Matters of Faith

by Kristy Kiernan

  “Who is this?” I finally asked, searching for the signature. I found it at the same time that she said the artist’s name, but it rang no bells.

  “This was painted by a man named Harold Newton, one of his earlier pieces. Crazy, isn’t it?”

  “It reminds me of someone, though. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s definitely an influence there.”

  “You’re right. Good eye. Newton studied with Beanie Backus. Look, you can see it here, and here, see the clouds, this light?”

  We pored over the painting and she told me the story of the Highwaymen while I listened, completely rapt. “So how’d you get this?” I asked. “Doesn’t seem like your usual thing.”

  She laughed. “No,” she said ruefully. “It’s definitely not for this gallery. But I saw it stuck in the corner of a garage when I went to look at a painting a client wanted to sell. The painting wasn’t anything, I didn’t wind up taking it, but he was showing off his wife’s new Mercedes in the garage and this just caught my eye. He said it had been his grandmother’s and had been in the garage for years. I gave him a couple hundred bucks for it and started doing some research.”

  “Wow, it’s really neat,” I said, embarrassed at my less-than-worldly expression.

  “You want to play with it?” she asked.

  I looked up at her in surprise. “What?”

  “Well, it needs a lot of work, obviously. You’ve just said you’re not painting, you’ve talked about your interest in restoration, and you need something to do.”

  I bit my lip and inspected the painting again.

  “Am I wrong?” she prodded me.

  “No, I guess not. But, Leigh, I’m not a restorer. I mean, I’d be experimenting on this. You must have a great restorer.”

  “I do,” she said. “And I give him plenty of work. This is a personal thing. You want it or not?”

  I stared at the painting again, and realized that yes, I did, I wanted it. “Okay,” I said.

  That was twenty years ago. I’d developed a good enough reputation that I turned down work on a regular basis. Fifteen years ago, Leigh died of breast cancer, and she left the Harold Newton to me. It hung on the far wall of my studio, and reminded me of how far I had come, and how sometimes your life’s work can sneak up on you. Now my hands were nearly itching with the desire to get in there on the fire sky and make things whole again, fix the wrongs with all the skill I’d developed over these twenty years.

  These I knew how to fix. But there were too many other things broken in my life now, more important things, and they were not going to allow me the time for this, not for a long time.

  Sandy and Stacey were going through my portfolio of before and after photos and exclaiming over the differences, and I smiled as I turned off my work lights. It felt good to remember that I had once been good at something. I made a mental note to call the fire sky client and let him know I’d be shipping the painting back to him.

  I knew what was happening. I knew that with this night at home, with my decision about my work, that I was settling in. I was accepting that it was possible that Meghan was going to be like this for a long time and it was time to find a new normal.

  It was the first time since I’d watched Ada and Marshall walk down the road to the bay that I’d considered new. I had been right about the dangers of that after all.

  “Chloe?” Stacey called to me from across the studio. “Are you getting tired?”

  I imagined that she’d seen my shoulders slump, that if the view of my back looked tired, my face must be a craggy map of exhaustion. I nodded and headed for the door, not trusting myself to turn around and see their kind, concerned faces.

  We trooped back downstairs, and once in the kitchen Sandy and Stacey started the bustling that women do when they realize they’ve left too much of a mess to take their leave as quickly as they’d like to, or have been made to feel they should.

  They were right. I was ready for them to leave, but wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone, either. As if reading my mind, Sandy said, “Are you sure you’re going to be all right here alone tonight?”

  Stacey turned from where she was washing wineglasses at the sink. “Oh, will Cal stay at the hospital all night?”

  The innocence of her question was genuine. Sandy flashed me a look and shrugged slightly, and I felt a surge of appreciation for the fact that she had obviously not been gossiping about me. And obviously Kevin hadn’t mentioned anything to his wife about Cal staying on Trillium’s Edge. Though I supposed it was possible that Cal had not said anything to Kevin.

