The Golden Hour

by T. Greenwood

  I had been bitching at dinner about the fox. “She showed me a T-shirt with a fox on it, asked me if I could make it look like that fox. What the hell?” I’d said.

  “Then don’t do it,” Gus had said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t do it.”

  “Don’t paint the fox?” I said.

  “The trees. The fox. Any of it.”

  “That’s what she’s paying me for,” I said. “That’s what she hired me to do.”

  I was baffled. I’d always griped about the commissions. It’s what I did. I griped, we joked, and then I sucked it up and painted. He never complained when checks came in.

  He sat back in his chair then.

  “You’ve sold out, Wynnie,” he said. “And it sucks.”

  I felt my face go hot.

  I looked at Avery, who was trying to fan her Go Fish cards in her little hands. She didn’t seem to be paying attention to us.

  “Seriously,” he said. “You haven’t painted anything but those goddamned trees since Avery was born. It’s like they’ve taken over your life.”

  I could feel the anger welling up inside of me.

  “I’m painting the goddamned trees so we can have goddamned food on the table,” I hissed. “So the goddamned electricity stays on.”

  His back stiffened.

  “Av,” he said. “Can you find me my slippers?”

  “Okay,” she said and hopped down off her chair, disappearing into our bedroom.

  “You’ve just gotten so bitter,” he said. “Did you know that? Don’t you realize it? You used to be so happy.”

  “I was happy,” I said, my eyes filling with tears. And he was right. Despite everything, I had been happy. Gus had made me happy. “But seriously, Gus. Happy doesn’t pay for preschool. Or shoes. Or paint even.”

  “I feel like you sold your soul,” he said, looking at me with nothing but sheer disappointment. He had never looked at me that way before. “And I miss it.”

  What I should have done is gone to him, leaned my forehead against his, let the tears that were welling up inside of me fall. I should have told him everything he said was true. I should have curled up in his lap and let him stroke my back.

  But instead I stood up from the table and said angrily, “What about you? You work in a sign shop.” I said this with such tremendous disdain, the words tasted bad in my mouth. Bitter. Bilious.

  “I work at the sign shop to support us. To support Avery,” he said softly, as if this particularly low blow had knocked the wind out of him. “I never gave up who I am as an artist.”

  I knew this was true. The vibrant, gorgeous work he made hadn’t changed one bit. Every minute he wasn’t working or spending time with our family, he was making art. It might only be a few hours a month, but those hours were dedicated to something honest. True. He may have vended his time, but he hadn’t abandoned his vision, hadn’t sold his soul.

  My nerves felt raw, exposed. Everything hurt. And I wanted him to hurt like this too.

  “I’m done. I can’t take this anymore,” I said. “I want out.”

  It was the truth. I wanted out. I wanted out of fake forests with cute foxes ripped off from Urban Outfitters T-shirts. I wanted out of this duplex with its crappy linoleum and rust-stained sinks. I wanted out of my own head at night when I couldn’t sleep.

  But I didn’t want out of us.

  “You mean this?” Gus said in disbelief.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean this.”

  Then he’d gotten angry. And silent. Which only made things worse. It wasn’t fair. So I stood up, found Avery still in the bedroom hunting under the bed for Gus’s slippers, and like some sort of petulant child, started packing my things.

  “I’m going to Pilar’s,” I said. “Can Avery please stay here with you tonight?”

  Gus looked at me in disbelief but nodded, threw his hands up as if he didn’t know what else to do with me, and I walked the four blocks to Pilar’s apartment still not breaking down, still not crying. Still not knowing how to rewind everything back to that moment when I broke everything. When I broke us.

  I had thought, hoped, that when I returned the next morning, I could apologize, go to him. But none of what I’d said could be unsaid now. I had set into motion something bigger and more powerful than either one of us. He was pissed. And rather than pining and waiting for me to end my tantrum, he simply began to disentangle me from his life. Two weeks later, when our tenant moved out, I moved my things across to the other side of the duplex. That crack I’d started had become a full and unforgiving chasm between us. And we were both too stubborn to try to fix it.

