Where You End (9 page)

thirteen

I pass the empty picnic areas and walk up the hill to the Nature Center, a small building that reminds me of a mountain lodge. Paloma is sitting on a bench outside the entrance, her big bag between her knees. She looks disappointed.

“It's closed,” she says.

“Oh.”

“I should have remembered. It's closed on Mondays.”

“What's in there?” I ask.

“Let's see if I remember. There's a bookstore, a play room, and even a planetarium for people interested in stars.” She winks at me and smirks. Her favorite part seems to be the taxidermy: “They have an owl, a fox and a whole raccoon family, all stuffed up … ”

“How do you know this place?” I ask.

“My mom used to take me here,” she says.

I try to imagine her mom and what she might look like. I'm afraid to ask about her illness.

“Your mom sounds pretty cool, you know, taking you to the Cathedral and the Nature Center,” I say, trying to sound casual.

“She took me everywhere. I don't know how she found out about these things, but she knew this city better than people who've lived here their whole lives. She was incredible,” Paloma says, her eyes a little watery.

“I've never been here,” I say, “and I've lived here forever.”

“My brother loved to feed the snake,” she says. “You can watch a ranger feed a rat to the snakes.
”

“No thank you,” I say. “Like a live rat?”

“Yup,” she says. “They strangle it, swallow it up, and then they sit there for days, depending on how big the rat is.”

I shudder.

“What?” She laughs. “You don
't like rats?”

“Not so much,” I say. “I especially don't like rats being swallowed by snakes.”

She smiles. “My little guy would go right up and touch it.”

“You mean your brother?”

She looks defensive. “Yeah,” she says.

“What's his name?” I ask.

“Pablo.”

“Like Pablo Neruda,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “He was my mom's favorite poet.”

I look for the book in my bag, but I left it at home on my unmade bed. I tell her I forgot it, but she doesn't seem worried.

“Do you want to show me the picture?” she asks.

I show her which buttons to press and hand her the camera. I stay standing. It's my only leverage.

She looks at the screen for an eternity. Her eyes squint, as if she wants to see what's beyond the image, inside the machine. She rests the camera on her lap and unties her hair. A few strands get caught in the elastic. She keeps her eye on Bogart, braids her hair, and picks the camera back up. She moves it closer to her face, occasionally pressing buttons without making any comments.

I have no idea what she's thinking or whether she'll be satisfied. I did get the stickers in there, which must be her brother's room. And that's the door she'd walk through every day. Those are the windows she'd opened when the rooms need air. That's the brick. That's the glider. Those are the bars. That's the house; it's better than nothing.

Paloma asks me to look at something with her, and I tell her about my rule about not looking at the pictures on the screen.

“Well then, how would you know it's what I want?” she says.

“You mean, how do I know it's good?”

“Not exactly. I mean, how do you know you got it right?”

“This is your house, right?” I ask.

“My uncle's house.”

“And I got the house.”

“Not exactly.”

I look at the photo, at the stickers. She looks closer and smiles a little.

“Those are his dinosaurs,” she says. “He
's only four, but he knows the names of all the dinosaurs.”

Without looking up from the camera, she says she wants another picture, in the daylight, after school, when Pablo gets home.

“I told you I couldn't guarantee—”

“This doesn't prove my brother's all right. That's his room, but I don't know that he's in there. I don't know he's safe.”

“Okay … ”

“You have to get closer than that,” she says, looking up now.

I try to argue that it's too dangerous, but she stands her ground and tells me we had a deal.

“You said to bring you something and you'd keep the secret,” I say.

“I did. Now bring me something else. Something that proves he's in there.”

“Well, how many pictures do I have to take?”

“As many as it takes.”

“That's not what you said. That could be a lot of pictures. I could get in trouble.”

“In trouble? Seriously? You're already in trouble.”

“Well, so are you.”

She starts thumbing through the pictures really fast. She's gonna break it if she keeps going like that.

“You're the one who offered to take pictures. You're the one who went all the way across town to take the picture,” she says, the wheel on my camera scanning through the photos at top speed.

“How do you know I live across town?” I ask.

“I don't know. I'm guessing you don't go to Sterling and live in Columbia Heights?”

I blush. I said I wouldn't lie, so I won't. “No. I don't live in Columbia Heights … ”

“I didn't think so,” she says.

“ … but I don't know how many times I can do this.”

“Let me ask you something,” she says.

“Okay.”