  But things apparently weren’t going to change anytime soon, and there was no reason to not start getting used to saying it.

  “Cal has been staying on Trill,” I said. “I think we’re separated.”

  Stacey whirled around with a gasp. “Oh no,” she cried. And then, for the first time since they’d arrived, she said something that made me remember how she and Sandy knew each other to begin with. It was also the first sentence I’d heard her speak in which she did not stutter over at least one word. “Oh Lord, bless your heart, how can he do this to you right now?”

  “He’s not doing it to me. We just—it’s been okay. I’m okay.” She looked confused, and when she spoke, her stutter was more pronounced this time. “But this is when the t-two of you should be su-su-supporting each other the most. Th-that’s wh-wh-what m-marriage is.”

  “Stacey,” Sandy cautioned.

  “It’s okay,” I said to her. “I think it’s been coming for a long time. And, believe it or not, I think it might even be easier this way. We can each deal with things the way we want to, without fighting with each other over what should be done, or who’s to blame. Though we’ve done plenty of that anyway.”

  “Oh,” she said, but she clearly wasn’t convinced. Perhaps her parents had never had problems, maybe she and Kevin were still madly in love with each other. Or perhaps she had religious objections to our separation.

  Whatever it was, I wasn’t quite ready to discuss the particulars, with anyone.

  “I am so tired,” I said, shooing them out. “Y’all should go on. There’s hardly anything left to do.”

  They both protested politely, but we finally exchanged hugs and promises to call and keep each other updated, and I stood at the screen door and watched them drive away, raising my hand at their taillights. The night had lost some of the humidity of the day, and I breathed in the scent of gardenias wafting from my wildly untamed little tree and the tangle of night-blooming jasmine beside the house.

  I started when the phone rang and turned to answer without closing the door, allowing the scent to fill the kitchen.

  “Hey, Chlo,” Cal said, and I immediately thought of Meghan.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, so afraid to ask the question, unable not to.

  “Nothing’s wrong, everything is fine,” he answered. Of course that was patently untrue, but at least there was no new emergency. “I’m just calling to check on you, make sure you’re okay there.”

  I listened to the creak of the house in the breeze, smelled the flowers. Cal never liked leaving the doors open—a breach in safety—and there were too many airborne irritants for Meghan to do it very often, but tonight I thought that I might even sleep with my window open.

  “I’ll be okay,” I said cautiously. Was he offering to come over? Looking for an invitation?

  “Good. Everything is all right at the hospital. I left around eight, and I just got off the phone with the nursing station and they said Meghan is fine, nothing has changed.”

  Well, Meghan wasn’t fine then, was she? I bit my tongue. “Anything new on Marshall today?” I asked. Cal had bought a laptop in order to keep tabs on Marshall’s cell phone use and to try to track him down through his friends. Neither his online efforts nor my phone calls had come to anything.

  “No,” he said. “I got a lot of information about comas today though. I printed a bunch of stuff out and left it in a file in her ro
om for you, along with a couple of other things I picked up.”

  “Okay,” I said. We fell silent for a moment.

  “Well, sleep well,” he finally said.

  “You too.” We hung up without saying, “I love you.”

  I returned to the screen door and looked out at the yard. The house might have survived my absence with little more than dust to show for it, but the landscape had quickly deteriorated. The taming of southwest Florida was a constant battle, and while you might be able to get away with an occasional week of disregard, two weeks was pushing it, and three weeks made a real statement. Let it go longer than that and you might as well raze the place and start over.

  I pushed open the door and walked over to the gardenia, wincing as the crushed shells dug into the soles of my bare feet. The kids ran, used to run, across the driveway all year long without shoes on, making the soles of their feet as tough as the soles of shoes. I never knew how they did it.

  The transition to the weed-choked grass made me sigh with relief, and I knelt down and began to gather up the spent, rotting gardenia blooms that had fallen to the ground. There must have been two hundred and they made a fragrant little pile on top of the old, barely-there-anymore, cypress mulch.

