Still Lives(25)

“I don’t know how she handled it, frankly,” says Jayme, looking surprised to be saying something.

“Handled what?” says Yegina.

Jayme turns a page in her Oaxacan cookbook, glares at a new recipe. “Making that whole show,” she says.

No one knows how to respond to this comment, not coming from Jayme, whom we all admire, and who is so private that she works out at a different gym from the rest of us and never stays at happy hour for more than one gin gimlet. Even trickier, we do know what Jayme means—what it must have cost Kim Lord to inhabit these murders—yet saying it aloud strips away the safe armor of our own intellectualization, the same armor that got us through the Jason Rains show on capital punishment, when we each allowed ourselves to sit in a lethal injection chair and watch the syringes come closer. Still Lives is art. Art should shock us. We work at the Rocque.

Silence falls over the table, but we keep knitting and sewing, and the needles make tiny clicking and piercing sounds.

“I bet the police will turn up something soon,” says Lisa.

“Motivation,” says Yegina. “That’s the first thing on my mind: Why would anyone want her missing?”

Motivations are misleading, I think. Only after all the evidence is in, after you unearth so many little hows, can you try to piece together the great why.

I’m about to say so, when Dee announces that boyfriends are the likeliest suspects, and that Shaw Ferguson looked shocked and miserable last night.

Here we go.

I feel everyone’s eyes on me now. They all know he dumped me. For her. Their collective sympathy is the hardest to endure. I knit harder, the yarn scratching my fingers.

“I thought he looked awful, too,” says Evie. “Like he hadn’t slept a wink.”

He did look awful.

“Greg Shaw Ferguson is too much of a narcissist to kill someone,” Yegina says.

He also looked deeply afraid.

“Oh well. That leaves Maggie, right?” Dee says. “The jealous ex.”

Dee clearly means it as a joke to clear the tension. I should have my own clever retort, but I don’t. My mouth tastes stale and hollow. The dread I felt in the galleries is carving through me again. I stare down at my hands, shoving the needle, ripping a new loop.

“Low blow, Dee,” Jayme says.

“This is what I was trying to avoid,” Yegina mutters.


One warm winter day in our first year in Los Angeles, I was driving the 101 with the skyscrapers streaming past on my right, the hills on my left, when I felt the city—really felt it—for the first time.

I was en route to the Rocque, my radio tuned to indie twang, my skirt tight over my thighs, my sunglasses heavy on my nose and just starting to slide on the sweat, and it happened—the sensation of metropolis—expanding me like a balloon.

I passed a parking garage under construction. Out of the corner of my eye: giant steel girders, ramps, and levels. When this is finished, I thought, two hundred people will come every day to slide their cars into these spots, and I will never know a single person by name or what troubles them, and they will not know me, and if two hundred more take their place, I won’t know that either.

I—who’d grown up in a Vermont village, who could identify every local family by name or habit—was now surrounded by so many thousands, millions, they could only be specters. Ever anonymous to me, and I to them. The isolation almost made me choke.

That was the painful part of my awakening.

After that, exhilaration. The road opened like a sea. I could be anyone speeding down it, not the daughter of my parents, the sister of my brothers. Not the girl who struck out at bat her entire first year of Little League. Not the teenager who sang a torturously earnest a cappella rendition of “This Land Is Your Land” in the school talent show. Not the Rocque newbie who brought maple-bran muffins to a cocktail potluck. And especially not the unknown young woman who sat outside Nikki Bolio’s funeral in her car, weeping uncontrollably.

All those old, encumbering selves slid away, leaving me feeling exposed but light, too, as if it were suddenly possible to float.

When I’d reached my office, I’d called Greg. “What’s wrong?” he said when he heard my husky voice. “Has something happened at work?”

“No, I just …” I paused. How could I explain the tingling in my skull, as if I had just hatched from a shell? “I could be anyone here. I just realized that. And it terrifies me.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s too huge—this city—”

“That’s not the city. That’s life. Life is huge. Isn’t that what you wanted?” Greg sounded earnest and impatient.

I meekly agreed with him, but something inside me did not. Maybe that was the moment things started to fall apart between us. Maybe it was also the moment I started to realize how na?ve I’d been about Los Angeles. I’d come here thinking that the sunny metropolis would catalyze me to a second start, but instead its staggering possibilities left me paralyzed.

Later that afternoon, I went downstairs to the galleries to check a wall label and ran into our exhibitions manager, Yegina, standing in the center of a room of hand-stitched photographs by a Cuban artist. Her dark head was cocked and her lips parted as her eyes followed the lines of red thread the artist had used to finish the Havana buildings that the Castro regime had left half constructed. Yegina looked more like she was listening than looking. Listening to a sublime symphony.