Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  I can feel the shock etch itself into my face. It’s at least five minutes of greeting everyone before I can whisper to Harry, “What the hell?”

  He’s smiling. “I, uh, may have told a couple of people about this.”

  “There are like thirty people here.”

  “Thirty? That many? I swear I only told one or two.” He thumps me across my shoulders. “Good thing you suck at math.”

  The guy I remember from last time is there to shake my hand and take the portraits I brought in and fit them into gallery frames. We watch. The first piece is one of my mom. And then there it goes, up there on the wall: my art.

  It feels like someone gently peeled back my skin and muscles, my rib cage, and carefully lifted out my heart and made copies of it and pinned them all over the building. My eyes well up, and I turn away so Harry won’t see. He punches me on the shoulder.

  “Damn, Danny,” he says. “Look at you.”

  And everyone watches with me as the next one (this one’s Harold Chiu) goes up. The portraits lit up in the clean, bright quiet, all of us held in a shared stillness—I feel it then, that power I think some part of me is always after. Or maybe it’s not power after all, this feeling, and instead it’s just a place to rest.

  This is what Vivian Ho meant when she said you have to choose what’s important to you and how far you’re willing to go for it. When the universe zooms in on all that space I take up inside it and asks me why, this is the only answer I’ve ever known.

  At home after the gallery showing, as soon as I’ve come in to tell my mom I’m back home, I go to my desk and pull out my Bristol pad.

  I’m going to do it. This is all I am. I’ll do this for myself and for my class and for Regina, who wasn’t there today, but messaged me as we were driving home: Hope it went well, sorry I couldn’t make it. Harry spent like all week orchestrating this.

  I go back into the kitchen and make myself some coffee and then come back and roll a piece of paper into a blending stick, sanding the edges with a nail file I stole from my mom. I fold the pad to an empty page, and for a second the blankness of it sucks all the air from the room. These used to be the best moments, that wide open space where the whole page was possibility still, where it could be anything at all before I narrowed it into one thing only. I miss how alive and expansive it always made me feel.

  But maybe it’s like seeing a friend after it’s been a long time, how you trust that when you brush away those webs of awkwardness the old friendship’s still there underneath, the way I’ve always kind of thought it would still be with Ethan.

  You have to start somewhere. I imagine a light source coming from behind her—all the lines dark and shadowed, Sandra backlit. It’s been so long since I’ve drawn anything my strokes are choppy and short at first, feathering the lines and blurring her outline. I tear out the piece of paper and start over. It’s the most expensive kind of paper I use and I almost never sketch on it, but I tell myself it’s fine, even if I go through the whole pad it’s worth it to be back in the game. This time—I haven’t had to do this in years—I practice the strokes through the air first before I lay them down.

  My palms are clammy. I drink some of my coffee. It’s now or never, isn’t it? All of today at the gallery still coursing through my veins—I feel wired. I feel buoyant. And everything you take in from the world becomes a part of you that flows back through you into whatever you draw, I know that. There won’t be a better time than now.

  I don’t like to look at photos of people I’m drawing; I like to hold them in my thoughts and reach past any one static image of them, and I call her face to mind. I draw her eyes. I tilt the pencil and arc wide swaths of lead to color her ever-present eye shadow, lightly stipple in the dark circles under her eyes she always tried to makeup over.

  It’s ten minutes later that my heart squeezes against itself, drops off a beat, and then pounds back against my chest so hard it knocks my breath away. It’s a different panic than the one that’s started to feel like home to me these past months. It’s not that it feels empty or that it doesn’t look like her—those things I expected, those things I could manage—it’s that it does.

  I put my pencil down and toss the blending stick into my trash can, a queasiness vibrating like guitar strings through my heart. I could’ve done it if it didn’t look like her. But it does, and I can’t.

  On Monday Mrs. Mosher lets us out a few minutes early for lunch, and I park myself outside Ms. Sharma’s classroom to wait for Regina. She comes out talking animatedly with Joel and Rachel Pruitt, the twins, and after they head for the cafeteria I say to Regina, “Walk to my locker with me?”

  “I have to go see Mr. Renato.”

  “Can I walk you there?”

  She hesitates a second too long, and I feel that closed-offness again. “Sure, if you want.”

  Part of me wishes she’d said no—I’m not exactly looking forward to this conversation. I reach out to take the books she’s carrying. “What do you have to see him about?”

  “Oh, I emailed him yesterday to make sure it’s okay to switch the date with the printer so the March issue comes out right on the seventh, and he emailed me back last night saying we should just stay on schedule and keep it for the twelfth like it’s scheduled.” She runs a hand through her hair that way she does when she’s a little stressed. She always gets like this in the final few days before we go to press, but it’s early this time. “I should’ve just done it without asking. He probably wouldn’t have noticed.”

  “Why doesn’t he want to change it?”

  “I think he just doesn’t want to have to deal with the printer. But I’ll tell him I’ll do it.”

  “Ah. You don’t think he’ll find out, do you? About the center spread?”

