Chapter 19
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, Dez rises in darkness, cooks breakfast with Simon and Dr. Lebevre, suffers through Zarlengo’s lectures, and devotes the rest of her time and energy to the Vault.
She doesn’t get used to Acheron’s eternal night, or watching intimate scenes from Mo’s life, or the hovering threat of Rafe’s mouth every morning when he graces her with his presence.
Truth be told, she wastes a twisted, delicious amount of time in bringing herself to orgasm, imagining Rafe hard and hot and pulsing within her.
But she also learns how to use her Lens.
By her second Friday at Acheron, she can isolate clips she wants to use from Mo’s Lifeline.
She learns to slide a scene from the right side of her Lens with her fingertips.
She discovers that if she turns a hundred and eighty degrees, she can drag an individual scene over to the left side of her Lens, where she can edit and arrange it into the rough cut of scenes making up her film.
She works chronologically sometimes, thematically others, intuitively always—and the Lens meets her wherever her mood is at on any given day.
Dez devotes nine to noon on her assignment about Lexa O’Rourke. Each day, when new script pages come in from the corresponding Scribe on the project, Paul Rowan, Dez is surprised and fascinated by his understanding of the poet’s inner world.
Like:
All these nights, all these beers in bars with my male writer friends, listening to them praise their own work, they seem to believe they actually can become Lord Byron or John Dunne.
Does becoming a man require imagining you are another man altogether, your favorite man, your idol?
To worship him so ardently you begin to think he’s you?
What woman has the time or space or interest in such solipsistic fantasies? When I write, it is not to take on the guise of some solitary, long-dead genius, but instead to commune with life in its entirety, to feel the gorgeous, trembling ache of every heart that beats right now, in time with mine.
Ah well, as long as I’m here and they’re young and sprung and handsome, I might as well take the most poetic one home with me …
Dez laughs at some of the pages she gets from Paul Rowan, and her heart breaks at others.
She uses the script as a guide to cull scenes from the Vault that reflect the woman she’s coming to know.
She weaves together formative experiences from Lexa O’Rourke’s life—a kiss in the rain at Vassar, a tick delivering Lyme disease.
Then, after breaking for a fast lunch, Dez spends the rest of her day on Mo.
Time vanishes when she’s working on her brother’s film.
Dez will feel she’s been in her Lens for moments, only to retract the screen and realize she’s the last one left in the Vault and has missed dinner again.
At first, it was a relief for a day to disappear like that.
But now Dez feels the pressure of the looming deadline Moriah set for them, November first. Even after the pages from Paul Rowan stop coming—a sign that he’s moved on to his next assignment—Dez still can’t envision the ending of her film about O’Rourke.
She’s working even slower on her brother’s film. Without a Scribe submitting pages of a script for her to follow, she has more freedom to shape the film however she likes. And Mo’s archive is so vast. Dez has never wanted to get something right so much in her life.
A week into her days on the Vault, a title presents itself. She calls Mo’s film Lazarus, inspired by a poem of Lexa O’Rourke’s. Her favorite line: “A sickness/not unto death/but above it.” Dez is proud of what she’s making. She can’t wait to share it with Mo.
She aches for her brother. For her mother, too.
Though Dez hasn’t been able to access any scenes from Mo’s Lifeline after the horrifying hospital scene, she has to believe he’s alive and healing, that her mom and the doctors are taking good care of him, that some part of him can feel her watching his life.
She sits with him. She cries with him. She prays for him. And then she gets back to work.
“Can I get you anything? Sparkling water? Oolong tea?” Acheron’s lead attorney Donegal is striking, a tailored pinstripe suit wrapping his lanky frame, which he leans against the edge of his chic, vintage wooden desk.
Dez sits down in an upholstered Scandinavian chair. Her instinct is to say no to fancy beverage offers, whether she’s thirsty or not.
But working in the Vault this week has given her new confidence. “Matcha, please,” she says. “If you have it.”
