Alyzon Whitestarr (43 page)

I almost collided with Jesse on the stairs. “Alyzon, why in the hell did you just …,” he began, then he stopped, seeing my face. “What’s the matter? Where’s Luke?”

Mirandah came out of her room. “What’s all the yelling?”

“Do you know where Serenity went?” I asked her.

“I saw her getting her coat,” Mirandah said. “She said she was going to see a documentary. Why?”

I heard the muffled sound of Luke beginning to cry in the studio, and I felt a little like doing the same. Yet some sensible bit of me was asking what on earth I was making such a fuss over. It could easily be that Serenity had gone to a movie. Hadn’t she seemed much calmer today? So why did I suddenly feel such frightened urgency?

It was the van
, I thought.

“Did Serenity say where this documentary was playing?” I asked Mirandah.

She shook her head, but Jesse said, “The only place I know where they play documentaries is the theater in the mall. Alyzon, why are you asking all of these questions about Serenity?”

“I … I just have this feeling she might be in trouble.”

“In trouble?” Jesse and Mirandah exchanged a baffled look.

I heard Mum call out, and went reluctantly back along the hall to her studio, knowing I deserved her reproaches for the way I had snarled at her. And yet Mum never reproached anyone for anything. So what did she want?

I pushed open the studio door and Mum was still sitting there with Luke in her arms. He was tugging delightedly on the long coils of red hair. I must have imagined him crying, I thought confusedly.

“I’m sorry I yelled,” I said.

She didn’t acknowledge the apology. “Alyzon, would you like to see the painting of Serenity?”

This was so unexpected that I laughed harshly. “Mum, I can look at it later. I have to …” But she turned the easel, and I stopped talking because the portrait was one of the best and most terrible Mum had ever painted. Serenity, dressed all in black, was standing with her hands hanging loosely by her sides gazing straight out of the canvas. Most of the bottom of her face was empty space, like in a Magritte painting, and you could see into the small cavern of her skull where a fire blazed. One eye was also a blank opening so that you could see the flames clearly through it as if it were a small window, while the other was Serenity’s normal eye, staring out with the same expression that I had seen in her eyes just
before in the bedroom: blind and blankly serene. A blue-centered almond floating on a sea of flame.

“What … what is this?” I whispered. I looked at Mum, feeling frightened and sick. “Why did you paint her like that?”

Mum answered almost casually. “Before your father came into my life, there was a darkness in me. I could feel it trying to consume me, and I thought I was going mad. Then I fell in love with Macoll, and it was suddenly easy to fight. For a time I thought I would defeat it, but then I realized that it can’t be defeated. Not once it’s inside you. But I found out that I could use painting to fill the gaps in my heart and mind so that there was nowhere for it to grow. Nothing of me is available to it when I paint.”

My ears rang with the enormity of what I was hearing. Because unless I was going insane, and in that second it seemed a distinct possibility, Mum was telling me that she was infected by the sickness just like Sarry That she had been infected before any of us were born. It sounded as if Da had helped her fight the sickness in almost the same way that Harrison and Raoul and Gilly had done with Sarry. Her love for him and his for her had given her something solid to hang on to. But unlike Sarry, Mum also had her painting. How ironic if creating art could be shaped to resist the sickness as well as to serve it. That was maybe why Mum did not have Sarry’s mental frailty.

“How … how did you get infected?”

She blinked at me. “Infected? That’s a good way to
describe it. I … I don’t remember really. It happened when I was young. It was the seventies, and I was so full of anger and confusion. I had run away from home and was living in a squalid apartment with some people like me. A woman came there one night. She befriended me and invited me to stay with her. She was so attractive and compelling, and she seemed to represent something that I didn’t have. A purpose or a meaning for life. So I moved in with her. I discovered then that she used and dealt drugs. It didn’t make her less glamorous to me, but then one night …” She shook her head, almost shuddering. “Alyzon, I can’t think of it. I daren’t. It’s too dangerous for me. I need to paint.”

