Carey wasn’t a painter, not exactly, though obviously it requires a very specific hand to realize glazes and paints and so on into sculpture. The most affecting parts of her sculptures were not the colors—they were necessary and very accurate and terrifying, but no—rather, it was the form, the way she took the mold of a living person’s body and, later, imaginatively inflated the cast version to match the various degrees of decay. Skin puffed up or went hard or fell away, and that was the art. The paint was—it was a necessary afterthought. It was specific and accurate but not haunting. The shape was what mattered.

One single dagger hung on the wall of brushes. Carey’s draggy calf line from five years ago could have been made by this, I thought, though it was hard to know. Brushes, made so patiently, so lovingly, were so easy to destroy. Leave them out too long and they sour.

Hers was in fine shape, if a little packed around the ferrule, the metal cylinder that held the squirrel-hair brushes in place, with remnants of old paint. I picked it up, gave it a solid wipeout with turp, then mixed a true neon yellow and painted the word YOKEFELLOWS over and over across the panels of Obedience, where they could hide beneath the coming layers of blacks.

It’s such an odd word, I thought, pushing and dragging and swooping the letters as artfully as I could. I laid the word down again and again, in twins and in stacks and loops and towers.

The only yokefellows I could think of were oxen. Who else would share a yoke? When did people write about oxen? The Bible? The Middle Ages? Shakespeare?

I made a mental note to ask Charlie what it had meant.

*  *  *

There’s a video of Stevie Nicks getting her makeup done and singing her guts out on an early version of “Wild Heart.” Cady used to play it on her computer. “I watch this every day and so do a third of American women,” she told me. In the video, Stevie is sitting on a metal radiator in Annie Leibovitz’s studio, so young, and so blond, eyes like dinner plates. You can’t believe that she is ever going to be unhappy, or that she’s already spent a million dollars on cocaine, or that her heart has ever been broken. She is a miracle in action. And you don’t know why anyone would ever try to stop her.