Dust of Eden (4 page)

Where were his ashes?
Those oddly red ashes his partner had sent.

She hadn't seen the glass flask since before Amber's accident. It had gone from the mantel to the study after the Lutheran day school leased the lower floor, but it wasn't there now. She was sure of that. Had it been thrown away? On the brink of self-destruction, the thought that her father's ashes had disappeared from her life seemed apocalyptic.

Another spasm of lightning, and she twisted to scrutinize the shelves, too late to catch anything but
afterdrift
. She groped through to the next room and the next, and then, in the dining room, where a curved glass highboy sat, she saw something that afterward seemed like a silver finger pointing from her father's grave. Breathing heavily in the dark, she waited until a sustained flash brought back the silver glint precisely where she was peering. Dust within glass within glass, she saw. The flask sat on the middle shelf of the cabinet, crowded against mugs and knickknacks that were leather or pewter or clay.

The bramble of lightning died as she shuffled toward the highboy—the darkness where she had last seen the highboy—and her cane thumped on the hardwood floor and her other hand paddled the air as if it were webbed. Her nails scrabbled against the glass, and the door opened with a yelp. Aromas of leather and lacquered wood puffed out. She fumbled past objects, trembling as though she were really reaching to touch the hand of the man who had authored her being. A millisecond flash from the window guided her, and she clamped on to the flask as if it were the last rock before the dizzying drop of a cataract. Conception and death, the bookends of life . . . her father the witness to both . . . alpha and omega.

Something fell, something broke, and she caught her breath for an instant, even though she knew it was not glass but the muted grate of ceramic. Slowly she withdrew the flask. By weight alone she was sure it was intact. Hugging that Holy Grail to her breast, she beetled back through the house to the staircase just as the electricity came back on. Up the steps she climbed to the third floor, past the framed photos she had raked from the walls, past her bedroom into her inner sanctum: the studio.

She could tell by the smell of a painting how much it had dried, and the last one wasn't ready for varnishing yet, but she tumbled it from the easel. Still clutching the flask, she toted a fresh canvas out of the pile she had ready and bumped it awkwardly into place. Then she went to her bench and squeezed out her paints. By habit she always did this in the same order: cool colors on the short side of the rectangular palette, warm colors to the right, separated by white. When she pulled the glass stopper from the flask, she hesitated. Her eyes scanned the shelves, and now she culled containers and pigments, a mortar and pestle, linseed oil, a rack of glass jars, a ring of plastic measuring spoons, rags and clean stir sticks broken down from larger sticks. Again she hesitated, weighing alternatives. Then she picked up the palette and scraped the oils into the glass jars. Like a master chef working from scratch, she prepared her stock according to instinct and imagination, cutting—always cutting with the
turps
—until the paste was thinned into a liquid in the jars. The colors blended swiftly now: first a basic array, then the flesh tones, then a very subtle
viridescence
for the eyes, and finally a variety of flaxen tints—she would have to experiment as she painted—for the hair.

This was the cognoscente Ariel
Leppa
. This was what her innermost passions, left to their own designs for a lifetime, had become. She was unschooled but sure in her craft. She had sought no help, been offered none. She knew painting, knew herself, knew what she saw and how to put its essence on canvas. But tonight there would be one difference, one new element in her alchemy.

Crying dry-eyed, not daring to inhale or exhale, she
unstoppered
the flask. Cautiously she lowered a kind of
pointel
made of glass with a tiny ladle on the end into the mouth. She expected the fine red dust to be compacted, or at least to have formed a crust, but there was no tension there at all. The glass ladle slid in as if it were air. Slowly she withdrew the measure and bore it to the first container of paint, and there she sprinkled it.

It lay on the surface like nutmeg on a soup, not sinking, not changing color at all. She picked up a flat stick and stirred it into suspension. Then she scrutinized the color and texture with satisfaction. No detectable change. She could cut it again and the fine red dust would not make its presence known. The difference in handling would simply be the thinness she chose. And thinned paints were her forte.

Because she didn't have time to let things dry. No time at all. Thick oils could take months to set completely, even years. Two weeks minimum just to dry to the touch. She had gone to galleries and talked with painters and knew she was right about this. But she had also learned to control the use of washes of turpentine, and even a drying and thinning medium like
Liquin
, so that she could finish quickly without sacrificing detail. The secret was a technique called
alla
prima
. And no one, she thought, did that better than she.

Wet on wet. She would work that way, using all the tricks she had accumulated in a lifetime. The painting would glow a little, look a little pale, but that was all right. It would be complete and detailed despite the wet layering. Details were another strength of her art. Not the kind of bigger-than-life detail of the masters, but a pure skill in creating likeness. At an age when other painters began to depend on memory and habit, Ariel
Leppa
still saw with an evolving interpretation and possessed a flawless transfer from mind to wrist and fingers. And now she was ready for her last painting.

A painting with her father's ashes, but not his face. Because her mother had destroyed the photographs, and the recall of the child who had wiped his image irretrievably from her memory was only of Old Spice shaving lotion, and a raspy cheek when he hugged, and the faintly mellow molasses smell of tobacco in his pocket in that same hug. Try as she might, she could never pull his face into focus, as if admitting it had existed was to admit it had departed. But now she needed his presence, because the final distillation must testify to some meaning or coherence that might have been. So she merged the three critical elements of her life: her skill, her father ashes, and the hallowed subject of her final portrait . . .

Amber.

No shortage of Amber photos. From studio poses to blurry snapshots, monochrome to noir, seraphic smiles to glowering outrage; and a progression from bassinet to wheelchair (the last one taken at Amber's insistence because Ariel didn't want a photo of her daughter in that contraption). But Ariel
Leppa
, nee Kenyon, didn't need a photograph for this painting. It would be Amber at age nine. Amber when her hair was golden and her eyes were a cat's green, and when there was something indefinable on the verge of rebellion in her soul and body that was still contained by childhood and a mother's call. That was just before Ariel lost her. Lost communication and insight.