She thrust Luke at me and began to take the painting of Serenity down. For a long moment she held it at arm’s length and looked at it. To my fascinated horror, tears spilled down her face. She looked at me with anguish in her drowning eyes. “I don’t want this to happen to her. That’s why I painted what I see. So that you could see what is happening. So that you will save her.”

I stared at her. “Me? But Da …”

She shook her head. “Macoll is strong, but he can’t save her.”

“Mum, I …” I hardly knew what I wanted to say, but suddenly she turned aside and thrust the painting face-first against the wall.

“I have to paint,” she muttered, and tore a sheet of paper from a rough block and began to sketch rapidly with a nub of charcoal. Even in the few seconds before I moved to leave the
studio, I saw some of the rigid tension ease out of her back, but she did not turn around again.

I left the studio carrying Luke, shaken to the core by what had just happened. I hardly believed it, and yet if it was true, so much of Mum’s eccentricity suddenly made perfect sense. I had always thought of her as inner-directed, but I had never, until now, known what held her inner eye. It was suddenly obvious to me that she had extended vision, despite her apparent blindness to ordinary things. How else would she have seen what she saw in Serenity and whatever it was that she saw in me? I felt an ache of pity for her, fighting a long, bitter, lonely battle against an enemy that only her death could finally vanquish.

There were a thousand questions I wanted to go back and ask, but something in her face had told me that she would refuse to talk about what had happened to her. I went down to the kitchen holding Luke as if he was a spar of wood in a wild sea. Mum had risked something to paint Serenity, I thought. Had risked herself. I suddenly remembered how Da had looked that night when Mum had told him she was going to do the painting. Anxious, concerned, troubled. He knew Mum saw things other people didn’t see. That was what had always made him so tolerant of her eccentricities.

Again I had the urge to turn back and demand that she tell me more, but Serenity was missing and there was no time to waste.

* * *

Jesse and Mirandah were in the kitchen looking worried.

“We have to find Serenity,” I said. My mind was sharp now, and very clear. “Jesse, find out if there’s a documentary playing at the mall. Mirandah, can you think of any other places where they show documentaries?”

“There’s the Historical Records Center above the library,” Mirandah said as I put Luke in his high chair and peeled a banana to give him a piece. “They have a small theater where they show archival films. I’ll get the number.”

“Anywhere else you can think of,” I said. “Call all of them.”

Jesse found the number to the mall theater and called as Mirandah flipped through the phone book. A moment later he hung up and said there were no documentaries scheduled for the day. “OK. Now what is going on?”

“Serenity is in danger,” I said.

“What kind of danger?” Mirandah asked, pulling the phone toward her.

Some of my certainty left me. “I don’t exactly know.” I felt my words were lame, but I wondered if maybe I had underestimated how deeply everyone else in the house had worried about Serenity’s slow transformation. Maybe no more needed to be said.

“She acted kind of weird in the hallway,” Mirandah said. “She looked at me, but I felt like she was looking straight through me.”

“There’s been something up with her for ages,” Jesse said decisively. “All right, let’s find her.” He called the numbers
that Mirandah gave him, but within fifteen minutes we had not found a single documentary playing that day.

“Where do you think she’s gone then?” Mirandah asked.

I stared at her. “I don’t know. We should try to contact Da. Where is his rehearsal?”

“It’s at those guys’ place. Neo Tokyo,” Jesse said.

“All right. Call Neil and see if he has a number for them or knows the address.” Jesse picked up the receiver, and I turned to Mirandah. “You’re sure Serenity said nothing else? Did she say she was going with anyone? Or that she was being picked up?”

“As far as I know, she doesn’t know anyone to be picked up by,” Mirandah said. “But if you really want to know …”

Jesse hung up and said that Neil didn’t know where Da was rehearsing.

I turned back to Mirandah. “What were you going to say a second ago? If I really wanted to know … what?”

