Anyhow, after her grandparents were killed, Anna changed a bit. I know it’s completely understandable considering the circumstances, but instead of wanting to hang out in the cafeteria at lunch, she started going to the art room to paint. It just about drove Kyle mad that she was always sneaking off. It sort of bugged me too. I mean, I know she loves to paint and I totally envy her dedication. But by grade ten, painting had taken over her life, especially the creepy bridge painting that Kyle fell in love with, the one Mrs. Galloway chose for the student exhibit. Normally it’s only the grade twelve students who get their art chosen. But Anna painted a picture of the West River Viaduct that was so remarkable, I knew before it was even finished it would be chosen.
The viaduct is the biggest landmark around. There’s a whole bunch of history to it too. Apparently seventy-seven workers died in the early 1900s while they were building it, so there are all sorts of legends and myths about the souls of the dead luring people to jump off. It’s the kind of thing kids talk about at parties, especially around Halloween. I think it’s a bunch of crap, but the painting was so haunting it almost made me believe the stories. I think Anna is the only person who can turn something as normal as a bridge into a beautiful piece of art.
When Kyle found out about the exhibit, he begged me to take him. We both knew Anna would tell him not to come if he said he wanted to go, but it would seem normal if he came with me. So, of course, being the good friend I am to them both, I agreed to meet him ahead of time and walk in together. We arranged to meet at the Starbucks down the street and have a quick Frappuccino. When I arrived, he was already sitting there with two iced drinks sweating rings of condensation onto the table. He was acting edgy and weird.
“What’s up with you?” I asked him finally. “You’re acting suspicious, like you’re packing a gun or something.”
“Yeah, right,” he grunted. “I’m just nervous.”
“About going to the art exhibit?”
“No. I made up my mind to ask her out. Once and for all. I’ve waited long enough. I just have to know if she likes me or not.” He fidgeted with his cellphone as he spoke.
“You’re going to ask her, like, on a date?” Even though they’d been friends almost two years, I couldn’t imagine Kyle and Anna alone together at a movie or eating at a restaurant. It seemed too weird.
“Maybe just for coffee to start. Tonight after the show or something.”
“You’re going to ditch me?”
He looked at me and rolled his eyes. It was obvious he wasn’t in the mood for me to be difficult.
Anna’s picture was hanging on the wall in the front entrance to the student gallery. Her painting could be in the city gallery, it’s that good. Even from outside the door, I saw it and felt chills go up my back. She painted it in early morning, with mist rising up from the river and muted sunlight in the background. There’s a single girl standing in the middle of the bridge, her head turned toward the bank of the ravine, looking off in the distance.
When we first arrived, Kyle and I did a lap of the gallery together. The place was packed so it took us a while to find Anna. Groups of students and teachers were huddled around talking about use of colour and how this painting used a modernist technique and that one had an eighteenth-century quality. Within ten minutes Kyle was complaining.
“I feel totally out of place here. All I know about a picture is if I like it or not.”
“We come to your dance recitals,” I pointed out.
“That’s different. It’s a show. It’s entertaining.”
“This is a show,” I countered.
We found Anna tucked away in a corner. It looked like she didn’t want to be there at all, even though everyone kept going over to tell her how wonderful her painting was and how it evoked so much emotion. She looked uncomfortable and examined the floor. It’s not that she’s shy. When you get to know her she’s funny. But maybe she doesn’t like attention the way some kids in the performance stream do. Take Kyle, for instance, he loves being in front of an audience, but I guess not everyone’s like him.
When Anna was finally alone, we walked over to where she was standing beside a pillar and said hi. Then Kyle gave me the look to let me know it would be a good time to disappear so I moved a few feet away.
“It looks like your painting is the star of the show,” Kyle said to her.
I hung on the edge of the conversation.
She looked up, surprised to see him, but maybe a little bit pleased.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said as she rubbed her thumb along her cheekbone. Kyle just about melts when she does that.
“It’s an amazing painting. I know I’ve seen it, I dunno, come to life, but it’s even better now that it’s done.”
I bit my tongue when Kyle said that. It was an idiotic comment, but Anna didn’t seem to notice.
She mumbled, “Thanks.”
“I know this sounds crazy, but it almost looks alive — it’s so realistic.”
I pretended to be looking at one of the grade twelve sculptures.
“It’s just a bridge. I don’t even know why I painted it,” Anna said.
“Well it’s never going to be just a bridge to me anymore.”
Tragically, I think he really did say something like that. Normally Kyle is pretty good at chatting up girls, but when it comes to Anna he sort of loses his cool. Anna looked away.
“I mean, I wish I could paint half as well as you. I can’t even draw stick people,” he said, trying to recover.
“I wish I could dance without tripping over one of my three left feet.” She turned back toward him.
I laughed to myself. I couldn’t help it. She has the best timing and delivery. I think she almost smiled, or was about to smile, until someone came over and started talking about her painting again. Then Kyle shuffled over near me and said he was ready to go.
