SHE OPENED THE PORTFOLIO slowly, dropping her gaze and fumbling with the latch on the leather case as if it were a complicated mechanism. It might have been my imagination, but her fingers appeared to be trembling a bit. Reaching inside, she took out a sheaf of papers and slid them onto the table. On top was a photograph—actually, a photocopy of a photograph—showing a frontal view of the dead girl’s skull, printed in high contrast to bring out the contours of the bone. “I wasn’t sure how to do this, so I started by taking pictures,” she said. She slid the frontal view aside; beneath it was another photocopied picture, this one showing the skull in three-quarter profile. “I used these as templates, underneath the paper I was drawing on, to make sure I didn’t change the shape or proportions.”
“Smart idea,” I said. “So then you put tracing paper on top of these and drew on that?”
She shook her head. “I tried that, but I could see the skull too well through the tracing paper. It was overwhelming, and I couldn’t visualize the face. Then I tried drawing on regular printer paper, but the skull was too faint through that—all I could see were the edges and the eyes. So finally I decided to try working on a light box, illuminating the skull and my drawing paper from underneath.”
“Third time’s the charm,” said Jeff, who was leaning in—more closely than necessary, it seemed to me—from her other side. “Just like with Goldilocks and the three bears. It was just right.” It was the cheesiest flirting I’d ever seen. I looked at Jenny, expecting to see her rolling her eyes in scorn.
Instead, she was beaming.
“Something like that.”
She slid the second skull image aside, and I felt a jolt almost like electricity. Staring up at me from the table was a teenage girl—a skinny, ashen-faced girl who looked as if she hadn’t had a good meal or a glimpse of the sun in months. Her hair hung straight, limp, and greasy looking. Her lips were thin and pursed. But it was the girl’s eyes that gripped me; they locked onto mine, or so it seemed, and wouldn’t let go.
“Wow,” I said. “You’ve put a lot of despair in those eyes.” Jenny looked at me for the first time since she’d slid the papers onto the table, and I saw concern in her eyes. “Don’t worry,” I hurried to assure her. “It’s fine. It’s better than fine; it’s really good. From what I see in the bones—from what I imagine they’re whispering—I’d say she had cause to despair, every day of her life. I’m just surprised you were able to convey that with a pencil and a piece of paper.”
“I can’t really take credit for that,” she said. “I borrowed that.” Seeing my puzzled look, she went on, “I’ve got a big book of photographs by Dorothea Lange. Do you know her work?”
“I do. She took a lot of portraits of hardscrabble folks during the Great Depression, didn’t she?”
She nodded. “Tenant farmers. Migrant workers. Appalachian families. I was looking through that book, and I saw a picture of a farmer’s wife holding their baby. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty, but she was totally beaten down by life already. You could see it in her eyes.” She paused to clear her throat. “If this girl had made it to twenty and had a baby, I bet she’d have looked like the farmer’s wife in that photo. So I borrowed that woman’s despair. She had plenty to go around.”
She set the frontal sketch aside to show me the next one, a three-quarter profile. It, too, was excellent—the girl’s gauntness was emphasized by the deep hollows in her cheeks, which showed up more prominently in this one. “I really like it,” I said slowly, “but the first one grabs me more. I’m not sure why.”
“It’s the eyes,” Jeff chimed in, surprising me. “In this one, she’s not looking at us.”
“You’re right,” I agreed, impressed that he’d nailed it so fast. I picked up the frontal view for another look. “The way those eyes stare at you? It’s like she’s challenging you, saying, ‘Hey, look at me. Do you know me?’ You can’t ignore that look.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Jenny said. “So next I did this one.” She unveiled another drawing—another three-quarter profile—but in this one, the girl’s gaze was locked on mine once more.