“Are you upset?” I asked him.
“I’ll be all right.”
“But I thought—”
“It’s okay, Sage. I’ll get by. I always do.”
When we finally made it home, Dad only had to circle the block once before he found parking.
“I just need to grab something from the back,” he said as we got out of the car. “Spoiler alert: It’s your birthday present.”
As we walked around the block, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen next. But in a strange way, I also had to give mental props to Sheila. The Wired Post Group was probably HEDZ’s fiercest competitor, and with its newest location in Greenpoint, it was a pretty smart career move on her part.
I kicked the pavement with my feet as we kept walking forward. I wanted so much to turn to my father and ask him to reconsider Chicago. If Sheila was smart enough to stay, why couldn’t he? Maliek, Tuyen, Gavin—any of those people I had seen or heard about—surely one of them could handle the new spot in a new city.
Why did it have to be him?
“You should stay, Dad,” I finally said as we approached the front door of my building. “You should stay, too, and send someone else in your place.”
He stopped and then turned to look up at the clouds above us. After a few moments, he said, “You would like that, wouldn’t you? You want me around, huh?”
I nodded.
Then, with one hand on the door handle and the other holding a small box wrapped in pink paper, Dad turned to me and smiled. I didn’t want to let him know that he had accidentally ruined the surprise. Earlier that week, I had heard him tell Mom that he’d bought me a camera—a real one—the kind his friends in the photography department swore by.
Without another word, we both went inside.
Epilogue
It was a Saturday afternoon, no different than any other when Sage and I returned to the blue house on Perry. Almost nine months had passed since that December never to be forgotten, and it felt as if the ground had begun to settle once again. Not that our family ever had a true sense of stability, to begin with, but it seemed like we were finally ready to pick up the pieces—and perhaps even decipher where they fit.
The house, officially under my ownership, had been vacant for months by then. I still hadn’t quite decided whether to sell it or keep it for my own. But with September approaching, the new school year looming ahead, I had to make a definitive decision—and soon. I had promised my father to try and restore the house to its best condition. It was the last thing I had ever told him that June before he passed.
As we searched through an endless plethora of tattered old boxes tucked away up inside the attic, Sage and I found ourselves rediscovering family treasures, photographs, and keepsakes preserved. Some were painstakingly wrapped in faded sheets of now-yellowing newspaper. Others hid in smaller boxes of their own. Sage even found a Claddagh ring—it had belonged to an aunt of my father’s—tucked inside a delicate pouch of burgundy-colored velvet. It was a modest, simple band of silver adorned with a single garnet stone.
As I rummaged, Sage grew restless, her attention span beginning to wane. She said it was depressing—the irony wasn’t lost on me—and boring. As she paced up and down across the attic floor, her eyes widened in wild animation. Her hand ran, almost compulsively, through her wild, recently dyed lavender hair.
Sage, of course, was still the ruler of her own little world. However, she was starting to open herself up to others just a bit. With her photo essay making the second cut, she had decided to intern for her father that summer after all. Mike had agreed to stay in New York, leaving all Chicago plans behind. Even though she hadn’t won, Sage had become more and more driven by an unquenchable fire that thrived inside her, and she continued to view the world with an artist’s eye.
“Do we have to keep looking through this… stuff… now? Can’t we come back tomorrow?” she asked. “Besides, I’m supposed to see Dad and Connor tonight. Miles and Finn are coming, too, so you know my hands are going to be full. Connor can’t help!” Settling cross-legged next to me on the floor, Sage curiously turned the Claddagh ring over and over in her hands. “I wonder if I can find a way to polish it,” she said. “It’s so tarnished, but I think I can fix that. What do you think?”
Mike had chosen to settle into a classic Fort Greene, Brooklyn, brownstone. Only this time, he had done it on his own. He had passed through it last Easter, and it had managed to catch his eye. With its old New York charm and ambiance of another time—scraped and varnished hardwood floors, rows of pristine, egg-shell white painted bookshelves constructed deeply into the living and bedroom walls—everything about it seemed right. But there was still some talk about someday purchasing some waterfront property on Long Island, where Sage could marvel at the wondrous surrounding natural beauty, while his boys could wave to sailboats passing by.
I wearily wiped at my tired eyes, craving respite from the old attic’s murky light, but there was still so much work to be done. “It’s beautiful,” I agreed. “How about this? We go through the closet in Grandpa Thomas’s room first. Then we head out for your soda and slice.”
Her eyes still fixated on the Claddagh, Sage nodded in agreement without further fuss. We set aside our collections to keep in a big box to take home with us, then gingerly walked down the attic steps to the second floor.
Walking within the still silence along the way to my father’s room, even the slightest and lightest steps we took seemed to take on the force of a thousand echoes, reverberating eerily down the hall. The floors were scratched and in some places splintered. Chips of jagged wood pierced upward from the floorboards like angry claws. In small patches, strips of wallpaper hung limply, peeled, exposing faded splotches of the cornflower blue paint underneath. As we approached his door, I hesitated momentarily, needing to take that deep breath before deciding to proceed.
We both entered, tip-toeing ever so gently, as if afraid to awaken the ghosts of my parents
from their eternal sleep. The room was empty, as I knew it would be. Most of my father’s belongings had been donated. Just a floor-length mirror and wastepaper basket had been left behind.
