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“Fine.” I sigh into my ratatouille, steam skirting across the table. “I haven’t painted a thing in the past six months.”
A stricken look crosses Marc’s face, like he doesn’t quite believe me. “Are you serious?”
“Deadly.”
“So you’re stuck,” he says.
“It’s more than that.”
I admit everything. How I can’t seem to paint anything but the girls. How I refuse to continue down that path of obliterating their white-frocked forms with trees and vines. How day after day I stare at the giant canvas in my loft, trying to summon the will to create something new.
“Okay, so you’re obsessed.”
“Bingo,” I say, reaching for the wine and taking a hearty gulp.
“I don’t want to seem insensitive,” Marc says. “And I certainly don’t want to belittle your emotions. You feel what you feel, and I get that. What I don’t understand is why, after all this time, what happened at that camp still haunts you so much. Those girls were practically strangers.”
My therapist has said the same thing. As if I don’t know how weird it is to be so affected by something that happened fifteen years ago and fixated on girls I knew for only two weeks.
“They werefriends,” I say. “And I feel bad about what happened to them.”
“Bad or guilty?”
“Both.”
I was the last person to see them alive. I could have stopped them from doing whatever the hell it was they had planned to do. Or I could have told Franny or a counselor as soon as they left. Instead, I went back to sleep. Now I still sometimes hear Vivian’s parting words in my dreams.
You’re too young for this, Em.
“And you’re afraid that being back there again will make you feel even worse,” Marc says.
Rather than answer, I reach for the glass, the wine catching my wobbly reflection. I stare at myself, shocked by how strange I appear. Do I really look that sad? I must, because Marc’s tone softens as he says, “It’s natural to be afraid. Friends of yours died.”
“Vanished,” I say.
“But theyaredead, Emma. You know that, right? The worst thing that could happen has already taken place.”
“There’s something worse than death.”
“Such as?”
“Not knowing,” I say. “Which is why I’m only able to paint those girls. And I can’t keep doing that, Marc. I need to move on.”
There’s more to it than that. Although he knows the basics of what took place, there’s still plenty I haven’t told Marc. Things that happened at Camp Nightingale. Things that happened afterward. The real reason I always wear the charm bracelet, the birds clinking each time I move my left arm. To admit them out loud would mean that they’re true. And I don’t want to confront that truth.
Some would say I’ve been lying to Marc. To everyone, really. But after my time at Camp Nightingale, I vowed never to lie again.
Omission. That’s my tactic. A different sin entirely.
“This is all the more reason for you to go.” Marc reaches across the table and clasps my hands. His palms are callused, his fingers lined with scars. The hands of a lifelong cook. “Maybe being there again is all you need to start painting something different. You know the old saying—sometimes the only way out is through.”
—
After dinner, I return to my loft and stand before a blank canvas. Its emptiness taunts me, as it’s done for weeks. A wide expanse of nothing daring me to fill it.
I grab a palette, well-worn and rainbow-hued. I smear some paint onto it, dab it with the tip of a brush, and will myself to paint something. Anything but the girls. I touch the brush to the canvas, bristles gliding, trailing color.
But then I take a step back and stare at the brushstroke, studying it. It’s yellow. Slightly curved. Like anSthat’s been squished. It is, I realize, a length of Vivian’s hair, the blond streak doing a little flip as she retreats. There’s nothing else it could be.