What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  Genevieve, back at her desk, bent a disappointed look upon her. “Don’t make anyone tell you anything twice,” she said. She adjusted the half-glasses on her nose, looked through them at the document she’d been typing. “Luckily you won’t have to worry about money.” She lifted the metal bar that held the paper in place, scrolled the page up a couple of inches. “You won’t have to get married.”

  This was a revelation: People had to get married?

  “Are you sorry you married Daddy?” Laura asked, her heart racing at her own audacity.

  “That’s not the point,” said her mother. She scrolled the page down again, dropped the metal bar back into place. “There weren’t other choices then. Everyone got married and had children.”

  Laura heard only what her mother didn’t say. Her mother didn’t say Of course not.

  “Are you sorry you had us?” Laura said.

  “No,” said her mother, after an unpardonable latency. “But one does give up a lot when one has children.” She pressed the backspace key and began typing again.

  Recalling that event more than forty years later, Laura wondered at her own passivity. She hadn’t said—or even thought—I’m eleven, I made a picture, not a life decision. She hadn’t pushed beyond those two timid questions. She had carried away a confused skein of impressions—that children were obstructive and only grudgingly chosen, that marriage was a trap. She’d also borne away a jewel—the notion that she had talent. Enough to catch her mother’s attention, to raise her eyebrows and interrupt her work.

  The untidy forsythia that had once made the halfway mark in the walk was gone, but Laura recognized the Dutch colonial on the opposite corner, its winding front walk and its window boxes bursting with pansies, and felt an unpleasant chime of memory. The clapboard was a different color now, but nonetheless she recognized it as one of the Drills houses. On the next block, another one, stone flowerpots flanking its door.

  Bea had invented the Drills game one morning on the walk to school when Laura was about ten. She chose houses along the route, one or two per block, and told Laura If I say Drill, you run as fast as you can to one of those houses and bang on the door. The game added an extra element of anxiety to the morning walk. Bea might say the word at any time—in the middle of a conversation, twice during the same morning, not at all for days. Hearing it, Laura would take off, heart slamming in her chest, beelining to the nearest Drills house, sometimes getting halfway up the front path before Beatrice would call her back. Once Beatrice didn’t call in time, or Laura didn’t hear her calling, and the door opened to a concerned elderly woman who looked down at the girl crying with embarrassment and fear on the doorstep.

  “My sister is playing a prank,” Bea had told the lady, marching up the walk and taking Laura’s hand as if she were a very little girl, leading her away. “We’re very sorry.” Laura had been so mad at Bea for that, she’d walked three feet behind her all the rest of the way.

  Of course, Laura could have refused to go along with it. But she always played Bea’s games, no matter how awful they were, even while steeped in shame for her own cravenness. So eagerly had she thirsted for even this kind of miserable attention from her sister. But considering it now, Laura realized there had been more to it: Bea had always invented games, and Laura had always played them. It was something that hadn’t changed about their lives, while every other thing had. The Drills game went on until Beatrice got her driver’s license and was able to drive them both to school. When Bea went off to college, Laura made the morning walk alone. She put away the memory of the Drills. Bea might even have forgotten them entirely; they had been just one game among many devised to bully her little sister, such a long time ago.

  At the bus stop, someone had planted a stand of lily-of-the-valley. It was the flower Bea had chosen for her wedding; the chapel had smelled beautiful from the frilled, fragrant bells. Laura at nineteen had been sneeringly dismissive of the event, the expense and planning, the big white dress. She’d stood at the altar in her bridesmaid dress and dyed-to-match heels, clutching her tasteful bouquet, just barely stopping herself from rolling her eyes when the bridal fanfare sounded. But watching her sister walk graceful and tall and alone down the aisle, a wave of admiration passed over Laura: how confident Bea was, how dignified. Bea caught Laura’s eye and twinkled a smile at her; Laura grinned back. A rare moment of solidarity, in which Laura knew that she and her sister were inescapably bonded, like a twin-trunked tree diverging widely from a wounded base, united forever by what was missing: their father. And by the other, earlier loss, the one that went unacknowledged. They never spoke of Philip. It was almost as though it were an ordinary thing, to have had a brother once and lost him, like a favorite toy you carried every day and couldn’t imagine being without, and then one day noticed you carried no more. With no memory of the last time you’d seen it, not knowing where, or exactly when, you’d put it down.

