Still Lives

by Maria Hummel

  Like Nikki, Evie stayed. She must have been waiting to be caught. To be recognized. Spotlighted for all to see. Finally, this daughter of no one and nowhere: a household name. When Evie started researching the photographs of murdered women for Still Lives, something had clicked. Instead of pitying the victims, she began envying each murderer his power, his gaze, his ability to position himself, godlike and merciless. When Brent broke things off with her, seemingly to pursue Kim, Evie began to describe to herself a killing that would make her seen. She studied the images; she studied Kim’s career and began plotting her own brutal work. After all, to her, Kim was hardly human, just an idol to be sacrificed.

  I wonder how long it took her to die, Evie had said about the photograph of Judy Ann Dull at her own crucifixion. I thought it was a question about the magnitude of suffering. Now I see that Evie was measuring time.

  I swerve up the road to the cliffs and crack my window, the scent of spring thaw and greenness flooding the car. It’s not nowhere here, the breeze seems to say as it rolls across the dash; it’s the most beautiful place there is. A white-flowering tree dips and sways by the bend; the serviceberry is in bloom. Fiddleheads unfurl their tight, hairy coils by a steep-spilling stream. My love for my home comes slamming through me. The rivulets of water glint and slide. Moss carpets the rocks by a fragile, ghostly clump of mushrooms.

  The path up the back of the cliffs is muddy and narrow, and my heavy, weak body begins floundering thirty steps from the parking lot. I gasp and push myself higher. I remember the view up there, the broad, patched valley, the far horizons of more hills. I need to get there. I need to stand on the brink of it, and find out why I am here and if I am meant to stay. Three times I stop and almost collapse. I wish I’d brought water. I wish I’d brought my mother to tell me to turn around right now and get back down to the car. The woods are wet and still, the rust-colored pine needles slipping beneath my boots. I couldn’t be farther from the desert, from the Pacific, from L.A.’s huge metal ribbons of traffic. Silence and footfall.

  I double over, my head spinning and shimmering with the memory of Evie-as-Kim hurrying from the Rocque. If only I had recognized the angry, lonely, invisible woman inside the disguise, Kim might not have died.

  I grip thin tree trunks, pulling myself up. I keep staggering until I see the clearing in the trees. The white, clouded sky.

  The cliff is a burst of emptiness and cold wind. Trees, trees, then nothing. Not even a branch before me. It’s such a long way down to the tidy cluster of the town below. The buildings are smaller than my fingertips. They sit alongside a slender road that winds to another village, more rumpled hills, and eventually the flat silver curve of Lake Champlain.

  I take another step, then I feel it, deep in my breastbone, Evie’s shove, what has been pushing at me ever since I woke in the hospital. How fast she moved. She flew at me. And behind me the ground gave way and the black pit rose. Since then, I’ve startled awake, many times, from the dream of falling backward.

  This time, I am facing the abyss. It yawns straight ahead, a lethal fifty-foot drop to the pines below, the gray rock rough with age but high and sheer. And Evie’s still here, with her flat face and furious palms, pressing me away from the edge. She won’t let me get within a step of it. She won’t let me get past her rage to the place where I might feel the great gaping blankness, why live, where I might let it lift me until I plummeted.

  She won’t let me go forward at all. This whole month she has been holding me back, and I cannot go on now except by passing through her.

  I don’t know how to do this, but the answer isn’t here.

  I once saw a painted map of Los Angeles circa 1880. It took up half a wall at an exhibition, and was drawn in 3-D from the distance of a short peak, like this one on which I now stand. The map showed rising green hills, orange groves, a low, delicate grid of streets, the pale-blue ocean. The dream of a city in a valley of paradise, flanked by the sea. It was the mapmaker’s gift to render both the existence of L.A. and its possibility, at the end of our continent, our last and greatest destination.

  Over a century later, immense, overcrowded, and corrupted, that’s still the Los Angeles that people fall in love with, the Los Angeles that drew Greg and me, and Kim and her paintings, and even Evie. It’s also the city where monstrous appetites meet private hopes, again and again, and devour them. Where ambition is savaged and changed to devastation, where a brilliant artist can be beaten, stabbed, and locked away to die while her party goes on, cups are raised, and bright beats begin to play.

  Los Angeles hangs before me now, though I am looking at my own familiar, humble slopes of pines, my own jags of granite, and it’s what I breathe though I am gulping the sweet, sharp scent of hemlock and wild raspberry. It gathers in my ears, L.A., like the harsh wind up here that won’t stop blowing, though I have ducked my chin and tucked my head into my jacket collar, and am turning away, down the hill.

  I’ll be back, I promise inside to so many people. It’s hard to see my destination, or who I’ll find there. I only know that I’m going.

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest thanks to the following friends and mentors, who were all instrumental in realizing this novel: Rita Mae Reese, Sarah Frisch, Melanie Abrams, Sara Houghteling, Malena Watrous, Robin Ekiss, Glori Simmons, Kasie Carlisle, Karen Lofgren, Eavan Boland, Tobias Wolff, Ken Fields, Adam Johnson, and Tom Kealey. I am indebted to Stanford University, the Jones lecturers, and my former coworkers at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I would also like to thank the University of Vermont, UVM’s Office of the Vice President for Research, and my dear colleagues for supporting the book in a myriad of ways.

  Thank you to Dan Smetanka, an editor of unparalleled dedication and brilliance, for deepening this story page by page. Thank you to my wonderful agent, Gail Hochman, for many times setting me straight on mystery writing, and to Megan Fishmann, Jennifer Kovitz, Sarah Baline, and the whole crew at Counterpoint and Catapult for bringing this book to readers.

  My loving family cannot be thanked enough. My everlasting gratitude goes to all the Hummels, Parmelees, Greenfields, Ochiais, Shettys, Hallans, Cohens, and Creasons, and especially to Bowie, Bruce, and Kyle.

  Author photograph © Karen Pike

  MARIA HUMMEL is the author of Motherland, San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year; House and Fire; and Wilderness Run. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize, Narrative, The Sun, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. She worked as a writer/editor at MOCA in Los Angeles, then received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and taught there for many years. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, and lives in Vermont with her husband and sons.