Light Travels at the Highest Possible Velocity
A Short Story About Guilt and Silence
In Seattle, at approximately 2:55 a.m., nearly twenty years ago, when I was sixteen, I drove too fast into a four-way intersection while talking on my mobile phone, turned too wide on a left, rode up onto the sidewalk, and crashed into a pedestrian who’d been waiting for the light to change. She died instantly.
Her name was Melissa and she was a member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians and had grown up on her tribe’s reservation in Eastern Washington and moved to Seattle for college but only made it through one semester before she dropped out. Afterward, she worked a series of minimum wage jobs and became the single mother of twin daughters. They were only seven years old and were alone in their apartment without adult supervision as their mother drunkenly walked home because her car had broken down again in the parking lot of the Journeyman Inn, which had become a gathering place for urban Native Americans and their family and friends visiting from various reservations. In Native parlance, it was known as an “Indian bar,” not owned by Native Americans but monopolized by them as customers. On the night of the accident, Melissa had refused to accept a ride from any of the other closing time refugees. Nobody knew exactly why she’d chosen to walk. It was drunk logic maybe. Or stumbling vanity. Or an intoxicated display of personal sovereignty.
I learned most of this through Seattle’s The Other, a leftist alternative weekly newspaper that covered the story and proclaimed, “A Native American woman should be able to walk home safely in early 21st century America but we’ve learned that still isn’t true.” I wanted to call the reporter and tell him that I didn’t even know that I’d hit a Native woman until days after the accident. I was unconscious the whole time. And I couldn’t publicly say it without being publicly destroyed but I wasn’t responsible for all the poor choices that Melissa had made — the choices that led to her standing drunk at a Seattle intersection at three in the morning. But I was completely responsible for hitting her — for crashing into a human being. Yes, I was white and slender and young and conventionally attractive, as The Other had unsubtly noted, but that had nothing to do with my reckless driving. Race didn’t play any part in the whole damn thing. White people have no monopoly on driving while talking on their mobile phones. But that’s not the kind of response a leftist newspaper would calmly accept. So I didn’t respond to that story at all. My lawyer advised me not to say a single word to any person about the accident. He said that I shouldn’t even confide in my parents. That was easy because I hadn’t told them anything real in years. “Keep everything hidden behind attorney-client privilege,” my lawyer warned. “Silence is your God,” he said.
When I hit Melissa, I was apologizing to my mother on my mobile phone because I’d broken curfew yet again. The phone’s reception was bad so I was shouting to be heard. My mother was shouting at me out of rage because I’d left the house and taken her car without permission. And she was also raging because my father hadn’t come home, either. I told her that I’d fallen asleep on the couch while watching a movie at my boyfriend’s house. That was a lie. I’d fallen asleep naked in my boyfriend’s bed after sex. I assumed that my father had also fallen asleep naked with his mistress. My mother knew that I was lying but it was easier for her to accept my deception and maintain her sense of family decorum: Her daughter was a virgin, her husband still loved her, and she had house insurance for every loss by earthquake, fire, flood, landslide, robbery, and personal disaster. My mother and I had pretended to be honest with each other since I was a precocious ten-year-old — since I’d arrived at the far shore of her love and saw there was nothing beyond. So, as I drove, I was distracted by my lies and my mother’s emptiness and the scent of my boyfriend on my skin when I slammed into Melissa. But I never saw her. I knew that I’d lost control of the car and was sliding toward a stand of cedar trees sitting fifteen feet off the street, but I don’t remember hitting her or the cedars. I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. Stupidity compounded by more stupidity. I rag-dolled off the walls, ceiling, and steering wheel, and was knocked brain-asleep. I didn’t drink or do drugs. They tested my blood in the ER. I was clean.
A few weeks after it happened, Melissa’s friends and family planted a small garden at the site of her death. The amateur horticulturalists were mostly Native Americans, though a few of Melissa’s white friends also did some work. The garden sat beneath the cedars that I’d rammed into. I’d damaged one tree so severely that it had to be cut down but the other trees healed. I don’t know plants so I can’t tell you what they grew in the garden. I only know that it was of modest size and color, probably because the city owned the land and hadn’t officially approved of the memorial. While they were building the garden, I was in the hospital ICU and then in a residential physical rehab facility with a broken nose, severe concussion, a fifty-stitch slice across my forehead, broken collarbone, torn ligaments in both knees, busted left wrist, and four cracked ribs. I was bruised everywhere but I was going to recover. Physically.
