After I dropped Ellie off at the commune, I drove to the nearest Chinese restaurant and got the spiciest food I could order because from the minute Ellie mentioned it, I wanted some. I ordered Dad an egg roll and a large pad Thai, his favorite from that place.
As I drove I tried to block out what Ellie had said, but it was hard.
I thought you were over it.
People are so stupid sometimes.
When I got home, Dad was still AWOL, so I sat at the kitchen table by myself and ate my dinner facing the place where the oven used to be. It was a vacuum of not-oven. I stared at it because I knew particles of my mother were still there somehow.
I looked at the vacuum of not-oven and I thought: I will somehow create a descendant. And that descendant will be trapped in a tunnel near the end of the Second Civil War.
I was pissed that I hadn’t talked to the USS Pledge man when I saw my future in him. I had so many questions, and he might have the answers. Maybe more visions of a baby or something. Anything.
I smiled even though I’d never liked babies. The first baby I ever held was my aunt Amy’s daughter when she was less than a month old and all Aunt Amy did the whole time was screech about how I had to hold the kid’s head up as if her precious God would make a creature so frail that not holding its head up every single second could snap it off like a dry twig.
I stared at the kitchen cabinet that had replaced the oven and wondered what it was like to bake bread or make a pie or roast a chicken or do any of those oven-themed things. Things that didn’t taste like radiation. Things that suffered real-oven side effects. Things that got crispy and browned. Things that rose or fell. If I was going to live past eighteen, I wanted those things.
I opened my fortune cookie. Everything serves to further.
Huh.
Everything serves to further.
I looked up at the not-oven vacuum. I decided to tell Dad that I planned on using part of my fifty thousand dollars to buy a new oven—electric—so I could learn to be a normal human. It was about time, right? To be normal?
Like anything about life after the bat is normal. Like anything could ever be normal knowing what I know—about now or the future.
I returned to the darkroom after dinner to find my negatives dry and Why People Take Pictures behind the cabinet where I’d left it. Where Darla had left it. I wanted to sit there all night and read the whole thing now that I had time.
I opened it to the next page and it was a two-page spread of old-time pornography. Nothing too shocking, mind you. Calendar stuff. Bikini-clad models on the beach, then bikini-clad models on the beach missing their tops. Then formerly-bikini-clad models on the beach showing their tan lines. Under each one, Darla wrote captions.
You.
Are.
All.
Worth.
More.
Than.
This.
On the next page there were two pretty gross pictures of Jasmine Blue Heffner. Her legs were—uh—open. It was—uh—uncomfortable. Not just because I was looking at Jasmine Blue Heffner’s privates, but because I knew she’d given these pictures to Dad. And because I knew Darla had found them. And I knew it must have crushed her. I turned the page and found a large picture of a tub of anti-aging cream. Under it, Darla wrote:
You’re a pornographer too, you know.
On the next page was a self-portrait. Darla was plain and beautiful. Her eyes looked like she’d seen a ghost. Underneath, it read:
I have wrinkles. I am not tortured by them. I am no one special and so what if I have wrinkles? One day I will be no one special and be dead. Am I making sense?
I stared at that last paragraph for a while and I wished I had Darla and her wrinkles rather than Dead Darla. Live Darla sounded like she would be fun to talk to. Honest. Not scared to say shit that most people are scared to say. Live Darla probably would have great taste in music. She might have had wrinkles, but she would have shown me around that darkroom and made me feel like I belonged there instead of feeling like a burglar.
I doled out three trays and started the print washer. It made a swooshing noise that calmed me as I mixed developer, stop bath and fixer for the trays. I stared at the setup. It was so simple, wasn’t it?
No microchips or megabytes or silicone or software. Just chemistry and water. Just silver on paper. Just light and darkness.
I inspected my dry negatives and cut them into strips and put them on the countertop in order. I turned on the amber light and hit the main switch so the room got dark. It was quieter, then, inside the room and inside my head. Everything was quieter. I got some glass and risked some of Darla’s old 8 x 10 paper and I made three contact sheets of my negatives. So simple. Light shines on the paper, though the negative, makes a tiny picture. Then I slipped the paper into the developer and moved the tray back and forth until the image formed. By the time I was finished and the contact sheets were in the dryer, I understood the therapeutic value of Darla’s darkroom.
I thought about what Ellie had said again. How could anyone think I would be over it? I thought about the thirteen years I’d lived while no one ever talked about it. I thought about how I always thought people just had a problem with death. I’d read articles. It’s true. People totally have a problem with death. But what’s worse is the problem they have afterward. They just don’t know what to say. They still have normal lives to get on with. They still have ovens.
I wanted to talk to Dad, but I was mad at him. For a list of things it was too late to bring up now.
I wanted to talk to Ellie, but I was mad at her, too.
Why hadn’t either of them helped me? Why hadn’t they asked? Wasn’t it obvious? Was it that hard to connect the dots of Glory O’Brien? Or had I been so good at hiding everything that they’d simply done exactly what I needed them to do… even though I needed them to do something entirely different?
It wasn’t Ellie’s responsibility to make sure I was okay.
Dad should have at least brought it up once by now.
I turned on the main light and opened some of Darla’s regular not-secret, not-hidden-behind-the-print-dryer sketchbooks. They were wonderful. So many obscure images of life. So many smart captions. So many indications that she was once happy. All there. Not crazy. Not ready to go. But then there was this one picture. It was of me and Dad. The caption read: When I’m with them, I feel trapped inside a latex balloon. It’s like witnessing an amazing father and his adorable daughter walking down the other side of the street.
I knew that feeling.
I knew what it was like to be in a latex balloon. It was suffocating. Somehow this connection didn’t make me cry. It made me understand a little. It made me wonder what I could do to get out of the balloon.
Then, as I turned toward the door, something caught my eye.
The tooth.
She’d hung it from the ceiling over the door, like morbid mistletoe. It shimmered—reflecting back to me, through Darla.
It had a small fortune-sized message attached to it. I stood on the stool and reached out with shaky hands to read it. It said: Not living your life is just like killing yourself, only it takes longer.