THE WEIGHT OF LINDA’S STRAP feels good against the back of my neck, and I close my eyes and count to five, the meditative practice recommended by Mr. Jakes, who freely admitted it was hippy crap but insisted we do it anyway.
But after the other day, I’d say Linda has seen stranger things than meditation.
I brush away the chill that’s crept to the surface of my skin probably a hundred times since then. No amount of renovation has been able to fully clear my mind of its questions. April and I primed all the walls in that room after she got back, but the wall with the mural stays. Much like the rest of this house that’s inches away from being condemned, April thinks it’s charming.
“Charming like marionette puppets are charming,” I’d said in response to her assessment. “Like clowns, or those antique dolls with teeth that look real from a distance.”
Now, alone while April focuses on all the wrong things and tries to find a repairman who works on ancient ovens (her earlier sense of reason apparently taking a backseat to adorable kitchens), I raise Linda, then slowly open my eyes, my first vision reborn inside the lens.
It’s out of focus, a too-tight close-up on a moss-covered tree stump. I click to capture the image, another lesson from Mr. Jakes, who thinks the first shot is the genesis of photographic magic. And while I’m still not sure I believe him, he was always so passionate about his process that I can’t imagine doing it any differently.
Now that I’ve got my first shot, I’m free to fiddle. I pull the focus out and scan my periphery, never taking my eye from behind the viewfinder. I capture a tree, horizontal when it should be upright, its roots exposed and curled into loose coils. I follow my ear and chase a squirrel up a tree, capturing at least three good shots of a rodent in flight. I imagine that series on a vertical display, framed, titled “Heads or Tails.” I’m not that great with titles, or photography for that matter, but I click away and try not to think too hard about how this feels exactly the way it used to.
Before tattoos of stars or Melissa Corey or letters written to no one or bonfires in the desert.
I follow another sound, this time to a monstrous tree with needles bunched in knobs all over the branches like spiny tentacles. Spindling arms sway in the ever-present breeze of the woods, and as I stand underneath the tree, I hear better the sound that drew me, though I have no idea what it is I’m hearing. It’s crackling, almost as though tiny popcorn kernels are bursting in every crevice of the tree. Now that I’m standing underneath, it feels less like a tree and more like some sort of needled umbrella, the clear kind that hugs maybe a little too closely to the person holding it.
“Bugs.” Miller approaches, his burnt red hair looking violet under the tree canopy. “They should be dead by June, but stuff never seems to die out here.”
I snap a picture of him without even thinking about it, ducking from under the tree’s claustrophobic enclosure.
“Would you think I was weird if I told you it sounded like the trees were chattering?” I say.
“I would probably think you were weird even if you didn’t tell me that,” he says.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You should thank me,” he says. “Boring people are boring.”
“Profound,” I say. I notice he’s carrying a paper bag and ask, “So what brings you to our creepy little house in the woods?”
“Your creepy little house,” he says, and I get that same feeling I got from him in the store, right before April came over. Like I crossed some imaginary line.
“I mean the house where we’re staying while my stepmom fixes it up to sell it to someone later. Why are you here?” I find a smooth oblong rock beside my foot and pick it up, thinking how it would make a great photo sitting there in the bowl of my palm, but feeling too self-conscious now to take a picture.
He reaches into the bag and pulls out a box containing a Pulverizer Max Strength In-Sink Disposal. “April ordered it the other day. I know the supplier, and he was able to rush deliver it.”
“Pays to be connected, huh?”
“Oh yeah, I know all the important people. Plumbers, electricians, general contractors. And from what I know about this house, she’s going to need all of them.”
“Yeah, well, you might try telling her that. Right now, she seems to be more focused on authentic decor, whatever that means,” I say, not wanting to be rude, but wishing I could have just a few more minutes alone to take some pictures in peace. I didn’t realize how much that house was getting to me, and even though the woods don’t exactly feel inviting, it beats breathing in the stale air of someone else’s abandoned problem.
He lifts his chin toward Linda, which I’ve only half-dropped out of my sightline. “You want to aim that thing somewhere else? Cameras make me nervous.”
“Worried you’re not photogenic?”
“Point and click feels, I don’t know, too fast. You should have to take your time with a picture. Painting’s kind of more my thing,” he says.
“You know, some might call that weird,” I say, and it totally sounds like I’m trying to flirt, which just makes me want to be alone even more. I can’t remember the last time I even thought about a guy in that way.
You mean aside from the other day in Scoot’s?
“And I’d take it as a compliment,” he says pointedly, and I let the camera fall around my neck. Even though I know he’s referring to my last comment, I can’t escape the feeling that he somehow divined my internal dialogue instead.
