Contessa

by Lori L. Otto

  “I don’t get it,” she says.

  “Do you see how this rooftop is at an angle, and how it gets thinner on either side here? These lines all meet at two different points. One over here,” I say, taking a few steps to the right of the painting and estimating the point they would converge on, “and the other here,” I explain, walking back to the other side and creating an imaginary point with my finger.

  Livvy’s eyes dance back and forth from the painting to my finger, and I can see that I’ve sparked something in her mind. She smiles and nods. “That’s so cool!”

  “Yeah?” I ask her, a little bit surprised.

  “How’d you know that?” she asks.

  “I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”

  “I don’t think you’re stupid,” she corrects me, sounding sorry. “I just think you should let me walk to and from the studio, Daddy, that’s all. You could watch me from the corner, if you wanted.”

  “A lot can happen in two blocks,” I tell her. “And I don’t think your mom would go for it.”

  “Daddy, please?”

  “Why don’t we walk together for four months?”

  “Why four months?”

  “Until you’re eleven. That will give me time to get used to the idea and to see what challenges you might face.”

  “In two blocks, Daddy?”

  “Work with me, Contessa, okay?”

  “Will you walk a few steps behind me?” she asks.

  I let out a loud, frustrated breath as I walk back across the room to pick up my jacket. Although I’m trying to be playful with her, I’m masking my true feelings. It hurts a little. “If you want me to, yes.”

  “Okay,” she finally agrees.

  “How about some ice cream?” I ask her.

  “Okay. Can we go to Shake Shack?”

  “Really?” I ask her, surprised she didn’t choose her favorite shop.

  “It’s near the Flatiron Building, isn’t it?”

  “I guess it is,” I respond, realizing why she’s really agreeing to go. “Get your bag. Let’s go.”

  Five years later

  LIVVY

  CHAPTER 2

  There are times when the paint bleeds through my makeshift smock. The darkest colors are the most noticeable, of course, but it’s the red pigment that takes the most time to scrub off of my skin. I no longer try to wash it off, choosing to leave it as a reminder of a man I never met, a scar that never truly heals.

  I stare intensely at my current work, pulling the photo out of the back pocket of my jeans and comparing the two. The black and white picture gives no real hint of his exact hair color or skin tone. I know it was dark blonde, or light brown, and I’ve done my best to match the paint color to what I remember him looking like in other photos I’ve seen. He was more tanned than my mother, but who isn’t? I imagined that my skin coloring very much matched his, and I had depicted it perfectly in the portrait. I made his eyes brown like mine, too. His smile is easy, relaxed; his expression happy, carefree and alive.

  Alive. I trace my pinky finger over his smile on the small wallet-sized photo I had stolen–borrowed really–only after making sure there was no paint on that finger. Something is off, but I can’t really figure out what it is. I try to block off the picture in small sections to compare it to the painting. His eyes look perfect. His lashes might be a little too dark. Maybe his cheekbones? I stare at his messy hair, impressed with my work. The highlights look natural, and I imagine how soft his hair must have been, the way it flopped in so many directions. You could tell from his expression that he didn’t care. He just looked like someone who enjoyed life.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Trey! I’ve told you not to sneak up on me!” I snap at my brother. At five, he doesn’t understand the concept of privacy. He has no respect for closed doors, much less for the half of the basement I use as my studio and bedroom.

  “You were just standing there,” he says, his voice shaky. I turn around to see his little forehead scrunched, his eyes beginning to water. “I’m sorry.” He juts his bottom lip out, and I can’t help but feel bad for reprimanding him. He’s five.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him as I sit in the chair next to him. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  “Okay,” he mumbles, making a production out of wiping his eyes. I’m sure he learned that from me. “So who is it?” he repeats his original question.

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “Just some man. He’s handsome, though, right?” I waggle my eyebrows at him. He vehemently shakes his head. “Do you like the painting at least?”

