by Laura Tucker
Two guys were unloading crates outside the button factory. I could hear the hundreds of little wheels turning as the heavy boxes shuttled down the slanted belt into the basement hatch.
“Olympia, go. Get out of here.” There was no harshness in my mom’s voice anymore, only exhaustion.
Desperation surged through me. “Mom, please. You have to get up. Will you get up? Please?” Another box rattled down the ramp.
My mom barely had the energy to shake her head no.
“You’re better off without me.” Her voice was a whisper.
“Please don’t say that. It’s not true.” Salt dripped into my mouth. I hadn’t even known that I was crying.
I allowed myself to imagine her bent in concentration over her workbench, her strong hands making something beautiful out of all this bad feeling. “What about your show?” I asked, but even before the sentence was all the way out of my mouth, I knew it was impossible.
She shook her head. “I don’t make anything anymore.” And her voice was bleak as she said, “This is no place for a kid, with me like this. You should go be with your dad now.”
I was crying in earnest now. “No, please. I don’t want to go to France. I don’t want to do anything except be here with you. You don’t have to get up; you don’t have to do anything. Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”
But she had already turned away.
I was afraid to stay, but afraid to go too far away, too, so I banged my way out of the room and sank to the floor outside, pressing my back against the closed door. I sat outside my mom’s room for a long time, hugging my legs tight, wiping the snot and tears that wouldn’t stop coming onto the knees of my jeans.
Inside, I could hear my mom sobbing, too, crying so bitterly I knew I would never be able to comfort her. Nobody would.
MIZ MONOCHROME
It was almost dark when I got back upstairs to the studio.
Field of Reeds, I chanted under my breath as I unlocked the big steel door with shaking hands. Field of Reeds. Every bit of me concentrated on what it would feel to lose myself in working on my model in the quiet, paint-splashed organization of the studio.
I knew it was stupid, but I felt like getting the model right might fix something.
An afterlife just like real life, except without anything to worry about.
Apollo had left a battered metal tray by my workstation with a note, a large yogurt container filled with white paint, and an open box of butter cookies next to a clean mug with a fresh tea bag in it.
Suddenly ravenous, I ate the cookies while I read the note.
Olympia, the note read in Apollo’s strong, slanted handwriting. This is nice primer. A coat before you paint will help your colors to stay true. Take a break for tea! (And don’t forget to turn off the hot plate.)
Love, A
My eyes welled up again.
After a while, it was a relief to turn back to my model, to the collection of little pieces waiting for paint. I arranged the notebook, the pencils, the little toothbrush. I’d have everything I needed. My mom and dad and Apollo were there, too—or their stand-in drinks, anyway.
But something was still missing.
Looking into the models at the Met, I’d felt like I was there. I could practically smell the fresh bread in the air and the prickly, yeasty smell of the beer, see the motes of grain sifting down through the sunlight as the model servant crushed his pestle into the nutty grains. I could smell the cows, hear them chewing, feel the warm terracotta tiles of the garden floor against my bare feet, hear the burble of the fountain and the buzz of the insects in the eucalyptus in the garden.
Compared to those, my model seemed uninhabited. It reminded me of the way my house had felt the night before.
I remembered Lady Day puzzling out the meaning of the garden—how there was no reason for it, no fruits or vegetables growing. It was a place to relax, to listen to music, to play board games and chat. That garden wasn’t part of an afterlife survival kit, unless playing games and listening to music in a beautiful shady spot was something you needed to survive.
Maybe it was.
I went back to the shelf where the box of modeling clay was kept, unwrapping a small block on my way back to the table. Unlike the pieces I’d tried to make of my parents, this piece came together right away and exactly the way it had looked in my head, like there was a direct connection between my brain and my hands.
And when that last, easy piece was finished, I knew my model was done.
Then I got to work painting it all, letting my focus narrow until there were only the tiny clay objects I’d made, going from brown to a dingy beige to a chalky white. With each consecutive coat, my paintbrush turned them clean. Soon, my hands were sticky and tight with dried primer, and the little pieces were drying next to the cardboard box I’d chosen to hold them, the sides trimmed down and painted a stark, spotless white. The methodical work gave my brain a place to rest, too.
I was placing the pieces in the box when the metal door swung open behind me. I took a moment to admire Apollo’s oversized green T-shirt, which had a hand-painted bronze arrow on it.
“Emerald,” I said. Despite its name, Emerald Green the pigment is dirtier, more copper-colored than the gemstones. The color was only commercially available for fifty years during the nineteenth century because it was poisonous—something they didn’t figure out until they’d used it to dye clothes and the wallpaper that most likely killed Napoleon.
He looked down and nodded in agreement. “Without the arsenic that blinded Monet, we hope.” He walked over to the hot plate and put the kettle on. “Now we will have a cup of tea while you show me all the progress on your survival kit for the afterlife.”
We took our tea over to my workspace. Apollo laughed about the toothbrush, and nodded approvingly at the extra notebook I’d added at the last minute, worried that one wouldn’t be enough.
