Matters of Faith (30 page)

“That's just my studio and office,” I called over my shoulder, dumping the sheets on the bed. Stacey and I got right to work as if we'd been making up beds together for years, and within a couple of minutes we were done. Sandy stood in the doorway looking on approvingly.

“You should sleep well tonight,” she said.

I nodded in agreement, but despite my earlier anticipation I knew that I would likely not sleep well. It was getting late, Meghan had been at the hospital alone for longer than she ever had, and I considered saying good-bye to Stacey and Sandy and heading back. I'd had a break, I'd had some fattening food, and, surprisingly, had enjoyed some company.

I felt refreshed, but lonely.

“I'd love t-t-to see where you work,” Stacey said.

“Sure.” I led them down the hall and up the stairs, feeling them glance into the kids' rooms again, and when I opened the door at the top of the stairs, the smell of paint hit me and I felt tears in my eyes for the first time in days.

It hadn't even crossed my mind that I might miss my work, but there it was. I went straight to the fire sky painting I'd been working on the day it happened. I turned on the two lights I always used and forgot completely about Sandy and Stacey wandering around behind me as I noticed things I'd never seen before in the painting, minuscule bits of paint loss, the small section in the lower left that had been touched up by someone else, someone good, but not as good as I.

I leaned down, looked at it from different angles, made mental notes about which colors I would have to mix, which areas to start on first, where I'd need a lighter hand, which spots I'd have to build up. My hands hovered over my brushes, and I picked up a palette knife and felt its slight heft in my fingers, made a mental note to black-light the painting again.

I had started this business quite by accident when Marshall was a baby. My OB/GYN was on the outskirts of Naples, north of us, and I would often make a day of my appointments in order to wander the art galleries in town. Because it was a wealthy area, most of the galleries carried high-quality, upper-end art, and though I could no more afford to buy such art than I could afford to buy a Bentley, I loved just being around it.

In one gallery I'd become friendly with the manager, and in my sixth month, feeling fat and sluggish, I collapsed on her sofa to gaze at the new paintings she was still positioning on the wall. We'd previously discussed my background, my artistic aspirations and utter lack of real talent, and that day she asked me if I'd been painting lately. I'd had to confess that no, I hadn't.

“I have something sort of interesting to show you,” she said, and retrieved a beat-up painting in a rickety frame from the back room. It couldn't have been more different from the gold-leafed traditional oils on the walls.

She carefully propped it on a small, wooden easel and maneuvered it in front of me so I could inspect it without moving from the sofa. I was so horrified at the condition of it that I barely noticed the painting itself, and it looked as though the frame might have actually been put together with some sort of household baseboard or door trim.

But once I got past the dirt and the homemade surrounding, I was taken by the Florida landscape. This was an unschooled hand, yes, but there was something there that niggled at my memory, and it wasn't just the backcountry scene, a small, serene inlet surrounded by palms and moss-hung oaks, with a lone crane fishing in the water, crossed palms against a beautifully clouded sky.

“Who is this?” I finally asked, searching for the signature. I found it at the same time that she said the artist's name, but it rang no bells.

“This was painted by a man named Harold Newton, one of his earlier pieces. Crazy, isn't it?”

“It reminds me of someone, though. I can't put my finger on it, but there's definitely an influence there.”

“You're right. Good eye. Newton studied with Beanie Backus. Look, you can see it here, and here, see the clouds, this light?”

We pored over the painting and she told me the story of the Highwaymen while I listened, completely rapt. “So how'd you get this?” I asked. “Doesn't seem like your usual thing.”

She laughed. “No,” she said ruefully. “It's definitely not for this gallery. But I saw it stuck in the corner of a garage when I went to look at a painting a client wanted to sell. The painting wasn't anything, I didn't wind up taking it, but he was showing off his wife's new Mercedes in the garage and this just caught my eye. He said it had been his grandmother's and had been in the garage for years. I gave him a couple hundred bucks for it and started doing some research.”

“Wow, it's really neat,” I said, embarrassed at my less-than-worldly expression.

“You want to play with it?” she asked.

I looked up at her in surprise. “What?”

“Well, it needs a lot of work, obviously. You've just said you're not painting, you've talked about your interest in restoration, and you need something to do.”

I bit my lip and inspected the painting again.

“Am I wrong?” she prodded me.

“No, I guess not. But, Leigh, I'm not a restorer. I mean, I'd be experimenting on this. You must have a great restorer.”

“I do,” she said. “And I give him plenty of work. This is a personal thing. You want it or not?”

I stared at the painting again, and realized that yes, I did, I wanted it. “Okay,” I said.

That was twenty years ago. I'd developed a good enough reputation that I turned down work on a regular basis. Fifteen years ago, Leigh died of breast cancer, and she left the Harold Newton to me. It hung on the far wall of my studio, and reminded me of how far I had come, and how sometimes your life's work can sneak up on you. Now my hands were nearly itching with the desire to get in there on the fire sky and make things whole again, fix the wrongs with all the skill I'd developed over these twenty years.

These I knew how to fix. But there were too many other things broken in my life now, more important things, and they were not going to allow me the time for this, not for a long time.

Sandy and Stacey were going through my portfolio of before and after photos and exclaiming over the differences, and I smiled as I turned off my work lights. It felt good to remember that I had once been good at something. I made a mental note to call the fire sky client and let him know I'd be shipping the painting back to him.

I knew what was happening. I knew that with this night at home, with my decision about my work, that I was
settling in
. I was accepting that it was possible that Meghan was going to be like this for a long time and it was time to find a new normal.

It was the first time since I'd watched Ada and Marshall walk down the road to the bay that I'd considered
new
. I had been right about the dangers of that after all.

“Chloe?” Stacey called to me from across the studio. “Are you getting tired?”