She would have preferred to paint in the daylight that entered the upper-story studio, but she didn't want to see another sunrise. With the easel moved to catch the bench lamp full and her thinned oils and solvents within reach, she made the first broad strokes and instantly the lines of force were unmistakably Amber. Amber from head to toe, a ghost, a spirit of turpentine barely visible in the first layer.

From the slashing pyrotechnics outside the house she had Sturm und
Drang
, and that seemed to be the right anthem. The rain drove straight at the windows as if trying to get in, trying to dialyze the oils and wash out the dark miracle that was taking place on canvas. But Ariel painted calmly, implacably. If she had ever permitted anyone to watch, they would have imagined that painting was her therapy. The physical tension that gripped her when she worked never showed. She moved like a dancer, holding poses through sheer tensile strength while appearing effortless and graceful. It exhausted her.

But the old energy was there this night, flowing to and from the image as never before.

She painted Amber standing in a white pinafore, and it was like caressing her features to life: the frail, downy forearms and agile fingers . . . the crown of her head, so full in contrast to her pixie chin . . . the tiny fissures of her rosebud lips ("
Stop pouting, young lady!
") . . . and the eyes—which expression to choose for the endlessly changing eyes? She summoned Amber's Queen of the Nile look—a touch of impudence and boredom within a sleepy knowledge beyond her years. And outside, Zeus hurling fire. On she painted, layer by layer floating independently, like pastry, a diaphanous miracle of
alla
prima
.

It was still dark when she realized she was finished. She had been staring for several minutes, the brush idle between her fingers, as if waiting for her child to speak. But it was the final uneasy whisper of the thunder that she heard. No more fulminations through the window. Just blackness. The downspouts murmured, as if things were fleeing. Something had left the house, something had arrived, and all was quite still.

She knew it was her best work ever. An utterly ephemeral creature sat on the canvas like a butterfly that would presently palpitate to life and resume flight. Speed had forced her to capture just what was essential, and yet the portrait was complete. Not one painter in a hundred could have done it with that technique. Maybe not one in a thousand. They would have ended up with a surreal wash, a wax figure on a hot day.

The flush of exultation ebbed, and Ariel felt the stiffness in her elbow, the shakiness in her legs. Where were her aspirins?

Oh.

She wouldn't need them. Except perhaps as an over
dose. Because she still had to commit suicide, didn't she? But she was too tired to kill herself now. Wasn't that funny? Too tired to sleep forever. When she woke up, then she would do it. She turned the easel and crossed the room to slump on the ratty Chesterfield sofa. Perhaps she would die effortlessly if she just closed her eyes. They would find her a week from now, or a month, whenever the first stray dog began howling outside. Her corpse would be awful by then. Serve them right. And they would see the painting, and maybe they would even understand when they wrote her obituary:
Ariel
Leppa
died in childbirth at age seventy-four
. . .

"M
other?"

Ariel's eyelids lifted like mechanical shutters. Something urgent and external was trying to reverse the entropy of her soul. And then she saw Amber and she knew she had died after all, right there on the Chesterfield. Everything else—the studio, the hum of the sump pump, the wind flapping a shingle on the roof—was like the hell on earth of her past, but here was her angel, whitely radiant with only her cat's green eyes for contrast, that and the faint gloss of her pink lips.

"Mother, get up!"

And that
unheavenly
impatience brought Ariel fully awake and alert to the fact that she was not dead.

A great fear swept over her as she struggled to a sitting position. Her old heart was beating like a fist on a mossy door. She twisted around to stare at the painting. The image was unchanged. Amber had not stepped out of the frame, life size, leaving an empty canvas. And yet…

How could this be happening?

Ariel swung back to gape at the flesh and blood reality before her. She
had
stepped out of it. Somehow. Yet how could flesh arise from paint? As if the oils were
embrocations
that had moistened some desiccated phantom of memory to life. But it couldn't be the pigments and oils—those same elements Ariel had mixed time and again—could it? It had to be the ashes. Her father's ashes.

Dysfunctional, desolate, disenfranchised Ariel
Leppa
wanted desperately to believe in magical interventions. Earth had failed her. She had lived in the shadows of life with only the hope of a retributive change—why shouldn't she be compensated? She had grown old waiting for her due, and the people who were required to pay it were now dead—the possibility of justice on earth was dead—so why shouldn't Amber be restored to her? Why shouldn't her guilty father make reparations from the grave? You didn't question magic. It just was. In a world of stumbling science and evolving impossibilities, call it a mutation of reality. If it worked, it would hang around. If it didn't, it would disappear. In the last summer of the millennium, in south central Minnesota, magic had appeared.

"Oh, my dear, my dear Amber . . ." she sighed at last with awe and delight.

A dart of annoyance shot from the cat green eyes. And the ten fingertips that had been bunched together in childlike indecision flew apart with a sweeping gesture at the room. "What's going on?” Amber said. “Where's the wallpaper, and the picture of Sir
Aarfie
?"

Ariel struggled to her feet, doubting again. The stiffness in her body was all too earthly. And Amber was forty-four years old and in a wheelchair. How could she be standing here disoriented, talking about wallpaper and Sir
Aarfie
—that absurd name given to a dog killed by a pickup truck decades ago? But there
had
been a picture—a painting Ariel had done of the toy collie—that hung in the studio, and the walls still would have been papered when Amber was nine. And then the clincher came, spoken by Amber with a hint of shock, as Ariel moved fully into the light, her sweater collar falling away from her face: