Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories

by Nancy Christie

  And there was enough time to recall the past, as she waited in her small empty room. It was so quiet—almost as quiet as it had been in her parents’ house in the woods, where the silence was perfect and absolute. Even the blue jays knew better than to allow their raucous cries to disturb the peace required by her father and so jealously guarded by her mother.

  Sometimes hours would go by with no one speaking at all, and when Annabelle finally used her voice, she would be surprised at the sound, as though she had forgotten what it was.

  But color—the house had been filled with color. Metallic shades of gold and silver, deep pulsing reds and vibrant greens—every color known to man was captured by her father on large rectangles of white canvas.

  And always, somewhere amidst the shades and hues, would be her mother, portraying whatever vision had seized her husband’s mind. She would stand there—motionless, breathless, nearly lifeless—while the brush stroked bits of her onto the canvas. Unmoving, until the vision released the artist, who, in turn, released his captive subject.

  When Annabelle took her own apartment, she painted the walls and ceilings and floors white—stark white, bone white, the white of bleached driftwood tossed carelessly onto the shore after a storm.

  And in the whiteness, she waited for someone to come, to bring all the colors of life alive through her.

  “I couldn’t do what my father did,” she explained to Jules at the next session. “I couldn’t create life from color as he did. So I thought if I took the color away, it would make it easier for someone else to bring it all to life. To start with a fresh canvas—clean, white, unused.”

  “You wanted to paint like your father?” Jules asked curiously. “Or did you just want to be like your father? He seems a driven man, not easy to live with. Was your mother happy, Anna, living with a man so obsessed by his art?”

  Annabelle frowned. How could Jules understand the man her father had been? How could anyone understand the driving force that held him in its grasp, forcing him to blindly obey its every whim?

  “When I was eight,” she answered obliquely, forehead creased with the effort of memory, “my mother found a young fox caught in a trap at the edge of the woods.”

  Outside, the cold December sun gleamed fitfully through bare branches, but Annabelle felt again the warmth of a May morning and saw the sunlight dancing in her mother’s hair and on the reddish brown fur of the injured animal cradled in her arms.

  “She brought it up to the house, trailing bits of leaves behind her, and she didn’t even notice her dress was smeared with its blood. I think she was going to bandage its leg. It was bleeding quite steadily . . . cut to the bone by the sharp teeth of the steel trap. Or perhaps it had tried to gnaw itself free . . .” She closed her eyes for a moment as the agony of the trapped animal flooded through her. Trapped, with no means to escape except by inflicting more pain on an already bruised body.

  Although sometimes, Annabelle thought, it was the only way.

  “But just as she stepped through the French doors, my father saw her, and just as quickly wanted to paint her . . . the way my mother looked, carrying that poor suffering animal.

  “It must have been near death by then. It didn’t struggle, not even when my father twisted its head against my mother’s breast and curled its bloodstained tail around her wrist.

  “She stood there for nearly two hours, trapped in the act of entering her home just as the fox had been trapped, until my father was satisfied with what he had put on the canvas. Then he released her. But by then the fox had died . . . in my mother’s arms, while she stood patiently as my father painted her.

  “He sold that picture for quite a bit of money, I think.” Annabelle looked down at her hands, surprised to see she had been clenching them, surprised to see how wet they were with tears—why had she started to cry? It was only an animal after all, not nearly as important as her father’s art.

  “What did your mother do with the fox?” Jules asked softly.

  Annabelle wiped the tears from her hands. She mustn’t cry. She must not cry.

  “She set it down on the loveseat in the corner,” and Annabelle the child watched with what grace and tenderness her mother placed the bloody, lifeless body on the soft white cushions.

  “Then she went to my father, who was so absorbed in his work that he never even noticed the fox had died. He was like that, you know,” Annabelle explained, almost matter-of-factly. “When he was painting, nothing else mattered. It was just the way he was.” She wasn’t certain if she was explaining it to Jules, or the little girl and her mother, who both waited helplessly for his attention to leave the canvas.

