Forever

Before, when I’d seen Amy’s work, it had been strange and whimsical — animals in urban areas, lovers painted in odd colors. But all the canvases I saw now had been drained of life. Even if they were paintings of places — alleys and barns — they felt like barren planets. There were no animals, no lovers. No focal point. The only canvas that had any subject was the one currently on her easel. It was a huge canvas, nearly as tall as I was, and it was all white except for a very small figure sitting in the lower left corner. The girl’s back was to the viewer, shoulders hunched up, dark blond hair down her back. Even facing away, it was unmistakably Grace.

“Go ahead, psychoanalyze me,” Amy said as I looked at the paintings.

“I’m trying to quit,” I said. And making that little joke felt like a cheat, like last night, when I’d played the singing-the-next-line game with Cole when I should’ve been grilling him. I was consorting with the enemy.

“Say what you’re thinking, then,” she said. “You make me nervous, Sam. Did I ever say that? I guess I should have. Here, I’ll say it. You never said anything when you were with Grace, and I didn’t know how to deal with that. Everyone says something to me. I can make anyone talk. The longer you went without saying anything, the more I wondered what the problem was.”

I looked at her. I knew I was only proving her point, but I didn’t know what to say.

“Oh, now you’re just messing with me,” she went on. “What are you thinking?”

I was thinking lots of things, but most of them needed to stay thoughts, not words. All of them were angry, accusatory. I turned toward the Grace on the canvas, her back toward me, an effective barrier. “I was thinking that that is not a Grace that I ever knew.”

She walked across the studio to stand next to me. I moved away from her. I was subtle, but she noticed it. “I see. Well, this is the only Grace I know.”

I said, slowly, “She looks lonely. Cold.” I wondered where she was.

“Independent. Stubborn.” Amy let out a sudden sigh and whirled away from me, making me start. “I didn’t think I was being a horrible mother. My parents never gave me any privacy. They read every book I read. Went to every social event I went to. Strict curfew. I lived under a microscope until I got to college and then I never went home again. I still don’t talk to them. They still look at me under that giant glass.” She made a binoculars motion at me. “I thought we were great, me and Lewis. As soon as Grace started wanting to do stuff on her own, we let her. I won’t lie — I was really happy to have my social life back, too. But she was doing great. Everyone said that their kids were acting out or doing badly in school. If Grace had started doing badly, we would’ve changed.”

It didn’t sound like a confession. It sounded like an artist’s statement. Conflict distilled into sound bites for the press. I didn’t look at Amy. I just looked at that Grace on the canvas. “You left her all alone.”

There was a pause. She hadn’t expected me to say anything, maybe. Or maybe she just hadn’t expected me to disagree. “That’s not true,” she said.

“I believe what she told me. I saw her cry over you guys. That was real. Grace isn’t dramatic.”

“She never asked for more,” Amy said.

Now I looked at Amy — fixed her with my yellow eyes. I knew it made her uncomfortable; it made everyone uncomfortable. “Really?”

Amy held my gaze for a few seconds and then looked away. I thought she was probably wishing she had left me on the sidewalk.

But when she looked back, her cheeks were wet and her nose was getting unbecomingly red. “Okay, Sam. No bullshit, right? I know there were times I was selfish. There were times I saw what I wanted to see. But it goes both ways, Sam — Grace wasn’t the warmest daughter in the world, either.” She turned away to wipe her nose on her blouse.

“Do you love her?” I asked.

She rested her cheek against her shoulder. “More than she loves me.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how much Grace loved her parents. I wished I was with her instead of here, in this studio, not knowing what to say.

Amy walked to the adjacent bathroom. I heard her blow her nose loudly before she returned from the bathroom. She stopped several feet away from me, dabbing her nose with a tissue. She had the weird look on her face that people get when they’re about to be more serious than they are used to.

“Do you love her?” she asked.

I felt my ears burn, though I wasn’t embarrassed by how I felt. “I’m here,” I said.

She chewed her lip and nodded at the floor. Then, not looking at me, she asked, “Where is she?”

I didn’t move.

After a long moment, she lifted her eyes to me. “Lewis thinks you killed her.”

It didn’t feel like anything. Not yet. Right now, they were just words.

“Because of your past,” she said. “He said that you were too quiet and strange, and that your parents had messed you up. That there was no way you couldn’t be ruined after that, and that you’d killed Grace when you found out he wouldn’t let her see you again.”

My hands wanted to make themselves into fists by my sides, but I thought that would look bad, so I forced them to hang, loose. They felt like deadweights at my sides, swollen and not belonging to my body. All the while, Amy was watching me, gauging my reaction.

I knew she wanted words, but I didn’t have any that I wanted to say. I just shook my head.

She smiled a sad little smile. “I don’t think you did. But then — where is she, Sam?”

Uneasiness budded slowly inside me. I didn’t know if it was from the conversation, or the paint fumes, or Cole back at the store by himself, but it was there, nonetheless.

“I don’t know,” I said, truthfully.

Grace’s mom touched my arm. “If you find her before we do,” she said, “tell her I love her.”

I thought of Grace and that empty dress balled in my hand. Grace, far, far away and unreachable in the woods.

“No matter what?” I asked, though I didn’t think she could possibly say it in a way that would convince me. I separated my hands; I realized I had been rubbing a thumb over one of my scarred wrists.

Amy’s voice was firm. “No matter what.”

And I didn’t believe her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ISABEL

The problem with Cole St. Clair is that you could believe everything he said, and, also, you couldn’t believe anything he said. Because he was just so grandiose that it was easy to believe he could accomplish the impossible. But he was also such an incredible dirtbag that you couldn’t really trust a single thing he said, either.