Paint Me True (13 page)

“No, it doesn’t sound silly. I think I may know the sandwich shop, even.”

“We went there a lot after that. It was on the way to the park. We’d go on walks or sit by the water and eat. I never took any pictures, though. Not sure what would capture that moment, really.”

“Let me think about it and then we can figure out the composition.”

The memory had restored the light to my aunt’s countenance. I tried to think of a time I’d felt like I’d been rescued from my mundane life. There were countless memories when I wished I could feel that way. The hours I’d spent in the hospital waiting room as my mother fought to live and lost. The torrent of phone calls I’d gotten when Lindsay’s cancer was diagnosed. I was in school and in the course of one class I’d feel my phone buzz over and over again as my family filled my inbox with message after message about cancer and treatments and options and last minute reunion plans.

The sound of my father overcome with tears when he called me to say that Rachel was gone. She’d been determined to have surgery, despite her weakened state. The doctors had warned us she might not make it, but nothing ever stopped Rachel. She was demanding and imperious and infuriating, and it made no sense that a mere operation could have ripped her from our world.

I squelched these memories, wadded them up like paper and threw them to the back of my mind. Now wasn’t the time to see them, or to wonder if I’d soon have more to add.

If Nora noticed my clenched fists, though, she gave no sign. She sat up, her legs crossed, and fiddled with a fold in her sheet. For a moment, it was easy to forget she was sick. It was like I had the old Aunt Nora back.

I got out my sketchbook and got to work, blocking out possible poses and angles. Later, I’d make a trip to the park, but right now I wanted to find a good composition for the characters. I tried sketching the figures from above, but that didn’t really pull the viewer into the picture. I tried several different angles, and finally decided on one with my aunt sitting with her back to the viewer, eating her sandwich. Paul lay propped up on one elbow, his attention entirely on her. Even with my aunt’s back in the field of view, I still felt this drew a person into the picture. They would have some hint of what passed between Nora and Paul and would instinctively step closer, as if hoping to overhear what the two lovebirds said.

I shaded in Paul’s hair and filled in more of his facial features. He was entirely focused on my aunt and looked at her as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. It was easy to imagine him, his gray eyes intent. I’d find an open spot in the park, I decided. I wanted the painting to convey that these two people created their own space. They weren’t hidden away somewhere, out of sight, but rather could make the rest of the world disappear no matter where they were, they were so enraptured with each other.

Someone behind me cleared their throat and I glanced at the time. An hour and a half had flown by. I sat bolt upright and turned to face the stern expression of the nurse who stood in the doorway. She had high cheekbones, skin as dark as undiluted coffee, and brown eyes that were narrowed in a way that said she would tolerate no misbehavior.

“Ms. Chesterton has an MRI over at the hospital.”

“I don’t want any scans,” muttered Nora.

“Aunt Nora, please,” I said. “You promised. No running away.”

The nurse lifted her chin and looked down at me with approval.

“I’m not running away-”

“Get up. You’re going,” I said.

Her shoulders drooped as if she were a puppet and someone had just let her strings go slack. “Please honey, don’t make me do this.”

“You have to do this. I don’t want to lose you, okay? It’s not your time. Let’s go.” I put my hand on her arm but she pulled away from me like a sullen child.

“Ms. Chesterton,” snapped the nurse.

I put up a hand to hold her back. I got the impression that, imposing as she was now, she could dial it up even further, and that wouldn’t work on my aunt.

Nora looked up at me, tears in her eyes. “I hate all this.” In that moment she wasn’t my older, stylish aunt who breezed through the world with unstoppable confidence. She was just a woman, and she was scared. That was the worst part of cancer, the way it reduced people, casting them down to the depths of humility and fear.

“I’ll come with you. It’ll be okay. Just think about Paul and the painting I’m going to do for you-”

“Listen, I don’t want anything but the smallest area possible scanned. No extra scans, no extra radiation, do you hear?”

“I’ve told them how you feel. Colin passed it all on.” I took my aunt firmly by the arm and hauled her out of bed. This, I knew, was the loving thing to do, but my aunt looked at me as if I’d just betrayed her to her worst enemy.

There was a wheelchair waiting for her in the hall. The nurse and I loaded her on and we set off. My aunt sat rigid and stared straight ahead. The nurse was happy because she was getting her job done. I forced myself to be optimistic. We’d find a benign tumor, or a cyst. Yes, a cyst.

We went out the front doors, across the parking lot, and into the hospital. After a couple of turns, we rode the elevator down, then went down another hallway and into a room with a big, bulky MRI machine. It was an older model than the ones that had scanned my sister, I noted, as the nurse and a man in scrubs with tired looking eyes and a scruffy attempt at a goatee exchanged information and my aunt’s records.

“Listen,” Aunt Nora said, the moment the nurse left the room. “You scan here and only here.” She blocked out a square on her abdomen with her hands.

“Aunt Nora, they may need-”

“Scan only here or I get up and walk out.” Her eyes were like ice and her tone like steel.

The technician looked at me, as if she’d just slapped him in the face.

“Where do you need to scan?” I asked.

“I need to check for a tumor in her abdominal cavity. Probably not more than what she says.” His eyes pleaded with me though. This was a man who spent his days taking pictures of peoples insides. It was likely that he went weeks without having a single real conversation with a patient, let alone a negotiation.

“I think it’ll be okay,” I said to my aunt.

She glared at him, then at me. I made sure not to let my irritation show. This entire moment seemed balanced on the tip of a pin, and I didn’t know which way it’d drop. Would Nora get the scan and be angry? Run out and cause a scene? Curl up in a ball and cry?

