Colors of Goodbye

by September Vaudrey

  The anesthesia on my wrist was beginning to wear off, and when the movie ended and we stood to walk to the car, my wrist began to throb. Katie was all sympathy—giving me plenty of “Ooooh, Mama” and “I’m so sorry you’re hurting!” She drove me home, made me a bed on the living room sofa, and brought me juice so I could pop a pain pill. Then she snuggled in next to me to watch some 30 Rock.

  This role reversal of being “mothered” by my daughter felt awkward but wonderful. It touched me on some deep level that caught me by surprise. I soaked it in, feeling deeply loved by my girl.

  Katie landed a waitressing job at Bandito Barney’s that would begin on May 31. With time on her hands before her start date—and with my wrist in a cast—she offered to make herself useful around the house. I sent her to Home Depot to pick out bedding flowers for my oak barrels and planters. She returned with two flats of hot-pink petunias.

  “These’ll liven the place up nicely,” Katie said. Grabbing a pair of canvas garden gloves—and changing into her striped bikini—she headed out into the springtime sun to fill my planters with the cheery petunias. She was right—their hot-pink petals added a summery zing to the place.

  SUNDAY, MAY 11

  My parents had flown in from Seattle for Mother’s Day weekend. My head was still cloudy with painkiller fog, but two things stood out: the incredible peppercorn steaks Scott and the kids prepared, and a Mother’s Day card from Katie. “Your joy is one of the main ingredients to this home’s climate,” she had written. “Don’t underestimate your contribution!”

  Her words captured some of my deepest hopes as a mom. In a family full of quick wits and strong personalities, I viewed myself as more of a “good audience” than a culture former. But joy was baseline for me, and it’s something I had been intentional about fostering in our home over the years. Could what she wrote be true? I felt a quiet mixture of hope and pride as I read and reread her words.

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 21

  On Bethany’s birthday, Katie called her big sister so they could “be together” as Bethany unwrapped Katie’s gift—a book she’d created in her graphic design class from the photo shoot with her sister. She had chosen her favorite shot—a beautiful profile of Bethany—and had reproduced it in black and white on each page. To each reproduction, Katie had added a different color or texture or image that represented a memory from their shared sisterhood or a character trait of Bethany that Katie admired.

  I had the privilege of overhearing Katie’s half of their conversation as she explained each page of her gift: “See the photo with the princess crown that I Photoshopped onto your head? I want you to know I’m sorry for always acting like the princess in our family—and for how that left you feeling like you had to be the tomboy.” Page by page, Katie described the characteristics she most admired about Bethany—her strength, her warmth, her kindness, her leadership, her humor—and apologized for the “sister scars” she’d caused Bethany over the years. Bethany had expressed similar sentiments to Katie almost three years prior—the night before Bethany had left for college. But Katie, age fifteen at the time, had not reciprocated. Now, at long last, Katie was making things right. She was owning her contributions to whatever bumps they had experienced together as kids and teens.

  For the next two hours, they shared the kind of laughter-and-tears conversation I imagine only sisters could share—stories of childhood adventures, apologies for past wrongs, commitments to stand in each other’s weddings, and promises for plenty of coffee dates, dinners together, and girls’ nights out at APU in the fall.

  Having watched these two grow from infancy to young women—loving each other so well but also inflicting inevitable stings along the way—my heart soared as I heard Katie’s long-overdue words of reconciliation toward Bethany. When at last they hung up, Katie said to me, “I can’t wait to live near Bethany in Crestview next year! She is so good to me, Mama. You know, lots of times growing up, when it looked like she was the cause of our little conflicts, often it was me just trying to make it look that way—trying to make her look mean and me look innocent. I had a lot of stuff I needed to apologize for.”

  I recalled her preschool confession in the minivan: “Sometimes I am mean to Bethany and Matt.” More than kids realize, parents see what’s really happening between the siblings, so her confessions were not news to me, but I appreciated her words nonetheless.

  “It feels so good to have a clean slate with my sister,” she continued. “She’s my hero!”