“But this, Olympia, this is your masterwork,” he said, picking up the tiny cat I’d made an hour before. She was still damp, so he held her gently in his huge hands as he examined her, appreciating each of the tiny whiskers I’d carved with the pushpin, the delicate ears, her intricate tabby stripes. Then he returned her carefully to the tiny bed, curled up neatly right where my feet would be, her triangular chin resting on her front paws.
Looking at her made me feel better.
Apollo’s arms were crossed against his chest, his head tilted to one side. He nodded. “It’s very good,” he said, and I let his words warm me along with what I knew, which was that they were true.
We stood there for a minute more, looking at the neat clean shapes and the little shadows they threw against the bright white box. I was supposed to paint it next, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to add color at all.
The model was just right the way it was, orderly and stripped down. Pristine. Blank.
Right as I had that thought, Apollo leaned in to look again, saying, “It is going to be quite the trick for you to capture some of these details when you start the paint. I have a very small brush; expensive, one or two fine hairs. I will see if I can find it for you.”
I must have stiffened a little, because he looked sideways at me and then threw his head back and laughed.
“Oh, no! Miz Monochrome. You are not going to paint it at all, are you? You’ve decided to leave it white.”
I was glad he was laughing.
“It feels done,” I said.
“Well, I made you something,” he said. “Last night, after you left. But my feelings will not be hurt if you prefer to bring your colorless campaign with you to the afterlife.”
As he crossed over to the stainless-steel worktable near the triangle painting, I noticed that he’d put hot pink laces into his worn brown work boots. And when he dropped the little object he came back with into my palm, I laughed with delight an
d recognition: Apollo had made me a miniature canvas, an exact copy of the blue study he’d made for me using ultramarine, the first color I ever mixed with him, back when I was nine.
“We will begin with the best,” he’d told me, watching carefully as I ground the precious lapis lazuli the way he’d shown me, mixing the powdery dust with alcohol. He’d shown me how to use a magnet to separate out the metallic pyrite in the stone, and how to knead the pigment carefully into a ball of wax, and then push it through a fine metal filter so that only the purest pigment remained.
The study he’d made with our paint had been so beautiful that I kept sneaking back to look at it, even after we’d cleaned up.
He’d surprised me by giving me the color study the next day, making a joke of it by sticking one of those gaudy plastic Christmas bows on the top. But it wasn’t a joke. It was the most beautiful thing I owned.
I carefully held the little canvas against the wall of the model, across from the bed. It would be the first thing I saw when I woke up in the afterlife, too.
Apollo was teasing me now. “Of course, I understand completely if my humble contribution dilutes your strict vision.”
“No. I love it,” I said, struggling to put what I was feeling into words. “That little bit of color makes the rest of it look right.” I put a dab of strong glue on the back of the canvas and held it in place with a careful finger, counting to thirty under my breath.
Apollo looked at his watch, a massive hunk of metal in a battered leather strap, the only thing he’d kept from his time in the Polish army. “It’s late, Olympia. What are you going to do now?”
I shrugged, but I knew exactly what I was going to do. Gluing the pieces in place would take about ten minutes. Then I was going to clean up my workspace and go upstairs to heat up a can of tomato soup, and then I was going to watch some stupid show on TV until I fell asleep on the couch. I didn’t think I was feeling brave enough to check on my mom again.
“Nothing much,” I said. And then, too quickly, “Do you want to get some dinner?”
I was mad at myself as soon as the question popped out of my mouth. It made me sound desperate, like one of his dumb girlfriends. But it was too late to take it back, and I knew that Apollo would be too much of a gentleman to say no.
He did hesitate for a minute before saying, “Actually, there’s a party I have to show a face at, for an artist I know. I don’t have to stay long. I know that it is a school night for you, but perhaps you would you like to come with me? We can eat a slice of Sicilian with tomatoes and onions on the way.”
I nodded quickly, still embarrassed, and then turned back to my glue. I’d been eating a lot of pizza, but it would be better than soup and saltines.
Besides, a party sounded interesting. I’d gone to art parties with my parents when I was a baby, but that meant falling asleep on a pile of coats in the bedroom while the grown-ups smoked and argued about time landscapes and ready-mades. Sometimes Linda would ask me to sleep over when she was throwing a party for her real estate clients so I could keep an eye on Maggie (Alex, too, if we’re being honest), but those parties were boring. The three of us would steal as many éclairs from the dessert tray as we could carry, and then we’d sit and eat them on the mezzanine, looking through the railing at grown-ups drinking wine and laughing at jokes that weren’t funny.
An art party would be better than that.
And even if it wasn’t, it would sure be better than going home.
NO ÉCLAIRS
There were no éclairs at the party Apollo took me to.
We crossed Canal, passing fabric warehouses and empty lots, until we came to a loft building in worse shape than ours. The stairwell had no lights, so Apollo sang a Polish drinking song and I followed his voice up through a fuzzy black so dense it filled my mouth.
Four flights up, he stopped and banged on a metal door.
We waited, my breath coming heavy and loud in the dark.
