Going to the star party that night took on a whole new light after I found those pictures. How would I ever look Jasmine Blue Heffner in the face again?
I wanted to read the whole book right then—call off going to Ellie’s and stay in the darkroom until I was done—but then I looked back at those pictures of Jasmine Blue and I closed the book.
If Darla’s question was Why do people take pictures?, then what sort of answer was that? Or were pictures like that why Darla was asking in the first place?
I said, to the empty room, “I take pictures because sometimes I can’t find the words to say what I want to say.”
There was no answer, but I felt as if I was haunted—as if I heard someone breathe right there next to me. It sounds stupid now, but I was scared. Maybe Bill was there. Maybe Darla was. I saw something move—something translucent.
I put Why People Take Pictures behind the cabinet and I locked the darkroom door. I went upstairs two steps at a time and closed the basement door the minute I got upstairs.
“Dad?”
He looked up. Transmission from Dad: An ancestor bricklayer from the nineteenth century stood on the top of a tall city building, smiling and taking in the view.
“Can we talk about something?” I asked.
He must have noticed the seriousness of my tone because he put his computer on the coffee table and sat up. “Sure. What’s up?” he asked.
“It’s about Jasmine Blue,” I said. “And why you don’t talk to her.”
A lot of awkward silence here.
Oh well.
I said, “You knew each other before, right?”
“We all moved out here together… technically. The four of us.” I stayed quiet. He added, “Me, your mom, Jasmine and Ed.”
“And?”
“We had big ideas.”
“Like?”
He sighed and shook his head. “We were going to start a nonconsumerist movement. Drop out. No attachment. No stuff,” he said. “We were stupid kids.”
I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t think that was a particularly stupid-kid way of thinking… unless that made me a stupid kid, which was probably up for debate considering my recent two-steps-at-a-time escape from my own basement, not to mention my lack of future plans.
He said, “The eighties and nineties were so… full of stuff. Materialistic. Everybody wanted a shiny new car. Money trees. Suits and ties. Everybody was greedy, you know?”
I nodded, but I didn’t know why this was so different from now. That was what everyone at graduation wanted. Success. Spell that with dollar signs. $ucce$$.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Jasmine started gathering her flock.”
“Which means?”
“She invited other people to start living over there. People who agreed with everything she said,” he said.
“So all those people weren’t there in the beginning?”
“No.”
“Did they drop you guys when new people showed up or something?”
“Not quite.”
“So, what’s the big deal? It’s their house. They can have people live there if they want, right?”
“It’s been a long time,” he said.
“Are you saying you can’t remember? Because I don’t believe you.”
“No. It’s just—complicated.”
“I don’t know. I can understand what it’s like when your best friend gets new friends. That must hurt.”
“Yeah. That’s not quite how it went,” he said.
“Well, yeah. The new friends moved onto Jasmine’s farm and started the commune without you, but right across the road. Is that close?”
He pointed toward the commune. “That,” he said. “That… place… isn’t Jasmine’s.”
“Oh,” I said. “Whose is it?”
“It was given to her. By your mother,” he said. “Given.”
“Given?”
“Well, maybe more like borrowed.”
“Like, she didn’t sell it to her? She just… what? Said, Hey you can live here?”
“Yep.”
“Huh,” I said. “So… Jasmine stopped talking to you guys once you gave her a house to live in?”
“Kinda,” he said.
“But she and Mom were close once, right?”
“Best friends.”
“And then… they weren’t?”
He sighed again. “Shit, Cupcake. It’s a hell of a long story.”
“And I really want to know,” I said.
“It’s adult stuff. I mean—I know you’re old enough, but you’re still my kid,” he said. “It’s not the kind of stuff you tell your kid.”
“I might already know more than you think I know. So you should tell me the rest or else you’ll die one day and I’ll never know the truth and that would suck.”
He stared at me.
I said, “What did Jasmine do?”
“Uh—she—uh. She didn’t—uh—something—uh…”
“Seriously? You can’t tell me?”
He exhaled. “Jasmine tried to steal me away from your mother,” he said. “She tried really hard.”
