Glow

by Megan E. Bryant

  A cup of hot cocoa does sound especially good right now. Spring is so late in coming this year, and we are all weary from an endless winter. I almost feel as if the cold has seeped into my bones and settled there, as if some hollow hand rummages around in the marrow searching for something it cannot find.

  But you know me; I am not interested in the grotesque. Which is why a nice hot cup of cocoa would be so welcome tonight. I am sure you would welcome one as well, wherever you may be. I wish that I could wrap all the warmth and light of home in these letters to you, Walter. My words are not enough to convey my love for you. Never enough. But tonight, they will have to suffice.

  Love,

  Lydia

  Chapter 15

  For almost a week, I spent every spare moment in the dark, filling a blank canvas with swirls of stars in all shapes and sizes; constellations only I could see; a glowing universe of my own making. It would take courage to cover them with an opaque night, painting heavy clouds to obscure all that light, but I wanted to believe in the promise of stars. Even when you couldn’t see them, you knew that they were there.

  More than that, this canvas was my last hope to find out how LG had made her paintings. I’d tried every other combination I could think of. If she hadn’t used oil paint over a hidden glowing image, then I was out of ideas. That’s why I called in sick on Friday; I couldn’t wait any longer to find out if it would work. Not one more day, not one more hour.

  I needed the lights on for what came next. Palette in hand, I swirled around blues and blacks, purples and grays. Sucking the hope out of color was a delicate kind of chemistry, but eventually I hit on just the right formulas, mixing shades that were heavy and humid, thick and bleak. Then I took a deep breath and started hiding my stars. I had most of the canvas covered with a layer of night when there was a knock, and my door swung open.

  “I see the lights are on,” Lauren said as she strode into my room uninvited. “That’s an improvement.”

  “Um, hi to you too,” I replied, trying not to frown. How did Lauren know that? I was about to ask when—

  “Come on,” she said, yanking open my closet door and walking right in as if she owned it. “It’s totally gorgeous today, and I’m taking you out. But you need to change first. Let’s go. Get up.”

  “No thanks,” I said, smushing more purple into the puddle of blue on my palette. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Up,” Lauren said again, shoving a tank dress at me. “You seriously need to get out. Let’s go shopping.”

  “I went out last night.”

  “What, to work? Not good enough. Come on, Jules. It’s so depressing in here, all stuffy and messy and—”

  “Could you not boss me?” I snapped. “For like five minutes of my life, could you please let me be?”

  Lauren stared at me, icy and unblinking.

  “I’m here for you,” she said. “I’m doing this for you.”

  Suddenly I saw everything the way she did: my paint-splattered shirt, my oily hair, my messy room reeking of paint and turpentine. I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. Pinched hard.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, my eyes still shut. “You’re right. I just wanted to—”

  Lauren’s hand was gentle on my arm. “You need to get out,” she said. “Come on. It’ll be fun. I’ll clean your brush.”

  “Thanks,” I said as Lauren took it away. I snuck one more glance at my painting. It would be okay until I got back; oil takes weeks to fully dry. That’s what I love most about oil paint. It gives you so many chances to fix your mistakes.

  Lauren’s promise of fun was, perhaps, slightly overstated. For six hours we shopped—or, I should say, Lauren shopped while I tried not to touch anything—at a bunch of exclusive boutiques I’d never seen before. I hovered in the margins of each store, hoping that no one would notice the broken strap on my sandal or the tiny hole in my dress. Just as I was wondering how much longer this shopping odyssey could possibly go on, we stopped at a fancy skin-care place where Lauren lost her mind over a jar of hand lotion. Pearlescent and creamy, it smelled faintly of honeysuckle or maybe sweet clover. Just a tiny dab left my skin velvety perfect.

  “This stuff is uh-maaaaa-zing,” Lauren crooned. “We need it.”

  I had to agree with her. Then I looked at the price: ninety dollars. Ninety dollars for a jar of lotion that was smaller than a strawberry.

  “Ehhh, it’s out of my budget,” I said, helping myself to just a little more from the tester.