I was lucky. Melissa was not.
I didn’t learn the extent of her injuries until I was discharged from the rehab facility. My parents thought they were protecting me and my healing process by withholding the details. And they, with a cold kindness, were probably right. Destroyed is the only accurate description of her injuries.
From Seattle Illustrated, I learned that Melissa had been trapped for years in a cycle of active addiction and temporary recovery. She was drunk when she conceived her twins with a white man — a member in probationary standing in the unofficial white ally auxiliary — whom she’d met at the Journeyman. She stayed sober for the length of her pregnancy but quickly returned to her binge-drinking life after their birth. Their white father had left before the girls were born. His whereabouts would always be unknown. Melissa had twice lost her girls to foster care. But she’d also twice won back her daughters because she was a kind, smart, and capable mother when she was sober. She’d been working as a cashier at a supermarket — a place with a mission to hire recovering addicts and alcoholics. She’d been sober for a year and none of her family or friends could point out any particular reason why Melissa relapsed that night. Addiction can ambush you by moonlight or sunlight. I only knew that I wasn’t the reason why Melissa lost her sobriety. The tragedy of her life was separate from my role in her tragic death. But that’s another thing that I could never say in public.
I could’ve been prosecuted as an adult for vehicular homicide. The threat was there. But my defense lawyer, working with the prosecutors, won me a deferred prosecution because I was a good kid — a juvenile with zero history of wrongdoing. Good grades. Part-time job at an ice cream store. Tutored kids at the Boys & Girls Club. Cross country runner with “slow feet and a big heart,” as my coach liked to say. I hadn’t even missed a day of school in two years. So I wouldn’t be charged with any crime if I didn’t drink, do drugs, or commit any other crimes for one year.
The lawyers were accused of racism. So was the judge. So was I. There were small protests. They were wrong about me. I wasn’t a racist. I was just an ordinary kid who did something extraordinarily stupid. But don’t get me wrong. I understood my metaphysical role in the accident. I wasn’t deemed guilty of murder or manslaughter but I was still a killer.
I killed the mother of two young daughters. They were named Melody and Aria. I suffered nightmares where I crashed into and killed them instead of their mother. In other softer dreams, I worked alongside Melody and Aria as we tended their mother’s memorial garden. That never happened, of course, but it was a dream that kept recurring for many years.
Four months after the wreck, I limped back to school, opened my locker, and painfully stepped back as dozens of little Matchbox cars spilled onto the floor. A dark prank. I heard people laughing and turned to see the culprits. My boyfriend, who’d only visited me once in the hospital, stood among them and was laughing more loudly than the others. I almost fainted with shame. And I almost fainted again when I realized that I deserved my shame. Then I took three deep breaths and walked out of the school. I would’ve ran but my injuries made it impossible for me to move at a faster pace. So my shattered body accidentally gave me a slow dignity. Shortly afterward, I obtained court permission to take the GED test, passed it, and received my high school diploma. I wouldn’t have to return to that school or to any of my former friends.
This all happened before social media could be fully used as a fatal weapon. People were more apt and able to forget tragedies. So, like a magician with surgical scars, I mostly disappeared from my previous life.
For eight months after I left school, my mother tended to my wounds while my father tended to his affair partner, another lawyer in the corporate firm. Our house became a mausoleum. But I still might have stayed in Seattle if my mother hadn’t looked me in the eyes one day and said, “I can’t believe I raised a murderer.”
So, on the day after my probation in Seattle ended, I moved to Los Angeles to live with my mother’s sister.
Aunt Patty was a freelance photographer. She created huge portraits of the poor and homeless who populated Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California. Her photos were gorgeous and dark and were often displayed in elite galleries but rarely sold to typical art collectors. Critics accused her of exploitation. With a characteristic mix of honesty and arrogance, Patty said that it was an accurate critique but added that all art is exploitation and that she was just better at it than almost everybody else wielding a camera. The ordinary rich didn’t want to decorate their homes with her portraits of unsheltered people and their interrogating eyes. It was the movie people — the superstar actors and directors — who purchased her work. They were rich progressive artists who’d once been desperate for opportunity and they wanted my aunt’s portraits to remind them of their former desperation.
“Look at that man’s eyes,” the actors and directors would say to their guests as they studied a portrait hanging on the walls. “Have you ever been that hungry? I’ve never been physically hungry like them. But my soul-hunger was deep and debilitating. I’m still soul-hungry. That’s the source of my art.”
