by Lisa Samson
“It’s not your life. It’s theirs.”
“Before Aunt Bel came back, they all seemed so distant. I hardly ever saw Mom. And everything with Daddy was just nice and fun like it’s been for years. Now they’re back in my life in a big way, and I look around and I’m like, ‘Is this it? This is my life?’ All I do is work, and everything’s falling apart all around me.”
At times like these, Finn usually has good instincts. He’ll coax me into his arms, reassure me, help me see that I’m overthinking things. But his instincts fail him tonight.
“You know what,” he says, climbing off the bed. “I think you’re being really emotional. If you’d just look at things calmly and rationally, you’d be a lot happier, you know?”
He pads down the hall to the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.
So that’s my problem. I’m simply irrational.
He comes back in. “Sara, I love you. But you’ve never been happy. You know that, don’t you? If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.”
“Why?”
“How much time do you have?”
“I married you so I’d always have enough time for you, hon.”
“Can we get out of here?” I hold out my hand and he pulls me off the bed.
“Let’s take a walk,” he says.
Finn takes my hand as we walk down Eastern Avenue. We’re well past the Broadway Market, a large indoor market that’s been in Baltimore for decades, where the smell of fish is fine and people come not just for the offerings but for the vendors themselves.
The people here make Finn and me look normal. Boring, even.
But the market is closed down and the pedestrians on the streets of Fells Point are the very last stragglers of an evening out drinking. Soon the delivery trucks will begin their rounds.
By four, we have made it back down to the Inner Harbor. I can’t help it; it’s one of my favorite places. Yes, it’s touristy with its Cheesecake Factory and upscale souvenir shops. But some talented local vendors are tucked into the glass walls of the pavilions. Potters. Glass blowers. Weavers. And anyway, I like the water. I always have.
We walk past the Science Center, the chill of the evening finally succumbing to the dew of morning, settling on our heads and shoulders. Finn hasn’t said anything, but he’s active in his ways, telling me he’s fine to let me set the pace.
Finally, we sit atop Federal Hill, looking at the lights reflected on the Harbor, the neon lights of the massive Domino Sugar sign up the water to our right.
Finn puts his arm around me and draws me close in to his side. “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Sara,” he begins, then takes my chin in his fingers and turns my face toward his. “I need to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“I know you’re not happy. There’s been something dark inside you, something hiding. And it’s been there ever since I’ve known you.”
I nod.
“I’ve tried so hard to make up for it.” He clears his throat. “To make life a really beautiful thing for you. To do for you what you try to do for others. But I always mess up, and instead of making things better, I make them worse.”
“Finn—”
“Let me finish. But the thing is, I can’t. I can’t do that anymore. Because as much as I want to be the balm to your pain, the person whose love for you heals all wounds, I’m not the one who can.”
“What are you saying?” I feel the heat of uncertainty and fear collect under my scalp.
“I’m saying I’m sorry.”
“What? Finn, no.”
“I’m sorry for thinking I had it in me in the first place. Sorry for raising your expectations, sorry for wasting time and effort.” He rushes to add, “Not that I wouldn’t have been there for you. I just think my efforts have been misguided. And it’s not like I won’t continue to be there for you.”
He’s right. I wish he wasn’t. “If anybody else could save me, I’d want it to be you.”
He leans forward and kisses me on the mouth. “I know. But maybe I just need to walk alongside you, not try and drag you to safety.”
I hug my knees to my chest. I don’t deserve this man. I lean my head against his shoulder and am filled with a feeling of gratitude unlike any I’ve ever felt.
“Okay. I’m ready to talk now.” I get to my knees and crawl to sit between his legs, my back against his front. He circles his arms around me. Together, his head atop mine, we look out from our hill.
And I realize something. Finn and I. We sit here together and we watch the world, and sometimes it comes up to us like waves lapping against the abutments down on the harbor below, sometimes it blows upon us like the breeze coming through the branches of the trees. But it’s always the two of us. He’s my person.
“I’ve never told you about my imaginary friend, have I?”
“No.” His arms tighten about me and he places a sweet, comforting kiss on the side of my neck. “What did you name him?”
“Jason. Although imaginary friends seem to name themselves. At least mine came with one.”
“Jason,” he repeats.
I nod. “I remember my father putting a stop to it. He said, ‘I don’t care if you have an imaginary friend, and it’s okay with me if you name him Jason. But please, don’t use that name around your mother. That’s all I ask.’ ”
“That’s odd. Don’t you think?”
“I never thought about it before.”
“So your little friend … is he still around? What is he like?”
Tears prick at the corners of my eyes. Finn and I, we were friends first. For over a year. And sometimes, like right now, it shows. He doesn’t call me crazy or laugh at my childishness. He’s totally on board, instantly in the boat with me.
“He’s actually just a baby. But it’s in his eyes, like he knows so much more than his size and age would tell you.”
“Is he nice to you? Does he like you, Sara?”
“He’s sad, Finn. And it makes me so terribly sad. I know he’s around because I did something. I did something really wrong. And I don’t know what it is.”
