The Painting

by Charis Cotter

  “Newfoundland,” I mumbled, and started to cry.

  She sat down beside me, putting an arm round my shoulders.

  “What’s wrong?” She had such a gentle voice.

  “My mother,” I gulped. “She’s in the hospital. I think she’s going to die.”

  Somehow I ended up in the librarian’s office, where they gave me water and tissues. I sat waiting and crying with Mrs. Silver patting my hand until Magda got there to take me home.

  “Can you get me the book?” I asked Magda. “The book I was reading? I want to take it home.”

  The librarian stepped forward and handed me two books. “I’ve checked these out for you, dear,” she said. “Now you take care of yourself and come back and see us soon.”

  “The poor thing,” she said to Magda, whose face was tight with worry.

  “I never should have let her go,” she said to the librarian. “I would have stopped her, but I thought it might do her good to get out of the house, and I know she loves to go to the library, so I thought it would be fine, but I never should have let her go, the poor child.” And she enveloped me in a hug. She smelled like vanilla.

  “It’s all just caught up with you, hasn’t it?” Magda said, patting my back. “Never you mind now.”

  “I have to see Mom,” I said, pulling away from her. “Please. Can we call my dad?”

  We took a taxi to the hospital. Magda kept wringing her hands. I’d never seen anyone do that before. It was like she was washing them with invisible soap, over and over again.

  “I can’t bear hospitals,” she muttered as we clambered out of the cab. “Ever since I was a girl and my father had pneumonia, and we thought he was going to die, and my mother took me to see him, and the smells and doctors in masks, and my poor father struggling for every breath he took—”

  She stopped suddenly and looked down at me.

  “He didn’t die, though,” she said quickly. “He lived to a ripe old age, down to the pub every Saturday night, happy as a clam.”

  She had my hand gripped tightly in hers as we went through the glass doors into the lobby and up to the reception desk. Soon we were trundling down a long white hallway that seemed to go on forever. I couldn’t see the end of it. It was lined with white tiles, and every few feet there was a closed door. We passed a few people going in the opposite direction. One old man was being pushed in a wheelchair by a nurse. Doctors dressed in green scrubs hurried along. I was finding it hard to breathe. Magda kept chattering on about her father and mother and Dublin, but I stopped listening.

  Finally we turned off down a corridor and got in an elevator. It let us out on the fifth floor and we turned left. We had to go through some swinging doors and stopped at a tall counter, where Magda spoke to a nurse.

  “This way,” said the nurse, and led us down the hall and into a large room where each bed was blocked off by green curtains. She went up to one in the far corner and pulled back the curtains.

  My stomach was flipping over and over. I loosened my hand from Magda’s trembling grip and walked up to the bed. The curtains formed four walls, like a tent filled with a strange green light.

  Mom lay there, motionless. The green light came from the screens behind her, with squiggly lines running up and down and across them. A tall pole with a plastic bag on it had a tube attached that ran under the covers.

  Her eyes were closed. Her face was very white, except for a dark bruise on her cheek. Her chest rose and fell a little with each breath.

  I stood staring at her, afraid to go any closer. Magda came in close behind me and gave me a little push.

  “Go on. Speak to her,” she whispered.

  “But will she hear me?”

  “I don’t know. But she might. People always say you should talk to someone in a coma, that it does them good, whether they can hear every word or not.”

  I went forward then and laced my fingers through my mother’s. They were cool.

  “Mom?” I said. It came out like a croak. “Mom?”

  She didn’t move.

  There was a scraping sound behind me as Magda moved a chair behind my legs. I sat down, still holding Mom’s cool fingers in my hand.

  “Mom?” I whispered. “Come back.”

  CLAIRE

  MY MOTHER COMPLETELY freaked out when she saw the wet floor, the burned wall and the remains of the fire in the wood box. She came storming up the stairs and woke me up. I sat up, groggy with sleep.