  He nods this time, walking toward the artwork with his hand outstretched. He touches the wet paint before I can stop him, smudging some of the pigment on the brown jacket my subject wears.

  “Careful, kiddo. It’s wet.” He pulls his hand back and looks at the paint globs on his fingers. “Here.” I pick up the bottom of the smock and rub the ink off of his fingers. When I’m done, he continues to wipe his hand on the black fabric as if I didn’t clean his fingers well enough. His attention span short, he smiles at me before running out of my room and upstairs to the main level of our house.

  “Hey, don’t tell Mom and Dad about the painting, ‘kay?”

  “‘Kay!” he yells back at me.

  I walk over to the mirror to look at my reflection, checking out how the latest paint smudges have changed the black garment I wear when I paint. The smock is worn and threadbare, but it’s been a part of my life since the first time I held a paintbrush when I was four years old.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, Contessa?” It was the nickname he’d given me the first night we met. He said that I looked like a little Italian princess. When I later found out that Contessa meant countess, and not princess, he explained that all little girls were princesses, but I was different. I was special to him, so he wanted me to have a special name.

  “At school, the big kids don’t have to use their fingers to paint.” I can remember sitting at the kitchen table, talking to my father as he cooked dinner, my fingers stained as they smeared watery colors on a piece of poster board. My focus never left the art project as I tried to create a new color by combining red and purple, then yellow, too, to lighten it up. I frowned at the brown mess in front of me, then shifted my attention to a blank spot on the page a few inches over, trying again. I was too young to know how to mix colors, but I never felt constrained by any limits. My parents always made me feel like I could do anything–encouraged me to do so, in fact–even before they officially became my parents.

  “No?” he had asked. He put down a spoon and walked over to me, crouching down, speaking to me, eye-to-eye. “What do they paint with then? Their noses?” I had giggled as the tip of his nose touched mine.

  “No!” I exclaimed. “They have brushes, Daddy. And they don’t have paper, either. They have this scratchy paper with wood.”

  My dad stood up, returning to the stove. “Brushes and scratchy paper, huh?”

  “Yeah. Can I have a brush, too, Daddy?”

  “I don’t see why not,” he’d answered. He rarely said no to me back then. “Why don’t you start cleaning up the table so we can have our dinner, and then we’ll see about getting you a brush after we eat. Sound good?”

  I couldn’t clean up fast enough. I hung my artwork on the refrigerator before it was even dry. Dad helped me reach the magnets that were just out of my grasp.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said of my finger painting. He said that of every painting, drawing, photo I’d ever created, all my life. It meant something when I was four.

  It seems hollow today, twelve years later.

  “It would be beautifuller with a brush,” I’d said to him, matter of fact.

  “More beautiful,” he had corrected me, but with a gentle smile. “But I’m not sure that’s possible.”

  Dad and I ate dinner quickly that night, and I had dressed myself in my warm winter coat and boots and was ready to go by the time Dad h
ad finished doing the dishes. We drove to an art supply store in Brooklyn. It was the same place Mom would often go to get paper supplies for her work.

  “Good evening, Mr. Holland,” a woman greeted us. When I was that age, I used to wonder why everyone knew my father’s name. I didn’t know at the time that he was one of the most well known men in New York. When I was old enough to know what a self-made millionaire was, I was in awe of my dad and felt pretty honored that he and my mother had chosen to adopt me. “How can I help you two tonight?”

  “Well, my daughter here says that the big kids get to paint with brushes instead of fingers. So as much as I don’t want my little girl being a big kid so soon, I figure we need to equip her with the tools she needs to create her masterpieces.”

  “Of course,” the woman agreed, leading us to an aisle with different baskets of brushes. “Top of the line, right here,” she’d said, picking up a wooden-handled tool with thick bristles.

  “I appreciate that,” Dad said, “but she’s four. We can probably start with quantity instead of quality. She’ll have to figure out how to use them.”

