And tonight Sam had looked at Stella’s photographs—photographs that were beautiful and true, full of the kind of seeing Stella did better than anyone—and had said these are good, you have your father’s eye and then asked Bea about negative space.
Bea didn’t know what to do with all of it. She couldn’t make it one thing. It wasn’t one thing. Sam was wonderful and Sam was absent and Sam was right here and Sam was already somewhere else, and never even asked about her children, and all of that was true at the same time and Bea was seventeen and didn’t have a drawer to put it in.
She texted her mother.
I asked her why she left. I’ll tell you about it when I’m home. I’m okay.
The reply came in under a minute.
I love you, Bea.
I love you too, Mom.
Bea set the phone on the arm of the chair and looked at the rock until it was too dark to see. Then she went inside and checked on Stella, who was in bed with her headphones in and her eyes open, looking at the ceiling.
“You okay?” Bea asked from the doorway, one hand on the frame.
“Yeah.” Stella pulled one headphone out. “Good hike today.”
“Yeah.”
“Night, Bea.”
“Stella?”
“Yeah?”
“Your photos are really good. You know that, right?”
Stella looked at her for a second. Something changed in her voice. “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
She put the headphone back in and closed her eyes, and Bea stood in the doorway and watched her cousin lie there pretending to sleep and thought about a folder of photographs sitting on a chair where nobody was looking at it.
She went to her own bed and lay there, the dry desert air on her skin and the sheets cool against her legs, and listened to the house settle and thought about all of it—Carmen’s studio and the canyon and the four-second answer and Stella’s prints that Sam had held for thirty seconds before turning back to Bea.
The whole complicated, confusing week.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Bea was asleep in the other bed, one arm over her face, breathing deep and slow. Ice cream after dinner, no regrets.
Stella pulled on jeans, sweater, boots, grabbed her bag, and slipped out without a sound.
The house was quiet. Sam’s door was closed. The kitchen still had the sundae evidence—a smear of hot fudge on the counter, the sprinkles container with the lid off, bowls in the sink Sam had apparently decided to deal with tomorrow. The whipped cream can was on its side near the stove. The whole room smelled like sugar and last night’s coffee.
Stella let herself out the front door and headed for the trail.
The morning was cold and clear, and the rocks turned from gray to pink to orange the way they did every dawn, in about twenty minutes. She’d been photographing it every morning since they’d arrived, standing at the end of Sam’s dirt road with her camera aimed at Cathedral Rock, trying to figure out what Carmen Sandoval saw in it that made her paint the same formation over and over for thirty years.
She walked past the end of the road and onto the trail that went up the ridge behind the house. The light was good. She shota few frames—the rocks, a juniper against the sky, the shadow of a fence post on red dirt. Her hands were cold. She tucked one into her jacket pocket and kept the other on the camera.
She found the flat rock she’d been sitting on every morning—the one about fifteen minutes up the trail, where you could see Sam’s house below and the canyon opening up to the north. The wind was still. No ocean. Just the dry quiet of a desert morning and somewhere down the ridge a bird starting up.
She sat down, set the camera in her lap, and took out her phone. She called Tyler.
It rang three times. He picked up sounding like he’d been awake for a while, which meant he’d been in the water already.
“Hey, kid.”
