by Nina LaCour
She points to her collection of books. “If you’d like to browse these for inspiration, go ahead. I have hours’ worth of grading to do.”
I get up and run my fingers across their spines. Sarah Moon. Walker Evans. Mona Kuhn. All the photographers I love.
“Actually,” I say, “if it’s all right, I’d really like to look through the drawer you told me about. The one with all of Ingrid’s pictures.”
“Of course,” Ms. Delani says. She points toward her cabinet. “Bottom drawer. I’ll be up front. Take as much time as you need.”
Ms. Delani lets me use the classroom phone to let my parents know I’ll be here past dinner, and then I settle on the floor of her office and pull open the drawer. Just as she told me, there are hundreds of photographs of me. Some I recognize, others I never knew existed. I set the images of myself aside. Go on looking.
I find a photograph of Ingrid’s room—paper lanterns hung at varying heights casting soft light across her magazines and scattered clothes. I set it down in front of me. I place one of her mom and dad sitting by the pool in their backyard beside it. Buried near the bottom of the file is one of her desk with colored pencils and a soda and her journal, now my journal, open to an early entry. There is one of her bathroom counter strewn with makeup and hair spray and bobby pins. Another of her reflection—a close-up of her photographing herself in the mirror. Most of her face is hidden by the camera. I touch the tip of her chin. Place it next to the others.
Ms. Delani appears in the open door. “I’m going to make myself some tea,” she says. “Want a cup?”
I nod, keep searching.
Her record player. Her pink toes in brittle grass. The corner of Davey’s living room: out the window, raindrops cling to telephone wires.
Ms. Delani steps around the photographs and sets a steaming mug on the windowsill next to me. She slips quietly away.
Her legs with a cut below one knee. Her dad, asleep on the sofa. I discover and sort and stare, concentrating so hard that I don’t notice how dark it has become until Ms. Delani flips on the light. I blink. Stand up. Examine her office floor, covered with pieces of Ingrid’s life.
I gather all the photographs I’ve chosen and walk out to the classroom. Ms. Delani is sipping her tea, reading a novel. I look at the clock. It’s almost nine.
“Oh no,” I say. “I’m sorry, I lost track of time.”
She glances from her book. “No trouble,” she says. “Did you find the inspiration you were looking for?”
I shake my head. “Not yet.”
She shuts her novel, takes the last sip of her tea. “Sometimes inspiration strikes; other times you have to hunt it down.”
“Could I borrow these?” I ask her.
She takes the group of photos from me. Looks at a couple.
“I’ll get you a folder to carry them in,” she says.
After I help her lock up, we walk to the parking lot together, climb into our cars, and say good night.
11
Later, after I’ve finished the dinner Dad reheated for me, I sit on the floor of my treehouse and lean against the one wall I’ve built so far. From up here I can see the faint outline of the hills, some lights from houses a mile or more away. I lie down on my back and look up at the stars. I put my headphones on and listen to some sad, wistful music. Just when it starts to get too cold, I take Ingrid’s journal out of my backpack and open to the next entry. It’s been so long since I’ve read—most of the time it’s enough just to carry it with me. I turn on my flashlight and sit with my knees dangling off the edge, into the black sky.
I look out at the black sky, and try to understand how Ingrid could have done this. I try to remember those guys, to picture them more clearly. I think one of their names was Kevin. Kevin and Lewis, maybe. Leroy? Kevin and Leroy? When exactly was this? What else was going on in my life on this day? I can’t believe that I could have seen her after this, the day after or even that night, and not have known. But that’s exactly what must have happened. Maybe she knew she could act like nothing had changed; maybe she got that good at pretending. Or maybe she thought that I would have noticed, and was disappointed when I didn’t.
Through a few branches, I can see a light in my house switch off. It’s my parents’ bedroom, and I imagine them climbing into bed, worrying about me out here. I know I should go back inside so they’ll get to sleep, but I can’t do that right now, even though it sounds good to climb down and leave the cold and try to forget about everything for a little while. Instead, I keep reading. The letters are short this time, one after another.
I keep turning the pages until I find a longer entry. dear caitlin, I read, this is a real letter. My heart stops. I shut the book.
There was no suicide note. That’s something I knew for sure. Her mom called my parents and told them—no good-bye, no suicide note.
But now. After so many months.
The night is cold. My parents must be tossing and turning or fast asleep. I open the book and flip through the rest of the pages.
They are all blank after this.
I knew it was coming, but it’s still hard to understand that after I read this, there will be nothing left of her for me to discover. I turn my flashlight off and all the light that’s left comes from the moon and the living room of my house. A gust of wind comes. All the leaves above and below and around me rustle. It’s the sound of losing, or of starting over. I can’t decide which.
I turn my flashlight on. I read.
For what feels like a million years, I lie on the hard, cold floor of my treehouse. Then, somehow, I climb down the ladder, feel my way through the dark of the yard, turn off all the lights in my house, and make it to my room.
I have her journal. I have her photographs. But still. There is so much missing. I crawl under my blankets and curl my body as tight as I can. I shiver and rub my feet together. Try so hard to get the cold out.