  In the days that followed, there was a renewed freshness to their sisterhood. The length and frequency of their phone conversations increased, they texted each other constantly, and there was palpable lightness and joy between them, even across the miles.

  MONDAY, MAY 26

  On Memorial Day, May 26, our friends Leanne and Jimmy and their kids came over for a barbeque. After dinner, the kids cleared the table and then headed downstairs to our rec room. The four grown-ups moved outside to the Bug Room. After doing the dishes, Katie brought us coffee and slices of the apple pie she had baked earlier that day. Its crust was filigreed with delicate swirls. All the world was a canvas.

  “So what has God been teaching you in school this year?” Jimmy asked Katie.

  “Good question!” she said, pulling up a chair. “My biggest learning is that everyone is so different. People come from all kinds of worldviews and were raised with different values, and I realized it’s not necessarily wrong that they were raised differently from how I was—it’s just, well, different. I can be pretty judgmental sometimes in viewing my way as right. And I am excited about living more open-mindedly, learning from how other people think and the choices they make.”

  Pure Katie. She sometimes took a while to spot where she was off base—she could be stubborn, judgmental, and a little prideful. But once she got it—once she saw where she needed to make a course correction—she went after it wholeheartedly.

  Her bathroom mirror read, “77 days.”

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 28

  Katie’s boyfriend, Dan, came over early Wednesday morning to say goodbye before he headed out for a weeklong fishing trip with buddies from junior high school.

  “I’ll be out of cell phone range the whole time, but you can always leave messages on my phone,” he told his girl.

  And so she did.

  Katie’s waitressing job included an all-day training on Wednesday, and she came home that night enthused.

  “Mom! They hired fifty new employees for summer,” she said, “and the owner and managers are the nicest people. The crowd there on the weekends can get a little rough, evidently, but the staff is awesome. The best part is that everyone there is so different from me! I don’t think any of the people I met today consider themselves to be Christ followers. I can’t wait to get to know them better.”

  Like a kid in a candy store, Katie was excited to make friends, learn from people who were different from her, and perhaps invite her new friends to consider the Jesus she loved and followed.

  FRIDAY, MAY 30

  The kids and I spent Friday morning getting the house ready for the next day’s drama team year-end celebration. By noon, we were about done with the prep work, and Katie was growing restless.

  “Mama, I need to paint,” she said as I pulled a pan of brownies from the oven. Painting was something spiritual for her, and when her impulse for creative expression struck, it was almost a primal urge.

  “Go for it,” I told her. “We can finish up here.”

  She ran upstairs. Minutes later, she breezed past me in her bikini, wooden easel in one hand and a fistful of brushes in the other. “I’m multitasking!” she said. “Tanning while painting!”

  Her ponytail swayed as she bounced by, her skin glistening with oil—and not SPF 30 tanning oil, mind you. Pure baby oil. She might as well have lathered up with Crisco. I could smell the familiar Johnson & Johnson fragrance of her infancy as she walked by. She set up her easel on the sun-soaked back deck.

&n
bsp; “Mom! We’re out of watercolor paper!” she moaned, trotting back inside and heading to the basement where the art supplies were stored. Soon she was back, carrying a twenty-by-thirty-inch sketch pad designed for pencil or pen and ink, not watercolors.

  “No worries,” she said, setting the pad down and filling a cup with water at the kitchen sink. “I’m just doing a rough draft anyway.” Then she headed back outdoors, where she planted the oversize tablet on her easel and whipped out her paints. “No peeking!” she hollered over her shoulder, adjusting her easel so I couldn’t see. I went inside to do dishes, closing the slider behind me.

  I loved to watch Katie work, but she rarely let people see a piece until it was complete. I usually gave her space, but today I couldn’t help stealing an occasional peek at her through the kitchen window above the sink.

  There she stood tanning in the sun, paintbrush in hand, her bronzing skin increasingly dotted with flecks of paint from her flying brush. Her face wore the familiar mixture of concentration and delight.

