A Darker Place (38 page)

“‘If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.’”

“That’s it. And if he wants to sue you for the coat off your back, give him your shirt as well.”

A loose translation, she thought, but a happy one.

“He also talked a lot about what you said, about thinking before I get mad.”

Ana took a deep breath. “Have you had a blood test, Jason?”

“A blood test? Oh, you mean because I was in that fight?”

“And the other one, with your mother’s… friend.”

“Sure. I had two, six months apart. I’m clean.”

“That’s a relief. I should tell you that I am, too. Your
hand,” she said when he looked at her, puzzled. “You cut your knuckle on my face. If I had HIV, you’d have been exposed. Something else to keep in mind next time you’re tempted to pound some drug addict into a pulp.”

“Yeah,” he said. His face suddenly relaxed into a crooked smile that would have melted stronger women than Ana. “Next time I’ll wear gloves.”

She laughed. “So, do you like it at Change?”

“It’s okay. There’s a lot of rules, but I’m learning a lot. And Dulcie’s happy.”

Dulcie is happy, and Dulcie’s brother shoots baskets and runs in the morning, and fantasizes about living the unencumbered life of a gypsy, sleeping when he likes and surviving on Cokes and hamburgers.

“You know,” she said after a few minutes, “I went to Japan one time. It’s a very crowded little country, the cities anyway. When you get on the subway during rush hour, they literally push the passengers in the door to pack them solid. Traditionally the Japanese lived in houses with walls made out of paper, and right on top of each other.

“People can’t survive like that, though, so they developed methods of achieving privacy for themselves when surrounded by people. Small areas, like a language that is filled with double meanings—they can say thank-you in a way that means ‘piss off’ with nobody to know or be insulted. There are elaborate forms of politeness and dressing—all ways of hiding in a crowd. Even their art reflects this. In the West we’ve developed big, sweeping art forms, things that catch at you and won’t let you walk by. Japanese art tends to be subtle and intense, so a person has to be looking for it to see the beauty of a teapot or a stroke of calligraphy.

“It’s a little like that bird you did on the side of the mug I bought,” she said as if the thought had suddenly occurred to her. “Controlled lines that say just what you
wanted them to and no more, no less. The essence of ‘quail’ with no superfluous decoration. I like that mug very much.”

He nodded, a motion closer to a squirm. After a minute of staring off into space, he said casually, “Steven said I could draw again if I wanted to.”

“Did he? That’s good to hear. Do you generally do a lot of drawing?”

“Not a lot. Sometimes, when I see something I like. Once I… um, I made this book for Dulcie once, for a Christmas present. She wanted this doll, but there wasn’t enough money, so I drew her a story about the doll, making it have all these adventures and stuff. She still has it somewhere.”

“I’ll bet she does.” She probably slept with it. “The reason I ask is that Japanese idea of privacy. If you were gifted at poetry, I might suggest that you… oh, write a poem about how Bryan made you feel at the museum that day, for instance. Since your form of expression seems to lie in your hands rather than with words, you might think about using them to create a place that is all yours, a place that is Jason Delgado’s alone. Small, intense drawings that capture how you really feel about things. You see, I’ve lived in communities like Change for a lot of my life, and although I do understand the importance of participating in communal life, I know also that if you don’t keep a little piece of yourself apart, you go a bit nuts.”

“Like you with your walks,” he said. “Dulcie said you like to walk in the mornings, by yourself.”

Ridiculous, the pleasure in knowing that the two children talked about her between themselves. “I do. I also keep a journal, with thoughts and descriptions and a few really clumsy drawings.” Not, admittedly, that the journal she had going at the moment was much more than a sham.

“Can I see it?”

“What, the journal?”

“Not to read. I just wanted to see your pictures. Oh, never mind, it’s not important.”

“No, I’d be happy for you to look at my drawings, if you promise not to laugh at them.” She reached into the nylon backpack at her feet and dug out the journal. He lowered the seat-back tray and put the journal on it, opening it methodically at the beginning, where Anne, still in her home in the mountains, had written:

The journal continued for half a dozen pages of purely imaginary non-events and the rough sketch of a nest with three eggs in it that according to the journal she could see from her bedroom window but which in truth was a long-abandoned nest brought to her by Eliot after a windstorm the previous fall, which she kept on her mantelpiece (empty of eggs).

Jason studied the delicate lines of the nest under the blue light of the overhead spot, while she sat back in the shadows and studied him.

When she first met him over the repairs of Rocinante’s heater, he had worn his black hair long and slicked back into a short ponytail. A few weeks ago, the urban-shark look had been replaced by a short buzz cut that looked less extreme and threatening but by its very lack of distraction served to emphasize the sharp edges of his nose and cheekbones. Even if he’d had an ordinary haircut flopping down in his eyes, though, she doubted that he would have looked like anything but what he
was: a young man with the eyes of a boy who had given up on hope, and the expressionless face of a killer.

