“Well.” His voice is creaky, the sound an old church door might make, as if he’s opening it up to give me a sermon of some kind.
I lock eyes with my mug, mortified. After a few fidgety minutes, in which I wait for another well that doesn’t come, I peep up. The Professor is sipping his tea. There are deep grooves around his mouth, practically engraved. He’s aged about a hundred years since summer.
Eventually he says, “Your sister sent me to find you. Asked that I talk to you. Again.”
I’m confused, then I remember the Visa bill speech—and the poems of Niko’s where she wished she could pass her guardianship to the Professor. I brace myself for the Ash lecture, but instead he asks, “How go the university applications? All set for SCAD?”
I squirm. I haven’t even signed up for a SCAD log-in to apply, let alone finished a single piece in my portfolio. Not to mention I’ve skipped school two days in a row. The deadline isn’t until January, anyway, but the thought of the work it will take makes me want to lie down and sleep for a hundred years.
“Fine,” I lie, wrapping my hands around my mug and shivering. I hadn’t realized until this minute how cold I am. This has been the longest day.
The Professor nods. Uneasily, I observe the droop of his face: jowls, beard, shoulders, all slumped together in an avalanche of dejection. He doesn’t look like he wants to give me a lecture on Niko’s behalf.
“The Prof—” I cut myself off in time and say, “Professor Gupta?”
“Yes?” He blinks at me the same fluttery way Ash sometimes does, with a small smile. It almost makes me laugh, how briefly alike the gesture makes them. Perhaps there is some great reason—I mean, hidden really deep down—Mum chose the Professor for her best friend.
“What, um,” I continue. “Did Mum … Did she ever talk to you about … her—about being ill?” I stutter and stammer to a halt, unsure how to phrase the question. “Like, her being crazy, I mean.”
“Crazy?” he barks, misunderstanding ruffling his face as he peers at me. More gently, he adds, “Er—Minnie. I’m not sure … Your mother was sometimes unhappy, definitely complicated, often … erm … an upsy-downsy sort of person.”
I think about The White Album and the Rainbow Series I, amazing and opposite artworks that have drawn worldwide acclaim. The spectacularly selfish act of going missing and leaving three teenage daughters. The interview in which she called synesthesia a kind of madness; the box beneath her bed filled with prescription medications I’m not sure she always took; starlit days and sinkhole ones when she had no use for smiling. Upsy-downsy doesn’t begin to cover it.
“Do you think…” I ask hesitantly. I’ve known the Professor almost my whole life, and we’ve never had a conversation like this. It’s like trying to talk to a briefcase. “Do you think she was only successful … I mean, do you think her art was good because she was, um, complicated?”
The Professor yanks on his bow tie, looks for an escape route, blows on his tea even though he’s drunk it all. This is the kind of conversation Mum might have rejoiced in—the origins of art!—but he looks like he’s being slowly strangled. Finally he harrumphs, “Rachael’s talent was separate from her … hmm, humph, her mind. She had her moments, but she never made art when she was unhappy, did she?” There’s a little “ha” of triumph on his face at this argument.
“No, she made art when she was a bit”—I wave my arms above my head, then try to talk the Professor’s language, change unhinged to—“overenergetic.”
He strokes his chin, going into what I recognize as one of his academic theology lectures. These usually happen over too-long dinners with Mum, and I tune them out, but now I listen attentively as he says, “Ah, here’s the rub. What is crazy, really? Perhaps it’s simply behavior that we don’t understand. Historically, martyrs have been accused of insanity—and, then, of course, there’s the witch trials…”
I tune out his unhelpfulness. Because there are artists who are definitely mad: Vincent van Gogh—not only that whole severed-his-own-ear thing, but he also shot himself in the chest. Michelangelo slept in his shoes. Edvard Munch had visions and hallucinations, Georgia O’Keeffe was hospitalized with anxiety, Francisco Goya was delirious, graffitiing the walls of his house with the Black Paintings series, surreal images of despair.
Each one totally certifiable. But also geniuses.
Perhaps the two always go hand in hand, the way you can’t have joy without sorrow, can’t have love without risking your heart a little bit, can’t wake without sleeping; winter and summer, failure and success, Emmy-Kate and Niko.