Aunt Patty and I lived in her three-bedroom home in the Los Feliz neighborhood. She slept in the master bedroom and had turned a second bedroom into her studio. She’d even built a darkroom that fit neatly into the space where a large walk-in closet had stood. The third bedroom had been reserved for guests until I moved in.
“Listen,” Patty said to me on the first day. “We’re only going to talk about your accident once. And then we’ll never speak of it again.”
“Okay,” I said, being too young to know how seriously that silence was going to hurt me.
“You killed somebody,” she said.
“Yes, I did.”
“You took a woman away from her family and friends. You took a mother away from her daughters.”
“I know.”
“You’re going to think about them everyday for the rest of your life.”
“I know.”
“So that means you have to ask for their forgiveness everyday for the rest of your life.”
“Like on the phone or something?”
“No, no, no. You don’t have the right to speak to them. You have to get down on your knees all by yourself and beg for forgiveness. And you have to do it alone and silently. Not with me. Or your mother. Or your goddamn father. Just you and you alone.”
“Okay,” I said, not knowing that I’d just entered a personal cloister.
“Now, darling,” Patty said. “That’s all there is to say about that. I’m happy you’re here. You’re my blood. And I’m going to give you food, shelter, and a job. You got that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I bet everything feels like razor blades in your shoes,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, you just keep walking. And your feet will stop bleeding someday.”
You might think that my aunt was cruel. But she wasn’t. Not really. Maybe the best thing I can say is that her love was less limited than my mother’s was. I don’t know how they were raised. Their parents had both died before I was born. Aunt Patty had friends, yes, but she never expressed romantic interest in anybody during the years that I lived with her. I had the distinct impression that, aside from photography, she was unaware of what else her body was for. During my years in Los Angeles, I had seven one-night stands and four relationships that all lasted for less than a year, so I was probably as emotionally muted as my mother and aunt were. Or maybe it was more complicated than that. I never told any of my lovers or friends about the accident. Only once did I even consider being honest with somebody. His name was Ethan — a sweet man from Oregon who’d come to LA to act but ended up owning a travel bookstore in Burbank.
One night, in bed, he said to me, “You wouldn’t believe how many customers — how many regular customers — buy guidebooks for countries they’ll never visit. A few of them have never even left the United States. There’s one — this elderly woman who buys two or three guidebooks a month — I don’t think she’s ever left California. I don’t think she has any family left. And not much money. I don’t think she realizes that I only charge her a few dollars for the books. She’s my very favorite customer.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because her curiosity is never defeated by her reality.”
I left him shortly after that night. I had to run before he realize how defeated that I was. How can you love somebody or accept their love when your primary emotion is shame?
I don’t know if Aunt Patty understood how much I was ruled by my shame. We didn’t have those kind of conversations. But, unlike my mother, Patty took me everywhere that she went. In Seattle, I’d always felt like an ignored dog chained in the backyard, but my aunt hired me as her assistant and we constantly traveled Southern California looking for people and places to photograph. I learned how to use different cameras, film, and lighting. And how to develop photos in the darkroom.
As we traveled, Patty would quote famous photographers.
“Ansel Adams,” she’d say. “He said that you don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
“And here’s Nan Goldin,” Aunt Patty would say. “She said that she used to think that she could never lose anyone if she photographed them enough. But she said, in fact, that her pictures showed her how much she’d lost.”
And Patty would say, “And this one, by Dorothea Lange, captures something almost brutal about art. She said, ‘It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.’”
It was the Encyclopedia of Patty.
But more than just teaching me ways of thinking about photography, she taught me how to see what images needed to be captured. Or maybe, considering my modest talents, I was taught to only catch glimpses of what needed to be fully seen.
And so, after a few years of being only her assistant, I also became Patty’s apprentice.
One day, in downtown Los Angeles, she asked me to approach a homeless man to ask if I could photograph him. Up until that point, I’d only photographed small objects like a glass of water or a single paperclip on a desk or a weed that was more beautiful than the flower it was subsuming. I’d been too afraid to photograph people. And I especially didn’t take self-portraits. Though I once thought of displaying ten self-portraits across one white wall with ten different facial expressions — anger, sadness, fear, joy, contempt, and more — but all of the photos would be titled Not Innocent.
“I don’t think I’m ready to aim a camera at someone’s face,” I said to my aunt.
“Yes, you are,” she said. “You take decent photos. Above average. That means you might get better. But you gotta start pushing yourself now. Start breaking past the boundaries in your mind.”
