THE HEADLIGHTS SHONE ON MY house like a spotlight. I knew I was supposed to say good night and thanks and this was fun and let’s do it again and all of those normal things you say to people, but when I looked over at Chris and his smile, I couldn’t think of any words to say. I wanted to lean into the space between us, something like gravity pulling me toward him. But I looked down at my hands in my lap, and said, “Well.”
And then he laughed and said, “Yeah.”
“Okay,” I tried to begin again, but words were failing me.
“Bike tires part two another day, then?” he asked.
“I’d like that.”
We were stuck looking at each other, except this time he looked away first. He ran his hand over his hair, and drummed his fingers along the edge of the steering wheel. I opened the door, and when the light inside the car turned on, it seemed to crush whatever the awkwardness was that had just taken place.
As I got out of the car, he raised his hand in a small wave. “Good night.”
“Night,” I said through the open window.
I went inside, but I stood there in the dark entryway and watched as his headlights faded down the driveway. The light was on in the kitchen for me. Mom’s way of saying she still cared about whether I made it home each night.
No way was I going to fall asleep. Between Chris and finding those Mallory spots and the fireworks still going off in the distance, the air around me was vibrating. I immediately started filling the coffeepot with water. I scooped in the coffee grounds—huge, heaping spoonfuls, until the white paper filter was nearly overflowing.
The coffeemaker began its gurgling and hissing routine, and I pulled a mug out of the cupboard. While I waited for the coffee, my thoughts drifted out the kitchen window and across the field up to the second story of the gray house, where a light was on. Tomorrow suddenly seemed like a really long time to have to wait to see him again.
“Mallory, what are you doing?”
I spun around. Mom was standing there in her bathrobe, her eyes half open.
“Mom,” I said. “You just called me Mallory.”
She flinched at the sound of my sister’s name. Her eyes opened all the way then, and she shook her head, her face getting all scrunched up. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I know what I said, Maia.” She argued in that tone she usually reserved for my father, and I had the distinct suspicion that she threw my name in there just to prove she still knew it.
Just then, the basement door creaked open.
Dad shuffled into the kitchen, his hair disheveled, and he was now standing right next to Mom. “What’s going on?” he mumbled.
Mom rolled her eyes—how dare he speak in her presence.
Next I heard Roxie padding down the stairs. Her nails clicked against the linoleum as she walked up between Mom and Dad, yet another set of eyes on me.
“Nothing’s going on,” I said. “It’s not even ten o’clock.”
Mom crossed her arms and firmed up her stance for just a moment before she sank back into her tiredness and unfolded her arms again. “Who was that dropping you off just now?” she asked.
“Hayden,” I lied, for some reason.
If she knew that wasn’t the truth, she didn’t give herself away. She looked at my dad and pulled her robe tighter across her chest, as if he was just some random man, a stranger, someone simply renting a room from her, and with whom it was inappropriate to be standing around in the kitchen while wearing pajamas. She started walking away, and I heard her say “Good night” from the living room.
Then it was just Dad and me, with Roxie standing in between us now, looking back and forth, probably trying to decipher which of us needed her more.
“Coffee at this hour?” he asked.
“I’m not tired,” I explained, and I knew I was taking a tone with him—that’s how he used to describe it, back when he had the wherewithal to stand his ground. “Is that a problem?” I added, like an extra test. Maybe if I copped enough attitude, it would snap him back into parent mode. But I was wrong. Because the way he looked at me, all hurt, like an injured animal, you’d have thought I’d said, Why don’t you go fuck off and die?
“No” was all he said. And then he walked away too.
Guilt trip. Squared.
The coffeemaker gave one last gurgle.
“Great,” I muttered.
I bent down and scratched Roxie in that spot behind the ears that she loved, and whispered, “You’re the only sane one left in this family.”
• • •
Roxie followed me outside the way she used to follow Mallory when she’d stay up late in the barn drinking coffee on one of her work binges.
I’d filled my cup too high and spilled the hot coffee on myself at least three times as I made my way outside in the dark. I didn’t really like coffee all that much, but I remembered how Mallory would make big pots of it, alternating with her weed, so she could stay awake to work. She’d said it helped her think straight, that it was natural and it wasn’t like she was some kind of meth-head, which is what happened to a lot of the kids around here after graduating from CHS. But I always thought that was just Mallory-bullshit.
I pulled open the barn door and turned on the lights.
I walked along the wall of endless pictures, searching for the places I’d seen today with Chris. There was the gas station graffiti that had been residing in the back of my mind ever since I found it. There was Bowman’s—Bowman’s bare and stark, and then Bowman’s full of people in party mode. There was the empty road with the clouds.
There was the cemetery gate. And now, following in succession, a picture of a stone statue, worn and weathered; it looked like a saint or angel or something, with this halo of sunlight all around it. If I didn’t know better, I would think Mallory had edited the photo that way. But she never did that. She’d said that if there was something in there you wanted out, then that was all the more reason it should stay in, and if there was something missing that should be there, then that’s why you keep doing it, why she would always go back out the next day and do it all over again.
I would go back to the cemetery in New Pines.
I would do it over again.
I sat down at Mallory’s table and rifled through the drawer until I found a sketchbook. When I opened it, there was nothing in it, although there had been pages ripped out, indentations on the blank paper underneath. I grabbed the red, waxy tipped pencil that was sitting out, and I made a list of all the pictures I’d found in real life so far.
As I sat there, surrounded by Mallory’s things, I was brought back to a night we shared out here. It was barely a year ago, on one of those caffeine- and marijuana-fueled nights—the last night we were friends. She was pacing back and forth in front of me, ranting and elated at the same time: “The world’s a mess, right?” she exclaimed.