There it is. I said the words out loud. I’d never even voiced them as words in my own mind, keeping it a misty feeling as deep as feelings will go.
“Then you need to find out.”
“I don’t even know where to begin. And there’s more, I think. I think. I think it might have to do with my mom and dad’s divorce.”
“Wait. You think you’re responsible for your parents’ divorce?”
Tears overflow the bottom rims of my eyelids. “Yes,” I whisper. “I do. I’ve known that since the day my mother told me our family would never be the same again.”
“Babe, most children think that sort of thing, but it’s never true.”
I turn around in the circle of his arms to look at him. I take his beautiful face in my hands. “Would I even tell you that if I didn’t think it was true?”
He shakes his head. “No. No, Sara. You’re smart enough to know the difference.”
11.
Image of the Invisible
A string of fine days is all it takes, days where the sun rises early, warm and clear, then refuses to be budged by wind or concealed by cloud, to make a distant memory of the gray rainy fog we have been living in for the last couple of weeks. Finn and I start sleeping with the window open, lulled by street sounds and early-morning birdsong into a state of dazed bliss. It’s chemical, I’m sure, our bodies recalled to their umbilical link with the physical world, something I am more conscious of than he is, being tethered already to the cycles of the moon.
At the back of the house, right outside the kitchen door, we have a tiny wooden deck just large enough for a hand-me-down wrought-iron bistro table and some outdoor chairs. Finn built the platform one weekend after tearing out the charming, trellised nook that had been there before, promising something bigger and better. He
left the project unfinished—the steps down to the minuscule patch of yard and the fence separating us from the house to our rear consist only of precariously stacked cinder blocks—but now that the weather has turned, it’s a perfect spot to catch the morning sun, so we fall into the habit of having breakfast outside.
I see this deck differently now. I see the bathroom tile differently. As well as the gouges on the floor in Aunt Bel’s room.
I come downstairs most days to find freshly ground coffee brewing and Finn at the stove, cooking omelets in the skillet. Aunt Bel, also an early riser, will already be outside, still in her robe with her legs tucked under her, smoking a cigarette and drinking orange juice. “Breakfast of Champions,” I’ll say, or something in that vein, and she’ll give the cigarette an appraising look—not a twinge of guilt—before saying good morning and raising it to her lips for another drag. Her fingers are always covered in dry paint now, especially around the nails, as if she’s been scratching at her canvas with her bare hands.
She smells of linseed oil too. I like that.
She hasn’t opened up to me since Daddy’s surprise visit. When I ask about the past, she’s every bit as evasive as before. But we have become closer somehow. I like to come home and see what she’s been doing down in the basement, to sit on the steps and watch her make an ugly mess on the canvas. She doesn’t know how to draw, doesn’t know how to create the visual abstractions with brush or knife that read to the eye as convincing detail. She isn’t interested in learning either. One Sunday night after the Microchurch broke up, I mentioned her painting to Rick, who offered to introduce her to his painter friend, the one who’d created the mural in the church. Aunt Bel shut this down straightaway and seemed miffed that I would even mention something so private as her painting to Rick. Whatever drives her, it certainly isn’t the desire to learn or improve. And recognition? Not even a little bit.
Maybe that’s why I find the process so soothing to be around. It’s the physical embodiment of white noise, affecting me just like the change of seasons. Some evenings I take my Autocord downstairs with me, and when she’s not too absorbed in the process, she tells me how during her first years in Kazakhstan she snapped hundreds of photos with the 35mm camera my grandfather had bought her for a high school photography class. Since my chat with the photographer at the Wedding Expo, I’ve been taking a lot of photos, using my digital SLR along with the light meter app on my phone, trying to get the hang of manual settings. Aunt Bel, however, is as uninterested in the technical minutia of photography as she is in the technique of painting. For her the process is, from first to last, one of emotion.
The question I want to ask is about the little boy in the photo on her dresser. Did she take that picture? Who is the boy? I never quite bring myself to ask, though, because I’m afraid of pushing. Let her open up at her own pace. There’s no rush, I tell myself. She will talk about the past when she’s ready, and not before. Still, I do wish she would open up.
And she never talks about God either. That seems kind of strange for a missionary. If that’s what she was. I don’t even know that anymore.
One night, while Finn is working late at the studio with Huey, trying to rebuild the used motor he bought to replace the Iron Maiden’s treadle, I realize that maybe I haven’t opened up to her either. Maybe somebody’s got to be the one to start that in a relationship. I mean, that makes sense, right? So I talk to Aunt Bel about Finn’s desire to start having babies.
“Where does that even come from?” I say.
“I didn’t really want to have kids,” she says. “But as for Finn, maybe you can simply chalk it up to instinct. It is a natural desire for men to want to reproduce, Sara.” Aunt Bel is working on something she started earlier, a crude face built on top of a gold-and-black checkerboard, a primitive asymmetrical grid of muddy gilt and grime. She runs her finger thoughtfully along the dried ridge of clumped paint that forms the chin. “You don’t want to have children?”