Slowly, she got to her feet and faced the slablike table where she would have to lay. With another baleful glance at the technician, she shuffled over. I helped her up and the technician began to fuss with her gown in order to make sure she lay the right way and everything lined up as it should.

“You need to go outside, please,” he said.

Nora didn’t even acknowledge that.

“I’ll see you soon,” I said, and slipped away.

Out in the hallway I paced. These moments, the waiting, they always seemed to last an eternity.

T
hat afternoon, when Nora fell asleep, I went to tour the park. It was somewhat difficult to pin down which park my aunt was thinking of. Along the river were several open spaces, some on college grounds, some not. Oxford had a fair amount of greenspace. I chose the most obvious location, a broad expanse of public park with gravel paths cutting pale lines through the lush grass.

There was plenty of open area away from trees, and I took dozens of pictures with my phone of what looked like the prettiest backgrounds. I wanted some dreaming spires in the distance, but all of my attempts to frame such a shot came to nothing, and I decided that I shouldn’t let reality get in the way of a great picture. George Washington had probably not stood up and pointed as he crossed the Delaware, and Aunt Nora might not have been in line of sight of any dreaming spires the day she and Paul made the park their own place. The picture, I decided, was symbolic. I was putting in elements that filled out the rest of the story. My subjects weren’t just falling madly in love, they were falling madly in love in Oxford, in autumn.

I looked wistfully at all the bicyclists who zipped past on the road. I wished I had the courage to join them, but not only did the cars all drive on the wrong side of the road, the roads were narrow and twisting, and the cars shot down them so fast that if I were to cross in front of one, there was no doubt who would live to tell the tale. It wouldn’t be me.

W
hen I got back to the hospital, the nurse on duty, a small man who spoke with such a low voice that I had to lean indecently close to hear him, told me, “The oncologist should be by today to discuss her scans.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll be here.”

The doctor was busy for the rest of the day, though. I waited the long hours in Nora’s room while she slept. It didn’t seem right, her sleeping so much. No matter how hard I worked to compose my second painting for her, her sleeping figure was like an anchor that dragged on me. I couldn’t cut loose and create.

T
hat evening, my Dad answered Skype immediately. “What’s wrong?” he asked. It was voice only, which meant he was walking around somewhere with his phone to his ear. Or maybe he was on his hands free device.

I turned off my video. “Dad, do you happen to have Keeley or John’s phone numbers?”

“Your cousins?”

“Yeah.”

He sighed into the phone with a blast of static. “I don’t know, hon. Nora doesn’t have them anywhere?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to snoop, and I don’t know whether to bring it up. She never talks about them. But...”

“What did the doctors find?”

“I don’t know, but she’s scared. Deep down, I can tell she’s worried that this could kill her.”

“She’s like you, honey, a veteran. She’s seen enough other people die this way that she knows too much about what’s in store.”

“Yeah.”

“Eliza, are you okay out there? Do you need me to come join you, or we can get other family-”

“What other family? I don’t think Mark would be able to take time off work, and he barely knows Nora.” Mark was my brother.

“I know. I just don’t like the idea of you facing this again, and alone this time.”

“Thanks.”

“I can come out-”

“I’ll keep the offer in mind, but right now, I think that I’m best off not calling in the troops. It’ll make things seem even worse to her. That’s why I’d like to call her kids without having to ask her for their numbers. They should know, but-”

“Yeah... honey, why don’t you think again about that? Either let Nora know what you’re doing or leave it be. I don’t know the details, but I gather Nora’s estranged from everyone in her family but you. The fact that her kids either don’t know she’s ill, or know but haven’t even called, means there’s a situation there and you don’t want to get in the middle of that.”

“And if I find out she’s terminal?”

“It’s good to think ahead, but that’s thinking too far ahead. You don’t know any such thing yet.”

That made sense. “Okay.”

“Call me anytime, all right?”

“Thanks. Oh, and I should have said before, Hattie’s house-sitting Carrie’s house. You know, my friend-”

“With the really right wing political agenda? Yes.”

“I don’t know that it’s an agenda. More like a dogma.”

“Ah, I see. My mistake.”

I giggled. “Dad, don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re making me laugh at my friend.”

“That is all you, honey.”

“I hate how you do that!”

“Yes, I feel the anger.” My dad could deliver irony with the most dead serious tone I’d ever heard.

“Night, Dad.”

“I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

He waited for me to cut the connection.

I went upstairs. It was late, but I was in no mood to sleep. The first portrait of Paul rested against the easel in the studio. It had turned out all right. I moved it over to the wall, got out my paints, and started to work. I’d done even less pre-planning this time around. It’d been impossible at Nora’s bedside, but I hoped some of the magic that had happened last night would happen again.

I let my mind wander to Nora’s story about the park. She’d told me only that one, short story, but I surmised that there were hundreds more. The park, she told me, was their place. That second date hadn’t really ended; it carried on every time they went back to the park.

Me and Len... our second date had been like that too, but in a different way.

“Um, hey,” he had said on the phone a week after our first date. “You doing anything tonight?”

The casual ask out without even a whole day’s notice. I was tempted to say I was busy, just on principle, but the truth was, it was Friday night and I didn’t have anything to do. Hattie was on a date Jenna was at work. “Well...”

“I could rent a movie,” he said. “Or I’ve got
Winnie the Pooh
from Netflix.”

“I dunno. Is that one gospel appropriate?” I asked. “Those British can be kinda racy.”

Stupid joke, but Len cracked up. His sense of humor was always a little... off. Or a lot off, actually. “That a yes?”

It wasn’t, but since I could think of worse things to do than watch a children’s movie, I said, “I guess so.”