Dark Rooms (11 page)

Again no response.

I said to Dad, “I don't think she cares about peaches anymore. I think she just wants to be by herself.”

He nodded, but didn't move. I could tell he had the same need I did, to touch her, make sure. He didn't dare, though. The sight of him standing there, doing that blinking-dog thing, hands dangling uselessly at his sides, made me so mad I had to look away.

And then Nica came bounding out of the kitchen, the screen door banging shut three times behind her. “Who doesn't care about peaches anymore?” she said.

She'd changed out of the cotton sundress she'd worn at lunch into a halter top and cutoffs, her feet bare, an old Band-Aid stuck to her heel, chafed from a pair of too-tight soccer cleats. An iPod knockoff was in one hand, a can of the pineapple chunks she liked to drink the juice from in the other. She looked at the three of us. I watched her as understanding dawned, the fun going out of her eyes, the smile disappearing back into her face. She placed the iPod knockoff on the flat part of the porch railing, the pineapple can, also. Then, biting her thumb joint, she retracted her head, a small roll of baby fat swelling under her chin as she decided something. Mind made up, she threw herself down on the bottom step, inserted herself roughly between Mom's legs and slumped backward. “Scratch my frog's belly,” she demanded, thrusting out her arm, twisting it so that its pale underside was exposed.

I waited for Mom to grimace in pain or push Nica away. But she
did neither. Instead she opened her eyes, and, lips turning up at the corners, began running her nails lightly across Nica's skin.

After a bit, Dad withdrew. I did, too, went back to my blanket. Why stay? I wasn't needed. Nica was there. She was taking care of the situation, rescuing Mom from despair. It seemed like she already had.

As it turned out, though, rescuing Mom wasn't so easy. Not that day. Not even for Nica.

I watched the two of them, the book in my hand nothing but a prop. Nica had moved to a patch of grass in front of Mom. Was trying, with increasing desperation, to entertain her, hold her attention. She began turning cartwheels and somersaults and handsprings, doing her best to avoid the croquet wicket sticking up out of the ground, rusted over and warped from being left outside all winter. Kept telling Mom to
look! look!
and Mom would look but only for a second, then her eyes would close again. And pretty soon, she stopped opening them altogether. I stopped looking, too. Became absorbed in my book for real.

And then I heard the same plea I'd been hearing for the better part of twenty minutes. The same plea but sounding different, like it was coming from farther away. Or higher up. I raised my head from my book, and, sure enough, there was Nica in the tree, technically peach, though we'd never fertilized it or irrigated it or pruned or thinned it, done any of the things you're supposed to do if you want it to actually yield fruit, so that the most it ever produced was a few wizened-looking nuggets that birds and insects got to before we did. Nica was balancing on a branch that was about a quarter of the way up, a bird feeder hanging from it. When she saw I was looking, she waved and began to climb.

At first I didn't understand what she was doing. And then my gaze traveled higher, beyond her. That's when I saw it: on the outermost limb of the uppermost branch a single peach, round and fat and a creamy pinkish gold. Nica, I realized, was going to pick it for Mom.

I opened my mouth to yell at her, order her to come down, but no words emerged, no sounds at all. She continued to ascend, her pace not slackening even though she was nearing the top of the tree and the adrenaline fizz she'd had when she'd started must've worn off, at least a little. Finally she reached the desired branch. And there she stood, some thirty feet in the sky. Again I tried to call out to her and again I couldn't. So I ran over to Mom, shook her arm.

It took Mom a while to crack her eyes, and when she did, they were bleary and unfocused. I pointed and she reluctantly followed the line of my finger over to Nica. Instantly, the dullness fell from her face.

Behind me I heard the creak of the screen door, then Dad's footsteps. I felt his hands resting on my shoulders. The three of us watched as Nica pushed herself away from the trunk, stepped out to the middle of the branch. There was nothing for her to hold on to now. She might as well have been a tightrope walker. As the branch thinned, it began to curve under her weight, curve and curve, ready to snap at any moment, the peach still beyond her grasp. Her movements became smaller, more cautious, like the danger of what she was trying to do had finally dawned on her. At last they stopped altogether. And for a minute, maybe more, she just stood there, looking so young, limbs clumsily long, feet pigeon-toed.
Keep going
, I commanded her silently, even though I didn't see how she could without getting herself crippled or killed.
Don't stop. Don't you dare stop
. I knew from the way Dad's fingers were digging into my shoulders that he was telling her the same thing in his head. Nica's gaze dipped to the ground and, at that moment, I thought it was over, that she was going to fall to her hands and knees, cling to the branch, crawl back to the safety of the trunk.