  She shrugs. “When was the last time he looked at something before it went to press?”

  “Fair enough.” I fight back the part of me that would keep her talking about the press logistics or about anything else, really, until we’re out of time. “Hey, I, ah, wanted to see how it’s going with all that. With the tribute, I mean. I keep meaning to talk to you about it.”

  “It’s going all right.” There’s a tiny shift in her posture—she stands straighter, and her voice brightens. “I’m working on my piece, and Margie and Helena are getting quotes from people. I think they’re going to just get as many as they can and then we’ll pick the best ones. How’s the art going? When do you think it’ll be ready?”

  “Ah, yeah, the art.”

  “I was thinking it would just be your art and a lot of white space, and—”

  “Right. Yeah.” I balance the books against myself with one hand and rub the other on the back of my neck, where the muscles feel tight. “About that, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to—”

  Her expression shifts. “You’re not going to do it?”

  “Reg, I think I have to pass this time. Could you use a photo instead?” My palms are sweating. “It’s just that my parents have both been such wrecks lately, and if I get in trouble for anything—I really think it might push them over the edge.”

  “I see.”

  She knows about what happened, obviously, even though we’ve been talking less; if nothing else most of the details about our lives channel back and forth through Harry. “My parents are both stressed all the time because my dad still hasn’t found anything and my dad is, like—not doing well. I think he’s depressed. And it’s been really hard on my mom.”

  “Right.”

  Why don’t I just tell her the truth? “I also just—I don’t think I could do it right. You know?” I swallow. “I’ve been off lately. With drawing, I mean, and I wouldn’t want to give you something crappy for this, of all things.” Her expression hasn’t softened. My face feels hot. “Reg, I swear to God, it’s not that I don’t care about Sandra or anything, or about you, it’s just that—”

  “I understand.”

  “Reg, come on, don’t be mad. I’ll help edit lay
out. Or I’ll do whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t have my name—”

  “Oh, that’s fine,” she says, her voice like shards of sun. “I understand. It’s fine.”

  For a long time after she died it didn’t feel like we’d ever find our way out of the initial shock and horror of it. It was the way everything reminded you, the way it would wash over you without warning when you were sitting in class or buying fries in the lunch line or lying in bed when the rest of the world had already gone to sleep. The ordinariness of the world, the same trees swaying, the same murals watching from the walls of the gym and the same hills gold with haze in the late afternoons, all felt like they’d been placed there specifically to mock us. Because nothing was ordinary, nothing was the same.

  And we were all scared. I wouldn’t have expected that from Sandra in a million years, and then you start to worry whether it could happen with other people you knew. Whether it could happen to you.

  For the rest of the school year, I felt sick walking into first period and seeing Ms. Lee every morning. Or we panicked whenever someone posted sad lyrics or whenever our calls went to voicemail, or I’d text Harry and Regina at odd hours and be jittery and anxious until I heard back. Sometimes Regina just wouldn’t answer and I’d freak out and make Harry check on her, and then the next morning she’d act like nothing had happened.

  At the first of those assemblies we all had to go to, eight days after she died, a psychologist told us that the vast majority of people who survive attempting suicide regret those attempts almost immediately and are thankful they survived. When she said it I got that sharp flash of pain above my heart that you get sometimes and you have to breathe past (precordial catch, my dad told me once when I was little), but it hurt so much I took shallow breaths to spare myself. There was a loosening feeling in my head. When I looked around the bleachers, a lot of people were crying. Harry was sitting stiffly next to me, and him sitting there was the only reason I was able to gather myself back together. I pressed my hand against my heart and breathed all the way past the pain until it released.

  This was the part I couldn’t stop thinking about then: If there was a moment, before it was all over, that she regretted it. If she saw what she was losing and tried to clutch the whole weight of the world in her hands as it all drained away.

  When you draw something it matters every time that you’re the one who drew it. I’ve always believed that. Like, what did you glimpse in a person’s expression? What do you have to say about them? Why is your perspective, yours of all the billions of people on earth, worth trapping on a piece of paper and showing to everyone?

  Harry read somewhere once that the reason your life flashes before your eyes when you die is that your brain always responds to information with all the knowledge it’s built in the past, and so when you’re about to die it shuffles frantically through everything it knows for clues about what’s happening, what it’s supposed to do. I always wondered if that happened to my sister, too, if she was still too small for that or if maybe it was just that her images were small too: her mom, her dad, her favorite toys, the view of the ceiling from her crib. (I drew those things once, in a strip.) Anyway, in that final burst of Sandra’s memory, I can’t help thinking about how maybe I would’ve flickered in and out and how I wonder if she ever knew I didn’t mean for things to go the way they did.

  But of course not. Of course more important thoughts would’ve fought for her attention before they went dark, and of course I didn’t matter to her any more in her last minutes than I did during all those years and years with her I threw away. Of course she didn’t forgive me.

  I wish I could do the drawing—I wish a lot of things—but there are lines you don’t cross. That one’s mine.

