In Sight of Stars

by Gae Polisner

  The silence is swift and deafening.

  Finally, I manage, “What?” Because, that second part … I’m not even sure I’ve understood. What she just implied about my father.

  Armond.

  “What?” I say again, but now I get it. It’s starting to solidify. I don’t know how it can be, but I’m trying to.

  I look to Dr. Alvarez for help.

  “Hear her out, Klee,” she says.

  I sit and wait, if I still can’t look at my mother.

  “The letters you found, Klee,” my mother says, ‘those were between your father and a man.”

  I hear what she’s saying, but none of it makes any sense in my brain.

  “Bullshit,” I say weakly. I say it, but I know that it’s not. She’s not lying. I don’t know why I couldn’t see it before.

  The growing distance between my mother and father … her coldness … The weird way my father acted that day in the gallery with Armond all those years ago …

  All those years.

  “Jesus.” I put my head in my hands. “How long—?”

  “I’m so sorry, Klee. I should have told you—”

  But, of course, if I just looked back myself, I would know.

  Of course I would.

  Anyone looking in would see.

  I slide down off the couch and onto the floor, lie back on the rug, and stare at the ceiling. Down here out of the swirl of the blizzard.

  “Are you okay?” My mother reaches down, but I wave her hand away. I wait for the crow, for the red-bearded man, while I breathe. Neither appears. Just an odd, hollow ringing in my ears.

  Dr. Alvarez gets up and moves toward me, but I say, “Actually, I’m okay. I think I’m okay. I just want to be down here for a minute. Go ahead, Mom, you can talk if you want. I’m listening.”

  My mother slides over on the couch so she can reach down and touch my bent knee. I fight the impulse to stop her from keeping her hand there.

  “I’m so sorry, Klee. I kept things from you … not to lie, but to protect you. To protect your memories of him. Maybe I was wrong, and I shouldn’t have. But they weren’t your problems, they were our problems. Grown-up problems, that it didn’t seem fair for you to have to know. I thought it would be better if—” Her voice stops. A hiccup escapes and her hand disappears from my leg. She pulls a tissue from the box and blows her nose. “I thought wrong, I guess, and I’m sorry. Because without knowing, how could you possibly understand?”

  I sit up, pull my knees to my chest, and study her face, so broken and apologetic, it almost hurts to look at her.

  “I am so sorry, Klee. I’d known for a while, well before his death, but there were other issues … I didn’t want to involve you in them. He was hurting, I knew that. But I was hurting, too. He made so many mistakes, but I loved him. It’s hard to explain, but I did.”

  The room is quiet. I close my eyes, glad to feel the floor under me, solid and sure.

  “So, my father was gay, is what you are telling me,” I finally say. “And Armond was his boyfriend. Or whatever.”

  “Yes,” she says. “For several years.”

  She smiles sadly and I nod again, and push a fist to my forehead and bang it there. Because I’m an idiot, because I didn’t see it, because I didn’t want to see what I probably should have known.

  My mother leans down toward me. “I’m sorry,” she says again, touching my cheek. “I was trying to protect you.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “He was many wonderful things, your father. But he did things wrong, too, and lying to us wasn’t the worst of it. He wasn’t honest with me, or with you. But worse, he wasn’t honest with himself. Not for a long time. And it led to bigger problems. Deceitful behavior. Problems with money. I’ll explain if you want. But first, you need to know this and understand: know that I loved him. Even after I knew, and none of this changes how very much we both loved you.”

  * * *

  Dad and I are in his studio painting a huge canvas of sunflowers together. I always feel important when he lets me help.

  “Everyone thinks objects are just one color, that sunflowers are yellow, say, and limes are green, but if you look carefully, you’ll see it’s not true,” he says. “Limes have hints of blue and yellow, and sunflowers are gray and blue and green and orange, because color is like that, more than you see at a first glance.”

  I stare at the sunflowers and squint, but try as I might, I mostly see yellow and orange. Still, I nod so he thinks I can see, because I don’t want to disappoint him.

