Burning Blue

my eye. The place where the painting used to hang, the one my father hocked for my bail. My memory of it sharpened. It was almost the exact picture I found when I broke into Angela’s house, the half-photo/half-sketch of Nicole sitting in front of a mirror, half her face covered with red ink. The one Angela had noted with sparkly glow pen in the corner of the sketch with that GBAM matrix or chat room name or whatever it was.

My father had a lot of artist’s prints, limited edition copies approved and signed by the artist of the masterwork they emulated. Which meant the original was likely hanging in a museum someplace. I had seen the original painting, the inspiration for my father’s print and Angela’s sketch, and I was pretty sure I’d seen it recently-very recently-but I couldn’t remember where. Somehow that painting connected Angela, Nicole and my father.

FIFTY-THREE

Sylvia got the door. She was in her pajamas.

“Hi,” I said.

“Mr. Castro’s here,” she said. “I’m just kidding.”

“Why do you hate me?”

“I don’t. I just don’t like you. Go. They’re in the kitchen.”

The kitchen smelled great. Mrs. Castro had the dumplings going. She was massaging Nicole’s shoulders. They were in their pajamas too. “It’s a pajama party,” Mrs. Castro said.

“I’m betting he sees that, Mom.”

“Go downstairs and get him some of your father’s PJs from storage.”

“Nah, I’m okay,” I said.

“He doesn’t want to wear Daddy’s clothes, Mom. Daddy terrifies him.”

“He terrifies everybody,” Mrs. Castro said. “Go. No pajamas, no dumplings.”

Nicole took my hand and led me downstairs. The basement was immaculate, and that made it creepier for some reason. Lots of storage racks. Nicole led me to the back. She sat on a wicker chest and patted the spot next to her for me to sit. I had the feeling she was going to kiss me. If she did, I wouldn’t be able to say what I had to say. So I just said it. “I know about it. The chat room.”

“The chat room?” Her eyes ticked right.

“Cutter’s Way.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t do this, Nicole. Please don’t.”

“Do what, Jay? What exactly am I doing?”

“We need to get you help. We’re going to. I promise.”

“You promise? Really? Oh, that makes me feel so much better. He promises. You know what you promised, Jay? You promised you would never hack me.”

“I had to.”

“No, you really didn’t. Nobody asked you to. Nobody wanted you to, either.” She pulled up her sleeves to reveal the bandages. “This is mine, okay? This is the one thing I can own. Just me. This has nothing to do with you.”

“It has everything to do with me. You’re my friend.”

“Then honor our friendship. Honor your word. Please don’t tell my mom. Please.”

“I’m not judging you, okay?”

“Judge me or don’t, it doesn’t matter. Shit, you broke it. How do I trust you after this? I can’t. God, I feel your fingers under my skin. You know what? Go.”

“The username,” I said. “GBAM.”

“Get out of my house. Now.”

“Just tell me how you came up with the chat handle, and I’ll leave.”

“It’s an acronym for a painting, my mother’s favorite, my destiny.” She pushed past me, upstairs.

I followed. “The Picasso? Guernica?” I stopped cold in the main vestibule where I’d left my backpack. I heard the bathroom door shut, the one just ahead of the kitchen. I fished in my backpack for the book I’d had my father sign for Mrs. Castro. The one I had been dragging around with me for how many days now, forever forgetting to give it to her. I flipped to the page Mrs. Castro had flagged “his best.” But she hadn’t been referring to Picasso’s Guernica. She’d meant the picture on the opposing page, another Picasso, a vision of a woman standing in front of a mirror. This was the original, the basis for the artist’s print that used to be on my living room wall. I checked the caption and the title: Girl Before a Mirror.

GBAM.

Mrs. Castro’s favorite painting.

The inspiration for the sketch I’d found in Angela’s bedroom. The one where Nicole reaches out to her reflection, exactly as the girl does in Picasso’s original. In the mirror, half of her face is perfect beauty, and the other half is horrific, rearranged, red.

My eyes ticked to the corner of the vestibule, the wall space next to the grandfather clock, above the umbrella stand. There it was again, the same image, locked in a small frame. I hadn’t given it but a half a glance the other day when I dropped Nicole’s umbrella into the stand, a black-and-white sketch copy of Girl Before a Mirror. I studied the sketch, the artist’s initials: E.C.

Elaine Castro and Angela Sammick were in love with the same work of art. Obsessed by it.

I had taken my anti-seizure meds that day, and they generally softened things, but at that moment I felt as if an intense and rough-edged heat was trying to squeeze between the hemispheres of my brain. I had to slump into the chair next to the grandfather clock to take it in. How the two women had come together was a mystery, but this much was definite: Mrs. Castro had hired Angela to burn Nicole. Angela had come up with the Arachnomorph ID that inspired the news sites to the spider-themed nickname, but Elaine Castro was the real Recluse.

It made no sense and perfect sense. Nicole told me that her mother wanted her to find the good in the burn, the fact that Nicole and Mrs. Castro could spend more time together now that Nicole didn’t have to run off to this match or that meeting, off to college, marriage, a life away from her mother, one that would leave Mrs. Castro even more isolated than she was after her husband left. Burned, Nicole would never leave her, would need her mother forever, would give the woman purpose. Elaine Castro had no one and nothing else. Her dreams of living life as an artist had been ripped from her that night of her debut when the doubt stared her in the face: Was she truly meant to paint? She wanted to, yes, but maybe she didn’t have that thing that makes it all worthwhile, whether you hit it big like Picasso or not: the need to.

I needed to get Nicole. Book in hand I rounded the corner to the bathroom off the kitchen. I tried the knob, locked. “Nicole, we have to get you out of here. Now.”

The bathroom door swung open. Mrs. Castro was drying her hands on a bright blue towel. She looked as I’d never seen her before, ugly somehow, her brows arched. She eyed the book in my hand, my fingers tucked into it at the page she’d flagged. “What’s wrong, Jay?” she said.

“I thought you were Nicole.”

“I gathered that. What’s the rush?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said, ‘We have to get you out of here.’”

“My father texted he got us tickets to the St. John’s game. It’s at the Garden, courtside. We have to get out of here now if we want to make the opening jump-”

“No, Jay, you said, ‘We have to get you out of here.’ Meaning Nicole.”

Nicole’s sobbing echoed from down the hallway.

I was terrified. Not of Mrs. Castro. At that moment she seemed smaller to me. Shrinking. I was terrified of myself. Of what I might do to this trembling, cornered thief in front of me. I felt she was