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  For my parents

  Photography is violent. When we capture a subject in a photo, we steal that person out of time and flatten them. We reduce them so we can preserve them forever. You have to acknowledge that violence. Rejoice in it. I think that’s why I do so many self-portraits. All my life, the person I felt most comfortable harming was myself.

  —MIRANDA BRAND (1956–1993)

  1.

  KATE

  JUNE 2017

  California revealed itself to Kate as a series of spots, like a scratch-off lottery ticket, the forested hills emerging in patches as the plane lowered through the clouds. The landscape had been split into pieces: the purple mountains, the long oval of the bay. Just as the last wisp of cloud disappeared, the plane bounced on a gust, lurching everyone against their seat belts, so when Kate first saw the whole view laid out beneath her, her throat was clogged with fear. The plane righted itself, and she was annoyed at the turbulence for tricking her, for ruining her first impression. The man beside her crossed himself.

  “I hate landings,” he said as he popped a Ritz cracker into his mouth. “Seems like no one knows how to fly a plane these days.”

  Kate realized she was clutching the armrest. Only the left one: the man had commandeered their shared armrest somewhere over Colorado. She forced herself to relax her grip. Her eyelashes were matted together and her mouth tasted like dishwater. The morning—the bleary, hungover wait for the delayed plane; the ill-advised airport pretzel during her first layover—already seemed distant, sopped up into the grimy sponge of cross-country travel.

  “Did it used to be better?” she asked the man, not because she especially wanted to talk to him, but because it was in her nature to ask questions. In elementary school, her parents had stopped taking her to the supermarket because she would interrogate them mercilessly about how the grocery cart was manufactured or how the vegetable mister worked. In college, she had been told she had a talent for the Socratic method.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ritz-cracker guy said. “I’ve been flying for business for thirty-three years. I only just started getting sick maybe, I don’t know, the last decade. You’d think new technology would have smoothed out the ride, but it’s all about the training.” He selected a new cracker. “Are you from San Francisco?”

  “New York. I’m out here to start a new job.”

  “Oh, yeah? What do you do?”

  “I’m an archivist.” The word felt unfamiliar in her mouth; she rolled it around, like a marble. At her seatmate’s blank look, she added, “I work with old documents.”

  “That’s a real job?”

  “Yep.”

  “You always done that?”

  “No. I used to work for a newspaper.”

  His expression cooled. “You’re a journalist?”

  “A copy editor.”

  “Like with the semicolons?”

  “Yes. And I checked facts, things like that.” The past tense was a dull hurt.

  “Didn’t know anyone checked facts these days,” he said. “I get all my news from people I trust—my wife, my friends. I like to have a direct line. Straight from the source.”

  Kate pressed her lips together. She already regretted encouraging the conversation, but she didn’t know how to end it politely. There were rules. Be accommodating. Pretend interest. Give them what they want. You started it. He smiled at her and drummed his fingers against the armrest, scattering crumbs.

  “Anyway,” he said, “it sounds to me like you made a good choice, switching careers.”

  This guy. He reminded her of Leonard Webb, although Leonard would have hated to hear that. He would have hated this guy’s rounded gut and checkered button-down and Midwestern twang. And Kate hated the guy for reminding her of Leonard at all.

  The plane bounced again. Someone screamed behind them. The seat belt light blinked off overhead, which couldn’t be right. Out the window, the unfamiliar skyline tipped sideways in its oval frame, and Kate’s stomach swayed.

  The guy was waiting for a follow-up, so she asked, unwillingly, “What do you do?”

  “Insurance. For farmers. I make sure they’re not undervaluing their land. A lot of site visits.”

  “So you’re kind of a fact-checker, too.”

  He looked at her like she was crazy. “No.”

  The plane dipped. They were coming in over the water now, so low and close Kate felt sure they would topple in. She imagined the water closing over her head. Would she be relieved? Before she had figured out the answer, the ground materialized beneath them, an asphalt miracle, and the wheels touched down.

  * * *

  Baggage claim. Kate waited with the rest of the tired passengers while the suitcases circled like alligators. The belt went on and on, the crowd thinned as others were reunited with their luggage, and still Kate’s bag did not appear. The back of her neck grew sweaty. Three months was a long time, and she had brought only the one suitcase. If her clothes vanished now, she would be truly alone. Not even an outlet-store sweater to keep her company.

  When it was just her and one nervous college student left standing at the carousel, her fraying red bag tumbled down the ramp. Relief made her light-headed, like helium filling her skull.

  Outside, she scanned the congested arrivals area for her aunt. The lanes were a mess of honking cars, panicked drivers bent double over their steering wheels as they searched the sidewalk for their loved ones. She finally spotted Louise waving from behind the windshield of a recently waxed Volvo. Louise parked the car in the middle lane and leaped out to hug Kate, which earned her a few sharp tweets on the traffic marshal’s whistle. Louise ignored him. She took Kate’s shoulders in her hands, even though Kate was a good six inches taller than her, and held her away to scrutinize her.

