Love, Life, and the List

by Kasie West

  “I know. But it seems as though she’s studying really hard to become one. She’s getting worse.”

  “Worse how?”

  “She used to at least go out. Leave the house. I can’t remember the last time she did that. She needs friends. That always seemed to help her before we moved here.”

  “I can probably get my mom to ask her out to lunch.”

  I didn’t need to say anything, just stared at him until he realized that was a ridiculous suggestion.

  “You’re right,” he said. “They aren’t a good match.”

  “It’s fine. She’ll be fine when my dad gets home in August.”

  “Your dad gets home in August?”

  I smiled at that thought. It was right around the corner. “Yes, I can’t wait. But he’ll miss the show. I mean, he would have missed the show. Now it doesn’t matter.”

  “Maybe you misunderstood Mr. Wallace.”

  “Nope. He was straightforward. Very. He actually used all the words I told you. No emotion, no depth, no heart. All of them.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  It was harsh. Being an artist defined me. It was the one thing I felt I was good at. The one thing I thought people, and Cooper, admired me for. And now I didn’t even have that. The tears I’d managed to control at the restaurant threatened to spill down my face.

  “It’s just one person’s opinion, Abby.”

  “He has a doctorate in art. He is a museum curator. And he is the only person close that can show my art. I needed this experience.” The lump in my throat was growing by the second, and I kept having to swallow it down.

  “What about another museum? Or gallery?”

  “I’ve been looking. It’s a long shot. Hundreds of people apply for shows. I thought I had an in with Mr. Wallace. But if he doesn’t like my art, you really think some stranger is going to take a chance on me?”

  “Don’t let him get in your head.”

  “He’s already there.” With those words the tears escaped, much to my frustration. I swiped at them angrily.

  Cooper pulled me into a hug. “Don’t cry. I hate it when you cry. It makes me want to beat people up.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I know you will be. And you’ll figure out a way to prove him wrong.” Cooper’s hand went up and down my back and I melted further against him.

  As comforting as Cooper’s words were, I wasn’t sure I would figure out a way to prove Mr. Wallace wrong. I wasn’t great at changing people’s feelings.

  SIX

  I stared at the blank canvas. Experience. Depth. Cooper was right. I needed to prove Mr. Wallace wrong. I’d get in that art show, get accepted to the program, and prove to Mr. Wallace, to Cooper, to everyone that I was a real artist. I’d paint something new. Something different. He wasn’t making final decisions on the applications until two weeks before the show. I’d show him that I was more than what he’d seen.

  I had about four weeks to paint five paintings better than I’d ever painted before. The time wasn’t what was causing a growing panic in my chest, though. I had time. Depending on the size, how detailed it was, how many continuous hours I could devote to the piece, I spent anywhere from a day to several days on a painting. Since it was summer, I had nothing but time. The tightness filling up my chest was due to the fact that I had no idea what I was going to paint. I had no idea what would be new or different or better.

  I flipped through my scrapbook of inspirational photos and prints, which normally gave me ideas. But nothing was coming to me. And wasn’t the point to do something different than I normally did?

  I shoved the scrapbook back in the hutch and dropped my paintbrush into the jar. I turned to leave the room and let out a scream when I saw my mom standing in the doorway behind me.

  “You scared me,” I said.

  “You didn’t paint anything.”

  “I know.”

  “Cooper told me what Mr. Wallace said.”

  “What? That traitor. When did he tell you that?”

  “He texted me this morning.”

  “I will kill him.”

  “What I want to know is, why you didn’t tell me.”

  “I don’t know. The more times I say it out loud, the more I believe it. I wasn’t even going to tell Cooper. He forced it out of me.”

  She shook her head. “That boy doesn’t have to force anything out of you.”

  “I know. I told him without much effort. I have no willpower when it comes to him. Keep that to yourself.”

  She smiled. My mom knew about my history with Cooper. She was the one I cried to last summer after that fateful late-night walk on the beach where I told him how I felt and he laughed it off.

  I brushed by her and out to the living room, where Grandpa was sleeping in the recliner. I sat on the couch, thinking my mom wouldn’t try to talk to me in here with Grandpa napping. I should’ve known better.

  She sat next to me. “I think your paintings are beautiful.”

  Grandpa snorted awake. “I wasn’t sleeping,” he said.

  “It’s okay, Gramps, when a man gets to be your age, he can’t help it.”

  “Would you punish your daughter for me?” he said.

  My mom laughed. “We’re talking about Mr. Wallace.”

  “No depth, huh?” Grandpa said.

  “You told him?” I threw my hands in the air.

  “I’m not allowed to know?” Grandpa asked, indignant. “Since when am I not allowed to know?”

  “Since I have no heart,” I said.

  Mom patted my shoulder. “You have a heart, baby. It’s your art Mr. Wallace is referring to.”

  “So you agree with him?”

  “I never said that. You know your father and I love what you do.”

  “Wait, did you tell Dad? He doesn’t need to worry about this right now.”

  “He likes to be kept up to date too.”

  I sighed. “I need to start waking up earlier.”