  “I’ll buy you one,” Lauren replied.

  “No…” I began. “It’s okay. I don’t need—”

  She tossed her hair back and, with a triumphant smile, beckoned to the lady behind the counter. “We’ll take two of these,” Lauren announced loudly. “In separate bags, please.”

  Her gold credit card flashed, and I thought: Is she enjoying this? No. She can’t be enjoying this. But how does she not realize how embarrassed I am?

  “Seriously, Laure, I don’t want it,” I whispered in a rush. “The smell is kind of…too strong—”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” Lauren said with a grin. “You’re getting one.” So she was enjoying it. It was all a joke to her.

  “Lauren, I really don’t want it,” I repeated. “You don’t have to do this—”

  But it was done. She was already signing the receipt.

  “Here,” Lauren said as she thrust a small white bag at me. “Enjoy it.”

  My fingers clenched the bag’s satin handles. Enjoy it? How, when the scent alone would conjure my humiliation, highlighted by spotless mirrors and dazzling chrome? As soon as we got in the car, I used my foot to nudge the bag far under my seat. Maybe by the time Lauren found it, she would’ve forgotten about buying it for me.

  I knew one thing: there was nothing Lauren could do or say to get me into another overpriced boutique today.

  “Question,” I began. “Do you remember Gifts of the Shepherd? On Branson?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I haven’t looked for any paintings there. Do you mind if we swing by? I know it’s kind of out of the way…”

  “I guess we can go,” Lauren replied. “If you want.” She pulled a hard U-turn and acted like she couldn’t hear everybody honking at her.

  We used to walk by Branson Avenue all the time in sixth grade. The neighborhood hadn’t been great then, but it was a lot worse now. I’m sure that Gifts of the Shepherd was set up with the best of intentions, but in the many years that it’d chugged along as a charity shop, the place had become so run-down that it might as well have been a giant middle finger to poor people. Everything about Gifts of the Shepherd said: We don’t care anymore. We give up.

  It said: Too hopeless to help.

  “I might wait outside,” Lauren said, her upper lip curled in a sneer of disgust.

  “Wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

  She looked over her shoulder at the iron bars on the windows and nodded without speaking. Now that was a bad sign. When Lauren clammed up like that, she was upset. Really upset.

  “Five seconds,” I said, already moving faster than normal. “Two. I’ll be right back.”

  The tables scattered around the store held precarious arrangements of knickknacks: china kittens, travel alarm clocks, a gaudy bejeweled hairbrush that had lost most of its rhinestones. There were just a few paintings, stacked so roughly that it broke my heart to see them carelessly strewn on a table like that. Those paintings had mattered to someone once. Someone had dreamed of making them; someone had believed not only in her vision but in her talent; someone had held a paintbrush and a palette and stood before a canvas whose utter blankness held all the possibility of the universe.

  And now? No one cared. These paintings mattered to no one.

  Except, maybe, to me.

  Focus, I told myself, focus, focus, focus.

  Then I found a painting in that telltale frame and nearly hugged it in relief. I came for you, I thought, before I snapped out of
it and remembered where I was, and what I was doing, and who was waiting for me in the doorway. I was just about to leave when I stopped and pawed through the rest of the pile. Just in case.

  And there. There it was.

  Another one.

  Thrilled with my good luck, I cradled both paintings in my arms and went straight to the register. I hardly dared to hope that there might be anything else connected to them, but there was: a narrow box of antique paintbrushes with specks of caked-on paint still splattering their handles. I knew in my heart, knew beyond all doubt, that they had belonged to LG.

  A few minutes later, I hurried up to Lauren with the biggest dumb smile on my face.

  “Hey. Sorry,” I said. “You’ll never believe what I just bought. Look!”

  “Show me in the car,” she whispered. “I want to get out of here. This place is disgusting.”

  “Where are we going to put these?” I asked, shrugging my shoulders to raise the paintings. “The trunk is packed.”

  “What a good day I had, huh?” Lauren replied. “The shopping gods were so with me!”

