up to hear it over the coarse and grumbling road. He keeps his window down so the evening comes blasting in. Pretty soon the air smells clean, and I make out the shadows of pine trees above us. We’re in the country.
My head hurts, making me sleepy, but I also know the smart thing is to look around, to memorize where we’re going, to leave marks anywhere I can. Fear doesn’t enter me. I think of Myla, think of her strong face, think of what she’d do.
Then we get out of the car. We get out of the car and it’s dusk. He pushes me forward, and I walk, but I ignore him too. It’s darker here in the forest. It’s like there’s a clear blue wash over everything, like looking at the evening through dark glasses. But I can still see the trees. Their trunks are tall and I can see the leaves above, green like verdigris and terre verte and malachite. We start to walk and the pine needles crunch beneath our feet. The needles are yellow, and I say the words for “yellow” to myself, the words from my mother’s book: ochre and giallorino and orpiment and realgar and saffron and arzica.
And I let myself think about the sheet of paper my mother wrote on. The sheet of paper in Il libro dell’arte. The one that fell out when I opened the book, the one that feathered down to the floor.
I picked it up and read it and I knew it was written for me. Now, more than anything, I want to tell Myla what it said. At first I thought it was a list of paint colors. But as I read down, I realized it was a message about who I was, and who I was supposed to be.
I see the words before me as I walk. A list. I do not listen to what the man is telling me. I will not hear him as he tells me I’m a good person. I hear only this: “Carmina.
“Jonquil.
“Lilac.
“Lila.
“Violet.
“Azure.
“Azura.”
They’re names. Names for me. Because under that list, my mother wrote: “Myla Rose and Azura May,” and I knew then, and know now, that my name is really Azura. Even if they didn’t name me that. Azura was my mother’s secret name for me, the beautiful name she chose.
I want to ask David why they called me Prudence. I want to make Myla call me Azura. I will be Azura when I’m an artist. That will be my name.
Then we stop walking. The man is crying. He wants to touch me but he won’t, I know he won’t, because he can’t even look in my eyes. It’s cold in the forest and I’m frightened. But I do not close my eyes. He asks for my forgiveness. There’s metal in my mouth and it tastes cold and empty. The tall trees point up from us into the evening, spreading their branches over us like hands. The smell of pine comes strong up from the ground. He prays. And then he kills me.
proof
the person in this photograph is a woman. You don’t recognize her. She’s standing, her body facing forward, leaning hard on one leg; she looks to her left, and she’s almost in profile. It’s clear she isn’t standing comfortably. She’s not used to being in pictures.
This woman’s hair is dark and long and very straight. There’s no wind, and her hair falls like a mane down her back. Her hands hang long at her sides, and two of the fingers on her right hand grip the bottom of her T-shirt.
The photograph is slightly out of focus. But it doesn’t matter. The woman is smiling, and that’s what you notice. Although you can tell she’s unused to this, unaccustomed to being seen, you can also tell that the photographer has said something wonderful to make this woman happy. She’s on the verge of laughing. For a brief moment, though her legs don’t know exactly how to stand, though her arms only know to hang limply at her sides, though she’s held her breath, waiting, for the click of the camera, the woman is comfortable.
chapter nineteen
they drove out of the city into farmland, heading west, straight for the coast. Myla was like a lit fuse, moving fast. She was going to go and get it over with once and for all. Samuel didn’t ask where they were going. She told him what she could.
“I was at college when Pru was abducted. I was finishing up the fall of my freshman year. I had a boyfriend, someone I thought I might love. It was the first time. It was bigger than anything I’d ever felt.” The afternoon had been soaked in light. They’d come back to the boy’s room after eating lunch in the dining hall. It was the first time they’d done this, the first time his roommate was out of town. When the boy clicked the door closed, locking it behind them, she’d felt the first shudder of embarrassment. She’d walked briskly to the window, looked out over the quad, contemplated yelling hello to two of the girls from her French class who were passing underneath. That would have ended things. Maybe it would keep her from wanting this. Then she heard him ease himself onto the bed.
“I was happy.” Myla looked at Samu
el now, saw that instead of looking at the speeding-past world, he was looking at her. “Truly happy. I’d found a simplicity that I thought would last forever.”
