jugs of liquid hand-labeled DEV, STOP, and FIX, in what Kate already recognized as Miranda’s handwriting. On one wall were two large sinks, their faucets fogged with cobwebs, and beside them a device like a fax machine and several long ropes peppered with clothespins. A few small prints dangled from these—still drying, after all these years. The place looked the same as it must have looked back in 1993. It was like Miranda had just this morning pinned up her prints and then gone outside to die.
Kate studied the photos on the clothesline. They were black-and-white pictures of a child. He was wearing a dark polo shirt and dark pants and stood against a blank wall, and the contrast between his clothing and the white wall made him look both dangerous and vulnerable. In one photo, he had shoved his hands in his pockets and was looking away, his face in profile, his chin jutted forward stubbornly. In the next, he had looked back at the camera and pouted his lower lip, like a miniature James Dean. The edges of his limbs were spookily blurred—Kate couldn’t tell whether that was time or artistry—but his eyes were in focus. In the last photo, he was still looking at the camera. His head was tilted slightly to the side, his hand up and slashing across his throat in a blur. His elbow stuck out like a knife. The universal gesture for Cut it. Or—You’re dead. What a weird hand signal for a child to make. Had he chosen it, or had Miranda told him how to pose?
The boy was Theo, of course. But it was hard to recognize him. He was still a few years short of puberty in these photos, and he had a child’s shallow, unformed nose, and his body was spindly and small. Kate had to squint to see the nascent jawline, the early signs of a level brow. She got closer to the photo, trying to make out the expression in his eyes. There was something angry there … Then she caught herself. His eyes were just flecks of light in a photo. Staged by Miranda, framed by Miranda, developed by Miranda. His eyes only showed what Miranda wanted them to show. All that these photos proved was how young Theo had been when his mother died. Even if he had somehow accidentally shot her, he wouldn’t have been able to cover it up. He would have been soaked with blood, traumatized, insensate.
Ignoring a twinge of guilt, Kate ducked under the clothesline and went over to the drying rack in the corner. All the trays were empty except one. She tried to pull out the drawer, but the roller mechanism had rusted, so she wiggled her fingers through the bars of the tray, gently gripped the very edge of the print, and pulled it to her, trying not to imagine how her boss at the museum would have shrieked. She wasn’t even wearing gloves.
This photograph had obviously been taken at the same time as the ones hanging from the clothesline. Theo was in it, same outfit, same background, but Miranda was there, too. She leaned down over him, crossing her arms across his chest in a pale X, her mouth cut open in a smile. Theo’s head was tilted back, up toward her, his young throat exposed as he laughed.
In all the self-portraits in the catalog, in the prints downstairs, Kate had never seen a photo of Miranda truly happy. Smiling like this, she looked so young. Her face was unlined, her skin glowing. It seemed inconceivable that she could have made this image and then taken her own life. That she could have appeared this joyful and also wanted to die.
Thirty-seven years old. Not much older than Kate.
Suddenly Kate felt a pressure behind her eyes. The photo trembled: her hands were shaking. She slid the photograph back into the rack and knotted her fingers together to hold them steady. It hadn’t been so long ago that she herself had lain in her bed, watching the city through her room’s single ice-fringed window, and thought about dying. It hadn’t been so long ago that she had had in her mind a list of the ways she could make it happen, ranked by how easy or hard they would be for her to achieve, and how messy they would be for someone else to clean up.
More as a fidget than anything, she checked her watch. Already 3:09—shit.