by Ninie Hammon
The woman got to her feet as he kept yapping. Sparky was not at all done with her attention, though, so he stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on her leg and gave her his pitiful look, and she melted in a puddle like everybody always done, leaned over and went back to petting him. Gave T.J. a chance to grab hold of himself and shut his mouth. When she looked at him again, he managed to sound mostly sane and reasonable.
“My mama’s pictures was…” Little kids with big eyes and big ears and toothless grins. Innocent. Harmless. That’s how it had started, anyway, how it had been in Before. He pointed to the still-wet painting. “What is that?”
“It’s a kidney.” She eyed the shapes on the canvas that resembled the inside of a fish when you gutted it. “Actually, it’s a kidney with a tumor.” She pointed to a blob in the upper right corner. “Cancer. I’m an illustrator for medical textbooks.”
A shattering crash of thunder roared so suddenly Sparky jumped and yelped. The woman looked out beyond T.J. at sky that had turned dark and threatening without either of them noticing. A gust of cold, rain-smelling air sent the empty soft drink can by her foot scurrying noisily across the porch and she began to gather up her art supplies.
“You’d better get Sparky home before he gets soaked.”
She leaned over and patted the top of his head.
“Goodbye, cute little dog.” Finality rang in those words with the solemnity of funeral bells.
When T.J. finished telling the story to Dobbs, the other man sat very still, staring down at the table for what seemed like a long time but wasn’t likely more’n a minute. Then he lifted his eyes and T.J. looked into the familiar faded-denim blue, waiting.
“So if it wasn’t what she was painting, what was it about that woman that put you in mind of your mama? What’s the rest of it?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“No, I expect I don’t. But tell me anyway.”
“I’ll show you.”
Dobbs got slowly to his feet and the two men stood together silent. Theirs wasn’t regular silence, though. It was the silence of men who knew each other so well wasn’t no need to mess up communication with talk.
Dobbs finally spoke.
“It’s starting again, isn’t it, T.J.?”
T.J. didn’t say nothing.
They filed without speaking into the garage. It had gotten dark and the storm that’d been threatening when T.J. left the Watford House had finally struck. The streetlight on the pole at the corner of the block shone through the windows with a rain-shrouded glow. Thunder cracked loud and a bright strobe of lightening torched the night sky and burned the details of the garage interior into their retinas. When the flash was gone, there was still plenty of light to see the painting leaned up against the far wall. To see the small table and bowl of fruit at the bottom of the canvas in front of the totally out-of-proportion window that completely filled the rest of the frame.
To see the face in the window.
Dobbs took an involuntary step back from it once he got a good look.
It was a woman’s face, a white woman, lying on her back. Her hollow eyes were closed but the rain squirming in silver worms down the garage windowpanes made it look like she was crying. Her lips seemed purple against her pale skin. Blood streamed from the gory bullet wound in her right temple.
“I didn’t know you had one,” Dobbs said, awe in his quiet voice. “I thought your mama burned them as soon as…”
“It’s the only one left.” T.J. couldn’t seem to breathe in enough air to form more than a handful of words at a time. “She painted it a couple of days before she died.”
The image of his mother when he found her, dangling lifeless from a barn rafter, flashed brighter than the lightning and was gone.
“What’s this painting got to do with the woman you met this afternoon?” Dobbs knew. T.J. could tell by the way he asked the question that he knew.
T.J. looked with wonder and fear and other emotions that didn’t have no names at the face in the painting, at the perfect triangle of moles beneath the woman’s right ear.
“It’s her. Not no doubt about it. This is a portrait of the woman who’s renting the Watford House. Said her name was Jessie Cunningham.”
Chapter Two
She’d told him her real name, just blurted out, “Jessie Cunningham.” That old man with the adorable dog, she’d told him who she was!
Jessie stood for a moment in the doorway of the room downstairs that she had turned into an art studio. She’d had lots of rooms to pick from in this huge house. They really ought to check out the suitability of the places where they parked her before she showed up with her suitcase and furniture. But they didn’t, of course. That first place, the one in Albuquerque, had been a duplex. She supposed this house demonstrated that she’d moved up in the world since then.
She carried her paints to the shelves that some carpenter years ago had painstakingly set into the walls on both sides of the room. In a house like this one, the room had obviously been the library. One set of shelves framed the big window that looked north. Good light for painting, north light. It was a shame, really, that the first time she’d had good light and a place to spread out her art supplies, she wouldn’t be using it.
She was more surprised really than alarmed by her slip of the tongue earlier. Or was it a slip of the tongue? Was it something more profound, some need to connect on a deeper level as who she really was with another human being? Now. At the end.
Naaaaaw, there was nothing deep about it. She’d just been distracted and let her name slip, that was all. She hadn’t practiced the new name enough yet. Bailey Donahue.
That’s why she’d insisted on Bailey as her “permanent” first name after that time in Omaha when the bank clerk called out Connie Bradshaw and she’d sat there like a bump on a pickle. The woman had noticed and it had been awk-ward even after Jessie hauled out the excuse that she’d just gotten married.
It was too hard to answer to a new first name, too hard to make it automatic. All the different last names were hard enough and she hadn’t managed to get either one of them right this afternoon.