  I turned off the water and set down my sponge. Even without seeing what she was painting, I never ceased to be amazed by her natural skill and speed. She studied the hawthorn tree just off the deck—evidently the subject of this project—and began transposing what she saw onto the paper.

  Forty-five minutes later, she called me outside, the tablet held close to her chest.

  “Mom! I’m going to paint a piece for you and Dad, and you are really going to like it!” she said. “Here’s the rough draft.”

  She turned the tablet toward me.

  It was lovely. Delicate strokes of green, brown, and blue captured the hawthorn tree with stunning accuracy. Translucent shadows of red traipsed along its branches and down its trunk, which was anchored in the bed of strawberries I’d planted beneath the tree last summer—some in bloom, some with ripening red fruit peeking from behind shiny green leaves. The copper wind chime I’d made Scott for our twentieth anniversary hung from a lower branch on the right. And to the left stood Scott’s copper citronella-oil lantern—one of his beloved possessions of summer and a stalwart soldier in his never-ending strategy of mosquito warfare.

  The painting, though quick and rough, showed balance and delicate beauty. I could only imagine how lovely the finished product would be.

  “Nice, Katie!”

  “I’m calling it The Bleeding Tree.”

  “The Bleeding Tree? Sounds . . . significant.”

  “Oh, it is!” she said, flashing a mysterious grin. “You’re going to love it. I can’t wait to tell you what it means!”

  “Me too!”

  Katie had never painted something exclusively for Scott and me before. Judging from the hints in its title, the streaks of red on the tree trunk, and the two copper items—one from each of us—I suspected she was painting something that reflected the growth and healing God had brought to our marriage on the heels of a hard season a few years back. Now our marriage was sweeter than ever, and our kids had witnessed its transformation. Perhaps this painting mirrored her worldview that God doesn’t waste pain but seeks to use it to bring greater beauty and growth to our lives.

  But this was only a guess. I would have to wait until she finished the final draft to hear what the artist intended.

  That afternoon, Katie moved on to other things, leaving her easel and tablet outside. Cleaning up is never as much fun as painting, after all.

  Tember would be graduating from middle school on Tuesday, but her eighth-grade dance was tonight, so Katie busied herself with creating a “beauty salon” in the girls’ bathroom for when Tember got home from school.

  “That girl has watched me get ready for so many dances,” Katie told me. “It’s time for me to watch her!” She set out a pair of her own earrings and a necklace that matched Tember’s dress. She pinned a matching bow on one of her own purses and set it out for Tember to borrow.

  When Tember got home from school, the salon was ready. Katie painted her little sister’s nails, styled her hair, and helped her get dressed. I couldn’t help but listen as their sisterly giggles and stories filled the air.

  “When it’s my senior prom,” Tember confided, “you will be away at college, and Bethany will have graduated. No one will be around to help me get ready.”

  “Tember, I promise you,” Katie said, “wherever I am, I will fly home for your senior prom and help you get ready. I will be here. I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

  Tember’s girlfriends arrived to carpool to the dance, and Scott took photos of the eighth graders in their cute dresses.

  “I want a picture with just me and Tember,” Katie said. She stepped next to her kid sister, and they wrapped their arms around each other.

  Click.

  Later that night, Jimmy and Leanne’s daughter Ester arrived home from college, and she and Katie met for coffee to catch up. I waited up for Katie to get home because she was always full of chatter and stories after a girlfriend date, and it was worth the wait.

  “Mama! Ester and I had the best conversation,” she said, bursting through the kitchen door. “We talked about how odd it is to go away for college and then come home where everybody is still the same—but you’re not the same. We both learned so much at school this year, and we both changed so much. We are super glad we went far away for school. It gives you a different perspective than if you had stayed local. We are going to make a habit of getting together this summer to process everything we’ve learned. And I got to meet her new boyfriend! Mom, it was such a great night! How was Tember’s dance?”

  “Wonderful! She had lots of fun. She’s already in bed. Katie, thank you so much for helping her get ready tonight. It meant the world to her.”

