The Corrections

succeeded in working through her grief even as her compulsion to draw guns intensified; that she mentioned this compulsion to no one, not even to the M.D./Ph.D. in Wilmington; that her friends and advisers all constantly exhorted her to “heal” herself through her “art”; that by “art” they meant her decorative woodcuts and lithos; that when she happened to see an old woodcut of hers in the bathroom or guest bedroom of a friend she twisted her body with shame at the fraudulence; that when she saw guns on TV or in a movie she writhed in a similar way and for similar reasons; that she was secretly convinced, in other words, that she had become a real artist, a genuinely good artist of the gun; that it was the proof of this artistry that she destroyed at the end of each day; that she was convinced that Jordan, despite having earned a B.F.A. in painting and an M.A. in art therapy, and despite the encouragement and paid instruction in art she’d received for twenty years, had not been a good artist; that after achieving this objective view of her deaddaughter she continued to draw guns and ammo; and that in spite of the rage and thirst for vengeance that her continuing obsession obviously betokened she had never once in five years drawn the face of Khellye Withers.
    On the October morning when these mysteries impressed themselves on her en masse, Sylvia took the stairs to her studio after breakfast at a run. On a sheet of ivory Canson paper, and using a mirror so that it appeared to be her right hand, she drew her left hand with its thumb raised and fingers curled, sixty degrees behind full profile, a nearly full rear view. This hand she then filled with a snub-nose .38 revolver, expertly foreshortened, whose barrel penetrated a pair of smirking lips above which she penciled accurately, from memory, the taunting eyes of Khellye Withers, over the recent exhaustion of whose legal appeals few tears had been shed. And at that—a pair of lips, a pair of eyes—Sylvia had set down her pencil.
    “It was time to move on,” Sylvia said to Enid. “I saw it all of a sudden. That whether I liked it or not, the survivor and the artist was me, not her. We’re all conditioned to think of our children as more important than us, you know, and to live vicariously through them. All of a sudden I was sick of that kind of thinking. I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but I’m alive now. And I can live deliberately. I’ve paid the price, I’ve done the work, and I have nothing to be ashamed of.
    “And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you’re seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talksseriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.”
    “Maybe one more?” Enid said to the dwarf, raising her glass. She was almost wholly not listening to Sylvia, but shaking her head and murmuring “Uh!” and “Oh!” while her consciousness stumbled through clouds of alcohol into such absurd realms of speculation as how the dwarf might feel against her hips and belly, embracing her. Sylvia turned out to be very intellectual, and Enid felt befriended under somewhat false pretenses, but while not listening she also had to listen, because she was missing certain key facts, such as whether Khellye Withers was black and whether Jordan had been brutally raped.
    From her studio Sylvia had gone straight to a Wawa Food Market and bought one of every dirty magazine it had in stock. Nothing she found in the magazines was sufficiently hardcore, however. She needed to see the actual plumbing, the literal act. She returned to Chadds Ford and switched on the computer that her younger son had given her to foster closeness in their time of loss. Her e-mailbox contained a month’s backlog of filial greetings that she ignored. In less than five minutes she located the goods she wanted—all it took was a credit card—and she moused through thumbnail views until she found the necessary angle on the necessary act with the necessary actors: black man performing oral sex on white man,