The name with which she had begun life was Jessica Nicole Bailey. When she was in high school, she’d played sports. If there was a ball bouncing somewhere, Jessie was catching it, hitting it or spiking it. The name on the back of her basketball/softball/volleyball jerseys was, of course, Bailey. And the cool kids called each other by those uniform names — “Hey, Bailey, we got algebra homework tonight?” You know, to put the peons in the stands in their places, impress upon them the pecking order, with jocks at the top and everybody else an also-ran.
Since she’d answered to the first name ‘Bailey’ for four years, she could remember it now. It wasn’t as totally foreign as Connie or Amanda or … what was the one in Peoria? Alexis. Seriously? Who could remember to answer to a name like Alexis?
Though her parents had never been married, never as far as Jessie could determine, or spent more than that one night together, her mother’d changed her last name, taken her father’s. No, not father. What did the kids call it now? Sperm donor? No, that term was way out of vogue, too. It had enjoyed a brief time in the sun back when there was some sense of outrage still that shiftless do-nothings went around fathering children to see who could collect the most notches in his masculinity belt. There was no sense of outrage now, though, no moral implications of any kind. That was just the way it was. Men got you knocked up and bailed, might even get two or three girls knocked up at the same time. Now they called that particular strata of low-life “Baby Daddies.”
The world had not yet turned completely wrong side out when her mother was young, though, and as soon as she discovered she was pregnant, Nora Monroe became Nora Bailey. That was the name she’d printed proudly on the birth certificate — Jessica Nicole Bailey — for the little girl Nora made a stab at mothering before she threw up her hands in defeat and let the state place the two-year-old in foster care,
in “a good home.”
Right. Copy that. A good home.
The animal shelters that would only release strays to “a good home” likely did a better job of enforcing that requirement than Child Protective Services had done for her. Rescue puppies had a better shot at growing up in a loving family environment than she’d been given.
She thought of the old man’s dog. Such an adorable dog.
She stopped breathing for a moment.
Maybe Bethany had a dog.
Maybe.
Jessie tried to picture her as a little girl with a dog, with the dog she’d seen today, the cute, friendly little thing, Sparky the Wonder Dog, whose fur was so soft he felt like a stuffed toy. She could picture the dog with a child, but it was a generic child, could have been anybody. She couldn’t picture Bethany as a little girl with a dog because the child was frozen in her memory as a toddler, only barely able to walk more than a couple of steps without falling on her backside. Now Bethany was about to turn three.
Jessie had missed her second birthday. But she wouldn’t miss her third.
She’d been there for the first one, though. She and Aaron had both been there.
A baby in a highchair sits banging a spoon on the metal tray.
Whap. Whap. Whap.
“Can we let her blow out the candle?” Jessie asks, holding the small chocolate cake with a lone candle burning in the center.
“What if she reaches for the flame?”
Aaron is always practical. Always protective.
“Right. We can sing her the song and blow it out for her.”
Aaron takes up the refrain in a deep baritone. “Happy Birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.”
The baby in the highchair bangs the spoon happily on the metal tray as an accompaniment to the words.
“Happy birthday deeeeeearrr Beth-a-ny.” Then they try to harmonize the last “happy birthday to you.” But their harmony is way off, he is flat and she is sharp and it sounds awful.
Bethany doesn’t mind a bit.
Aaron blows on a little horn with streamers and Jessie puffs air into the paper roll-out thing that extends toward Bethany’s nose. She grabs for it but it retracts before she can catch it.
“Make a wish, honey,” Aaron says to the little girl.
Whap. Whap. Whap,
“Make a wish for her,” Jessie says.
Looking at him now, his brown hair in eyes that are the color of robins’ eggs, Jessie thinks Aaron has never looked more handsome, and she feels that thing in the bottom of her belly. That little fluttering. She wonders if she will always feel that when she looks at Aaron.
“Okay, I wish … I wish to become her official candle-blower-outer, whose job it will be to blow out the candles on every one of her birthday cakes until she gets married, which she never will because I don’t intend to let her date.”
He sucks in a big breath of air, puffing out his cheeks, then blows, snuffing the candle flame, sending up a little trail of black smoke in its dying breath.
Aaron quickly pulls the candle out of the circle of candy that kept it in place in the center of the cake so Bethany can’t grab the hot wax on the top of it. Then he takes the cake from Jessie and places it in the center of the metal tray on the highchair. At first Bethany just looks at it. Then she drops the spoon she’d been banging on the tray and reaches out a tiny index finger and touches the icing. When she returns the finger to her mouth, her little eyebrows shoot up in delight, and Jessie and Aaron both laugh.
They laugh even harder when she reaches out with both hands and grabs handfuls of the icing and cake, shoving them into her mouth, smearing the chocolate icing all over her face.
Aaron grabs his phone and begins filming her as she destroys the cake and slathers her face with icing.