  “What happened?” she yelled, shaking me awake. “What did you do? How many times have I told you—”

  “I—I—” My teeth chattered and I couldn’t catch my breath.

  “Tell me this instant!” she said, giving me another fierce shake.

  I finally woke up completely. “Stop it!” I cried, pushing her hands away. “Let me tell you!”

  She stood back, panting, her eyes wild and her hair all in a mess. She looked like a witch. Mary and Joan called her a witch sometimes, just to get a rise out of me, but the truth was she did look strange, compared to their proper mothers in their house-dresses and cardigans. Maisie wore long flowery skirts and big men’s boots, with plaid lumber jackets layered over her hand-knit sweaters. She had long, curly dark-brown hair that expanded in the damp sea air like some strange dark halo. She wore a long black cloak that ballooned and swirled around her in the wind. The local women kept their distance, but all the men liked her fine.

  Maisie had an awful temper. When she lost it, she raged and shouted and threw things and scared the life out of me. But I learned long ago that the only way to get through it was to keep my head down and wait till she blew herself out, like a storm at sea.

  “The electricity went off. I lit a candle and the wind blew the door open and the wood box caught fire. I put it out with buckets of water and everything’s fine. I’m fine.”

  She glared at me.

  “How many times, Claire, how many times have I told you to be careful with candles, especially in storms? And the door should have been latched.”

  “If I latched it, how would you get in?”

  “Through the lighthouse door. You must latch it in a storm. I’ve told you. When are you going to start taking responsibility? When are you going to grow up?”

  “I was doing fine. It was an accident. Accidents happen.”

  “For some reason, they seem to happen around you more than anyone else.”

  She stopped, realizing what she had said. The room, the storm and the argument all fell away, and there was only Maisie and me and the horrible thing that we never talked about. It filled the space between us and seemed to suck all the air out of the room. We couldn’t look away.

  “It wasn’t my fault…” I whispered. “She ran. I couldn’t stop her.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said slowly. “You know I didn’t mean that.”

  The silence deepened. It felt like we were standing on the edge of a precipice, and if we said anything else, we would lose our balance and fall.

  Maisie closed her eyes and grabbed two fistfuls of hair on either side of her head, as if she could squeeze all the pain away. Then she opened her eyes and gave a big sigh.

  “Claire, I’m sorry. I lost my temper. I was worried about you. I didn’t mean anything else. Just go to sleep now, okay?”

  I got back into bed. She waited until I pulled up the covers to my chin, then she left, closing the door behind her.

  It’s been hard between me and Maisie, ever since Annie died. She sent me away at first, to stay with Nan for a couple of weeks, after the accident. I heard her telling Nan she needed to be on her own, and Nan told her I needed her, and then Maisie said, “I can’t face her. I just can’t face her yet.”

  Then Nan said, “It wasn’t her fault, Maisie. You know what Annie was like. None of us could hold her once she made up her mind to run.”

  “I know that,” said Maisie. “Of course I know that. But I can’t face her, just the same.”

  Annie was always Maisi
e’s favorite. Mothers say they don’t have favorites, but it was as plain as day. Annie was just like Maisie—lively and funny with a wicked temper and determined to get her own way. She and Maisie would have terrible shouting fights and then make up and roll around the floor laughing, while I stood by watching silently, forgotten. Annie loved to paint, just like Maisie, and would splash around happily with paint and brushes in Maisie’s studio for hours, while it bored me silly. I’d rather read a book. I just don’t see the world the way they did. They were always rushing to draw whatever they saw, while I—didn’t.

  Maisie would sigh and say, “What am I going to do with you, Claire?” when I refused to sit down and draw with the two of them, or yawned my way through another gallery opening. I hung back at parties, while Maisie and Annie would take the floor, dancing, laughing, both of them loving to be the center of attention. Sometimes people forgot that Maisie had two daughters, because Annie was so adorable and I was so quiet. Annie and I were fine on our own, but when Maisie was around, I felt like the odd one out.

