Blue. Because blue was her current conviction about color. Standing in front of the car with her arms at her sides and her head tilted slightly, looking at it the way she'd been looking at it since the beginning, like it was a puzzle she was deciding whether to solve. Cole stood beside her. "It looks different here," Emma said.
"How so? " "At the shop it looked broken. " She studied the car. "Here it looks like it meant to look this way. " Cole looked at the burned carbon, the warped clamshell, the missing door, all of it lit carefully by the museum's installation lights, which did exactly what good lighting does to difficult things, showed them honestly without making them worse than they were. "I think that's kind of the point," he said. "That broken things can be displayed? " "That things that went through something hard carry that in them. And that's not something to hide. " He paused.
"Some things are more true for what happened to them, not less. " Emma was quiet for a moment. "Like people," she said. "Yeah," Cole said. "Like people. " She slipped her hand into his and they stood there together in front of the only completed prototype of Program 7X Meridian, and Cole felt the weight of the past 14 months, the thousand-dollar bet, the long nights in the workshop, the fear that had lived quietly in the background of everything, the grinding legal months, the morning the report arrived and he'd finished making her sandwich and called her down to breakfast like it was an ordinary day. He felt all of it settle into something quieter and more permanent than it had been while it was happening.
Victoria appeared at his other shoulder. She'd managed to disengage from the museum director and she stood now in the space beside Cole without announcing herself looking at the car. "The director wants a photograph," she said. "The three of us with the car. " "Uh Emma, too," Cole said. "Obviously Emma, too. " A pause.
"I said the three of us. " Cole looked at her. Victoria was looking at the car, but there was a small shift at the corner of her mouth that was not quite a smile and was more honest than a smile would have been. "Okay," he said. They took the photograph. It was imperfect.
Emma blinked at the wrong moment and Cole had his hands in his pockets because he never knew what to do with his hands in photographs. And Victoria was turned slightly toward the car rather than the camera because something about the exhibit had drawn her attention at the last second. It looked like what it was, three people who had been through something together standing in front of the evidence of it, none of them posing. Later, after the opening, after the guests had gone and the museum staff were beginning to close up, Cole stood alone with the car for a few minutes. Emma was with Victoria near the exit talking about something.
He could hear Emma's voice from across the room, the animated cadence of a point being made about something she found interesting, and Victoria's voice responding with the directness that Emma had apparently decided somewhere along the way was a quality she be Cole looked at the car. He thought about the mechanic's truth, the thing he'd always believed and rarely said aloud, that objects carried their history in their structure, in their materials, in the marks left by the hands that built them. That if you knew how to look, you could read a thing, not just what it was, but what it had been through, who had touched it, what they'd intended. Most people didn't know how to look. Most people saw damage and stopped there.