  Not a single sunflower had survived the rabbits, but I’d rarely had a good year with them, and whenever I sowed the seeds I knew they had little chance of maturing. I got a certain sense of satisfaction that I was making little bunnies happy, giving them a treat. But year after year did get old. I couldn’t see myself doing it again.

  I pulled suckers off the base of the jasmine and added them to the pile, pulled tiny mahogany saplings with their attached seed pods from the ground, and, despite the fact that I actually sort of liked it, pulled the Florida pussley flowering at the edge of the grass.

  The more I put to rights, the more I saw that was falling apart, and soon I was sweating, with dirt smeared across my forearms and staining the knees of my old cotton pajamas. I wound up at the end of my planting bed, with piles of weeds and broken-off overgrowth at regular intervals. I’d need to get some bags to put all the detritus into; I needed to pull out the mower and the edger too.

  Gold light fell out of the open kitchen door, unrestrained by the screen, glowing upon the steps as if beckoning me back inside with the promise of a home-cooked meal, a pleasant evening, a happy family. I realized I was breathing heavily enough that I was rasping deep in my throat. I dropped the handful of dead purple queen stalks I’d been clutching and took a deep breath.

  It was almost eleven o’clock at night. I was not going to mow the lawn, or edge the drive, but I wasn’t quite ready to walk through that golden light into that lie of a house. I walked over to my car and studied it for a moment before carefully stepping up on the bumper, crawling across the hood—hearing it buckle beneath me slightly—and up onto the roof where I lay, gazing at the stars for long enough to catch my breath.

  Then I slid down the windshield and off the edge. I stared at the rectangle of light and then walked into the house, where I pulled the tomatoes out of the blue bowl, and threw it into the garbage, where it lay there, upside down, rebuking me.

  I fished it out. I couldn’t throw it away. It had been my mother’s, now it was mine, and one day it would be my daughter’s. Maybe I thought of Ada when I looked at it now, but maybe one day I wouldn’t think of Ada for any reason.

  I dragged a chair over to the refrigerator and climbed up to open the cabinet above it. All of the little items we never used but I couldn’t bear to toss were stored in there. I slid some old wineglasses over and pushed the bowl to the back of the cabinet. It would be there for Meghan when she was ready for it.

  I closed the cabinet doors softly and returned the chair to its place, the kitchen almost in perfect order but for the full garbage, something that had always been Cal’s job. I tied the red plastic handles tightly together and hauled it out to the big, green garbage can beside the outbuilding. The garbage would be picked up in the morning, so I tilted it onto its big, black rubber wheels and pulled it to the curb, dropping it with a thunk next to the mailbox.

  It had been years since I’d taken the garbage out. What a simple, satisfying chore. Why had wives encouraged this division instead of, say, cleaning toilets? I checked the mailbox, knowing it was unnecessary, Cal had been picking up the mail to take care of the bills, but it seemed a waste to not check since I was all the way out there.

  I slammed the door on the empty box, marched back up the shell drive without flinching, through the door with its promise of family, and up the stairs, where I stripped out of my dirty pajamas and put on jeans and a T-shirt. And then I drove back to the hospital.

  MARSHALL

  He’d almost expected Grandmother Tobias to get all flustered and start hustling around getting things ready; cooking, cleaning, maybe nervously talking about how she wished she’d had time to get her hair done. But in the time he’d been there he should have realized that his grandmother never had been, and was not now, a typical woman. Instead, she got a gleam in her eyes and immediately pushed him into the truck to go fishing.

  She didn’t want to greet her son with cakes and a nice manicure, she wanted fresh fried fish and homemade ice cream and, based on the way she thumbed through her Bible and moved worn Post-its around, a few appropriate verses. He wondered what kinds of things she’d found that she wanted to make sure she remembered enough to bring her Bible along in the canoe, but he didn’t ask and she didn’t offer.