Then again, plenty of my favorite artists manage to be stable as suburbia, so who the eff knows?
“Now, er—Minnie.” The Professor concludes his ramblings, pushing back his chair with a squeak. “I must say good night. Tomorrow,” he adds, “I have a whole day researching in the British Library!”
“Er, good?”
“Indeed, yes.” He beams, rocking on his heels. I’m surprised to feel a sudden rush of fondness for his out-and-out nerdiness.
I walk him to the front door, replaying our conversation, no closer to any answers. He’s halfway down the path when I blurt it: “Were you in love with Mum?”
“Oh.” The Professor turns, tugging on his bow tie. “Wouldn’t that have been something?” He stares off into the night, years and years into the past. “I was in awe of your mother. Who wouldn’t be? And I loved her … but not in the sense you think.”
When he says this, for once he doesn’t stutter or waffle or stammer. It’s the truth.
“So, then … why else do you keep coming around here?” I ask.
He waggles his head, perplexed. “Minnie,” he says gently, for once minus the er. “Why would I not? Your mother was a lovely woman with very little practical sense. She left you no guardian, Niko made it known she was in difficulty, I am here. What on earth else would I do? It’s simply my, er, responsibility.”
We’re staring at each other, equally bemused. To him, this clearly makes perfect sense. But he’s the only one of Mum’s friends who’s behaved this way. The glitterati art crowd, the Young British Artists, SCAD professors: They’ve all been interviewed on the news about her art, but they’ve never once checked in on us. Not asked us about school and eaten fried eggs each Saturday and scolded us about Visa bills.
In a cheesy Hollywood film, this would be the part where I discover I’ve had a father figure here all along. But, no. It’s not that simple. He’s just the person who is here. And I find myself astonishingly glad that he is. It’s enough.
“Well, there we are,” the Professor says, more or less to himself. He shuffles out onto the sidewalk. A moment later, I hear the creak of his own front gate, then the sound of his door opening and softly shutting. I linger on the path for a minute or two, staring up at the starless sky, then I turn around, and go inside.
Beige
(An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)
Life without a whirlwind mother. Life without these high-highs and low-lows, probably. And that might be what I’m really afraid of. If I fix my broken brain, switch off the monochrome sinkholes and the neon wildness somehow—won’t I be a little bit beige? The color of a shoebox beneath a bed.
CHAPTER 27
The Color of Smoke
A cool wind blows in the next morning, ushering normal life back in. I should probably go to school.
At breakfast I collapse at the kitchen table, staring blankly up Emmy-Kate’s abstracts. All night long I’ve been contemplating Mum and madness. The Professor is certain that she was merely complicated; the mysteriously missing shoebox suggests that she has or had some specific diagnosis. I think I’m still more comfortable thinking of it as sinkholes and starlight, something uniquely her, not medicalized.
Although, perhaps if she suspected I had it too, she should have left me with some answers.
Emmy-Kate stalks in and I swivel my head, waving hopefully: “Hey…”
She
stops, narrowing her eyes until they’re two little slits. I can’t believe she’s having sex.
Hand on bony hip, she says, “Ugh, take a picture, Minnie, it’ll last longer.”
I take a deep breath, say, “Emmy-Kate, I’m sorry—”
“My room’s free now, if you want to go and rummage in my private things,” she interrupts, sounding like a poisoned apple, one that speaks.
“I don’t, I promise. But can I talk to you about it?”
I’m too late to take on the role of responsible big sister—especially since sex is a topic I know next to nothing about—and Emmy-Kate chirps, “Nope!” while miming zipping her glossy lips. But a confession is bubbling. Her eyes bulge, the proverbial fairy-tale frog sitting on her tongue. Then she thinks better of it, shaking out a never-ending bowl of Frosted Flakes, conspicuously ignoring me as she sits on the counter, kicking her long legs and fiddling with her phone.
I look down at my own lifeless phone. Last night I texted Felix to explain, but he didn’t reply, or call, or swoop down the road looking like a beanie-wearing Count Dracula. And no wonder: I did all that with him, when I had a boyfriend. Speaking of whom: I dial Ash’s number, but it goes straight to voice mail, the same way it did last night. Over and over again.