  I’d found a packet of ten brushes in the bottom bucket, all with different-colored handles and different-sized bristles. “Can we get these, Daddy?”

  “Are these good for a blossoming new artist?” he asked the saleswoman.

  “Absolutely,” she smiled. “But you’ll need some paints to go with those.”

  “Lead the way,” Dad offered, letting me walk in front of him to bookshelves full of bright pigments in tubes and jars. I’m sure my eyes were as wide as saucers.

  “Oh, Daddy! I want one of everything!” I’d exclaimed with pleading eyes and folded hands. “Please?”

  “Contessa, you could paint our house with all of this paint. It’s way too much.” He was always very reasonable, rational. “What would you recommend?” he again deflected to the woman.

  “Primary colors,” she said as she picked up tubes of red, yellow and blue. “Did you know you can make almost any color out of just these three?” she asked me.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “How?”

  She demonstrated how red and yellow could make orange, blue and yellow could make green. I was fascinated, but didn’t believe her, remembering the one standard brown color I always seemed to end up with. That said, I still couldn’t wait to try it out at home.

  We ended up getting more than what Dad had intended to buy, I’m sure, but he wanted to make sure I had everything I might need. “I don’t want your mom to come home and tell me what I did wrong,” he’d explained. “I want this to be a surprise, and I don’t want her to have to worry about a thing.”

  When we got home, Dad set up an easel in the corner of the casual dining room, covering the tile floor around it with a cloth we had picked up on the way out. I broke open the packaging for the paintbrushes and the palette and ran my fingers through the fine hairs of the bristles.

  “Where do brushes come from?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “Horses, I think? Or maybe pigs?”

  “They kill horsies for these?” I’d dropped all the brushes on the floor, startled. He turned around and smiled at me, leaning down to pick up the tools now strewn across the tile.

  “Livvy, hon, they don’t kill the horses. They just use their hair. It grows back, just like yours.” He tugged on my pigtail and chuckled, handing me the brushes.

  “Promise?”

  “I wouldn’t lie, Tessa.”

  “Okay,” I’d said with a sigh of relief. “Daddy, can I have a horsie?”

  “No,” he said quickly, shaking his head and grinning at me. He stood back to survey the new workspace as I started to uncap a tube of paint. “Livvy, your mom will be so angry if you get paint on your clothes. I think she’s got a smock in the closet upstairs. Don’t start painting yet, okay? Can you wait for me to come back down?”

  “Okay, Daddy.” He wasn’t gone long before he carried the black smock into the kitchen. It was wrinkled, but had ruffles on it and a belt that tied in a ribbon around the waist. He put it on me, and even though he bunched up the smock and tied the belt around it to shorten the length, the garment dragged the floor.

  “Good, it even covers your boots. You’ll grow into it, right?” he’d asked with a self-satisfied grin. I nodded, feeling spots on the smock that were already dirty with dried paint.

  “Is this Mommy’s?”

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “Okay, it’s getting close to bedtime, so why don’t you pick a little square on the canvas and just focus on that. Mom should be home in a half hour for bath time.”

  I nodded happily and got to work. Just as Dad had predicted, my mom had returned home from work thirty minutes later, as I was putting the finishing touches on a small painting of our dog, Ruby. Our fox terrier wouldn’t sit still to model for me, so I had to do most of the work from memory.

  “Where’s my family?” Mom had yelled from the front door.

  “In here, Poppet,” Dad answered, calling her by the nickname he’d given her the first time they met in college. Apparently, she looked like a doll to him, with her fair skin and denim overalls and red hair in two pigtails. To this day, Mom doesn’t know what he saw in her that night. “Come see what our daughter is doing.” His voice was proud, and I could hear the smile in his words. I turned around to see her enter the kitchen. She stopped dead in her tracks, and her expression was sad, confused. She took a deep breath, and then forced her lips into a smile.