  Kate did her own inventory. She hadn’t seen her aunt in three years, but Louise looked exactly the same. Only more tan. Like a deck that had been re-stained to a fresh but unrealistic brown. She was petite—she had a metabolism that could process pig lard into sinewy muscle—with a head of tight, tiny curls that always looked just a little wet. Louise was a harder, shinier version of Kate’s mother, a version that had been dipped in enamel and set out to dry. Kate remembered Louise as nosy and annoying, but she hoped that her aunt had changed, or that she herself had grown more patient, or that she had simply misremembered.

  At last Louise dropped her hands and declared, “You look exhausted.”

  Kate managed a smile. “It’s been a long day.”

  “I bet! Three connections! You should have booked a direct flight.” Louise grabbed the suitcase and, over Kate’s protests, started wrestling it into the trunk. “I have an under-eye cream you can use. It’ll take away the circles. And did you eat? We have plenty of food waiting at home. Oh—I should call Frank, remind him to defrost the steak.”

  If Louise was a renovated deck, Kate was a plaster wall under demolition. Pieces of herself were falling off in the balmy California air. “I can text him from the road if you want.”

  “Oh, yes.” Louise nodded, as if Kate were reminding her about a city she had visited a long time ago. “Texting.”

  Louise chattered all the way through San Francisco’s endless loops of overpasses and underpasses, gushing words like a sprung fire hydrant. She told Kate how they had prepared the guest room, how excited they were to have her, how she had planned out all kinds of activities. They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin, the turnoff to Sausalito, a sign for Tiburon, and still Louise talked.

  Kate tried to listen, but the words floated over her without touching down. She rested her head against the window and watched the surroundings through half-closed eyes. Up here, the light was rich and liquid, more golden than down near the airport; it pooled on the huge houses in the hills, the boats in the marina. People must pay a lot of money to live in that light.

  “By the way,” Louise said as they took a steep exit, “I saved last week’s Atlantic for you. There’s an article I thought you should read.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s all about how your generation is feeling very lost. Something to do with the brain chemicals released when you look at television screens. Also, the economy. But by the end, the guy they profiled was feeling much better. He had realized he needed to go to law school. It helps a lot when you discover the right thing, you know?”

  Kate’s eyes slid over to her aunt. “Yep,” she said.

  She knew the article Louise meant. It had been everywhere. For a couple days, the internet had been full of memes and think pieces about the trite quotes and obviously staged photos. Her college friends had pilloried it by group text. Or at least the people in the group with good jobs had pilloried it. The ot
hers, the ones like Kate, stayed silent.

  “Your job just wasn’t the right fit,” Louise continued. “It wasn’t your passion. Otherwise you wouldn’t have … well. My point is, your feelings are perfectly normal.”

  “Thanks,” Kate said.

  “And law school is always an option.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, you would have to take the LSAT. I think Faye’s son took it, if you want to borrow his books while you’re here.”

  She means well, Kate told herself. That was her family’s private saying about Louise. She means well. They had used it that time when Louise lectured a recovering alcoholic cousin about the importance of “letting loose once in a while,” and that time when Louise was babysitting seven-year-old Kate and took her to the emergency room for what she thought was a fatal rash and turned out to be a sunburn. They used it every year when Louise sent offensively large checks for birthdays and Christmas, not realizing that her proud New Englander siblings saw the money as an insult. Louise was brash, oblivious, and eager to intervene, but she did have good intentions.

  Desperate to change the conversation, Kate said, “Have you met Theo Brand yet? He said he was coming in last week to open up the house.”

  “Roberta saw him at the general store. Apparently, he was—” Louise broke off.

  “He was what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.” Now Kate sat up straight. “I’m going to meet him tomorrow anyway.”

  “Well, Roberta just said he wasn’t very … nice.” Louise twisted the steering wheel; they had come onto a series of browned switchbacks. The ocean lay ahead of them like a blue tarp pulled snug across the furry line of the earth. “He wouldn’t talk to her.”

  “Maybe he was tired. He has two little kids.” Their voices had been in the background at the end of their phone interview, high and plaintive.

  Louise sniffed. “Lots of people have kids and still manage to say hello.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, it was more than that. She said it was like he looked right through her.” The car pitched to one side as Louise shivered. “I don’t know about you being all alone in that big house with him. You’ll tell me if anything kooky goes on in there, right?”

  “No,” Kate said. “I can’t. I signed a nondisclosure agreement.”

  “You what?” The car lurched sideways again. Kate grabbed the handle above her door.

  “It’s not that unusual.”

  “It sounds very unusual.”

  “Well, it’s not.” Kate was almost laughing. So much for misremembering what Louise was like. “I thought you thought this job was a good idea. You’re the one who got it for me.”