“Did you really think that this would be it? Did you think you would push a Picasso, take one picture for me, and then everything would be over and you'd go back to your life?”

I guess not. I don't know what I thought. I guess so.

“You have more than ten pictures of houses in here, and I presume they are not all your house. You took them at night, which means you're not sleeping very much. I'm only the most recent of your troubles. You had a problem before you met me. You can stop taking pictures if you want, but this is not the end, my friend.”

“Are you going to tell somebody?” I ask.

Paloma shakes her head. She's annoyed. “What do you think?”

“I don't know,” I say.

“Do you trust me?” she asks.

“I don't know,” I say. “I think I want to, but I don't know.”

She looks at me now. The screen gets tired of waiting and turns black.

“Why did you push the sculpture?”

“I guess I was mad,” I say.

“About what?”

“About everything, I guess, but mostly about this guy.”

“What did he do?”

“He turned out to be a wimp,” I say.

“That can't be too surprising.” She shrugs.

“Well, I was surprised.”

“So you broke up with a wimp, and now you knock over precious art and take pictures in the middle of the night?”

“No. He left me, and yes, I pushed a sculpture, and I do take pictures in the middle of the night. It helps me to fall back asleep.”

“That
's a lot of grieving for someone with no balls,” she says.

“Maybe,” I say. I leave out the part about my period being late.

“What's the guy's name?” she asks.

I shake my head. “It doesn't matter.”

“Names always matter. I just want to have a name I can match the asshole to,” she says, just like that, which makes me smile.

“It doesn't matter,” I repeat.

After a long moment and a sigh, she starts looking at the pictures again. I still haven't asked her why she came to school today.

“I just thought … ”

“You wanna go? Go,” she says, still looking at the pictures. “Who's keeping you? Go.”

Her eyes are focused on the camera, but she won't stop pressing buttons long enough to really be looking. She's nervous. I don't know if I should snatch the camera from her hands and run. I go over the scenario in my head.

Here it is. I take the camera, I start running. I run through the woods, on the horse trail, down to the mill. I walk to the bus from there. I go home. Mom and Dad are there. They've spoken to Ms. K. They know I skipped class this afternoon. They ask me a million questions. I lie. They get sadder. I suffer through dinner. I try and fall asleep. I can't. I check my underwear. I go take a picture in the middle of the night. Then what? Then nothing. A whole bunch of nothing becoming something I cannot go back to erase. It hits me. She's not the one who has to let me go. I'm the one who has to let her go. And I can't, not yet. You know why? Because she sees something no one else can see. She picked me. She chose me, and I'm sure she will eventually tell me what this is all about.

“Do you promise me this is your uncle's house?” I ask.

“And not my former restraining-order boyfriend's?” she says.

“Yeah, not that,” I say, not quite sure whether she's joking.

She stops scrolling through the pictures and looks me straight in the eyes. “I promise you it's the house.”

I sit down next to her without looking at the screen.

She says she wants the picture soon. She reminds me that I shouldn't let anybody see me.

“But aren't they worried about you?” I ask.

Paloma sighs.

“If you want me to do this, you have to tell me a little bit more. You're going to have to explain a little bit more,” I say.

She sighs again.

“It's hard to explain,
” she says, “but I will, as soon as I see them. I will. I just can't do it now. Sometimes we do things and we don't know why. Maybe the answer comes later.”

I hope she's right. If I didn't think God was pissed at me, I would pray she's right.

“You still don't know why you pushed the statue, right?
” she asks.

“No. Not really.”

“But you want to know, right? You feel guilty?”

“Yes.”

“So then we're exactly the same.”

That last sentence stings. The thought sends an army of ants rushing underneath my skin. The thrill of recognition, the bite of truth—I know that from somewhere. I've buried that feeling.

Something rustles in the trees behind the building. Paloma gets up and walks down a wooden walkway, my camera still in her hand.

“You have to come look at this,” she whispers, motioning for me to join her.

My feet feel light and nervous on the wood. Someone raked the leaves off to the side, and the ground below us is every shade of brown. We're on a lookout, a few feet above the worms. Paloma points to the woods, and I count one, two, three, four, five deer foraging in the forest in front of us, no more than fifteen feet away. Occasionally one of them looks up and chews, and a twig or a stem leaks out of their mouth, making them look extra helpless, those big glassy eyes saying nothing at all.

Paloma breathes.

“Wanna take a picture?” she says.

