Paint Me True (23 page)

“Will you stop comparing me to your female relatives?”

“My mom would. Probably.”

“
Len
.”

“It’s a favorable comparison. Look, why don’t you glue it. You’ve done sculpture before, right? You ever done balsa wood and tissue paper?”

I snatched the crooked kite frame from him and knelt over it as I straightened it out, held it while the glue set, and then set about wrapping the tissue paper over the frame. Len looked at me as if I were a swimsuit model making calf eyes at him. Only a true nerd would go goggle eyed at a woman performing a minor act of engineering. I scowled at him.

“Okay, you’re doing the technical part there, maybe I could do the aesthetics? Can I draw on it with marker?”

“No.”

“Aw...”

“Only if you don’t draw teeth on it, and shark gills.”

“Aw, maaan. Can I do eyes at least?”

“No!”

He laughed. “Okay, gimme the marker.”

I raised an eyebrow and handed it over. He pinned the kite gently with one knee and drew a smiley face.

“That’s just great,” I said.

“You are harsh, you know that? Keep this up and I’m gonna make a picture of this kite your screensaver.”

“I know how to change my screensaver.”

“Well... I’ll... think of something.” He shook a fist at me as he got up and held the kite out. The wind grabbed it immediately and tugged at it like a puppy worrying a rag. Len tossed it up in the air with a practiced motion and let the string slide through his fingers as the wind carried it up and up. For a moment it danced on the end of the line, its multi-colored tail of tissue paper streamers swirling in its wake. Then the string broke and it dropped, nose first and broke up into a pile of wood pieces and torn tissue paper that began to blow away along the ground. Len and I had to chase after it.

“Well,” he said, as we stuffed the remains of the kite into a garbage can while the first drops of rain began to fall. “You want to go watch a DVD?”

I
painted on and on into the night, until my arm had a cramp in it and the scent of the paint gave me a headache, until my eyes were so tired from focusing on details that I carried on with them out of focus, until I caught myself jerking awake after falling asleep on my feet, brush still going. I had a hazy idea that I was painting a fictional proposal, Paul on bended knee before Nora, who turned her face away from him and towards the viewer, tears on her cheeks. It was in the archway Colin and I had walked through in Balliol College, the one that led to the larger quad full of sun and green grass and trees. I supposed that was supposed to be symbolic of Nora and Paul’s relationship going from modest beginnings to bigger things? I was too tired to dwell on how poor and unsuitable that metaphor was. I was just grasping at whatever memories came to hand, since I’d done zero research for this, not even looking at the staircase where Paul had his room and had done his actual proposal.

When the clock struck one, I couldn’t keep painting. I dropped my arms, rubbed my neck, and did my best to clean my brush. The house was dead silent. Everyone else had gone to bed.

I stumbled down the stairs to get a drink from the kitchen. The water was cool right from the tap. I downed two glasses full, then opened the dishwasher, rolled out the top rack with a rattle, and nestled my glass in among the other dirty dishes.

As I reached the foot of the stairs, I saw that I’d left the lights on in the studio. Their bright white glow looked garish and inappropriate in the dark hallway. When I climbed the stairs, though, I found Nora was awake, and even more surprising, out of bed. She stood in the doorway of the studio. Her back was to me, so I couldn’t see her expression.

I winced and wished I’d covered the painting up. It was a rough draft, at best. Something slapped down in a few hours with no preplanning and a heart full of bitterness. Nora was still as a statue, her slim hands grasping the doorframe.

“Hey,” I said softly.

She inhaled sharply and I heard her sniffle. “Oh, honey.”

Unsure if those were tears of pain or joy, I went to stand next to her and forced myself to look at that painting.

It wasn’t half bad. In fact, it was better than I would have thought possible, given how it was put together. When I looked sidelong at my aunt, I saw that her eyes glowed with happiness. “It’s perfect,” she said.

“It’s how things should have gone,” I told her.

“Thank you.”

“You okay? Hungry or thirsty or anything?”

“I’m fine.” She turned to me and held out her arms.

I pressed her frail, skeletal body to mine and tried not to notice how her bones jutted out at harsh angles. “I love you,” she said.

“Love you too. You want to stay up for a while or-”

“I’m exhausted. Can you help me back to bed?”

I did, letting her lean against me. She was lighter than she’d been a few weeks ago. I lifted her into her bed and tucked the covers around her. She lost consciousness before I straightened up to ask her if she needed anything else.

It was way past time for me to get to sleep. I went to turn out the studio lights and shut the door, and then I think I was out before my head hit the pillow.

W
hen I opened my eyes again, it was to the sound of a sharp knock on the door. “Eliza?”

I rolled over. The light outside my window was gray, which meant it was still very early. My neck was still sore and when I held up my hands, I noted I still had paint in the grooves around my fingernails.

“Eliza?” the voice repeated.

“Yes?” I sat up.

The door opened and Keeley peered around the edge, her eyes solemn.

I leapt out of bed. “What happened?”

“She’s gone.”

It took a long moment for that to sink in. “What?”

“She’s... she’s gone.” My cousin began to cry in earnest.

Instinct took over and I went to put my arms around her. Much to my surprise, she hugged back.

Beyond her, in the corridor, John stepped out of his mother’s room. His eyes were red too. At the sight of me, he gave a friendly nod, then wandered off towards the stairs as if he wasn’t entirely sure where he was going. I knew that feeling. It was what happened when someone you were bound to left the world. Once the connection unraveled, you felt like you were adrift. There were days I still felt like that, as if Mom’s death had been just hours ago.

