What We Hold In Our Hands (7 page)

“Leave it there,” Barry said. “You've got it. If you keep painting you're going to muddy it.”

André set down his brush. “Do you think it's done?”

“It's very nice. Especially that melon wedge in the foreground. You've captured the different tones there very nicely. I like this soft pink background and the feathery quality of the leaves against the strong melon shapes. Everything works to set off that red flesh.”

“That's a good painting,” Katya said.

“Beautiful,” said Miriam.

André felt his chest swell, as when strangers admired his son. “Finally, I got it.”

“You got it once,” Barry said. “That'll be enough to keep you going until the next time. Why don't you start another while you're on a roll? And try staying for critique tonight.”

André prepared another piece of paper, taping the edges to the board. He sketched the composition on a drawing pad. This time he'd make a large dark—a close-up focusing on the big curve and dark stripes of the melon's skin. But when he picked up his brush, the blank paper made him think about his marriage, and caused his hand to tremble.

One night, a few weeks before she'd left, Liz had said, “I've never felt loved by you.”

“I tell you I love you all the time.” He'd stared at her pale lashes, the whites of her eyes.

“You're always either finding fault with the things that are important to me—the paintings I admire, the installations and artists at work—or putting me on a pedestal, like I'm this domestic goddess that I'm just so tired of trying to be.”

“That's not how it is. You're the one always finding fault with me. You never say it outright, but you think I'm a failure, that I don't have the guts to start my own practice.
You
don't love
me
.”

“That's not true.”

But she'd proven him right. All that stuff about not feeling loved had just been an excuse.

Even now his chest felt heavy with the memory of her lying to him. Starting to wheeze and cough, he fled to the adjacent kitchen for a drink.

Katya sauntered in to freshen her painting water. “You look flushed. Are you sick?” she asked.

“It's hot in here.” Everything looked blurred, undefined. He searched for his glasses in his empty shirt pocket.

“I'm a nurse, you know.” She peered into his eyes. “I see sick people all day. Are you sure you're not sick?”

“Maybe I am.” He'd heard her tell Miriam that she was a nurse, but he'd forgotten. Nursing had seemed too prosaic a career for Katya. Now she was leaning so close to him that he was able to see her clearly without his glasses—her velvety hair, her skin reddish beneath high cheekbones, the smile lines on either side of her mouth. He kept still, enjoying her nearness, feeling his breath quicken.

“Maybe I have a serious illness that requires lots of nursing.”

“No,” she said, slowly sizing him up. “You look all right to me. I'm more worried about my melon. It doesn't look well at all.”

“Oh.” He rubbed his neck, still sore from last week's attempt at fixing the light, which had since been dismantled, so that tonight only the shell of the fixture remained.

When Katya looked at him, did she see what Liz saw? What Bridget saw? Lately Bridget had been moping around the house. Last night he'd scolded her for serving half-cooked fish sticks and leaving the laundry in the dryer to wrinkle. She'd burst into tears, and wept openly on the sofa, making him feel like a brute.

“I'm sorry,” he'd repeated half a dozen times, kneeling in front of her with a box of Kleenex.

She'd laughed then, reaching out a hand as if to caress his face, but only touching one finger to the tip of his nose.

He decided to try one more time with Katya. “Show me your painting,” he said. The swirling strokes of red and orange made the melons look wild, but still recognizable, unlike the fruits and flowers Liz used to paint before they were married, her large canvases laden with impenetrable slabs of colour.

“Very nice. You just need some highlights and a cast shadow here.”

“Of course. I forgot the shadow. Thanks.” She turned her back on him, and filled her brush with paint.

He contemplated the sketch he'd prepared. It was okay, but there wasn't enough time for him to start a new watercolour. Instead he walked around the room and looked at everyone else's. Returning to his seat, viewing his painting from a distance, his face grew hot. It was fucking amateurish. His colours weren't as clear as he'd thought. The purple splotch on the melon's flesh, which had seemed a charming rendition of a bruise, now looked like a mistake.