Miller takes a seat on the fallen tree with its coiled roots, and I fight the urge to ask him not to. It’s not my tree, and these aren’t my woods. But now that their images reside in my camera, I feel responsible for them. So I sit with Miller, maybe to take some of the ownership. Or maybe to snuff out the feeling that any of this should have an emotional response beyond me just wanting to be alone right now.
“So, what’s new? I mean, besides the need to fight the skull-crushing boredom of living like a hermit out in the woods?” he says.
“I’m here against my will, remember?”
“That’s right. I forgot. Kidnapped by your evil stepmother.”
I pull in a deep breath, then look at him. “It’s your garden-variety troubled teen sabbatical,” I say, hoping this closes the topic.
Miller flips the Pulverizer box in the air, then turns it between his hands, examining it from every angle.
“You don’t seem too troubled,” he says, his thumb tracing the P on the box over and over. “I’ve seen troubled, and you don’t seem like that.”
“Okay, no offense, but whether or not I’m boring or screwed up or whatever else you think I am, I’m not really interested in changing your mind. I just want to take some pictures and get a decent night’s sleep in this place and get the next two months over with so I can go back to Seattle and resume my other screwed up existence.”
“Whoa, okay,” Miller holds his hands in surrender, standing up from the tree I was so protective of a second ago. Now I wish he’d sit back down.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Look, I got this sense that maybe you wanted to talk the other day. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I don’t know how to tell anymore.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “I’m nineteen and I run a business. I’m not supposed to be running a business. I’m supposed to be, I don’t know, irresponsible or something.” He looks at me. “Right?”
I shrug. I thought he just worked at his dad’s shop. I didn’t think he actually owned it. Then I remember what he said about how his uncle looks after him now that his folks have passed away.
Suddenly, Miller seems a little more screwed up than me.
“You’re so asking the wrong person about normal,” I say. “I think normal people can have a basic conversation without biting the other person’s head off.” It’s my version of an apology. I’m clearly as good at saying sorry as my mom is.
He lifts the Pulverizer. “I’m going to install this for your stepmom so she’ll like me. Then I’m going to go back to the store until we close up for the night. Why don’t I come back around eight? I mean, if you’re interested in that whole relearning how to talk thing.”
I eye the Pulverizer box while I consider everything he just said. Then I look at Linda in my hands. Miller’s face is still the last image showing on the screen. The digital version of him looks past me into the woods.
It would be nice to be around someone who doesn’t know everything about the last four years, who doesn’t look at me and see what I could have done differently.
“Eight o’clock,” I say before I can understand what I’m saying.
He backs away, turns, and heads for the house, a smile buried behind a distant gaze.
As he leaves, I raise Linda to my eye, point, and click.
In a warm car under a busted street lamp with a guy I barely know.
Wet clothes plastered to my body under a jacket that isn’t mine because I was too stubborn to bring one, even though I knew it would probably rain. But because it was the last thing Mom said to me on the phone, I left my jacket on the hook.
This is probably one of those scenarios I should be avoiding. The kind I used to find myself in whenever I hung out with Rae. Guys we didn’t know, guys Rae invited into the car to get to know better. One for her, one for me. And I was done with that long before she knew it.
Rain hammers the roof and windshield, assaulting Miller’s car with random fury.
“How can you not drive in the rain and live here?” I ask, sipping the rich coffee from a Ripp’s to-go cup.
“I said I don’t like to. I can, but you don’t know the roads here like I do,” he says. “The ones leading into the woods are the worst. I have four-wheel-drive, and it’s barely enough. I think the real question is why you’re afraid of getting wet. Aren’t you from Seattle originally?”
“I don’t like to stand under a downpour without a jacket. That’s different than being afraid.”
“Well, you have a jacket now,” he says.
“You can have it back.”
“It’s cool. I was getting too hot anyway.”
“You don’t say,” I mutter.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing, it’s just . . . I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. When I said I’m going through some stuff, I wasn’t lying.”
I had planned on telling him that the minute he drove up to the Carver House, but it never quite felt like the right time to say it, and the nicer he is, the stranger this all feels.
“I didn’t think you were lying,” he says. Now he’s squirming, and I’ve made him feel awkward, and this is exactly why I shouldn’t have agreed to go anywhere with him, especially not to his weird uncle’s coffee shop, which he clearly had no idea would be the beginning of this exceedingly uncomfortable night, with his uncle giving me the evil eye the whole time until we finally had to take our coffee and sit in Miller’s car behind Scoot’s.
“It’s just that I’m—”
“You’re screwed up. Yeah, I get it,” he says. “Penny, my parents both died before I turned sixteen, and my grandparents died right after I turned eighteen. What do you think that does to a person?”
There is no possible answer that could fill the gaping space Miller’s confession just left.
“So just get it over with and tell me so we can move on to something else.”