  * * *

  “Maybe if I can just get away for a while, I can get back to the work that matters to me,” I tried to explain now. And while it wasn’t the main reason for leaving, it was a good one. A true one. Part of me knew if I could actually do this, then Gus and I might even stand a chance. “Please, Gus. I need this. And I need you to let me go.”

  He’d sighed hard, his eyes wide and sad.

  “I’ll take good care of Avery. Pilar will be with us. You can come whenever you want. And you can have Avery over Christmas. It’ll be okay.” I was pleading now, desperate.

  Gus’s eyes filled with tears, and this time when I leaned against him again, he didn’t pull away. “Wyn, I can only do this for a few months. Just until March. I need you to promise.” These words he spoke into my hair, his breath warm. Gentle. My breath hitched.

  I held up my hand, pinky finger extended, and he linked his finger with mine.

  * * *

  We left New York on Saturday, Halloween. Gus let me take our old Honda; the sign shop was just a couple of subway stops from our house, so he wouldn’t really need the car. I hadn’t wanted to stop in Haven, where my folks still lived, but they had pleaded with me to bring Avery to see them before we went to Maine. I knew they also wanted to talk about Robby, about what it might mean if he was granted a retrial.

  I had avoided going home except for major holidays since I moved out at seventeen. Everyone in Haven knew what had happened to me. I couldn’t seem to go anywhere without a thousand eyes on my back, never mind that Robby’s family reportedly still lived there, in that house way out on Route 9.

  My plan was for us to spend the night with my parents and then drive to Maine on Sunday morning. Pilar was finishing up some things in the city and would fly into Portland to meet us on Sunday afternoon. We’d take the car ferry to the island together. If we could just get to the island, everything would be fine.

  Avery was very excited about trick-or-treating in my parents’ neighborhood. She’d never been trick-or-treating before. Last year, Gus and I had thrown a costume party at our house; our neighborhood in Queens was not the kind of place you take your kids and go around knocking on doors for candy.

  As I pulled into my parents’ driveway, I could see my mother had pulled out all the stops. Every house on the street was decked out from top to bottom. Their neighborhood, once full of young families, was now filled with retired grandparents. In the last few years, it had garnered a reputation for having the best holiday decorations (both Halloween and Christmas) and the best Halloween candy. They bused kids in for this. Last year my mother said she counted fifteen hundred trick-or-treaters. She started buying candy on clearance the day after Halloween to stock up for the next year.

  Filmy ghosts hung from the trees that lined the drive. A pair of harvest dummies dressed up like the American Gothic couple were propped up on the porch. Cobwebs laced every shrub, every mum. A virtual pumpkin patch filled the front yard. The plaster of paris tombstones she’d carefully crafted were interspersed between. In deference to my father, they were all for literary figures: Emily Dickinson (Because I could not stop for Death—He kindly stopped for me—), Edgar Allan Poe, Thoreau.

  Our house had been, at one time, a beautiful Queen Anne like all of the other Victorians on this street. But by the time my parents bought it in the early e
ighties, its beauty had faded. They’d always intended to revive it, to give it a face-lift. But there was never the time nor the money required, and it had settled into looking like the scary haunted mansion of its reputation. I think they actually enjoyed it now.

  My mother was in the yard wrestling with a giant piece of chicken wire when we pulled up. Avery unbuckled herself from her car seat and threw open the door, running toward my mother like an offensive tackle. My mother stumbled backward.

  “Careful!” I warned as I got out of the car and reached into the backseat for our overnight bag.

  “What are you making?” Avery asked.

  “Ghosts,” my mother said to Avery, wiggling her fingers and widening her eyes. To me, she said, “I saw it on Pinterest. Are you on there?”

  I shook my head.

  “You should be on there; it’s great for artists. Anyway, you use chicken wire to make the shapes of ball gowns and then you spray paint them with glow-in-the-dark paint. At night, it looks like there’s a ghost ball on your lawn.”