  “I am not. All I did was pass your résumé to his cleaning girl.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Louise’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel.

  “I didn’t vouch for him,” she muttered.

  Kate sighed. This was just like her family. Urge you to do something, and then when you did it, imply you were stupid for doing it.

  They were right along the ocean now. Beyond the flimsy guardrail, the water silvered and coruscated beneath a white evening sky. Gulls stretched their wings and dove toward dark Jurassic cliffs. Pulled up at the last moment, then dove again. Looking for the thrill of wind in their feathers—or for the kill.

  * * *

  Twenty hours earlier, Kate had been in New York, or more specifically in Bushwick, at the birthday party of someone she didn’t know. Her best friend, Natasha, had dragged her along. Kate had once loved parties. She had been charming, adept at shunting her excess energy into clever conversation. It was harder these days. She got nervous and shaky. She missed cues for witty lines. She didn’t want people recognizing her, staring at her, wondering if she was still crazy, what meds she was on, if she had gotten a settlement from the newspaper. Worse, she didn’t want them thinking she was boring.

  But Natasha had leverage: Kate was crashing in their old apartment the night before her early flight out of JFK, and even though her name was technically on the lease through the end of the month, the rules of hospitality were in effect. A good guest was game for anything.

  Now it was past midnight—long after she should have left, given how early she would have to get up for her flight. It was getting to that moment in the party: the playlist had shifted from indie electronic to nostalgia pop, the alcohol from microbrews to PBR, and an array of medical-grade joints were being discreetly passed around. Kate was standing by an open window, studying the skyline. She had drunk just enough to take the edge off. Not enough to dull her anxiety entirely: if she pushed against it, she would still bleed.

  Wet metal tapped her shoulder. Natasha, with a new beer. Thank God. Kate took it and used the windowsill to pop off the cap.

  “How you doing?” Natasha asked. Her voice too kind.

  “Fine.”

  “No one you know, right? I promised.”

  “Right. Yeah, it’s cool. I’m glad I came.”

  If Natasha knew Kate was lying, she didn’t comment. “I wish you weren’t leaving,” she said instead, dragging her braids forward over her shoulder. “What am I going to do? Who am I going to hang out with?”

  “You’ll be fine,” Kate said. “What am I going to do, out in California, with my crazy aunt and uncle and a bunch of weird old shit?”

  “You love weird old shit. You’re going to get super tan. And you can find all kinds of secrets about Miranda Brand and write a book. You can get a million dollars and buy one of those pink Victorian mansions. Go on all the TV shows. You’ll never come back to New York.”

  That didn’t sound so bad. New York was contaminated now. Whenever Kate stood on her usual subway platform or passed a familiar bar, she remembered what it had been like to see those places before her life had tipped upside down. And she couldn’t get a job here, anyway, not at the Times or the Post or any place where Leonard Webb had friends, which was everywhere on the East Coast. California was an empty sheet on a clothesline, a place bleached clean of knowledge.

  “I’ll mention you in my Pulitzer speech,” Kate said.

  “Hell no, bitch. You’re aiming for the Nobel fucking Prize.”

  Kate laughed and shook her head. Out the window in front of them, a sea of flat roofs stained with bird shit swelled out into the black snake of the East River. Beyond lay the tiered glow of the Williamsburg Bridge, the starry needles of Manhattan. The liquor store sign fizzing neon on the opposite corner. The smell of plantains and jerk chicken rising from the late-night Jamaican place down below. Out in the night, half a mile off, a helicopter hovered in the sky. Thump-thump-thump. The spotlight hunting its prey.

  The sight made Kate shiver, and she said what she had been thinking for the past hour. “Those guys over there have been watching me.”

  “Which guys?”

  Without looking, Kate tilted her head to the kitchen, where several men in identical thick-framed glasses were standing in a small group. “They know about Leonard.”

  Natasha glanced over. “No, they don’t.”

  “They’re journalists.”

  “They’re lawyers,” Natasha said. “I’ve met them before.”

  “Maybe they’re with the firm that I talked to about suing.”

  “They don’t recognize you,” Natasha said, her tone final, and Kate felt herself recoil in surprise. Natasha must have realized how she had sounded, because she hugged Kate around the shoulders and added in a softer voice, “I’m going to miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too,” Kate said.

  It was true and not true. She felt like she had been wearing a mask for years, and suddenly the elastic had snapped, and now she couldn’t hold it in place. She would miss Natasha, infinitely. They had been friends for more than ten years, had turned twenty and then thirty together, had consoled each other through heartbreaks and deaths and many daily disappointments. But now when Kate saw Natasha, she only remembered that morning when Natasha had come into her room to tell Kate (unwashed, unmoving, watching the radiator eat a circle of frost on the window) that she had called Kate’s mother to come pick her up and take her home.