MR. JAKES IS LATE, BUT I don’t mind. I was hoping for a little more time with Linda, anyway. I washed the strap three times in the washing machine before April finally suggested I try sticking it in the dishwasher. All the mud and dirt are finally out of the cloth. There isn’t much I can do about the scratches on the corners but smooth the frayed plastic down and apologize to Mr. Jakes for scarring his baby.
But that’s not why I want the time with her. Holding the camera as high as my arms will reach, I turn her around and angle the lens at my face. I tilt my head up and click. Then I return Linda to my lap and advance to my picture. I still flinch a little each time. It’s going to take a while before I’m not bracing myself for what I might find.
My hair has gotten a little longer, and I now have to tuck pieces behind my ear. The points of the stars are still there of course, but I can’t see them as clearly anymore. Wrapped around tough neck muscles and skimming the tops of my shoulders, they’re a part of me, but folded away, sheltered but not forgotten.
The light in the room casts a purplish shade over me, and I look sleepier than I used to. Or maybe that’s what calm looks like on me. Either way, Linda always did make me look a little different than my mind’s eye saw me. This time, I don’t mind what I see.
This time, I recognize myself.
“Why does every student take the self portrait on the last day?”
I turn to see Mr. Jakes standing in the doorway, blocking some of the purple light from outside.
“I’m not your student anymore, remember?”
“So you made clear the last time you came to see me,” he says, and a smile seems to sneak up on him, taking him off guard. He clears his throat. “You’ve brought Linda home.” He reaches for the camera before recoiling in genuine horror. “What in God’s name have you done to my child?”
I was prepared for this. “She’s given me some amazing images,” I say, which is truer than I’d like it to be.
“From where did she give you these stellar images? The bottom of a bunker?”
It’s true, she and I have been through a kind of war.
Mr. Jakes takes Linda gingerly from my hand. I remember learning once that you should never pick up a baby bird that’s fallen from its nest, no matter how much it calls out for help. Touching the chick would make its mother abandon it, the scent of human an offense the unassuming creature could never disguise.
After he’s done examining her, he pushes Linda back into my hands. “I don’t even recognize her anymore. She’s not mine.”
“Look, I’m sorry, okay? She still works just fine,” I start to say.
But he shakes his head before I can finish, his lips pinched against the mere thought of reclaiming her. “She’s not mine.”
I hold her closer. I cradle her, the strap a little softer than it used to be after four thorough washes.
Then something in Mr. Jakes’s face shifts. He doesn’t look so pained. His lips loosen their hold on each other.
“I’m teaching three more sections in the fall,” he says. “One of them is 101. A lot of the same material we covered in the class you took, stuff you’ve already heard. But a lot of the stuff you missed, plus some history of photography, which you need.”
“You as in the general you, or you as in me?” I ask.
“You,” he says. “You’ll suck without it.”
“I see,” I say. “So does that mean I don’t actually suck now?”
He doesn’t answer. I’m not even sure he heard me. “It’s a transferable credit,” he says. “It’d count toward a major. If you wanted it to.”
I wasn’t planning on telling him that my proposal for an independent study of photography was accepted by my guidance counselor on a probationary agreement. It’s awkward to explain that I’m a sort-of independent senior, so long as I can keep my GPA above a 3.0. I feel like he might be disappointed in me for cutting it so close grade-wise. I still don’t think I’ll tell him that part, but I can at least answer him about the class.
“Okay,” I say, and I make sure he sees me nod before I look down at Linda. I know I owe it to the reluctant mentor looking completely uncomfortable in front of me right now. And when my heart jumps a little at the thought of pointing the camera in plenty of new directions, I let myself enjoy the feeling.
“I will,” I say. And I mean it.
Outside, I feel my phone vibrate in my purse and find my mom’s face on the screen, her weird downturned smile looking ready as ever to mock me.
“Your father wants me to tell you he’s going to be in Boise until Thursday now.”
“Why couldn’t he just call me and tell me that?” I ask. “And wait, you and Dad talked?”
I think back on their conversation from March. The amicability of their relationship has been low on my list of things to care about since the summer, but now the thought of them chatting casts enough of a shadow for me to feel the chill of confusion.
“Yes, Penny. We do that on occasion, considering we share a daughter and all. That is, unless you’ve decided on a more suitable replacement for me.”
It has been almost a full week since Mom has not-so-subtly suggested I have swapped her out for April. She’s improving as far as I can tell, so I give her a pass.