12
In the morning, I make my way down the stairs and find my parents in the kitchen.
“I don’t think I’m up for school today,” I tell them. They exchange glances. I trace the outline of the doorknob with my finger. “I want to stay home and finish my treehouse.”
I look down at the kitchen floor and move my blue sock along the gray tiles. I know my parents are giving each other silent messages.
“What about your schoolwork?” my dad eventually asks.
“Could you get the assignments from Dylan?” my mom suggests.
I nod.
“Okay, then,” says my dad.
“But only today,” adds my mom.
“Thank you,” I say, and trudge back upstairs.
Later, after my parents have left, I go back down to the kitchen and make a bowl of cereal. I sit at the table, where my dad has left his newspapers in a pile. On the cover of the San Francisco Chronicle are pictures of war—a woman screaming; a bombed-out, faraway city. I sort through the stack for the Los Cerros Tribune, in search of milder news.
I find it, eat a spoonful of cornflakes, and scan the headlines: NEW GOLF COURSE PLAN APPROVED, LOCAL DOG WINS NATIONAL
COMPETITION, DATE SET FOR DEMOLITION. I cast the paper aside and pour myself a cup of coffee. I already know that I don’t like regular coffee, but I think I know what is being demolished, and I need a minute to collect myself.
I take a sip and dump the rest out.
I return to the table, gather the courage, and read.
After months of debate regarding the long-closed Parkside Theater between Cherry Ave. and Magnolia Ave. on the west side of Los Cerros, the owner of the land, with a private developer, has scheduled the demolition for June 25 of this year . . .
13
At ten, I start on the treehouse. My arms and legs feel heavy and tired, but I force myself to keep moving. It takes me until two to finish the fourth wall, but the next two go faster. As I lift and pound, I try to keep my head clear, but every minute it swims with thoughts of her.
I wrot
e a speech for the funeral. I was too sad and out of it to write anything good, but I knew that if I had died, I would have wanted Ingrid to write a speech for me. I got up there, to the podium. I put the paper down so that I could read it, but then the letters didn’t make sense. I couldn’t read them in order. There were certain words that I could focus on, friend and talent and remember, but everything else was blurry. I don’t know how long I stood up there before Davey came and took my arm. Come on, he said. You don’t have to do this. And I followed him down the platform and back to my parents, because it was easier than being up there alone.
I’m leaving huge openings in the center of all the walls. What’s the point of a treehouse if you don’t have a view? I attach long, thick canvas curtains above the openings, and hooks below to tie them down in case of rain and wind.
Later that day, at the cemetery, when Ingrid’s casket was about to be lowered into the ground, I covered my eyes. I thought it would be better that way, but it was worse because Ingrid’s mom let out this terrible sound. It wasn’t a scream and it wasn’t a moan. It was something I’ll never be able to describe, something that stayed in my ears for months, all during my family’s escape to the forest.
When my dad gets home from work, I ask for his help. He changes into a sweatsuit and comes out to the treehouse to see what I need.
“What progress!” He claps his hands.
The clap stays in the air. Everything else is quiet. He waits for me to tell him what to do, but I stand with my arms limp at my sides.
“Honey,” he says. “Honey.”
He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me that much.
“The roof,” I say.
“What?” He searches my face, trying to figure out what a roof has to do with why I’m crying.
“I need help with the roof.”
He scans the yard and sees the long beams waiting. Then he walks over to the pile and lifts one. “Do you want to climb up first and I’ll come after and hand it to you?”
At the cemetery, when I opened my eyes again, Ingrid’s dad was holding on to her mom, who was making normal sobbing sounds by then, and he was completely silent, but his whole body was shaking like crazy, like he was caught in a personal earthquake.
My dad looks lost in his sweatsuit and sneakers, waiting for an answer.
“Yes,” I say. “I’ll go first.” And I start climbing.
14
After dinner I put my pajamas on, get into bed, and just lie there. At eight, Dylan calls.
“You want the English homework?”
“I guess.”
“We’re supposed to read the first three chapters of Frankenstein and write a page-long response about the relationship between Mary Shelley’s dedication to her dad and the discussion of parenting in the book.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to write it down?”
“Not really.”
She’s quiet. “Do you want me to come over? Do you need to talk?” “I’m just tired.”
“I know it’s more than that.”
I stare at the photo of Ingrid on my wall. “I’m sorry,” I say. I can hardly talk. My voice comes out slow and groggy. “Please don’t be mad. I just can’t talk right now.”
I pull the covers over my head. I open my eyes under the blankets and I can barely make out the little star pattern of my sheets.
“Caitlin,” she says. Her voice is soft. “You’re going to have to talk about it sometime.”
“I know.” I nod, even though I know she can’t see me.
15
The garage is a terrifying, claustrophobic mess of junk that my parents refuse to throw away, but right now, as I dig through it, I feel like a sweepstakes winner collecting on my prize. It’s too good to be true that any of this stuff—the old globe where the Soviet Union still exists, the five Persian rugs from when my mom was obsessed with auctions, the countless candleholders and little figurine things that my dad’s held on to from the seventies—any or all of this could be mine.
