33 LEAVE THE LIGHT ON ALL NIGHT
The last time I saw Moody was at Posthumous: A Celebration of Life . With the absence of thesis work, Caroline’s parents had donated every painting of hers that they still owned, and Rotham filled the atrium with it to host a show in her honor. Painting students were encouraged to create a commemorative piece for Caroline that would be displayed along with her work in place of a Solo exhibition.
The only materials I had left that hadn’t burned were a pad of sketchbook paper and a set of charcoal. They had been safe on my bedroom desk, far from Grainer’s fire. I wanted to draw Caroline, but I tried a million times, couldn’t get the eyes right, her face always emerging incorrectly. Instead, I tried to capture something meaningful. A place we could go, before things had unraveled.
Of course, there was the summer before senior year, what I now thought of as our last truly peaceful time together. On the last day we all lay on the beach under hot light, spread out in a star with our heads in the center. I picked out a meditation and put it on Saz’s speaker. Amrita folded her arms behind her head. I could feel my sunburn under my clothes as we listened to the woman’s voice tell us how to manifest. Above us the clouds were wispy, a daytime moon directly overhead and a slice of rainbow beneath it. We’d chosen that spot without knowing; it marked us in place.
I couldn’t think of anything to manifest, but I looked at that piece of sky from behind my sunglasses and teared up with the love I had for them.
We walked down to the water after and linked our arms until we were an interconnected row. Upon Caroline’s instruction we howled at the surf like dogs, laughing, stumbling. Even Finch did it. I couldn’t remember ever being so happy. When we turned back to our blanket, seagulls flocking overhead and hoping to snatch up the food we had abandoned, we found an elderly woman watching us. “I’m not a creep,” she said, laughing. “I just took your picture.”
It took forever to teach her how to text us the image. But we got it after a while, and there we were, an intertwined line caught forever in her lens.
With my first painting now ash, I drew that photo again for Caroline. The five of us at the edge of the water with our arms linked together, heads tipped back in our howl. I thought that maybe she might like the memory, too, if she could see it somewhere, if she was in the room with me, if she’d never left at all.
It hung beside a painting Caroline had made our junior year before she’d leaned into abstraction—a portrait of her mother sitting on their porch in Michigan, little white dog bundled in a blanket in her arms. But the sky and lake were loose approximations. She’d outlined them with a dry brush, coaxing color from the background with a wash of burnt orange until the scene felt like an earthy memory. It was strange to see a painting like that from Caroline’s hand. Like looking at a past version of her, one still seeking a way to make her parents proud.
The room was laden with paintings like that. Someone had carefully arranged vinyl lettering on the glass beside the doors that read Posthumous . It seemed like such a crass name for a memorial show—but Caroline’s parents stood beside the entrance and greeted students, faculty, and the public with smiles on their faces. Caroline’s death made national news, and now there were cameras flashing in every direction. She’d given her parents the legend they wanted out of Rotham.
“It’s lovely,” Moody said as she took in my drawing. She had her hair down and was dressed in a tight black turtleneck, one that made her appear like a floating head. Her single earring was a bell this time—it chimed when she moved.
She didn’t wait for me to respond, just kept on: “You always have such a wonderful way of showing your viewer exactly who and what you love. Your pieces are like time capsules. You take me with you, and you let me live in that moment. It’s something to treasure.”
I fought tears, but they rose anyway, burning high in my nose. When I didn’t speak, Moody touched my shoulder gently.
“I’m so sorry about what happened to Caroline,” she continued. “And I’m sorry that the work you did is gone, but I hope you continue to paint. It would be a shame if this awful year discouraged you from sharing your gift with the world. I think you would have made a fine Soloist, Joanna.”
I thanked her hollowly—it was a compliment, sure, but one that only made me feel more alone. Caroline was gone. Finch wanted nothing to do with me. Saz was broken beyond repair, Amrita trying to hold the rest of us together and watching us slip through her fingers.