  “Well, good. Remember that, Klee. That there’s always more to life than you can see with your own two eyes.”

  After that we paint, and I make sure to load all different colors on my brush, and Dad says, “Good, see? Just like that,” or, “Maybe not so much blue in that one.”

  As we paint, Dad talks to me about art and “technique,” and he tells me about different famous artists like he always does. Van Gogh and Gauguin, Pissarro, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec, but mostly Van Gogh.

  He tells me Van Gogh was brilliant but crazy, and he got in a fight with Gauguin once, and the next thing you know, Van Gogh is chopping off his own ear and chasing Gauguin down the street with it.

  “Wait, why did he want to give him his ear, again?” I ask, because he’s told me this story before but it never makes sense.

  “He didn’t. It wasn’t a thoughtful act, but a desperate one. He wrapped it up, and tried to give it as a gift.”

  “To who?”

  “Some say a girl. A woman.”

  “Why would she want it?”

  Dad laughs. “Oh, I doubt she did. He wasn’t thinking straight by then. He’d gone mad. After that, they sent him to the asylum at Saint-Rémy.”

  “Was he angry because he was sick?”

  Dad looks over at me confused, then adds, “Oh, mad as in crazy, not angry. They sent him to a mental institution is what I meant.”

  “Did he stop painting then?”

  “No. He painted more than ever, and better than ever. Sometimes we must be crazy for our art.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He painted magnificent paintings, sometimes a hundred or more in a year. He painted Starry Night while he was there.”

  “Did he get famous?”

  Dad laughs, but the sound has lost some of its joy. He walks to the sink to wash his brushes and add more paint to the palette. “No, he was never famous, Klee. Not while he was alive. Not until long after he died.”

  “That’s sad,” I say. “How did he die?”

  “Shot himself in a wheat field.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was crazy, I told you.”

  There’s a knock at the door, and Mom comes in. She’s smiling. She’s made us her “fancy” sandwiches with little ruffled toothpicks poked into them.

  Mom puts the tray on the worktable near the door and doesn’t say anything, just stands watching us as we paint. The look on her face is happy, angelic. Like there’s nowhere she’d rather be.

  After a while Dad says, “Why don’t you sit, Marielle, or better yet, grab a brush and come help?”

  She laughs but shakes her head. “You know I have two left hands.”

  “It’s just for fun. There are no mistakes. We’re doing an abstract of sunflowers.” He winks at her. “Our homage to Van Gogh.”

  Her face changes.

  I see it now, how her face changed. Every time he talked to me about Van Gogh. I never saw it back then.

  “Of course, who else?” she says.

  I want her to go back to being happy, like she was when she first walked in. If I tell her how smart I am, how much Dad has taught me, maybe she’ll smile again.

  “Did you know he cut off his ear to give it to a girl? But he didn’t die from that. He went mad. Which means crazy. But, when he went to the hospital, he still painted. He painted hundreds of paintings. But then he got sicker and shot himself.”

  “Jesu
s, Mark!” Mom’s eyes flash with fury. She walks to the vase and pulls the sunflowers out, jamming them into the garbage. “Why do you have to do this to him? He’s just a little boy…”

  “It’s life, Mari. You can’t shelter him.” He dips his brush and keeps working.

  “It’s not life, it’s death! And it’s not okay. He’s eight years old, for Christ’s sake. Let him be eight. Let him be carefree. Don’t teach him this morbid stuff you keep in your head, just because you’re not happy with your life! You think it’s cute, to turn him into you, into the crazy artist you want to be. Well, it’s not! So knock it off. Seriously. Keep your morbid, inappropriate bullshit to yourself!”

  She storms out, leaving the studio broken and quiet. After another moment, Dad says, “That’s your mother for you. She’ll get over it. If you’re going to paint, well, you’re not a baby. We can’t protect you from the world.”

  Right. Because, I’m not a baby. I’m an artist like Dad is. Like Van Gogh was.

