Adrift in the Sound (23 page)

TWENTY–FOUR

TIDE DETERGENT
, with its big, orange bull’s-eye box, sat on Sandy’s kitchen table. Lizette put it where Al could find it later when he got around to washing clothes. Fresh coffee warmed in the electric pot on the counter. Bread and butter sat next to the toaster. Rinsed glasses dripped in the dish drainer. The streaming sunlight disturbed Lizette. It shouted, woke things best left alone. She heard a bumping sound from the basement and froze, listened, but the sound did not come again.

When she carried the baby downstairs to feed her, she heard Al snoring in Sandy’s bed. At the bottom of the stairs now, she listened up, tried to sense if Al was stirring, perhaps preparing to come down or waiting for her to leave. She dressed Violet, shushed and kissed her cheeks to keep her from crying. She prepared three bottles of formula, popped her medication, then bundled the baby, full and cooing, into fluffy blankets. Banking sofa pillows around Violet so she wouldn’t fall off, Lizette hurried outside.

She took the stroller from the front porch and unfolded it on the walkway in front of the house, clicked the safety latches into place, went back inside. Violet wiggled, trying to turn over.
Can’t trust you anymore
, Lizette thought, smiling to herself, amazed at how fast Violet was growing.

A postcard from Sandy had come last week addressed to Marian, who’d gone back to Orcas a couple of months ago. Sandy said Mexico was a
gas
that they’d bought a boat and fished every day, drank margaritas by the hotel pool at night. Didn’t know when she’d be back, she’d said. “
Off to Colombia on business. Stay dry. S.S”.
The postcard had a picture of Acapulco Bay, lights from the hotels reflecting off the water. Lizette ripped it and threw it in the garbage.

The baby rested in the stroller’s reclined seat and Lizette fixed the blankets around her to ward off the morning chill, fluffed the edges so the lace showed.
Egg in a nest
, she thought. She hooked her big canvas bag filled with diapers, ointments, changes of clothes, lotions and bottles, over the stroller handle. While packing, she’d added some crow feathers she’d collected and a yarn god’s eye to the day’s supplies. She rolled down hill, holding the stroller back so it wouldn’t run away.

Garrulous blue jays flittered in the brambles under the freeway. Lizette twittered to them, feeling their spirit. She rounded a corner and came to a well-kept street with gardens overflowing in late summer—orange poppies with naughty black hearts bobbed in the breeze. Hot-pink fuchsias hung from baskets, the blooms shaped like billowing skirts, a profusion of immodesty. She picked lipstick-red roses and baby-pink buds, lavender pansies with black cow faces and fresh-cheeked daisies, placing them in the stroller, blanketing Violet, except for her pink nose and cupid’s bow lips.

A dog barked. A man yelled, “What the hell’re you doin’! Them flowers ain’t yours!” Lizette couldn’t see who hollered from behind a curtained window and hurried along, almost running. On the next block, she picked more flowers, quickly snapping the blooms from their stems with her thumbnail, glancing around, dropping them into the stroller. Pushing faster. The sky was gray with a hint of rain from the west. She adjusted the blue awning over Violet. A volley of robins took wing from a small lawn as they rushed past.

Along Eastlake Avenue, shopkeepers prepared to open. Sheets of oak veneer, lashed to a red pickup truck, waited to be unloaded beside the cabinet shop. Harbor Freight and Salvage, stuffed with surplus left over from the Vietnam War, displayed boat anchors, wool socks, screwdrivers, dummy hand grenades and a gas mask in its front window. Further along, an outboard motor repair shop, its metal door rolled up, blasted the morning news from a radio on a workbench.

“One man died in a boating mishap in the Strait of Juan de Fuca after a Coast Guard rescue. His fishing companion reported the man fell overboard trying to save his catch from the jaws of an orca and drowned.”
A guy in greasy overalls shuffled to the radio, sipping coffee in a paper cup, and turned up the volume.
“The new Marine Mammal Protection Act now makes it a crime to disturb orcas and seals. Officials said fishermen can expect maximum enforcement. On the entertainment front, Elvis Presley, King of Rock and Roll, will play the Seattle Center tonight. Promoters say tickets are sold out and concert goers should expect a heavy police presence.”

