Part 15 (1/2)

David had purchased a double plot for himself and Sarah, counting on his daughters growing to a ripe old age to decide about interment with partners of their own. But when Pru died, there'd been no surrounding plots available, so David had insisted on yielding his place to his daughter.

And so the headstones read, side by side: WOLFE WOLFE.

Prudence May Sarah Rose Beloved Daughter Beloved Wife and Sister and Mother It all sounded so simple. Two distinct categories for each, and Myla was a partic.i.p.ant in the second category for both. She was what made Pru a sister and what made Sarah a mother.

Emma squatted before both graves and placed her hand on Pru's. Myla tried to listen to what she was saying. ”And Jake says hi. I wish you could meet him. You have the exact same sense of humor. And I wish you could meet Myla's boyfriend, Samuel. I know you'd approve. I'm really glad she's back.” Emma looked over her shoulder at Myla and smiled. ”She looks great. I bet you can see her, and I bet you're really proud of her. So, okay. Well. I'm gonna go now. Send another cardinal my way if you want, just so I know you're listening.” Emma put a potted flower on each grave and said apologetically to Myla as she stood up, ”I never met your mother, so I never say much to her. I just tell her that we want you to come home, and if she can help at all, to send you in our direction. So maybe she listened.” Emma pointed toward a tree where Samuel and Jane were standing. ”I'll be right over there if you need me.”

Myla was left alone with the stones. In her life as Kate Scott, whenever she'd imagined being here, at this cemetery, she'd always thought it would make her profoundly sad. But actually standing here, she was surprised to not feel much of anything. It was as if the place held no meaning. It was strange to hear Emma speaking so matter-of-factly about the reality of the graves. The stones, the actual ground, meant something to her; she relied on them as a place where she might speak to her friend and her friend's mother. They were loci of some kind of faith that the dead were listening, and though Myla knew most of the world believed in something similar, such a concept had always been foreign to her.

She looked at the two names on the headstones, traced them with her eyes. ”Hi, Pru,” she said. ”Hi, Mama. I'm back. I'm finally back.” She squatted down and put her hands on the feet of both graves. ”I know you're not really here, but I guess I'm supposed to think you are. So I'm just going to try to go with it. I've been reading David's book, and I'm finally getting a glimpse into how much he knew about the way the world is built. I wish you guys could see it.” The gra.s.s was cool and wet underneath her hands. The odd thing about graves was you could sit there for hours, or you could simply visit for five minutes. It didn't matter all that much.

”I love you,” she said. ”I'm doing much better than I was. I'll come visit again much sooner.” She rose and went toward the living. They joined her and trekked to the opposite end of the lawn, where, years before, Jane and Steve had found a plot after much wrangling with the manager of the cemetery. Myla remembered Steve on the phone demanding to speak to someone's boss. At that point all she'd felt was a need to blame them. But now she could see that they'd been extraordinary in their handling of David's death. Though she'd turned them away, they'd kept their hands open.

David's grave was cut into a slope. Jane and Emma kept their distance, Emma urging the last pot of geraniums into Samuel's hands. Samuel joined Myla at the headstone. The words on the headstone had been chosen by Jane and Steve, after Myla had told them repeatedly that she ”didn't care about that bulls.h.i.+t.” So David's stone read differently from Sarah's and Pru's: WOLFE.

David Smithson Extraordinary Father, Brilliant Scholar, Remarkable Friend Myla knew that David would have been embarra.s.sed by such glowing reviews, but she had to admit it had helped with the media. At the time, the photograph of his headstone had appeared on more than one magazine cover, raising the content of conversation in American households to include at least some suggestion that David Smithson Wolfe had been a good father. His death had elevated him to a position of pity in the eyes of the public. But Myla had wanted, and wanted now, as she looked down at his small patch of earth, something more for him. Wanted to award him what he deserved, in his own right.

She leaned down. ”I'm reading your book,” she said. ”Your mind.” She shook her head. ”G.o.d, I wish I'd known your mind when I had the chance to know you. I wish I'd known what you thought about this world.” She used her fingernail to clear some moss from the curve of the first S in his middle name. ”I'm back. I'm back and I'm getting better.”