“There are just a few more things in there,” I said, approaching the closet with caution. Sage stood several steps behind, watching my every move. Then after a few more moments of quiet hesitation, she joined me at my side.
Opening the closet door, I stood on the tips of my toes, raising my head as far up as it could go. I tried my best to see, but it was out of reach. Almost instantly, curiosity got the better of me.
“I need a closer look,” I said, as I reached. My hand brushed against the shelf, awakening a dust cloud that soon spread all around me. Sage quickly jumped aside, coughing fitfully into the closed fist she held protectively against her nose and mouth.
“Sage, help me find something to stand on. A stool… table…” However, I finally settled on that wastepaper basket in the corner.
“There.” I motioned toward it. “Bring it over.”
Sage raised her eyebrow at me in response, looking at me as if I’d nearly lost my mind. But she brought it to me anyway, turning it over, creating a sort of makeshift stepping stool of spindly wicker. “It doesn’t look very strong, Mom,” she warned, her voice a fluid mixture of skepticism and concern. “It looks like it’s been around forever.”
“Stand next to me, Sage. Just grab on to my hand. And make sure I don’t fall!”
She helped me stand upright onto the basket, and I performed a sort of impromptu balancing act as I held my breath.
“One of the pitfalls of being short, huh Mom?”
“Sage! You should talk!”
Then I felt the basket slip just slightly under my feet, and I whispered a silent prayer it wouldn’t send me headfirst into the ground. Sage planted her foot and lower leg steadily against the basket, trying her best to secure it in place. I stretched and strained again but missed. I tried again—and again—until I succeede
d. Our eyes then met for just one moment before we both burst into a song written with uproarious laughter.
“Just this last thing,” I promised, wiping years of dust from the top of the weathered box. Then I settled in the center of the room, sitting cross-legged myself on the floor. “I haven’t looked through these in a very long time,” I whispered. It had been decades since I had snuck into the room, searching for the signs, the evidence, that at one time she had really existed—that at one point, I’d had a mother to call my own.
“What’s in there?” asked Sage, eyeing the shoebox almost cautiously.
“Come look.” Lifting its lid, I grinned up at Sage and patted the carpeted floor beside me invitingly. After a slight moment’s hesitation, she sat down by my side once again.
Inside we found a bundle of photographs, which Sage eagerly grasped within her hands without a hint of vacillation. I remembered when I had found them myself, years ago. I hadn’t been that much older than she. The photographs’ color had long faded, and their edges had softened. Sage flipped through them with avid attention, nonetheless.
It was a small, simple book that caught my attention. Little enough to slip into my back pocket. It was one of my mother’s journals.
Taking it lovingly into my hands, I explored its body made of creamy tan leather. It felt so gentle, silky even, against my skin. I turned it over within my palm, ran my fingers along the spine, and flipped through the faded pages. So many stories. Dreams unrealized, unfulfilled.
Together we delved into the penned words of my mother, all the stories she sadly never had a chance to tell. Memories from her childhood. Family holiday parties that lasted well into the night. The life and home she and my father had so lovingly shared. We even found little notes she had written, addressed especially to me. I must have been just a baby at the time. There were to-do lists, interpretations of her dreams, drawings and doodles, mostly of figure eights and loopy flowers.
Sage thoughtfully looked over my shoulder, and her lips moved as she read without a sound. She then looked up at me, her eyes warmly meeting my own. “I always wondered what she was like.”
So, when I closed my eyes, I could almost hear my mother’s voice, if I willed the memories to wash over me once again.
“For another day,” I whispered as I closed the journal, placing it almost reverently in my lap. “It’s time for your story now. Time for you to move forward—time for us both.”
There are moments we replay over and over in our minds. And, sometimes, if we close our eyes just tight enough, we reconstruct the images, sounds… the words from the ones we love. It’s as if all we could ever ask for is to freeze those memories in time—as if doing so would somehow make them, everything, more real to us—and less likely to dissipate from our hearts.
But we also can’t become so consumed with what once was that we become damaged, blocked, forgetting to live.
Such is the balancing act. We are shaped in ways that we’re truly unprepared for. I suppose that’s the way it tends to go for any family, or really anyone, who has ever learned to love. Whether it be confronting illness, a hidden secret, or a simple human flaw, there’s no handbook designed without defect, no all-knowing guide waiting to place a life’s topography into your eager hands. And anyone who believes otherwise is sadly mistaken. Because even if there were some sort of roadmap, some perfectly delineated playbook instructing us as to exactly what we’re supposed to do, where we’re meant to go, and how… well, something intrinsically human would still be missing.
It wouldn’t quite be life then, now would it?
I never pictured myself as someone who could be responsible for the life of another person. As self-interested as that may sound, there had always been a part of me that was primarily concerned with my own self-preservation. I’m not proud to admit this.
Whenever I did seek that basic need for human connection—no matter who it was with—I, too, usually ended up feeling exhausted, defeated. Always focused on the outcome, never the process. Always looking for external answers and definitive solutions, but never reflecting deep within myself…
Until now.
Painting Sage Page 22