But I was wrong. Suddenly she was in motion again, all hesitancy gone, all uncertainty. Bending neatly at the waist, she lifted one foot high in the air, and, graceful as a dancer, separated the fruit from the twig with a deft twist of her wrist. Straightening, she held the peach aloft.

I turned to Mom. Seeing the glow in her eyes, the twin spots of
color burning in her cheeks, I realized that Nica had done it, had rescued her, had single-handedly pulled her out from under the despair that had descended like dirt on a coffin. Mom began to clap and cheer. At the sound, Nica, clambering down the tree, glanced over her shoulder. Her face split into a pre-braces grin—lopsided, homely, totally irresistible. All at once I felt a jealousy so raw and sharp it was almost hatred. I could hardly bear to look at her.

And it was as I was turning my eyes away, just as she'd dropped to the lowest branch, her safe passage now all but assured, that her footing faltered and she tumbled to the ground. The distance was short, not more than five or six feet, and she stood quickly, started jogging toward us, waving the peach to show that it was as undamaged as she was. Only she was damaged. She must've knocked her head against the trunk on the way down because she paused suddenly. Raising a tentative hand, she touched her crown, like she was testing to see if her hair was wet. She gazed curiously at the tips of her fingers, then held them out to us. Red, as bright and gleaming as fresh paint.

A second later, she collapsed.

At the sight Dad and I turned to stone. Mom, though, immediately leaped to her feet and began to run. I looked on, completely engrossed in the scene unfolding before me, but feeling strangely apart from it, too. Everything about it—the emotional states of the players, the dramatic poses they'd struck, the chorus of cicadas, making the dying day pulsate at its edges—so high intensity and hypervivid that it seemed unreal. Like a fragment of a dream. No, like a fragment of a movie. The way Mom was holding Nica, an arm under her neck, another under her knees, Mom's downturned face inches from Nica's upturned, exquisite profile to exquisite profile, all against the backdrop of a sky stained orange-pink by the setting sun was, I realized, just like that poster of
Gone with the Wind,
the one in the lobby of the art theater in New Haven that Mom took us to when she wanted to see something old or with subtitles.

Dad reached for my hand, pulled me out of my trance. By the time we got to Mom and Nica, Nica's eyes had already opened and Mom was laying her tenderly down on the grass, parting her hair to look at the wound.

“What happened?” Nica said, her voice dazed-sounding.

“You hit your head, baby.”

“I did?”

“You're going to have a big bump.”

“Am I bleeding?”

“No, baby. No blood.”

“But I'm dizzy.”

“I'll bet you are. Now, I want you to stay still. Just lie there.”

Nica started to protest, raising herself up on one arm. Mom leaned over and pressed Nica's mouth with her own, as though to stop its movement. The kiss was soft and brief, but it pushed Nica back to the ground.

Mom stood, began walking rapidly toward the house. She turned around to shout, “I mean it, do not move. I'll be right back.”

When the screen door shut, Nica again stuck out an arm, tried to raise herself. Dad crouched down, gently put his hand to her shoulder. “You heard your mother, sweetheart. No moving.”

“But there's a pebble digging into my back.”

“Ignore it. You lost consciousness for a few seconds. We just want to make sure you're all right.”

Nica sighed, but she was enjoying being fussed over. I could tell.

“And no more peach picking for you,” Dad said. “You could have broken your neck.”

Nica's eyes, suddenly bright with worry, scanned his face. “That's what she wanted, though, isn't it? A peach?”

Something shifted in Dad's mouth. He nodded, looked away.

I dropped beside her. “Does it hurt?”

“No,” she said, but I knew she was lying by her tone—too cool. Her hair was spread out around her head like a dark halo, framing her face, so pale I could see the thin blue veins running under her chin, up to her ears. Shame at my earlier envy welled up inside me, jammed in my throat, making it difficult to breathe.

Nica tugged on the cuff of Dad's pant leg until he looked down at her again. “Where'd Mom go?”