  My mom gestured to the paintings hung around the living room. They were like windows that let in no light, but made the room seem endless. Each one was a different scene of the outside world. I’d painted busy places like Times Square and the Strip in Vegas, but also serene places, like countryside villas in France and green-covered bluffs in Ireland. Not that I’d ever been to any of those places, but I’d seen a lot of pictures. I’d painted these one by one since our move here, thinking they could inspire my mom to see more of the world, but I wasn’t really sure they helped. Maybe they actually made her feel like she didn’t need to go anywhere, since she had the whole world in her living room.

  “Just look how talented you are,” she said.

  The paintings looked nearly real. But wasn’t that Mr. Wallace’s point? They weren’t unique. They weren’t my own. They were based off pictures. But what did I feel when I looked at them? I just thought they looked like nice places to visit. I couldn’t feel the wind on my face or taste the air. Is that what was supposed to happen when looking at really good art?

  Maybe Mr. Wallace was right. But maybe there was something I could do about it. “I need experience.”

  “You’ve been painting for as long as I can remember,” Mom said.

  “No, I mean experiences. What experiences will help me find depth—find my heart?” I needed to find inspiration from life, not from pictures. And not just inspiration, but emotion too.

  “I think you have a perfect heart,” Mom said.

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re my mom, you have to say that. I’m being serious. I need to do something. Lots of somethings, apparently. But what?”

  “What kind of qualities are you looking to develop?” Grandpa asked.

  I thought about that as I tapped my finger over and over again on the arm of the couch. My gaze drifted to my grandpa, one of my favorite people in the world. What were my favorite qualities about him?

  “Courage. Like you,” I decided.

  “Me?” Grandpa asked.

&
nbsp; “Yes, you say what you’re feeling no matter what the people around you think. You know how to stand your ground. How did you learn that?”

  “A really mean drill sergeant in boot camp.”

  “So I should join the army? Follow in yours and Dad’s footsteps?”

  He nodded. “Sure, when you’re eighteen, you should. It made me a man.”

  “You want me to join the army and become a man?”

  He let out a growl. “Stop pretending to take me so literally.”

  “You’re not joining the army, Abby,” Mom said. “Grandpa was saying that he gained courage by standing up to someone even when it was hard.”

  “Right. I have no idea how to do that.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” Grandpa said.

  “What else?” Mom asked. “What other traits do you admire?”

  “I like how you know something about everything, Mom.”

  She laughed. “I’m pretty sure you hate that.”

  “Well, I’m not a fan of the brown recluse stories.”

  “She means she’s not a fan of your paranoid reading,” Grandpa said.

  I swatted my hand through the air in his direction. “That’s not what I said.”

  My mom patted my leg. “Well, whatever the case, reading is right. I’d say that books can give you a new perspective on things. I know you already read, so may I suggest reading something out of your comfort zone? Like a classic.”

  “Hold on.” I jumped up. “Let me go get paper. I need to write these down.” I went to the junk drawer in the kitchen and found a pen, then plucked a piece of paper from the printer on the counter. I grabbed a magazine off the coffee table and sat back down, positioning the paper on top of the magazine. At the top of the page I wrote The Heart List and underlined it two times. “Okay, so, stand up to someone and read a really old book.”

  Mom rolled her eyes but didn’t protest. “What other traits are important to you?”

  “Dad is always somewhere new and doing something different. I think that made him who he is. The kind of person who is flexible and adventurous.”

  “So try something new?” my grandpa said.

  “And he doesn’t mean drugs,” Mom added.

  “Because that was the first thing I thought of.”

  “Try more than one new thing. Make it five. Try five things you’ve never done before,” Grandpa said.

  “Five? What do you think I am? A newly minted person? Five is a lot. Are there five things I haven’t tried?”

  My mom rolled her eyes. “Please. There are a hundred things you haven’t done.”

  “Okay, fine. You’re right.” I wrote it down. Three things were on my list. That wasn’t enough. If I had to drastically change the way I saw the world, which would hopefully change the way I painted, I needed more experiences. I thought of my friends and things I admired in them. “Rachel is kind to everyone. I think everyone likes her. What experience could I possibly have that will grant me that quality?”

  “What about learning a stranger’s story?” Mom said.

  “What do you mean? Just walk up to a random person and ask what their deal is?”

  “No, care enough about something you see someone do to want to know more about that person. To let what you hear change you in some way.”

  “So, learn a story.” I added that to my list. “What else?” My pen was poised, eager to soak up their wisdom, which I was sure was going to transform me into the best painter in the universe by the time the deadline for the showcase came around.

  “You tell us,” Grandpa said.

  “My friend Justin is on a service mission in South America right now. I bet that experience will give him more depth than anything I could dream up.”

  Grandpa grunted. “You don’t have to go to South America to do service. There’s plenty here.”

  “Like what?”

  “I have complete faith that you’ll find something,” Mom said.

  I added service to my list, with Justin’s name next to it. Then I added names next to the other items on the list they had inspired. I had Grandpa, Mom, Dad, Rachel, Justin . . . “Cooper,” I said aloud.

  “What about him?”

  “I don’t have a Cooper-inspired experience.”