“So what was on the agenda for this conversation?” I ask.
“Many topics that are none of your business, aside from that one detail,” she says. “He’ll be on project sites from today until he gets home. I assume he’s told his own wife, but you might consider mentioning it to her when you see her.”
She’s having a bad day. Two April mentions in one phone call means a worse than normal day. And though I pull in the deepest breath I can, I refrain from sighing loudly enough for her to hear me.
“Did he say anything else?” I ask. “For me to know, I mean.”
“No. Just that he loves you, blah blah. The usual,” Mom says, which makes me glad I’ve managed to keep my cool for as long as I have. I guess I’m improving a little too.
“Well, if you talk to him again,” I say, “tell him I love him too.”
“Sure. Glad to be the bearer of so much warmth,” she says.
“Hey,” I say. “I got into that program for seniors. The independent study. On probation. My grades aren’t high enough yet. But if I do really well, you know . . . ,” I say, deciding to add, “I haven’t told anyone else yet.”
There’s a long pause, and I pull my phone away to make sure the call hasn’t dropped. Her face on the screen is still there, her hair looking a little grayer than I think it did a second ago, which is of course impossible. Mostly.
“Well, hon, you’ll get them up. You’re smart.”
Now it’s me who doesn’t know what to say. It’s the best she can do, so I try to feel like it’s enough.
“This call is costing me a fortune,” she says. “You went over your data allowance again this month. Seriously, Penny, what are you doing, watching documentaries over the wireless?”
“Bye, Mom,” I say.
“Good-bye, Penny.”
Before I turn the corner onto my dad’s street, I pass the house with the garden gnome mooning passersby. I uncap Linda and take a picture of him.
“That’s some sage advice, my friend” I tell him.
Back at home, Rob is pulling something out of the oven that was likely meant to be cookies. Burnt sugar has the kind of cloying odor I’ve smelled in those really cheap candle jars they sell at the ninety-nine-cent store.
“It’s only been eight minutes. The recipe says ten. What the hell?”
“You need more butter in the batter,” April says. “And language.”
“In the batter?” Rob asks.
“As in watch it,” April says. “Save it for when I’m not standing right next to you helping you bake cookies for your new girlfriend.”
“Aha,” I say, and they both look up. “I was going to ask. And no offense, Rob, but I wouldn’t even let you pour cereal for me.”
He looks genuinely panicked. “Look, you missed a few things this summer,” he says. “I’m more than just soccer and surprisingly insightful advice for my age. I’m in a relationship now.”
I will not look at April. If I look at April, I will see the look she’s dying to give me, and Rob will never be able to erase the sound of his mother and stepsister laughing at his declaration of sudden maturity.
So I take a cookie from the tray, and despite its steaming, charred edges that smell even sweeter this close to my face—and despite the stamp of heat it presses onto my tongue—I nod my head and give him an air high five.
“Gwen had better appreciate you,” April says, and finally I feel brave enough to glance up at her. She’s looking right at me, something I didn’t expect given this should be a moment between her own son and her. But Rob is too busy sliding burnt hockey pucks from the cookie sheet to see the look April offers me. A smile that seems to thank me, though I can’t imagine what she would have to thank me for. Still, I feel grateful, and I find myself hoping my face somehow reflects that.
In my room, eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photographs paper my walls. Every surface mirrors back the glossy image of a mistaken picture. Overexposed renderings of streams and trees, the unfocused capture of what was probably a toad leaping from a rock. A close-up of a man I thought was interesting on the street, but when I printed the picture, he felt hollow somehow. Mr. Jakes’s classroom recycling bin is full of these types of shots. Ideas gone wrong, meandering inspiration that got caught up in barbed wire along the way.
I keep each and every one, though.
At the end of the summer, after April and I came home, after the fire inspector decided it had to be old wiring that caused the blaze—a fire inspector who plays poker with Miller’s electrician friend two nights a week—April decided she had no choice but to take a loss on the property. She could have fought to keep it. It was, after all, legally hers. But after it was condemned and the inspector added it to the long list of investigations he would eventually get to, April reflected back on the summer’s failures and told the fine folks at Pierce County that they could choke on the house for all she cared. She was done.
And only because I was standing there when she threw her phone after hanging up did she also hear the breath escape my mouth. The one I think I might have been holding all summer.
“Good fucking riddance,” she said to me.
In that moment, for the first time ever, I saw where Rob got everything. His compassion and speedy assessment of the problem, his unmuddled advice. His confusion at why I might be so grateful for the honor of his understanding.
