Dark Rooms (28 page)

Immediately I felt her stiffen. “Okay,” she said. “I won't.”

A few minutes later her body withdrew into a private shrimplike curl and her breathing deepened. I lay awake for hours, but eventually I must've nodded off too, because before I knew it my alarm clock was
blaring. I shut it off, turned to Nica. But Nica wasn't there. She looked like her normal self at breakfast. Didn't say a word about the night before. Didn't say a word the next day either. And I guess I began to believe that I'd made it all up, that she'd visited me in a dream or something, and then dismissed the matter from my mind altogether.

But thinking about it now, I understand that it's the exact instant, the precise, scientific point, when I began to lose contact with her. This wasn't a loss I noticed all the time, only at certain moments. Every so often, in the middle of an ordinary conversation, and without the slightest warning, she'd fall into silence. These silences never lasted for very long, but in them I'd realize that something had come between us, some invisible yet solid thing, like a layer of glass; she was on one side, I was on the other, and I couldn't reach her no matter how hard I tried.

Maybe if I'd been different that night, had handled myself better, with more courage, less selfishness, things wouldn't have worked out the way they did. Maybe that's why I have to find her killer. Not because she's my sister or because there's been some abstract miscarriage of justice, but because she'd come to me and I'd let her down, and now I owe her, plain and simple.

I blink and I'm back in the café. I reset my attention to Mom's voice. She's still bitching about Mr. Amory and what a big mouth he has. She's in the middle of a sentence when I stand up. “Let's go to your studio,” I say.

Mom pays the bill, cash—a ten, face-up, Alexander Hamilton looking less like a Founding Father than a poet or composer—so we don't have to hang around while the waitress swipes a credit card. I pour the rest of my soda into the box of dry-looking flowers at my elbow. As we exit the café, I glance over at Damon. He's still in front of the bookstore, leaning against the bumper of a Volkswagen Beetle, holding up
a paperback with a shiny cover. He's so absorbed in it he doesn't notice that Mom and I are on the move.

It's just past noon, the sun high and hot. Immediately I start to sweat. I'm glad when the walk to her studio turns out to be a short one. I don't speak and neither does she, but I know she's on edge because she drops her key twice fitting it into the lock. At last she opens the door.

The studio is a large rectangle of light, raw space and tall windows. At the far end is a closed door—a bathroom she's converted into a darkroom, no doubt. A circular table is at the center, on top a pair of cotton gloves, a can of Nova Tar Buster, a bowl of red apples. Tacked to the walls are photos of Nica. Nica at different ages. Nica in different moods. Nica shot from different angles. Everywhere I look Nica, Nica, Nica. Even Mom's a version of Nica, standing there, gnawing on a thumb joint, just like Nica used to when she was lost in thought.

I'm about to ask Mom where I should start when I see a sight familiar and shocking at once: my sister, looking like the child star of an adult film turned snuff film mid-reel; like wormbait trussed up as jailbait; like a
femme fatale
in every sense, a
femme
who leads men to their dooms and a
femme
who is doomed herself.
Nica's Dream
. This version of the photograph is even clearer and more finely etched than the original hanging in our kitchen.

“I had the negative,” Mom says, talking nervous-fast. “I printed it and reprinted it, used high-quality paper and conjured up every detail I possibly could. I'm still not totally satisfied.” She pauses, then goes on: “Since Aurora's coming up so soon, I tried to pick out not only the images I want to use, but also the sequence I want the images to appear in, so they'd form a narrative.”

Without comment I move on to the next photograph. I recognize it. It's a shot of Nica at thirteen trying to unhook her bra, head bowed, arms bent at the elbow and jutting out of her scrawny torso like angel wings.

I recognize the next photo as well. Nica's Converse sticking out the bottom of a bathroom stall, the angle of the feet, the way the toe of one foot is planted firmly on the ground, the heel a couple inches in the air, letting you know she's inserting a tampon.

And the next: Nica, sitting on the bleachers at Chandler in a plaid skirt, knees slightly open, several black pubic hairs curling over the elastic leg hole of her underpants, cotton and an immaculate white.

I'm moving quickly now, eager to reach the end. I want to make sure there isn't anything new here, no surprises, and then, once I do, I can grind Mom's face in the fact that she's nothing without Nica, that it's over for her.