She’d turned to face the boy, slowly, aware that the sun was streaming itself around her. She’d felt her limbs bathed in gold, her hair like a wildfire of red and yellow, her white cotton shirt folding itself around her breasts. She’d seen herself through the boy’s eyes. She was irresistible.
The boy had sat down and put on a tape, Chet Baker. That had done it. It had turned something in her, and at that moment a voice inside her had told her she’d never go back to the place she’d been before. It had pushed her over the threshold. She’d fiddled with the buttons of her shirt.
“I can’t describe it, but I felt . . . in control. In control of me and what I wanted and, hell, who I was. I wanted this and I was going to have it.”
She’d closed her eyes. It wasn’t dark inside her own head; it was golden. She’d felt the cotton slip down her arms and onto the floor, felt her nipples sear with the boy’s looking. The sun warmed her back. Her fingers found the buttons of her skirt and deftly released them. Then she slipped her fingers into the waistband, slid her hands under the elastic of her underwear, and pushed both skirt and underwear down until they let loose around her ankles. The boy had said nothing, could only watch.
“I’d been nude a million times but never naked. This was the first time. The first time I was naked, the first time I let someone love me. And it was the same day my father called and told me my sister was missing. I came back to my room after having sex for the very first time, and when I walked in the door, my roommate said, ‘I’ve been looking for you. Your dad called. I think something’s wrong.’ And then the world shattered.
“I flew home, even though Jane and Steve and David assured me Pru would be back any day. I think a part of me knew she was already gone. I felt cut inside, unbound.
“Anyway. I’m sure you know this part. It was three days of waiting. We didn’t sleep. Jane made us elaborate meals and we didn’t eat them. We were holed up in our house. I saw my father pray for the first time.”
She remembered David’s back, out in the early-morning sun, on the porch, hunched. His voice saying, “Dear God, protect her.” The surge of rage in her when she heard those words. Everyone was giving up. People were showing weakness. One couldn’t show weakness. That would let Pru die.
“And then someone found her.” Myla ignored the grit in her voice. “My sister’s body, in a pine forest near the coast. She hadn’t been raped, but it doesn’t make much difference, does it? The two hikers who made the ‘discovery’—as the media so charmingly termed it—found the man who’d killed her lying by her side. He’d had the decency to blow his own brains out.
“I tried to be a dutiful daughter. My life was over, but Jane sat me down and told me I had to go on. David and I had only silence between us. I didn’t have any words for him, and he kept his to himself. I stayed home for Christmas vacation, mainly in my bedroom, and then everyone insisted I go back to college. Something normal, something regular, they said.”
She remembered her father at the airport, the last time they’d seen each other. His shy touch on her shoulder, her insistence that he hug her instead. Jane wrapping her in a scratchy brown scarf she’d knit, urging Myla to come home soon. Myla had dumped the scarf as she’d transferred planes in Chicago.
“So I go back to school, and everyone knows what happened. Everyone stares at me. The campus police has to ban the media, who wait outside the school gates every time I step beyond them. I’m invited to join dozens of counseling groups: for abused children, for people dealing with grief, for those not dealing with grief.
“And then. Two months go by. And I get a second call. From Jane. My father has died of a heart attack, and they want me to come home. No one even apologizes anymore. People don’t want to look at me. I’m a reminder of what’s sad in the world, and college is for people who are happy.”
She remembered her roommate’s words: “I think maybe you’re depressed.” As simple an assessment as that.
“So I go home. I go to the funeral. Two nights later, I get into an excellently huge argument with Steve and Jane and leave their house for good. I go to a local bar and get wasted. I decide I’m going to leave Portland and never come back. But before I do that, I drive out here.”
Myla swept her arm against the outside, which had turned from a country highway, thick on either side with wheat fields and old farmhouses, to a forest road winding its way through the dark and light of leaf shadows. She remembered this drive from the only other time she’d taken it, in the darkness, driving fast, drunk. It hadn’t been dark enough for her, the moon nearly full and punching too much light into the open air. She’d listened to music, loud, angry music, and had swerved in and out around cars. She’d decided this was a night when she deserved to be out of control. She’d wanted to see where it had happened.