She stood. She'd said what there was to say. It didn't make her sad to be here, but it didn't make her happy. She wanted to be back in the car, talking about the book with her family. Samuel was weeding the edge of the headstone. He looked up at her, surprised at her quickness.

”I'm ready to go,” she said.

And they went.

RUTH AND I RETURN TO THE stream where we used to go to all the time with Myla, the one that has a lagoon if you walk far enough. It's the first time I've been here without Myla, and I miss her, but not just because I have to carry the film coolers all by myself. I asked if she wanted to come along, and she almost said yes, I could see it. But then she remembered she had plans with her friends and told me she hoped I had a good time. So Ruth and I came here alone.

It's sunny in this little patch of water, and I stand in between two big rocks, and Ruth starts taking pictures. It doesn't feel right this way, to be here without Myla, even though it's beautiful and warm and I can't wait to go swimming in the deepest part of the water.

Ruth notices I'm distracted. She asks, ”What's wrong?” And I say nothing. I don't want her to feel bad, but I can't lie.

Then she stands up from underneath her dark-cloth and says, ”Come here.”

”What?” I ask.

”Come here.” So I come. And she has me stand next to her to look at the outside world the way she sees it. It's different from over here. When I was little, I used to try to identify everything through the gla.s.s; now I want to loosen my seeing. It's all smudges of colors and lines, circles and ripples of light in the water, the curve of branches echoing the curves in the clouds. Color. I squint and notice the light and dark, the shadows from the boulders that hint down on the river, and the s.h.i.+mmer from the water that glimmers on the boulders in turn. I love the way it's almost too much. So much to see. And then she says it. The thing I've been wanting her to say. ”Take a picture,” she says.

We move under the dark-cloth together. Together we look at the upside-down world, smaller and more manageable in this darkness. She can tell I'm afraid I might do something wrong. She says, ”There's no one I'd rather trust with this camera.”

”But I'm just a kid,” I say.

”You're more mature at eleven than most people ever are. I trust you. Take a picture.”

So I act like a photographer. I say, ”I need a subject.”

Ruth smiles. ”Uh-oh. The torturer becomes the victim.”

”Get out there,” I say, and so she helps me do a light reading and reminds me how to focus the lens and how to c.o.c.k the b.u.t.ton that makes the shutter work. She goes and stands out where I was standing, and I move back and forth between the front of the camera and the back, trying to remember all the different things to do as I've seen her do them all these years. Ruth gives me little hints, but she lets me fix it on my own.

Then I tell her I'm ready. I go to the cooler and get a film holder from the front, with the tab pushed up, so I know it's unexposed. And then I close the lens and slip the holder into the back of the camera, and I pull out the slide. I notice Ruth standing there, and I see she's not comfortable standing there, and it's something I never even imagined. So right before I take the picture, I say, ”Say cheese,” and that makes her laugh.

Afterward, she comes over to me and says, ”William Henry Fox Talbot, who invented the photograph, called it 'The Pencil of Nature.'” It seems like the perfect thing to say right then, to comfort me, because it sounds like something Myla would know. I need someone to tell me I can see the world and make it look my own way. I look out at the world from this perspective, and it's wide and wild and lovely. I want to see it this way from now on. And then we take more pictures.

THEY WERE IN THE CAR AGAIN. This time just the two of them. Samuel turned on the radio, and they listened to oldie fading into oldie, until the signal faded as they ventured first east and then up the mountain. It was early morning. Myla had fretted about leaving Emma, but Jane a.s.sured her that left to her own devices, Emma would sleep until noon. Jane had practically pushed them out the door, unable to hide her relief that Myla and Samuel seemed to be thriving.

Myla slowed down, trying to make out the small unmarked road to turn onto. It had been fifteen years or so since she'd been here, but she thought Samuel would appreciate the gesture. She'd told him she was going to be honest, and that honesty had to include her past, the life she'd left behind. This place was also incredibly beautiful, and she wanted him to see it.