Hurrying on, the news chatter washed away on the wind coming from the lake. Lizette bent over the stroller handle and pushed for downtown, the dangling bag flapped against her shins. At the coffee house, she looked around at the Friday morning crowd to see if she recognized anyone and ordered a raisin snail with a cup of tea. It had been nearly a year since she’d been there and breathed the thick, rich smell of roasted coffee. Back then she’d been confused about the future. But now, even though the shop seemed the same, she felt new, alive with purpose.

Violet slept under her blanket of flowers and Lizette settled into her favorite chair by the window, pulled out her sketch book. The place was quiet in the gap between the morning rush and lunch hour. The stereo played a Haydn piano rondo. Fisher flashed through her mind, his interest in her and Violet feeling like a rubber band on her wrist. She dipped a flat brush in the glass of drinking water beside her and slopped water across the blank page of her sketch pad, wetted the brush again and charged it with blue from the color tray she’d pulled from her bag, deftly laid down a color gradient, then threw the scatter of robins from this morning’s walk into the picture, the gardens jumbled with blooms. She worked quickly and set the sketch pad aside so the image could dry.

The harsh whir of the shop’s coffee grinder made Violet stir. Lizette picked her up and the baby blinked, her eyes periwinkle blue in the mid-morning light. She drank half a bottle and fell back asleep. Lizette lounged content in the warm light streaming through the picture window. An image of Al crept to the edge of her consciousness and she shook her head quickly, dismissed the thought, hoping Bella had done her job and scared the bee-Jesus out of him. She prayed it would be enough to freak him out, that the beady-eyed little bastard would be halfway to Portland by the time they got back home. She laid Violet in the stroller and headed down the hill to Pike Place Market.

Produce vendors called to her. She waved. The fish monger came out to look at the baby. “I didn’t know,” he said, amazed, looking at her lean mid-section, bending down and pulling the baby’s blanket away to look. “How old?” About four months, Lizette told him with pride. “Beautiful,” the man said as Lizette moved on. Everyone had heard what happened to her, about the attack. They all felt sorry but agreed she shouldn’t have been hanging around on the streets. Bound to happen, they said, shaking their heads. Such a pretty girl, so stupid.

“Cara mia!”
The fruit seller tossed her an apple and she caught it one-handed as she hurried past, put it in her sack and turned onto the sidewalk.

At Pioneer Square she slowed, looked in store windows littered with clothes and cooking utensils. The galleries were just opening, yawning with their red-brick mouths open. She dawdled along Occidental Avenue, noticed a man in a long black raincoat at the end of the block sweeping the mottled brick sidewalk. She ducked into a gallery, its front decked with flower boxes, big hanging baskets, blue lobelia and white petunias cascading over the sides.

The interior was warm with wood tones, the lighting subdued and indirect, and she collected herself, stopped shaking. The colors drew Lizette first, then the framing and punch of unexpected shapes. Above her, mobile sculptures attached to the ceiling beams bobbed in the disturbed air. A big, white marble penguin commanded attention in the center of the burnished oak floor, the piece, rounded and graceful at the bottom, narrowed upward to its stylized head, beak tucked neatly under a sculpted wing, creating a feeling of repose. She looked for the artist’s signature, found Bufano on the base. She sat on a hassock and took the sculpture in. She glanced over the framed sketches and to a mid-sized watercolor of birds and a garden, not more inspired in its execution than her own sketch had been this morning, and dismissed it.

“Welcome to Wentz Gallery,” a flat voice said from behind a fussy carved desk in one of the dark corners. Lizette wasn’t ready to interact with a stranger. She pulled inside herself and rocked the stroller back and forth with her foot.

