So smart

I watched Ellie look from drummer to drummer in the drum circle. Her eyes grew wide sometimes, as if she was seeing the same carnage I was seeing. Or maybe she was seeing other stuff. Rick’s DNA trail. Her mother’s commune trail. Maybe she would eventually find out that her whole world belonged to me.

Rick stayed by the drum circle. Seeing him reminded me to look around for a little kid with curly hair and bad skin. There were two kids playing over by the campfire. I didn’t care enough to go and look at them. So I went to find Mr. Heffner, Ellie’s dad. I figured he’d have something interesting to tell me if I looked at him long enough.

Transmission from Ed Heffner: His father was bald and impotent. His grandfather had been bald and impotent. Ed couldn’t help being bald, but he refused to be impotent. And so, he sneaked pills into the commune that helped him not be impotent. His father’s last words to him were “Are you ever going to get a job and grow up?” He didn’t really like his dad that much. He didn’t really like Jasmine all that much. He loved Ellie more than anything.

“Congratulations,” he said to me.

“Thanks.”

“Graduation is a big deal,” he said. “I didn’t think we’d see you here tonight.”

“Senior week at the shore isn’t really my thing.” I’d been invited. I never RSVP’d. “I hope Ellie graduates soon,” I said. “It was sad not to have her with me today, seeing we started school together and all.”

“I hope she graduates soon, too.”

I looked at him. What did I have to lose? “Well, Jasmine rules all, right? What can you do about it?”

He frowned.

I said, “I mean, I couldn’t live across the road all this time and not notice that, right?”

“Don’t believe everything your dad tells you,” he said.

“Really? Because he tells me a lot.”

Ed Heffner looked more uncomfortable than he already had. “Well,” he said. “It’s not as simple as you probably think.”

We had a standoff. He stared. I stared. He smiled. I smiled. He frowned. I frowned. Then I said something without even knowing I was going to say it.

“What was my mom like?” This question floated between us. It was an inconvenience. “I mean—was she nice? Funny? Was she depressed?” I didn’t know why I was asking Ed Heffner this, but I was.

“Your mom was funny as hell. So smart,” he said. “So smart.”

“Huh,” I said.

And then silence again—nothing to say.

He looked at his hands. “None of us saw it coming. If we had, I think we would have helped. She’d started working in that mall. She wasn’t around much after that. We—uh—were closed-minded about the fact that she got a job.”

“She had a job?”

Ed looked uncomfortable again. “Maybe you should ask your dad.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Things come between friends sometimes,” he said.

“They sure do,” I said, looking over at Ellie. “I know what things came between Jasmine and my mom.”

“Yeah. Jasmine really thought the job was against the whole point of why we moved out here.”

“It wasn’t the job,” I said.

He looked at me. Transmission from Ed Heffner: His daughter, Ellie, will marry young and he won’t be happy about it.

“Well, what was it, then?” he asked.

“Maybe you should ask Jasmine,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she knows.”

“Well,” he said. “She was a good woman, your mom. You should know that. She left us too soon.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You’re the only person who’s ever really talked to me about her like this.” I felt tears forming and my throat closing up around them.

He turned to leave and reached his hand toward my shoulder and squeezed. “Talk to your dad. He can tell you.”

“I will,” I said, turning from him, too.

Then Ed Heffner walked to his house, opened the door and went in and didn’t come out again for the rest of the night. Something about what he said made me want to go back to the darkroom, haunted or not haunted. Why was I afraid of my own mother?

I found Ellie talking to a group of younger kids and got her attention. “I’m going to head home. Long day,” I said.

“You’ll miss the cake at midnight!”

“I know. It’s cool. I’m tired.”

“See you tomorrow?” she said. Then she whispered, “Mall?”

I gave her the thumbs-up and walked away from the commune.

I went straight into the darkroom and grabbed Why People Take Pictures and I opened it to Bill’s picture and I stared at it. Then I flipped through it and I found a self-portrait of Darla. It was a Polaroid—cyan highlights, a warm skin tone underneath, shiny and flat—making Darla two-dimensional and ethereal. She looked into the camera in a way that wasn’t all there. She stared out at me as if to give me a clue. I wasn’t all there. It wasn’t any one thing. It was everything. Because I wasn’t all there.

This was a guess. I wasn’t getting transmissions from pictures the way I could get them from living people. But my gut told me I was probably right. She wasn’t all there. I didn’t know if this meant I was off the hook or not. Was I immune to not all there or was it coming, out of the blue, like it did for her?

I looked at myself in the reflective black surface of the splashback behind the sink. I looked back at Bill, the man with no head. I flipped to the picture of Darla.

Transmission from Dead Darla: N/A

Transmission from Bill: N/A

Transmission from me: N/A

Looking at Bill freaked me out. There were weirdos who looked at pictures like that on the Internet. I didn’t want to be like them. It seemed disrespectful. Maybe Bill had a family. He had to have had a family. Everyone has to come from somewhere, right?

I closed Why People Take Pictures and opened one of Darla’s other sketchbooks. None of the others had titles. Just numbers. I opened #3 of five.

The first picture was a picture of me. I was a tiny baby. I’d never seen it before and it made me inhale quickly and exhale slowly. It made me afraid to turn the page, but I turned the page anyway.

The next ten pages were pictures of tiny-baby me, too. A few of me with Dad, who looked so young and, frankly, scuzzy. There was one of me asleep on Darla’s chest. She had her eyes closed and was smiling. I stared at the picture for a while, but couldn’t figure out what I felt. It was a mix.

On the last page of the series, Darla wrote a poem.

I might buy a glistening crystal ball

and lay it down before you.

Roll it between us, and teach you

that the future is round.

And upon shattering it, show you

it is as vast as the shards that

surround us, as sharp as teeth

in living traps.

I will startle you with warnings,

scold you with expectations,

and not confine you to my limits,

but our limits.

Cells made of cells made of cells,

we are a chain of fierce knitting,

a patchwork of relation that

does not fray.

I shall buy a pouch made of leather

and pass it on to you, delicately,

filled with my dust.

Then I will tell you a story.

Underneath the poem, she signed her name. Darla O’Brien. I read the poem about five times. I liked it, but it was morbid or something. Plus, if she thought she’d done anything delicately, she was wrong.

After the poem, there were pictures I already knew—a series of rocks—the same rocks that were upstairs on the living room wall that bored me. Her fascination with rocks was weird. She filled at least forty pages of book #3 with small prints and sketches of them with one repeating question.

What makes a rock a rock?

I took #3 to my room and looked through it as I lay in bed. There were a few pages of chemistry information, but mostly it was more pictures of me and Dad (Roy After a Day in the Garden was my favorite) and then more rocks. The rocks made me tired. I fell asleep with one question on my mind.

What makes a rock a rock?