  Maisie told me many times that she didn’t blame me for Annie’s death. Too many times.

  Every so often it comes out. What Maisie really feels. She’ll let something slip about responsibility, or accidents, and I can see it in her eyes. She blames me all right.

  Oh, she’s tried to convince me that she doesn’t. In those first few weeks she would go over it and over it, telling me it wasn’t my fault. But I could tell by the way she looked at me that she blamed me. She thought I should have held tighter and I should have moved quicker to stop her.

  But I didn’t. The memory of that day is etched in my mind like a scene taken with a flash camera. Everything is bright and hard and clear. It was hot. Sammy started to bark and Annie was running across that road before I could blink. If it’s anyone’s fault, I guess it’s Annie’s. She knew not to run across the road; she knew she was supposed to hold my hand. But she loved that little dog and that’s all she thought of.

  How can one minute change everything so much, forever?

  ANNIE

  IT HAPPENED IN an instant. Mom was driving home from the university after teaching her Tuesday evening class when she lost control of the car somehow and ran into the concrete foundation of an overpass. They had to use the jaws-of-life, Dad said, to get her out. She was knocked unconscious by the force of the impact and never woke up. She had a severe concussion and lots of bruises. The airbag had saved her life, he said.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table gulping down hot tea. Magda put another plate of peanut-butter, chocolate-chip muffins on the table. Dad had eaten two already and was soon halfway through his third. It was the morning after I saw Mom at the hospital. Magda had stayed overnight, sleeping on the couch in the living room.

  Dad had spent all night at the hospital with Mom and just got home. He and Magda decided that I should stay home from school another day. Fine with me. I was tired, after a night of broken dreams about long hospital corridors and breaking glass.

  Mom was at the hospital where Dad worked, so he knew a lot of the doctors and nurses in the intensive care unit. They kept him up to date about her condition.

  “These coma cases can be tricky,” he said, wiping some crumbs off his mouth with a linen napkin. “Cathleen doesn’t seem to have any major injuries to her brain, aside from concussion, but they can’t really tell yet. She could come out of it any time, or it could take a while. The good thing is, she’s breathing on her own.”

  I watched his fingers as he folded the napkin carefully. They were long and thin. A surgeon’s fingers. He operated on people’s brains with those fingers. They hovered over the folded napkin, then reached for another muffin.

  “The police don’t understand why she lost control of the car,” he went on, smearing butter on it. “There were no other cars around. They don’t think she was going very fast.”

  I could see it in my mind: the dark road, the headlights of Mom’s car, a dip in the road under a bridge—

  “Maybe a cat—or a squirrel?”

  He glanced over at me. There were dark shadows under his eyes. He held my gaze for a moment, as if he was about to tell me something, but all he said was, “Maybe.”

  A few minutes later, Dad went upstairs to get some sleep. We heard his footsteps as he slowly mounted the stairs, stumbling once and then continuing.

  I pushed away my plate. Magda stood at the sink washing dishes and sighing loudly every now and then, but for once, not talking. The library books were sitting on the end of the table, where Magda must have left them when we got in from the hospital yesterday. I’d been so tired that I went to bed in the afternoon and fell into a deep sleep, waking up for the supper that Magda brought up to me on a tray, then promptly falling asleep again. This was my first chance to look at the book of Newfoundland painters again.

  Through the Looking-Glass lay on top. Now how did that get there? It was the book Mrs. Silver had been looking at. The librarian must have thought it was one I wanted and checked it out by mistake.

  It was one of my favorites. I couldn’t resist flipping through to look at Tenniel’s illustrations. Alice curled up with the kitten in the big chair, the frightful Jabberwock, the Red Queen running with Alice clutching her hand and flying out behind her. They were like old friends. There were Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and a few pages later, the Red King sleeping. I frowned. What did that remind me of? The Red King sleeping. I started to read. Then it came back to me.

