How to Be Luminous Read online

  “Oops,” says Ash, jabbing at the volume before propping himself up on one elbow, looking down on me. “Everything all right in there?” he asks, pushing back my mound of hair and tapping my forehead. “You look a million miles away. What were you thinking about?”

  I can’t tell him I was picturing Mum, crawling out of the seabed after three months. I can’t tell him that whenever I see her, she’s in full, lurid color, but the world—including him—remains stubbornly black and white. I’d sound … crazy. Given my DNA, it’s not a thought I want to pursue.

  “I was thinking, are you sure you’re good at music?” I say. “Because I think you might have cloth ears. I mean, that song was … Would you even call it a song?”

  “All right, Grandma, that’s it,” threatens Ash. He rolls over, starts tickling me.

  I yelp in protest and he laughs, a lock of hair falling in front of his eyes, making him look more Elvis-y than ever. “Name one band,” he says, cocking his eyebrow, “that isn’t the Beatles.”

  “I…” My brain draws a blank. “That proves nothing,” I argue, “and anyway—”

  He kisses me before I can finish, both of us laughing into each other’s mouths. Briefly, I float above our entangled bodies, looking down at myself pretending to be normal.

  Ash rearranges us as we kiss, draping himself lazily half on, half off me, his leg hooked over mine, one hand on my waist. We have things down to a fine routine. Gradually, his fingers slide up to my rib cage. There’s usually a line, right beneath my boobs, where I stop him going any further. But this time, for some reason, I slide my own hands under Ash’s shirt.

  “Yeah?” he murmurs, his breath warm in my ear.

  “Yeah.”

  It’s like pushing a button marked WARP SPEED.

  I don’t know which of us is leading this, but my cardigan goes vamoose beneath his fingers—which are now everywhere. In my hair and underneath my dress and undoing my bra and sliding into my underwear, all at once. And I’m not thinking about how sad I am anymore. I’m thinking: wow, I’m so effing alive. I can feel Ash—his hard-on, I mean—pressing against my thigh. We roll over and over, tumbling into the sofa. Something goes crash.

  Ash straightaway peels himself from my mouth. His face is flushed, eyes sleepy, lips puffy from kissing. “Whoa,” he says, shaking himself like a dopey dog. “Wait, what was that?”

  “Nothing.” I shake my head, try to kiss him again. The moment we popped apart, all the other stuff came rushing back in. And I want to obscure it.

  “Min, hang on a sec.” Ash squeezes my hand and rolls off me, looking like an upturned beetle for a second. Then he sits up, looking around. “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” I push myself upright, smoothing down my dress and shoving my hair into something less just-been-kissed. Then I see what Ash sees, and gasp.

  Mum’s ashtray. A chunky ceramic, made by her. Usually it sits on a side table next to the sofa. Now it’s in two sharp pieces on the floor. None of us, not even Niko, have been able to face clearing it out, and it’s still full of cigarette butts. Or was. A pile of ashes besmirches the rug. Salvador Dalí gives me a disapproving look over his floppy ears. A riptide of regret swells.

  Not only about the ashtray. But what happened—that crazy, out-of-control kiss. That’s never happened before. And I know if I take Ash’s hand and lead him up to the Chaos Cave, we’ll land on my bed and continue it. Have sex. Or at least take another huge step toward it. Then another, and another.

  I’m no longer sure if I want to.

  It’s not that I’m not curious—about boners and blowjobs and the mechanics of the whole thing. (I mean, I get the basic idea.) But I don’t want to lose my virginity in monochrome.

  And sex is like jumping off a cliff: a split-second decision that can’t be undone. You don’t get to take it back, even if your feelings later change. The same way I can’t unbreak this ashtray.

  I’m not sure if Mum understood how long forever really is.

  * * *

  After Ash says good night, I go upstairs to the Chaos Cave. My window is open, blowing in cool September sky. It’s deepening in that strange city way where dark never truly arrives. You never see stars in London; only a dustbowl of silvery gray. There are too many lampposts, too many phones and happy houses, too many people. I want to turn out all the lights at once, plunge this huge metropolis into the same bottomless night I’m trapped in.

  I miss my mother like I miss yellow.