This Jason now sitting next to her was no longer that same young man whose devastating good looks and icy aloofness had sent such unexpected and disconcerting ripples down Ana’s spine. He had matured dramatically in the few weeks she had known him, and paradoxically shed much of the hard defensive shell that made him appear so much older than he was. There was a boy in his eyes now—a wary boy, to be sure, ready instantly to snap back into his shell, but still a person who had experienced the first faint glimmerings of hope and who might, given time, come to believe in it. That this change had taken place despite the trauma of the alembic was eloquent testimony to his strength of spirit and the incomprehensible workings of the human mind. It was even possible, she had to acknowledge, that the change had been worked, in part, precisely because of the trauma.

Whatever the cause, and whatever the long-term effects on the boy, Ana was pleased to find that in recent days, a shift had taken place in her own perception of the boy as well. A month ago she would have been hard put to sit with her arm brushing casually against his, their faces eighteen inches apart, talking about Hemingway and drawing; the electricity of his taut personality would have left her as dry-mouthed and sweating as a teenager. On the other hand, it could simply be that familiarity had bred relaxation.

And she was relaxed with him now. She was still intrigued by him, amused and impressed and—yes—secretly in love with him, but her libido or hormones or whatever it was seemed to have rolled over and gone back to sleep, a condition for which she was truly grateful.

“How did you do this?” he asked, pointing to a
drawing she had made of a tumble of rocks in the bright sun, a shape defined by its shadows.

“That’s called negative space,” she told him. “You use your pencil to draw around the object, treating the thing itself as minimally as you can without making it just a white blob, but working up the background and the shadows. You have to see it with your eyes out of focus, if that makes sense.”

He nodded, cocking his head at the drawing before turning the page.

Ana tensed slightly as he approached the section where she had first written about him. One’s own name had a way of leaping off the page to catch the eye, and she would rather he not read even the sanitized version of her reaction to him. But there was not a drawing on that particular page, and he turned past it, safely now into school and Steven territory.

When he had reached the end (a small horned lizard she had seen sunning itself the other morning) he handed it back to her.

“You don’t have any drawings of people in there.”

“No. People’s faces are too subtle for me. Lizards are about the closest I come, and even those might not be recognizable to a herpetologist.”

“The cat was good.”

“Anyone can draw a cat.”

“That’s true,” he admitted. He shifted in his seat, and Ana edged aside to give him a bit more room, under the guise of leaning forward to check on Benjamin. She sat back into the edge of her seat, and then saw that Jason was holding out something to her between the thumb and finger of his right hand. It was a very small sketch book, about three inches by five, the wire coil of its binding bent and flattened, the green cardboard cover cracked and limp with long use. She took the artifact, opened it with the edge of a fingernail, then put it down
on her lap and resumed her reading glasses, feeling around for the light button.

The drawings were necessarily tiny, the details often smudged by the treatment the book had withstood and by the graphite on one page rubbing off onto the facing one. Densely worked, the subjects varied from a figure out of some video game (horns, huge grimace, and exaggerated muscles) to a sleeping Dulcie who looked little more than a baby.

After a few pages she looked up. “Are you sure you want me to see these?”

“Yeah. I do.”

She went through the book from cover to cover, seeing images of the Change compound worked into pages already containing drawings of an earlier time: A coiled rattlesnake had been fitted into a blank corner next to the ear of a seated teddy bear, a spotted goat Ana recognized from an unsuccessful time in the milking barn appeared to be walking toward a futuristic airship belching flames from its engines.

She closed it and gave it back to Jason, who shifted again and made the small book disappear into an inner pocket of his jacket.

“I apologize,” she said.

“What for?”

“Teachers get into the bad habit of teaching all the time. You don’t need to be told about making a personal space with your drawing. Sorry.”

“That’s okay.” He squirmed again with embarrassment.

“And you draw mostly from memory.”

“Yeah, You can tell?”

“In drawings this size it’s easier to hide the fuzzy detail, but mostly it’s that the outside objects like the goat and those dogs are more abstract than the things from your room or Dulcie. You’re remembering how you saw
them, not recording how they look. They’re very beautiful. Some of them are very fine drawings. You should have some training.”

He did not answer, and she bent forward to look into his face, which was blank.

“What did I say wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Please, Jason. Tell me.”

“It’s just something I do. It’s a kid thing. Guys don’t make pictures.”

She actually laughed aloud. “God, Jason, you have some learning to do about artists. Some of the randiest, most macho guys in the world make pictures. And earn an incredible amount of money doing it.”

He looked at her sideways. “Really?”

“Really. Keep drawing, Jason. Even if you don’t do anything with it professionally, it’ll teach you to see the world.”

“You should laugh more often,” he said earnestly. “It makes your face relax.” He then went scarlet with embarrassment.

“I used to laugh a lot,” she said, keeping her voice light. “I’ll work on it.”

After a minute, he asked her, “Can you show me how to do the ‘negative space’ stuff?”

Ana opened her own journal to a blank white page and found a pencil. “It’s not so much a technique of drawing,” she began, “as a different way of seeing and thinking about space.”