Faced with that new revelation and a comfort knowing that there are two of them in my life, I offered April only one observation from the events of the summer.
“I think some destruction is just too massive to repair.”
I never told her what happened that night we fled the house, and she never asked me.
Instead, she took a job with the Seattle Historical Society after two months off for internal reflection and an unexpected boost in luck after the investigation on the Carver House closed. The official cause of the fire: faulty wiring. The result: a substantial payment on insurance, enough to erase over half the devastating debt April thought she’d incurred.
Her new job specializes in, among other things, restoring old houses. Her first project is a 1912 Victorian in Pioneer Square. There was some competition for the position, apparently, but not even a spotty track record could keep April from cajoling her now boss into hiring her.
“It’s three stories, with a basement and an attic!” she said after the deal closed. “And it’s a total mess.”
She’s been giddy for weeks. I’ve agreed to take her “before” and “after” pictures on this one, too, but only because I think it might be fun to spend weekends with her. Plus, it’ll give me a little more practice behind the lens.
My gaze rests on the only image that survived the summer. I’ve hung it on the back of my bedroom door so I see it right before I go to bed at night, and it’s the first thing I see in the morning. It’s of a silver cloud, bloated with the light of the sun it’s hiding, dusty rays extending from the edges.
The phone in my purse vibrates, and when I pull it out, I see only a phone number, no name or face to accompany it. But it’s a number I remember, even after two months of not seeing it.
“It didn’t work.”
I barely recognize Miller’s voice. I could blame the horrible reception. It sounds like he’s calling me from the bottom of a well, just like the very first time I heard his voice. But the crushing anguish is what distorts his tone now, fracturing each word so it sounds like they’re falling in pieces from his mouth.
“What didn’t work?” I ask, but it’s only to make him keep talking. I already know what he’s going to say.
“The last painting. I finished it, recreated it just the way it happened. The day they took him away. Just the way it should have happened. I thought . . .”
“Miller, I’m so sorry,” I say. It’s the only thing I can say, but it’s all wrong. Miller knows I’m not really sorry. Danny belongs to the woods now, just like the rest of them do. No one ever should have come back. Miller has finished his tragic landscape, and it didn’t work, and now he’s broken. And even though I didn’t want him to be right, I never wanted him to feel what it was to be wrong.
“You were right, though, Penny.”
“It’s okay. I’m not saying—” He stops himself, and I feel horrible. He’s agitated, and I know he’s probably looking for people to hate. It makes me sick to think I’m that person, but I’m willing to serve the purpose this one time.
“I’m trying to say that you were right. It doesn’t have anything to do with him. Any of them. It’s the woods. It’s the goddamn woods, Penny.”
His voice pitches high, and I brush off the thought that he sounds a little hysterical. Of course he would be after what he’s been through.
“He wants out, Penny. Don’t you see? He wants out, but the woods . . .”
I feel cold suddenly, and I press my palm to my skin to find some warmth. But none comes, and I listen more closely to Miller’s voice to try and locate the source of the chill I can’t escape. I think I can hear traffic, but I’m not entirely certain.
“Miller, where are you?”
“Penny, you told me once that you were a throwaway. That your parents didn’t see the purpose for you. Do you still believe that?”
I hesitate while I try to parse out what Miller just asked me and the increasing frenzy in his tone.
“Because I don’t believe it,” he says before I can answer. “I don’t know if I ever told you that, but I should have. I think everyone has a purpose. We all serve a purpose.”
“Miller? I can barely hear you.”
But in the pause between our breaths, I hear something else, something I couldn’t quite place earlier. Now I recognize the source of the chill under my skin. Deep in the background of wherever Miller is, I hear the faintest sound of music. The tinny sound of a melody I used to struggle to place. But not anymore.
“I finally understand now,” Miller continues. “You helped me see.”
“Helped you see what? Miller, you—”
“I have to do it, Penny. I have to make it right. But it’s okay. It’s all going to be better once I make it right.”
“Miller!” I don’t realize I’m shouting until I hear April calling to me from the kitchen.
“Miller?” I ask my phone, but when I pull it away from my ear, I see nothing but a blank screen. He’s gone.
April’s in my room now.
“Is that who I think it is?” she asks, her eyes looking like they’re ready to ignite.
“Hmm?” I ask, hunting for my most casual expression. “Oh, it was, um, my mom.”
April crinkles her eyebrows, but she doesn’t question me once I’ve invoked my mother.
