pencils bound together with a rubber band, a couple of kneaded erasers, a half-consumed package of chewing gum, a pile of photocopied handouts from a math class; coins, CD cases, a calculator. A framed photo showed a man and woman who were clearly the subjects of the portrait studies. As the camera had caught them, they were a thirty- something Navajo couple with the slightly stilted smiles you often saw in studio shots. She scrutinized their faces for the qualities Tommy had emphasized in his studies. On the back, someone had written Thomas and Bernice Keeday, 1996. Tommy's adoptive parents.
Comparing the photo to the portraits, Cree had to acknowledge that Tommy was a hugely talented kid. Also, as Joseph said, a kid with deep ambivalence about the people he'd known as his parents. Or maybe simply a kid trying to figure out who they were, experimenting with different conceptions of them. The thought made her heart ache.
She put the photo down and went through the drawers, feeling like a burglar, apologizing to Tommy in her mind. But she found nothing revealing: just baggy jeans, shirts, underpants, sweatshirts. She knelt to look under the bed, where a pair of well-worn cleated athletic shoes kept company with a shabby suitcase and a shoe box full of cassettes and CDs. Tommy's preference in music reinforced her sense of his identification with angry, urban black rebellion. She thought about Tommy's cultural uncertainties and wondered what he'd feel if he knew that eleven- year-old Seattle white girls like Zoe also ate up the gangsta style. What banner of rebellion would remain for him to carry?
The suitcase was empty and told her nothing.
The outside hall door clicked again, loud enough to startle Cree. She panned the light at the door of the room and into the hall, and decided she'd better shut the damned thing, not waste heat. But as she was heading to the hall, her eyes went to the inner wall, and what she saw drew her immediately to Tommy's desk. On the desktop lay a couple of large, spiral-bound artist's sketchbooks. More drawings had been taped to the wall behind it.
The flashlight was dimming, but it cast enough light to tell that these had been drawn since he'd arrived at Oak Springs. In one, Cree recognized the central campus road, looking north with the hogan just to the left, a delivery truck off to the right, Julieta's once and future house distant in the center. Tommy had compressed the buildings at the bottom of the page, a horizontal band of detail beneath a huge, featureless sky. The radical vertical asymmetry struck Cree as a strong compositional experiment, suggesting that Tommy was growing rapidly as an artist. Another drawing showed a group of fellow students seated in the mottled shade of a trellis. Tommy had done a beautiful job of capturing the boys and girls in their various postures, then had heightened the intensity of the scene by exaggerating the shadows. The hard chiaroscuro was fascinating but a little jarring, cutting the space into two very different dimensions.
The third one really grabbed Cree's eye: a self-portrait. The face was well rendered, instantly recognizable as Tommy's despite the powerful artifice he'd chosen to portray himself with. The face was divided by a line down the middle. He'd rendered the left half in the conventional manner with black lines on the white page, the right half in the negative, white lines on black.
It screamed from all of the newer drawings: two dimensions, two layers, two visions. Two Tommys. Pulse racing, she ignored the pestering wind noise and the puffs of chill creeping along the floor from the hall. She moved aside a tin box full of charcoal and pencils to open one of the sketchbooks.
Holding the feeble flashlight close, she opened the book and saw that these drawings continued the theme of division or doubleness. The first few looked like the mesa near the school: the steep sandstone cliffs, the tumbled boulders and dry gullies. In one, he'd included fellow members of his drawing class, sitting on rocks with sketch pads propped against knees. Again, he'd used shadow and composition to divide every scene into different dimensions.
It was a drawing several pages farther that stopped her cold.
Another pencil sketch of weatherworn cliffs, the angle of the shadows suggesting midday. In this one, Tommy had subtly morphed the features of the rocks into human faces. A halfdozen huge faces, deftly rendered in the shadows and highlights of rock shapes and fissures. Agonized stone faces pressed against their interface with the air. Pushing, swarming, silently clamoring.
Just like the ones in her dreams.
Cree felt suddenly weak, and her stomach tightened in a deep, sick clench. She flipped the page and found another drawing similar to the first: faces emerging from patterns of light and shadow. On closer inspection, she saw again the deliberate variation of character: One seemed noble, one brutish, others cruel, cowering, pathetic, wise. The only affect that ran through all of them was suffering.
Cree dropped the book, feeling utterly out of her depth. Her head ached with each pounding heartbeat. Everything was going around, dizzying, her thoughts hyperanimated and chaotic. And she'd been so engrossed that she'd ignored something crucial: The noise in the hall wasn't right. There was a shifting sound now, the quiet sound of cloth moving against cloth.
She switched off the flashlight and inched toward the door, afraid to look into the hall, afraid to stay where she was. Afraid to breathe. She forced herself to the doorway, made herself push her face around the edge of the frame.
23
'Lynn! Good Jesus, you startled me!' Cree felt a flood of relief at the sight of the nurse, standing twenty feet away in the dim green light with arm outstretched, hand against the wall. She looked like a person who had been startled while listening or waiting for something. Cree wondered how long she'd been there.
'As you did me. Oh, my!' Lynn blew out a breath and fluttered a hand against her chest. Then she came toward Cree, trailing her fingers against the corridor wall. 'I thought you might be here, but I got a little worried when I found the door open. And no lights on.'
Cree backed into the dorm room. 'I couldn't sleep. So I figured I'd come and look at Tommy's drawings and things. Before the other kids got back.'
Lynn Pierce came through the door and switched on the overhead lights. The tubes flickered and hummed and then came on garishly bright. She took in the room before locking her disconcerting eyes on Cree's. 'In the dark?' she asked expressionlessly.
'I borrowed your flashlight.'
'I know. I heard you go into the office.' A clever expression fled quickly across her face and was banished. 'So you still hope to be working with him?'
'It'll probably come down to getting his grandparents' permission. If there's any chance I can, I figured I should make use of the time. Get to know him better.'
Lynn looked at the open notebook on Tommy's desk, the bureau drawer Cree had neglected to close. 'Finding anything interesting?'
'I think so.'
' Like-?'
Cree went to the desk, flipped the notebook pages to one of the drawings of faces. 'This, for example. Do you know if it's from life-a real place? Or is it a made-up place?'
Lynn Pierce came to her shoulder to consider the drawing. 'It looks like the walls of the mesa. Oh, sure-it's that spot about, oh, maybe a mile north of here. It's the deepest gully on this side, the rock formations are pretty distinctive. Picturesque, I guess you'd say. The art teachers often take classes there before the cold weather sets in. What-the faces?'
'Do they mean anything to you?'
Lynn shrugged and shook her silver head once. 'A teenage boy with an active imagination.'
Unaccountably ill at ease with Lynn so close to her shoulder, Cree left the desk and went to sit on the end of Tommy's bed. 'Did you want to talk to me? Is that why you followed me here?'
Smiling minutely, Lynn turned to face Cree and half sat against the edge of the desk. 'Mind if I smoke? Strictly speaking, it's not allowed, but with the kids gone… ' She rummaged in her pocket and brought out a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a little foil ashtray folded into a half circle. She opened the ashtray and smoothed out its creases before setting it on the desk. She lit a cigarette and drew on it hungrily. When she exhaled, she carefully