  What he did do, though, was try to record everything in his mind that he could about fishing this creek. The light was different from the coast, and even from the bay. This central Florida light was softer and more golden than the bright, white heat on the Gulf of Mexico; heavier, closer than the air on the bay.

  He filed the color of the water away, absent the deep blues and greens he was used to, and though the browns and yellows of it initially seemed somehow intrinsically wrong to him, he’d come to appreciate its layers, the clear iced-tea sparkle on the top, the deceptive depths where the big fish hovered.

  He could not see, despite what his grandmother said about people who belonged always coming back, that he would ever return. If there had been something to glean from his family about faith, he had already gotten it with the early morning visit from his grandmother.

  If someone who claimed to hear God’s voice could not satisfy him, he did not know what could, and so he tried to remember the light and the color and the flash of the fish and the air on his skin.

  His grandmother had already moved beyond his presence. In the same way that he had been hurt when she seemed to be more interested in Ada than in him, he felt that same sullen irritation now. He’d been interesting after Ada left, and now that his father was coming, it was as if she’d forgotten him, and forgotten the fact that the only reason his father was coming was because of him.

  They arrived back at the house about three hours before his father was due to arrive, and his stomach began to lurch around the three-hour mark. It got worse with every half hour that passed and by the time his dad was due to turn into the drive he’d had three bouts of diarrhea. There was only one bathroom in the house, and it was pretty difficult to hide the fact that he was afflicted with nerves in this humiliating way.

  Grandmother Tobias didn’t say a word, but she looked at him knowingly over her glasses whenever he reappeared in the living room. He finally took to avoiding her, lying down on the guestroom bed, sweating in the heat and the still air before rising again for another trip across the hall.

  When his grandmother called to him to ask for help cleaning the fish and he stood swaying over the sink, he actually thought that he might have to add fainting to his list of embarrassing symptoms.

  But not only did he live, and somehow manage to stay on his feet, it appeared that his hearing improved, because the old, wood-rimmed clock that hung in the living room ticked incessantly throughout his remaining time.

  Seventeenr />
  THE nurses smiled wearily at me as I passed the station. Neither of them commented on the fact that I was supposed to be spending the night at home, and I imagined that they saw a lot of well-intentioned promises to family and friends broken.

  I dropped my purse into my chair and leaned over the rail to kiss Meghan, slipping my hand across her cheek and back into her hair, tucking it behind her ear, the way that used to make me crazy when she did it herself. It fell forward, and I tucked it more firmly this time.

  And her hand moved.

  On purpose, not one of the twitches we’d gotten used to. It raised up, as if to brush my hand away from her ear.

  Her right hand definitely moved. Her manicure had never chipped or worn, because of course she hadn’t used her hands in weeks, but had just grown out so that she had little semi-circles of bare nail in front of each cuticle. When her hand moved, raised, it led from the thumb, and the bit of pink iridescent polish flashed in the low light.

  I quickly, frantically, took inventory of my movements and how they might have caused the movement, but I hadn’t tugged on the sheet, hadn’t jostled the mattress, and it had moved up. Nothing could have done that. I held my breath for a moment and then whispered, “Meghan?”

  Then quickly on the heels of the whisper I nearly yelled, “Meghan! Meghan, move your hand again!” while I jabbed at the nurse button on the railing. Reva, the nurse on duty for the past two nights, hurried into the room.

  “We okay?” she asked.

  “She moved her hand,” I cried, “she moved her hand!”

  Reva immediately began to work. She pulled a small flashlight from the pack she wore about her waist and checked Meghan’s eyes, then grabbed her chart and began to take all her vitals.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said, as I hovered around her.

  “I kissed her cheek, I touched her face, and then I tucked her hair behind her ear, and I saw her hand move, like she wanted me to stop. What’s happening? Is anything different?”