  “She pulled the neckline of her dress until the buttons released the fragile material and it fell like rain past her shoulders to the floor. My father looked up then. He saw my mother standing there, smears of blood on her shoulders and across her breast. Perhaps the fox had bit her in its agony.

  “He ran his fingers lightly across the blood and then on the canvas, adding a touch of dark red to the painting. And then,” Annabelle looked blindly out the window, “he reached for my mother. He never even knew when I left the room, just as he never knew when the fox had died.

  “But it didn’t matter,” she added, forcing the words past a throat curiously constricted with pain. “After all, she was his wife and loved him so. And the picture kept the fox alive in a way. Nothing else mattered. Nothing.”

  “How did you feel about your mother allowing the fox to die?”

  Annabelle looked at Jules in surprise. Didn’t he understand? Her father had to paint, and nothing could be allowed to interfere.

  “She had no choice,” she answered hesitantly. “My father needed her to stand there with the fox, and my mother. . . .” Annabelle paused for a moment, searching for the right words to explain the strange symbiotic relationship that bound her parents, “my mother needed my father to need her. She would do anything, anything at all, for my father.”

  “Then why did she kill herself?” Jules swiveled in his chair until he was staring directly at Annabelle, forcing her to meet his eyes. Until now, he had been gentle, his words barely stroking her mind. He had a lover’s touch—kind, persuasive.

  But now, his rough words stripped away her memories, leaving her naked and defenseless in the cold light.

  “She didn’t kill herself,” Annabelle answered mechanically, crossing her shivering arms in front of her chest.

  It seemed as though she had been saying those words forever to a hundred different questioners. And none of them believed her. But she had to keep trying.

  “We used to swim in that lake on warm summer evenings, my mother and I, while my father sat on the bank and painted her. And when she grew tired, she would float gently on the surface, her hair swirling in a golden cloud around her. My mother loved the water.”

  “But it was night, Anna, dark and cold. Why would your mother choose to swim alone in a cold lake unless she wanted to die?”

  Annabelle shook her head. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. The same words she had repeated to herself, from the safety of her bedroom, as she watched the stretcher carrying the slender wet figure. Only her mother’s hair was exposed, slipping from under the cover like a golden curtain to the ground. Poor dead drowned Ophelia, gone mad for love.

  “It was a mistake. My mother would never have left my father. They needed each other. . . .” She struck the arm of the chair for emphasis.

  Jules was silent but she knew that he, like all the others, didn’t believe her. But Annabelle understood the truth. For whatever reason, her mother had left the house, and, once outside, was forever prevented from returning, leaving behind a grieving child and an artist with no subject, no release.

  “It was a mistake, an accident. She would not have left him. It was nobody’s fault,” but the last words were spoken without conviction.

  Annabelle moved then, as though her body had just awakened from an unrestful sleep.

&
nbsp; “I can’t stay,” buttoning her coat, pulling on gloves. The dangers outside were preferable to those that awaited her here in the darkness. Too many questions, leading to doors that must remain closed—deep holes from which she could never escape—snares to twist her until she was caught forever.

  It would be safer in her apartment, safer still in the house by the lake. Nothing could harm her there. If only she could escape.

  January came, and with it, the first snowfall of the new year, soft and almost warm. Jules sat quietly for a time, and together they watched the snow drift down.

  “It must have been difficult for you afterward. The house would be so empty with your mother gone,” Jules observed finally, and Annabelle understood her respite was over. They would begin again. “You went away to school some weeks later, didn’t you? Was it hard for you to leave your father? Did you miss him?”

  Annabelle sat silently, watching the white flakes spin out of control. With her mother’s death, what balance there had been to their lives was lost. Her father locked himself in the studio for days afterward, painting.

