Ten years after my brother burned to death in our backyard, I hung thirty-one paintings in a rented loft on Mission Street.

We found a spot for the old minivan four blocks away, a small miracle. But Mission Street smelled of urine, and I kept pressing my nose into the elbow of my sweatshirt for the annihilating sweetness of turpentine. My husband carried the larger canvases; I took the small ones and a shoebox of track-light gels. Twice we had to edge past a man in a three-piece suit—three pieces from three different suits—throwing up into a trash can, while a woman in a leopard-skin halter circled him, shouting and waving her purse. Beside me Juan Carlos turned the canvases in against his chest and lengthened his stride. For a moment I smelled the Gabilan hills of my childhood instead: the golden lumps rolling out into the horizon, the drowsy fields lying open like palms, the soil itself clean. Here on Mission Street the dirt was alive, and it was mean. It hunched in the corners.

The loft was not much better. A brown blob had spread across the ceiling around an unshaded bulb, ringed by an advancing band of yellow, and I was certain that one day it would bring the wet plaster down and suffocate us all, or hand us some slower death by asbestos. Then the fact of it lodged in my throat like a swallowed stone: this was where my show would hang. And in it, against Juan Carlos’s wishes, I would unveil Diver. He said he couldn’t be in a room with it. He didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask. If the ceiling chose that night to fall, I thought, it might be for the best.

At night, the room forgave itself. The track lights lent the canvases a dishwater glow, as I had intended, and all but erased the stain overhead. The breathy smell of cheese filled the place, and later, after a bottle slipped from someone’s hand and burst, an oaky sweetness of Chardonnay rose up through it, cut with floor wax.

A knot of gel-haired young men came first—dot-com, I guessed—and I circulated behind them with my hands folded like a dilettante, gathering scraps of their bright, weightless talk. Y2K was a nothing, one of them was saying. Y2K had always been a nothing. The serious collectors arrived later, known by their solitude, their contempt for analysis, their long attention to one or two works and no others. Within the hour a red dot had gone up beside Moth Wings, and I caught the giddy flash of Juan Carlos’s eye across the room; he’d made the sale. But for hours after that nothing else sold, and I disliked, more and more, the thought of Moth Wings hanging alone in a stranger’s house, spilling its guts over and over to a bathroom across the hall.

A commotion in the doorway announced Sandra Billingsly—arching her back, sweeping the room, throwing off confidence like radio waves. She was a faculty art therapist at the Veterans’ hospital, where I took clients two afternoons a week. It was Sandra who had pushed me to show that night, Sandra who, through her husband, had made sure that a few of the more consequential collectors marked it down. She crossed straight to Diver and stood before it with her spine tense, a strung bow. She didn’t look at paintings so much as aim herself at them.

“This one changes everything,” she said. “Throws all the rest into a different light.”

I looked at my own canvas and saw only the places where the black had gone flat and dead because I’d overworked it. That was what standing next to Sandra did.

“It’s the same face, though, isn’t it.” She spoke lightly, to the wall. “All nine. The same face, a little more gone each time. I keep wanting to ask you whose it is.”

“Nobody’s,” I said. “It’s a study.”

“Mm.” She pressed a finger into her chin.

She didn’t know that I’d been painting that face since before I could hold a brush right, and that I’d chosen it about as much as you choose the shape of your own hands. Nobody knew. I’d first seen it when I was four, on the ceiling of the upstairs hall: a face green and violet at once, the color you see when you look straight at the sun and then shut your eyes. It hung up there most nights of my childhood, looking down without seeing me. I’d hold my pee until it cramped rather than walk under it to the bathroom. But I never told a soul; I assumed everyone had one. It had hung there long before Tom Coady, before the murder, before there was a single thing a person could point to and say, There, that’s what did it to her.

Sandra felt only the edge of it. The face wasn’t a subject I’d picked; it was a thing using me to get itself onto a wall.

“Your other work plays with a person,” she said. “It teases: how little you can show, what makes a face. Who can you see when there’s no one there?”

The cold came in at my ankles as the loft door opened. I didn’t turn to look.