Emmy-Kate is slurping and I’m despairing when Niko walks in. She bashes around, loudly charring her toast and crashing into a seat opposite me, arms folded, glaring into space. I try and fail to catch her eye. Last night, I left the salvaged poetry pages propped against her door, along with a note of apology. They were gone this morning, but that’s probably more to do with her aversion to clutter than forgiveness.
I’m almost grateful to leave the house. Emmy-Kate runs off till she’s miles ahead of me, stomping along on too-high heels, hair swinging from side to side like an angry Shetland pony. And I come face-to-face with the Full Moon Inn. I stop and stare up at the second-floor windows, where I swear I see a curtain twitch. Felix wasn’t in the bakery this morning. He’s up there watching me, I know it.
The pub’s front door is closed, barred shut, but down the side alley, a smaller staff door is propped open. A man with an undertaker air and masses of salt-and-pepper curls is slumped against the fence, eyes closed; the only clue that he’s not a statue the smoke curling from his cigarette. Felix’s dad, I bet: They both look like life has knocked the stuffing out of them.
I skulk in his direction. Leaves eddy on the sidewalk as I duck past his closed eyes and dart through the door.
The pub is empty, chairs hooked upside down on tables. Sun floats in through leaded windows, illuminating armfuls of dust motes. The air looks like a pointillist painting. Behind the bar is a glass door marked PRIVATE. I swallow my nerves and go through it, then up the stairs beyond.
Each step creaks creepily as I climb. I’m ready to abandon this stupid cloak-and-dagger pursuit when I reach the top and see Felix’s bedroom straight ahead.
No question it’s his.
The wide-open door reveals walls smothered in art. I walk inside, mesmerized, my fourth bedroom snoop in as many days. Every inch of wall is stuck with sketches, the ceiling too. The dinosaur studies, The Kiss—and our kiss (!), the Rainbow Series I; portraits. Depressing ones. There are thick, jagged lines through each face. My broken-people theory comes back to me, Felix’s claim that I’m his grief twin.
The desk is equally a riot, piled with sketch pads and jars and jars of brushes and pens. Here, there’s a self-portrait: Felix in crisis. Black lines streak across the page, capturing his curls and flat mouth in a lion roar of grief. Wowsers. It’s entirely possible he drew this with the charcoal in one hand and the other stuck in an electric socket.
And there are portraits of me. Hundreds of them, actually: on dinosaur day, under the willow tree, lying beneath the bubble, slumped on the bench, covered in porcelain, even running from the classroom that first day. Is this a tad stalky for a boy who’s known me all of three weeks…? On the other hand, I’m the one sneaking into his bedroom uninvited.
This is when I hear Felix’s unhappy rumble from behind me: “What do you want, Minnie?”
I spin around. He’s leaning in the doorway: the self-portrait come to life, rebel without a cause, shadows circling his wary eyes. His hair is wet and shoved to one side, dripping onto his T-shirt and jeans, his feet bare. “Hi…” I say hesitantly. The last time I saw him, our tongues were locked around each other. Actually, the last time I saw him, he was turning his back and running away without a word. “You weren’t answering your phone.”
His eyes flick away, then back to mine. A heartbeat passes. My feet start moving toward him, acting on their own accord, when Felix holds up a “stop” hand.
“Don’t.”
I come to a faltering halt. “I wanted to talk to you,” I say.
Felix brings his shoulders up around his ears, then scrubs at his chin with one hand. With his face screwed up, eyes closed, squeezing out the sentence, he says, “Nothing to talk about. You have a boyfriend.”
I shake my head. “Actually … not anymore.”
Felix tilts his head back and says to the ceiling, Adam’s apple bobbing, “But you did. And you never said. You let me think … And now, what?” He drops his head, eyes blazing. “Let me guess: He saw us kissing and he broke up with you. You’re here because there’s a Minnie’s-boyfriend gap to fill.”
“That’s not exactly what happened. And I’m not looking for a boyfriend.” At least, I don’t think I am. “I wanted to explain.”
