by Lisa Samson
“I’m not working on no pink press.” Throwing his hands up, Huey stalks off in the direction of the Vandercook, then whirls around suddenly. “And lemme just say, we’re getting the cart before the horse here. Before we start painting the thing, we better make sure it’ll even go back together.”
Finn jerks himself upright, speckling the floor with paint. “Everything that comes apart can be put back together.”
“Tell that to Humpty Dumpty.”
I point to the brush. “Wanna watch where you put that thing?”
“Sorry. But we’ll have it up and running in another couple of days. The paint needs to go on first, otherwise you won’t get good coverage on some of the parts. We’d be further along if Huey was helping in more than fits and spurts. This is a two-man job.”
“The brochures don’t print themselves!” Huey calls from his post by the window, a broad smile on his face. “The broadsides don’t print themselves, or the greeting cards, or the wedding invitations, or anything else we do up in here!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Finn says, slapping more paint on metal.
While he’s at it, Aunt Bel steps through the Firehouse lobby and into the studio, peering through the door first like she’s afraid of interrupting. She wears a light blue summer dress and sandals, accentuating the slightness of her form, and keeps her broken finger tucked with a wing-like arm against her chest, as if it were suspended from an invisible sling. Just inside the door, she unhitches a canvas shopping bag from her shoulder, leaving it beside the coatrack. Seeing her, Finn calls her over for a consultation on the swatches. Instead of demurring, as I expect, she goes around the counter for a closer look, unfolding the wing arm to steady herself against the counter.
“What do you think?” Finn asks her.
“These are the choices? I wouldn’t vote for either one. Don’t be disappointed. It’s just—if it were me—I would keep the pieces as they are. Leave them raw and unpainted. It’s more honest that way, don’t you think?”
“They’ll rust if I don’t paint them.” Finn’s slumped shoulders and his flat tone are brimming with disappointment, showing me just how seriously he takes Aunt Bel’s opinion. I’m surprised he doesn’t shrug it off, the way he would Huey’s dissent or Diana’s, maybe even mine. He doesn’t, though. I can see the gears turning in his head. “Maybe … ,” he says, pondering a new course. “Just maybe I could clear-coat it? Put a clear finish on that’ll keep the rust away but preserve that honest, raw look you’re talking about.”
“I like the green,” I say.
“I’ve seen it on bicycle frames where they leave the metal unpainted so you can see the welds and the bare steel. It’s a pretty cool finish, but I don’t know how it’s done.” He pats his jeans and produces his phone. “I bet there’s a video or something …” He heads off toward his cubicle. “Let me do a little research on this.”
Aunt Bel gets to her feet, using the steadying arm to pull herself up. Even though she’s putting her weight on it, the arm remains bent at the elbow and turned slightly outward. The break that never healed properly. She didn’t get far enough in her story last night to explain that, or the man who visited yesterday. Reaching Michael was like hitting an emotional speed bump, or maybe a brick wall. No going beyond it, at least for now.
All I can do is ask God, though I surely don’t deserve it, to keep us all safe if that’s what’s necessary. I hope he’s not in a hateful mood and prone to let us all learn a valuable lesson here. What that lesson is, I can’t say yet.
As I look at her, Finn’s words to Huey echo in my head. Everything that comes apart can be put back together again. This is not true. And the man who said life breaks you and you’re stronger at the broken places wasn’t right either, whoever he was. The breaks may fuse, as Aunt Bel’s have in her arm, but that isn’t strength or even healing. It’s just damage. Some places, when you bend or break them, will not mend. And you’ll never move in quite the same freedom as before.
And I am honest enough to admit that this terrifies me. It’s a low-wattage existential terror, not a scream-girl fear.
“You’re not mad, are you?” Aunt Bel whispers. “I like the green too. It’s a pretty color. I should have thought more before I said anything.”
“No, I’m not mad. It’s his monster, he can paint it any color he wants as far as I’m concerned. Or no color at all.”
“I thought it was your monster.”
“It’ll be nobody’s monster if he doesn’t get it working. You may have noticed there’s a pattern here.”