  The city bus lumbered into view, wheezed to a stop. Laura boarded, stuffed two dollar bills into the glass box at the front, and took a seat. Watched through the scratched windowpanes as the old neighborhood fell behind her.

  * * *

  Edward didn’t return her call. He came to her house instead, rang the bell.

  “I’ve been back for a week,” she said, standing in the front doorway.

  “I was in Philadelphia,” he said. She saw that his suit was rumpled, his face fatigued. “Wall-to-wall meetings.”

  “You sent my calls to voicemail.”

  “I thought we needed to talk in person. And I needed to cool off.”

  “I thought we were broken up,” she said.

  “Laura,” he said. His voice soft: How could you think that? “I was angry. Not fifteen.”

  They stood staring at each other, a foot of space between them.

  “Someone caring about what happens to you is not the same as someone trying to control you,” said Edward.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  “I’m working on it,” she said. She remembered the texts she’d ignored—happy and then confused and then worried. “I’m sorry I missed the partner dinner,” she said.

  “I really wanted you there.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “The things I want matter too.”

  “I know,” she said. Her voice cracked. He put his arms wide, and she stepped into them.

  “How are you?” he said into her hair.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She was, she realized, just so relieved to see him.

  “It really is your brother?” She nodded against his shoulder. “Incredible.” He pulled back to look into her face. “I officially apologize for not believing you.” His expression was penitent. “I have hated being away from you.”

  “Me too.”

  “Shall we put all of this down to extraordinary circumstances?”

  She nodded, stepped back to let him into the foyer, closed the door behind him. They went into the living room and sat together on the sofa.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Philip’s still in intensive care,” she said. “He has fluid in his lungs. They think it was the plane ride that tipped him over.” The nurse’s phrasing, as though Philip were a vase or a Weeble. She bit her lip. “I should have taken him to a doctor in Bangkok.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” said Edward. “Laura. You couldn’t.”

  “I was an idiot.” It was like a dam bursting, the things that she’d been thinking without putting them into words, no one to tell. “I was living out some kind of fantasy, having a holiday with my brother. Doing all the things we might have done—” She realized she was crying, and scrubbed a hand across her face. “You should have seen him riding the Skytrain.”

  “What did he tell you about his disappearance?” said Edward, giving her a packet of tissues from his breast pocket.

  “Nothing.” She blotted her eyes. “My fault again. I should have pushed him to talk. I should
have. Even though it felt really wrong when I tried.” She remembered Bea in the ER waiting room, her puzzled, helpless face. “I failed my sister,” she said. “I failed my mother.”

  “Have you told your mother anything?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m done making bad unilateral decisions. Bea and I need to discuss how to handle telling Mum.” She blew her nose. “If Bea ever talks to me again.”

  “You haven’t been painting, have you,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “How can you tell?”

  “You always seem—weighed down—when you’re not working,” he said. She’d been feeling the opposite: empty, dry as dust, floating over the landscape of her life. “It’ll come back,” he said. He put out his hand and she took it. His clean, sure hand. “Remember the good part: You rescued your brother. You recognized him and you went.”

  “But that was wrong too,” she said. “I mean, the way I did it. I could have arranged for DNA testing first; then Bea and I could have gone together. Bea would have thought to take him to a doctor. She would definitely have asked him more questions than I did.”

  “You didn’t want to wait,” he said. “You were eager to bring him home.”

  “True. But that’s not all of it.” She confessed, “I didn’t want anyone to go with me. I wanted to go alone. I was being the hero.” She took a deep breath, released it in a shuddering sigh. “And now.”