“What do you mean you want to go? You didn’t ask her out yet?”
“I can’t. I feel stupid standing here. You coming or not?”
I followed him out of the school to help him lick his wounds, even though I knew it was going to be a long night.
Anna’s Mom
I knew Anna had a gift by the time she was three. When other kids were scribbling stick figures, she was shading in noses and eye sockets. When other kids were playing house and dress-up she would be in the corner at a Little Tykes easel drawing the plastic animals. She had no patience for other kids’ frivolous play and especially not their artwork. One day at playgroup, when she wasn’t yet four, she tried to explain what one of the other girls had done wrong.
“Cats don’t have legs like sticks,” she said, pointing to the girl’s picture.
“My cat does,” the little redhead replied.
“No he doesn’t. How can he walk without feet?”
The girl picked up her paintbrush and drew a circle at the bottom of each stick leg.
“Cat feet aren’t round like that,” Anna insisted.
I was talking to another mother across the room and only partly paying attention.
“My cat does,” the little redhead said.
“He does not! That’s impossible.” Anna took her own paintbrush and started drawing a proper outline around the cat.
The little redheaded girl started screaming.
“She’s wrecking my picture. Anna’s wrecking my picture!”
That’s when I ran over to settle the commotion.
“Anna, sweetheart, you can’t paint on Jenna’s picture like that.” I steered her back to her own easel.
“I was just trying to fix it for her. She did it all wrong. You ask Granny. It’s okay that it’s blue but it can’t be made of sticks.” Anna was exasperated.
“Not everyone can draw like you,” I said quietly, trying to calm her down.
“They could if
they tried. You just have to draw what you see and I never seed a cat that had feet like balls.”
She slipped a new sheet of paper onto her easel and started painting a cat. She worked quickly, feverishly, and when she was finished she pulled it down and took it over to the redheaded girl.
“This is what a cat looks like,” Anna said and shoved it in her face.
The girl’s mother looked up at me and scowled. “Did you paint that?” she asked me.
I shook my head apologetically. “I’m sorry. Anna takes her artwork very seriously.”
The mother sized me up. “Are you trying to tell me your three-year-old daughter painted that?”
I knew it would seem impossible to a stranger, but I was already used to Anna’s talent by then. “Yes, she seems to have a gift for drawing. But she doesn’t get it from me. I’m still at stick figures too.” I laughed, trying to lighten the tension.
The woman refused to smile. She pulled her daughter over to the giant building blocks and started on a castle.
“Can we go home now?” Anna said after that. “I want to use the watercolours Granny gave me. The water paints here are all orange. Someone mixed the colours together.”
I took Anna home and never went back to playgroup again. Instead, my mother came over three mornings a week to give her art lessons. My mother had been an artist. She wasn’t professional, but when she was around she was forever sketching, painting, and taking classes. When I was a child we never ate in our dining room because it was stacked with half-finished canvases and our kitchen sink was usually full of dirty paintbrushes. I didn’t inherit any artistic talent, so I was happy to see the art gene skipped to the next generation. My mother was pleased too. Or maybe she wasn’t so much pleased as relieved. She’d been watching for it in Joe, but he was always more interested in building Lego inventions than drawing. When Anna came along, it was like a dream come true for my mother. Finally she had someone she could mentor, someone with real talent. In fact, she always said Anna had more natural ability than she ever did.
To be perfectly honest, I felt left out when my mother and Anna were together. Once Anna started going to school, the art lessons shifted to the weekends. A couple times a month, as long as it wasn’t raining, they’d go on drawing expeditions down along the river where there were few people to interrupt them. When Anna was little, I’d tag along with a book and a backpack full of snacks and wait for them to take a break from sketching so we could all talk. But they used their breaks to look at their work, to talk about it, to make suggestions on how to improve the composition or the perspective. They’d inhale the juice boxes and cookies I’d brought without even noticing I was there, then start on another picture. By the time she was ten, Anna was sketching textbook-quality trees and flowers, insects and birds. By the time she was twelve, I just handed my mother the backpack and told them to be back before dinner. I got tired of being in the way.
Eventually, Anna met a friend with an interest in art. It was a relief for me to see her with someone her own age and with the same level of talent. It made her seem less precocious. She’d always had friends to play with and birthday parties to go to, but I worried that because they didn’t understand her need to paint and draw, she never really connected with her classmates. Then she got accepted to the arts high school and I was sure she’d find kids like her who spent all their spare time sketching and painting. In fact, she met Aliya on her first day at Bachman. I’d never seen her so excited before.
“How was school?” I asked when I got home. Anna was in her bedroom, on her laptop, which was her second favourite preoccupation next to drawing. I’d wondered all day how she was making out and resisted, more than once, calling to check on her.
“Good,” she said without looking up. “Our painting teacher, Mrs. Galloway, has a painting in the gallery downtown and I met this really cool girl, Aliya, in my class. She’s on the same bus as me and everything. She’s really talented. You should see how well she can draw people’s faces. I’m hopeless with portraits, but look, she drew this at lunch in the cafeteria.”