I pause before answering. It’s a complicated question. “I’m fine with it, in theory. But no. Not yet. Babies are fragile, Aunt Bel. I don’t trust myself with a baby. And Finn, as apt as he would be to care for our kids at least fifty-fifty … I mean, you can’t send them back, right? If you’re not the parent you’d hoped you’d be, you’re pretty much stuck with it, you know?”
Her finger pauses, and I can tell she doesn’t like what I’ve said. The same thing happens when I’m too blunt with friends who have children. You speak in less-than-fawning ways about the reality of kids and they react like you’ve uttered blasphemy. Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe I’ve revealed too much.
“ ‘Stuck with it’ is too harsh,” I say. “But what I mean is, your whole life is changed.” I was about to say, Your whole life is turned upside down, but maybe that’s too honest for my aunt too. “Maybe it was different before you left, but these days, if you have kids, people think your whole life should revolve around them—especially if you’re the mom. I mean, I have friends I can’t even talk to anymore, can’t have a serious conversation with, because they can’t think anymore except in baby talk. They’re choking for air, spread way too thin, no time to get together, and I’m the bad guy.”
“Tell me,” Aunt Bel says, still pondering her painting. “Why do you think you’d be such a terrible mother?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve just never trusted myself around kids. I don’t even like to hold babies.”
“Did you drop one sometime or something?” Her eyes bore into mine.
I shake my head. “No. Not that I can remember. There’s nothing like that.”
She picks up a paintbrush and points it at me. “Then you’re just like ninety-nine percent of all women. You just admit it.”
“Maybe. But it feels different.”
“How would you know?”
She has a point.
“This isn’t criticism,” she says. “Only an observation. I look back at my parents, the things they thought were important, and I wonder if my choices—which I thought at the time were my own—were shaped too much by a reaction to them. To all the family, really. Coming home, it’s been on my mind a lot. Why did I go, Sara?” She shakes her head. “But this conversation isn’t about me. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You’ll make a wonderful mother.”
“You really think I’m hard on myself?”
“You seem very sure you’re not worthy to have a baby.”
Worthy.
Huh.
“But who’s worthy to do anything, if you think about it?” she says. “You can only try. And even then, you may think you’re doing the right thing, and it’s so far off the mark. But yet, what else could you have done?”
My conversations with Aunt Bel often go this way—tentative observations put forward only to die the death of a thousand qualifications—but this is different. She’s not just hinting at something now, she’s saying it.
“My father mentioned something about an accident. Something that happened before you left for the field.”
She stares at me, unblinking.
So we’re going that route again. “Never mind. Forget I brought that up.”
“Sure.” The left side of her mouth rises. “If you say so, Sara.”
I can’t help but smile back.
Still, I might as well go for broke.
“Aunt Bel,” I ask, “who is the boy in the photo, the one you keep on the dresser in your room?”
“Just a little boy,” she says, “from a long time ago.”
“What was his name?”
She thinks about this, but doesn’t answer.
“Tell me about him.”
“Well,” she says, walking to the worktable, absently turning the pages of her sketchbook. “Like you said. Everything changes, and then … you’re stuck with it.”
“Was he yours? You never said you’d had a child.”
Now she’s reaching for her cigarettes, her hands shaking. She puts the pack to her li
ps, pulls it away with one stick between her teeth, then lets out a deep sigh and snatches it away.
“Oh, Sara,” she says, “there are so many things I never want to think about again. But not him. I can’t forget him, but it hurts me to remember.”
To my dismay, her eyes shine with tears. Her shoulders slump and I go to her, enfolding her in my arms. She feels fragile and slight to the touch.
“Where is he now, Aunt Bel?” I whisper.
She pulls away from me, covering her mouth with one of her paint-stained hands, eyes bulging with grief. Shaking her head in a gesture of forlorn negation. Saying no to me, no to the idea of the boy, to his very existence. Maybe no to the world too, and to its maker above. Staring at my aunt, I gaze into a pit of inconceivable loss and find that I cannot sustain this gaze, not even for a moment. I have to look away, my heart swelling with kindred shame.
After that night in the basement, I treat Aunt Bel like a fresh wound. Leave her to heal, I tell myself. Don’t pick at the scab, or else. I tell myself this is for her benefit, though it is probably for mine as well.
Is the boy her child? Her failure to deny my assumption seems to confirm it. And was the boy left behind in Kazakhstan? No, surely not. The distance between them, judging by the shattering effect of his memory, must be more than geographic. Bel had a child, I tell myself, and that child died. And there I was, complaining to her about my fear of motherhood cramping my personal style.
So I see her at breakfast each morning and make my flippant remark about her combination of orange juice and cigarettes. And when I visit my aunt in her basement studio, I am careful not to prod her anymore.
But we are linked. I know this now because in her eyes, I see something I put there. She ran away because of me.
I can’t even talk to Finn about this one.
I’ve never believed in ESP or even highly developed intuition. I think most things are as you see them if you care enough to cut to the heart of the matter. And perhaps this isn’t any different. Perhaps once I get the nerve up to talk to my mother …
But I know Aunt Bel came to my house for a reason. I am the reason. And she is the reason. You can call it ESP, intuition, or whatever else you’d like. But I know this to be true.