The Light at the End of the Hall

Veronica and Sylvie decided to arrange their data like a graphic novel. Veronica’s sketches would go in the panels and Sylvie would add all the data in a manner that was both scientific and narrative. Veronica couldn’t help but feel the plants were telling a bigger story.

She was very conscientiously outlining each frame, and the care she put into making them reminded her of the way she used to put dashes between each letter in each word she spelled when she was in kindergarten. Her mother had tried to make her see that instead of adding clarity, she was making her writing illegible. But Veronica never saw it that way.

She had one more frame to make when the lead of her pencil broke. She dug into her pencil case and came up empty. “Oh, no,” Veronica said, “I broke my lead.”

“There’s a sharpener in my room,” Sylvie said without looking up.

Veronica left the living room wondering what strange things lurked in the uncharted areas of the Samuelses’ apartment. Maybe showing people around your apartment was the behavior of grown-ups. Her mother always took people on tours of their apartment and got so excited to go on tours of other people’s. Kids generally didn’t do that. But still, it was strange to have spent every day here and not know anything about what was beyond the living room. She’d never actually been anywhere except the living room, a powder room, and the kitchen.

Veronica made her way down the hall. Toward the end was a light, like someone had left a TV on, which struck her as odd. But this light was many colors. It throbbed and bounced off the wall, which made the source impossible to identify. What was it: a lava lamp? An interactive artwork? She was mildly disappointed to discover the source of all these colors was just an ordinary laptop.

On the desk in Sylvie’s room an open laptop played a slide show. Each image held for a second or two before morphing into the next. Sylvie’s life was exposed for Veronica to examine.

Some babies look like old men when they are born. Sylvie was adorable. And the way her mother gazed upon her was startling. There was so much love in her eyes, so much joy in her face. None of the pictures of Veronica and her mother had that kind of mother-daughter-precious-moment-captured-forever-on-film quality because Mr. Morgan took the pictures and it always took him so long to operate the camera that by the time he finally pressed the button, whatever spontaneity had prompted the picture in the first place was long gone.

The pictures on Sylvie’s laptop told a beautiful story, but it was too short. The oldest Sylvie looked in the pictures was two or three. The last picture of them together was taken at a beach. They were standing in the surf holding hands. And even though the picture was taken from behind, Veronica was certain they were smiling.

Veronica understood now that Sylvie Samuels wasn’t weird or cold or creepy. Sylvie had a hole in her heart where her love used to be. Sylvie Samuels was sad, just like Veronica.