"No, no, she's still in it," she said. "She's absolutely still in it. It's just—there was an accident with the roof. Water. She's had to redo it. No. No, I'd rather you didn't do close-ups, actually. I know I said. I know. I'm telling you different." A long pause. "Because it's her picture," my mother said. "Not mine. She'll tell you what she wants people to look at."
I finished the roof at eleven-forty Friday night.
That left the window.
The upstairs right window, the hole my sister dug out with the corner of a putty knife. I had saved it for last because I didn't know what to put in it. I'd thought about it all day while I tore. I could put her back the way she was, at the desk with the chem book. But that was a lie, she'd said, and she was right. I could put her at the dining room table, downstairs, with my mother, but then it would be a different house, a house I hadn't seen yet, and I didn't put things in my pictures I hadn't seen. I could leave the hole, the raw plywood, and let people wonder. I thought about that one the longest. It would have been honest. It would have been the meanest thing I'd ever made.
In the end I filled it with a piece of yellow tissue, the warm yellow I'd used for all the lit windows, layered three times so it glowed. A lamp on. A desk, made from a sliver of the grocery-bag brown. A chair pushed back from the desk at an angle, like somebody had just gotten up. Nobody in it.
Krista came down around midnight and looked at it for a long time.
"Where'd I go," she said.
"I don't know yet," I said. "I'll tell you when I see it."