  Without Ash’s kisses to hide in, my brain drifts toward the possibility of her sprawled, bloody, across wet rocks; or a body bloated and unrecognizable at sea. Grotesque images that have gone flash-flash-flash through my head all summer. Ever since the day I found her letter.

  As soon as the last bell rang for the end of the school year, I headed straight to Mum’s studio. There was a storm brewing: London crackled with heat as I walked down Full Moon Lane beneath a boiling mauve sky. When I reached the studio, underneath the overhead railway line, the door was locked. Mum wasn’t inside, but she’d left a fan blowing, so she was due back at any moment. I was propping open the door to try to cool the stuffy space when I heard the piano plink of the kilns.

  Clay kilns don’t roar with fire the way you’d imagine; they’re not loud or mechanical. They give off the occasional soft, quiet ping, like a fork tapped lightly on a glass.

  I hadn’t known she had pieces ready to fire. She’d been working on a new series for weeks: Schiaparelli. Stoneware columns glazed in shocking pink. But every time the pots had dried enough to go in the kiln, she’d smashed each one down to dust. Intrigued, I checked the kilns’ control panels. Three were covered in dust sheets, but the largest was cooling down from a pre-glaze cycle—meaning she must have put something in at least yesterday, or the day before.

  I was thinking about sneaking a peek through the kiln’s spyhole when the rain arrived—with joyous abandon. It smacked down on the asphalt, bouncing in through the open door, pooling in puddles on the floor. I turned around to watch, and that’s when I spotted it—a piece of paper folded in three and propped up on her wheel. Her handwriting, oddly uneven on the back, addressed to me:

  A shiver blew through the empty studio, along with the rain. Then, after I read the letter, white noise: time moving in stops and stutters along with my newly malfunctioning heart.

  I don’t remember calling the police or curling up and hiding under the worktable to wait, but I must have done because that’s where I was when they arrived. Shivering on the cold concrete floor, watching the rain and the red light from the police car flash-flash-flash across the wet yard, the last true, pure color before they began to fade.

  Someone made hot, sweet tea, and a blanket was put around my shoulders. I answered question after question—what was she wearing when had I last seen her had she done something like this before was she on any medication could we have a description a recent photograph where did I live who should they call where was my dad—

  That one almost made me laugh. I’d never needed a dad, not when I had a mother whose presence was so enormous, she filled the father-shaped hole in my life the way night-scented jasmine engulfed the garden in summer. And now she was gone and it was too late to ask who else I came from.

  Ever since that afternoon, the questions have blurred into my own, unanswered ones:

  Will her body wash up one day, like Virginia Woolf’s? Are any of the #RachaelSloe sightings on the internet real? Will this goodbye echo through my life or does it get better? What to do with all this hopeless hope if she never comes back? And how do I survive when THERE ARE NO COLORS LEFT?

  Certainty thrums through me: Mum lost her colors too.

  More than once. The first time would have been the year Emmy-Kate was born and Mum made The White Album—her only work without color. That’s it, that’s why she gave up making art. It had nothing to do with having three babies—she was waiting for the colors to come back. When they did, she went right back to work.

>   But then it happened again, I’m sure of it. That’s why she kept smashing the Schiaparelli series instead of glazing it pink. Only this time, she gave up for good. She didn’t survive without color a second time. So where does that leave me?

  Plum

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

  Our moth-eaten rug, clawed to pieces by Salvador Dalí and covered in cigarette burns. Emmy-Kate’s most notorious boy-grabbing bra. A bruised heart. The frantic sky right before the storm.

  CHAPTER 8

  Just Like a Dream

  It’s midnight and Emmy-Kate still isn’t home. She must be a pumpkin by now.

  I can’t sleep. Salvador Dalí and I are curled up on my bed, where I’ve been since Ash left, replaying our kiss over and over. Now we’ve done that—hands under clothes, bra pushed aside, skin against skin and bodies writhing—there’s no way to go back to fully dressed kisses. The only way is forward.