When the door swung open, a giant woman with cheekbones painted on like knives kissed Apollo and pulled him by the hand into the squash of people behind her. She didn’t even look at me.
I could tell by the way his shoulders were set that it annoyed him how bossy she was. Apollo doesn’t like being told what to do.
He turned around to mouth something at me over his shoulder, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The door, covered in stickers and fat Sharpie, had slammed shut behind me, and Apollo had disappeared into the crowd.
A camera flashbulb popped. In the afterglow, the air was ghost-colored from the smoke. The big room smelled like armpits and spilled wine and perfume. Candles dripped onto the bottles they were set into, and the music sounded like someone shaking change in a coffee can to discipline a dog. I pushed through people laughing, their heads thrown back like something was going to bite their throats, or maybe they were going to do the biting.
This was no place for a kid.
On the other hand, it made me invisible. I could look at anything, everything. All the women were wearing boots, silver and covered in writing, or black with zippers all the way up. They were beautiful.
It was too hot.
A woman wearing tight leather pants was sitting backward on a chair like a lion tamer, legs spread, one knee up against an industrial sink, the other nearly touching a table crowded with bottles. It didn’t look like she was going to let me through, and something cold and hard curled at the bottom of my stomach. Suddenly, she clapped her knees together against the chair back like she’d been making a joke, and I slid by her fast, half expecting her to slam her knees out again to block me. When she didn’t, the thrill of a near miss shot up the back of my legs.
By the table with the bottles, there was a woman with a knob where her hand should have been. I know about birth defects because Linda is obsessed with them. This kid Kai in the second grade at our school only has two fingers on his left hand; it looks like a lobster claw. Linda always makes it sound like the claw is Kai’s mom’s fault, but she seems nice when I see her pushing him on the swings at the park.
The woman with the tiny fist wasn’t hiding her hand, like Kai does. Instead, she’d dipped it in yellow rubber, so that her arm had a colored tip, like a match, and when she talked, she waved the yellow fist around like a scepter. People think yellow is happy, punch buggies and have a nice day, but it can be a warning, too. Wasps are yellow, and police tape. I bet the woman with the yellow fist knew that.
The skinniest man I’d ever seen swayed in the middle of the room, holding a bottle and dancing, but not to the music. I kept looking away, afraid he’d open his eyes and catch me watching, but he didn’t, so I let myself stare until I felt the shock of something cold and wet on my ankle, and then an insistent, hard shove behind my knee.
There was a black and brown dog snuffling around my legs, a big German shepherd with a pointy nose and a sloping back, like the cop dogs on the train. I held my hand out to her, the way my dad had showed me. She gave a quick disinterested sniff and let me pat her thick, oily coat. It felt like petting a bear.
I wondered if the music was bothering her. It was bothering me, and Lady Day says that dogs’ ears are four times more sensitive than humans’. But she didn’t seem bothered; she seemed busy. She didn’t let me pet her for long before she headed back off, into the crowd. When I looked up again, the dancing man was gone.
I made a beeline over to the window. I thought it would be cooler there, but it wasn’t. The music kept coming loud and fast out of the black speakers. I felt like if I had one extra second I could get ahead of the noise and the heat and the smoke, but there wasn’t any time. My heart kept beating too fast, or maybe it was the music.
I turned around and put one foot onto the windowsill to brace myself. Then I grabbed the brass handles and yanked. With a blast of cool air, the heavy glass panes rolled up on their c
ounterweights, just like at home. I swung myself up and out.
OUTSIDE, LOOKING IN
As soon as I felt the fire escape beneath my feet, the jangly feeling from the party drained right out of me, through the metal grating and onto the street.
The window rolled back down as soon as I let it. I jammed one of my sneakers in there, next to a cord snaking over to the building next door; they were stealing the electricity for the stereo. With one yank, I could have thrown the whole party into silence.
It was quiet outside, and the distant sounds of Broadway ponged around my head, filling the space where the music used to be. I rocked forward into a squat and peered down. Mica glittered in the dark pavement below. Getting down to the second floor would be easy, but the ladder at the bottom was pulled up and locked, and the last drop to the sidewalk stretched out into the darkness. Alex could have done that jump, maybe. But it was way too far for me.
I dumped my backpack off my shoulder and got my notebook out. I drew the windows first, big frames I could fill in with the black night behind, the easiest way I could think of to get across the feeling of shiny dark danger the party had given me.
Then I flipped the page and drew the dancing man in long, quick lines. I’d draw him properly later, but I wanted to remember the delicate shadows under the ribs that poked out from beneath his skin, and the careless, loose swing of his arms crossing his body as he swayed, like the sleeves of a coat with no arms in them.
My Blackwing moved until it stopped.
I’d go back inside and find Apollo. It was time to talk to him. The thing with my mom had gone too far; I needed help. I’d confess about peeking into the box and seeing his colors. He wouldn’t be mad. Maybe he’d tell me where he was going. And if it wasn’t too much, maybe he could take me with him.
As I crammed my notebook back into my book bag, a voice came out of the dark.
“Hey,” it said, deliberately soft, but I flinched anyway.