The next photo, though, brings me to a dead stop. I never thought I'd see it again. It's the one Nica showed me that night in the kitchen all those years ago: her in bed, back to the camera, Dora the Explorer sheet draped over her hip, the rest of her bare, face in profile, breast, too, eyes shut. All details I'd noticed then. Here are the details I didn't notice: her brow, tight-knit and furrowed, signifying concentration rather than rest; her neck, arched, the cords in it standing out; her shoulders, hunched and rounded. Nica, I realize, isn't naked and asleep in this picture, like I'd thought at the time. She's naked and masturbating. Jesus, and I didn't understand why she was so upset it had been taken without her knowledge.
Big deal,
I'd said to her.
You've let mom take plenty of nude shots before.
My shame turns suddenly to confusion. How come the photograph's here, still exists? Wouldn't Nica have invoked her right to destroy it? Watched Mom burn the negative as she usually insisted on doing? Obviously not. Or maybe she did invoke the right and then Mom talked her out of it. I'd seen Mom do that kind of thing to Nica before. Mom would let her contempt show when Nica got emotional, failed to take depravity in stride, be cool about it. And Nica would break.

To get away from the shame and confusion I start walking again. I pass a series of photos of Nica and Jamie: Nica painting her toenails
on the porch while Jamie does push-ups in the grass; Nica, her finger hooked in one of the belt loops of Jamie's pants, pulling him toward her; Nica and Jamie on the couch, both bare-chested, feeding on each other with open mouths; Nica and Jamie present only in their absence, his jeans and hers tangled together like sleeping lovers at the foot of her bed.

I've seen these images before. I'm walking faster and faster, the photographs streaking by:

Nica, under a streetlamp at night, crouching to light a cigarette;

Nica, struggling to open her birth control compact in our bathroom, her retainer, still wet with saliva, teetering on the lip of the sink;

Nica, a bottle of Smirnoff's in her fist, drawing Maddie in for an almost-kiss as she tips the vodka out of her own mouth and into Maddie's.

Seen it. Seen it. Seen it. All this material is old to me. I turn in triumph to Mom to tell her so. And then I notice that I missed a photograph, the last one. My eye must have skipped over it because it doesn't seem to belong with the others. Unlike the images that precede it—grainy, low-lit, in stark black and white—this image is in color, supersaturated color, color that's bright and sharp-edged to an almost hallucinatory degree, color so vivid and full-bodied it makes you feel as if you've been living in Kansas your whole life and a tornado's suddenly spit you out in Oz. And it's not just the style that sets the photo apart. It's the content, too. This is a complete departure from the documentary-type portraits of adolescent ritual and misbehavior that the show's been composed of so far. There's no exploitive or dirty-minded kick here. And Nica's not the focus, no person is. It's a pastoral shot featuring a sun-dappled garden full of striped lavender crocuses and budding yellow daffodils and dew-drenched grass, the post from a Norman Rockwell white picket fence in the background, all under a sky as blue as a baby's eye. The scene is an idyll, benign
and becalmed, an enchanted small-town world in which nothing bad could ever happen.

Then my gaze drifts downward, and I see that Nica is in the picture, after all, just hidden, her upper half obscured by grass, her lower half out of the frame altogether. Her body is turned away from the camera and curled tightly, fetally into itself, the delicate knobs along her spine showing through her shirt like beads on a string. Her face is visible, but only the right side, eyes puffily closed, mouth slack and hanging open. She's asleep, I realize. I realize, too, that this image is meant to serve as a companion piece to
Nica's Dream,
though with none of the earlier work's feeling of subversive eroticism. On the contrary, this appears to be—in spite of its sneaky staging—a straight-ahead, no-frills shot of an out-cold girl, a real girl, one tending to a bodily need, getting rest the same way she might get a drink of water. The affect is definitely flat and I wonder if this isn't deliberate on Mom's part, a tweaking of the viewer-voyeur for expecting yet another illicit thrill. Or maybe the affect is flat because it had to be: Mom was afraid if she got any closer, Nica would wake up, tell her to take a hike.