“Yeah,” I agreed, half-heartedly.
“Nothing makes sense. Everything’s so chaotic and out of control. But when you’re taking a photo”—she paused for emphasis (she was always doing that)—“it’s like the only thing in the entire world that has to make sense is what’s inside the frame. This little rectangle of space. And all the rest of it can fall away.” She held her hands out as if she were letting something invisible fall from between her fingers.
I yawned. I had been reaching my breaking point with her for months, probably for my entire life, and this was the night when I’d finally had enough. I told her I was tired and wanted to go back to the house and get into bed.
When I stood up, she pulled on my arm and said, “Come on, we’re having secret sister time, Mai.”
“No we’re not,” I snapped. Maybe it was a little bit of a contact high that made me stand up to her that night. Regardless of why I did it, I did. And I’d never be able to take it back. “You’re just using me,” I told her, my voice full of needles. “You don’t care that it’s me here. You just talk at me while you get more and more obliterated and make less and less sense. You try to make me feel like it’s some special sister bonding thing, when really you just keep me here so I don’t tell Mom and Dad you’re a pothead.”
“Whoa-ho.” Her voice lilted, and she took a step back, clapping her hands together like I’d just finished a performance. “Where did that come from?”
“From me!” I had to yell to get her to hear me, and that made me even angrier.
“I don’t know if I should be hurt or impressed.”
“Neither,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Or both,” she added, and turned her back to me.
She picked up a photograph that was lying on the table along with a handful of thumbtacks and brought them over to the wall, not so much ignoring me but pretending I had disappeared.
“I’m serious, Mallory!” I said, following along behind her.
She arranged the four thumbtacks in a row, holding the heads of the tacks between her lips as she centered the photo on the wall with both hands. “So get out,” she mumbled through the hardware in her mouth.
I stood there for a moment and watched as she steadied the photo and then took each tack one by one and speared the corners with precision, never looking back at me, not saying another word.
I closed my eyes now as I sat in her chair, trying hard to remember what the photograph was. I remember looking at it right before I walked out, and thinking how she cared more about this stupid picture than being my sister. I stood, retracing the steps I had taken as I followed her that night, the sequence of events so ingrained in my mind that they led me directly to it.
The photo was of a stained glass window.
I touched the corner where one of the tacks was positioned on a tilt, not flush with the wall like the other three. Was that the tack she’d pressed in as she told me to get out?
The window was a square in the center of a rectangle of paper—the white space around it made it stand out. As I looked at all the surrounding photos, this was the only one cropped in that way. Maybe that’s what she was talking about when I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. About how it’s only what’s inside the frame that needs to make sense.
That was the key to figuring out where this window was. It had been cropped. Cropped from something else, a bigger picture. I raced back over to Mallory’s desk. I flung open the drawers. She had hundreds of multicolored file folders jammed in each drawer, only the colors didn’t seem to indicate any particular organizational system.
In each folder, there were hundreds of plastic sleeves filled with even more negatives, row after row after row. Black-and-white ghostly images, all turned inside out.
I removed the file folders by the armful and splayed them out on the floor.
I took a deep breath, then a sip of coffee, and opened the first one. I grasped the first sleeve at the corners, between my thumb and forefinger, and held it up to the light. My eyes scanned each tiny image, one after another. Sheet after sheet. I’d made it through only three folders, and I’d barely even started to make the beginning of a dent in what was still left to go through.
I wished I hadn’t messed things up with Neil so badly, because he could have probably told me in one glance where this window lived. I leaned forward over my thighs and let my forehead rest against a pile of slippery plastic sleeves. “Mallory,” I groaned. I hesitated to talk to her outright, to ask a real question of her. Because not getting an answer would be too hard. This was stupid. Impossible.
I began collecting the folders again, stacking them one on top of the other. I carried them in my arms and set them down on the edge of the desk. I went and got another stack, and another. And as I set down the very last pile, one of the folders at the bottom slid out of place, like a house slipping off its foundation. I reached out to try to catch it, but it was too late.
The entire collection, stack upon stack of thousands of plastic sleeves, cascaded to the floor. If they had been in any order, I would never be able to put them back the way they’d been.
“Goddammit,” I muttered.
Roxie ambled to the edge of the mess and stood over the sleeve that was farthest away, almost reaching the wall. She sniffed at it and then looked at me. Defeated, I walked over to where she was standing and sat down on the cold, hard floor. She leaned in and touched her nose to mine, and then lay down.
I curled up into a ball around her, and she snuggled into me. My cheek was resting against one of those zillion plastic sleeves. I picked it up, preparing to toss it toward the larger pile, but, almost as a reflex, I held it above my head instead.
My eyes were tired and unfocused, but there it was. The negative I had been searching for. This was the one. I was sure of it. I stumbled to my feet and brought it over to the picture on the wall to compare.
It wasn’t a window; I could see that now. Or it wasn’t just a window. It was a door, a window inside a door.
“We actually found it.” I wasn’t sure whether the “we” I was referring to was Roxie and me or Mallory and me, but either way, we had done it. I was feeling closer to Mallory with every passing second.
Except now there was the next step, figuring out where the door was.
Instead of daunting, it felt exciting. Like I was finally onto something. Like this whole night meant something. Like I was supposed to leave the picnic, supposed to drive away with Chris, supposed to find the cemetery gate and the soda shop with the jukebox, and even the new age store with the incense.
I wanted to tell Chris, but then I’d have to tell him everything. Like one of those fireworks exploding on the side of the road, the realization jolted me: For the first time in my life I was doing something that had a purpose. I wished I knew how to share it with him.