He made a face, then. Like he’d just eaten a bad piece of shellfish. “I didn’t handle it right,” he went on, before I had a chance to say anything. “Darla had every reason to be angry.”
“Is that why…?”
“No.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with it?”
“No.”
“So she and Jasmine had a big fight or something?”
I felt bad for pressing. But at the same time, I’d just found naked pictures of Jasmine Blue Heffner in a secret book in Darla’s darkroom and I wanted to know where they came from.
He was quiet and sent out signals that the conversation was over.
I didn’t want to piss Dad off and then leave.
I didn’t want to make him sad, either.
But I was inexplicably angry about those pictures.
He put the laptop back on his lap and started to type as if we weren’t having a conversation and that made me angry. The old, not-graduated Glory O’Brien might have just microwaved a snack pocket cherry pie, but Glory O’Brien the bat wanted the truth. I stood with my hand on my hip.
“Did Mom take those pictures of her? Is that one of those weird nineties things you talk about? Posing naked and stuff like that?”
It took a minute for my question to prance across the room and into his ears, but once it did, he put his face into his hands. For a second I thought he might be crying, but then he looked at me.
I sat down. He closed the lid on his laptop and curled his legs cross-legged, winced from knee pain, then uncrossed them.
“Jasmine gave me the pictures. I was an idiot and I didn’t tell your mother because that was her best friend, right? And what best friend would, you know—do that? And then your mom found the pictures.”
I squinted at him. “You saved them?”
“I told you I was an idiot about it,” he said. “It’s not like I looked at them or anything. I stuck them in the back of my studio and under a hundred other pictures I kept there. Painters, we… collect pictures and stuff so we can refer to them. Your mom was digging through the pile one day and—well, yeah. That’s when things went bad.”
He looked sick.
“You mean for her, or for you?”
“For all of us,” he said. “Jasmine said she’d stay on the commune and never come here again as long as Darla allowed her to stay on the land. She apologized a lot for the pictures, but your mom wouldn’t accept the apologies. Not from me, either.”
“So this is what caused it?”
“No. Of course not.” It sounded like that was probably the three millionth time he’d said it.
“We’ve never talked about it, you know?” I said.
He nodded vaguely.
“I’ve always wanted to know… uh.” I stopped there. “I mean, why didn’t we leave or make her leave or whatever? Wasn’t there a better solution?”
“We didn’t know it was coming,” he said. “Nobody knew it was coming.”
“I don’t mean that,” I said. That (n.): A better word for suicide. “I mean before that. I mean, couldn’t you just tell Jasmine to go away and show Mom that the pictures were just a—uh—mistake?”
“It was more complicated than that.”
“Oh.”
“Stuff like that lingers,” he said. “And then when Darla died, I could have kicked Jasmine out myself but I didn’t because you and Ellie were tight as kids, and how could I take away your only friend at the same time you lost your mom?”
“Shit.” I said that because he said only friend. I said it because that fact made two secrets into a bigger, more awful secret.
“Yeah.”
“That must be hard,” I said. “Not talking to her all these years.”
“Not talking to Jasmine is easy. Since Darla died, she acts like I’m dead, too,” he said. “And where the fuck are those pictures that you saw? I don’t want them in the house. I don’t want you thinking about this shit.”
“Language, Dad.”
“Seriously.”
“I’m glad you told me this,” I said. I looked at him and he smiled at me through a pained face. Transmission from Dad: One of his ancestors once killed a giant stag by jumping on its back and garroting it with a young tree limb. Still no future for me. No grandchildren fighting or dying in CWII. Just Megaloceros giganteus. Just a vision of someone ripping meat from the bone of an enormous drumstick.
My train still felt on track. It felt like its brakes worked. It felt like I could stop it anytime. But I was starting to realize that Why People Take Pictures was a turning point. I had never had control of my train. I wasn’t sure who, exactly, had control of it. It was different from day to day. Markus Glenn had control the day he asked me to touch his tipi. Ellie had control the days when we were kids and she changed the rules and then, as teenagers, she made me drink the dust of a mummified bat. Dad had control by relinquishing control. I walked through the freight cars and the passenger cars. I walked toward the engine. I wanted to see who was driving. But deep down, I knew who was driving.