  I stare out at the Chaos Cave. Lampposts cast artificial light across the room, illuminating everything from the SCAD mission statement to the corkboard above my desk. It’s crammed with dog-eared exhibition postcards, copies of favorite paintings—the California swimming pool of David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash, the precise watercolor of Eric Ravilious’s Cyclamen and Tomatoes—and photos of Niko, Emmy-Kate, and me. There’s a mini poster from Mum’s Tate Modern comeback show; a cinema ticket from my first date with Ash. But something’s missing. My studio key usually hangs from a ribbon in the top right corner. They’re both gone.

  I push Salvador Dalí aside—he gives an indignant snuffle—and slide out of bed, walking to my desk and scouring the messy surface. My eyes skate over the box of tiles, then back again. Aha. The key, its ribbon, and the pin that usually holds them in place have fallen inside. I reach in and scoop them out, my fingers brushing the loose preparatory sketches I made for the tile quilt.

  After returning the key to its rightful place, reknotting the ribbon and pushing in the pin extra-hard, I sit down and review the sketches. Sheet after sheet of tessellated tiles. Ms. Goldenblatt’s encouraging scrawl anoints the corner of one page: love it! But it seems to me as though a stranger drew these. They’re not exactly inspiring me to start kneading clay. And another memory is beginning to bloom in my head, like a hothouse orchid.

  I try to ignore it, open my portfolio. The spine creaks from lack of use. Page after page is filled with different techniques and styles, different mediums—watercolors, oils, acrylics, gouache, collages, pen-and-ink—photographs of abandoned sculptures and sketches of objects that I never got around to making, or never finished. Nothing is complete. Halfway across each page, the paint or ink or collage fades out, giving way to reveal the initial pencil lines of the idea. Like I gave up.

  The memory is pushing at my mind now, clawing its way in. A day at the studio last winter, when Mum cranked the stereo to ear-splitting volume, booming out the Beatles and singing raucously as she began to slap huge handfuls of clay on the wheel. She covered herself and me and the walls and ceiling in her quest to find the shape it was going to become.

  I shake it off, keep leafing through the portfolio. I’m trying to find me in here, and I can’t. There’s no signature style, nothing that unmistakably says: Minnie Sloe made this. Not the way Emmy-Kate’s sparkle is evident in her abstract acrylics, how Niko is so committed to cutting up paper she cuts her fingers too; and Mum is a ceramicist through and through.

  “What do you think, Salvador Dalí?” I ask out loud, to stop thinking about her.

  I pick up an ordinary writing pencil and find a blank page, tentatively starting to draw. It’s too late. The memory comes crashing in.

  Mum hadn’t moved from the wheel all day. She barely let it stop spinning in between slapping down a new piece of clay to make off-kilter stalagmites. But as each skyscraper reached its zenith, she smashed it down. Splat! She stopped only to suck on a cigarette or shake a fist at her own efforts. I watched from my own workbench, yawning.

  At some point she yelled, “Come on,” to the clay, but I took it as her exhorting me to move. For once, her effervescence wasn’t totally infectious, but I dragged my fingers through a bag of clay anyway, dropped a fistful on the workbench, and listlessly started kneading.

  There was a rhythm to it. Pushing down with the heels of my hands. Pulling up and pushing down again. Cutting the stiff clay in half with a wire and layering it, then kneading again. The Beatles and the trains overhead and Mum’s frustrated, exhilarated shouts faded out, until there was nothing but me and the clay. Squishing it over and over and over.

  “Min?” When Mum pressed a hand to my shoulder, I flew out of my skin.

  “Sneak much?” I complained.

  “Honey, I’ve been saying your name for hours.”

  She was peeling off her smock, her hands already washed and dried and anointed in glycerin. I glanced around. The sun had thickened into dusk, and Mum had finally finished a piece without splatting it. “Check it out,” she crowed. “Schiaparelli begins at last.”

  She looked down at my own hunk of clay, which was so overworked it had crumbled into pieces. Her blue eyes flicked to me with a kapow flash of worry. It was only there for a split second before she stuffed her concern behind a mile-wide smile and rapid-fire words: “Ready to call it quits, honey? Want to hit Il Giardino, share a tiramisu? We can make Emmy-Kate love us by picking up pizza.”

  She kept babbling even as I nodded, sweeping the useless clay crumbles into the bin, not letting up until I more or less forgot that look on her face.