Donegal smiles, reaching behind him and pressing a button. “Olivia, bring Ms. Rae some matcha tea.”
All the paintings on Donegal’s walls depict people being stabbed in the back—with knives, scissors, swords, fountain pens. Lawyer humor.
“I’ve read your file,” Donegal says breezily, as if describing a trendy novel. “There are a lot of moving parts.”
“Well, my brother isn’t moving,” Dez says. “That’s why I want to visit him.”
“Thanks, Olivia,” Donegal says as his assistant arrives with Dez’s tea. “The problem with going back to Death Valley is you’ll immediately be arrested.”
“That’s my problem,” Dez says. “I can handle it.”
“Maybe so,” Donegal says. “But Acheron can’t risk it.” The lawyer rises and strides around his desk to stand before her. “Acheron would expose itself to the charge of aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice.”
“Isn’t Acheron doing that, anyway?” Dez asks.
“You signed an acceptance letter when you agreed to come here,” the lawyer reminds her. “Of your own volition.”
“It didn’t say you wouldn’t let me leave!” Dez says. “If it had, I wouldn’t have signed it.” But what had the acceptance letter said exactly? She remembers it was brief enough not to add to her long list of worries at the time.
But … was it also vague enough that Dez could have signed away, without realizing it, some essential right to see her family? Her stomach roils.
“All we’re doing is trying to protect you,” Donegal says. “To keep you out of prison.”
“I’m not the criminal,” she insists. “A man with a gun tried to—”
“Your tea is getting cold.”
Dez frowns down at the beige ceramic mug in her hands, the dim green liquid inside. It looks swampy, obscure, like a moat around a castle. “I didn’t burn my brother on purpose,” she says.
“I’ve read your file,” Donegal says again.
“Do you believe me?” Dez asks.
“I’m on your side,” Donegal says. “That’s enough. And it doesn’t come cheap.”
Dez realizes that no one will believe her about the masked man until she proves it.
“Do you watch police procedurals?” Donegal asks.
She shakes her head.
“Well, there’s a phrase you’ll hear on a lot of them: ‘Wait until this all blows over.’ That’s what we’d like you to do.”
“But what if it never blows over?” Dez asks.
“Every artist has skeletons in her closet,” Donegal says. “Skeletons disintegrate over time.”
Dez leaves the lawyer’s office stiffly. When she boarded the plane to come to Acheron, the promise of free legal counsel soothed her. But in the five minutes she spent in Donegal’s office, the lawyer said more to frighten her than to reassure.
And Dez can’t help but wonder if that wasn’t the point all along.
“I need your help with something,” Dez tells Rafe at the end of her second week as they close themselves inside her Lens.
“At your service.”
She feels his closeness, smells his petrichor scent. She consciously avoids the trap of looking at his lips. He’s too good at acting like nothing happened between them, while somehow also making her feel embarrassed that it did.
“There’s a scene I want to include in Mo’s film, but I can’t find it.”
“The archive is huge, and you’ve been at this for eight days.”
“The archive of my father isn’t huge,” Dez says. “He left when Mo was six, and even before that, he was barely around.” She turns around in the Lens, to a portion of the screen where she’s keeping all the scenes featuring her father and her brother.
“What’s the missing scene?” Rafe says.
“This hockey game Dad took us to in Vegas. I was twelve, and I remember feeling so special. Like, of all the things my dad could have been doing that day, he wanted to be with us. To drive us two hours to this city we’d never been to before, to watch this sport we knew nothing about.
Toward the end of the game, everyone was standing up, and Mo was too small to see the rink, so my dad picked Mo up and put him on his shoulders.
My brother loved it. He was laughing his head off.
And the cameraman picked it up. They played it on the Jumbotron.
So I figured that would be in the Vault, you know? ”
“It would be,” Rafe confirms.
“I think it’s the one happy memory Mo has with my dad. I’ve got to put it in. But I’ve searched and searched the files, and it isn’t there.”
