How to Be Luminous Read online

  But as our lips meet for the first time in forever, this line from the goodbye letter runs through my head: disappear into the sky.

  Dark Green

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

  Meadow Park in the rain. The bitter looks Emmy-Kate and Niko gave me whenever I showed off about going to Mum’s studio—I was the only Sloe sister to whom she’d given a key.

  CHAPTER 6

  The White Album

  Over the next couple of days I find myself drawn back to the Rainbow Series I after school. Despite Ash’s return, I still feel like I have the flu: a constant headache, sandpaper throat, limbs made out of lead. Existing is exhausting.

  I’m here again now, squished beneath one of the titanic bubbles, hidden from view. The earth is still damp from rain; drops cling to the heavy clay that hangs in the air, inches from my face. This is something I do a lot: hiding out. Overpopulated city, big school, terraced house, nosy neighbor, two sisters, and a larger-than-life mother—solitude is sometimes something of a necessity.

  Now, this is where I feel closest to Mum’s spirit, here with her more-alive-than-alive art. I press a hand to the curved sphere above me, feeling for the sculpture’s heartbeat, and whisper, “Where are you?”

  And bam, here she is, lying next to me. Wearing coral lipstick and jabbing a lit cigarette in the air like a demented firefly, saying, “Should we shake things up, Minnie? Get another rabbit?”

  The relief of hearing her voice again fills me up.

  “The first one is bad enough,” I tell her, and she smiles lopsidedly. I smile back.

  Music starts leaking from the air. “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles. Although actually, there’s a veil of translucent cloud over the September sky, diffusing the light. For a moment, I think the song is coming from her. Then a buzzing begins and, duh, it’s my phone. Mum fades.

  The screen shows half a dozen texts and a missed FaceTime call, all from Niko. I ignore the messages, thinking of my ringtone. Another Beatles song. I never followed up on that brain snag from Monday, The White Album.

  I google it and get a hundred thousand million Beatles results. Duh. But as soon as I add Mum’s name—and scroll past dated articles about her missing status—a Wikipedia article pops up. It says The White Album was made the year Emmy-Kate was born, her last piece before she abruptly retired from art. There’s a tiny picture. The caption underneath reads:

  Rachael Sloe (b. 1978)

  “THE WHITE ALBUM” (2004)

  Mixed media—glazed stoneware and dry ice

  A haunting installation piece. The only work of the artist’s that lacks color.

  I turn my phone sideways so the image fills the screen.

  The White Album looks like broken eggshells—from one giant mother-effing goose—and feathered wings, suspended from the ceiling of a gallery. But the matte glaze means the pieces don’t reflect any light. They recede, imperceptible and ghostly.

  It reminds me of me: floating through this strange otherworldly dimension of nocolor. More than reminds me, actually. Looking at The White Album is like lifting off my skull, the way you would the top of a soft-boiled egg, and peering inside my own brain.

  I shudder, shaking the worms below. Queasy claustrophobia slithers in, a new awareness of the heavy clay sphere above my head, how no one knows where I am.

  Upping the creepiness quotient: footsteps. Heavy ones, shuffling through the garden. I roll over, peering out from underneath the bubble.

  An emo art pilgrim in a beanie hat and Doc Martens boots is standing in the middle of the walled garden, wearing the same expression of slack-jawed awe that hits everyone who comes here. He’s toting a sketch pad under one arm but looks a little too young to be a SCAD arthead—more my age than Niko’s.

  His shoulders are bowed, but even so, it’s obvious he’s skyscraper-tall. And unhappy. I can feel it clear as day from where I’m lying: He’s the epicenter of his own personal earthquake, and his sadness shakes the ground. Ugh. Join the effing club, I think. I’m sick of people commandeering my mother’s tragedy for themselves.

  Speaking of which: This guy’s gloomy gaze lands on the memorial, worn after the rain. I’m expecting him to move toward it, leave a drawing as some people have been doing, but he turns away, stepping farther into the garden. His eyes are on the ground, so as he strides past my bubble he sees me straightaway, but doesn’t put it together for another few footsteps.

  “Uhhh…” he says, doubling back and peering down at me.

