The Effects Of Light Part 19

Myla nodded. The tripod was cold to the touch. She longed for a slice of sun. Then she looked back at the piece of paper in her hands and read the first postscript.

P.S. Enclosed you'll find two things. The first your father gave me, the small brown envelope. He didn't know what to do with it when it came to him in the mail. But I think it's best you read it yourself.

Myla fingered the small envelope with David's name and address. She edged it open at the neatly sliced top, where her father had already opened it. She pulled out the slim, small letter and read it.

Dear Mr. Wolfe,

My brother was the one who murdered your little girl. He'd always been off. I guess I never knew how off he was.

Three months ago, he came over for dinner. He told my family he wanted to save the innocents. We'd never been too religious so I didn't understand.

A couple weeks later I brought him leftovers. He'd been listening to the radio and he told me about these little girls out in Oregon whose father made them be in dirty pictures. I mean no disrespect but that's what the radio had said. The guy on the radio said someone had to save those girls.

I asked my brother if he'd ever seen the pictures. I said maybe they just showed your girls in the bathtub or something. I'd heard about people getting in trouble for taking pictures like that.

My brother said these were different. I asked him again how he knew. I asked him if he'd seen them himself. He said no, he didn't have to see them, he knew they were dirty.

That was the last I saw of my brother. I'm sorry he killed your little girl. I wish I could undo what he did. I thought it might help you if you knew my brother never saw those pictures. This morning I opened up my paper and saw some of them. They're beautiful.

Sincerely, Lacey Johnson.

Myla sat down. The world was spinning outside of this small spot of truth, this small knowledge, that Steve and Ruth and David had handed her. And here it had come: some kind of answer, an answer she never thought she'd have, that she'd longed for for so long. The knowledge that the man who'd killed her sister had simply listened to what others had told him, that he hadn't been thinking for himself. She smiled, surprising herself. David, in the midst of all his sorrow, all his desperation, must have felt something like satisfaction. For wasn't this exactly what his book was about? Wasn't he full of the knowledge that people were afraid to see, afraid to think for themselves?

Even as she smiled, Myla knew she was crying. But she was wiping away her tears with her sleeve. She read the other postscript, the last words she had from Ruth.

P.P.S. I also enclose in this packet the seven best photographs my camera ever took. Look at them, Myla. They'll tell you what to believe.

Myla stood and walked to the light. Her heart was pounding. She was afraid, but she was braver than she'd been. She withdrew from the packet a piece of cardboard and leaned it and Ruth's letter against her chest. She turned over the top print. And she looked.

Contact prints. Printed on eight-by-ten paper, directly from the negatives. Printed beautifully with aching detail, they were stunningly real. Every single dot of light, every single goose b.u.mp, every single shiver was lit up for her to see. Seven photographs. Rose and May on the floor. Rose and May standing side by side. Rose in the water. May by the water. Rose and May on the riverbed. May alone in the orchard. Ruth standing at the stream. They were them at their most them.

For thirteen years, Myla had been afraid to look at Ruth's photographs. And now that she looked, she saw what she'd been afraid of. It wasn't that arguments clanged through her head or justification rang in her ears. It wasn't that she envied her youth or felt critical of her flaws. No, what she saw was simple: she loved these pictures. They were her life and she loved them, full of their shadows and darknesses, of curves in the river and the hot, dappling sun, of the sweep of her sister's small hands curled into air. This was what Myla's life had looked like. The gilded light of that past was now manifest in her hands. It was so beautiful that the ache from missing it was unbearable.

Steve said to her, "I'm leaving now. I'll be at home, with Jane and Samuel. We'll be waiting for you there."

He touched her shoulder then, before ducking out under the garage door. She heard his car start some moments later, and realized he must have hidden it behind the units, just so she wouldn't drive away. She was crying, gathering herself. She turned to the room and peered into the darkness.

There were boxes and boxes to look at. Boxes and boxes of hope and beauty. Beauty Ruth had given her, a chance to see her life, to hold it in her hands. Myla knew then, just knew. There was work. And she was going to do it. She wanted this work. She was choosing it. She wanted it more than anything in the world.

MYLA AND SAMUEL ARE ON A bench. They are sitting across the river from the city, perched on the hill that pitches down to Oaks Bottom. The sun is sinking behind the West Hills, behind Portland, and it catches the wet shine in each cloud skipping overhead. The breeze in the sky is softer, calmer, down here on this hill, where Myla lies with her head on Samuel's lap, letting him care.

She is bone-tired. She is sick of thinking about it all and afraid to stop thinking about it all, but where once she feared that would mean Pru and David and Ruth and Sarah were gone from her, she now feels that somehow they're here.

Samuel says, "Just rest now. Relax."

