phone and muttered, “You don’t need that. I know the way.”
Claire looked at her funny. “What, you have a photographic memory?”
“Yeah, Claire, maybe I fucking do.”
“Don’t say ‘fuck’ in front of Murphy.”
Murphy laughed. The kid had a weird sense of humor.
“Anyway,” Claire went on, “the phone is more reliable. I’m not risking taking wrong turns in a small town. We could end up someplace bad. It could be like Hawkins, Indiana, for all we know.”
“Hawkins?” Eileen asked.
“Indiana. From Stranger Things.”
“Stranger Things?”
“Oh my God, Leenie.”
“What?”
“You know what Stranger Things is.”
“Yeah.”
“So, you know what Hawkins is.”
“Sheesh, Claire, who doesn’t know what Hawkins is?”
Claire slammed a hand on the wheel, releasing a sharp honk. “You ass!”
“Hey,” Murphy said. “Don’t say ‘ass’ in front of me.”
Eileen snorted. Maybe Murphy’s sense of humor was okay.
Claire appeared to be taking deep breaths. Steadying herself. Calming down. Probably a technique that god-awful YouTube girl had taught her. Eileen didn’t press her. As always, it wasn’t worth the effort.
* * *
“It’s raining,” Murphy said a half hour later.
It was. Featherlight rain was misting the windshield, accumulating enough to warrant the lowest wiper setting. The moon shone on the highway, spilling silver light outward, toward a field of evergreens on the right—a whole forest of Christmas trees.
“It’s beautiful,” Murphy murmured, dreamily.
Eileen wondered what it was like to be that person: an Oregonian still in love with the rain. After all the muddy, sunless winters. After so many too-damp springs. To be a person who could say, “It’s beautiful.” Murphy’s age was probably to blame. Give her five winters more and maybe, like Eileen, she’d be sick to death of it. Claire was sick of it too, Eileen knew—desperate to get to Yale. They were both over this place.
It hadn’t always been that way, though. Once, Eileen had been as excited about a new pastel set as Murphy was about her magic tricks. Eileen couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t liked to make art. There were even memories, lodged deep in her mind, of finger painting with Dad. He’d squirted greens and blues on a Styrofoam plate in the kitchen, and together they’d dipped their hands and drawn a school of fish on a flattened Amazon box.
For her birthdays Eileen had asked only for paints and pencils, cardstock and crayons. Mom had hardly ever bought the right kind. The crayons were waxy, and faint on paper. The paint was cheap, filled with gloopy chunks. The pencils had bad erasers that left behind pink streaks, or worse, tore through paper. Still, they’d been supplies, and Eileen has used them all up. She’d traced animals from old magazines, and she’d filled in every free space of her Dollar Tree watercolor books. She’d mastered the art of outlining and checkering in crayon drawings.
As she’d grown Eileen had advanced to freestyle. She’d started with little things in the house like tape dispensers and tumblers of orange juice, and then, eventually, moved on to people, like Claire. She’d found tutorials on YouTube, she’d made As in Ms. Kletter’s sixth-grade art class. She’d gotten good at technique.
Then she’d grown up more, and it was no longer about technique, but expression. Mr. Lee had taught her that freshman year: A piece of art was about more than technical perfection; it was about how it made a person feel. So Eileen had nurtured an obsession with color wheels and spectrums, with the impressionists and modernists, and the umph you felt, like a kick in the throat, when certain colors and shapes grabbed your eye.
She’d been a true artist—curious since birth, devoted since she could hold a brush. Back then the world had been colored in rainbow hues, the saturation ticked up to the max with optimism. The future had seemed clear: an arts program—maybe even the Myrtle Waugh Fellowship in Eugene—and after that, teaching, and as a side gig, an art shop. And maybe she’d get lucky, and someone important would notice her work, and she’d find herself lauded in galleries in New York.
It was possible. Anything had been possible then, when she was fourteen. Back then, like Murphy, she’d been in love with the rain.
The letters had changed that. The letters first, and then the junior art exhibit.
Now rain was … rain.
The wipers sliced through it, violently flinging every offending droplet aside.
The clock on the dash read 4:53 a.m.
Sleep in heavenly peace,
Sleep in heavenly peace.
Frank Sinatra crooned the carol as Claire took the exit for Rockport. The empty countryside turned to rows of weather-worn bungalows. A sign