  “And now,” Edward said, taking her hand, “we wait.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  TWO MORE weeks passed, in which there was no good news about the lungs in the daily litany of updates delivered sometimes by a doctor, sometimes a nurse. Laura and Edward fell into a new pattern, spending about one night in three together, not all of them at Edward’s. Laura cleared a space for him in the closet, a drawer in the bureau. She went to the hospital every day and visited Genevieve three times a week, always half hoping and half fearing running into Beatrice, but it didn’t happen. The ICU nurses didn’t mention whether Bea had been there, but the evidence of her was in the Tudor when Laura visited: food in storage containers in the refrigerator, more squares filled in on the dry-erase calendar on the kitchen wall. When the month changed, a multicolored star appeared around the third Saturday, accompanied by Bea’s neat capitals: GENEVIEVE’S BIRTHDAY.

  Are you painting? texted Sullivan.

  I’m thinking, Laura texted back.

  Thinking about painting?

  She sent a straight-line-mouth emoji in reply.

  She didn’t tell him that she was painting. Only not in the studio. She had begun repainting the interior walls of her house, telling herself it was something she’d meant to do anyway. Room by room, she clustered the furniture into the middle of the floor and outlined the walls with the square brush, then filled in with the roller, two coats. She didn’t miss the subtext: this was paint she could control, that didn’t defy her. The smell hanging in the air of her house—although it was a low-VOC, water-soluble weak kin to oil paints—was comforting. Stripping away the long blue tails of tape when the paint was dry, admiring the neat lines, she felt a mild echo of accomplishment.

  * * *

  She was prying the lid off a quart of bruise-colored paint in her second-floor guest room one evening, the furniture huddled in the middle of the floor under a drop cloth and every ding and crater in the walls spackled and sanded to velvet, when she felt a stirring at the back of her mind, like a tickling. She wasn’t sure at first, but then it happened again. She jammed the lid back in place and climbed the stairs into the studio, pressed the control panel on the wall to flood the workspace with light. Thinking, Thank God.

  She took one of the ready canvases and propped it up, cleaned the dust from the thick pane of glass she used for mixing colors. From the drawer of crumpled metal tubes she conjured a palette, stood for a little while looking at the blank canvas surface. Then she took up a brush and dipped it into the bright butter of paint, and with a pell-mell feeling of releasing hounds from their traces, let her mind connect to her hands.

  And then it was a chase, a long blur of hours punctuated at intervals with pacing or lying on the floor, sometimes swallowing from a bottle in the refrigerator, the long cold slash down her throat tasting like paint. From time to time, she went outside onto the terrace, hunched at the rail like a gargoyle in a warm spitting gust of morning, again in the broad light of midday, later in a steady curtain of afternoon rain, the roofs of the neighborhood slanting wet and gray all around.

  It was early evening when she put down her brush. She stood before the filled canvas for five minutes, paced for five minutes, then back to the canvas. Finally, she took up the wide plastic blade that she’d bought at a kitchen store and stepped up to the painting, set the tool at the upper right edge. She pulled it across, the paint rising in rumpling ribbons over the blade, over her hands. She made a second pass just below the first, and then a third, like cleaning a window.

  Quick steps behind her; before she could react, hands came over her shoulder. They grasped the blade, wrested it away. She staggered back, heart in her throat, wheeled around to see Sullivan.

  “What the fuck,” she spat. Breath heaving.

  “Gotcha,” he said. He raised the blade high above his head, out of her reach. There was paint on his cuff, she saw with satisfaction. “I want to see one of these paintings before you destroy it.”

  “There’s nothing to see,” she said.

  “Art is not private,” he said. “Let me look.”

  She moved aside; as he leaned close to the half-scraped canvas, she stood looking away, hands gummed with paint, heart still going fast from the shock of his arrival.

  “I knew you were still in there,” he said, finally, turning away from the painting.