  “I could hold them on my lap, maybe?”

  She shook her head. “I know. Put them in the car seats.”

  “Really?”

  “Why not?”

  It was actually kind of hilarious, the two paintings tucked into the twins’ car seats, and then Lauren—she was in such a weird mood—started cracking up as she buckled the safety harnesses over them.

  “Claude. Don’t,” I said, laughing in spite of myself. “What if the paint chips?”

  “Excuse me, Vince. The safety of these paintings is my highest priority,” she shot back. “And I happen to know for a fact that these are the best car seats money can buy.”

  I just shook my head as I climbed into the front seat. For the entire drive to my house, Lauren rambled about everything she’d bought that day. Her self-obsessed monologue required nothing more from me than occasional noises to show I was still listening. Which I was. Mostly. But I snapped to attention as soon as she approached my house.

  “Hello,” Lauren said as she peered through the windshield. “Why is there a kitchen in your front yard?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, staring at the fridge, the stove, and the dishwasher, just hanging out in the grass next to the For Sale by Owner sign like they were having a party. But everything became clear when Lauren and I walked into the kitchen and saw their shiny new replacements.

  “Holy crap,” she said as she looked around. “Did you know about this?”

  I shook my head, stunned into silence.

  “Look,” Lauren continued. “Tile samples. I bet she’s getting new countertops too.”

  I still didn’t say anything.

  “When my parents redid our kitchen, it cost, like, fifty thousand dollars. I’m not even kidding. Where is she getting the money for this?”

  “I don’t know,” I finally replied.

  “You are a saint,” Lauren said. “An absolute saint. This is a total outrage. First she blows through your college money, and now she’s getting a fancy new kitchen? Does she even have a job?”

  “I—I can’t deal with this right now.”

  “You know what I did yesterday?” Lauren asked me. “I registered for my classes. Introduction to Printmaking. Figure Drawing. Survey of European Art. Sculpture One.”

  I flinched with every course she rattled off. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because, Julie, it should be you too,” she said firmly. “You should be choosing all your classes. You should be getting ready to move into the dorms. You should be going to college next month! What your mom did to you? Derailing your future? It’s one of the worst things I have ever witnessed.”

  “Can you stop?” I snapped. “You’re not helping.”

  “Are you mad?” she asked. “Good. You should be mad. I have been waiting for months for you to get mad. Because until you get mad about it, Julie, you’re not going to be able to change anything.”

  “I am already working as hard as I can—”

  Lauren shook her head. “That’s not what I mean,” she said. “Nobody could work harder than you. Nobody could do more than you’ve done. But your mom, Julie, and you know I love her, what she did was way out of line. And you have to call her out, because as long as she thinks that her new kitchen is more important than you going to college—”

  “Why would she do this?” I cried as I burst into tears. “Why? We just paid off all her debt!”

  Lauren wrapped me in a hug. “I’m so sorry, Jules. I am so, so sorry. Don’t cry.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “Just…tell her that she has to return this stuff. All of it. And if she somehow had the money to pay for it…well, she owes it to you, so she should give it to you.”

  Like it was that easy. I mean, I appreciated the support, but even Lauren had to know that this entire situation was a thousand times more complicated than that.

  “Let’s do something,” she said suddenly. “Anything you want. We could go to a movie or…or…go get something to eat. Anything.”

  I didn’t even have to think about it. “Let’s go look at the paintings. In the dark.”

  There was a pause before she replied. “Okay.”

  With every step up the stairs, I could feel something sinister slinking toward us. The air itself was charged with anticipation, like the atmosphere before an electrical storm. My body crackled with apprehension. I gritted my teeth, once, before Lauren laid her hand briefly along the side of my jaw. We stood next to each other in heavy silence, the kind where language fails you, and even the thought of speaking, of disrupting the stillness, seems like a dangerous mistake.

