Paint Me True (22 page)

She nodded, brusquely.

“So I guess it falls to me to decide who gets what. I need your help. I mean, I assume John should get the house, since he has children, but I don’t even know how much money there is or anything like that.”

Louisa did not look at me as she said, “You’re not obligated to give them anything.”

“It’s not really mine to give. Nora... you know how she is. She must’ve had a fit of pique a few years ago, but what she did was a mistake and you know it. So help me.”

“Well, I suppose we’ll need to look into matters, yes. But now eat your scone, dear. I know you wanted to get back to Nora.” She put the little tubs of butter, jam, and clotted cream by my plate. She was as meddling and bossy as ever, but now I could see the love that motivated her.

“Look,” I said, “now that I’ve found my cousins, can you help me with a few things?”

“Of course, of course.”

S
o much had changed in the course of a day that when I finally got home and went upstairs to see my aunt, I was shocked at how she looked the same. She was thin and frail and sleepy, but she still smiled when I walked in. She didn’t know that I’d dug into her secrets. I was still the one who painted her beautiful pictures of Paul.

I’d obsessed about this moment and now it was here. I reminded myself that I’d weathered an awkward conversation with Louisa just a few hours ago. I could do this.

“Hello, dear,” she said.

“Hi. Are you comfortable?”

“I am. Did you have a good date?”

“Um, you know? Yes. It went really well.”

“What have you got there?” She nodded at the large bag I toted under one arm.

I unslung it from my shoulder and set it on the floor. “I got four,” I said as I dug in with a crackle of plastic and came up with a large teddy bear. I didn’t bother to add that Louisa had come shopping with me. “Found the Toys R Us. It’s got microfiber fur. Feel.” I passed it to her and she took it in her hands and caressed the plush fur.

“Four of these-”

“All the same, of course. Nothing for them to fight over. They’re for John’s kids.”

“You’re sending these to John?”

“Well, that’d be doing it the hard way. He’ll be here tomorrow, midmorning.”

She dropped the teddy bear and gave me a startled look as if I’d just fired a gun into the ceiling of her bedroom. “John’s coming?”

“And his kids, and Keeley. Yes.”

“They’re coming? Here?” She cast about, as if looking for a place to run and hide. Then she looked up at me, a thousand questions in her eyes. How had I found them? What had they said? What did I think of her as a result? If I’d found her children, I had access to what they’d say about her and their father.

And now the moment had arrived. The moment when she realized I knew the truth and then what? Would she fly into a rage and throw me out? Burst into tears? Curl up into a ball and not respond when I tried to talk to her?

I picked up the teddy bear and stuffed it back into the bag. “Anyway, I’ll get started on that third painting of Paul as soon as possible, but I wanted to get the house ready first. I’ve got beds to make and all that stuff.”

Her gaze turned quizzical.

I kissed her on the cheek. “I love you. Call me if you need anything.”

I
was up so late getting the house ready that it was a struggle to stay awake in church. Brother Babcock had me sit next to him. Louisa, he explained, was going to meet John and Keeley at the station and bring them to the house. He patted my shoulder sympathetically as I yawned my way through Sacrament meeting. He then gave me a ride home and we arrived at the house just as Louisa pulled into the driveway from the other direction. The nurse’s car was also in the driveway, so it was a tight squeeze.

I got out and stood with my hand shielding my eyes as my two cousins, whom I’d never seen outside of anonymous photographs on the walls, emerged. John was so tall he unfolded from the car to stand up straight, then leaned back in to extract one baby and a woman I took to be his wife – given she was shorter, rounder, and had much redder hair than the Keeley I’d seen in pictures – extracted another. Two other children with the big eyes of toddlers clambered out and looked at me as if I were their new headmistress and they weren’t sure what they thought of me yet.

The passenger side door opened and out stepped a woman with light brown hair, a very slender frame, and freckles over her nose. At the sight of me she gave a hesitant smile, then turned to get her luggage.

Brother Babcock waded into the fray to get suitcases and when I tried to follow, I found there were none left for me. Keeley turned around and found herself in the same situation. It was then that our eyes really met.

“Hi,” I said.

Her mouth twitched, and it wasn’t because she suppressed a smile.

“I tried to get in touch with you sooner,” I said, “but I didn’t know how. I mistakenly thought Louisa was evil. Didn’t occur to me to ask her.”

At that Keeley did chuckle. “She’s not too evil.”

“Not excessively,” agreed Louisa.

I dug in my purse and produced two house keys. I handed one to Keeley and one to John. Louisa looked at me expectantly. “There are only those two extras right now,” I lied. There was no way I was going to give her another key to the house. She might have apologized for trying to go in uninvited, but I suspected she wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to do it again if she had the chance.

She gave me a tight lipped nod, then picked up one of the two toddlers and carried her towards the house. “This is your grandma’s house,” she explained.

John came to stand beside me. He didn’t say anything, just looked me over.

“Your mother’s in her room,” I said. “She’ll have regular visits and care from nurses.”

“For how long?”

“Until the end.” I shrugged.

“Right.”

He looked a bit like my other cousins on that side of the family. The same angular jaw and hesitant stance when he found himself out of his depth.

Since I didn’t know what to say next, I followed Louisa inside. As everyone filed in, I could feel the house change from the lonesome, empty place it had been every time I’d visited, to a home full of chatter and running feet and giggles upstairs. Pip raced around and shot up the staircase, tags jangling and tail wagging frantically.

“Best not to let her know I’m here,” said Louisa in a low voice. “I’ll go see if there’s anything for lunch in the kitchen.”

John’s wife, Bea, followed her and when I looked in the sitting room I saw Brother Babcock with an arm around Keeley. She smiled up at him while they caught up with each other.