  “To me, too! I’m crazy about that girl.”

  And with that, she bounded up the stairs and headed to bed.

  Her easel and tablet stood forgotten on the back deck. A light rain began to fall.

  8:00 A.M., SATURDAY, MAY 31

  Early Saturday morning, everyone scurried around with last-minute touches to get the house ready for the drama party at nine. Katie put away her easel and tossed the rain-spotted rough draft of The Bleeding Tree into the trash.

  2:50 P.M., SATURDAY, MAY 31

  Katie races down the stairs and into the kitchen, where I am cutting brownies into squares.

  “Mom! Where are my keys?” she asks, pulling on her black flats as she scans the room. “It’s ten to three! I’m gonna be late!”

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  9:00 A.M., SUNDAY, JUNE 1

  The organ donation lady stops by Katie’s room to see me. “Surgery has been scheduled for 12:30 a.m.,” she says.

  Surgery? I hadn’t thought of Katie’s donation as a surgery, but of course it is.

  Scott calls. I update him about the results of the caloric stimulation test in Katie’s ears—he is not surprised, but he groans just the same.

  “Katie’s surgery will be at 12:30 a.m.,” I say.

  “All right. We’ll come by around ten o’clock. The kids are doing pretty well. They ate and showered, and now they’ve crashed. A bunch of them are snuggled together, watching reruns of The Office in the living room.”

  “Probably just what they need—a chance to veg after this emotional overload. Are you in the Bug Room?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m glad. Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  At lunchtime, the nurse brings me a tray. I bite into a strawberry, but it tastes like sawdust.

  I return to my plastic chair to hold Katie’s hand. When my arms grow weary, I rest my hands in my lap and find myself picking at hangnails—a nasty, nervous childhood habit. Looking down, my hands now remind me of the hands of a woman I saw once in Scott’s ER. She sat in her waiting room chair, rocking, hints of mental illness behind her eyes, her lips mouthing silent conversations. Her cuticles were raw and bloody.

  My cuticles are raw now too. But in spite of myself, I pull at one more bit of dried skin until it cuts i
nto flesh and bleeds. I apply pressure with my thumb.

  Unbelievable how the world can change. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours. This time yesterday, Katie had been so full of life, heading off to work. And the day before—Friday—she had been overtaken by an urge to paint us a picture . . .

  The Bleeding Tree! That rough draft has become Katie’s final finished work—and it lies crumpled in the trash. I grab my phone and call Sam’s cell phone. Utterly reliable, he is just the right person for this small but vital task.

  He picks up at the first ring. “Hey, Mama.” He sounds so grown.

  “Sam! Go to the garage trash can and find that painting Katie did on Friday. She threw it away. It was just a rough draft—but can you find it?”

  “I’m on it,” he says.

  He gets the urgency. We hang up. Who knows how much party garbage he will need to sift through to find that painting?

  He calls back a short time later. “Got it.”

  “Is it ruined?”

  “No. It’s bent and a little wet—but salvageable.”

  I exhale. “Fantastic. Nice work, Sam. Thank you! Put it on my desk for now, okay? Maybe Mr. Pinley can help restore it.” Katie’s high school art teacher at Fremd was an important player in her creative development and over the years became a family friend after Katie entered his department as a student.

  “Will do.”

  I am so grateful for my boy. Rescuing this painting is a small win, but I’ll take it.

  A nurse I recognize from the ER yesterday stops by. “Did you hear about the witness to Katherine’s accident?” she asks.

  “What? No! There was a witness?”

  “Yes,” she says. “The officer who handled the accident last night was here again this morning for another case. He told us a witness called the police department. Evidently Katherine passed by this guy’s car before crashing into the second car. The witness saw her swerve onto the shoulder of the road, then pull back onto the pavement. When he passed her, she was slumped over her steering wheel, unconscious. He then glanced up at his rearview mirror and saw her car turn into the path of the other vehicle. He said she was definitely passed out, unconscious, before the impact.”