It was the best pep talk that my aunt was capable of delivering. It was enough.
“Okay,” I said and walked toward that homeless man. He had dark brown skin and black hair. And was very short. Barely over five feet tall, as short as me. I assumed that he was Guatemalan.
“Hola, señor,” I said to him.
He just stared at me. His skin was dry and chapped. His hair was greasy and spindly. His wrinkles were geologic.
“Como estas, mi amigo?” I said.
“Why are you speaking Mexican at me?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I assumed you spoke Spanish.”
“I ain’t no Mexican,” he said. “I’m Apache.”
“Oh,” I said. “You’re Native American.”
“Shit, ain’t nobody says Native American. Indians say Indian.”
“Okay, it’s Indians, then,” I said. “I knew some Indians up in Seattle.”
“What kind of Indians?”
“Two daughters and a mother,” I said. “But the mother died.”
“That’s what Indians do,” he said. “We die.”
For a moment, I thought about telling him that I’d killed Melissa. But he wasn’t my priest and I wasn’t his parishioner. And isn’t it true that white people spend our whole lives confessing to Indians? And aren’t we so good at forgiving ourselves? I wanted no part of that ceremony. I had a whole other ceremony to follow — one that I couldn’t stop. So many people in Los Angeles were from Central and South America. Short brown people were everywhere. Short brown women with long black hair pulled back into ponytails. Women who looked like Melissa. There were thousands of Melissas. Tens of thousands. Sometimes, in my car, waiting at an intersection, waiting for the light to change, two, three, or ten Melissas would walk in front of me. And I’d silently and ceremonially apologize to each of them.
“The mother’s name was Melissa,” I said to the Apache. “The daughters are Melody and Aria.”
“I didn’t ask their goddamn names,” he said. “Names are selfish. What tribe are they?”
“Spokane Indians.”
“Never heard of them.”
“They’re a small tribe,” I said. “River people. They worship the salmon.”
“How you know all that? You some kind of asshole anthropologist?”
“I’m just a photographer,” I said. “And probably an asshole, too. But I like your face.”
“Ah, no,” he said. “My face looks like a box of scars.”
“I think your scars are beautiful,” I said.
“Liar,” he said.
“Sometimes, I lie,” I said. “Sometimes, I tell the truth.”
He nodded his head. He’d decided that I was okay.
“Just don’t speak no Mexican at me anymore,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, wondering if he disliked Guatemalans as much as he seemed to dislike Mexicans. Some people like to say that black and brown people can’t be racist. I don’t think that’s true. And what would they say about an Indian man who didn’t like Mexicans? About a brown man who was racist toward other brown people?
“You know we Apaches been kicking the shit out of Mexicans for ten thousand years,” he said.
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“Yeah, and we beat those Spanish invaders, too. I forget what they’re called.”
“Conquistadors,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Long-ass name for them pointy-hat motherfuckers. We shot arrows right through their shiny little armor.”
“You Apache were warriors,” I said.
“We’ve never stopped being warriors.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I stand corrected. I apologize.”
“A lot of them Mexicans pretend to be Indians,” he said. “But they’re really just from Spain.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said and wondered if it was true. I think it might’ve been partly true.
“Anyways,” he said. “Pretty white woman saying pretty white words. What you want from me?”
“Can I please take your photograph?” I asked.
“Indians think cameras steal your soul,” he said.
“I’ve heard that,” I said.
“But I think that’s superstitious bullshit,” he said. “My soul is bulletproof. And bulletproof is expensive.”
“How expensive?” I asked.
“Twenty bucks,” he said.
“Ten bucks,” I counteroffered.
“Ah, damn, you treaty-maker, you’re trying to steal from me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Twenty bucks.”
I gave him his money and he grinned for me. He was missing some teeth and the rest were crooked but they shone brightly white against his dark skin.
“I like your smile,” I said.
“You white people always trying to take pictures of sad Indians,” he said. “My smile is my rifle.”
A few hours later, after I’d developed the photo, Patty studied it.
“This is getting closer to good,” she said. “You got that man to reveal something. That smile is complicated.”
“He’s a desert Indian,” I said. “So he has a desert face.”
“Desert face is a good way to say it,” Patty said. “That’ll begin a conversation.”
I thought of Melissa, a river Indian with a river face.
“I don’t want anybody else to see my photo,” I said. “Is that okay?”
“You’re the artist,” she said. “You’re in charge of your art.”
My father eventually strode away from my life. He divorced my mother and married his mistress. One Christmas, he sent me a card with a photo of his new family — his thieving wife and their unlucky toddler.