“Oh, hey, can I borrow your car?” I ask, using every ounce of willpower to maintain my fake calm. “I was hoping to get to the frame shop before it closes.”
“Now? Sorry, no. I need to see a guy about some vintage wallpaper.”
I give her a look.
“It’s important. It’s for the new house,” she says, almost pouting. “And why am I explaining myself to you? It’s my car.”
I debate how not to give away my conversation with Miller but still get the jeep from her.
“Tomorrow,” she offers. And before I can object, she leaves the room.
I stare at my walls the entire night, awash in a sea of black and white and shades of gray. I stare until my eyes give out and I fall into a haze so deep, I forget where I am.
I wake up in a room I swore I’d never have to see again.
“No,” I tell Danny, his eyes staring at me from the wall, blinking slowly enough for me to know he has one last message to convey. The grass beneath him is gone, the ground nothing but piles of black char. Instead of the swirl of paint dust that used to envelop me, tiny black flakes dance like confused snow in the air between us.
He walks away, and I follow him because all I want to do is wake from his horror once and for all. All I want is for him to finally let me go.
A young Miller stands beside Danny, smoke from a cigarette between his older brother’s fingers making Miller’s eyes water. He rubs at his nose and scrunches his face, then leans unconvincingly toward the cigarette.
“Can I try?”
“Give it a rest,” Danny says, and he looks at Miller like he might ruffle his hair. Or punch his back. Instead, he does neither and reaches for his lighter, flicking it. He watches the spark ignite over and over, until he finishes his cigarette and stomps it into the dirt.
They’re standing behind a building I recognize, staring at a wall I stared at through a rain-soaked windshield by the light of a dying streetlamp.
A wall coated in graffiti I saw later in a sketchbook.
“I have to tell you something,” Miller says to his brother.
“No,” Danny says.
“I have to tell you,” Miller persists.
“Don’t say a fucking word,” Danny says, his eyes broiling behind their green facade.
Then Danny looks away, his eyes fixed somewhere beside the Dumpster behind Scoot’s.
“I heard it fly into the window,” he says.
Miller looks confused, but he stays silent, a practice he seems to understand he’s supposed to follow.
“I was clear across the store when I heard. Sounded like a rock or something. I got all pissed, thinking someone was messing with us, you know?”
Miller remains silent, but his eyes continue to search for what they’re supposed to be seeing.
“But then I saw this little spray of feathers on the glass, and I knew what happened. I went outside, and it was just lying there in the rocks. Except its eyes were moving around. Like it knew it should be dead, but it still needed to see what was going on.”
The young Miller and I find what it is Danny’s talking about.
A bird, a crow by the look of it, the kind that’s always digging through Dumpsters and screaming about what they’ve found.
“I was going to kill it. But then something else happened. Another crow, this big angry fucker, it flew down and stood between me and the other one. Actually stood there between us. And it started making all kinds of noise. And I knew if I got any closer, it would do its damndest to peck my eyes out. So I walked away, and I listened to it squawk all day long. Until finally it just stopped. And when I went out there to check on it, there it was. Dead as a fucking doornail.”
Then they’re both silent for a while.
“Are you sorry about it?” Danny asks Miller, the question pointed directly at his younger brother, and we both know he isn’t talking about a dead crow.
Miller nods dutifully at the ground.
“Say it, then,” Danny says, his voice rattling with the anger from before.
“I’m sorry,” Miller says, sounding older than he should.
But he still doesn’t look at his brother.
There they stand, two brothers who never lived up to the first, watching a dead bird until the other crows come for it. And they walk away before they see what it is that crows do when one of their own dies.
But I see it.
Even though it’s still dark when I finally pull away from the house in April’s jeep the next day, I reason that five a.m. is officially morning time, and if April were awake, I’m sure she would agree.
The radio would normally be blaring, but my mind is already too cluttered with the sound of Miller’s frantic rambling from the day before, and images of crows and sprinkled ashes from a dead forest. In the few hours of sleep I did manage to cobble together, Miller’s voice hovered over the surface of my consciousness.
“It’s all going to be better once I make it right.”
I’m crossing onto WA-16 in half the time it would normally take me to get from Seattle to Point Finney, and I slow as soon as I reach the exit I swore I’d never take again. Only now do I understand that despite my hurrying to get here, I’m in no way ready to see whatever it is I think I’m going to find.