”Is this where those pictures of the lake were taken? You know, the one of you in the water, with your arms spread out on either side of you, and your hands resting on it. And what about the photograph of Pru standing on the other side of the lake?”

”Those were taken at Elk Lake. It's a four-hour drive from here, down by the town of Bend, on Mount Bachelor. No, this is where that picture of us was taken . . . you may have never seen it, actually. I don't know if it was ever published. But it's me in the foreground, looking, I don't know, sullen and fifteen. And Pru on a rock behind me, crouching.”

”She's this bright ball of light in the background?”

”Yeah. That's the one. It was taken here. If I can ever find where 'here' is.” She steered the car down the gravel road, and eventually into a small dusty parking area.

As they walked down the path, Myla recognized its details. Her conscious mind had forgotten the path's idiosyncrasies, but she walked down it often in her dreams. First she glimpsed the stream, and then it curved into full view, bringing both its glimmer and its gurgle. Here was the boulder on which she and Ruth and Pru had taken their water breaks as they made their way down the path. As Myla walked, her back remembered the excruciating weight of Ruth's gear: the coolers filled with film holders, the backpack filled with reflectors and the lens. Everything they'd needed had to be carried in.

”Just up here,” she said, and Samuel stepped aside to let her pa.s.s. They walked up the small hill, and then below them opened the lagoon, or the ravine, or whatever it was. Myla felt a small tremor of again being fifteen, when her mind had been looser. She didn't care what it was called. She didn't care how they'd gotten here. She simply longed to slip off her clothes and dip herself in the water, to cool herself after their hike.

She took off her shoes, stepping onto the smooth stones lining the stream bank, and then into the stream itself. The water was a shock, melted snow that ached her arches. And still she stood there, numbing her feet, looking at the rock where Pru had crouched all those years ago. ”Why do I keep moving?” she asked, forgetting even Samuel.

But he was there. He'd taken off his shoes too. He was standing beside her.

”All I want to do is drive,” she said. ”All I want to do is walk. This is the first place I've felt I could stand still. And even here I want to swim.”

”Maybe you think that if you move fast enough, or far enough, you'll stumble across the answer. Maybe that's why you're racing through your father's book.”

”Yeah,” she said, ”but I don't want the journey to be over.” She couldn't feel her feet anymore, and when she looked down at her toes, layered underwater, she barely knew they belonged to her. ”Have you reached the stuff about Rubens and Rembrandt yet? You know, their work with nudes? It's in the second section.”

He cleared his throat and looked out across the river.

”What?” she asked after a second.

”I just-” He looked at her. ”I don't want you to take this the wrong way. I'm glad you're reading David's book, and I'm glad you love it. But it seems to be consuming you. I mean, I'm as intrigued by his ideas and theories as you are. But after all, that is what they are: just theories. I hate seeing you get diverted from your own search for the truth about your past-”

”I don't know what you mean,” said Myla, folding her arms around herself. ”What do you mean by that?”

He stepped closer to her and tried to put his hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. ”Myla,” he said. ”Please listen to me the way I listened to you at the Hillcrest Hotel the other day. Please?”

She nodded, silent, looking out across the water and not at him.

”I think I need to get at this another way,” he said. ”So humor me while I try to get my bearings. I've been thinking a lot about what you did and what you said when we were together at the Hillcrest. And I agree with a lot of it. I've read all sorts of stuff about Ruth's photographs. There are some people who look at the pictures of you and Pru and see innocent little girls who've been put in a precarious spot by the adult capturing their image. Then there are others who look at you two and see girls who're worldly, who know a thing or two, who might even have been tempting something bad. The other night you showed me that both of these opinions are irrelevant. They're irrelevant if you believe that every single human being, no matter their age, gets to be in charge of their own body. I have no doubt that was what your father and Ruth and you girls all believed. And I admire that belief, because it's so simple. But it's also something we as a culture seem to have completely disregarded. We don't think of that as a basic human right. We think of it as out of left field.”

He cleared his throat. ”But I'm a man who wants to protect children. Just as I want to protect that tree over there. I don't want anything to hurt it, and I don't want anything to hurt you.”

”We can talk about this if you want to,” she said. ”We can really talk about it.”