Next to his painting lay the blank paper. He'd thought it had reminded him of his marriage because that's how they'd started—with a fresh sheet on which they'd both proceeded to hurl paint and make a mess. But maybe Liz was the white paper, not blank, but exposed to a constant source of light that cast a blinding reflection. Is that why she'd stopped painting? Had his opinions discouraged her? He remembered now that the six months she'd taken off work had been meant as a sabbatical, a time for her to paint. But Liz had felt blocked.

“I can't work here,” she'd said, furiously whisking egg whites for a soufflé. “I get distracted by housework and cooking. And the lighting is too harsh.”

“Those are just excuses,” he'd said. “If you really wanted to paint, none of that would matter.”

“If I really wanted to paint, I'd find a more supportive partner,” Liz had yelled, flinging the foamy egg at André's face.

He'd thought their marriage was perfect, but maybe she'd been telling the truth about never feeling loved. Maybe disappointment was what had made her restless and bitter, disappointment in the meagerness of his love. So stingy he couldn't even give his own son a marshmallow or make the phone call Braden had trusted him to make, inviting Liz to hear him sing at school. Or summon the courage to turn off the light that made the things it shone on appear either brightly perfect or horrifyingly blank.

He sat hunched over his still life, staring at the backs of the other students' heads, until Katya said, “That's your breakthrough painting. You're getting the hang.”

“I don't like it. The fruit's too dark.”

“It's stormy. I know I complain about still life, but it's really the same as landscape, only on a smaller scale. You've got another seascape there. That melon's a ship.”

“Then how do you explain all that pink?”

“That's dawn.” Katya grinned.

“Don't say, it's darkest before the dawn,” André groaned.

“You rescued mine. See how the shadows ground the fruit? They looked like they were floating before.”

“Let's go out for coffee to celebrate.” He blurted the words before remembering how she'd rejected him in the kitchen.

“I'm meeting someone after.” She flipped back the hair on one side of her face, as if tossing André back into a pond.

“Me too.” He gulped for the breath he'd missed while awaiting her answer. “I forgot I have a date with my son for hot chocolate.” He hastily packed his brushes and paints before Barry could catch him for critique.

At home, a strange red car blocked the driveway. Liz's new car. André's hands tightened around the steering wheel as he parked on the street.

The house was dark. He switched on a light, listened for Braden's voice. Nothing. He strode upstairs, peered into Braden's room. The bed was empty. Liz had taken his son. André felt his heart plummet, as if the cracks in his chest had finally given way, and sent everything crashing. But why was her car still here? They must be somewhere in the house. Why hadn't he thought to seek out Bridget in the basement? He knew he'd find them there—Bridget and Liz—all chummy, chatting like women do, no secrets, their men revealed, exposed. He sprinted downstairs, but stalled halfway, hearing a muffled voice. Heart beating fast, he found himself calling her name, a hopeful, soft “Liz,” surfacing from his chest. But when he got to the bottom of the stairs, all he saw through the open door was Bridget on the phone.

“I'll call you back, Mum,” she said.

“Where are they?”

“She took him down the street to a friend's. They should be back any minute. I told her you'd be home soon.”

“She could've taken him away,” he said, his voice breaking. “You shouldn't even let her into the house!”

“But she's his mother.”

He took off his glasses, wiped his sleeve across his forehead. “You shouldn't have answered the door.”

“Now I'll know.” She spoke softly, careful of him. She sounded older, nearly maternal. Liz hadn't spoken kindly to him in so long.

“It's okay,” Bridget said, as he slid his arms around her, letting his forehead rest against hers.

She seemed to be pardoning his mistakes, erasing his failures, easing his guilt.

“I'm leaving in a couple weeks.” She pulled away, her face as pink as it had been a week ago when he'd thought she'd been on the phone with a boyfriend.

“Am I that hard to work for?”

“It's nothing to do with you. I miss home too much.”

He leaned towards her again. She let him kiss her.

He felt a space open in his chest. “Whatever you want to do is fine,” he said. He wanted to do something large and generous for her, send her home tomorrow with three month's wages. The thought made him feel almost happy. But then he'd have to find someone else to look after his son.

“You'd better go,” Bridget said, her face even pinker, as she pushed him out the door.

“I have to go get Braden,” he said.

He hadn't seen Liz and Braden together in months; she'd always arranged her visits to coincide with André's absences.