“You’re so young. You have nothing but time. Rest now, and grieve. But don’t let the world pass you by.” Moody gave me a knowing smile and squeezed my shoulder before she turned back into the crowd, stopping beside Mars’s piece—a gorgeous, intricate houndstooth pattern that resembled one Caroline had often worn as a quilted jacket.
I went walking in search of Amrita. Everyone, regardless of the fact that St. Roche’s email hadn’t stressed a dress code, had arrived in black, accessorized by gaudy jewelry and fancy little scarves. It made the atrium feel like a trendy German club as opposed to a memorial. And it made it much harder to find anyone I knew when everyone was a carbon copy of each other.
Finally, I spotted Amrita by the fountain, sitting next to Saz with plastic cups of wine in their hands. Amrita leaned her cheek against my hip when I reached them. I wrapped an arm around her and held fast, looking past the crowd at their pieces hanging side by side. Saz’s was the most tender painting I’d ever seen her make: it was Caroline’s torso, the thin fabric of her shirt barely concealing her chest, the pale wash of her stomach and belly button exposed. Her arms were full of limp flowers. The whole thing was made up of thick blue brushstrokes, so swollen with color that I imagined I could eat it. Even without Caroline’s face in the image, you could tell it was her—the knuckles were so perfect, the wrists delicate and freckled, fine gold bracelets outlined with a narrow brush. To its right hung Amrita’s piece—a finely rendered illustration of Caroline made to look like a doll in a box, with exact copies of her favorite clothes twist-tied to the packaging, so vivid and lush with color that I felt I could reach into the painting and pull that little Caroline free. And between the two paintings was another Caroline original, this time from our sophomore year. It was the painting she had made in the class where we met, an abstract layering of all the different hues we had mulled and mixed. I could see a place where her thumb had left a print.
“Seen Finch yet?” Amrita asked.
“She probably went outside to smoke,” Saz said, shrugging. Her dark hair bounced with the movement. She hadn’t cried yet today, but there were blue circles beneath her eyes, and her cheeks were flushed as if she might start at any moment.
Amrita gave me a pointed look. I grimaced down at her. “Finch wants nothing to do with me.”
“Oh, come on. We all know there was something going on with you two. We promised we’d never date each other and ruin the friend group, in case you forgot.”
I paled. “Well, something a little more drastic ruined us, wouldn’t you say?”
Amrita looked away again, back to her painting. Saz’s lip trembled. “I should have never opened that disgusting book,” she whispered feverishly. “I should have never even brought it up.”
Amrita’s smile was sad. “It’s not your fault. We would have done something foolish eventually. You just sped up the process.”
I saw a head bob through the crowd. Finch melded and warped with the packed room. Every time I turned, I expected to find another creature in a corner. But the room remained unburdened by the dead—beyond Caroline everywhere, imprinted on everything.
“I’m going to do another lap,” I said, pulling away. “Let me know if you need me?”
“Don’t wander too far,” Amrita answered. “Caroline’s mom wants to take a picture of all of us, and she told me to wrangle you.”
Saz scrubbed a hand over her face. “A picture? What is this, the fucking prom?”
Amrita shrugged. “I’m not going to argue with a woman who just lost her daughter.”
I sighed and slipped back into the wave, passing Phoebe’s sculpture of burned wood and rubble piled atop a marble stand—jarring to see, and even more jarring to contemplate if she’d pulled remnants from Grainer or burned the wood herself. Cameron’s perfectly captured hyperrealist portrait of Caroline was so accurate that it had lost all its soul; her eyes were a cold, piercing blue staring back at me.
I passed those pieces by and went to Finch’s.