I take the camera back and look through the view-finder, past the deer, at a rock on a hill in the forest. It's hard to believe it will all grow back when spring comes around, hard to even want that. I take a picture, and I feel better, like I have a heart that works.

“My name is Eva,” she says.

I look at her face, the fine wrinkles around her eyes, the almost-smile on her lips, a smile of quiet relief. It feels warm. I'm touched she finally told me something I can count on.

“Miriam,” I answer.

She tells me next time she'd like a picture she can hold on to, one she can take with her. Then she's off, big bag and everything. I watch to see where she goes, but it's getting late and my parents are waiting for me. I'd like to tell my dad about this place. He'd like to see a snake swallow a rat. I look back at the deer and start walking away.

The thing with DC is that the woods are everywhere. Walk, bike, run, or drive no more than two miles in any direction and you can find enough green to lose yourself in. I mean, places where you could scream without anybody hearing you. Or bothering you. Or telling you to stop. Places where you can't hear the cars, where the ditzy deer barely look up at you, where the alligators used to hang before the White House was built.

I run down the walkway to where the dirt trail starts, to where it smells more rotten. Then I run some more, away from the deer and the building, panting, toward the top of the hill, to the highest point of the loop. When I get there, I'm sweating. From my rock, all I see are trees. I feel sort of free. I may not be done with Eva, or Picasso, but this feels free, as free as my bike, as free as the pictures. Fuck love. This is a hundred times better. I scream as loud as my voice will let me.

fourteen

All I want are pretzels, and all we have are wheat crackers. I make a mental note to ask Mom to buy me some chips, but that doesn't seem fair since I skipped classes, knocked over a sculpture, and regularly sneak out of our house in the middle of the night. I should buy my own damn chips. At least until I figure out what I'm doing.

Thank you God. Behind the cereal, a shiny Snyder bag with a few leftover nuggets beckons. Buttermilk Ranch, no less. I crunch through the sour/salt/sour and brush the crumbs off my teeth with my tongue. Shame on me for ever turning this junk down in the past. I have about half an hour before the first parent walks through the door, not enough time to bury the rush of my afternoon with Eva. I eat the whole bag.

I walk upstairs to put the camera in a safe place, but when I open the door, I see dozens of prints, floating like shiny rafts on my bedspread. I hesitate before walking any closer. It's strange to see my secret like this, exposed and on my bed. It seems too dangerous to touch. I count twenty-three prints from where I'm standing. There is no sound, but the pictures are deafening. It's as if my sleepless nights are all screaming at once.

I walk closer, hoping to shut them up. I remember taking most of them: the house with the ivy, the red cat sleeping on a kitchen island, the dinner table never cleared, the neon house number and the stained glass door, the bright tongues of tropical flowers in a crowded sunroom, the copies of
Foreign Policy
magazine turning a coffee table baby blue. The best of my night wanderings is here, impossible to ignore.

My first one, the shed, is on my pillow. I took that one on the first night of insomnia, when I started checking my underwear for traces of blood. The walls of the shed are green from a flood light. I remember that light. Behind the window, several empty bottles are lined up on a shelf, each one a little different, all darkened by the night. I pick the print up and see a note in the back. The handwriting is familiar:

Come out in the light.
Adam

I can feel the color leaving my face. I run to the bathroom and puke ranch dressing until my throat burns.

“Miriam!” my mother yells.

This is too much. Picasso, Paloma, Eva, Ms. K, Adam. I rinse my mouth and catch my breath. I want to look at the pictures one last time. There they are.

Adam. Adam who dunked a kid in the fish bowl over a camera our first year at Sterling. We had biology together, and one sweaty day he got into a fight with a bunch of guys who were messing with his camera. I was in the front of the room, drawing a nucleus or something, when I heard Adam getting worked up.
All right, dude
.
Okay, give it back
.
That's funny, give me the camera. Hey. You're gonna break it. Give me the camera, man.
His nerves revved the boys up, and they turned into a pack of drooling, dumb dogs. One of the zit-faced jackasses thought it would be funny to throw the camera in the class aquarium, so Adam returned the favor and shoved the kid's head so far into the water, I can still see the bubbles scattering the fat fishes.

The teacher had to pry Adam
's fingers from the boy's neck long after the whole class was done gasping and hooting. I was the only one who understood the gravity of the crime—the camera had been our shared love from the start. He had to sit in the office for the rest of the day. I waited until everyone had cleared out to sit next to him, let him curse, get him a lemon Snapple, and wait for his mom to take us home. I lent him Lauren for five months until he had saved enough money for a new camera. He would have done the same for me.

