Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [7]
“Sorry you missed,” I say.
She lets go of me then. Takes a step back.
There are cars stopped behind us. Somebody starts honking. I look for Truman, but he’s gone. Of course he is. He wasn’t real. It’s the pills playing tricks. Dr. Becker said I might start seeing things if I took too many.
I try to get moving, to get out of the street, but my legs are shaking so badly I can’t walk right. There’s a man on the sidewalk, gawking at me. I give him the finger and stumble home.
5
“Mom?” I shout as I open the door to my house. There’s no answer. That’s not good.
I kick my way through the heap of mail on the floor. Bills. More bills. Letters from realtors who want to sell our house for us. Postcards from art galleries. A copy of Immolation, St. Anselm’s student lit rag. Letters for my father from people who still haven’t heard that he moved to Boston over a year ago to chair the genetics department at Harvard. My father’s a genetics expert. World-famous. My mother’s out of her mind.
“Mom? Mom!” I shout.
Still no answer. Alarm bells go off in my head. I run into the parlor. She’s there. Not standing in the backyard in her bare feet, clutching handfuls of snow. Not breaking every dish in the house. Not curled up catatonic in Truman’s bed. Just sitting at her easel, painting. I kiss the top of her head, relieved.
“You okay?” I ask her.
She nods and smiles, presses her hand to my cheek, and never takes her eyes off her canvas.
I want her to ask me if I’m okay. I want to tell her what I almost did. Minutes ago on Henry Street. I want her to tell me never to do it again. To bitch me out. To put her arms around me and hold me. But she doesn’t.
She’s working on another picture of Truman. There are so many already. Hanging on the walls. Leaning against chairs. Propped up on the piano. Stacked in the doorway. He’s everywhere I look.
There are tools on the floor. Sawdust. Screws and nails. Scraps of canvas. She likes to build her own stretchers. There are crumpled rags and crushed silver tubes strewn about, splats of color on the floor. I can smell the oil paint. It’s my favorite smell in the whole world. For just a second, I stand there inhaling, and it’s like before. Before Truman died.
It’s a chilly fall evening and it’s raining and we’re all in the parlor, the three of us, Mom and me and Truman. There’s a fire in the fireplace and Mom’s painting. She’s making her still lifes. They’re so good. The critic for the Times said the one in the Met’s collection is “the world made small.” Once she painted a tiny nest with a blue egg in it, resting under the arch of an old black sewing machine. Another time it was a red sewing box, tipped over and spilling out its contents, next to a chipped coffee cup. And my favorite—one of a red amaryllis next to a music box. Truman’s like her and he draws while she paints. I play my guitar. The rain comes down harder, darkness falls. We don’t care. Together in our house, in the firelight, we are the world made small.
A few times, my father was there with us. Home late, as always, rumpled and bleary-eyed and smelling like the lab. He would walk in noiselessly and sit on the edge of the sofa as if he were only visiting. Distant. Apart from us. A shy admirer.
“Moo shu pork?” I ask my mother now.
She nods, then frowns. “The eyes aren’t right,” she says. “I need to get the eyes right.”
“You will, Mom,” I say.
But she won’t. Vermeer and Rembrandt and da Vinci put together couldn’t do it. Even if they got the shade right—a clear, startling Windex blue—they’d still fail because Truman’s eyes were totally transparent. That whole windows to the soul thing? That was him. When you looked into his eyes, you could see everything he thought and felt and loved. You could see Lyra and Pan. The Temple of Dendur. Bottle rockets. Garry Kasparov. Beck. Kyuma. Chili cheese dogs. Derek Jeter. And us.
I walk to the kitchen and call in our order: the moo shu, two egg rolls, sesame noodles. Willie Chen brings it. I’m on a first-name basis with all the delivery guys.