“But this one.” Sandra squinted at the canvas, her back still curving impossibly backward. “She really is in there. Is she going under? Or is she coming up? You won’t say. That’s the terror of the whole thing.”

“You don’t like it.”

Sandra drew a breath in through her nose and held it a beat too long. “It makes me feel like I can’t breathe.”

“That’s the point of it, though,” a man’s voice said. “Not being able to.”

I felt him before I placed him. The cold of the street still in his coat, ink, starched cotton, and, under all of it, cough-drops. My pulse raced in my neck. I looked at my painting.

“They taunt you,” he said, to the row of canvases, not to us. “You feel it? Start down at that end”—the earliest, the shyest—“and walk up to this one. It’s trapped in there, unable to breathe. But they get less careful as they go. She can’t help showing a little more each time.”

“Tempt,” Sandra said. “They tempt. They lead the eye toward the dark and let you fill it in yourself.”

“No. Taunt. And this one doesn’t let the eye fill anything in. This is a person who can’t get a breath.”

I stepped aside to let someone pass, and the shadows of the room went over the painting and off again.

“I’ve stood over a few of these,” he said. “They come up wearing that look.”

Sandra laughed, not sure of him. “It’s a metaphor, Mr.—”

“I know what it is.” He looked at her now, pleasant. “It’s both.”

I wanted to tell them they were both wrong, that I’d sat at the easel on the balcony over the trash chute for weeks, trying to paint something else, then mixed the black and gotten lost down in it, and come up with this.

“You two know each other?” Sandra said.

“Mr. Eldridge.” I got the name out level.

“So you remember me.”

“Everyone remembers you.” To Sandra I explained, “From back home.”

“From back home,” he agreed. “Sheriff’s department, down in Monterey County.” He smiled at her. His face was freshly shaved, with some razor burn on his neck.

He waved his wide hand, like a paddle, toward the row. “These used to look at you. You’d come around a corner and there it’d be, staring, like it was waiting for you.” He put his head to one side. “But this one’s not looking. Not at us, anyway. What’s it looking at?”

“Itself,” Sandra said. “It’s the self turned inward, looking for itself.”

“Sure,” he said, and let it lie there.

I set my glass on the sill so it wouldn’t clatter against my ring.

Somebody in violet caught Sandra’s sleeve—a collector, a question—and she turned away. One second. Less.

I put my mouth near his ear, and I wasn’t level anymore. “Don’t you do this here.”

“Do what?” He didn’t drop his voice.

“Not in front of her. Not in this room.”

“I’m admiring your work.” His eyes came down me, slowly, and stopped at my feet. I could feel the sweat on my heels. “Reebok. Size eight.” He turned and plucked a toothpick of cheese from a tray floating by. “You’ve got long feet, for a woman. I made casts once.”

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.” I spoke too quickly. I should have said, What casts? But maybe the time for that had passed

“No.” He chuckled. “You kept my card, though.” He popped the cheese into his mouth.

Sandra was back, glowing, catching the tail of it. “What card?”

“Old business,” I said, and smiled. My voice came out fine, it came out fine, but my hand, as I clutched the hem of my blouse, was clammy to the wrist.

Eldridge leaned in toward me—just an inch, a man getting closer to be heard over a room. “There’s a young man in the office now. Doesn’t like a thing left open.”

I kept my face to the painting.

“And they can do things with what’s kept these days.” Lower. “Things they couldn’t, back then.”

“I don’t—”

“You do.”

A couple drifted behind us, laughing at something, and he raised his glass to them, easy, a guest at a party, and waited them out of earshot.

“Come to me before it’s him.” Soft as a priest now, at my ear. “I’m old. I’d sooner it was me you told. I’d sooner you came standing up.”

The back of my collar had gone damp.

“There’s a man’ll die where he’s sitting. Never lifted a hand. That keep you warm, does it, nights?”

Sandra was a few steps away, examining a canvas she’d already looked at twice. Juan Carlos was entangled with guests behind a partition. I could make out the drawl of his voice, not the words.

“Nobody’s innocent,” I said. Low, level. It took everything I had.