Anna pulled a sheet of paper out of her backpack and fluttered it at me. I stepped forward and took it. It was stunning. She’d drawn Anna perfectly, with a questioning look in her eyes that I recognized but had never been able to understand.
“She drew this over lunch?”
“Yep. And she knows a guy in the performance stream who is in the same modern dance class as Mariam. It’s such a sweet school.”
“I’m glad you had a good first day. Maybe you can have Aliya over sometime,” I suggested.
“She’s going to come drawing this weekend with Granny and me. She said she needs more practice with plants and you know that’s Granny’s specialty.”
Anna and my mom were like part of the same person. I think Anna had a hard time seeing where she ended and my mother began. I’ve never seen anything like it, two people so similar. Whereas my mother always mystified me, Anna could tell what she was thinking before she even spoke. It took effort on my part, but by the time Anna became a teenager I’d learned to accept and even be grateful for their relationship. If she wasn’t confiding in me, at least I knew she was talking to someone. My mom, of course, passed along things she thought I should know: what boy Anna liked in her class, what mean thing one of her friends said, the intolerable things I said and did. So for years, I knew my daughter through my mother and, of course, I saw my mother through Anna’s eyes. Sometimes it was a hard pill to swallow, especially considering the relationship I had with my mother was inconsistent and strained much of my childhood and teenage years, but their connection kept me tethered to them both. Then I lost my mother, both parents just before Christmas, and I lost part of my connection to Anna too.
The only way to describe what it felt like to lose both parents at once is blindsided. It’s impossible to piece together my memories of the day and it’s sickening how the morning seemed so slow and deliberate until the police arrived. After that my brain short-circuited and I can’t recall what happened first or second. My husband insists I called him to come home while the police were still at the house and yet I remember him being away on a business trip until the next day. I was in that limbo for hours it seemed, until I remembered Anna and Joe. I knew they were both going to be devastated. I didn’t think I could face them with the news, but there wasn’t much choice.
Joe’s school was closer, so he got home first, and as soon as I saw him, I saw the fear in his eyes.
“Anna?” he asked, when he found me huddled in bed crying.
“She’s not home yet,” I managed to wail. “Granny and Gramps were in an accident. They’ve both been killed.”
Joe’s knees buckled and he sank to the floor. I knew I should go to him but I couldn’t move.
“I should have called you.” It was the only thought I could form until I heard the front door open.
“Mom?” Anna called from the living room. She wouldn’t know to look in the bedroom for me.
“Joe?” she called out again.
The house was too quiet, I realized too late. She knew something was wrong right away.
Everyone deals with tragedy differently, I know that, but Anna’s reaction was almost eerie. She came into the bedroom and looked at Joe crying on the floor, then at me sobbing on the bed. I’d been crying for hours by then and my face must have been puffy and unrecognizable. Joe had his face buried in his knees. She didn’t speak a word but waited at the doorway. I wanted to say something, anything, but my throat was strangled with grief. Finally Joe took one long shuddering sob and said: “Granny and Gramps were in a car accident.”
Anna stepped into the room and sat quietly on the end of my bed. Her cheeks were still red from being outside in the cold.
“Are they okay?” she asked.
“No, sweetheart. They died.” I choked on the last word.
�
�How?”
“Their car went into the river.”
“They drowned?”
I nodded and gasped.
She sat on the end of the bed with her head down. She didn’t cry or move. I wasn’t even sure she was breathing. When my husband came home finally, she looked at him and scowled.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“With the police,” he stammered.
It was news to me.
Anna handled their deaths remarkably well. She was stoic and proper, but I was a blubbering mess for months. I had so many of my own deep-rooted issues to work through, including the immobilizing anger at the drunk who slammed into their car one nondescript Thursday morning, that I barely had the energy to worry about anything or anyone else. I don’t think we went through with any of our Christmas traditions. I was too busy progressing through the stages of grief like the perfect student: denial, anger, bargaining, depression.
I still haven’t moved on to acceptance yet. I can’t because I haven’t forgiven my mother for putting her art ahead of me. And then there were those unexplained absences, months at a time when she was mysteriously gone without an explanation. I’m still digging through a closet of dusty skeletons to find out what that was all about.
When I finally recovered a little, after about six months when the shock at least lifted, I looked to Anna for signs of her suffering, but she never missed a beat. I watched her school grades for the slightest fluctuation, but nothing. She kept bringing home As and Bs in her academic courses and straight As in her art classes. I watched for her to lose interest in her art, but that didn’t happen either. If anything she became even more dedicated. I watched to see if she would pull away from us or her friends. But nothing of the sort happened. Her girlfriends were remarkably supportive and she seemed secure in their friendships. I was so relieved that she was going to be okay. I took pride in her strength. I assumed it was because she was young that she handled what I couldn’t, that she was coping so well because kids adapt without thinking. I was almost glad she didn’t have to lose them when she was an adult like me, when the struggle would last longer and cut deeper.
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