  “Cool!” Avery said. “Can I help?”

  “Sure thing, sweet bean, but let’s have some tea first.”

  My mother came to me, pulling off her work gloves and holding out her arms. She was wearing paint-splattered overalls and a gray mohair sweater that scratched against my cheek. Her silvery hair was piled up on top of her head in a sloppy bun. She had metallic butterfly barrettes holding the loose hairs in place.

  My mother was a high school art teacher until two years ago, when she retired. Now she’d taken on kooky lady who lives in the haunted house as a full-time job.

  “Where’s Daddy?” I asked, pulling away from her.

  “At the library.”

  My father retired from his own teaching job a year ago. He had been a beloved English teacher at the high school for thirty-five years. When he retired, they built a new library and named it after him. Now he volunteered there, running a chess club after school.

  “Is this a new one?” my mother asked, squinting at the new tattoo on the inside of my wrist. She stroked it with her thumb, frowning.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  For the last ten years, I’d been slowly illustrating my left arm. It had started as a way to mask the scars. I started at my clavicle with a night-blooming cereus, a moonflower. But eventually the garden grew to include a sea of forget-me-nots, wild roses, snapdragons, ivy creeping between them. Before I left the city, I had my friend, Gino, who is responsible for most of the more recent flowers, add a small pinecone on the inside of my wrist. We usually worked in trade, but this one was on the house. A going away present.

  “It’s Maine’s state flower,” I said.

  “A pinecone? Is that really considered a flower?”

  “Apparently.”

  “I can’t say I’m happy about any of this,” she said, touching the pinecone absently.

  “The tattoo?”

  “Maine,” she said.

  * * *

  Inside, my mother made tea and put three teacups and saucers on the table. She got Daddy’s work stool from his office and adjusted it so Avery was able to sit with us at the table. She’d made the raspberry linzer cookies Avery loved and bought some fancy pink paper napkins with butterflies on them too.

  “One at a time,” I said to Avery as she reached for the plate of cookies. “How’s Mark?” I asked my mother.

  Mark was my little brother. He was a firefighter. For a long time he was a part-time weed smoker and full-time gamer, but in the last two years or so he’d come around. He still lived in Haven.

  “He’s good. He’ll be here for supper,” she said.

  The tea was peppermint. Avery carefully poured the cream from the little china pitcher into her own teacup.

  “Careful, baby,” I said as the liquid threatened to spill over.

  “I spoke to Larry again this morning,” my mother said. Our lawyer.

  I glanced at Avery. My mother was a firm believer that children should not be shielded from, nor silenced around, adult conversations. As a kid this was great, but as a mom, I was no longer so sure I agreed.

  When I didn’t respond, she continued, “He’s not worried. So they tested for DNA. Big deal. Worst case, and I mean absolute worst case, his DNA isn’t anywhere in the sample or whatever, he gets another trial. Larry says your testimony should be more than enough.”

  I shook my head. My hands were sweating, my heart flip-flopping.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I’m just not sure I’d want to testify.”

  Her eyes widened. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Of course you would. They can’t let that monster out of prison.”

  This was a conversation I’d anticipated. I knew from the minute she’d found out about the petition she’d been speculating and planning what our next steps should be. And so I’d planned my counterargument. How my testimony hadn’t been necessary to put him in prison, why should it be necessary to keep him there? Every other bit of evidence pointed to him. Never mind his confession. It took the jury a whopping hour to convict him on all counts. On all counts. And even if they assembled a new jury, my case was the stuff of legends in these parts. There wasn’t a single person in a hundred-mile radius who didn’t know the story of what happened to me.

  Running through my argument point by point, it was almost enough even to convince myself. That I was safe. That none of this mattered.

  I remained silent, occupying myself with the teapot lid.

  “Of course we’d find a way to appeal,” she said. “If they actually granted him another trial.”