I slow to a stop at the gas station, its lights still on even though the sun has begun to push through the clouds. The massive expanse of concrete yawns before me as I open the jeep’s door and emerge to hear what I already knew I would.
The melody that I couldn’t place all summer, the tune that emanated from ancient throats, that chimed in the background of Miller’s call yesterday.
The melody that I can now place.
That tinny jingle piping from the speakers above the metal awning covering the gas pumps. And when I reluctantly lift my eyes to the entrance of the convenience store, the boy with the cardboard sign is nowhere to be found.
I approach the fork in the road slowly. The choice at my right will take me into the North Woods to desperate trees that may or may not still be standing. I slow to a stop while my heart struggles to keep pace with the engine. With each acceleration, my pulse takes a cue, so I cut the wheel to the left and tell my heart it’s okay. We’ll get this over with soon.
I pull into the shared dirt lot between Ripp’s and Scoot’s. At six thirty in the morning on a Saturday, Ripp’s should be open, but it’s not. In fact, I’m the only one in the parking lot, the jeep’s engine rippling the sudden quiet of its surroundings. I pull to the far corner of Ripp’s, angling toward the entrance but positioning far enough back to snug the car into a space that allows me to see into three windows of Scoot’s, all of which are unshaded even though the CLOSED sign faces out.
I turn to Ripp’s windows, looking for the posted hours, thinking but not believing that maybe he’d changed his weekend hours since I was here last. To my right in the passenger seat, Linda sits patiently where I left her after seeing Mr. Jakes yesterday. I use her now to zoom in on the hours stenciled on the glass door of Ripp’s, which still claim the café opens at six every morning.
And then a sign above the door catches my eye.
Hastily written on a piece of white notebook paper torn from its spiral binding, the squared-off lines of a fat Magic Marker explain where Ripp and presumably others are.
Age 15
4'7'' 97 lbs.
Help us find Shane, last seen 9/14/14 at the Gas ’N Drive off Exit 122. Search party meets at 6:00 a.m. in front of Point Finney Public Library. Call Ripp’s cell to meet up: 253-555-8812. Any information, call the Sheriff ASAP!
Taped below the description is a glossy Polaroid, the kind of picture taken in institutions that still keep Polaroid cameras around. I recognize him, but he looks different without his khaki jacket camouflaging him against the wall behind him. His hair—closely cropped and standing in tiny, shocked stubble on top of his head—frames a thin face and a smile that looks like it had second thoughts right before the shutter snapped. His ears are massive. His eyes pierce the lens, challenging it to a fight. But his shoulders sag on a neck that looks too thin to hold such a heavy weight, and that’s how I know that Shane Michael Rawson was once someone’s problem.
The faint sound of a screen door bending on its hinge pulls my attention from the handmade sign on Ripp’s door and toward Scoot’s. There, standing in the dawn light at the front of the alley leading to the trash cans and the back of Miller’s family store is a boy who isn’t a boy anymore.
There is nothing about his body that indicates his age, but his face betrays the years his body refuses to confess, years that surpass Miller’s age, but not by much. A patchy layer of stubble spots his jawline and cheeks and upper lip. His hair is a little too long, smoothed back by a thick-toothed comb but with some areas unattended to, like he just woke up from a hard, unmoving sleep. Like he woke up with a struggle. A flannel jacket I recognize as Miller’s fits loosely around his body, and I remember with a piercing clarity the way the lining felt against the wet of my skin in Miller’s car.
He folds a worn purple cap tightly in his hands. Unfurling it, he slides it over his fiery, unforgiving hair. And now the picture is complete, the portrait I watched take shape all summer.
As if summoned, Miller joins Danny at the top of the alley—an orphan and his traded sibling—and they find me parked in the farthest corner of Ripp’s, my camera angled in their direction. Their matching green eyes and burnt hair catch a sudden ray of sunlight, one brave stroke of the sun clawing its way from behind overlapping clouds. But the clouds win, snuffing the light before it’s had a chance to catch, and Miller turns his brother around toward the store. The bell follows them inside, and the CLOSED sign slaps the glass of the window.
I sit in the dirt parking lot for several more minutes, Linda fixed to the same location, her lens searching for whatever it is she thinks I want her to capture.
When I finally lower her and return her to the seat beside me, I leave her confused. I haven’t let her blink on a single image. And as I drive away, I imagine the blur of color her shutter would close around if only I would hold her up to the rear window.
But she would struggle too hard to find a clear image, and I won’t do that to her. I’d rather face her forward.
I’d rather see what she can show me ahead.