I’m furnishing my treehouse. Under boxes of dusty records, I find a rug with a blue and green design, bordered by a pretty amber color. Pushing more boxes aside on one of the shelves, I find some of my dad’s old things. I read the dirty quotes in his yearbooks and find his junior-year picture. His hair is a little long around the ears and he’s wearing a leather cord as a necklace. He looks surprisingly cool. Next, I find a hummingbird feeder that’s made of carved wood and glass. I hold it toward the lightbulb in the ceiling to get a better look at it. Whoever made it carved bird shapes into the wood and painted their beaks yellow and their eyes blue. The tips of their wings are painted red. I put it with the rug.
Soon it gets hard to breathe. Dust is everywhere. I grab a battery-operated boom box and a couple empty wine crates and escape into the fresh air. Before shutting the garage door, I pull out an old cardboard box and rip off a little part of it. In the house, I get a marker and tape to attach it to a stick. Like a little kid I write, Keep OUT.
Once I get everything brought up the treehouse ladder, I’m too tired to do anything else. I unroll the rug and lie down on top of it. It’s a little dusty, but at this point I don’t really care. I lie there and look out one of the windows across all the other trees. Up here, from this angle, it looks like I’m in the middle of a forest. I don’t close my eyes; I don’t fall asleep. I just stare out the opening and listen to the faraway sounds of cars on the road in front of the house.
Later, I hear footsteps through the yard, getting closer. I’m afraid it’s my parents because I decided to stay home from school again today, and I doubt they’ll be thrilled. The footsteps stop at the base of the tree. I hope my sign works.
Then I hear Dylan’s voice. “Is this real?” she asks.
I don’t get up because I don’t want her to see me. “It’s a joke,” I yell down.
“So can I come up, then?”
“No.”
I wait for her to say something else, but there’s just quiet, followed by the sound of her stomping away.
“Wait!” I yell. Her footsteps stop. I climb down.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” I say.
16
At the noodle place, sitting across from Dylan at our favorite booth, I confess.
“I have her journal.”
Dylan’s coffee mug is lifted to her mouth, but she doesn’t sip.
“She slid it under my bed before she killed herself. At least I’m pretty sure she slid it under.”
She lowers her mug to the table, and fixes me with the kind of stare only she can pull off, the kind that usually makes me squirm under the pressure of it. But this time, I just stare back.
I repeat myself: “I have her journal.”
She sips.
Holds the coffee in her mouth.
Swallows slowly.
Whispers, “Fuck.”
Murmurs, “Why haven’t you told me?”
Reaches across to my arm.
She keeps her hand there until the waiter comes with our soup and surveys our table nervously, not sure where to set the giant bowls, and she has to let go. I open my backpack, and pull the journal out—black cover, a Wite-Out bird half chipped off. I hand it to her over the steam that rises from our soup. She takes it and looks down at the cover. Her hands are shaking, but her hands are always shaking. It could be the coffee, but I don’t think so.
She opens to the first page. I know it so well by now. I’ve probably memorized every entry. She is studying Ingrid’s self-portrait, reading what she wrote above it: me on a sunday morning. I keep wondering, What Sunday? What was I doing when she was drawing that? Where was I when she was watching the Wite-Out dry?
I ask, “What about you?”
She looks, confused, from the journal.
“I want to know what happened to you. I know there was something.”
She looks back down, turns to the next page.
“Another time,”
she says.
“When?”
“Later.”
“Later tonight?”
She doesn’t answer me. She turns to the last entry. While she reads, I carefully tear my napkin into strips.
17
It is later. We are in my room.
Dylan sits cross-legged on my floor and sets her hands, palms up, on her lap.
“I had a brother,” she says. “His name was Danny. You remember that picture in my room? The one you said was cute? That was him.”
I do remember, but I just nod, don’t say anything.
“When I was eleven and he was three, he got really sick.”
Dylan stops. She stares into her empty hands. Stays silent until her breathing steadies. She’s wearing a tank top and I can see the definition in her wiry arms. Her eyes look huge, greener than I remember.
When she talks again, her voice is so quiet I can barely hear her. “We tried,” she says. “We did everything we could. At the end he was so weak.”
I can’t look at her anymore, so I study the carpet. I remember the picture of him on her desk, and remember asking her about it, but I can’t think of the words I used. It’s hard for me to accept that I didn’t notice that he looked like her, or wonder why she didn’t say anything about it.
“Dylan,” I start. I don’t know what I’m going to say next, but I know I have to say something. “That must have been—” I try, but Dylan shakes her head, cuts me off.
“After it happened, we all felt alone. I was sure there was no way my parents could understand the way I felt, and my mom thought that my dad had no clue how much it hurt her because he still went to work every day. My dad thought that my mom couldn’t even begin to understand what it was like for him to lose his son. They had to split up for a year before they could understand the way they were hurting.”
