Still Lives(86)

She nods.

When I reach the end of our road, I have the choice to drive west to Burlington, the lakefront city where I used to meet Nikki, or east, deeper into the country, where Nikki lived. I turn east. I’ve only visited her hometown once, when I was younger, to hike the cliffs above it, but when I get there, it is exactly as I remember: a gas station, a village of white wooden houses set too close to the road, a volunteer fire department, and a couple of churches. Blink and you miss it, this little center. Most people in the town live on long woodsy roads that wind off in either direction. Exactly like my hometown. I don’t know which house Nikki grew up in, or where her killer lives, but I bet the houses are close. I bet in the winter they are visible to each other through the bare trees and snow, and if not the houses, then their woodsmoke, winding skyward, mingling in the gray air.

I could stay here and find out who killed her. It might take a while, but I could do it. Is that what Nikki would have wanted? To bring down her neighbors?

At Luster’s, Hendricks told me that Nikki had bragged to everyone in town that she was talking to a reporter. Even before that, she knew she was in danger for squealing on people, and she made it worse. She made herself a target, and she didn’t run away. I never understood why, until I witnessed Evie also hesitate.

Evie was so meticulous at first. Killing Kim and getting her out of the museum was nearly impossible, and she pulled it off. All the way through the Gala and into the next day she’d kept her cool, going about her usual business while Kim died slowly in the crate. Evie could have left L.A. safely and easily after she buried Kim, but she didn’t. She waited. She stalled. Was she hoping Brent would pick up where they’d left off? She would have known by then that he’d reject her, but still she lingered.

Like Nikki, Evie stayed. She must have been waiting to be caught. To be recognized. Spotlighted for all to see. Finally, this daughter of no one and nowhere: a household name. When Evie started researching the photographs of murdered women for Still Lives, something had clicked. Instead of pitying the victims, she began envying each murderer his power, his gaze, his ability to position himself, godlike and merciless. When Brent broke things off with her, seemingly to pursue Kim, Evie began to describe to herself a killing that would make her seen. She studied the images; she studied Kim’s career and began plotting her own brutal work. After all, to her, Kim was hardly human, just an idol to be sacrificed.

I wonder how long it took her to die, Evie had said about the photograph of Judy Ann Dull at her own crucifixion. I thought it was a question about the magnitude of suffering. Now I see that Evie was measuring time.

I swerve up the road to the cliffs and crack my window, the scent of spring thaw and greenness flooding the car. It’s not nowhere here, the breeze seems to say as it rolls across the dash; it’s the most beautiful place there is. A white-flowering tree dips and sways by the bend; the serviceberry is in bloom. Fiddleheads unfurl their tight, hairy coils by a steep-spilling stream. My love for my home comes slamming through me. The rivulets of water glint and slide. Moss carpets the rocks by a fragile, ghostly clump of mushrooms.

The path up the back of the cliffs is muddy and narrow, and my heavy, weak body begins floundering thirty steps from the parking lot. I gasp and push myself higher. I remember the view up there, the broad, patched valley, the far horizons of more hills. I need to get there. I need to stand on the brink of it, and find out why I am here and if I am meant to stay. Three times I stop and almost collapse. I wish I’d brought water. I wish I’d brought my mother to tell me to turn around right now and get back down to the car. The woods are wet and still, the rust-colored pine needles slipping beneath my boots. I couldn’t be farther from the desert, from the Pacific, from L.A.’s huge metal ribbons of traffic. Silence and footfall.

I double over, my head spinning and shimmering with the memory of Evie-as-Kim hurrying from the Rocque. If only I had recognized the angry, lonely, invisible woman inside the disguise, Kim might not have died.

I grip thin tree trunks, pulling myself up. I keep staggering until I see the clearing in the trees. The white, clouded sky.

The cliff is a burst of emptiness and cold wind. Trees, trees, then nothing. Not even a branch before me. It’s such a long way down to the tidy cluster of the town below. The buildings are smaller than my fingertips. They sit alongside a slender road that winds to another village, more rumpled hills, and eventually the flat silver curve of Lake Champlain.

I take another step, then I feel it, deep in my breastbone, Evie’s shove, what has been pushing at me ever since I woke in the hospital. How fast she moved. She flew at me. And behind me the ground gave way and the black pit rose. Since then, I’ve startled awake, many times, from the dream of falling backward.

This time, I am facing the abyss. It yawns straight ahead, a lethal fifty-foot drop to the pines below, the gray rock rough with age but high and sheer. And Evie’s still here, with her flat face and furious palms, pressing me away from the edge. She won’t let me get within a step of it. She won’t let me get past her rage to the place where I might feel the great gaping blankness, why live, where I might let it lift me until I plummeted.

She won’t let me go forward at all. This whole month she has been holding me back, and I cannot go on now except by passing through her.

I don’t know how to do this, but the answer isn’t here.

I once saw a painted map of Los Angeles circa 1880. It took up half a wall at an exhibition, and was drawn in 3-D from the distance of a short peak, like this one on which I now stand. The map showed rising green hills, orange groves, a low, delicate grid of streets, the pale-blue ocean. The dream of a city in a valley of paradise, flanked by the sea. It was the mapmaker’s gift to render both the existence of L.A. and its possibility, at the end of our continent, our last and greatest destination.