It was a faceless silhouette, featureless, hairless, just a deep red shape that I recognized from a photo Saz had taken of Caroline lying on the grass our junior year, hands crossed over her head like the wrists had been knotted together. Beneath that silhouette was a warm sea of sand—the slope of the dunes sliding down to meet the shore, everything glowing with imbued light. The only mark made in the body was a bright and humanoid eye peering out of the skull. It was so alive, so opposite from Cameron’s, yet equally well rendered. This one had captured something imperfect and beautiful. It was as if Finch had plucked the eye from Caroline’s head and set it into the recess of the canvas.
I finally spotted Finch again. She was standing beside Thea with her arms crossed over her chest, nodding along to something the other girl was saying. I balked, considered turning away—and then forced myself forward.
“And I talked to this gallerist, but he said I’d have to intern for a while in the city, and I said I couldn’t do that without a stipend, and he said I should be thankful for the opportunity at all, but I tried to tell him that—oh, hi, Joanna.”
The look Thea gave me was pitying. I didn’t want to think about what she was looking at—my sallow, sleepless appearance, or the way I couldn’t stop myself from fidgeting with a ring around my middle finger.
“Can we talk?” I asked Finch, ignoring Thea’s greeting entirely.
Finch finally looked at my mouth. She still wouldn’t drag her eyes up to meet mine. “Now?” she asked.
“Yeah, now,” I said, fighting to keep the irritation out of my voice. “You busy?”
Thea narrowed her eyes at me. “No,” Finch said finally. And then to Thea, “I’ll catch up with you later.”
I led her outside. The world was finally beginning to hold on to its light; it was after five, and the sun was just starting to set. Still, I wanted real spring. I wanted everything green and good to come and stay forever. I thought if it never snowed again, I would be the happiest girl alive—that the snow would always remind me of that day, the sirens, the rising flame.
“I can’t do this with you,” Finch said.
“Do what?”
“You know what,” she snapped. “I’m not going to feed into this ritual bullshit. Caroline is dead because of it, and you might as well be. You’ve been a walking corpse for six months, Jo. It’s taken everything from you. That ritual was the biggest mistake we’ve ever made and we can’t take that back, but we can move on and let it go. I need you to let it go.”
“You saw it,” I whispered. “You cannot tell me that I’m crazy.”
Frustration built in her face. I could tell she wanted to lash out, to hit something, to implode, but she just ran her fingers through her hair.
“Doesn’t that scare the shit out of you?” she asked. “I don’t care if I saw it, because it doesn’t change anything. I never want to see it again. I want to get as far away from that thing as I possibly can. We can do that. We can lock up that night somewhere and never think about it again.”
She took my hands—her fingers were so warm and mine so cold, the heat of her wicking into me, seeping like blood on cloth. “Please, Jo,” she begged. Then, heartbreakingly, “You know I love you so fucking much. I love all of you. That’s why I’m asking you to drop it.”
I wondered if Caroline had felt as alone as I did all this time, even surrounded by them. If she had also lived in the joy of seeing the creature rise and finding everyone else in awe of it too, that haunt and its capacity for power, in all that it asked of us, in all that it fed on.
“I can’t,” I said. “It’s with me forever.”
Her face fell. I thought maybe I’d see her cry for the very first time.
“Finch! Jo!” Saz called. “Photo-op time!”
Finch dropped my hand, and the absence set in immediately. She twisted away from me and obeyed Saz’s call. I followed and joined the line of them as Mrs. Aster arranged us with new determination on her face.
“Perfect,” she said with Caroline’s mouth, “that’s just right. That will be beautiful. Right side, don’t look so dour.”
“Smile, or she’ll make us take another hundred of these,” Amrita muttered through her teeth.
I obeyed Mrs. Aster’s demands and forced a smile on one end of our four. Finch stood at the other. The world stretched between us in the shape of my women. I felt that eternal chain and the gaps we would never cross, all the ways we had become necessary for survival for one another. Who else would ever understand this moment? Who could ever comprehend what we had done, and where we would go, and how we would continue to go on? How would we continue on?
Amrita hooked her arm with mine. I held fast.