Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [133]
“Senator, our trip downriver was not my gift to Abbie. It was her gift to me—and I have a feeling that she’d been planning it a long time.” I studied my work. “I didn’t paint her to imprison her. I painted her…to set us free.”
Abbie’s death had shattered his tough exterior. Now he lived with his emotions close to the surface. Sewn on his sleeve. “She teach you that?”
The hurt reminded me of what was, and is, beautiful. Of what I’d known, and lost. Of love given. And taken away. The more it hurt, the deeper the ache, the sweeter the memory. So while I mind the hurt, I live with it.
I smiled.
The senator hung Indomitable, and many others, in Abbie’s design studio, which he turned into my gallery. Or rather, our gallery. We call it “Abbie’s.” He named it. He hung the Fein print in his bathroom, where it’s his alone to see. He stares at it when he’s shaving. The interest in my work has been overwhelming. It’s funny. Now New York is coming to us. Two weeks ago, he called to say we’d gotten six figures for something I painted a few months ago—a picture of me walking back across that lawn at the Bare Bottom with Abbie laughing so hard it hurt. The buyer said something about that laughter, something about Abbie’s face, how it tugged at him and wouldn’t let him go. How it spoke to him.
That pleases me in places that words don’t reach. The senator told me that a philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “That which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.” I’ve known silence my whole life. I’m okay with that, too. Only difference now is that my hands are screaming at the top of their lungs.
Last week, I pulled my cap down, slid on my sunglasses and mingled around the gallery. Sort of eavesdropping. Nobody knew me. I got to talking to this lady and she said she’d been there for four hours. Said she’d been doing that once a month for six months. She tapped her chest and said, “Something about is satisfies me.” I asked her which one was her favorite and she quickly pointed at this little eight by ten. It was the picture of me and my mom on the river, sitting on that bench. I pulled off my hat, slid off my glasses, lifted the piece off the wall and gave it to her. When I left she was still crying. Maybe my mom was right. Maybe some people just need to dive in and drink deeply. Maybe we all do.
THE SMELL OF PAINT filled my studio. The painter’s high. The light over Fort Sumter was gentle, even golden. I stared at the vase on the shelf to my left. She’d been there every day, watching. Reminding me of my last promise.
The eleventh wish.
It was time.
I set down my brush, picked up the phone and dialed the number. When he picked up, I asked, “Can you land that thing on a dirt road?”
I could hear him move the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “’Pends on the road.”
I put in a call to my probation officer. While the district attorney had dropped all charges against me related to Abbie’s death, they couldn’t let the drug thing slide. In truth, I did steal a rather large amount of drugs and transport them across several state lines. I admitted it. The evidence would have been difficult to hide. But given that they found none in my system, they gave me twenty-four months’ probation. Any time I leave the city, I need to register it with a guy behind a desk in Columbia who likes my painting.
I made a stop at the senator’s house. He was in his study. Yesterday, he’d made the announcement that he would not stand for reelection. He saw the vase in my arms. “You decided to keep your promise?”
I nodded. “I can put you right alongside her.”
He smiled. We’d come a long way. Abbie would have liked that.
He nodded and began unfolding and folding his handkerchief. “I’d like that. I’d like that very much.”
BOB PICKED ME UP outside of town and we flew south, hugging the coastline. When we reached Cumberland Island, he banked hard west and we buzzed the town of St. Marys. We circled it once and Bob landed on a dirt road not far from the point. I walked down the dirt road, hopped