  I blink up. Beneath the beanie, he has loop-the-loop dark curls that fall in front of his eyes, which are shadowed from lack of sleep. Pale skin, almost as white as a Sloe’s. His face is all angles, with the kind of cheekbones Emmy-Kate would kill for, and familiar too … I flash back to Monday, to the new boy in my art lesson with his head glued to his sketch pad. Same dour dude, I’m sure of it.

  And here I am, hyperaware that I’m stuffed beneath a priceless, prizewinning artwork.

  “Cool idea,” he says, apparently unperturbed, as though he comes across horizontal girls every day. He cups a cigarette to his mouth, lights it, takes a long drag. “There’s a few sculptures that make me want to do that. Get a different perspective on the work.”

  How pretentious. My face burns with annoyance and I start wriggling free, but he’s slumping to the ground and sitting on the path, blocking my exit. His satchel falls open next to him. My inner snoop can’t help peeking inside: pencils, charcoals, hard pastels, ink … Yup, definite arthead. No doubt he’s SCAD-bound.

  “So, I’m Felix,” he offers, Eeyore-dreary, fiddling with his cigarette. His fingers are callused. “I think we’re in the same art class? At Poets Corner High?”

  “I’m Minnie.” I pick at a run in my tights, letting a century go by before giving up and adding the unavoidable, which he’ll find out anyway: “Sloe.” I wave around at the Rainbow Series I to make it clear: Yes, uh-huh, that Sloe, go ahead and speculate.

  This name is going to follow me my whole life. To SCAD, if I ever summon the courage to go. My professors will have automatic expectations, assumptions. And forget about trying to be an artist, as a career … Her disappearance has only made it worse, put the name Sloe in every newspaper in Britain. I might as well be called Minnie Monet or Minnie Matisse. Nothing I make will ever measure up.

  “Yeah, okay, wow. I mean, I know.” Felix shakes his head, setting off a roller coaster of curls. He peers through them at me: a frank, open examination that unpeels me down to my bones.

  Obviously he knows exactly what’s happened—men on the effing moon know what’s happened. It was on the ten o’clock news, the front page of the London Evening Standard. The internet is filled with artheads sharing photos of her work, hashtagging them #RachaelSloe, #missing, #haveyouseenher.

  It’s more than that, though. Felix looks the exact same way I feel. Like an atom bomb has gone off. But how dare he? How can his own grief compare to mine? He’s mourning Rachael Sloe, Artist. Not the real her who dances with Salvador Dalí and can only cook fish sticks.

  “I’m sorry about your mum,” he says, fixing me with these rainstorm-sad eyes. Gross. Stop it. You don’t even know.

  My mouth pinches in sharp resentment. “Thanks.”

  “Yeah.” He pauses, tapping his cigarette and spilling ash over the path. Some of it lands on one of the tiny spheres embedded in the concrete, but at least he wipes it off. “I’m actually a fan. I mean, I really liked her work.”

  I bob my head stiffly, wrapping my arms around my knees.

  “This—” He touches the bubble next to us. Possessiveness consumes me: I resist the urge to smack his hand away. “It’s, wow. Seeing it for real. It’s more-more than I thought it would be, you know?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So, anyway,” says Felix, sounding cautious—like he finally senses he’s unwelcome, “I heard Ms. Goldenblatt say you’re this clay obsessive…”

  Oh, no. Don’t tell me he’s a ceram
ics nut. Does he think we’re going to bond because he likes her art, likes clay? Him and a thousand others. When Niko started at SCAD last year, she complained about this—that students would approach her wanting to talk about Mum, but wouldn’t make the effort to learn a sign or two, or even fingerspell. This is what will happen to me next year: I’ll be another Rachael Sloe clone. “Me too.” Felix stubs out his cigarette on the sole of his boot. “Clay, I mean. In fact—”

  He breaks off as a pair of tourists comes loudly into the garden, laughing and talking. They take out their phones, snapping photos not of the art but of the creepy memorial-cum-shrine, then each other in front of it. Suicide selfies.

  I look away, catching my reflection in the bubble. My mirror image self is pale to the point of invisibility, with a frenzied fog of gray hair. She seems far away, and I don’t know if it’s because my vision is fading or I am.

  The tourists come traipsing through the Rainbow Series I, close to where we’re sitting, their voices still raised. They don’t know it’s a cemetery. “You okay?” Felix asks in a low voice.