  “What do you like best about Cooper?” Mom asked.

  I closed my eyes for a moment. What didn’t I like about him? Every laugh and story we shared raced through my mind. I stopped myself from saying everything. “He’s fearless. Nothing scares him. Maybe I need to overcome some of my fears.”

  “How?” Grandpa asked.

  “By facing one.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that one,” Mom said.

  “Nothing dangerous.”

  “It’s a good one,” Grandpa said as I wrote it down.

  “How about, quit a bad habit,” my grandpa said. “That’s always character-building.”

  “I don’t drink or smoke, Gramps.”

  “Are those the only bad habits in the world? What about that horrible sarcasm of yours? That would be a good one to nip in the bud.”

  “Nobody says nip in the bud. And I’ll quit being sarcastic once you do.”

  He curled his lip. “Or you can pick another thing.”

  “That’s what I thought.” I added quit a bad habit to my list.

  “If you’re looking for character-building, you should add fall in love to your list,” my mom said.

  As I wrote it down, Grandpa asked, “Didn’t she already do that one?”

  I gasped. “Did you tell him?”

  Mom narrowed her eyes at Grandpa and I rolled mine. “So I guess I can check that one off.”

  “Fall in love with someone who loves you back,” she said.

  “Ouch. Now you’re just being mean.”

  She patted my leg. “It will change you.”

  “Okay, so I’m going to add have my heart broken to the list, because I can already check that one off.”

  “Are you looking for things you can already cross off?” Mom asked.

  “No.” But I wrote it anyway and put a tidy check next to it with a smile.

  My mom let out a breathy laugh. “How about, see life come into the world.”

  “Uh . . . you’re getting weird now. You want me to case hospitals? And by the way, gross.”

  “That sentence can be interpreted in many ways, and I definitely didn’t mean follow pregnant women.”

  “Okay, I’ll write it, but I don’t know how that can be interpreted in more ways than the obvious one.”

  “How about,” my grandpa said, with a dramatic pause, “see a life go out of the world.”

  “And that is the end of my list. When you people start talking about death, I’m done.”

  “It changes you, child.”

  “I don’t want to see that. Even if it does make me a deeper person.”

  “Understandable.”

  Besides, I felt like I could already put a check mark next to that one too. I hadn’t exactly seen my grandma die, but I felt like I saw the heartache it had caused often enough. I wrote it down, but didn’t add the checkmark. Maybe there was another way to interpret that one as well. I hoped this worked. Because if it didn’t, maybe I really wasn’t an artist. And if I wasn’t an artist, what was I?

  SEVEN

  I read, then reread, the list I’d made the day before. I hoped that the best traits of the people in my life cobbled together into this list would turn me into a Frankenstein’s-monster version of the lot of them. The nonfreakish version. There were eleven things on the list. Well, technically ten if I didn’t count the one I’d already checked off. How to become deep in ten steps . . . or less? I hoped it would be less.

  Maybe this was why the art institute winter program asked for sales history, because they knew how hard it was to make it past the gatekeepers of galleries. That could narrow down their list of applicants dramatically.

  I fished a pushpin out of the container on my desk and found
a spare bit of wall space between a quote about love and a picture of a dandelion, all its seeds but one floating away on the wind. I’d pinned all sorts of inspiration on my wall—art, quotes, poems, scenery—over the years. Muses for my painting. It was all things I’d seen while flipping through magazines or scrolling through my phone—some I added to my scrapbook, some to my walls. I laughed a little as I turned a circle, taking in everything now. They were all things that had made me feel something, I realized. It’s why I’d pinned them there. Oh, the irony that my paintings weren’t doing the same thing for someone else.

  I snapped a picture of the list with my phone and out of habit was about to send a group text to Rachel, Justin, and Cooper, when I remembered Rachel wouldn’t get it and Justin was in the middle of being philanthropic. He didn’t need to see my attempt at depth right now. Instead, I emailed the picture to myself, then sat down at my laptop to compose a letter to my dad.

  Hey pops,

  Attached you will find a list of activities that will make me so full of heart you might not recognize me when you get home. And since you’re always gone so long that I forget who you are, we’ll be in the same boat this time. You’re welcome. Also, I figured out what I want you to bring me home this time. I want a small rock shaped like a heart. You should scour the desert to find it. It’s the only way I will know you truly love me and think about me every day. Plus it will represent my heart growing three sizes. Is that how many sizes the Grinch’s grew? I forget. Remember when we used to watch that every Christmas and you said that you almost named me Cindy Lou Who? I’m still eternally grateful you didn’t (even though I now know that’s not a true story). Love, your appropriately named daughter.

  I picked up the little vial of sand I kept on my desk that Dad had brought me home after I requested it during his last tour. He always brought me home something. Sometimes it was something I asked for, sometimes it was something he said reminded him of me, like painted beads or glass art.

  I turned the bottle sideways, letting the sand move along the vial as I tipped it back and forth.

  There was a knock on my door, followed by Cooper’s voice: “Are you presentable?”

  I set the small bottle down, hit Send on my email, and shut the laptop. “Presentable? Do you mean decent?”