She can barely move her head from where it rests on his thighs. She can barely find her voice. She has no tears. It's comforting to have as much of the truth as she'll ever know.

Samuel lets her be quiet. He says to her then, as the sun is only a bright sliver slicing behind the dark hills, "I've been thinking a lot about you. About your family. Like a nineteenth-century novel, your family, and mine's like a seventies sitcom." She can hear laughter in his voice, and it makes her wish she had the energy to smile. "I've been thinking about your minds. You're all so smart. Close your eyes," he says. So she does.

"I've been thinking about your father, Myla. About what he believed about time and the way it doesn't work in a straight line. I think he's right, that there are bigger planes of experience than the ones we can see from the vantage of our limited time lines. Think about it: dreams, memories, connections between people." His fingers trace the outline of her upper arm. "That's what moves us into a bigger realm. That's what expands our visions. That's how Pru and Sarah and David live on, through your stories of them, and their images, and your love for them. There's truth to that."

"But what does it mean, finally?" she asks, summoning all her strength to make language.

"It changes lives," he says without a second's hesitation. "It's changed my life. You want to know why I'm leaving academia? Imagine that you'd come to that second lecture about Ruth Handel. Imagine you'd had the chance to hear my cla.s.s, the one I taught two days after you walked out of my lecture.

"I started by letting the students talk. You'd be amazed how vocal they got about the story. Everyone had an opinion. That kid you called the Dream Student started us off with a definition of censorship, and that led to fifteen minutes of wrangling over the definition of p.o.r.nography. Someone mentioned that she'd almost been abducted out of a grocery cart when she was four, and I steered the conversation back to the topic, encouraging them to focus. I asked them to tell me what fascinated them so much about the story of your family's tragedy.

"And inevitably, someone raised his hand and said, 'The dad was an idiot to let anyone take those pictures of his kids.' Someone else said, 'He must have been a pervert.' Someone disagreed and asked, 'What about Ruth Handel? It's her fault.' And so the blaming began. People blamed the media, the galleries, the newspapers, the endemic spread of p.o.r.nography in our country. They blamed your family. Someone blamed art, claiming our const.i.tution allows too much freedom of expression."

Myla feels Samuel's hand tense on her shoulder as he speaks, and she opens her eyes to see his face gazing out across the water, toward the darkening city. He continues, "And I said nothing. I let them blame art. I didn't know how not to. It seemed that something or someone should be blamed. So I ignored the obvious. I was so caught up in my academic, theoretical appraisal of the events that I didn't have any grip on who else to blame."

His voice breaks, and for the first time since he started speaking, he looks down at her. "But I know now." He stops. "There is someone to blame. There is someone to blame, but it's a simple truth. People don't want that. This debate about whether the pictures are or aren't 'decent' isn't supposed to be eclipsed by such hideous, horrible reality."

His voice washes over her. "A man murdered your sister. A man. Not art. That's the truth, and there's no way around it." Samuel's warm hand presses into Myla's, and his voice grows low and full of sorrow. "Let go of every other truth you know. Someone murdered Pru. Your growing up didn't kill her, and neither did Ruth's photographs. Some will say the photographs set into motion a series of events. But I think that's a dumb way to see our lives. A dumb way to see time. That way embraces fear, and I want to be like the artist your father talks about, the one who stretches our culture for us, who makes room for a glorious, expansive future. Art is a force that cannot be stopped."

He takes into his hands the seven artist's prints Ruth has left for Myla. He brings them out into the dimming light and pores over them slowly, one by one. "They're so beautiful," he says. "You're both so beautiful."

He's crying, and the evening descends, cooling them both. Myla lets Samuel's words cradle her thoughts, and feels herself tucking into him, slipping into a sleep she can't resist. At the end of it, she's dreaming, and her dream is a memory, and the memory is this.

They were in a bathtub, an unfamiliar bathtub. It was summertime, and they were staying in a rented cottage on the coast. Over the swish of the water, Myla could hear the deeper pull of the tide, the thick resonance of the ocean. She could see darkness out the window and was frustrated at David for being in the other room, doing work when it was vacation and they should be making dinner together, or walking on the beach. In the bathtub, there was barely room for her and Pru, especially because Pru's slippery four-year-old legs kept trying to walk back and forth across Myla. Pru's hair was plastered on her back, and her body was hot like steam itself.

And then the bathroom door swung open, and there was David with a smile on his face and two towels in his hands. He swept Pru up and scooped her into a towel and said, "It's amazing out there! Just wait until you see!" Myla stood up, incredulous that he'd been out in the night without them. He told her to hurry up, and she grabbed the other towel from him and wrapped it around her shoulders. She followed him out of the bathroom, out of the house, letting the screen door slam behind her.