  The thing about high school is that no matter what happens between you and someone else, you still get up each morning knowing you’re going to face them approximately eighty times that week—all of it resurrected there in the hallway between periods/in the rally court at lunch/in class.

  Which is to say that Tuesday morning I see Regina coming down the hall and I lift my hand to wave, but she turns away fast without acknowledging me and goes in the opposite direction. My face catches flame. I look around to make sure no one saw.

  All week Regina avoids me as much as she plausibly can, and all week it knifes me every time. It’s striking how fast the glow from Neighborhood disappears.

  But something happens at the end of that week: I get a call from Araceli Padilla, who runs Neighborhood, to tell me that one of my pictures sold. I’m so surprised I can’t think of anything to say for a good ten seconds. I knew it was technically a possibility, but I think the things you dream about most sometimes seem less possible—you imagine them so much, so many different ways, that they take on a kind of otherworldliness you only recognize as fantasy.

  “Wow,” I say finally, recovering. “That’s—wow. Thank you so much. Which one was it?”

  It was the portrait of my mom I drew last year—one of the dozens and dozens I’ve drawn trying to capture that expression on her face the day she told me about my sister. It’s imperfect, and her expression’s off, but I like it because I think there’s something cohesive in all the small vignettes that I drew to compose her face, and because I think even if I didn’t quite nail the expression, something about her, some essential quality, still comes through all the same.

  Araceli doesn’t know who bought it; it was one of the new cashiers who rang it up. All day, all through the Calc quiz and the AP Econ group project and the in-class essay for Lit, I think about that, imagining that picture going home with someone. It’s dumb, but part of me misses it. I should’ve taken better photos of it. I didn’t expect anyone to actually buy it.

  I wake up Saturday morning weirdly determined to believe everything will be all right. Maybe every artist has dry spells. Vivian Ho made it sound like it’ll never be easy, that the struggle is part of things, and maybe that’s okay, maybe I’ll be better for it someday.

  I decide I’ll tell my parents about the picture, mostly because I know how excited they’ll be. It’ll be instant gratification. I’ll have to lie and say I learned about the exhibit online—they’d hate that I went to San Francisco without telling them—and that I mailed the pieces in.

  When I come out to the kitchen they’re both sitting there at the table like they’re waiting for me.

  “Sit down,” my dad says, motioning. When I do, slowly, my mom sets down a bowl of re gan mian in front of me. She never cooks breakfast anymore. Alarm bells go off in my head.

  “We have something to tell you,” my mom says.

  My mind flashes back to that search history about divorce and my heart stutters against my chest so hard it knocks my breath away. I shouldn’t have sat down. I press my fist against my chest to try to steady my heart. “What’s going on?”

  I can name the exact tacit negotiation taking place in the way they look at each other: which of them it will be to break the news. My mom gives in first.

  “You should remember that in fall you go to RISD,” she says in English, then switches back to Chinese. “That is the most important thing. You will work hard and achieve your dreams there. Your future is secure.”

  She looks at my dad for help, but he’s staring down at his noodles. She inhales sharply through her nose. The freezer is making its clattering sound and the light overhead is flickering.

  “Daniel, we’re moving. You’re already accepted to RISD, so—”

  Another heart palpitation, this one so hard I feel it down to my palms. “What do you mean we’re moving?”

  “The rent is too high here.”

  “What? But—” The words get jumbled on their way to me; I have to untangle them and even still they barely make sense. “But we—”

  “We have no choice. It’s too expensive.”

  I have grown up in this house. My life is literally written on its walls. I know this kitchen so well I don’t even see it anymore;
I have to look around it and focus in order to ground myself. “Can’t we get a loan? Just until Ba finds—”

  “That is not an option. We can no longer afford it.”

  “But, I mean, you’re just never going to find another job or what?”

  “Daniel,” my mother hisses.

  My face is hot. “Can’t you talk to the landlords? They probably don’t want someone else to—”

  “We’ve already spoken to them.”

  I never even think of the landlords, shadowy beings who occasionally appear when a pipe bursts. I don’t think of our home as theirs. “Can you talk to them again?”

  “There’s nothing more to talk about.”

  “But we don’t—then what are we even supposed to do? Just move into some random apartment or something?”

  My parents exchange another look. “Daniel, Cupertino as a whole is very expensive. Apartments are no more affordable. Cupertino is a terrible value for the money, and we don’t need to pay for a good school district anymore because you have already been accepted for next year. So we will move to San José.”

  “San José?” Technically Cupertino shares a border with the west part of San José, on the other side of De Anza. “Like where, where Los Dos is? Like by Westgate?”

  “It will be…less close to here.”

  “Okay, then where? Like by Valley Fair or what?”

  “Not by Valley Fair. More…past the airport. It’s all we can afford.”

  “The airport? I can’t live all the way over there and go to MV.”

  My mom flinches—they knew that already, of course. She pushes my noodles toward me. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  This can’t be happening. What the hell. What in the absolute hell. An old panic rises up, that same trapped feeling I remember from when they told me we were leaving Austin—the world trailing away from me as I struggle after it.