Delan hears her snap the photo. “Come,” he says as he turns on a flashlight so they can walk farther inside. “Soran, stay there in case we get lost.” He glances at Olivia. “Joking. We won’t get lost; it’s not too big.” And then, back to his brother, “Soran, stay there.”
The cave is black and cool. Delan takes her hand, helping her over rocks, and in stereo bats squeal, one side and then the other. Holding his hand in darkness, surrounded by ancient life, she’s hit with a feeling that if the world spun as many times as it did and somehow they found each other—though they were born continents away—that that in itself is a miracle. That truly, in looking at where they all began and somehow have ended up, that life itself is a miracle. And in this moment, she feels happiness without question, because already so much has been overcome, just in the fact that they stand here together. “Delan,” she says. “I’m happy.”
He spins the flashlight at her. A cringe as the light hits her eyes before he aims it at a rock. “You should be happy. Why wouldn’t you be happy? Why is this an announcement?”
“I was just saying I was happy, that’s all.”
“You overthink. You are happy most of the time. I see that you are, even if you don’t. Maybe you’re afraid to be happy when you realize it. Afraid that it will be taken. Your mother.”
She smiles. “I say I’m happy, and you bring up my dead mother?”
“No, that’s the easy answer. I know what it is. It’s come to me. You think to be an artist, to be taken seriously, you must suffer.”
Now she turns to him. “No I don’t.”
“You do. I’ve seen it when we have certain people over. You smile less. There are no jokes. You search your stories for the saddest ones.”
“I do?”
“Look, there,” he says, aiming his flashlight at two rocks across from each other. “Can’t you see them sitting there? After a hunt?” A moment passes, and he continues. “Maybe it’s because you’re younger; you see life as either-or. But I’m an artist, too, and I have suffered, and I would rather not keep suffering, so I smile. And if I am happy, I don’t tell myself not to be.”
He shines the light under his chin to show his smile and then back to the path before them.
Delan’s words stick. Parties they’ve had—a director here, an artist there, all sorts of creative people who Delan and Mason paraded through the house. He might be right. She shuts down. Becomes quiet, lest they confuse a smile with youth. She wants to be taken seriously when she talks of studying Mondrian or Kline to understand composition. She wants to take photos of the people in the house, reclining by the fireplace and lost in themselves, without being shooed away or dismissed. Somehow, over the course of time, permission for this has become enmeshed with a need to make people believe she has suffered as they have, that she is part of their club, when the truth is she has not. Yes, her mother died when she was young and yes, it was loss, horrifying loss that emptied her of everything for years, but her father’s love tipped the scale back to where it should be, and her childhood was, all in all, happy. And yet that, her father’s achievement, raising a daughter on his own, that she does not speak of. As if having an amazing father in one’s life disqualifies one from being an artist. Maybe it is because she’s younger that she thinks this—though even that, his drawing attention to the six years that separate them, even that makes her angry, makes her feel less than all the lovely, wounded people who tell stories that make people lean in, that make people respect them because they’ve gone through so much. The actress with the ski-slope nose, she remembers Mason announcing, Christ, what she draws from. I heard her mother put her on a diet when she was seven and pimped her to the landlord at ten for a break in rent. Olivia was horrified, not only at what was said but that Mason knew. Now Olivia thinks of her father again, drawing from his own childhood for his writing. All that past suffering, isn’t it true that pain inspires? Doesn’t it lead to insight?
“Van Gogh,” she says. They’re standing outside his parents’ house, Lailan playing nearby. Soran walked to his friend’s to get the car to take them to an early dinner, and now they wait to see its flare of orange. “He was tortured. A wreck of a human, but look at what he did. And Sylvia Plath.”
“This whole time, you’ve been stewing.”
“Dostoyevsky,” she says. “Hemingway. There’ve been so many.” Remembering the checkpoints, she’s got her camera in her knit purse and pats her bag, reassured of its presence, while Lailan jumps from a spot by a car’s tire to a rock and then to a brick, avoiding the ground. Now and then, the girl points a toe and comes close to touching the cobblestone road but draws her foot back sharply. Olivia tries to decipher her game. “Beethoven,” she says, watching. “He lost his mother and his hearing. A composer whose ability to hear was