“‘Me and Felix. He. We’re not. It’s not like that. We’re nothing,’” he recites. The words I said to Ash at the Rainbow Series I. “And,” he adds, in a tight, strained voice, “you’re right. We’re nothing. You’re with him. So what is it that you want from me?”
“I want…” I trail off.
And therein lies the problem—kind of a huge one. I don’t have a clue what I want, and Felix knows it. I bite my lip, looking around the room. Now that I’m accustomed to the ferocious art surrounding us, other details spring from the mess. T-shirts leave a Hansel-and-Gretel trail across the floor—Felix is as allergic to laundry baskets as I am—and his unmade bed is filled with books cracked open at the spines. It makes me want to tell him about the way Emmy-Kate marks her place: tearing off the corner of each page and eating them as she goes along. I don’t want things to end before we can have stupid conversations like that, tell each other everything.
“I want you.” I can’t pull this sentence off the way Emmy-Kate could.
“No, thanks,” Felix says, like he’s kicking a stone.
Euuuurrrrgh. Some of yesterday’s rage comes back to me in the face of Felix’s moodiness. A tidal pool of emotions opens up—misery, jealousy, confusion, annoyance, lust. Why can’t he be kissing me right now, instead of staring morosely at the carpet? Or at least talking to me, telling me what’s on his mind.
I don’t know because you don’t tell me.
Ash’s frustration at me, mine at Felix.
Another meltdown is rising, but I swallow it, say “Forget it,” mostly to myself, and inch past an immobile Felix because I can’t take another confrontation.
I retrace my steps down the ancient, creaking staircase, along the narrow corridor, through the empty, dusty pub—where Felix’s dad jumps, doing a double take—and out into the blustery black-and-white morning, legs shaking all the way.
I want to take the world apart at the seams.
Vanilla
(An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)
Vanilla. What I’ve always suspected I am. Niko makes art with sharp cuts, and now grief-stricken poetry. Emmy-Kate paints in a five-star league of her own. My mother is famous. Felix draws like a clenched fist. I still don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.
CHAPTER 28
The Color of Night
School holds zero allure so again, I don’t bother with it. I phone the office and tell them I’m ill and won’t be coming in. Although my coughs o
n the answering machine are fake, I do feel poorly—there’s a lump in my throat.
The house hums with silence, with the same forsaken atmosphere as yesterday. And when I retreat to the Chaos Cave, the mess kicks me to the floor.
I tidy half-heartedly, scooping armfuls of dirty clothes downstairs to the washing machine and piling art materials on the desk. I put the clay tiles outside in the shed. The whole time, I think: Even if Mum did lose all her colors, why did she leave? Why weren’t we reason enough to stay?
I’m facing a lifetime without purple. If I go to SCAD in this state, try to become an artist when I can’t see properly … will my sisters be enough to keep me tethered to the earth?
Under a cardigan, I come across the books I retrieved from Mum’s room. I cocoon myself in bed with them and Salvador Dalí, sliding the Georgia O’Keeffe hardback onto my lap. “Aight,” I say. “Let’s see what Mum was up to.”
O’Keeffe painted flowers in extreme close-up: irises and lilacs in pink-lavender-yellow-teal. Mum’s Post-it notes mark so many pages, it’s impossible to tell what she was bookmarking—these flowers can’t all be pink, this can’t all be research for Schiaparelli.
One painting is completely covered in Post-its, all emblazoned with her handwriting, saying things like “YES!!!” and “THIS IS IT!” The caption beneath says:
Blue and Green Music (1919–1921). Oil on canvas. The Art Institute of Chicago. O’Keeffe believed music could be “translated into something for the eye.”
It’s been one of my favorite paintings since forever, but I never thought about the title before. Blue and green music …
“Sounds a lot like synesthesia, doesn’t it, Salvador Dalí?”
The next book is the Yves Klein. He was famous for inventing a brand-new shade of blue. A synthetic ultramarine he named International Klein Blue. This dude invented the sky. Woke up one day and announced, “The blue sky is my first artwork.”
How to Be Luminous Page 17