She shrugged. “I was just saying maybe you ought to look in Serenity’s diary if you want to know where she went.”

“Serenity doesn’t keep …” I stopped, remembering her reaction when I had wondered at the fuss she was making over my touching the yellow book. It’s not as if it’s a diary, I had said, and she had blanched.

Mirandah took my silence as disbelief. “She does. I came in to borrow something of yours when you were in the hospital, and Serenity was writing in a notebook. I would have thought it was homework, except when I turned away, I saw
her in the mirror, shoving it between the bed and the mattress. What else could it be but a diary?”

I thought of the notebook Serenity had been cradling in her arms before she went into the studio to Mum, and ran out of the kitchen and upstairs. Sure enough, the notebook I had seen was hidden beneath the mattress. One glance told me that Mirandah was right. It was a diary.

I carried it to the kitchen and handed it to Jesse, asking him to use his speed-reading ability to see if there was any mention of where Serenity might have gone. He frowned, but then he opened it and began to read.

I dialed Harrison’s number. It rang and rang, and I was just about to give up when a man answered the phone, his voice low but pleasant. Remembering the last time I had called, my voice was cool as I asked for Harrison.

“He went out just after lunch,” the man said gently. “I’m his father, Jack. What was your name?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, shamed by my rudeness—because alcoholism was a sickness, too, after all. “I … I’m Alyzon Whitestarr.”

“Well, he didn’t leave you any message, Alyzon,” Harrison’s father said. “I’ll let him know you called, shall I? Does he have your number?”

I said that he did, thanked his father politely, and hung up. Then I dialed the hotel where Gilly and her grandmother were staying. The concierge told me that they were out and he had no idea when they would return. I dialed Raoul’s number but got his voice mail. I left a message asking him to call
and said, as I had not felt able to do in the other two messages, that Serenity had disappeared. I was aware of Mirandah and Jesse exchanging glances of alarmed puzzlement, but there was no time to explain because the phone rang the minute I put the receiver down. It was Harrison. He said in a cheerful voice that he and Raoul were returning from errands and had dropped by his house. “My father said you just called.”

“Serenity has disappeared, and I’m afraid she might have gone off in a van.”

“Hold on.” There was a swift urgent exchange, then Harrison said they would be over shortly. After hanging up, I turned to find Jesse lifting his head from the diary. His eyes were appalled.

“She hates us,” he said, sounding shattered. “Over and over again she says it. All of us, but especially Da. She says he is a filthy hypocrite because all he does is sing songs while the world falls into darkness. That’s how she puts it—falls into darkness! She says Da is a collaborator because he doesn’t fight anything.”

“It’s because of Aya,” I said.

Jesse nodded. “She calls ‘Song for Aya’ the anthem of a coward. But what else could Da have done that he didn’t do?”

“Flip to the last entries,” I said impatiently.

“I’m scared,” Mirandah said.

“Listen,” Jesse said, and he read, “‘If I truly believe in my ideals, I must act upon them. I must show them all what is courage. It is strange and lovely how all confusion fades
once you accept that you are ready to act. Let Da see what it is to have the courage of one’s convictions. Will he dare to sing of what I will do? I doubt it, and yet it would be a penance. People like him must be made to see that there are those who are prepared to do anything for their ideals. I am ready.’”

“Jesus, what is she planning to do?” Mirandah cried, looking horrified.

“I don’t know,” I said tersely. Because Mirandah’s question made me realize that it did sound as if she was preparing to do something. Had I been wrong? Was she actually joining the gang rather than becoming its victim? I said impatiently, “Read the rest of it.”

Jesse bent over the pages once more, his body now tense as he scanned the lines of writing. Luke began to cry. Mirandah picked him up, grimaced, and went to change him. I hurried upstairs after her, to pull on boots and a sweater and jacket. When I brushed my hair and cleaned my teeth, my face looked grim and purposeful in the spotted mirror over the sink.