  I ignore him, sinking down to the ground and sliding back underneath my bubble. Who cares if this emo-doom-Byron boy thinks I’m weird? I put my hands over my eyes, thinking, Go away. Everybody.

  When I open them again, he has. All that’s left is a cigarette butt on the path, and a crushed-up chalk pastel, ground beneath a Doc Martens boot.

  CHAPTER 7

  A Whiter Shade of Pale

  As we sit down to dinner on Saturday night, Emmy-Kate throws salt over her shoulder. Halfway through the gesture, her eyes widen and she goes statue-still, but it’s too late: A snow flurry of grains pitter-patters against the window behind her.

  “I just…” she croaks, hiding behind chlorine-scented hair.

  But the imitation of Mum is too vivid. I can’t shake the thought of her finally coming home. Standing out there in the garden, watching us from the dwindling twilight: the strange way we’re starting to coalesce around her absence like an oyster around a pearl.

  Ash is here too, and the Professor. Niko invited him after he “popped in” again this afternoon. I understand why she’s insistent the three of us eat together at least once a week—she’s paranoid about impressing the social workers. But why encourage him? He’s got his own microwave, next door.

  “Well, anyway. It was Friday the thirteenth yesterday,” Emmy-Kate signs/says, in a teeny-tiny voice.

  At this, even Niko eyeballs the salt. But before she can do something so uncharacteristic as to make a mess, the Professor swoops in and grabs it, shaking it over his food.

  We’re eating chips and sausages—vegetarian Quorn ones in deference to Niko, Ash, and the Professor, but otherwise our standard plate. Even before Mum disappeared, we had a revolving diet of pizza and microwave meals. We eat the way we do so she can focus on her work instead of what she calls “domestic drudgery.” It hasn’t occurred to any of us to learn how to cook.

  “All the best food groups are frozen,” Mum claimed years ago, during another dinner; this one without the Professor.

  The four of us were gathered in the kitchen. We hadn’t seen her properly in months, not since the day she’d unexpectedly announced she was going to her studio to start a new series, her first since Emmy-Kate was born. We’d never before in our lives glimpsed artist her, a mother who only had eyes for clay. She’d been making a series called Girls in the Moon, ceramics glazed bright purple. She’d finally completed it that morning and wanted to celebrate over frozen lasagna and too much wine.

  Emmy-Kate cut into the lasagna, discovering that the charred outsides concealed a still-frozen center. She put the knife down, freeing her hands to announce, “Kind of like a Baked Alaska.”

  “Well, goes to show—Sloes are kitchen-incapable,” Mum signed, then waved her hand to indicate this was a given. In doing so, she sloshed red wine over her dress. “Crap.”

  Laughing, she grabbed the salt and threw one handful on the stain, then another over her shoulder, onto the floor.

  Niko groaned in mock despair. “Muuummm. The kitchen’s messy enough as it is.”

  Mum threw another handful of salt around deliberately, then wagged a finger, giving her an electric smile. “Domesticity is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

  “That’s consistency!” Niko pointed out, clearly trying not to laugh.

  It was funny how quickly we slipped back into being ourselves, even after months of barely seeing her. She’d been eating at her studio a few neighborhoods away, practically sleeping there, or leaving the house in the middle of the night to adjust the temperature on the kilns—there’s no automatic way to do it. But now that she was finally home for good, things snapped back to normal in an instant.

  “Oh, same diff.” Mum’s hands paused as she gulped her wine, ignoring Niko’s rapid-fire arguments.

  We were all signing silently, a constant flurry of movement and laughter. Recently, we’d had to slow down and speak, too: While Mum had been at the studio, the Professor had played babysitter and we’d eaten with him each night, going at his signing speed and vocabulary, a hodgepodge of voices and signs and interpretation. But today Mum had suggested, “How about only my girls? It feels like an age since I saw you all.”

  “This means I don’t have to tidy my room ever,” Emmy-Kate decided. “Because of the hobgoblins.”

  “Exactly,” Mum agreed. She pushed away her plate. “Minnie, let’s phone for a pizza.”

  “Another one?” Niko asked.