  “We artists stick together,” I say, “because there’s more to life than we can see with our eyes.”

  “You got it, kid,” my father says.

  Day 12—Afternoon

  I skip Group, which Dr. Alvarez says is okay. I think about looking for Sabrina and Martin after, to see how they are, but I don’t want to talk to anyone. I just need some more time to process.

  I’m not ashamed of what my father was. It’s not like that at all. I’m mad at him for lying to us. For faking things. For being an imposter. For thinking he needed to be.

  I’m mad because I don’t know who he was.

  I stare out my window, down onto the courtyard where the brachiosaurus is in motion, loud and rumbling, chomping up sections of earth.

  Memory after memory seeps in, with my parents in role reversal, a personal Freaky Friday where Dad is moody and absent, and my mother is the one trying to be cheerful, the one trying to hold everything together.

  Why did I make her out to be the villain, sticking up for him over her, over and over again?

  Did I think he needed protecting?

  My chest constricts.

  If those were Dad’s letters, how could he live that way, and not tell us? Tell me.

  Didn’t he think I deserved to know?

  Day 12—Evening

  “You awake?” Sister Agnes Teresa’s familiar voice asks after a soft knock.

  I’m already dressed in the swim trunks, hoping she might drop in.

  “Rough day?” she asks, when she sees me.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I say.

  * * *

  I wade forward, letting the cool water envelop me. When I turn back, Sister Agnes Teresa is folding her habit over the side of a chair. She wears the same serviceable navy one-piece she had on the other night.

  I dive under and swim the length of the pool and back without coming up for air, letting it wash away the images from the past few days that play on a loop in my head.

  “My dearest man, I could breathe in your deep, musky scent forever…”

  I try not to imagine anything. Try not to think beyond the words.

  I wouldn’t have cared. Not one iota if it meant him sticking around.

  Still, Jesus, I should have known.

  I resurface in the shallow end, gasping for breath.

  “You okay?” Sister Agnes Teresa asks, looking down with concern.

  “Yeah, better now,” I say. “I just need to swim.”

  “Then swim we shall,” she says.

  She wades in next to me and swims a lap of breast stroke, far more gracefully than I could have imagined a few short days ago. After several more laps in silence, we meet in the deep end, where I float on my back and she paddles around until she’s close enough to flip over and float next to me

  “Tell me everything,” she says. “If you want to.”

  And I do, and it’s not as hard to tell as I thought it would be. The more I repeat the details, the more they lose their power, become a story of my past, a piece of history. Words dissolving away in the water.

  “So that’s it,” I finally say, righting myself so I can see her. “Though my mom tells me there’s more. She says my father wasn’t depressed because of that, that he was lying about a lot of things. Money. I don’t know what.”

  Sister Agnes Teresa rights herself, too. The look she gives me is full of grief and of understanding.

  We swim together to the shallow end, and she climbs up the steps ahead of me.

  “So now what, Mr. Alden?” she says. “What are you going to do about all of this?”

  That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it? I mean, what am I supposed to do? Everything is fucked-up and my father is gone. How can I tell him now that it would have been okay? How does he give me that chance? How do we see that we could have figured it out, together? That we would have still loved him, even if we couldn’t be the same kind of family anymore?

  I make my way toward Sister Agnes Teresa, but I’m not quite ready to get out. Maybe I’ll swim a few more laps before going back to my room for bed.

  “You know, Klee, we all have hardships,” she says, calling me by my first name for the first time that I can remember. She grabs her towel and dries off. When she’s done, she holds a second one out to me. I reluctantly haul myself out, sit on a chair, and dry my hair. “We get what we’re dealt in this life, that’s what I’ve learned. So, the way I see it, there are only two choices in the end: Pity yourself and shut down, or put a smile on your face and keep going. I suggest the latter. It works better. You’re only seventeen. As they say, you have your whole future ahead of you. And, there’s a whole wide world of tragedy and heartbreak ahead. But there’s adventure, too. There’s love and joy and discovery. And plenty of good living still to be done.”