“He’s very ambitious. And he has a good heart.”
“Yes, I know,” I say.
Finn returns from his online research, but instead of popping more paint cans and slathering on a few more samples, he walks right up to Aunt Bel, rubbing his hands together briskly, and says, “Did you bring it? I wanna take a look.”
“Bring what?” I ask.
Back around the counter, she retrieves the shopping bag from under the coatrack, then hands it to Finn, who sets the bag on the counter with reverence. Reaching inside, he withdraws a framed canvas about two feet by two feet in size. Not one of the pre-stretched ones we bought for her. She must have rigged it on her own. The surface is layered in black paint and gold, terra-cotta and copper, a charred-looking mess of ridges that reminds me a little of burnt toast.
Finn lifts the picture by the corners and holds it up for inspection. “Wow. So this is it. I don’t know why, but I expected it to be bigger.”
“The other ones were,” Aunt Bel says. “It needed to be smaller. It needed to be whittled down.”
“Why?” I ask. Other than, perhaps, to save paint.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Do I have to?”
“No, Aunt Bel,” says Finn. “It’s art. You don’t have to analyze it if you don’t feel like it.”
She places her fingertips on her chin. “I’ll have to think about the why. It’s intriguing.”
He turns the picture toward me. “Have a look, babe.”
I have seen the image before—many iterations of it, in fact, though until now I had no idea the pieces I’ve watched her work on down in the basement were meant to be different versions of the same thing. I didn’t know she was whittling down. Aunt Bel’s work has all the sophistication of a cave painting. There’s a face, not so much painted on as built up, the contours thick enough to stand out from the canvas, as if someone were standing behind it and pushing his nose into the fabric. There’s a sort of gash for a mouth, and crescent-shaped craters where eyes should be, and all around the face, like a fringe or a lion’s mane, the metallics are brushed on in thin slices that make me think someone took a chisel to a piece of fool’s gold.
“It has sort of a primitive vibe,” I say.
“Yeah,” Finn breathes. “Really powerful, right?”
I hesitate and then nod.
“Let’s go have a look,” he says.
Aunt Bel dazzles us both with her girlish, beaming smile. She might as well jump up and down. “You like it, then? You both really do?”
“I think it’s flippin’ amazing. Right, Sara?”
“Amazing,” I say, adding a thumbs-up just to be polite.
“Let’s see it on the wall, then.”
I hate this painting. I’ve hated them all since the moment she started painting them and, like my aunt, I haven’t analyzed why.
Finn takes the painting and the two of us follow, passing through the lobby and down the back hallway, through the double doors that open into the gallery. I haven’t been inside since last Sunday night. The skylights throb with clear white light, giving the gallery a clean, ethereal glow. To my surprise, the walls are bare. All the paintings that were hanging before—eight or nine of them—have been taken down.
“What’s this?” I ask.
He strides over to the table, setting Aunt Bel’s canvas down so he can fiddle with one of the art lights attached to the center of the wall. Then he grabs a coil
of wire and starts stringing the back of the canvas for hanging.
“You’re going to hang it all alone?” Aunt Bel asks. “All alone calls too much attention to it.”
“No, it’ll be perfect.”
Frowning, she looks to me and mouths, Help me?
I have nothing to add, though. It seems they’ve had a whole conversation about this and I was none the wiser. If Finn had floated the idea past me, I could have told him this was … premature. Now he’s going to cause her a great deal of embarrassment, and there’s nothing I can do.
“There,” he says, hanging the picture on the wall, then stepping back. “Wait, wait.” He jogs back to the entrance and flips the dimmer switch for the art lights. The burnt toast cave painting absorbs and swallows the light, a bit like a black hole. Walking back, Finn gazes at his handiwork for a long minute, then sighs. “Perfect.”
But Aunt Bel doesn’t think so. Standing with her wing tucked in and her right hand clutching her left elbow, she starts shaking her head. Shallow turns at first, increasing in violence until I half expect an Exorcist-style three-sixty.
“It’s not ready,” she says. “I thought it was ready, but see that it isn’t. I need more time. It needs to be smaller, a lot smaller.”