  “Hey, I’m teaching you girls how to be geniuses, here.” Mum signed and swigged wine and smoked, all at once. “Skip the cooking and the cleaning and get creative. How do you think the great artists did it? Everyone raves about Picasso, but no one spares a thought for poor Mrs. Picasso doing all the vacuuming while her husband doodled.”

  Emmy-Kate burst into giggles; even Niko was snorting. I had to hang up on the pizza place, I was laughing so hard. I never expected her to quit SCAD altogether barely two weeks later, nor to start a new series that lasted almost a year.

  The next time she took a break from the studio, we were warier with our hearts.

  Now, forks scrape in silence against ceramic plates. The Professor periodically clears frogs from his throat. Niko is trying to engage Ash in conversation, signing slowly, her face pinkening in frustration when he asks her again and again to “Repeat?” Next to me, Emmy-Kate is shoveling in chips at demonic speed. As soon as she clears her plate, she signs-says, all in one breath, “I’m finished may I please leave the table I’m going upstairs to do homework thanks bye.”

  It’s the beginning of a mass exodus. The Professor retreats next door. Niko looks from me to Ash to his guitar, biting her lip. When he doesn’t make a move toward it, she tells me she’s going out with some SCAD friends, glancing behind her as she leaves.

  I’m stacking the dishwasher, wondering if doing so makes me a hobgoblin, when Ash comes up behind me. He wraps his arms around my waist, nuzzling his face into my neck. “Finally,” he says. “Hello.” This is the first time we’ve touched all evening—kissing in front of his uncle, my sisters, is too Flowers in the Attic.

  “Hi.” I’m turning to face him when I see something through the window.

  A pair of high-heeled shoes, tumbling from the sky. They’re followed fast by Emmy-Kate, climbing down the trellis from her bedroom. WTFasaurus? She jumps barefoot onto the grass in a tiny dress and raccoon mask of eyeliner, retrieves the shoes, then goes flitting from the garden—Cinderella in reverse.

  I tell myself that this is definitely not my problem. In fact, Emmy-Kate has the right idea. What if, instead of hanging out with Ash, I followed her? Ran into the night and lost myself in London’s vast streets, abandoned my whole life the way Mum has: the SCAD destiny. Monochromacy. Art. The Professor. Even the sweet way Ash is looking at me right now. Sex.

  We end up on the sitting-room floor, Salvador Dalí stretched full-length on the sofa above our heads. Ash takes ou
t his phone and starts scrolling through playlists.

  “Uh-oh,” I say. “Let me guess, you want to play me some noisy grime band that hasn’t heard of melody?”

  He laughs. “You’ll love this one, I promise.”

  “You always say that,” I point out, but my words get lost in the loud frenetic music beginning to blare from his phone. Ash wiggles his eyebrows and starts beatboxing ridiculously along. Affection for his idiocy surges.

  But the thing is, even a song as fast as this sounds despondent. Everything does. All I want is for Mum to walk in the door, hear this awful not-music, and crack up laughing.

  And it’s not my artist mother I miss—the intense, semi-possessed one of the past six years. I miss the Mum of the wilderness years. That mother would be dragging me to my feet and doing a stupid dance to this terrible tune. Lifting the rabbit from the sofa and settling there with a book, the three of us competing to squish in with her. Little Emmy-Kate always won; Niko too, so they could sign one-handed, their spare hands wrapped around mugs of herbal tea. And my place was always the floor, leaning back against her legs as she poked her cold feet against me. The exact same spot I’m in now.

  And maybe I’m not even missing that Mum, but that Minnie. Pre-teenage me.

  A girl who’d never used a kiln or kissed a boy, who had all her colors and both of her sisters.

  I stare at the sitting-room door until it flies open and she’s standing in the doorway in a bright blue ballgown, soaked in seawater and holding an enormous pink conch shell. “Inspirational!” she shouts. “Minnie, twelve weeks underwater was what I needed—the new series will be ocean blue. I’ll call it The Beachy Head Adventure.”

  It’s as if she’s standing beneath her own personal spotlight, the Milky Way. Mum didn’t only have sinkholes. There were these other times when every aspect of her would hit fast-forward; she’d grow louder and happier and whirlier. We thought of it as being starlit.

  The beat on the phone goes bass-line ballistic, rattling my ribs. The door slams shut.