“Look at this,” I said to Patty. “The asshole is bragging about his new kid.”
“If it wasn’t for you,” she said, “your father would be a monumental waste of sperm.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But what about his new kid? Is he a waste?”
“To be determined at a later date,” my aunt said.
After I’d first arrived in Los Angeles, my mother called me weekly. Then monthly. Then months passed between calls. Then it was years of silence.
I came home one night to find Patty on the phone with my mother. I’m not sure how they managed to stay connected. From what I could hear on Patty’s side of the calls, they only seemed to talk about books, movies, and food.
“It’s your Mom,” she said and offered her phone to me. “You wanna talk to her?”
“No,” I said.
And then my mother and I never spoke again.
Ten years after I’d killed Melissa, Aunt Patty flew to Seattle for my mother’s funeral. But I didn’t go. Then, eight years after her sister died, Patty coughed up blood one night, discovered that she had lung cancer, and only lived for six more months.
On her deathbed, she held my hand and said, “I’m sorry your mother stopped loving you.”
“But you never did,” I said.
“You’re gonna miss me,” she said.
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re gonna be scared,” she said.
“I’m terrified of a world without you.”
“Everything I have is yours now.”
“I don’t want to use your cameras,” I said. “I’m just gonna leave them where they are.”
“Don’t turn my house into a museum,” she said. “Use everything of mine. They’re your tools now.”
Per Patty’s request, there was no funeral. And also, per her request, I had her body cremated and sprinkled her ashes at the base of a sycamore tree in Griffith Park.
The last thing that Patty quoted to me was, “Henri Cartier-Bresson said that ‘Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.’”
For a year after my aunt’s death, I did nothing with her cameras or mine. Then I called her photographer friends and held a giveaway.
“What’s a giveaway?” asked a vintage collector with nose hairs brambling an inch out of his nostrils. I think that’s why people get married. So they have somebody to monitor their personal appearance.
“A giveaway is a Spokane Indian thing,” I said. “A person’s life isn’t measured by the stuff they keep. It’s measured by what they give to people.”
“Well, then, the pharaohs are fucked,” he said. “They got buried with gold and honey and the bodies of their sacrificial slaves. Hell, they even killed the pharaoh’s dogs and threw them in the crypt, too.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“I didn’t know you were Indian,” he said.
“I’m not,” I said. “I just appreciate their culture.”
It took six days to empty the house of Patty’s possessions. I gave away her photography equipment, photographs, shoes, and clothes, keeping only her work jacket with all the pockets — the blue one that she wore on her artistic treks.
I gave away almost all of my clothes, too. But I kept three black T-shirts, a black sweatshirt with matching black sweatpants, a pair of black jeans, black hiking boots, two black bras, five pair of black underwear, and that blue work jacket.
And I kept one cheap little camera.
Then I called a local charity that accepted used cars. I watched them load Patty’s Prius onto a flatbed and haul it away. I didn’t need a car. Yes, I had a license but driving still made me nervous and tentative.
I called another charity that took away all the furniture — the beds, dressers, bookshelves, tables, lamps, and area rugs.
We never had much in the kitchen so all the utensils, plates, bowls, pans, and pots fit into two cardboard boxes that I left on the curb with “FREE” written in black ink on their sides. Those were gone overnight.
Then I sat in my empty bedroom and wondered if I should keep the stack of the mediocre photos that I’d taken. I suppose that I should’ve become a great photographer because Patty had been my teacher. But, fifteen years after I’d taken that decent photo of a homeless Apache man, I’d never taken anything as good and certainly not anything better.
Philip K. Dick wrote, “When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?”
I think he meant that a photographer, no matter their subject, is also creating an autobiography. So when I look at my meager photographs, I see the reflection of my silence.
I now owned Patty’s house. Her money in the bank was now mine. Almost too much money. And I’d only inherited it because I’d fled Seattle, my parents, and my crime. It didn’t seem fair. If I stayed smart with the house and cash, I was set for life. But it made me wonder if artists and their heirs should be rich. Patty’s photos were alive on the walls of superstars’ houses but none of those people had ever been a part of her life. I wondered how many of them were even aware that Patty had died. She was relatively famous, I guess, but I ignored all the phone calls and emails from reporters who wanted to write an obituary. Journalists had helped destroy my life. So I wouldn’t help them write what would’ve been a bullshit story about Patty, anyway. How do you write something accurate about somebody you never knew? And I also worried that the story might include my past. My juvenile records were sealed, and the wreck had happened twenty years earlier, but the Internet and social media had turned everybody into a public figure. That’s how I knew that Melody and Aria had been raised by their grandmother on the Spokane Indian Reservation — by Melissa’s mother. The girls played volleyball, basketball, and softball at the tribal high school. They’d both graduated from Gonzaga University in Spokane and moved back to the rez to teach English and History. They’d both had boyfriends over the years. All Indian guys from different tribes. But none of those relationships lasted for very long.