  “What’s this, Jacks?”

  Dad stuttered with his answer, looking genuinely concerned with Mom’s reaction. “We, uh, got her some real paint supplies. Livvy said the big kids use brushes, so I thought that was a good idea.” When she didn’t answer him, he continued. “It’s not a good idea?” he said quietly, shooting a quick glance in my direction.

  “No, it’s great,” Mom said, tension leaving her shoulders. “Just... what is she wearing?” She walked quickly in my direction and started to untie the ribbon around my waist, even before giving me a hug. I thought it was because she didn’t want to get paint on her clothes.

  “Your smock.”

  “It’s not a smock, it’s a dress,” she mumbled quickly, not looking at him, removing the garment from my body. She draped it over one arm and embraced me with the other, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “Is that Ruby?” she asked me before clearing her throat. Her voice sounded funny.

  “Uh-huh. Can you tell?”

  “Of course I can tell, Liv. It looks just like her. You did an amazing job. You should paint her dog house behind her.” She outlined an area around the dog. “Wouldn’t that be cute?

  “How do I make pink?” I asked her.

  She looked at my palette, which was smeared with too much paint.

  “Red and white make pink,” she taught me. “Do you want to try that?”

  “Yeah, but Daddy said you’ll get mad if I get paint on me,” I explained, cleaning the brush in the dirty water I’d been using. “I don’t want you to get mad.”

  “It’s just paint, sweetie. A little paint never hurt anyone.” She swallowed hard, then stood up and patted me on the top of my head before walking across the kitchen.

  “Come here,” my dad said to her. I turned around to watch their usual, loving exchange. My parents had always been affectionate with one another. There was never any question about how much they loved each other. On this particular occasion, though, my mom didn’t kiss Dad back.

  “I’m sorry,” I heard him whisper.

  “Does that really look like a smock to you?” she said in frustration. I had to strain to hear her, but I could feel that something was wrong. I’d always been pretty perceptive.

  “Once I put it on her, no. But Em, it has paint on it,” he said with a slight laugh as he struggled with the veiled emotions my mother was trying to hide from him. I watched the silent exchange as my adoptive parents spoke only with their ey
es. It wouldn’t have made such an impact on me had a tear not dropped down each of my mother’s cheeks when she blinked.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I didn’t know.”

  “No, I know,” she said with a sigh. “I’m sorry. And I love that you did that for her. You’re so sweet.”

  He went in for another kiss. This one was returned, and when they separated, my mom looked back over in my direction, but seemed to look beyond me.

  “Are you okay, Mommy?”

  “Yeah, baby,” she answered, walking back over to me. “I’m great. Let’s get this back on you. Your Grandma Hennigan made you that sweater, and she’d kill me if we ruined it.” She slipped the smock back on my arms and secured it with the ribbon. “Why don’t you finish the dog house, and then we need to get you ready for bed. ‘Kay?”

  “‘Kay.” After I finished painting the pink dog house, Mom carefully removed my smock, hanging it on the short coat-rack that matched my furniture in my bedroom. She was giving it to me, even though I knew it was more than just some ratty piece of clothing to her.

  “Livvy?” Mom calls as she walks downstairs. Quickly, I exit my room to meet her in the media room so she can’t see what I’m working on.

  “Yeah?”

  She laughs at me when she sees me. “When are you ever going to retire that thing?” she asks as she tugs on the frayed ribbon around my waist.

  “I like it,” I tell her. “It has history.”

  “You should let me wash it for you.”

  “I just did two days ago. I take care of it, Mom, don’t worry.”

  She smiles and nods. “I know. Wait, is that a new hole?” she asks, poking her finger through an opening in the seam.

  “I just noticed it yesterday, but yeah.”

  “That dress was expensive when I bought it. Very high quality, but I guess I never thought it would get this much wear. Anyway, dinner will be ready in five minutes. Can you get cleaned up by then?”