“No.” The smile, there and gone. “I thought you might feel that way.” Then, full and warm, chin up for the whole room to see: “Congratulations, Gwendolyn. Truly. A fine show.” He fastened the top button of his coat and told Sandra it had been a pleasure. Then he went out through the crowd to the door, and the cold came in around him and was gone.

“What an odd, rude little man,” Sandra said. “Where did you say you know him from?”

I reached for my glass on the sill. I’d sweated a whole gray thumbprint onto it, and I stood there in the middle of my own opening working the glass with my fingers, over and over, long after there was nothing left to rub.

Father arrived just as the crowd was thinning. He was easy to spot, in pleated slacks and deck shoes, working through the black sweaters and gabardine, blinking from stranger to stranger like a man come to an airport to meet a distant relative.

The deck shoes made me think of his cruise to Barbados with Marty and Barbara. She got the house, I’d once heard him say, and I got you two. Barbara’s answering look had said clearly, Lucky us. The story had come down to me in pieces, some from Father, some from things Marty and Barbara let drop: that he’d spent nearly the whole cruise in his cabin, except for one night when he drank four shots of Malibu rum, danced badly to Nirvana, and ended up alone on deck with a cocktail waitress, whom he apparently frightened off by telling her about the murder at his house. “Had a rough go of it,” Marty liked to say of that trip.

Finally he spotted me and lit up with relief. His embrace was muscular and smelled of aftershave, and it reminded me, as it always did, that he was a man. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, letting go and looking around.

“She’s not here, don’t worry. One of her groups is meeting.”

“Look, you sold one!” He nodded at Moth Wings.

“The only one.”

“Yeah, but he’ll tell his buddies, and then they’ll all be beating down your door.”

I felt my face do the thing I hated—Collectors don’t have buddies, it said.

He put his hands in his pockets and began to wander among the canvases, and I followed a few steps back. His deck shoes stepped carefully, heel to toe.

Juan Carlos caught up to him. “Jerry!”

“Hi, Juan Carlos.” He didn’t say Juan, I noticed. That was new.

“What do you think?”

Father folded his arms and gave the question its due. “You know, I always figured art was supposed to look nice.”

Juan Carlos laughed, too loud.

“But she got me to see that’s not really the point. Or it doesn’t have to be.” He winked at me. “It’s supposed to make you feel something. Or see something you thought you knew—even something as plain as a face.”

We walked a while. He had seen most of the paintings before, but he was working to find new things in them, pulling back from each as if struck by some small private revelation, and I found myself at his side. We took the rest of the wall at the same slow pace, our steps landing together. He stopped at my calmest piece—a field of violet waves with almost nothing in it to suggest a face—and I rested a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t reach up or turn, only let it stay there. When we came to the darker canvases, I saw them through his eyes and hurried him past.

At the end of the night, when it was only the three of us, we finished a Napa Riesling and stood marveling at the emptied room, at the faint cones of dust turning under the lamps.

“Wonder what I’d paint,” Father said, “if I could.”

“Why couldn’t you?” Juan Carlos said. “There’s nothing magic about it. Anyone can learn it. Like the guitarra. Like carpentry.”

I’d heard his drawing-isn’t-magic speech before, more than once, always with the same two examples in the same order, and I looked away to the window, fogged with the warmth of our breath. It wasn’t the speech I was listening to, it was the sound of his English—the drawl he’d carried up from San Antonio and, I always suspected, had gone on practicing in private, thickening it over the years the way other men thicken at the waist. His Spanish ran the other way, a hot clatter I couldn’t follow a word of and loved to hear. A single Spanish word, however, set down perfectly in the middle of all that Texas, was for the room.

Through a cleared patch in the fog I could make out a billboard for a radio station in sickening pinks and yellows, while behind me my husband explained my life’s work to my father.

“I don’t know where it comes from. I mean—” Father swallowed. I heard him set down his glass. “I’ve got a dental practice.”

He was pulling something out of his coat when I turned. A clipping from a magazine, two folded pages, stapled in a corner. “I thought you might—” he said to me. Then he stopped. I could see the title: The Magic of Art Therapy. A stock photo of a boy with some crayons. “I know you do adults. You might find it interesting. They say you don’t have to be any good at art.” He held it out only a little, and when I didn’t reach for it, he folded the crease down again. “Them, that is.”