He stood on the sidewalk, arms crossed in front of his chest, and waited for Liz, unable to think what he might say to her. For now his neck had stopped hurting. It felt easy and warm as he sketched circles with his head. But he could feel the weather changing, a cold wind piecing itself together out of the silky November night.

His eyes grew dry and sore from staring down the street, almost forgetting to blink, until two shadows—one large, one small—emerged from the dark. He squinted as they passed under a street lamp, but the light did nothing to make their pairing less strange, or less natural.

Lemon Curl

WITHIN THE LOW, GREYING BERMUDA LIMESTONE WALL
grows a further wall of pink oleander, bordering the lemon grove. A big arching white cedar stands across from the lemon trees. Under its shade, no grass will grow, and the ground, red from the iron-rich soil, lies bare and soft. A curving gravel path leads up past rose bushes and nasturtiums to a small white house with dark green shutters. Twelve years ago, before she and Larry bought the property, Liv had asked the owners if the lemons were edible. She'd understood from childhood that the milky sap of oleanders was poisonous, and wondered if the poison might leach into the soil. The owners had told her not to worry; they'd been eating the lemons for years.

One morning, towards the close of 1982, lemons fall from the tree and tumble through the rain-soaked air. Liv is falling too, although looking at her, you can see no movement of any kind. She lies flat on her stomach in bed, face pressed into the pillow so that you wonder how she can breathe, or if she is alive at all.

If you could see inside Liv's head, you'd be struck by the jumble of brightly coloured images—plump oranges, yellow and red lantana, striped horse jumps, translucent purple jellyfish, small pink hands, achingly white sails—all falling at different speeds, all subject to gravity. At one time, Liv had managed to keep the images circling, holding them in the air like a juggler—talented, promising Liv, who had dreamed of starting a horse-riding school and breeding horses, but who has instead found herself alone with a brood of children and a grove full of lemons.

Her children are stretched out in various positions on the living-room floor, playing Monopoly, travelling past Go, collecting two hundred dollars, going to jail, constantly surprised by their good, bad, and indifferent luck.

“Oh, shit!” says Lucy when she lands on Boardwalk, owned by her brother, Luke, who added a house to his property each time he passed Go.

“Pay up.” Luke holds out his palm.

“I'll have to mortgage my railroads and sell my hotels. Shit and damn!” At seven, Lucy loves to practice her swearing in her parents' absence.

“Watch your mouth,” warns her older sister, Laina.

“Just because Mom's sick doesn't make you the boss.” Lucy dumps her hotels into the cardboard box.

“Mom's not sick,” Luke says. “She's gone mental.”

“Don't say that!” Lucy hurls her favourite playing piece, a Scottie dog, at her brother's face. The steel clinks against his tooth.

“That hurt, you little shit.” Luke jumps for Lucy, grabbing onto her tangled blonde hair.

“Stop it!” Laina rushes to separate them. Play money and plastic houses scatter over the board. “That's enough,” she says in exactly their mother's old tone.

“I'm sick of you both.” Luke glares at his sisters.

“Go to hell.” Laina dumps the Monopoly board back into the box.

The screen door slams behind Lucy as she hurtles across the rose garden in the rain. When she reaches the steps leading down to the grove of trees, she stops to pull up her sagging knee socks. Rain pelts her head and skin. If you listen carefully, you can pick out the tune of the song she sings to make herself feel happy again. It's one of the reggae songs her father used to play on the stereo—Bob Marley's “Three Little Birds.” She skips down the steps and climbs the old white cedar. Under its sheltering branches, the rain becomes a drizzle. Years ago, her father nailed a platform up there and called it a tree fort. That was for Luke, but Lucy is the one who uses it most. The nails are rusty now, and the boards shift a little under her weight. “
Don't worry
,” she sings. Through the trailing leaves, she can see her mother's lemon trees, the plump yellow fruit glistening between dark shiny leaves, the fallen lemons like wet grenades in the slick crab grass.