Adam trusts me. Adam should know about the sculpture, and Eva, and whatever else I find out. Adam would care. He would understand. I think of yesterday. He must have taken my photos with one of those gadgets he's always plugging into his camera. Maybe while I was in the shower. I want to see him now, but Mom will never let me past her, not if she knows about me leaving school today.

“Miriam!” she yells again.

I do what they do in the movies, what I've dreamt of doing since I was nine years old and reading my mom's vintage Nancy Drew books. I open the window, step onto the sloped roof, and climb down the porch pole, scratching myself silly on the bare clematis. Once I'm on my street, I actually think through my choices. It's only four blocks, but my shoes are still inside. My mom knows I'm here. I can still taste the puke, and I'm really really thirsty. I brush my pants off and walk back through my front door. I will go after. When I'm done facing her wrath.

“Hey Miriam,” Mom calls from the kitchen.

“Yes.”

“Sit down in the living room please.”

My mouth is sour and dry. I can't believe I climbed out the window. What if Mr. Wallace saw me? What if I had fallen off the roo
f
? This last hypothetical is kind of hilarious, and I want to laugh, but my mother does not look like she's in the mood. I sit on my favorite corner of our old couch, squishing the printed birds and flowers. I get serious and gear up for a logical consequence, Mom's favorite kind.

“Ms. Kiper called me.”

From the tone, I figure my mother had time to rehearse this confrontation, maybe in the car on the way back from the gallery. She wants to sit but she can't get comfortable, so she leans on the windowsill across from the coffee table. The hanging pot is level with her head and it looks sort of stupid, like it's been cut and pasted. I bite my tongue. Why is everything so absurd all of a sudden?

“Can I tell you what happened?” I offer.

She relaxes, but I don
't, since I actually know what happened and I also know I can't tell her half of it. Her eyes are begging. She comes closer and I'm comforted by her smell, the same greasy flower face cream she's used ever since I can remember. Her smell. I think I made a mistake. Her shoulders come down, she is listening, patiently waiting. I have to talk before she does.

“Go ahead,” she says, “tell me.”

“I went in to see Ms. K, Ms. Kiper, and I felt sort of dumb, to be honest. She was nice and everything, but I didn't really know why I was there. I don't know why you guys didn
't talk to me first.”

My mother takes off a shiny red plastic bangle and turns it over in her hands, looking for balance and the right words.

“We didn't know
what
to do, Miriam. We wanted to check in, and we wanted to do it right. We didn't have time to tell you. We should've told you.”

Okay. She doesn't know about me skipping. She was just checking in.

“Nothing's wrong with me,” I say.

Mom sighs and puts her bangle back on.

“I know maybe nothing's wrong with you, but you haven't been talking to us, and you're pulling away from everybody else.”

“You mean I haven't been nice to you. That's what you mean. Look, I'm sorry. And who's everybody else?”

“I'm not going to get into that. We just want to know what's wrong. We're here to help, love. What can we do to help?”

This is the part she said out loud in the car, this is the line she had to make sure she delivered. Maybe Ms. K coached her.

“Help me do what?” I say.

She leans back again. “Okay, Miriam. You were late to the field trip bus, and I'm still not sure why because we both know it wasn't to see Winogrand. You barely eat, except for whatever junk is left over in the pantry. You don't talk
… ”

“How do you know I didn't go see Winogrand?”

We're both surprised at how loud my voice is. I'm sure now that I don't want her to know what happened. Not before I know why I haven't been bleeding. Not before I find out why Eva wants the pictures, why she's left home.

“Miriam, what are we supposed to do?”

Her words are so earnest, I don't know how to answer. There's no room for snark.

“I was mad, Mom. I was just mad. That's why I did the thing at dinner that night. Don't you ever make mistakes when you're mad?”

“All the time,” she says. “All the time.”

“Okay, then you don't need to jump in to rescue everybody all the time.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you always have to fix things.”

She looks at me like she's trying to crack a code.

“What would you have me do?”

“I don't know … let me make mistakes.”

That sounds vaguely right, so I repeat it.

Yeah.

“Let me make mistakes. Don't act like you never make them. Don't act like you can always fix everything.”

