A Blue So Dark Read Online Free Page B

and whites, the images so old it's like I've stepped into a time warp. Like it's 1969, because here's an old VW bug-the kind with the engine in the back-plastered with NOW bumper stickers, and here's a woman (the tag stuck to the glass says it's actually a self-portrait) with long, ironed hair and a skirt so short it barely even covers her belly button. Another photo's a still life, but instead of apples and oranges, it's an assortment of roach clips and political buttons-peace signs and enameled flowers that scream Stop the War Machine and Anti-Draft and End Mass Murder in Vietnam!
    "What is all this stuff?" I ask her, pointing.
    "Oh, pictures for the show," she sighs. "Trying to decide which ones to use."
    "The show?"
    "Yeah-you know," she says, waving her hand like it's nothing-like she's just rearranging some old knickknacks. "That First Friday Art Walk business."
    "You're going to be in it?"
    "Yeah," Nell says, sighing into her chair. "A change of pace from all the family portraits that pay the bills."
    "What's the theme?" I ask, trying to make sense of it all.
    "Theme," she snorts. "My-life."
    This practically lights my freaking hair on fire. My eyes start bouncing through the details in the photos, searching them the way some ransacker would rifle through the contents of somebody's drawers. "Your life?" I say, disbelief wracking my voice.
    "What?" she laughs. "You don't think an old lady like me ever smoked weed or got arrested at a war protest?" She grins as she twirls a shock of electric-white hair around her finger.
    "Who's this?" I ask, my heart knocking on my tonsils as I point at one of the framed photos. But I'm not talking about the younger Nell in the frozen image, wearing a one-piece swimsuit. I'm talking about the girl Nell's hugging-she's twelve, maybe thirteen, with long black hair. They're laughing in the picture, their bodies tangled like they've accidentally fallen onto the beach. Grains of sand dot their thighs. But they look like they're just so absurdly happy, they don't care that they've crumpled into a painful heap, elbows in stomachs, thigh bones crashing together like cymbals.
    "My daughter," she says. I know that's what she says. But the words that bounce in my head, up and down like rubber balls, are your mother. Because this is her-Grace Ambrose, born April 3, 1970-when she was younger even than I am now. This is my mother, before illness built a nest inside her brain. And this is Nell when she was Grace's mother, when times were still sweet, when no one knew yet that Mom would leave home in a furious rush, barely eighteen, and never speak to Nell again.
    "I didn't know you had a daughter," I lie, glancing over my shoulder at the white-haired Nell. The truth is, Nell's the one who doesn't know she has a granddaughter, let alone that her granddaughter is standing in her very own studio, as she has just about every Saturday for the past five months now, because she wanted to know if her grandmother really was the evil incarnate her mother always made her out to be.
    "Yeah, well, you know-" Nell says, her voice trailing off like a pop song that fades at the end instead of culminating in one loud, final guitar chord. "It's complicated."
    "Mothers are complicated, too," I mumble.
    "Yours must be," Nell laughs. "I swear, with a name like `Aura,' I always figured somebody drop-kicked you in the woods-only, instead of being raised by wolves, you were raised by the last hippie commune on the face of the earth."
    Thank God my town is just big enough to get lost in. If I lived in a real-life Mayberry, I'd never be able to pull this off-Nell would have known exactly who I was the minute I'd shown up. Or the town busybody would have grabbed Mom's sleeve in the coffee aisle of the grocery store, blabbing that I was at Nell's studio-and I'd be in the coldest, darkest dog house ever built. I never would have gotten a chance to know my grandmother.
    I turn back to the photo that looks exactly like the fairy