  What did I see in her eyes that day? Worry, fear, unhappiness? Was it something to do with me, or was that the start of one of her sinkholes and I missed it?

  The fact she’s not here to answer a single one of my questions is unbearable. Yet somehow my body is bearing it. I think people should split in two when stuff like this happens.

  I shiver, feeling the breeze from earlier race in through my open window. I go to shut it, then change my mind; stick my head out instead and yell, “Where are you?” Shout it over and over again, hammering my fists on the windowsill and hollering at the railway line.

  This doesn’t make me feel much better, so I howl it, werewolf-style: Aroooooooooo!

  A shout of “Shut up!” drifts down the street, and I do. The last thing I want is to wake up the house next door. The Professor in his pajamas? Eek. I give one last, inaudible howl under my breath—but Mum doesn’t show.

  Emmy-Kate does, though, like night-blooming magic. She emerges from the shrubbery, shoes dangling from one hand, and peers up at me with wide eyes. For a second, she looks about twelve years old: her gawky, swimming nerd, tree-climbing self.

  Then she turns and whistles softly. A boy in a baseball cap pushes open the back gate and arrives at her side, taking her hand. Whoa. I blink, and Emmy-Kate is back to looking like the current iteration of her: her inappropriate dress a bright, brittle carapace, accessorized with shiny lipstick and dozens of shaving scabs at her ankles.

  She looks up and puts a finger to her lips, swinging onto the trellis. Even though she’s tiny, it trembles beneath her weight, shaking the roses from their slumber.

  “Good night, Minnie,” she says from halfway, challenging me to withdraw. I do. Her voice is the last thing I hear before I fall asleep.

  Shocking Pink

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

  Mum’s fuchsia mouth print on every coffee mug until Niko bleached them. The punk-rock hairstyles of SCAD students streaming along Full Moon Lane to campus. Heart emojis on texts from Ash. Schiaparelli, her last, unfinished, series. The ineffable essence of my mother’s work—a tremor of YES that ran through her soul and into her art, and that I can’t even come close to imitating.

  CHAPTER 9

  When Clay Dries, That Color

  I wake to a telltale creak.

  Every Sunday for as long as I can remember, Emmy-Kate has climbed from her window at dawn to go swimming. I roll over, pee
ring through the curtains at the pall of early autumn that surrounds the house, amazed she’s awake after coming home so late last night. In the thin morning light, I see not Em but her baseball-capped Romeo making his clandestine escape. Roses incline their heads as he goes by. I can’t believe he stayed the whole night!

  I bury myself beneath the duvet, trying to delete this information so I don’t have to deal with the pang of jealousy it provokes. Emmy-Kate is sneaking in contraband boys; throwing salt, and painting with her hands. She’s walking through the world with a carefree heart.

  Sometimes I suspect Mum split her genes between us three ways, the way white light refracts to reveal the primary colors. Red: Niko got the brains and the bossy boots, the commanding presence. Yellow: Emmy-Kate got the free-spirited beauty, the kind accompanied by orchestras. What if I got the other thing? Blue. The thread of melancholy that ran through her.

  I wish I had Em’s devil-may-care frivolity. But contemplating last night’s kiss with Ash—let alone sex!—gives me the same sensation as when I think about returning to the ceramics studio. Dread.

  By the time I stumble downstairs, Emmy-Kate is sitting pretty on the kitchen counter, wearing a swimsuit and sweatpants, spooning in cereal. Niko is at the table, scrawling what looks like a shopping list on a watercolor pad. She flips it shut when I come in. The kitchen is in the doldrums, as though a dirty rag has been wiped across the air.

  Emmy-Kate puts down her bowl but doesn’t quite meet my eye, starts signing a mile a minute about some new art-supply shop that’s opened up on Full Moon Lane.

  “It has this motto.” Her hands cascade. “‘Let’s fill this town with artists.’ Isn’t that cool?”

  I stop paying attention, instead examine the walls lined with her abstracts and Niko’s cutouts, the shelves bowed beneath hundreds of Mum’s plates. Whenever she started a new series, she’d practice her glaze colors on crockery.