  And Annabelle drifted through the house, tall at thirteen, with the long golden hair so like her mother’s. She would spend hours in her mother’s bedroom, wrapping the familiar nightgowns and robes around her slender body, and look into the mirror, trying to find her mother’s face in the glass.

  It was two weeks later when her father emerged from his self-imposed isolation, and intent on the canvas he held, strode into his wife’s room, only to find Annabelle seated at the dressing table, her mother’s favorite red velvet robe pulled tightly around her.

  For a moment, he stared in bewilderment, and then the familiar absorbed look came over his face as he studied the figure before him—the golden hair, the child’s body, a woman’s face.

  And Annabelle, who had seen that look a thousand times before—and every time but once it had been directed at her mother—felt a curious mixture of fear and anticipation.

  His fingers tightened on the paintbrush he still carried, and Annabelle knew he wanted to paint her—just her—and wouldn’t rest until he did.

  “I was afraid,” she whispered now softly. “I knew what he wanted. But I couldn’t . . . not again.”

  Her mother would have gone to the studio, Annabelle knew, and stood patiently while her husband tore bits of her free to lay on the canvas. But Annabelle was a child, not a woman, and the look in his eyes frightened her.

  “I was not like my mother.” The despair in her voice echoed in the room. How could she ever think she could be like her mother—inspire the kind of life and love and passion her mother had? She was a coward, poor weak Annabelle, so she ran away—away to school, leaving her father.

  “Did you miss him, Anna?” Jules asked again.

  After her mother’s death, her father traveled to Europe, where he painted pictures of mountains and lakes. But never people. Her father painted no more pictures of people—of women—of his wife.

  “When he died, Anna, how did you feel?”

  The room was cold, and Annabelle shivered. It was like a scene from a courtroom drama—a murder trial perhaps. Where were you when the victim died? How did you feel—were you lost, grieving? Did you feel free?

  “I was alone in my apartment. My father’s agent called, telling me of the plane crash . . . that my father had died.” She stumbled a bit over the words, the way she had stumbled as she turned from the phone after resting it carefully in its cradle. The man’s words, cut off in mid-sentence, echoed in the apartment: “Dead. Dead.”

  The phone had rung again, the shrillness shattering the silence. But Annabelle wouldn’t answer it—not again. Not ever again. He wasn’t coming home. She wouldn’t have another chance.

  “What did you do then?”

  Annabelle frowned with the effort of remembering. What had she done? It seemed so long ago, although less than six months had passed. Late summertime it had been, and the leaves were just beginning to lose their fresh look as they died, cell by cell, on the trees.

  Now it was the holiday decorations that were fading, and the snow, so clean and white, would soon be a dirty shroud on the city.

  “Anna?”

  She closed her eyes, unconsciously running the fingers of her right hand over the scar above her left wrist.

  “I went into the kitchen and washed the cup I had used for coffee.” And the pot and the silverware, and finally, every dish that lined the otherwise empty cabinet.

  “I always clean up after myself. I don’t like leaving messes for other people.” Her mother had left a mess—wet blankets dripping, a nightdress that, scrub as she would, Annabelle could never seem to make clean again.

  A child, broken in pieces, never again to be whole.

  But then, rules weren’t made for people like her parents.

  “And then?”

  “I wanted a bath. I went into the bathroom and took off all my clothes so I could take a bath.” She had blocked the overflow outlet and when she finally lowered her thin naked body into the tub, some of the water cascaded onto the tile floor.

  “I was so cold.” She remembered the coldness—the coldness of death. Her mother had left her; now her father was gone. And they had taken their world away with them, leaving her to stand out there alone, waiting. Watching. Wanting.

  She had lain in the tub, inching her way down the porcelain interior until her knees were sticking out of the water, and her head was almost level with the surface, with her hair floating around her, the way her mother’s had. Looking down, all she could see were her bony knees and the poor shriveled tips of her breasts, while all the rest of her body lay hidden.