John’s voice called out upstairs, “Put your bags next to your beds. Here, like so.” His voice got softer as he moved away.

I climbed the stairs to Nora’s room, knocked, and entered when the nurse opened the door. My aunt was propped up on pillows, looking thin and drawn. I went over to hold her hand and her gaze darted to me with the quick, jerky movements of a bird. “I’m guessing you know they’re here,” I said.

The nurse slipped silently out.

“Yes.”

“You ready?”

“No.” That came out as a whisper.

Heavy footsteps sounded in the corridor and there came a sharp knock.

Nora grasped my hands tight. “Eliza, I-”

“Come in!” I said.

The door opened and John peered around it.

Nora grasped my hand so tight I felt the bones give. I gently pried to loosen it, but she didn’t even notice.

“Mum,” he said.

The door opened wider and his daughter peered around as well, her brown eyes wide.

“Leah, this is your grandmum. Mum, this is Leah Nora Chesterton.”

Nora dropped my hand and moved to sit up.

“Hello, Grandma. Thank you for the stuffed teddy bear.”

I could tell Nora was about to cry. I moved quietly around the bed and slipped out. This was their moment.

I went downstairs to check my email. There I found a message from Hattie.

Hey,

So... okay. I thought it over and decided you were right. I called my brother and he wasn’t too horrible. I didn’t talk about the Church and he didn’t either. I’m going to the “wedding”. No idea what to get for a gift.

Things are better, though, so thank you.

-H

I blinked and read that over again. She’d reconciled with her brother? My cartoon had convinced her? I’d spent my entire career living from one thin compliment to the next. I got a lot of, “That’s beautiful”s and “Perfect”s, but this was the first time anyone had told me something I’d drawn had made them change the way they lived their life.

This was
Hattie
, who believed the Democrats, Satan, and Hollywood were part of a cabal bent on stealing her family and making her miserable.
She
had offered reconciliation?

I felt like I’d been away from home for a very long time.

A
s the evening wore on, I felt more and more like a fifth wheel. The Babcocks and my cousins had a lot of catching up to do. The children got over their initial shyness quickly and staged a teddy bear wrestling match in the sitting room. I found myself pushed to the corner time and again. I sketched the children silly pictures of mice eating off toadstools and frogs playing piano, which they cut out and spread on the floor to make up stories. I found myself being served food for dinner and unable to elbow my way in to help with dishes. Then after dinner there was a frenzy to get the children ready for bed.

I slipped upstairs to the studio to get a moment to myself. I’d promised Nora that third painting, but how could I paint it given all I now knew? Especially with her children and sister-in-law in the house?

I had to paint something, though. My hands were itching. After a moment’s fiddling, I got the lamps on and positioned how I wanted. Paul’s proposal and Nora’s disappointment surfaced up in my mind. She’d known then that there was something out of kilter in her fairytale. She had a feud with the in-laws before she was even married. That proposal wasn’t a moment that she wanted to capture, but could I paint an idealized picture of a proposal or ring shopping? Some subjects just couldn’t be made pretty with any kind of artistic tricks. Some truths were inherently ugly.

The real question was, did I want to knowingly paint a lie? What would my cousins and Louisa think? I had to find something positive I could say about Nora and Paul. There had to be good things, even if they’d been fleeting. I didn’t bother with preliminary sketches this time. This one would be rough, but that was okay. I was painting for Nora, who had mere weeks left to live, if that. I took a deep breath and cast about for a memory of a good spontaneous romantic moment from my own love life.

Needless to say, Len hadn’t given me any. He didn’t do spontaneity. Whenever he had called up out of the blue, it was because he’d worked long hours all week and hadn’t paused long enough to call me earlier. Rather than take control of the situation, he’d open with an apology and pause, as if to see whether I’d tell him to get lost. Then he’d make his tentative offer.

“So... you want to go to the movies?” was a common one.

“You... want to watch a DVD?” was another.

Occasionally he mixed up a little. Once he said, “You want to go to the park and fly a kite?”

“Do you have a kite?” I asked.

“No, but I have instructions I downloaded from the internet on how to make one out of balsa wood and tissue paper.”

“Do you have balsa wood and tissue paper?”

“I have the wood. We can go get the paper.”

“I have tissue paper.” I’d been playing around with it after one of my nieces posted a link to the
Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar
fanpage on Facebook. Eric Carle had done such beautiful illustrations with tissue paper and glue.

“Oh yeah? You have some that we can use?”

“As long as you’re okay with only using the ugly colors,” I said.

“I’m not gonna know what those are, so as long as you’re the one to pick them out, I think we’re good.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you for not making the obvious joke.”

“Which is?”

“That if I don’t know what colors are ugly, how do I always pick them out to wear? Well, that’s what my mom would say, at least.”

“Can you not compare me to your mother?”

“Sorry. I’ll come by in half an hour?”

“Okay.”

A
t the park we lasted about twenty minutes before I wanted to throttle him. “Look, you have balsa wood lying around your house, that means you know how to build models, explain to me why you can’t glue two pieces together and keep them straight?”

It was a gray day with a steady wind, ideal for kite flying, though it had a damp chill to it that foretold rain. The sky above was still light, though, despite the horizon to horizon cloud cover. Around us were a crowd of kids celebrating someone’s birthday, dozens of people walking their dogs, and the usual scattering of couples on picnic blankets, all of whom were packing up to leave before any drops fell. In the distance, a few kites danced in the sky.

“Not even my sisters would put balsa wood and models together.” The wind blew his too long hair into his eyes so he had to have one hand on the top of his head at all times to hold it back. That did not improve his kite building skills.