Still Lives(38)

When the red 12 flashed above the door, I was almost grateful to enter the execution chamber. Being told where to sit and where to place my hands was a relief. The belts didn’t hurt. I waved at the darkened mirror. Dee rolled the syringes over, and then my chair lurched back. The tipping changed everything. My head sank like an anchor, dragging on my body. The white ceiling had a slick, sickly sheen. I knew people were watching beyond the mirror. Everyone is watching me, I thought. I felt their eyes. I heard their silence. They were already inured to pity. I strained against the belts. Then blackout.

A second TV flashed the names of the hundreds of people who have been executed in California since 1778.

“That was really eerie,” I said to Brent moments later as he helped me out of the chair. I wanted to compliment him, but my voice sounded false, chirpy. “It must have been something to see your stage sets.”

He inclined his brown head.

“We should do a show of your shows,” I added.

Brent finally met my gaze. Inside his eyes something glowed briefly, like an ember blown by breath. It burned into you, that look, and I could see why everyone worshiped and feared him. He seemed capable of reducing a person to ash. And now that his wife was worse, he acted like he was seeking a target—picking more fights with the curators, talking to his female staff in such an abrasive, flirtatious way it made one of them quit.

“Next person’s up,” he said, dismissing me.

Unsettled by the experience, I couldn’t go back to my office, so I walked down to Grand Central Market in the hot sun and bought a fountain cola with lots of ice. The cold sweetness tasted good. The bustling pupusa stall, with its white counter and round slabs of dough, almost comforted me. The ice-cream place made me pause wistfully, staring down at the pink, green, brown, and speckled mounds. I watched two women bend to bowls of caldo de camarones, their fingers delicately peeling shrimp shells, piling the translucence beside them. Neon signs led me farther. For the first time, I lingered at a jewelry stall, touching rings couched in velvet and name necklaces of cheap, diamond-studded gold dangling from a display. Isabella. Tracy. Samuel. I listened to Spanish radio and rapid spoken Vietnamese. Light spilled into the building from both ends, and the concrete floor wore stars of sawdust. My straw made squeaks on the cup’s Styrofoam bottom.

On the way back, I stopped at a water fountain, refilled the cup, and drank the slightly warm, slightly sugary sluice. I popped the lid and chewed the thin bits of ice until everything was gone. Then I returned to my desk. I did my job fine, but I was pursued all day by the dull sense that I had lost something valuable and could not find it.


After I hang up on Yegina, I go upstairs and try to nap but end up staring. I scrounge in my cupboards for a can of minestrone, heat it, set a neat table with a folded napkin and a full water glass. But I cannot eat. I flip open my phone and contemplate the keypad, but never dial.

Yegina’s right, I tell myself again and again. You can’t step into this stuff and step out again. But I just don’t believe Greg is guilty of murder.

It’s well past dark outside my bungalow when I unroll Kevin’s notes on my little dining table and pore over them, shaking my head.

I still haven’t seen “Disappearances” up close, but I know it resembles a real still life more than any of the others. It is packed with objects, and the objects are arranged, so why wouldn’t the objects hold a meaning? The real question is: What meaning, and how do you know? She doesn’t like what I’m seeing, Kevin told me. I don’t either. Reading his translations of the symbols in “Disappearances” makes my skin crawl. According to him, Kim Lord’s depictions of objects like a bottle, a notebook, and a bloodstained screwdriver each reference horrible crimes against women.

As I fold up the notes and raise my head, I can hear my own breath, feel its dampness. My body is cramped and prickly from sitting so long, but I have the feeling that if I rise from this chair, if I make any big movements, a dark, lurking presence outside will know I’m here alone and enter. I switch off the overhead light. Better. I switch off all the lights in the bungalow, until the only illumination is the orange glow of the rest of Los Angeles extending to the desert and the sea. The glow’s dull persistence is comforting. It will go on until dawn.

I dig in my purse for the flash drive, pull it free.

There’s no path for someone ordinary like me to find one missing woman in this whole city. To rescue her if she needs rescuing. To clear the name of an innocent man. It takes teams of police officers, laboratories, experts, courts. The impossibilities rise around me, steep and sheer. But I think of the hero of Fitzgerald’s last novel, Monroe Stahr, flying over the highest mountains and talking to his pilot about the old railroad men and how they had to lay a track through anyway. You can’t test the best way—except by doing it. So you just do it … You choose some way for no reason at all.

I stick the drive into the computer and open the files, scrolling through them fast. Ten. Twenty. Fifty. One hundred. Kim’s in every frame, bending, collapsed, grinning, stripped and bound.

My phone rings. Yegina. She knows. She always knows.

I keep scrolling, wincing at what I see but not surprised by it. These are all studies for the paintings in Still Lives.

Four rings. Yegina doesn’t leave a message. She calls again, hangs up again when I don’t pick up.

At the very end of the string of pictures are five photos I don’t recognize. They don’t connect with the exhibition at all.