Pairs and pairs of eyes stare down at me.
Tacked to the exposed beams are a series of pictures, hand-drawn in charcoal with rips at the tops. There must be at least a dozen. I hold up the lamp: it’s the same girl’s face in every drawing. Her eyes are set back far, her lids are heavy. One eye is bigger than the other. The brows are mannish and unshaped. The nose is flat, the shape of the face an exaggerated heart, with a broad forehead and a weak chin. She smiles without showing her teeth.
Not a pretty face, but drawn lovingly. Instead of looking away, I’m drawn in.
In the first sketch, her hair is pulled back but for loose wisps. In a middle picture, her hair hangs around her face, drawn indecisively, as though the artist didn’t have enough information. I raise the Coleman lamp slowly in front of the drawings. There is an order to things, an evolution of certainty about the subject. In the first, the girl is barely there, the eyes, nose, and mouth drawn as markers. In the second, the strokes are more confident, the lines of the jaw and the forehead more defined. By the third, the artist has begun shading under the eyes and around the cheeks. The next four focus on the mouth, capturing her slip of a smile, closed lips forcing lines into the cheeks and lifting the chin. By the eighth, the artist tries to get the hair right, but by the ninth, he or she has given up, drawing just a few suggestive strokes. The tenth is sure, the outline firm, the shading bold. The girl looks right through me, in this tenth sketch, with her Mona Lisa smile: the smile of a girl who knows someone loves her.
I lift the lamp close to the last sketch, a busy scene set in a forest, where trees lush with fruit hold birds with feathery tails. The girl is dressed like an ancient Greek goddess, with lace-up sandals winding around muscled calves and a short toga. Her waist is encircled in a belt that ends in a snake’s head. She wears a crown of leaves, and has an impossible pin-up bod. She runs, looking over her shoulder with a smile of pleasure at a warrior-type guy, an arsenal on his back. His muscled arms pull back a bow, and his thighs bulge. Animals look on from above and below, way too interested.
Why is Liv wallpapering our secret spot with soft-core porn for Dungeons and Dragons freaks?
I set the lamp down and kneel on the Mexican blanket. A pile in a spot just outside the circle of light catches my eye. I crawl closer. A stack of manila envelopes, tops torn open, the first covered in a fine dust. The envelopes are about the size of the sketches, and they are wrinkled and finger-stained in the manner of things that go through the mail. I lift one, blowing off the dust, which is thick and stubborn. The address is handwritten in careful lettering. “My Olivia,” it says above a post office box number in Shiverton. There are eleven envelopes.
The ceiling presses down on me, making it hard to breathe. I set the envelopes down on top of one another and wriggle, itchy all over. The film on the envelopes is fiberglass insulation dust, maybe. Or not. A familiar chunky numbness settles behind my tongue. I feel for a beam and hang on as my eyes fill with white.
*
A fallen tree, like the husk of a giant dead insect. I press my body inside. Rot snags my hair and scrapes my back. I tell myself I itch not from beetles or millipedes or pill bugs or any other insect that lives in this log, and there are worse things. Hours pass as I listen for a twig snap or the suction sound of boots in the mud. Black turns to purple. It is time to run.
*
Deborah’s sharp consonants carry up the stairs, faint, but loud enough to break the seal. I cover my face with splayed fingers.
“No,” I gasp, hard, the command you give a disobedient dog. I spread my fingers and the white peels back, and I am here, back in the eaves, where I used to play.
Go. Now.
I switch off the lamp and pass through the panel door, batting coats aside for air. On the landing, I hear Deborah thank a harried school official.
“Julia?” she calls.
I thunder down the stairs, yelling, “Just tell Liv I stopped by, please!” She’s screaming for me to come back as I tumble into the car, pressing the start button and miming through the window that I can’t hear her, sorry, gotta run. I peel out in front of a minivan, leaving tire shred as the driver lays on her horn.
*
“You’re home! How wonderful!” Mom yells, as though I’ve returned home from the war, or abroad, or college, all of which seem like better alternatives right now than dinner with the Mincae, for which it appears I am late. A dome of salmonella-white poultry sits in the lit oven. Mom looks at it with fear, then pulls herself away.