And they often posted photos of their mother.
After nearly twenty years away, I stood on the sidewalk near the spot where Melissa was standing when I crashed into her. I’d left my rental car six blocks away and walked. I didn’t want to drive through that intersection ever again.
According to the GPS, the Spokane Indian Reservation was 294 miles away from the intersection where I’d killed Melissa. With restroom, gas, and food breaks, it would probably take me six hours to make that drive. The Spokane Reservation didn’t seem to be a tourist destination. I’d visited other reservations that seemed eager to attract white people and their money. But not the Spokanes. Their reservation was bracketed by the Spokane and Columbia Rivers and, on the map, it looked like something of an island.
Melissa’s memorial garden was gone, overtaken by blackberry brambles. I remembered that the city would spray them with weed killer because they invaded too much of the space around them, crowding out other plants and eroding the soil. But the blackberries, at their best, were delicious. Animals, birds, and humans braved the thorns to eat them. I plucked one from the stem and crushed it between my fingers. Dark juice. I wondered if the fruit had been poisoned by weed killer. I wiped my hand on my pants. They were black so any stain didn’t matter. And then I doubted that the black bramble had been sprayed. It was so massive and wild that the city must not have tried to control it yet. The blackberries could take over the entire city if left untended for a few decades. In any case, the brambles surrounded the base of the cedar trees, the same cedars that I’d crashed into. I remembered that one of the trees had been cut down. The local tribes used cedar for practical and religion reasons so I wondered if they’d somehow come into possession of the cedar that I’d mortally wounded. I didn’t know if the Spokane Indians had a relationship with cedar. It seemed to me that cedar needed a rain shadow in order to grow in abundance. There were four distinct seasons in Eastern Washington. Maybe the Spokane Indians needed all four season in order to thrive. I’d read that that Spokane meant “Children of the Sun” and that Spokane’s sunniest days were during the winter. That felt like a contradiction but maybe it wasn’t. I hadn’t grown up in the snow so I had no firsthand knowledge. And, anyway, maybe humans need contradiction just as much as they needed the sun.
Otherwise, the intersection was the same as the last time I’d seen it, though it was busier with traffic now. Seattle had grown. How many tens of thousands of cars, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, had passed through that intersection in the twenty years since I’d killed Melissa?
A jogger ran in place, waiting for the light to change in the same spot where Melissa had waited so long ago. But it was two in the afternoon and warm. The jogger was white and wore a neon orange tank top and matching shorts and running shoes. She was highly visible, as safe as she could make herself. I thought about asking her if she knew what had happened at the intersection two decades earlier. Probably not. She might be new to the city. To the neighborhood. Or it might be just a dim memory for her. For everybody. It was an accident that had only changed the lives of a few people and I knew that all of the survivors and mourners had moved away. And after seeing that Melissa’s memorial garden had turned into a blackberry bramble, I assumed that her family hadn’t visited there in a long time, either. The garden’s flowers had become ghosts. The city certainly hadn’t paused to remember. That’s how it goes. Very few people matter. Almost all of us are obliterated by the passage of time.
I plucked another berry and ate it. Sweet with a hint of sour.
My high school boyfriend’s house was the same. Re-sided, re-roofed, and re-painted but with the same bones. According to his social media, his parents had sold the house and moved to a downtown condominium. He lived on an island across the bay from Seattle. He was married with four kids. I wondered if he ever thought about the Matchbook cars that had spilled out of my locker. I don’t know if he’d directly participated in that dark prank, if he’d helped load my locker with all those toys, but he’d stood with the audience and laughed. Did he ever think about his act of cruelty? Did he look back in shame? Did his wife and kids ever experience his cruelty? Maybe they saw it on a daily basis. The last time I was in his childhood home, in the furnished basement, in his bed, he kept whispering my name as we made love. As we had sex. As we fucked. All that tenderness and viciousness in one person.
My childhood home had been torn down and replaced by a three-story black box. A heartless construction. Some architects are artists. Some destroy the soul of a neighborhood.