Lucy climbs down for some. They are so ripe their rinds are almost orange. She knows they'll taste as sweet as lemonade, not like the lemons from the grocery store, or the ones served in iced tea at restaurants in town. They never go out to eat anymore. She hasn't had a hamburger or fried chicken in over six months. They eat hot dogs, grilled cheese, canned soup, mostly prepared by Laina. Back in the tree, Lucy digs her fingernails into the thin lemon rind, which pulls easily from the fruit. She lets the curling pieces of rind fall to the earth. Her mother says that these lemons are a superior variety, what all lemons should be like, but Lucy cannot remember the name. She thinks it begins with an
M
.

Liv has not stirred except for a slight shift in the position of her head to seek air. The movement in and out of her nostrils is soft and slow. She can subsist on very little. Lately she rouses herself only when Laina brings her tea or soup. She'd wanted to name Laina Toby after Larry's dead father, but Larry had said he didn't want to be reminded of the past every time he looked at his daughter. He was the one who chose the children's names, continuing the alliterative trend he and Liv had accidentally begun. She'd thought it silly until he persuaded her that the
L
's were a way of declaring their unity, of looping them all closer together.

Each time Laina sets cup and saucer onto the nightstand, the sight of her crinkled forehead stirs Liv's guilt. A twelve year old shouldn't have to take care of her mother. Liv tugs at one of the round leather buttons on her wool cardigan, clutches it to her chest, feeling herself slide ever closer to the hard, bare place she senses at the end. Don't they call it rock bottom? Isn't she there yet?

Laina hates weekends. She can't have friends over, and she can't go anywhere without her siblings. Her life has become a box she moves within. On one side are her brother and sister. On the opposite side lies her mother. The third side is school. And the last side, the one that walls her off most completely from herself, is the need she feels to keep people from knowing, to pretend that everything in their house is normal.

Laina returns the Monopoly game to the closet, notices the vacuum cleaner, and decides the house needs a good cleaning. The vacuum sucks up dried grass and mud tracked in from the garden, Cheerios and corn flakes spilled on the carpet, crinkled curls of paper cast off from the children's notebooks. Its loud hum drowns out the silence oozing from Luke's and her mother's rooms. She imagines Luke behind his closed door, lying flat on his stomach across his bed, face lost in his pillow.

Laina wipes the cedar coffee table with a damp cloth, erasing the sticky fingerprints and smears of chocolate her brother and sister have left there. She thinks of what Aunt Carol said when she was visiting from England a few months ago—that Luke would miss his father most because he's a boy, and boys should not have to grow up without their fathers. Laina has always loved Aunt Carol, who has a British accent, wears short skirts, and tells stories about her many boyfriends, but when she said that about Luke, Laina felt her stomach twist. She wanted to scream that it wasn't true. Laina is the one who misses their father most, and hates him most too, because, as everyone always said, she was his favourite, and she will never understand how he could leave her behind.

Liv thinks of the time before the children because those are the years that seem most truly happy. The June day she and Larry first met at a party on the beach, when everyone had returned from their American and Canadian universities. He walked her home, and they kissed on the swing in her parents' garden until the stars came out. A week or two later, she took him for a boat cruise in the lemony sunlight amongst the islands of Hamilton Harbour, then out to Somerset where they docked at Lantana for lunch under pink umbrellas. Larry drank beer from a chilled mug. Liv sipped Planters' Punch, the dark rum floating on top, sweet and strong on her tongue, like the sun that was burning her skin, like Larry stroking her body in a private cove, where they crouched half-submersed in the salty water. He scraped his calf on a limestone reef, and she would never forget the sudden bruising pressure of his fingers on her forearm, his yelp of pain, or the tears that bent his lashes.

Luke removes the screen from his window and climbs through, dropping softly to the ground. He doesn't want Laina to know where he's going. Luke is a boy full of secrets. His biggest secret is that he doesn't really miss his father. It's his mother he misses. She never wanders into his room at night anymore. He used to hear her soft footsteps, feel her hand rest on his forehead, smell her lavender hand lotion as he floated back to sleep. Lately, bereft of her hovering presence, he wakes abruptly from nightmares. Last night he was chasing her wheeled coffin, which rolled ahead of him like an old-fashioned racing car past pink and yellow houses until it was so far ahead that he knew he'd never catch it.