“Into the house to get you an ice pack.”

But when Mom came out of the house a minute later, it wasn't an ice pack she was carrying. It was a roll of film.

Dad watched her as she switched the old film out of her camera, replaced it with the new. “What are you doing, Claire?” he said.

“I'm just going to take a few shots.”

“Pictures? Now? She could really be hurt.”

Mom, busy working the rewind crank, didn't say anything back.

“At the very least she has a concussion.”

“Oh, Jesus, Hank,” Mom said, yanking on the film, pulling it taut. “Don't be such a drama queen. She doesn't have a concussion. She just banged her head a little. It's a bruise, nothing more.”

“She needs to go to the emergency room.”

“And I'll take her to the emergency room. Afterward. All I need is ten minutes.”

“I think we should take her now. Leaving her lying on the damp ground like this makes me”—he paused, blinked—“anxious.”

Mom released the shutter, then cocked it, her movements jerky with impatience. “
Anxious.
What a finky shitty little word.
Anxious.
If you mean scared, say scared.”

“All right. It scares me.”

“What difference is ten minutes going to make? They never let you in to see a doctor right away. It usually takes hours.”

“Claire,” he said softly, pleading.

“What?” Her eyes were flat, hard, showing no mercy.

“I'm fine, Dad,” Nica said. Her voice sounded different than it did a minute ago. Wearier. Older, too.

Dad straightened, stepped back from her so that he was standing next to me. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Let Mom take the pictures.”

“Five minutes, that's it.”

Dad reached for my hand again and we returned to the house. While he finished washing the dishes from lunch, I ate the tomato soup he heated up for me and did my homework at the kitchen table, watching Mom and Nica from the window. Mom wanted Nica to look the way she did when she first collapsed. At least I assume that's what Mom wanted because she dropped to her knees to reposition the peach in Nica's palm, to lower Nica's eyelids with the tips of her fingers. Then she began to shoot. The sight of her crouched over Nica's small crumpled form, the camera jutting out of her head like a horn, caused a tightening in my chest that I could ease only by opening my mouth and looking away. Which is exactly what I did until Mom started calling Dad's name. Nica, it seemed, had slipped back into unconsciousness during the session, lasting not five minutes, as Mom had promised, but three times that—four times—and probably would have gone on even longer if the final drops of light hadn't drained from the day.

Nica came to quickly. After that, though, Mom was as eager as Dad to get her to the emergency room. It was what Dad thought: a concussion. Minor, the doctor said. But it didn't seem too minor when Nica, in the months following, suffered from migraines so severe they made her throw up and was often unable to sleep through the night. Still, the headaches stopped eventually. So did the sleeplessness. And besides, cranial trauma was a small price to pay.
Nica's Dream
was taken during that twilight shoot, and it turned out to be Mom's first real photograph.

For a long time, though—years, in fact—Mom did nothing with
Nica's Dream
. Then last summer, on a whim, she sent it in to
B&W Magazine
. It won the Silver Award in the Single Image Contest and received a full page in the fall issue. Soon after that New York took notice. A woman with a gallery on West Twentieth, not quite an established gallery but more than up-and-coming, called and asked to see other samples of her work, then called again and offered her a solo exhibition; it was set to open in November.

I'm not sure why Mom sat on the picture for so long. Was scared of how good it was maybe. Thought it was a fluke. Nica, though, she knew was no fluke. In her youngest daughter Mom had found what she'd been searching for since the day she picked up her mom's Brownie Instamatic at age eleven: her muse and one true subject, the thing she was put on this earth to photograph.

And photograph Nica she did. Constantly. Compulsively. And Nica, selfish, imperious, didn't-give-two-shits Nica, let her. Nica would pose for Mom anytime. No matter what she was doing—Super-Glueing captions to a posterboard for her Ice Mummies of the Inca World project in her bedroom, watching a slasher movie with me (me through the chinks in my fingers) in the family room, baking chocolate chip cookies from scratch with Dad in the kitchen—she'd drop it as soon as Mom reached for the camera. Even when she turned into a teenager and her social life became more absorbing, she wouldn't think twice about telling Jamie he'd have to smoke that bag of Quebec Gold all by himself or sending Maddie off alone to some dive bar with a lax ID policy if Mom said she felt like working. Mom and Mom's needs came first, always.