“But it’s perfect how it is, Bel,” Finn tells her. “Don’t you see? The eyes. Look at the eyes. I’m not going to let you touch it. That’s staying right where it is.”
She giggles like a schoolgirl. “You really think—?”
“I’ll be right back,” I say, heading for the door.
I’m not trying to be rude, and trust me, neither of them takes much notice. They’re so absorbed in looking at the picture I could start pulling my hair out in clumps and they wouldn’t stop me until I was bald. Later, when I have him to myself, I can suggest to Finn that hanging my aunt’s amateur crack at abstract expressionism for everyone to see will only expose her to ridicule. I can imagine them dragging St. Rick over to comment—Rick, who offered to introduce Aunt Bel to a real painter only to be rebuffed. There’s nothing I can do for now, though, after being blindsided by the whole thing.
I slip through the door, pop into the restroom, then go back to the studio.
Diana nearly bumps into me, walking out as I’m walking in.
“Oh,” she says, backpedaling. Then, to a man over her shoulder: “Here she is. Sara, I was just going to get you.”
The man at the counter reminds me of a large, friendly bear. Portly, his face half-hidden behind a bushy salt-and-pepper beard, his smile reveals a row of yellow teeth with a gap in the middle. His belly strains against the weave of his black pullover sweater, the elastic at the waist bagging on the sides where he must have overstretched it too far trying to make room for his midsection.
“Please to make your acquaintance!” he exclaims.
From the accent, I know exactly who he must be. The man from Uralsk who visited yesterday. Diana’s eyes widen, conveying a private note of panic. She knows as well as I do that Aunt Bel has no desire to see the man—or to be seen by him.
“You’re looking for me?” I ask.
“You are Sara, the niece of Belinda Novikova? The one who makes the bird that says ‘tweet-tweet’?”
My brain takes a second to process the accent. He’s referring to the greeting card that Aunt Bel somehow got her hands on in Kazakhstan, the one with the not-so-subtle Twitter reference. And what was the name he called Bel—Novikova?
“Sergei!” he says. He offers his mammoth hand and I give him mine. I mean, who needs their right hand, anyway?
“You came yesterday. I’m sorry I didn’t—” My voice jolts with each pump of his hand.
“It is my last day here”—he breathes deep and lets go—“in your lovely city of Baltimore. So I come to see you again. Is all right, yes? Over the phone is not so good, yes?” He raises his arms, and for a second I fear he’ll put me in a bear hug, lift me right off my feet. That’s the kind of guy Sergei is, I can already tell. He’s about as dangerous as Finn, unless, I imagine, he’s protecting someone. I wouldn’t want to be on the losing end of that struggle. But Sergei looks around, noticing Huey over by the window, glancing at Diana as he takes another breath. It must require a lot of breath to employ that many decibels.
“I think,” he says, reducing his volume to a stage whisper, “it is not so good in public, yes? In private is better. We go in private, yes? I tell you there.”
“We can go over there,” I say, pointing toward my cubicle. “That’s private enough.” Then to Diana: “You can go take care of that … thing.”
She doesn’t have to be told twice. She pushes through the door, heading down the hallway to warn Aunt Bel and Finn.
“Right over here,” I say, motioning him toward my desk.
Sergei lowers himself carefully into my guest chair—afraid it won’t hold his weight—and rubs his big hand over his mouth until the lips form a frown. The effect seems quite theatrical. A man pretending to be sad, or affecting sympathy for the sadness of another.
“What can I do for you, Sergei?”
“It is very sad occasion. I am bearer of bad news. I come to you from very far, from lovely city of Uralsk in nation of Kazakhstan. They send me because I am coming already to America, to city of Washington, D.C., where we have the great conference. I am the only one of Kazakhstan, the only one of the shepherds, to be coming there.”
Again, my mind has to process. “You’re a … shepherd?”
“Da, da. A shepherd of the flock of Jesus Christ.”
“Ah, I see.”
He’s come here while visiting the United States to attend some kind of event in D.C., perhaps a world missions conference.
