He turned off the engine. He hadn’t slept the night before.

It wasn’t the
thunder and lightning that had kept him up—he’d been going through the art
works that Julia had left stacked against the wall in the upstairs bedroom that
had been her studio. They were piled in the back seat now. The paintings, he
thought, while sitting in the car perched on the berm of the slope, were not as
strong as the drawings, which, though more or less precise studies for their oil
counterparts, all rural Virginia scenes—trees in a field, a dying pond, a rotting
house in a mountain hollow—nonetheless had about them, with their bold
erasures and smudges and retraced pencil lines, the feeling of something
abstract and, in comparison with the worked and reworked paintings,
complexly three-dimensional. The paintings seemed to exist as strangely flat
fields—they put Billy in mind of Early American naïve art—and, in looking at
them and, back in the day, talking to Julia about them, he’d come to see how
purposefully she distorted light and shadow. “I’m searching for something that
isn’t quite there,” she’d once said.
He was fearful of shifting his weight and starting another slide—the car
had gone four or five feet already, and the embankment fell maybe ten more.
He could hear running water. Was there a creek off in the woods? He knew this
country, or thought he did, but it was always surprising him, just the same.
He wiped his hands on his pants. Gently now, he ratcheted down the
brake. He eased open the driver’s-side door.

The Emerald Light in the Air, Donald Antrim