  Day 13—Morning

  “Mom?” I stand at the nurses’ station. Shelly, the weekend nurse, is dispensing colored pills into paper cups.

  “Klee? I’m so glad you called. It’s … just really good to hear your voice.”

  “Yeah … so, listen. When can I come home? I think I’m ready to come home.”

  Silence on the other end, then the sound of my mother hiccupping back tears.

  “We’ll talk to Dr. Alvarez. We’ll see if we can get you checked out this weekend.”

  “No rush,” I say. “Another day or two won’t kill me. Plus, I want to say goodbye, and Dr. Alvarez doesn’t come back in until Monday.”

  Day 13—Evening

  I sit on the edge of the pool and swirl my legs, making waves while I wait for Sister Agnes Teresa.

  She’s in the corner, draping pieces of clothing over a chair. Tonight, she’s left the room lights off altogether, leaving only the pool light on.

  “So peaceful this way, don’t you think?” she asks, but tonight it agitates me.

  I’m melancholy and filled with despair.

  I miss my father.

  I miss all the things I never got to say. The things that he needed to hear.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered to us,” I whisper aloud to him, swishing the water once more. Blue-green ripples journey outward, bouncing the light, and casting illusive ghosts about, which flit and dance across the dark tile walls.

  * * *

  “Many years ago,” my father begins, “there were two boys, named Liu Ch’en and Yuan Chao. They were cousins.”

  I roll my eyes. Of all the stories my father tells, Liu Ch’en and Yuan Chao is his favorite. I like his stories, but I don’t get this one. I don’t get what he wants me to understand.

  It’s presunrise. We’re on vacation again, maybe somewhere in Mexico. He’s taking me fishing. We’ve left Mom in the hotel room to sleep.

  Dad leads me down a dock to the edge of the water. There are big rocks, slick with moss that we have to cross over, so he holds my hand tightly as he pulls me forward.

  “It’s important to be careful,” he says, looking back at me, “but not too careful. If you’re
too careful, you’ll never do anything.”

  Eventually, we reach the large flat rock the concierge told us is a fishing spot called Fisherman’s Boulder. Dad sits and nods at me to do the same. His long, bony legs are bent up in front of him. I sit, folding my knees the same way.

  “Isn’t this heaven?” he says. “I’d like to paint it.”

  “It is,” I say. “We should have brought our paints.”

  “We’ll fish instead. And paint in our heads.”

  “Okay,” I say. “So tell me the story. About Liu Ch’en and Yuan Chao.”

  “They were cousins,” my father says.

  Whenever Dad tells stories, the kids are always cousins or “only” children like me, never siblings, so I wonder if Liu Ch’en and Yuan Chao were really brothers, and Dad just says they were cousins so I don’t feel sad.

  “Yep, I know that part,” I say.

  “So one day Liu Ch’en and Yuan Chao go into the hills to fetch water, a chore their mothers have asked of them. The walk to the stream is a joyous one. The hills are lush with springtime. Flowers everywhere.”

  “The stream is in the hillside?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says. “Well, through the hills to a clearing. Anyway, the cousins are overcome by the beauty of it all. They put their pails down and set off for a walk. They walk and they walk, and the countryside grows more sparse with each step, until the path they’re on ends, and they find themselves at the entrance to a cave.” Dad nods across from where we sit, as if there is a cave there, but all I see are boats and water.

  “They want to go into the cave, but a blue fairy sits on either side of the entrance, each on a large stone, like this one.” He pats the rock under us. “Only there, it is dry. The stream is gone.”

  I lean my head against his shoulder, not caring if we fish at all, just happy to be here with him.

  “At the fairies’ feet is a white rabbit,” my father says, stroking a hand through my hair. “The rabbit keeps hopping up and down. Up and down. Up. Down. Each time it jumps, the flowers at the mouth of the cave blossom, opening into full bloom. And, each time the rabbit sits, the flowers wilt and close.