Loud Awake and Lost (23 page)

I see it as soon as I enter the gallery. It's hanging at the opposite end of the room. Which means that when they moved it out of that apartment, they noticed the
K
sprayed bold and directly onto the dining room wallpaper. That must have shocked them. It makes me smile.

Familiar and yet foreign; at first I'm afraid to approach. It has been almost three years since Anthony painted it. I can fit into the shape of that girl, but I know that I am changed. He only knew me as a girl who turned to face in a new direction. But now I am the girl who actually left.

It's crowded. Hatch is here, and Lucia's uncle Carlos, who is the curator of the show, and Lucia herself, who ended up staying in the States, where she's attending Hunter College. And Maisie—and others, so many others. It's a bump and jostle. I'm only off work and home for a few of these end-of-summer days, and still I feel a bit jet-lagged. Also maybe a little self-conscious in my California casual, my jeans faded and my T-shirt simple and loose. No sleek fashion getup for me.

“Those jeans! You hold on to clothing the way other people keep pets,” Rachel joked when she came over last night with some of the old gang, including Sadie and Perrin and Holden—with Cass—for my tasting-menu Folly. It was an ambitious medley of everything I'd learned this past semester in culinary school, with a few dishes straight out of The Reef, the restaurant in Long Beach where I've been working all summer.

I knew I'd feel off-kilter, mixing in with this sleek arty world. But I never would have missed this night.

“Hey, you!” Alice raises her hand from across the room. Alice de Souza is why the gallery space is packed, although the show itself is stand-alone provocative—Lucia's uncle has an eye for art that goes beyond just-another-rich-dude-collector. There's a lot to look at on the walls. But Alice is the main draw. She's become even more famous in these years since I first met her, when she was just a wild-card member of Kai's street-artist pack, another bandit with a spray can and a chin-set view of her big place in the world.

Alice is legit; she's graduated past It-girl into purposeful, complex work. I read all about her in a glossy magazine piece in a San Bernardino hair salon while I was getting a trim; her likes and dislikes and her goals and what she ate for lunch. She'd seemed as far away as Mars.

But Alice is worthy of her hype. She's eye-catchingly cool, too, as she strides toward me, knowing that every eye is on her—some trying not to stare, others completely unapologetic. “I'm so glad you could make it.” And then she cuffs the side of my ear with a kiss. It is a kiss-kiss sort of night, and we're all playing our parts.

“Me too.”

“Ready?”

“Yep.”

“Good, then come on. Come see it, Ember.” Her hand, an artist's hand, is large and brown and fine-boned. My hand, a chef's apprentice hand, is nicked and burned and well protected in hers.

We are immediately sidetracked, of course. By Lucia's uncle Carlos, who greets me with the manic energy befitting the host of a highly successful party. This is officially a hot venue; it will be written up, photos are being snapped, paintings will be sold.

But not that painting. Never that painting that has given Anthony Travolo this moment of fame—the online posts, the tribute pages. Carlos himself promised in his email message, inviting me to the event, that the painting never would be sold. Its worth, he said, was personally incalculable “as a memory of that fine young man.”

I know that part of my presence here is sensationalism. I'm the crucial bit of the story that is whispered—
she
must
feel
so
awful, so guilty, he would have been a big star, maybe.
My role in the tragedy is still, in moments, almost too crushing to bear. Too much story. And it makes me glad that I don't live here anymore, and likely never will again.

Alice is navigating me through rubberneckers and well-wishers and bloggers, gallerinas and critics, collectors and scenesters. She's done this a hundred times before. But ever since I contacted her about Anthony's painting—along with the taped photo he'd printed from our day in Coney Island, plus the sketches he'd left in his notebook—she has become proprietorial of his art, of me, of our meaning. I'm grateful.

Anthony's art is raw, mostly potential. Even my untrained eye sees that. He's trying to find me in those freezing January dunes. But my shyness of his prying camera phone, my desire to be beautiful for him, my heady joy in our brand-new romance—he found all of it.

I stare at the painting and I find that girl, and I see all the things that lit me up. The palette of thick dream-dappled colors, my cold bright cheeks, the peek through my fingers—shy, but I couldn't resist seeing and being seen by him.

“It's about love,” murmurs Alice at my shoulder.

“Yes,” I agree. I can taste again the salt in the wind. I can feel my fingers splayed against my face. The oily chop of the brush, my half-closed eyes.

He has captured our light exactly, that stark and glowing afternoon. I never wanted it to end. On oil and canvas, forever,
Ember
was
here.
Even if cell by cell and day by day, I am aging past that moment when Anthony laid bare everything he knew about me.

In this painting, he has found our eternity.

Lucia, who has approached noiselessly to stand at my side, breaks my trance. “Uncle Carlos is taking the piece to Italy next week,” she says. “It will be part of a group show in Florence, and then another in Rome.”

“Oh. That's cool.” Anthony, who had not even owned a passport, who would have wanted almost more than anything to be at home in the world. How he would have loved that.

They leave me with the portrait, and I am alone with it until I feel him.

I turn, shading my vision. The sun is behind him so that he is all shadow, a crisp cutout of darkness backlit by the window. I hear his voice in my ear again, that night in the Tribeca apartment, when he brought me to the dining room and showed me his painting of me for the first time—
“Look. Look at you. You're my best work, the best that's in me.”

I never saw him again after the night I went back to the bridge. I never wanted to. I'd found some peace in my grief, and in many ways I've traveled far from that hour. To build a new life, to become another Ember; I'd had to.

He raises his hand.

Tentatively, I raise mine. As I watch him, I let his image burn through me, and then I close my eyes and let the impression, as if on the slow beat of a hawk's wing, take flight.

“Ember.” Hatch has bounded over. He is taller than I, finally, and filled out—there is substance to him. A junior this year; next year he will be the same age as I was when I met Anthony. And then a year older. And so it goes.

“What's up?” I don't need to look to know that Anthony is gone.

I give Hatch my full attention.

He smiles his brother's smile. “A few of us are heading out for dinner at this Moroccan joint in Bensonhurst. Supposed to be great. If you want to join up?”

“Fez.”

“Yeah. That's it. How'd you know?” He looks surprised. “You ever been?”

“No,” I say. “Not yet.”

I would like to thank everyone who has encouraged and assisted me with this book. Special
thanks to my first readers—Mackenzie Brady, Meredith Kaffel, Charlotte Sheedy, and Courtney
Sheinmel—who believed so fiercely in the manuscript from its earliest days. I am always indebted to
team Knopf/Random House: Stephen Brown, Lauren Donovan, Sarah Hokanson, Adrienne Waintraub, and particularly
my editor, Nancy Hinkel, who brings such grace and insight to every moment of our process. A big thanks to my
husband, Erich Mauff, for ever respecting my “room of one's own,” even as we expanded our family and doubled
our chaos this year. And finally, I am especially indebted to my brother Robert Watson for speaking with such
candor about his own neurological trauma and recovery after the nearly fatal car accident of his youth. I
never could have told Ember's story without knowing the reality of Robert's survival, as well as the strength
it took for him to get there.

ADELE GRIFFIN
is the author of
Tighter
and
All You Never Wanted
. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York. Find her on the Web at
adelegriffin.com
.