I stroked Keeley’s hair. “I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner. I wanted to call you and tell you about your mother-”

“No, no. It’s best this way. If I’d been here longer, I’m sure Mum and I would’ve gotten into a row.” She half laughed, half cried as she spoke. I knew that feeling too, when life was too sad for one heart to contain it all. When humor got wrapped around the tragedy, because that was the only way it was survivable.

John’s footsteps in the hall let me know he was coming back. Keeley heard him too because she let go of me and turned to him. They clung to each other, there in the hallway.

I slipped back into my room, shut the door and only then did I let myself cry. It would be hard enough for my cousins to have their complicated relationship with their mother over before they could ever hope to set it right.

Me, I’d lost my best friend, my second mother, the woman who through her praise, generosity, and insight had made me an artist. Once again I had a hole ripped in my life that no one else would ever fill. It was like every death took a little piece of me with it, or in this case, a big piece.

I
emerged only after I heard everyone else leave the house. Louisa stuffed a note under my door to let me know they were going to “get things sorted”. She jotted her cell number down so I could get in touch.

I started in surprise when the nurse padded up the stairs. “Sorry,” I said, “I didn’t hear you arrive this morning.”

“I stayed here all night. She seemed poorly. I just need to gather some things and then I’ll be off.”

I wondered how I’d missed her, or if my last memory of Nora was just a dream. I went over to the studio and opened the door. The painting was still there, looking just as I’d remembered it. It had been the easiest painting I’d ever painted, which made no sense to me. Paul looked like the hero of an action adventure movie with that direct gaze of his and muscled physique.

I went all the way in and shut the door. The photograph of Paul I’d first used to sketch his likeness was leaning against the wall on the far side of the room. I went to retrieve it and saw that it was a picture of a man in his thirties, better looking than average, but with a rather blank, uninteresting expression. He gazed off into the distance at nothing much, as if he were thinking about nothing much. He was the sort of person I’d pass on the street, the sort of person I most certainly did pass on the street every day. There was nothing remarkable about him.

The photograph didn’t employ any of the artistic tricks I’d used to make him more interesting. He didn’t gaze directly at the viewer with a penetrating stare. His eyes weren’t shaded in a way to make them seem deep and intense. His hair wasn’t crafted to look tousled in a scruffy, sexy kind of way, and his mouth didn’t half smile with the promise of hidden secrets.

Nora hadn’t been the only liar in this. I’d supported her lies with my art, drawing the man she wanted Paul to be, rather than the man he was. I’d always thought of art as a window into truth, but I spent a lot of time orchestrating “truths” while these lies came easily. These lies all made good use of my hard earned tricks of the trade.

Paul’s eyes, for example. I looked at the picture again and squinted. They weren’t even the same shape, or the right distance apart. I held up my hands to mask the rest of Paul’s face in the painting, leaving only the eyes.

Realization hit like a bolt of lightning. I knew those eyes, only they weren’t gray as I’d painted them. They were pale blue.

I let my hands drop. The mouth, with the hint of a smile. The angle of the shoulders as he put his full attention on Nora. I knew all of these features, and none of them belonged to Paul. That’s because when I had channeled my ideal of a perfect boyfriend, I hadn’t channeled Paul.

I’d channeled Len.

I
t was obvious, now that I’d noticed it. These pictures had almost nothing to do with Nora’s stories. For one thing, they were backwards. Nora had talked about her infatuation with Paul. How unattainable he seemed and how she would do anything for him. These pictures showed Paul infatuated with her. She was the unattainable one. She was the object of desire. No wonder she’d loved them so much. It’s what she’d wanted so badly.

And it was what I’d had, until a few weeks ago. Even the proposal with tears now took on a new meaning to me. I got down on the floor and rested my forehead in my palms. Chris’s blessing surfaced up.

Your Heavenly Father would have you know that He has a very special lesson for you to learn.

As was often the case when the Lord had something to say, it was more complicated than it appeared at first blush. I thought Nora had taught me about true love, and maybe she had, just not in the way I’d thought. All of my paintings had made her a cipher. Her back was usually to the viewer, leaving it unclear how she felt about “Paul’s” attentions. I’d put Nora in my place in my last relationship. My subconscious thought it was the perfect relationship, evidently, or did I just think Len seemed appropriately infatuated? I had to admit, once I gave him a virtual makeover, he was gorgeous. If I changed the hair color, eye color, and shape of the face to match the real Len, the figure in the paintings would be even more gorgeous.

Had I really just looked at Len’s scruffy wardrobe and no deeper? Had I ignored the attentions of a guy even more attractive than any of my previous boyfriends because he barely ever spent money on himself? I was an artist. I was supposed to see past the surface.

Right then, I realized that I missed Len. I couldn’t go a day without thinking about him, and whenever I painted from the heart, it was while I went over memories of him. Now that I put two and two together, I felt a sharp, physical pain in the center of my chest that made it hard to breathe.

I missed his hugs. He didn’t give them often, but he gave them like he meant them. First he’d wrap his arms around me, then he’d take my hand in his, look me in the eye, and ask me how I was. There, in the safety of our embrace, I could say anything and those eyes would stay fixed on mine for as long as I spoke.

And his kisses. He did pure, chaste kisses that would have fit at the end of a Disney movie, only he had a way of lingering over them - his eyelashes brushing my cheekbones, his fingertips stroking the nape of my neck - that made me crazy for him. And when the kisses were over, the hugs would carry on, and I’d pour my heart out. Or I’d lean my head against his chest and just listen to the whisper of his breathing. Times like that he’d say, “I love you,” in that heartbreaking way of his. He said it like it hurt him, because he knew he wouldn’t hear it back, but he said it anyway because it was the truth.

I folded my arms, bowed my head, and fought against the tears burning in my eyes for the second time that day. Please, Lord, I thought. Please don’t let it be too late. Please can I have a second chance with him?