I kept my cheap camera on the passenger seat of my rental car as I drove onto the Spokane Indian Reservation.
Susan Sontag wrote, “There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”
So, as I drove down a steep road, past Little Falls Dam, and over a bridge across the Spokane River, I thought of that homeless Apache man from Los Angeles. And I wondered if I’d made him my possession. He was probably dead. Had probably been dead for years. There might not be another photograph of him in the world. He might be buried in a nameless grave. Or maybe he somehow made it back to his reservation, family, and tribe. He’d joked about cameras stealing Indian souls. He thought it was bullshit. My aunt thought it was just part of the job description.
The Spokane Reservation was beautiful. It seemed to be one epic pine forest, though I saw, as I drove up a steep switchback, that forest fires had burned some areas down to black. I’d seen a video on Melody and Aria’s Facebook where they’d waited at midnight in their car — waited at an intersection near the tribal post office — along with a dozen other Spokanes in their cars, as a wall of flames threatened the little town of Wellpinit, the headquarters for the reservation.
“That sucker’s gonna come right over the hill,” Melody had said.
“No,” Aria said. “God will stop it.”
“It’s just Bo and them out there trying to bulldoze a fireline.”
“God sent Bo and them to do God’s work.”
“You gotta give up that God stuff.”
“You gotta accept God.”
“Looks like God sent us a forest fire.”
It was odd to hear twins bickering about anything, let alone about God. But I’ve seen, because of my research about twins, ultrasound video of twins wrestling for space in the womb. Maybe twins never stop wrestling for space. The only thing for sure is that Bo and the other Indian firefighters did cut the fireline that stopped the blaze from reaching town.
As I drove into Wellpinit, I passed a church that had been abandoned. The windows and front door were boarded up. I guess there were no more Presbyterians on the reservation.
There was more traffic than I expected. And a lot of cars parked on the roadside. Two teams of Indians were playing softball on a sparse field. They wore uniforms so it some kind of official game. I stopped at the intersection, rolled down my window, and called out to an Indian kid walking by.
“Hey,” I said. “Why’s it so busy?”
The kid gave me a puzzled look. I imagined that Indians often give puzzled looks to us white people.
“It’s powwow,” he said.
Of course, of course, I thought. It was the Labor Day weekend powwow. It had been happening annually for over a century. How did I forget that?
“Hey,” I said. “Do you know where Melody and Aria are?”
He gave me another puzzled look.
“They’re dancers,” he said. “So they’re at the powwow grounds. Dancing.”
He shook his head and walked away. But I called after him again.
“Where’s the powwow grounds?” I asked.
He pointed to my right.
“Thank you,” I said.
“No problem,” he said. “White people get to dance, too.”
Yes, I remembered that every powwow has intertribal songs where anybody can two-step to the drumbeat, even the white people in their New Balance sneakers. It’s pretty amazing that, day after day, minute after minute, Indians still welcome white people into their spaces.
I drove to the powwow grounds, followed a security guard’s directions, and parked in a gravel lot. Then I walked across the road onto the grounds. I felt self-conscious. Shame and fear had me breathing hard. I feared that an Indian would recognize me as the white woman who’d killed Melissa. That was irrational, of course. But irrational emotions still hurt as much as real ones.
I’d been to powwows in California but that Spokane Indian powwow was different. There were far fewer white people and far more dark-skinned and dark-haired Indians.
I followed the sound of the drums to the dance arena and walked inside. It was impressive. Bleachers surrounded the dirt dance floor. In front of the bleachers were dozens of folding chairs. And a dozen powwow drums surrounded by dozens of drummers and singers. There were maybe a hundred dancers — men, women, and children — wearing feathers, ribbons, jingles, and facepaint. All of it was circular and gorgeous. I wanted to cry but I didn’t want to be a white woman crying at a powwow.
And then I saw Melody and Aria wearing long buckskin dresses and beaded headwear. They were dancing. Slowly and gracefully stepping in their moccasins that reached up to their knees. They were very tall, over six feet. Taller than almost all of the other Indian women. And taller than at least half of the Indian men, too. Their long black hair was braided into two dark rivers that waterfalled to their waists. A much shorter elderly woman danced between them. I recognized her. Their grandmother. Their mother’s mother. The woman who’d raised them after they’d buried their mother.
Being a photographer, I felt the overwhelming urge to capture their image. But I’d forgotten my camera in the car and I was relieved that I didn’t have it. God knows that I was an inferior photographer who’d take an inferior photo. But I also didn’t want to be a thief.