I try not to feel wounded, but my face must give away some of my struggle because Miller follows, a little more gently, with “Relearning how to talk. Remember?”
The pines outside the window bend and bow against the wind, stoically enduring the abuse. I wonder if they even feel it anymore.
I try to remember anyone ever making me an offer like that. Anyone ever telling me they’d just listen. They’d just let me say it. All of it. Someone who hasn’t heard the back story third-hand, who didn’t know me before I came to Phoenix, who didn’t know me after Melissa Corey. Who didn’t need to see me as something just so they could make sense of the next something I became.
Rob made the offer once, but I shut him down flat.
I try to remember the last time I opened my mouth to say anything that meant anything. Suddenly, my jaw feels rusted shut, a hinge unpracticed and lazy.
“Rae.” Just hearing her name on my lips is enough to make me want to get out in the rain and walk home.
But saying her name. Not saying her name. Either way, she’s with me every day. The hinge loosens a little in the silence that follows—as Miller listens—and I try a little more.
“She was my best friend. Basically my only friend after I moved to Phoenix.”
Miller doesn’t say anything, so I keep going. I’ve already come this far.
“It was cool hanging out with her at first. She was like me, but not at all like me, you know? She was the version of me I wanted to be. I mean, I guess I thought I did. But then . . .”
I lose my way, and for some reason, the only thing that brings me back is the sound of Miller sipping his coffee two feet away.
“Then she wasn’t what I wanted to be like anymore.”
If Miller is following, he doesn’t say a word. And maybe right now, he doesn’t think I’m horrible. Maybe right now, he thinks this is all pretty ridiculous. But the rain is starting to let up, and if I’m going to tell him all of it, at least I know I could probably walk the road home and find my way back to the Carver House if he tells me to get out of the car.
“This girl got beat up.”
My heart cracks against the impact. A confession I have never, not once, owned out loud.
“I let it happen,” I say after the cracked pieces have fallen to the floor of the car, the destruction nearly complete. “This girl, she didn’t do anything . . . but Rae hit her like she did. And I let her. Afterward . . .”
Miller says nothing, and I force myself to keep going.
“I knew I was done after that. I couldn’t tell if I hated Rae or me more.”
I try to swallow the knot in my throat, but it refuses to budge.
“I wrote some things she wasn’t supposed to see. Nobody was supposed to see. But I should have known that she would find the notepad because Rae was always going through my stuff. She had this thing about secrets. How they were worse than lies.”
I take a sip of my own coffee, but not because I want it. Because I just need a second more before the final confession. I’m not Catholic, but I wonder if this is how it feels behind that little curtain. And if it is, I wonder how Catholics repair their hearts each time. If they have a special glue that mends things by the time they pull the curtain and step out.
“She confronted me, and it was awful. And she got super high because of it, and I didn’t stop her when she went off on her own for a walk. I just let her go.”
My face is wet. I think at first it’s because I never dried the rain off it, but my throat hurts, and now I know I’ve been practically screaming my story at Miller, who has let me scream and sob my horrible story of my horrible self, and he hasn’t said a word in response, which is how I know that everything Rae said to me that night was true.
“Some girl she didn’t even know found her.”
Miller lets me cry. He lets me shiver under his jacket and wipe my face on the sleeve. He doesn’t touch my shoulder or clear his throat or offer me those empty words of recycled sincerity I got from everyone else after it happened. He doesn’t even sip his coffee anymore. He just sits there next to me while I empty my soul. I didn’t think I had any tears left to sacrifice to this pain, but they must have been there all along, tricking me into believing they’d run dry. And maybe it’s because he doesn’t know what to say to someone who doesn’t really deserve to be crying these types of tears at all. Because it’s not like I’m some poor victim. I could have stopped every single thing that happened. I could have led Melissa Corey away from the equipment shed. I could have ripped those pages from my notepad and shredded them to fine strips.
I could have stayed with Rae that night instead of letting her wander into the desert by herself.
When I finally wipe the last of my unearned tears away, I notice that it’s stopped raining completely. That’s when Miller finally says something.
“So who’s in Phoenix?”
I turn to face him now. “What?”
“You’re from here, but you moved to Phoenix, and now you’re back here. So that means either your whole family moved back so you could get away from what happened, or someone decided you needed to be . . .”
There’s a sharp edge to his voice, and even though I’m trying to stay away from anything that can cut me after Rae, something about the way he says it makes me think he might know what it feels like to be—
“Returned,” I say. “My mom. She brought me back. Like a sweater with a snag in it.”
“Yeah,” he says.
We sit in his car for an hour and a half and do absolutely nothing but sip our coffees. The trees dance so hard, they make their own music under all that creaking.
We don’t say another word the whole drive back, and the sound of the car door closing behind me echoes in my ears until sleep takes me several hours later.