I took the clipping from him and held it, moving my thumb over the staple. Then I put it in my pocket, still folded.

Father picked up his glass. “I have a proposition.” He gestured toward me with the glass, not quite a toast. “I want an art therapy session. Lord knows I could use one.”

“Dad. It wouldn’t be like you think. And I’m supposed to stay out of it.”

“Could do you both some good,” Juan Carlos said.

“I’ll pay you double the going rate—that’s only fair, since you’ll have to be involved, like Juan says. Juan Carlos.” He pulled out a checkbook.

“Dad, please.”

“I insist.” He licked his thumb and flipped to a fresh check. “How’s Tuesday night?”

Juan Carlos began stacking trays. “I think it’s a good idea.”

“I know you do,” I snapped.

“Come on, Gwen,” he said, “why do you have to be so opaque?” Bottles clinked in his arms.

“Fine.”

I looked at Father. He had gotten older. His lips were thin and pale as folded linen, and his glasses were bifocals now, the division lines making little cups of the flesh under his eyes. But the eyes themselves were bright, and he was swallowing something down, the hopeful bob of his Adam’s apple giving him away.

I felt the tears come, and he must have seen them because he put away his checkbook and rested his hand on my arm. “It’s all right, sweetheart. We don’t have to. It’s all right.”

I let the hand fall away.

When I raised my head, he wasn’t looking at me. He had the glass tilted, turning it slowly by the stem, watching the last inch of Riesling climb the side and slide down, and he did not drink it.

Under everything, Eldridge’s voice hadn’t left my ear. Soft, close, pleasant as a neighbor across a fence, the cough-drop still on his breath. That keep you warm, does it, nights?

“Tuesday,” I said.

I looked for Juan Carlos. He’d stopped at the door, the empty bottles cradled in one arm and a stack of trays under the other. He used his elbow to flip on the overhead light. On the ceiling the brown stain stood out again, the yellow ring heavier and wetter than I remembered.

Gwendolyn Hale is an artist in San Francisco. She’s been painting the same face since before she could hold a brush right—a face going under in a black that she grinds herself out of soot. She has never been able to say whose face it is.

In the last week of the millennium, she has her first real show. A retired detective from Monterey County crosses the room and reveals to her that he knows her secret: she set the fire that killed her brother in 1989. A man went to prison for it, and unless she confesses, he will die there.

In 1989, Gwen was a lonely girl in Mirasol, a farming town in the Salad Bowl of California, in the second year of a drought. Her mother rented their old in-law unit to Tom Coady, a charming drifter who said he broke horses in Alberta. He seemed to be the only adult who saw Gwen instead of her gifted, quiet brother. Then she discovered that Coady was raping her brother, and she decided to kill him. But the fire she set killed her brother instead, and Coady was convicted of murder.

What she intended that night, and what some part of her may have wanted, she has spent the rest of her life trying to work out.

The novel runs in two converging timelines, Mirasol in 1989 and San Francisco a decade later. Told in order, it would ask whether she gets caught. In parallel, it asks how she lives inside the secret, which is the only question I wanted to answer. In the later timeline she confesses constantly without ever saying it: to her husband, to a dying stranger, to a grief circle, to a police form she can’t fill in. Meanwhile the vice closes. If she confesses, a child rapist will go free. If she doesn’t, she can never have a real life. Both timelines end in a courtroom, with Coady’s conviction in 1990, and hers ten years later.

In the final pages, Gwen accepts that she knew. She goes back to that night, and what she finds there is not absolution. She remembers looking in the window to the room where the fire began, and this time she knows that the shape under the blanket was small. She loved him, and she wanted him gone.

I loved my brother. I wanted him gone, sometimes. All children want that, sometimes. In writing this novel, I was exploring what separates the wish from the act. I suspected that the distance is shorter than we like to think. LAMPBLACK asks if a person can ever fully know her own intentions—if she can spend a lifetime expressing herself, in nine canvases showing a face she will not name, without ever getting to the bottom of what she meant—and what it costs the body and the mind to hold onto a thing like that.