Mom's eyes are turning red. She gets up and points a finger at my face:

“I am forty-four years old, Miriam. Don't talk to me like you know better. You know yours and I know mine, but I'm still your mother. That's what mothers do.”

The words are coming out strained. She's fumbling.

“We'll talk about this later. Tomorrow, actually. With your father, in Ms. Kiper's office, after school.”

“All right,” I say, “fine. I guess we're officially in family therapy, like everybody else you know. As long as it
helps.
”

She walks back toward her kitchen and stops to pick up my shoes, align them, and stick them under the bench. My elbow is still burning from the attempted escape. I lift my shirt and see a scrape above my hip. Adam's phone number runs through my head. The night pictures are still breathing on my bed.

Adam calls my mother Meema, as in Meem's Mama.
Meema, you have the longest hair I've ever seen. Meema, my mom said I can stay for dinner. Meema, tell us the story of when you met Lee Friedlander. Meema, how about putting our pictures up at the gallery? Meema, let me do the dishes. Meema, can we use your printing paper? Meema, this roast is amazing. What do you think of the Iraq war? Meema, what about the settlements? Where are the paper towels?
Years and years of riding in my car, eating my cereal, making my mother laugh.
Meema, is Miriam up there?

You want me out in the light? Fine.

I tell Mom I'm not hungry and I'll be back in an hour. She tells me that's not the way it works, and I tell her I need to calm down, which are the exact words she's asked me to use since I was three. Mom is disarmed.

I'm so tired, but the bike is the place where I make the most sense. I push, and it goes. I circle around my neighborhood, feeling my gut grow full and my mind strangely empty. Here is my body, I think. Nice to meet you, I think. Where have you been, I think. Here is the cold air, the burn in my thighs when the hill starts. Here is my sweat. Out in the light, like you said.

I ride toward Adam's and stick my arm out to touch the mailbox without stopping. My fingers hit the metal, but they don't make any sound. A voice calls from the garage, and I pedal so fast I run the next three stop signs. I freeze in the middle of the next block, letting several cars roll by me before I remember where I am and what I was doing. Then I push away from our world, toward the place no one else knows about, the place where I feel awake.

I only make it halfway to Eva's before the hour is up. I'll have to turn back and try again tomorrow. I ride fast on the way back. Back in my part of the city, I ride past the pool where I learned how to swim. I ride past our shoe store, our movie theater, the post office where I got to stick the stamps. I ride through neighborhoods where people garden, and go to college, and have dinner parties where they talk about the election, whichever one is up next. My neighborhoods, where it's safe and relatively happy, where people shield themselves from grief until it hits them in the face. Because it does, for all of us.

I remember Mom'
s eyes, the effort they made to stay dry, the love in her self-control. I know she's worried, but I cannot leave my mystery girl now, with that sculpture off the pedestal and her house in my camera. For everyone else, I am a picture, a map of light. To Eva, I am the girl who was mad enough to push Picasso. She gave me my turning point. She showed me who I could be.

I make one more stop before packing it in. I want to see if I can turn on his lights myself, if it will work. When I turn into Adam's street, he is standing in front of his mailbox, and he is smiling. I want to turn back, but it's too late now. I think of his note and the pictures. I should say thank you, but the smile and the hand waving hello are too much. It's too much. Like an idiot, I ride past him, and he steps off the sidewalk into the street, just looking at me. I circle back and aim for the box, but he's laughing now, laughing and holding his hands up, like he's surrendering officially. I ride past him again.

“Is this what you're looking for?” Adam yells as I ride, putting his hand on the mailbox, standing right in front of it. He looks so tall next to that thing. We used to drop new pictures in there when we couldn't wait to share them.

“Do you have anything for me?” he yells.

I don't have any pictures. I just want to touch the mailbox, because that's what I do when I go out. I keep riding around in a circle.

I'm stuck on this invisible rail.

“Wait,” he says.

I shake my head and bike faster, around the circle one more time, two more times, while he runs inside. I touch the mailbox and feel relieved, but Adam comes out on his own bike before I can ride away. He takes the outside lane of our invisible track. A dog barks in the neighbor's yard.

We ride around I don't know how many times, around the street he grew up on, around that little island with the massive tree in the middle, the roots spilling toward the edges of the circle. Adam doesn't say a word and I try not to look at him, because I'm embarrassed and this is weird, and it's been a really long day. But I know he's smiling his smile, so I try to relax and listen for the buzz of the spokes as we turn. I want to tell him something, but I don't know where to start, so I just keep riding.