I imagined that she'd seen my shoulders slump, that if the view of my back looked tired, my face must be a craggy map of exhaustion. I nodded and headed for the door, not trusting myself to turn around and see their kind, concerned faces.

We trooped back downstairs, and once in the kitchen Sandy and Stacey started the bustling that women do when they realize they've left too much of a mess to take their leave as quickly as they'd like to, or have been made to feel they should.

They were right. I was ready for them to leave, but wasn't sure I wanted to be alone, either. As if reading my mind, Sandy said, “Are you sure you're going to be all right here alone tonight?”

Stacey turned from where she was washing wineglasses at the sink. “Oh, will Cal stay at the hospital all night?”

The innocence of her question was genuine. Sandy flashed me a look and shrugged slightly, and I felt a surge of appreciation for the fact that she had obviously not been gossiping about me. And obviously Kevin hadn't mentioned anything to his wife about Cal staying on
Trillium's Edge
. Though I supposed it was possible that Cal had not said anything to Kevin.

But things apparently weren't going to change anytime soon, and there was no reason to not start getting used to saying it.

“Cal has been staying on
Trill
,” I said. “I think we're separated.”

Stacey whirled around with a gasp. “Oh no,” she cried. And then, for the first time since they'd arrived, she said something that made me remember how she and Sandy knew each other to begin with. It was also the first sentence I'd heard her speak in which she did not stutter over at least one word. “Oh Lord, bless your heart, how can he do this to you right now?”

“He's not doing it to me. We just—it's been okay. I'm okay.” She looked confused, and when she spoke, her stutter was more pronounced this time. “But this is when the t-two of you should be su-su-supporting each other the most. Th-that's wh-wh-what m-marriage is.”

“Stacey,” Sandy cautioned.

“It's okay,” I said to her. “I think it's been coming for a long time. And, believe it or not, I think it might even be easier this way. We can each deal with things the way we want to, without fighting with each other over what should be done, or who's to blame. Though we've done plenty of that anyway.”

“Oh,” she said, but she clearly wasn't convinced. Perhaps her parents had never had problems, maybe she and Kevin were still madly in love with each other. Or perhaps she had religious objections to our separation.

Whatever it was, I wasn't quite ready to discuss the particulars, with anyone.

“I am so tired,” I said, shooing them out. “Y'all should go on. There's hardly anything left to do.”

They both protested politely, but we finally exchanged hugs and promises to call and keep each other updated, and I stood at the screen door and watched them drive away, raising my hand at their taillights. The night had lost some of the humidity of the day, and I breathed in the scent of gardenias wafting from my wildly untamed little tree and the tangle of night-blooming jasmine beside the house.

I started when the phone rang and turned to answer without closing the door, allowing the scent to fill the kitchen.

“Hey, Chlo,” Cal said, and I immediately thought of Meghan.

“What's wrong?” I asked, so afraid to ask the question, unable not to.

“Nothing's wrong, everything is fine,” he answered. Of course that was patently untrue, but at least there was no new emergency. “I'm just calling to check on you, make sure you're okay there.”

I listened to the creak of the house in the breeze, smelled the flowers. Cal never liked leaving the doors open—a breach in safety—and there were too many airborne irritants for Meghan to do it very often, but tonight I thought that I might even sleep with my window open.

“I'll be okay,” I said cautiously. Was he offering to come over? Looking for an invitation?

“Good. Everything is all right at the hospital. I left around eight, and I just got off the phone with the nursing station and they said Meghan is fine, nothing has changed.”

Well, Meghan wasn't fine then, was she? I bit my tongue. “Anything new on Marshall today?” I asked. Cal had bought a laptop in order to keep tabs on Marshall's cell phone use and to try to track him down through his friends. Neither his online efforts nor my phone calls had come to anything.

“No,” he said. “I got a lot of information about comas today though. I printed a bunch of stuff out and left it in a file in her room for you, along with a couple of other things I picked up.”

“Okay,” I said. We fell silent for a moment.

“Well, sleep well,” he finally said.

“You too.” We hung up without saying, “I love you.”

I returned to the screen door and looked out at the yard. The house might have survived my absence with little more than dust to show for it, but the landscape had quickly deteriorated. The taming of southwest Florida was a constant battle, and while you might be able to get away with an occasional week of disregard, two weeks was pushing it, and three weeks made a real statement. Let it go longer than that and you might as well raze the place and start over.

I pushed open the door and walked over to the gardenia, wincing as the crushed shells dug into the soles of my bare feet. The kids ran, used to run, across the driveway all year long without shoes on, making the soles of their feet as tough as the soles of shoes. I never knew how they did it.

The transition to the weed-choked grass made me sigh with relief, and I knelt down and began to gather up the spent, rotting gardenia blooms that had fallen to the ground. There must have been two hundred and they made a fragrant little pile on top of the old, barely-there-anymore, cypress mulch.

Not a single sunflower had survived the rabbits, but I'd rarely had a good year with them, and whenever I sowed the seeds I knew they had little chance of maturing. I got a certain sense of satisfaction that I was making little bunnies happy, giving them a treat. But year after year did get old. I couldn't see myself doing it again.

I pulled suckers off the base of the jasmine and added them to the pile, pulled tiny mahogany saplings with their attached seed pods from the ground, and, despite the fact that I actually sort of liked it, pulled the Florida pussley flowering at the edge of the grass.

The more I put to rights, the more I saw that was falling apart, and soon I was sweating, with dirt smeared across my forearms and staining the knees of my old cotton pajamas. I wound up at the end of my planting bed, with piles of weeds and broken-off overgrowth at regular intervals. I'd need to get some bags to put all the detritus into; I needed to pull out the mower and the edger too.