I'm about to ask her when I'm struck by the brilliant redness of Nica's mouth. Lipstick, I think. But then I remember, Nica didn't wear lipstick, only lip gloss, the clear kind. That's definitely lipstick, though, isn't it? There's even a fleck of it on her teeth. Had she borrowed it from Maddie? I move in for a closer look. Understanding comes at me fast, in a single jolt: that's not lipstick, it's blood. I suddenly understand other things, too: the wooden spike isn't a post from a picket fence, it's a grave marker; the setting isn't some suburban garden, it's a cemetery; and the girl isn't sleeping, she's dead. Nica's dead.

Standing there, I feel the sun streaming in from the window, and it's like it's passing right through me, like I'm not even there, have disappeared.

And then Mom's voice, small and soft, comes from somewhere behind me: “What do you think?”

Not taking my eyes off the photo, “Did you take it before or after you called the police?”

“Before. Graydon banged on our back door. He was talking fast, so fast I couldn't follow his words. I didn't need to understand him, though, to know he was telling me that Nica was dead. His face said it plainly enough. He took my hand and brought me to her and then ran off. Grace, there was blood everywhere. The ground was soggy with it. All flowing from her broken little body.” Mom stops, her breath coming hard. When she continues, she can barely speak: “I went back to the house and got my camera. I think it was my way of coping with—not coping with—the horror of what I was seeing.”

For a long time there's the sound of Mom's weeping and then no sound at all. And then I say, “And after you were done shooting, you dialed 911?”

“Immediately after. Then I sat with her until the police and ambulances arrived.”

So that morning when I walked from the house to the edge of the graveyard looking for Nica, Nica was actually there. Mom, too. If I hadn't been so focused on Jamie's dorm, seeing if Nica was sneaking out of it, I might have spotted them. “The photo isn't in black and white,” I say. “How come?”

“It was an accident. I grabbed a roll of film. I thought it was black and white, but it wasn't. It was the old Kodachrome film I used years ago. They don't even make it anymore.”

“Black and white would have been okay. What you have is better, though. This photograph—it's darkness in full color.”

“Thank you,” she says, and though her tone is shy, I hear the confidence in it, the excitement even. She's taken a good picture and she knows it. “I was crying and shaking so hard some of the shots didn't
come out at all. Even this one was a mistake. I meant for Nica to be at the center of the frame.”

“No. If you show all of her, you just have a crime-scene photo.”

“I thought the same thing.” Mom reaches into the drawer of the table, pulls out a stack of photos, hands them to me. “But, here, look through these. Tell me if there's one you like better because—”

I turn to her. “The show's going to be huge. You're going to be huge.” And before she can say anything back, I walk out the door.

I pause on the sidewalk outside the studio. I feel as if I've just been sliced open from throat to pelvis, rust-colored blobs spilling out the slit. The street's hot, shadowless, the asphalt gummy beneath my feet. The few clouds in the sky are swollen and sore-looking. As I go to fish my sunglasses out of my bag, I realize I'm still holding the photos. Blindly I shove them into a side pocket with the stash of tampons I haven't touched since early summer. Then I start making my way back to the main drag.

Damon's still leaning against the bumper of the Volkswagen. “Hey, you,” I say. Hearing my voice, he looks up from his book, smiles. The smile vanishes, though, when he sees my face. He jams the book in the rack, puts his arm around me. I collapse against his side. As he leads me away, I wish I'd looked at the title.

We parked in the lot behind the public library, empty except for two or three other cars. Once we're inside mine, I crank the AC. It's busted, though, so it's pushing the heat around some but not breaking
it up any. I lower my window, unbutton the top two buttons on my shirt. Glance over at Damon. His eyes are closed and he's playing with his cross, sliding it along its gold chain, tucking it under his bottom lip. I can see that he's trying to figure out what to say to me, afraid I'll fall apart if he comes out with the wrong thing. I'm about to tell him that he doesn't have to say a word, that just having him next to me makes me feel better. But I don't. Instead I get caught up watching a bead of perspiration that starts at his hairline, trickles down his cheek, and disappears into the scruff on his jaw. Get caught up watching the muscles in his forearm slide and fan out under his skin. Get caught up watching the strip of honeyed abdomen between the hem of his wife beater and the waist of his jeans go from smooth to ridged when he shifts in his seat.