“What are they?”
She ignored the question. “I was interested in what you said at that dinner, about how when we die everything evaporates. I think that was the word? It resonated with me. I try to pay attention to resonance.”
I remembered saying that, but I didn’t know what else I could add. “Honestly I think I was annoyed at that Leanne woman and trying to seem deep.”
“Don’t brush your thoughts off as imposture,” she said sharply. “It’s tiresome.”
“Sorry,” I said, taken aback.
“Don’t apologize, either. Especially since you know from experience. Your parents. You aren’t just blathering. You know exactly how much gets lost.” One of the dogs was resting its head in her lap, and she stroked its ears. She looked at me slantwise with her glinty, mineral flicker. “It must be much worse for you, but people think they know about me because I’ve been around and have been written about and so on. Almost no one has more than a few scattered data points, but they connect the dots however they please.”
“Oh my god, yes,” I said, leaning forward. “And they come up with ideas about you that make sense to them and so seem true to them but are actually arbitrary.”
“Yes, exactly. Like constellations. It’s impossible to ever fully explain yourself while you’re alive, and then once you’re dead, forget about it—you’re at the mercy of the living.” She pointed at the sketchbook in my lap. “My mother said Jamie told her he filled those last pages during a battle. He thought he was making realistic sketches and only discovered later that they were scribbles.” She sipped her tea. The mug was green ceramic, like the fireplace tiles. “I’m glad he didn’t make the drawings he thought he did. They would have been lies. Art is distortion but a form of distortion that has the possibility of offering clarification, like a corrective lens.”
“I don’t completely follow,” I said.
“All I’m saying is that it’s good some things are lost. It’s natural.”
“But you still want to show me that,” I said, indicating the document box, “rather than letting them be lost.”
“Yee-ess.” She stretched out the word, maybe with uncertainty. “I don’t know if it’s so much that the letters fill in gaps as expose them.”
“Well, like I said on the phone, I can’t really change anything about the movie. Especially not now. We’re almost done.”
She waved a hand. “The movie is just another obfuscation. The truth is worthwhile in its own right.”
“Totally,” I said, oddly relieved. “It took me a long time to figure out that the movie doesn’t really matter, but once I did, I could finally—I don’t know—act.” I paused. “I should tell you,” I said, “I told Redwood you have Marian’s letters. He wants to read them.”
“Do you want him to read them?”
“No.”
“Then he doesn’t need to,” she said. “I’ve chosen to show them to you, specifically you, but, like I’ve said, my purpose isn’t necessarily for them to be made public.” She seemed to muse. “I wonder if I’m enacting a kind of installation.” Then, mockingly: “Maybe this is my first stab at performance art.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “I didn’t tell Redwood about Jamie being your father, either.”
“Biological father. No, I assumed I would have heard from Carol by now if you had. Why didn’t you?”
Now I mused. Redwood and I had come back from Denali and gone to bed together, and it had been perfectly fine, perfectly nice, but I hadn’t been able to shake that precarious feeling, like something was about to give way. “At first I thought I was just being possessive,” I said, “but I think maybe it was more that I’ve had stuff about myself, information, get launched out into the world—or I’ve done the launching—and I’m not sure what difference it makes, how much strangers know about you. They still don’t know anything. So it doesn’t matter how much truth there is in Peregrine. Like maybe it’s better if it’s just a movie.”
“Out of curiosity, what do you have left to film?”
“We’re going to Hawaii with a skeleton crew to pick up a couple of location scenes, and then the plane crash is the last thing.”
“It’s almost like some kind of confrontational New Age therapy, you filming a scene where a plane crashes into water.”