  Tweedledee told Alice that the Red King was dreaming the story and Alice was only a thing in his dream. Like Claire. She was just someone in my dream. When I stopped dreaming, she disappeared. But…but what if the dream wasn’t mine? What if it was someone else’s dream, and they were dreaming me?

  I didn’t like that idea. Not at all.

  CLAIRE

  I DON’T KNOW WHO my father is. Maisie won’t tell.

  “Somebody I knew at art school in Toronto,” was all she would say. “Somebody unimportant.”

  How could the man who was my father be unimportant? I used to fantasize about him appearing at the door one day and taking me away to Toronto. He would be tall with straight, light-brown hair the same color as mine. I didn’t look anything like Maisie or Annie, so I must look like him. He’d be rich, and lonely, and want me to come and live with him in a big house, and I’d have lots of nice clothes that weren’t secondhand, and I’d have lots of friends and go to a cool high school in Toronto. Then I would travel the world—Ireland, France, Italy—all those places that lay on the other side of the wide Atlantic.

  And I wouldn’t give another thought to Maisie, or Crooked Head Lighthouse.

  I knew it was a fantasy and that it would never happen. Not like that. My father, whoever he was, didn’t even know he had a daughter. Maisie came back to St. John’s after art school, found out she was pregnant and decided to go it alone. She never saw him again. It was the same with Annie’s father. Maisie never told us who he was. I guess she thought he was as unimportant as my dad.

  So I wasn’t going to be rescued by my fantasy father. What would happen, though, was that I would get out of Crooked Head Lighthouse someday, all by myself. And maybe sooner rather than later. I had a plan. Maisie didn’t really want me with her. Every time she looked at me she saw the person who let Annie run.

  Sometimes the silence in this house, between my mom and me, is so heavy that I feel I’m being ground into the floor. When I’m alone the silence is different—it’s just quiet. My thoughts can run free and I’m almost happy. But when we’re both here, there are so many things unsaid that they weigh me down.

  I’ve never been much of a talker. Maisie and Annie would chatter away like birds, and I’d just listen to them. But after Annie died, Maisie’s chitchat slowed down. It used to be when we drove in the car she kept up a running commentary on everything that was going on in her life—how her work was going, who was buying what painting and what she would charge them, all the doings of
her friends, gossip and opinions about all their lives. I just tuned her out, like she was a radio in the background.

  After Annie died our trips in the car were silent. She stopped sharing her thoughts with me. Strangely, I found I missed that. It was as if we drove out of range of the radio station, and the signal disappeared. Even though I hadn’t really been listening, I felt its absence. She was just too far away for her voice to carry back to me.

  ANNIE

  I CLOSED Through the Looking-Glass and reached for the book about Newfoundland painters. The painting on the cover was of a huge whale under the ocean, with a wrecked ship plunging past it to the depths of the sea. I looked away. I sure didn’t want to fall into that painting.

  I focused on the lopsided green bow at the back of Magda’s apron. Mom’s apron. The last time Mom wore it was when she was making supper the night before the accident. She kept bugging me to set the table while I was trying to draw the salt and pepper shakers.

  The image of her white, still face in the hospital swam into my head. My breath caught in my throat. It hurt, like something was trapped there. Where was she? How could she just not be here anymore? Was she aware of anything? Did it hurt? Or was she lost in a dream, unable to find her way back?

  I couldn’t bear thinking about her. I reached for the book. I turned the pages quickly to the Maisie King page and started reading about the artist.

  Margaret Ellen (“Maisie”) King was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1944 and graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1965. She made a living as a portraitist in St. John’s for several years. In 1974 King moved to an abandoned lighthouse at Crooked Head, Newfoundland, where her family had been lighthouse keepers for three generations. In this isolated spot, King developed her reputation over the next decade as one of the foremost landscape artists in Newfoundland. Her portraits have also earned her international kudos, and she has had numerous exhibits of her paintings across North America and in Europe. She still lives and works at Crooked Head Lighthouse.