Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [115]
Slowly, the image took shape. A charcoal outline on canvas. Like heavy fog lifting off the ocean after a storm. The sun burned it off. The way her toes curled into the sand, the right foot turned slightly in more than the left, the slim legs, long calves, knotty knees, drawn thighs, hollow hips, the hand clasped around a bloody tissue, the scars that barbwired around her chest, the yellowed, thin skin draped across her collar bone, the throbbing vine-thick vein on her neck, the flaky and cracked flaring nostrils, the purplish-blue vein pulsating on her temple, the white head, deep eyes, gray skin, the fatigue. Silhouetted against a backdrop of storm clouds, thunder and the river.
The hours passed.
I’d been painting long enough to know that each piece, if made well, can take on a life of its own. This piece had done something I’d not intended. It etched both her smallness—her shrunken, pale, sickly frame, the protrusion of her collar bone and the indentation of every rib, the matching cavities in her chest—while also capturing her enormity and her magnificence. Her larger-than-lifeness. Her I-am-not-my-cancerness. I sat back and looked at my sketch—the structure of what would become the one piece she’d always thought I could make. And there, beneath the tears, beneath the realization of what she’d just given me, it came to me. She whispered it from the canvas—the word that is my wife.
Indomitable.
At dusk, I carried her from the bench. She glanced at the canvas. “Took you long enough.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t get my subject to sit still.”
She tied the scarf back around her head. “Gee, that’s sort of a letdown. I thought you were just enjoying seeing me naked.”
“Well…”
Her breathing was labored and raspy. I set her on my seat, my feet sinking into the sand. She stared at herself, following each stroke, each shadow with her finger. After a minute, she nodded. “Not even Rembrandt…”
Her eyes were slits. She cracked a smile and fought the pain, pushing her lids upward. I asked, “Scale of one to ten?”
Her eyelids fell and she leaned against me as the rain began to smack the river.
45
JUNE 10, DUSK
Abbie lay on her back, her stomach rising and falling with short, shallow breaths. Posing had wiped her out. Her face was white and pale. Eyes rolled back and forth behind her lids. Bob sat with a shot glass in one hand and a bottle of tequila in the other. I stared out over the river. Bob said, “You don’t owe me anything and you have every right to your own privacy, but…how’d you two get here? Really?”
I started at the beginning and told him the story of us. Of jogging along the Battery. Of Rosalia. Of asking the senator’s permission to marry, eloping and buying our house in Charleston. I told him about our nearly year-long trip. I told him about finding the lump, and of the last four years. Every detail. The surgeries, treatments, hopes and discoveries. Finally, I told him about Heather.
While I talked, Annie rolled through in gentle sheets beyond the glass. She had weakened to a tropical storm, but every few minutes, we felt a gust followed by the muted pop of a pine tree snapping in half. Toward dark, the river had swelled with debris—muddying the water.
I stared through the window, speaking softly. “Growing up on the river, we found rope swings at every bend. Climbing and swinging were just part of what we did. A paper mill, located about a mile or so through the woods behind our trailer park, used to pipe their discharge into a pond behind the mill. In times of heavy rain, the pond would fill up and any discharge would overflow into these concrete holding tanks which would then ‘spill’ the water down into the river. The tanks helped reduce the erosion on the river’s bank. To prevent kids like me from playing in them, they welded metal grates over the holes. Problem was, the temptation was too great. Being an asthmatic, I was relatively small, so I tied my rope to a grate, climbed through the hole and started swinging around like Tarzan. It was all fun and games until I slipped, the