  It was peaceful and warm, and when she heard the phone, she turned the faucet on faster so the flow would drown its insistent ring, not caring that the water level had reached the top and was, even now, steadily trickling over the edge.

  That was what had brought the landlady up two flights of stairs to Annabelle’s door. The water had leaked through the floorboards to the apartment below.

  When the knocking came, it was easy for Annabelle to disregard it. Her world was peaceful, calm. Nothing mattered anymore. The lake was warm.

  “What did you do?” Jules’ voice, soft, barely penetrated her consciousness.

  “I just wanted to be left alone,” she said. “I didn’t want to see anyone. But they wouldn’t leave me alone,” and she didn’t even try to explain who “they” were or why they would bother her.

  “So you took the razor,” Jules prompted, watching her narrowly through half-closed lids.

  He looks like a lizard, Annabelle thought dreamily, waiting to flick his tongue to catch his dinner.

  But he won’t catch me! she thought triumphantly, and suddenly, sat up straight.

  “It was my tub, after all!” she shouted. “My water! My apartment! My razor, my skin, my life! What right did anyone have to take it from me?” and the tears came, great tearing sobs pulling at her lungs until she was gasping for breath.

  “She had no right. . . .”

  Annabelle had screamed at the landlady, who had used her passkey to open the door, only to find a tub full of rose-colored water. “No right! You have no right to come in here!” Words unheard, for the energy to change thought into sound had seeped from her as steadily as the blood had seeped from her veins.

  “I wasn’t her child! I wasn’t anybody’s child . . . not any more!” and the sobs stopped as suddenly as they had begun, as Annabelle’s words echoed in the room.

  “Why did he leave me? I was ready. I wasn’t afraid,” and the words opened doors long closed.

  She was thirteen, and had gone into her father’s studio fresh from the lake, with only a towel wrapped around her swimsuit-clad body. Her father was painting yet another portrait of her mother.

  “He always painted my mother. Oh, there were other things in the scene as well . . . animals, trees, the lake with the sun glancing off its surface to dazzle your eyes. But my moth
er was always there, irresistibly drawing your attention.

  “I don’t know what it was about my father’s paintings that made her seem so alive. He’d been painting her for years, and she always looked the same . . . flaming eyes, golden hair, slender body. . . .”

  Annabelle’s voice trailed off as she saw again the endless succession of pictures her father had created—some with her mother clothed in styles from long ago, some of her naked body gleaming like ivory, like bones.

  Her father was in love with her mother’s body—that much Annabelle the adult understood even if the child had been unable to perceive it at the time.

  But was he in love with his wife?

  “I never thought I would be as beautiful as my mother, even though she promised me my time would come. I grew taller, of course”—tall enough to reach first her mother’s shoulders, and then look into her eyes—“but to look like her seemed impossible. Still, our hair was the same, and I wore it long and loose like hers. I hoped I would look like her when I grew up.”

  But she hadn’t. Something had gone wrong, it seemed, in those years after her mother’s death. Like a plant denied the life-giving warmth of the sun, Annabelle had faded, her early promise just a bitter memory.

  She got up from the office couch and walked to the small mirror hanging near the coat rack. The light in the room was dim but adequate, and Annabelle could see in the reflection the way her hair, now short and straight, failed to capture even a bit of glow from the lamp.

  She ran her fingers impatiently through the strands, unsurprised to feel the brittleness of the ends. Like the hair on a corpse, she thought, and gathered a handful tightly back from her face. The skin pulled across her cheekbones, and it was a death’s head that stared back at her from the mirror.

  “I’m not beautiful like my mother,” she said aloud. “I never was, even at thirteen. He was wrong, you know,” she added, turning back to Jules. “I wasn’t ready, not then.”

  “Who was wrong, Anna?” Jules asked, but her eyes were caught by the past, and she didn’t see the desk and lamp and psychiatrist. There was only the sunlight and her father, and the empty canvas he had placed on the easel.