Standing in front of unit 34, I could swear there’s a low hum radiating down the long metal alleys. And I wonder whether in fact the keys and locks were meant to keep these old memories and broken objects safe—or if they are really meant to keep them from getting out.

—

The unit is full of art.

The storage space is roughly 10 x 20, but so packed with canvases and old art supplies I still have trouble squeezing inside. Many of the paintings are wrapped in tarp and duct tape and garbage bags while a few are left exposed. Not all of them are finished, although it’s difficult to tell: there’s an image of a woman’s face that seems to simply explode or disappear into white space, even though her clothing is painstakingly detailed. They’re Kaycee’s.

Some paintings are better than others. But all of them are good. I can tell that much without knowing a thing about art. I move as carefully as I can, afraid to touch or disturb anything. I peer through the clear garbage bags to puzzle out the shapes she pinned down with her brush: cornfields, the football stadium, even the Donut Hole. All familiar and deeply ordinary—and yet somehow, in her frenzy of brushstrokes and colors, they all light up with a strange and terrifying beauty. The football field opens like the jaws of a shark to consume the sky. The Donut Hole glows against dusk, and its sign casts a fluorescent halo into the clouds, but in the parking lot a figure lies curled in the fetal position.

There are portraits, too: I recognize a young Misha in one, a shadow splitting her face. The next painting, distorted through plastic, looks at first like a collage of random shapes. Then I find a pair of eyes buried deep in the thickness of the paint, and another, and another. It’s like one of those visual deceptions where a vase is buried in a woman’s hair—in a millisecond the jigsaw of random shapes becomes instead a series of faces staring out at me from the paint.

Some glower, others appear to weep. All of them are Kaycee. It’s a self-portrait, an explosion of her—or versions of her—again and again on canvas. One has hair the color of blood. In all of them, her features are obscured, cut up, or erased, some imagined in negative space.

Even when we were little, she had that gift: she could study something I’d seen every day, take it apart and make it new. I labored over line drawings while she made flowers ripple on the page. She spent hours one day in the sun drawing the same enormous mushroom, over and over, until she was satisfied she’d got it right. When she asked if I liked it, I asked her to show me the actual mushroom she’d been staring at all day, but there wasn’t one. Just a scattering of shattered beer bottles in the middle of the field.