The night air was warm, which was a surprise; most evenings like this on the Oregon coast, you needed at least a sweater, and here she was with only a towel wrapped around her. She made out the shapes of David and Pru as they broke over the dune, and she ran to catch up with them. The sand was cool and silky underneath her feet, and the reeds scratched her ankles and shins as she raced forward.

When Myla reached the top of the dune, she looked down and saw David and Pru already running toward the water. Myla's heart was pounding from running, and she wondered what the big deal was. The sound of the ocean made it too loud to ask, so she hurtled herself down the hill, loosening her knees so it was a smooth way down. When she hit the sand of the beach, she felt the towel slipping from her shoulders, and the warm night air shocked her body. She left the towel behind her, felt the delight of the ocean breeze all over her. She started running to where David and Pru were stopped, stomping the ground, laughing.

And then she saw. She looked down at her feet as she entered the cooler sand, the part that had been licked recently by the ocean, and as she drew closer and closer to the water, she saw light bursting around her every step. At first she thought she'd made it up, that her vision was just sparkling from all that hard running, but then the tiny bursts of green became more and more obvious each time she pounded the sand. Soon every step was an explosion of light, setting off a chain reaction around her feet-a series of moving constellations.

"What is it?" she asked David when she reached him.

He was jumping up and down as if the light might make him fly, and he was laughing. "Plankton, I think. I've heard it called phosph.o.r.escence. That, or it's magic."

"I choose magic!" yelled Pru, who was running around them, leaving wide arcs of brightness behind her. Myla watched her run, traced the sprint of her sister across the sand, the way Pru's arms clapped toward the sky, the way her legs tensed and released as she made footprints of light. Myla admired her father's long bright stride along the water, into the distance, as if he were jumping onto luminescent lily pads. She lifted her right foot and sank it down into the sand, felt the squish of the cold between her toes, watched the bright flash of impact. She lifted her left foot slowly, then sank it into the beach; another burst, and then another. She looked up and saw her father and sister hurtling back and forth around her, leaving comet trails behind them in the sand. She wanted to be able to run like them, but it was as though the light bursting from the sand had turned reality so far on its head that she'd forgotten how. And then Pru came rushing toward her in the night. She ran to Myla, grabbed her hand, and pulled her along. It was only then that Myla's lungs quickened, that her ankles lifted into the night, that her hair flew from her shoulders. Each time she stepped, she admired her own bright wake.

acknowledgments.

Although David Smithson Wolfe is a literary creation, many of his ideas derive from the essential conversation I've been carrying on with my mother, Elizabeth Beverly, for as long as I can remember. Words cannot express the grat.i.tude I feel for the love she has showered on this book of mine: without her, it would not, could not, be.

Research into David's theories on art, history, and time has led me to some fascinating thinkers and their books: Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye; William V. Dunning's Changing Images of Pictorial s.p.a.ce: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting; Mary D. Garrard's Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art; David Freedberg's The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response; David Hockney's Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters; Martin Kemp's The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat; Simon Schama's Rembrandt's Eyes (Myla reads this on her first day of notebook research); Leonard Shlain's Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in s.p.a.ce, Time & Light (which a.s.serts, "There are no straight lines in nature"); Debora Silverman's Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art; Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West; and Philip Steadman's Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces.

Thanks to Margaret and Geoff Lobenstine, and to Amy March for having such faith in my project that they literally invested in my future; to Maia Davis and Jock Sturges, and to Mona Kuhn for explaining the mechanics of large-format camera work as well as for offering me seven years of gorgeous insight into the many-faceted relationships that may exist between photographers and their subjects; to Adam Blau, Daniel J. Blau, Jennifer Cayer, Annie Dawid, Amber Hall, Rosanna Marshall, and Wendy Salinger for reading this book in its many incarnations and readily offering the perfect blend of unquestioning encouragement and incisive criticism; and to Hannah, Sandy, and Steve Engel for gleefully letting me borrow their home, their cat, and pieces of their family.

The intellectual and artistic life zinging through the Wolfe household borrows in no small way from the discussions that occurred around my own childhood dinner table, from the encouragement pouring forth from my parents each time I pursued another creative project, and from the steadfast love I have never lived without. Profound thanks to my mother and also my father, Dr. Robert Dunster Whittemore II, for teaching me, through the example of his fieldwork, that observation is the best way to learn the workings of a people; my sister, Kai Beverly-Whittemore, for the kind sharing of her elegant mind, unwavering trust, and sweet heart; and my husband, David M. Lobenstine, for continuing to show me that there is much in this life that lies far beyond the bounds of language.

Finally, thanks to my agent, Anne Hawkins, for writing the best rejection letter I could have imagined, and to my editor, Rick Horgan, for understanding this book from the moment it was cast in his direction.

end.