“What is the bad news?” I ask.
As the words come out, my skin tingles with anticipation, though somehow I know what he is going to say. He must be here to tell me what Aunt Bel couldn’t. He is here to share with me the fate of little Michael, the boy in the picture, Aunt Bel’s absent son.
“Is terrible,” he says, and now there’s nothing theatrical in his manner. He reaches one of his big hands out and cups my shoulder, the warmth of his body flowing into mine. “I never had pleasure of meeting her, but by reputation I admire her very much. Many people come and go. She never goes, she always stays. She shows love to so many people. I tell you, there is no one like her, no one at all. You be proud.” He says something else that sounds like ocean gourd. “It is honor to know you, because she is your mother’s sister.”
“You’re talking about Bel. Belinda.”
“Something happens to her,” he says. “Something has happened. In the middle of the night she drives, in the bad weather, in the snow. She is going beside river. A woman is sick. She goes to nurse her, but the woman—” He shrugs. “Maybe she goes to Jesus, is for me to say? She is very sick, this woman. Sick in the head since many years.”
“You mean Belinda is sick in the head?”
“No, no,” he says. “Another lady. Katya Aslanova. The good friend of Belinda Novikova—who has many friends.”
The name rings a bell. Katya, the friend who gave Bel the sweater she often wears. Katya, sick in the head. Maybe she goes to Jesus. In other words, dead.
“Is terrible, but Belinda Novikova, she is driving home beside river—is very far to go from Uralsk all the way to sea—and when it is snowing, and road is slippery, that is when her car goes down into water.”
“That’s awful,” I say. “You mean she crashed her car?” That might explain the broken arm that wasn’t properly set. A car crash in the snow, followed by some third-world triage in some former Soviet hospital. Then it dawns on me that you don’t travel around the world and track down the niece of someone you never met in person just to tell her about a car crash. There’s something more to this. Michael. That’s it. Aunt Bel must not have been alone in the car.
“She crashed it, yes,” he says, with an air of finality.
“But … she wasn’t alone in the car. Was M
ichael with her? Her little boy?”
Sergei draws his hand back, cocking his big bearded chin sideways. “Little boy? Ah, I see, the little boy. Yes. I never meet her with little boy. That is much—no, many years past. But I am hearing of this boy many times, a lovely boy. Yes. Is sad, this life she lives. When I think of all the good things this lady does, and so much she suffers—well, if I did not have faith, I do not know.”
“So Michael died a long time ago.”
“Young lady,” he says, hovering his hand over me again, this time in what seems like a gesture of blessing. “I am very sorry to the utmost. The great loss you suffer, we suffer with you. We want you to know this. When it happens—no, when it happened—” He smiles briefly at the correction, then recollects the subject matter. “—nobody in Uralsk knows who to tell. There is family in America, we know, but how to reach them? Is a mystery. But one remembers little card, which Belinda Novikova cherishes, because it comes all the way from here and is you who makes it. How to find you from only this card?” Sergei shifts in his chair, raising both hands in the direction of my computer screen. “On the Internet! There we look, and there we find. One says he will call and tell you, but this is not for telephone. And since I am coming here, I tell them I will do it. So here I am, yes? And I am telling you.”
He keeps his hands up, a benedictory pose, and murmurs some words in what I assume is Russian, or maybe Kazakh. Then he gazes at me, eyes half shut.
“Well,” he says.
“You came a long way for this. I’m not sure what Aunt Bel was thinking—”
“She is very good lady,” Sergei says. “No. She was very good lady, yes?”
“She was? You mean past tense was?”
He rubs his lips again.
“Sergei, I’m not sure I understand.”
“My English. What a pity.” He raises a big crooked finger. “Ah, yes! Almost I forget.”
Digging through the pockets of his worn corduroy trousers, he produces a lumpy wallet made of cracked green leather. Opening it, he produces a photograph, handing it to me. In the picture, there is a stone cross maybe three feet high, with the slanted notch through the top half that denotes an Orthodox cross. In the background, down an icy slick, a wide gray river flows, its banks piled high with snow.