I found a seat in the bleachers next to an Indian woman dressed in T-shirt and jeans. Standard gear for any American. But she also wore a huge beaded medallion that depicted a red salmon rising over a blue river.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hey,” the red salmon woman said.
“It’s okay if I sit here?” I asked because I didn’t know the powwow rules.
“Sure,” the red salmon woman said. “You’re lucky to find a spot. People been showing up early morning to put their blankets down to save a space.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t trust Indians who wake up at dawn,” she said and laughed at her own joke.
We sat without talking through a few songs. I reflexively bobbed my head and tapped my foot in sync with the dumbbeat. And then I’d realize what I was doing and stop my minor dancing.
“Do you know those tall girls?” I asked.
“Melody and Aria?” said the red salmon woman. “I’ve known them forever. How do you know them?”
“Back in Seattle, I knew their mother a little bit,” I said, feeling like a spy.
“Melissa was a good woman,” she said. “Awful what happened to her.”
“Yes,” I said. “It still hurts.”
“But you know what? I hate to say it but those girls got devastated and lucky at the same time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like I said, Melissa was a really good woman,” she said. “But I think she was headed for a bad end no matter what. And she would’ve taken Melody and Aria with her.”
It was a shocking statement. Too honest. It was something only another Indian could’ve said. It gave me a sense of relief. But I didn’t want that relief. I wanted to cry again. And then a few tears did fall.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the red salmon woman said. “You loved her, didn’t you?”
“I think about her all the time,” I said.
“You should go say hi to the girls. I’m sure they’d love to meet you. You could tell them some stories about their Mom, I bet.”
“Maybe,” I said.
We silently watched the twins and their grandmother move in circles.
“They’re great dancers,” I said.
“Nah,” said red salmon woman. “They’re just average. But they’re still unicorns.”
“Why unicorns?”
“Because they’re college girls who came back to the rez after they graduated,” she said. “And because they’re college girls who are traditional Indians, too.”
The powwow song ended and all the Indians left the dance floor. The twins stood together while their grandmother walked away with a different agenda.
“Come on,” said red salmon woman. “I’ll introduce you.”
I felt powerless as she took my hand and led me out of the bleachers and toward the twins.
“Melody, Aria,” the red salmon woman called to them. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
They turned to face us. Up close, they were even more beautiful. I remembered that their tribe’s name, Spokane, meant “Children of the Sun.” And that’s what they were. Twin suns. I almost closed my eyes against their brightness. Then opened them and accepted their light.
“She knew your mom,” the red salmon woman said about me.
The twins smiled. After two decades, their good thoughts about Melissa were probably larger than their grief — maybe much larger. I only had my grief — my selfish, selfish grief.
“Tell them a story about their mother,” the red salmon woman said.
All at once, every one of my old injuries began to hurt.
“I’m Melody.”
“I’m Aria. What’s your name?”
They reached their right hands out to me. Out of goodwill and peace, I was supposed to take their hands with mine. But I couldn’t do it. The taste of blackberries flooded my mouth.
“How did you know our mother?” Melody asked.
“We can take you to her grave,” Aria said. “She’s buried at the Presbyterian cemetery.”
They were so expectant. So pleased to meet me. But I could see that they didn’t recognize me. They didn’t know who I was. They didn’t know that I was the one who’d forced them to become unicorns.
I realized the red salmon woman was still holding my hand. I pulled it away too roughly.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I said.
And then I hugged the red salmon woman because I didn’t have the strength to hug the twins.
And then I ran.
I was the white woman, weeping, who ran away from the powwow grounds. I ran past the security guards and into the parking lot. I ran past my car and into the pine trees beyond.
Lord, there are forest fires that cannot be extinguished. Lord, there are fire lines that can’t be dug in time to stop all the destruction. Lord, there are flames that burn down the house that lies empty beneath your ribs.
Sherman Alexie is poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, memoirist, and filmmaker. He’s the author of twenty-four books, including his novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the National Book Award for Young Peoples Literature and was listed by the American Library Association as the Most Banned and Challenged Book in the United States from 2010 to 2019. He’s also won the PEN/Faulkner and PEN/Malamud Awards. He wrote and co-produced Smoke Signals, the feature film that won the 1998 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy and is preserved in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. He lives with his wife and sons in Seattle.
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A very well written story, captivating. Love it.
This made me cry on the train. A wonderful story, Sherman.