“Are you looking for something in particular
?
” the voice said. “We exhibit contemporary work from local artists, some from outside the area that we think are imaginative. We specialize in out of the ordinary works.”

Lizette turned her back to the voice and got up, walked to a painting illuminated by track lights from above. She’d noticed a line, a pattern from across the gallery and was pulled to stand in front of the big canvas. Her mind fuzzed electrically as she recognized the painting,
her painting.
Smells of the cabin came to her, the desolate sound of the sea folding in waves and hissing onto the beach in the cove below her windows, the spy-hopping seal, the ominous dorsal fin of Looney, flagging his hunt, the memories crackling through her like lightening. The aroma of cedar and mold, even how it felt to stand on the soft pine floor in front of a canvas, this canvas, light subdued, the cabin’s corners murky. These sensory recollections overwhelmed her. Shocked, she couldn’t hoist herself onto the raft of expressible feelings and stood before her own work, dumbstruck.

“This is one of my favorite pieces,” the man said, standing close beside her. “We’ve only had it a couple of months, but it looks like we’ve already got a bidding war over it.” The voice, a slight man it turned out, dressed impeccably in a moss-green tailored jacket and gray trousers, the corduroy wale so small Lizette thought at first glance the fabric was velvet, crowded her personal body space and she tipped away. His longish hair was swept from his forehead and he had a black silk scarf knotted at the side of his throat, cowboy style.
Calculated perfection
, she thought, becoming angry.
Pretentious fop!
But his translucent blue eyes were open to her, guileless and kind, sincerely helpful. Some of her internal tension relaxed.

“Curators from the Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York have been in to look at it, too.” he said, proudly sweeping his arm toward her painting. “We may also have a collector interested in acquiring it.” He walked to her painting. “We’re quite pleased.”

“How much?” Lizette said, moving closer to look at her signature in the bottom right corner.

“Well, this artist, she’s some kind of recluse, we understand, lives on Orcas Island. She has an agent so the starting prices were negotiated. Initially we were talking about fifty thousand dollars, but it’s probably going to be more than that.” Lizette chirped, rubbed the muscles in her neck. “There are other paintings by this artist,” the man continued, “if you’re interested. We’ve already sold the few smaller pieces we had, sent the rest to our affiliate in New York, which is how the MOMA curator got wind of this artist.”

Lizette stepped to within inches of the canvas, fascinated with her own work in the rich light. She saw where lines were too timid, where a clumping of chromium oxide missed the green she desired. She’d mixed it with pureed oatmeal and spit and saw that it was too full bodied for her purpose. The light did not pass through the layers as she’d intended. She’d used pure pigment, melted bees wax that she’d kept soft in a pot on the cabin stove, mixed in tree sap she’d gathered in the woods surrounding the ranch, fused the elements to create what she thought was the right viscosity, spread them sensuously on the canvas in the dark hours of her grief, adding charcoal from the fire, cranberry juice, clotted blood from her own menstrual period, scraps from decaying metal around the ranch. Then she’d shaped the undersea images with her mother’s palette knife.

She’d distilled her visionary underworld on the canvas in the greens and blues and gloaming grays, creating a worldscape, expanses of ocean, kelp forests in the depths, the welkin submerged. Generally, she liked the work, once she got over the shock of unexpected confrontation. But, more importantly, she saw ways to better execute her vision, techniques that called for more refinement. She felt excited, butterflies fluttering in her chest, the urgency to work burned into a roaring blaze of desire. Her breath came in short gasps. She felt faint.

“The way the pigments fuse … “ Lizette jumped, surprised again by the man’s voice so near to her ear. “The effect adds to the ethereal quality of the encaustic medium. Some paintings have ten or more layers built up, but this work is extraordinary. There are easily two dozen levels, the coloration changing with the light source and time of day. This piece is quite seductive, tactile, sultry. It’s like the canvas breathes life.” A well-dressed couple came into the gallery and the man turned and went to greet them. “Welcome to Wentz Gallery,” he said before his voice trailed out of Lizette’s consciousness.