“This is why assignments aren’t given to first-years who know the subject personally,” Rafe says. “Memory is subjective.”
“Not this memory.”
“Something you think happened a certain way may actually have played out very differently.”
Dez shakes her head. “I know this happened. I was there. It was simple. Just a flash of joy in a little boy’s life.”
“It was a dozen years ago in a childhood marked by trauma,” Rafe says. “It could have been another kid up on another father’s shoulders, and you wish it had been Mo. You wish it so much that your memory—”
“I didn’t make this up.”
“If it’s not in the Vault, maybe you did.”
“Why are you gaslighting me?” Dez says, angry.
“I’m concerned by how saccharine you seem to want to make this film. Happy little hockey memories with your abusive dad? Come on, Dez. Don’t waste your time digging for a syrupy scene that may only exist in your mind. You’re not doing Mo any favors by neutering his life.”
“I’m not neutering his life,” she says through her teeth. Rafe has a rare ability to set her on the defensive. And to make her want to cut him.
“Then tell me the main conceit.”
“The conceit?” Dez says. She hasn’t been thinking in those terms. All she knows is she’s doing this for her brother.
He sighs, disappointed. “Your genre is Drama, right? Dramas deal in conceit.”
“I’ve been trying to focus on Mo’s wound. Zarlengo says all wounds—”
Rafe rubs his face like he’s being tortured. “The wound stuff is for beginners. A wound is just a premise. It’s atmosphere.”
“Art is atmosphere,” Dez says.
Rafe turns to look at her, a dare in his cobalt eyes. “Okay, Dez. What’s your wound?”
Dez flinches at his intensity. She runs her thumb over the scar on her wrist. “I wouldn’t know where to begin. What’s yours?”
“My mentor abandoned me.”
“For what? A job in the entertainment industry?” Dez remembers Zarlengo guaranteeing them the dream jobs that awaited.
“Quite the contrary,” Rafe says, his expression one of unimaginable loss.
A light bulb goes on inside of Dez. “Oh, you were … Were you in love?”
“I wish it were that simple,” Rafe says.
Dez turns away, feeling jealous and embarrassed. Is it cliché for an Acheron protégé to fall for their mentor?
“Look, I have a lot to do,” she says, “and if you’re not going to help me find this scene, just leave me to it—”
“No, I think I’d like to see Daddy in action.” Rafe reaches past her, to the space on the Lens where she’s keeping the scenes with her dad. He drags one at random to the center of the screen. It’s the last scene Dez would have shown him if she’d been given the choice.
On the screen, her father trundles toward Mo, his footsteps terrible, a wet towel gripped in his hand. It’s late and he’s been drinking; Dez can practically smell the beer soaking her Lens. And Mo made the mistake of leaving his towel on the bathroom floor.
Dez holds her breath as her father’s shadow falls over her brother’s face. He was watching Looney Tunes, a sketch about the Road Runner. She knows what’s about to happen. She remembers. And still she’s not prepared.
“No,” she whispers, reliving the horror of her father grabbing Mo off the couch, holding him up roughly by the arm. Her brother screams—
—and Dez?
Dez does exactly what she’d done at ten years old, when she ran into the living room to the sound of her brother’s cry. She runs at the person hurting Mo.
“Dez,” Rafe says. “Stop—”
But Dez can’t stop. She runs at her father until …
The floor drops out from under her.
Her stomach rises through her chest.
She flails her arms.
“Dez!!”
Rafe’s voice reaches her. How can he be so far away? He was next to her a second ago.
Now she hears the echo of his voice ricocheting in darkness.
Gone is the scene in her living room. The footage of her brother. Her father’s senseless, blistering rage. Everything in Dez’s world has become completely black.
Nothing. She sees nothing.
Until, looking down, disparate pinpricks of light blink into sight. Coming nearer in such a way that finally tells Dez beyond a shadow of a doubt:
She’s falling.