“We’re going to where she died, aren’t we?” asked Samuel.
“Yes.”
Pru had been killed up an old logging road, and Myla knew the way reflexively. As they turned, she saw the road was barricaded with a couple of old logs, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her.
She remembered that first night, when the turnoff was fresh from two months of police activity, easy to spot even under the cover of forest. Then there’d been no need to get out to move anything. She’d driven full throttle into the forest.
Now she stepped from the car and was hit with the smell of pine, strong, sharp, with a tang in it that made the back of her throat rise. Samuel was already helping her move the logs before she needed to ask.
The car moved from the blacktop to the slickness of the pine needles with relative ease. The tires crunched against the layers and layers of woven ground, basketed over time.
In the darkness of that night years before, she’d revved up the turns, oblivious to speed. She’d stopped when forced to stop and, spilling herself into the night, had been hit with the strong smell. She hadn’t expected that, the way a potent smell could solidify a moment. She’d vomited then, sick with the world. Then she’d stood and walked.
Myla turned to Samuel as if this were a perfectly normal moment. “It’s just a mile or two up here.” He nodded, silent.
The road climbed steadily, and the trees above them ached with green, some branches brushing against the top of the car. Then the road turned, and she knew they’d reached the end. The pine smell insinuated itself through the car vents, and she believed that at last she was prepared for its full-on power. There was only one way to find out.
The slam of the car door in the old-growth forest was tinny. She was overwhelmed by the smell that had met her in her nightmares, the smell of these trees, but she wasn’t dreaming now. She looked up and watched the trunks, huge, old, proud, swaying slowly, moaning with wind. She’d had no time to notice them the last time she’d been here. Now she knew those trees were the source of the smell she hated. Looking up, she realized they’d towered over Pru at the moment she’d died, and Myla suddenly felt grateful to them for their grace. Grateful in a way her teenage self hadn’t understood. It comforted her that things of beauty had filled Pru’s last sight. She memorized this new idea—that she liked these trees—to keep herself from vomiting.
Myla walked alone up the hill to her left, climbing over fallen trunks and moss and small caterpillars holing the wood. She stepped over ants on their productive expeditions and the warm nests of baby voles. She stepped over new ferns unfurling their wands of green, over worms drilling through the damp and fertile earth, over mushrooms pushing their way into sunlight. She stepped over and over until she stopped. Samuel stopped behind her.
Years before, this had been as far as she could go. She’d walked to this spot, and something in her had broken. The next thing she’d known, she was driving away, leaving everything she’d once known behind her. She couldn’t remember what had happened to her whe
n she’d seen the spot where Pru had died, and now she was seeing it again. She was back. She wanted to diminish its power to nothing.
Myla looked at the spot on the ground. Here was the place she’d dreamed about, dreaded all this time. She wanted to understand it, wanted to dissect it until it yielded nothing. As she examined the ground, examined the last spot where Pru had claimed breath, Myla watched and waited. For something to make this place crushable. For something to make this very spot something she could destroy.
The problem was basic: there was nothing special about this place. Just a patch of forest floor. People walking in these woods would have no idea this was where her beloved sister, her light, her breath, her bud of a companion, had fallen. There was nothing to set it apart. There was nothing to destroy. There was no answer.
Samuel stood apart from her and watched. And then he came to her and touched her. A small touch, on the back, a small tap of understanding, what understanding he could give.
Samuel’s touch, his push against her back, was enough to fill Myla with all the thoughts she’d avoided for so long. All the things she wanted to believe in: David’s faith in what he’d known to be true, Pru’s bravery, Ruth’s vision, Sarah’s silence, and now this man’s, Samuel’s, love for her. It pushed these thoughts out of her mouth, into a cry she didn’t know she’d held inside herself, a release of all burden. It was weeping, it involved tears, but it was more than that. It was more basic than anything she had ever felt. It was raw, without thought, or words, or a need to understand. It simply was.
It lasted.
MYLA AND SAMUEL CAME back many hours later, as afternoon light skimmed over the city. What Myla felt now was a combination of giddiness and deep exhaustion that she knew would not be worn off in sleep.
The Effects of Light Page 26