  “Too expensive,” I said. I knew this argument wouldn’t work with her, even though it was true. Too expensive. My parents had mortgaged this house three times in the last twenty years to cover legal expenses. If not for their pensions, they’d never have been able to retire.

  “Who fucking cares about money?” my mother hissed. When Avery looked up at her from her tea, my mother said sweetly, “Pardon my français.”

  “I’m sure Larry’s right. It’ll be fine,” I said, forcing myself to smile. “And in the meantime, Avery and I are going to Maine. I’m going to paint. Get my head together and figure out what to do . . .” I started, looking at Avery to see if she was paying attention. She was absorbed in twirling her honey on a wooden honey stick. “. . . about Gus.”

  “So what does Gus think about this?”

  You can’t always just run away.

  “He’s being a grown-up,” I said. “He knows this is my choice.”

  “He’ll kill him, you know,” she said. “If he gets out.”

  Avery looked up again. “Daddy won’t even kill spiders,” she said. She was always, always listening. “Really. I found one in my room and he carried it outside. It was in the middle of the night even.”

  “Daddy is not killing anybody,” I assured her. “And I am not talking about this anymore.”

  My father came into the kitchen like a storm, dressed in blue jeans and a soft flannel shirt, olive green rubber boots and suspenders.

  “Well, if it isn’t Miss Avericious Alouiscious!” he said.

  “Poppy!” she squealed, tipping over her tea. I used the pretty pink napkins to sop it up.

  “How about we go see what Lucy is up to?” he said, winking at me. At least he knew she shouldn’t be a part of this conversation.

  “Yay!”

  Lucy was my parents’ pig. They’d bought her several years ago at the same time they bought their chickens. She was intended to be an Easter ham, but wound up being an adored pet.

  He lifted Avery up, threw her over his shoulder, and marched out the door.

  “Are you guys talking about divorce?” my mother blurted.

  “God. I don’t know, Mom. Let me just deal with one thing at a time, please.”

  She stood up, picked up Avery’s plate and empty teacup. I noticed her hands trembling. She took the dishes to the sink.

  “There are fire ants in Mai
ne,” she said. “Just so you know. They’ll eat you alive.”

  I sighed.

  * * *

  My brother came for supper and I could tell he was in love before he even opened his mouth. He was practically glowing. He’d also lost weight. At one point he’d been close to two hundred fifty pounds. But not anymore. He looked fit. Healthy. I could always tell how happy he was by the size of his waistline.

  After supper, while my parents took Avery out trick-or-treating, Mark and I sat outside on the porch handing out candy. They’d left us with ten bags and strict instructions about how much to divvy out per kid to make it last. I’d found an old roach in the glove box of the Honda and now surreptitiously lit it. I hadn’t smoked pot in years, but I was antsy, needed something to calm me down. I thought Mark might want to share.

  “So who is she?” I asked.

  “Who?” he said, grinning.

  “The girl.” I smacked his arm and peered down the street to make sure no kids were coming before taking a quick drag on the joint. “Who is she?”

  “Veronica.”

  “Veronica from high school?” I asked, coughing. Smoke blew out of my nose. Veronica Smith was the first girl who broke Mark’s heart. I’d had to talk him down from a few rooftops over this stupid girl before.

  “She’s different now,” he said. “She’s got a daughter. Her husband died.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  Mark was twenty-three years old, which made Veronica twenty-three as well. Widowed with a kid at twenty-three didn’t seem fair, even for her.

  I offered him the joint, but he shook his head. “Can’t,” he explained. “Random testing.”

  I nodded and took his puff.

  “It sucks about Robby.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He was only three when it happened. He says he doesn’t remember anything except Grandma coming to stay with us for the summer. He barely remembers who I was in the land of Before. I remember him though. A mop of dark hair, big brown eyes. He was quiet and shy, sweet and pudgy and gentle. I also remember he had nightmares every night that summer. It was as if on some primitive level he was sympathizing with me. Kids know shit. They know when the world isn’t good.