Luke lets himself out the back gate, closes it behind him. Before setting off down the road, he takes a deep breath as if steeling himself for adventure. You can tell that each stride fills him with a sense of freedom and forgetting. The rain has stopped, the clouds are parting, and the asphalt sparkles in the sun. His bare arms feel warm even though it's only two weeks until Christmas. His grandparents will be coming from the States. Maybe they can get his mother out of bed. Luke climbs onto the limestone wall that skirts the road and walks along the top of it, picking petals off hibiscus, doing battle with long flexible oleander stalks, popping acid-green cherry leaves into his mouth. At the end of the road, he jumps off to cross the busy street before following rough stone steps down to the water. Even though winter is near, it's a fine Saturday afternoon, and a few people are boating. A warm breeze ripples across the harbour. Luke breathes in the salty air with its tang of sulphur, feeling his body soften.

His father used to take them out in the motorboat. There it sits, glistening on the water. It's not fair that they don't use it anymore. All alone out there, the boat will rot or sink. Someone needs to watch it, or put it away for the winter. He climbs into the small rowboat, moored at the dock, grabs the oars and rows out to the motorboat. You can easily read its embarrassing name, “Liv and Larn,” painted on the stern in bold blue script, and understand why Luke wants to take a stone and scratch out the “Larn.” Tying up to the boat's mooring, he pulls on the rope until he is close enough to jump aboard.

Liv remembers the blue ribbons she won jumping horses when she was young, how her horse, Ringo, had responded to the slightest pressure of her knees as he carried her over white gates and stiff green hedges. Ringo's love and loyalty had been exclusive and had lasted until his sudden death while Liv was away at university. She can still make herself cry by reading the letter in which her mother described his heart attack, a letter Liv received on a sunny October morning when she was planning to skip classes for a drive in the country with a tall, shy philosophy student she'd been flirting with for weeks. After spending the afternoon weeping on his shoulder, she refused to see him again because she couldn't look into his dark, attentive eyes without thinking of Ringo.

Luke finds a sponge under a seat. He sops up the rainwater that has collected in the stern, grimacing as he squeezes the sponge dry. He pulls a key from his pocket, another of his secrets. He'd found it in the kitchen drawer reserved for odds and ends, the place his father had always kept it. He tells himself that he only wants to see if the engine is still running, but once he hears its steady growl, he can't resist taking the boat for a spin. That's what his father used to say—“Hey, sport, want to go for a spin?”

Luke pulls in the bumpers, releases the boat from its mooring, and starts off with a burst of speed, which lifts the bow so that he can't see what's ahead. Slowing it a little to reach a plane, he heads towards the islands where they used to anchor for a swim and a picnic. Luke wishes he had one of his mother's tuna sandwiches now, along with a thermos of lemonade, but he forgets about food as the cool air rushes at his face, the salt spray splashes his arms, and the sun warms the top of his head. He has driven the boat plenty of times, but always with his parents and sisters along. Now he feels different—older, freer, more excited, and more afraid. The hairs on his arms and legs rise. His scalp tingles.

Liv's foot twitches as if she would like to kick someone. She's reliving one of the fights she and Larry had before they were married. They'd been snorkelling amongst the coral reefs. Liv's head was still full of the brightly coloured fishes she'd seen—red squirrel fish, blue and yellow angelfish, a milky purple man-o-war, the pale green body of a moray eel whose head was hidden inside the reef. Larry was trying to start the engine, which sputtered as it ran out of gas.

“I asked you if the tank was full,” Liv said.

“No, you didn't,” Larry argued. “I assumed your father had filled it up after the weekend.”

“Why should my father keep the tank full for us?”

“He usually does.”

“Not after the weekend.”

“Are you trying to make me look like a fool? You and your father…”

“What? Do you think we planned this?”

Larry grabbed an oar and started to paddle on one side of the boat. Liv took the other oar, trying to help.

“No! Sit down.”

Liv sat. The afternoon sun scorched her skin. Larry had a thing about her father, maybe because he'd grown up without one. She watched him attack the waves with the wooden oar. It would take hours to get anywhere. A cloud crept across the sun, cooling the breeze. Larry looked like a little boy playing ship's captain, or pirate. She couldn't decide which. Luckily, another boat came along and lent them a tank of gas. Larry helped Liv out of the boat without looking at her, his lips pressed tight, eyes glistening.