  She realized she had been holding her breath only when she let it out.

  “Here,” he said, offering her the blade. “Do what you need to do.” She didn’t take it; he set it down onto the paint-smeared glass pane. “But ask yourself why you need to do it.”

  “If I knew why,” she said. She finished the sentence with a shrug.

  “I have a theory,” he said. He went to the sink, pressed down on the pump-bottle of vegetable oil there, rubbed his palms together to dissolve the paint. “You’re not enough of an asshole.” He pumped soap onto his hands, lathered. “You let yourself be distracted by personal stuff. Your mother’s illness, now your long-lost brother.” He stepped on the foot controls and put his hands under the water to rinse. “But in a hundred years, will any of it matter?”

  “In a hundred years,” she repeated, incredulous. “You’re an asshole.”

  “Never said I wasn’t,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Real artists put the work first.” He took a towel from beside the sink, turned to face her, wiping his hands. “I only want what’s best for you. And the art. Which is also you.” He put the towel down. “Be an asshole,” he said. “Let other people take care of the trivial shit.”

  * * *

  That night as she tried to fall asleep, she mulled over what Sullivan had said. Was that it, then, was that the answer? Had giving attention to personal issues compromised her work? The timing was right: her block had begun shortly after her mother’s diagnosis. Also, there was a certain economy to it—empty her mind of everything else, and inspiration would flood in to fill the empty space. Human connections were messy. She’d been a loner back in high school, after all, hadn’t minded it much; maybe that was her true nature.

  She’d arrived in New York for college thinking what most freshmen probably feel: My life starts now. The city was huge, filthy, fabulous; by comparison, Washington seemed a prissy hamlet. Laura made friends, had fun, did well in her classes; her work got attention and praise. It was everything she’d wanted, until junior year, when she took an advanced studio course led by Professor Davis. Everyone cries in her class, Laura’s roommate, Allison, said. Ev-er-y-one. Laura had seen Professor Davis from a distance, short and wide, he
r gray-streaked black hair in a Buster Brown cut with a blocky fringe. Laura didn’t see anything scary about her.

  The world is not gentle, Professor Davis said in the first session, looking around at all of them with small bright eyes. Better get used to it now. Laura sat smug, unworried. She was one of the class stars, on track for the senior prize; Professor Davis wouldn’t be making her cry. The crit began, students going one by one to put work up on the easel at the front of the class and stand beside it, stolid or blubbering, as the professor made her comments. When Laura’s turn came, Professor Davis stepped close to the canvas, studied it for a quiet minute. Then she turned to the rest of the class. Here we have, ladies and gentlemen, she said, a fine example of the School of Mediocre.

  Although it became clear as the weeks went on that any effort to appease Professor Davis only exacerbated her scorn, Laura couldn’t stop herself, like a moth fluttering again and again toward a flame. She worked as hard as she ever had but Professor Davis was unimpressed. One week, as Laura lifted her painting onto the easel at the front of the room, the professor actually groaned.

  “Fuck you,” said Laura.

  The class went silent. The professor stared hard at Laura. Then she smiled, dark dirty pearls of smoker’s teeth.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Fuck me. What does my opinion matter?” She spread her arms wide and waited as if expecting Laura to reply, but then answered herself, thundering, “It doesn’t!” She dropped her arms. “Yours does. So why are you trying to please me?” She stepped closer to Laura. “I can see that you have talent. But week after week, you give me—” She waved at the canvas. “You know that this is no good. You know.”

  Laura stood frozen, the words going straight into her soul.

  Professor Davis walked a few steps away, toward the windows. “They won’t let me have the freshmen,” she said, as if talking to herself. “They say I’m too mean. But then this is what happens. Those nice professors—everyone loves them, nobody cries in their classes—” She turned back to Laura. “Whenever you tried to push yourself, they corrected you. Am I right? They told you no no no.” With sorrow: “They made you insipid.” With disgust: “And you let them.”