  The painting I’d carried upstairs was a bedroom with two beds, end to end, and a girl at each one. Through the window, a moon was rising—or setting—but it cast barely any light. The blackness of the night sky seemed to pour into the room. One of the girls had already slipped into her bed and lay there, expressionless, with her eyes wide open. The other girl knelt at the side of the other bed…praying, I think? It was hard to tell, especially with her head bowed so that her hair concealed most of her face. I wanted to pull back those dark curtains of hair and let the light shine through her eyes. I wanted to see her, to know for myself. What was in that face? Those eyes?

  I turned to the other painting, a portrait of a young woman, hoping to find the answer there. LG? I wondered. Is that you?

  Of course, there was no response. I didn’t expect one. I mean, I’m not crazy.

  But what if it was her?

  Lauren spoke first. “So…” she said, and her voice was hushed, respectful. “Self-portrait?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I think so.”

  I studied the girl’s smooth cheeks, the hair swept away from her face. The whorl of her ear was an infinite spiral, a wonder of design. You had to marvel at such meticulous invention. An ear: who could imagine such a thing? And yet when you thought of it by itself, say, cut from a head, sitting alone on the kitchen table, or the floor, an ear became an object of horror, a dried apricot of disgust. I was about to mention that to Lauren, to make another one of our endless van Gogh jokes, when—without warning—she turned out the lights.

  Maybe it was because I wasn’t expecting the sudden darkness, but I hadn’t braced myself for what could appear. Or maybe it was because I was in too deep, way too deep. I was drowning in what these paintings might mean and all the questions I couldn’t answer. And here it was: more horror, more mystery. I should’ve known by now that I wouldn’t be able to look away.

  At first glance, the portrait had hardly changed at all. The glow seemed to illuminate those delicate doll-features from within, turning her eyes into large, luminous moons staring at me from many light-years away. The only thing I noticed—the only real difference—was her jaw. It was gone. Only her upper lip, like half a heart, remained. Then came a great emptiness where her lower lip should’ve been, where
her chin was missing. This was not a mouth you could kiss; this was not a face you should see. The gaping hole seemed poised to speak, but whatever it wanted to say could only be communicated by her eyes.

  Look away, I thought.

  But I didn’t. On the street, you wouldn’t stare at someone who looked like that, but here, in my room, face to half-face, looking away from her would’ve been rude. I might as well have said You disgust me and I’m afraid of you. And that, I think, is why I wanted to touch her—I mean, the painting. This is what I would do for the ravaged girl in the painting. I would find the beauty in her. I was admiring her pretty ears, tracing the tiny rosebud earring that had appeared, when Lauren spoke.

  “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “You know.” Lauren’s voice, disembodied in the darkness. “Touch it. The painting.”

  “I’m not going to hurt it.”

  “Well, not on purpose. But your skin can harm…Come on, Julie, you know this. Don’t touch the goddamn painting.”

  That was it. I turned on the light. “What’s your problem?” But when I saw Lauren’s face, saw how gray she was, her lips nearly invisible, I softened my voice. “Whoa. What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong? Are we looking at the same thing? Did you see…did you see—”

  “I just looked at the portrait. What is it, Lauren? I know it’s creepy and—”

  “Look at the other one.”

  Lauren scooched backward until she was pressed against the wall—she was as far away from the paintings as she could be without leaving my room—and then she drew her knees up to her chest and hugged herself. I was so annoyed with her. Why now was she freaking out about the paintings?

  When I turned out the light, I understood.

  I understood so much, actually, that it seemed to smack me on the head. How could I have missed it? I mean, of course the beds were graves, crowned with funereal wreaths of roses. Of course they were. And of course the girls were skeletons, so long dead that their elastic skin and gristly muscle and creamy fat had all rotted away, so that only their bones, elemental and eternal, remained. The one who’d been in the bed was clearly dead and buried. The other one—the one who’d been praying—was worse. She was crawling into her grave, dangling one foot over the side the way you might sit on the edge of a pool and skim your toes through the water. That yawning grave, so cold, so deep, so eerily empty. It was waiting for her, and worse than knowing that was realizing that she knew it too. Why else would she have painted it?