Watching her, watching Aaron move around to get different angles of the carnage, Jessie is willing to admit that this is not likely a unique event as first birthdays go, that hundreds of thousands of toddlers buried their hands up to the elbows in their cakes every day, likely had to be hosed down to get them clean. But at the same time, she is certain that no child has ever looked more adorable with chocolate cake in her hair than Bethany. And no father has ever looked more smitten than Aaron. The little girl had had her daddy twisted around her little finger since the nurse handed her to him in the delivery room and she wound her little fingers around his. What’s he going to be like when she turns sixteen?
The thought of Bethany at sixteen, looking like a female version of Aaron, fills her head and her eyes suddenly well with tears.
“She’s growing up so fast,” she says.
Aaron sets his phone down and puts his arm around her shoulders and the two of them stand an adoring audience to the disemboweling of a chocolate cake.
“I wish I could keep her just like she is forever,” Jessie says.
In a black-humor, cruel-joke kind of way, Jessie got her wish. Though Bethany had grown, had changed, had become a little girl instead of a toddler, she was frozen in Jessie’s memory at fifteen months old, holding out her arms to Jessie, crying when Aaron handed her to Jessie’s sister, María. Jessie had not seen the child since.
And Bethany was about to turn three. Three years old. Jessie was sure there’d be a party. Aaron’s family would make over her, shower her with presents. And they’d let her blow out the three candles on her birthday cake. Aaron had wished that he would always be there to blow out Bethany’s birthday candles. His wish had not been granted.
Well, Jessie wasn’t going to miss her birthday. Not again. She would never again miss Bethany’s birthday. She realized then that her cheeks were wet, though she knew she hadn’t cried. Couldn’t possibly have cried. She was cried out, had poured out every single tear in her whole body and now she was as dry as chalk dust.
She stepped over to the counter, pulled open the drawer and picked up the Smith & Wesson revolver. It looked smaller than it had when she’d purchased it in Hendersonville. But it was big enough to do the job. Had it felt cold that day in the store? She couldn’t remember. But it felt cold now as she passed it back and forth from one hand to the other.
It felt as cold as death.
“What are you going to do about it?” Dobbs asked.
The words seemed overloud in the empty garage, almost like they was echoing off the walls, repeating. But the echoing was only going on inside T.J.’s head.
“I don’t know. I ain’t decided yet.”
“Not making a decision is a decision.”
The wind slapped the branches of the sycamore tree against the side of the garage. There was a crack of thunder so loud and close it sounded like lightning had struck something right out in the front yard. Sparky whimpered and T.J. could feel the warmth of him cowering against his leg.
“It’s alright, Sparks. Ain’t no loud noise gonna hurt you.”
The dog had been scared of storms ever since he was a pup, but T.J. resisted the urge to reach down and pick him up and coddle him. That’d just make it worse. And besides, there was scary things in life for a fact. And even dogs had to figure out how to go on living in spite of ‘em.
Another clap of thunder rumbled in the sky and though T.J. didn’t see the lightning strike that made it, the streetlight went out, plunging the garage into darkness.
T.J. was glad of the sudden veil of darkness that hid his face from Dobbs. But then, Dobbs didn’t need to read his face to know what he was thinking.
He fumbled around in the dark on the work bench until his hand fell on the flashlight. He slipped the switch and a bilious, dim ray of light stuck out like a half power lightsaber into the darkness. Of course, you never thought to change the batteries in a flashlight until you needed it. He shook it once and the light was brighter. He turned and shined the beam on the face of the dead woman in the painting.
“All these years, you never said anything about having one of your mama’s paintings.” He could hear the awe in Dobbs’s voice. “Why’d you keep it
?”
“I dunno.” But he did know. His mama’d painted it two days before she killed herself. It’d been the last one. He hadn’t thought about it in close to half a century. Everything about that time was scorched around the edges. Any time he thought about After, his mind filled with the image of her dangling limp, her head twisted to the side at an unnatural angle, and his whole being pulled back from that sight like his soul had touched a hot stove. Jerking away was involuntary. “This is all I had. She burned all the others.”
His mother painted — was compelled to paint — images she didn’t understand. People she didn’t know. Places she hadn’t never seen in an entire lifetime spent in one little hollow in the West Virginia mountains. After that first time, she hid them paintings, the ones she created with the paintbrushes flyin’ over the canvas and her head thrown back, her eyes closed. But often, he found her collapsed on the floor in front of an easel that held a canvas with the paint still wet on some awful scene, dead bodies, mangled corpses. He’d describe them to a wide-eyed Dobbs as they sat with their feet danglin’ in the creek down from Dobbs’s house.
He’d told Dobbs about a severed-hand painting and Dobbs had come runnin’ breathless to their secret place in the woods the next day, babblin’ the story he’d heard his father tell about how Ulysses Everett had got his hand chopped off helping Henry Tucker cut wood. Most of the paintings only haunted his mother, though. For days after she painted ‘em, she was … strange. She’d cock her head the way you do when you hear something, only wasn’t no noise he could hear. Or her nose’d wrinkle up like she smelled something foul. Then, in a few days, maybe a week after she painted it, she’d take the painting out to the backyard and burn it soon’s Pa left that morning for the mill. She had to burn ‘em, of course. If Pa knew she’d been paintin’ ‘em … but he didn’t have no idea what was going on in his home with his wife and three sons, was falling-down drunk every night after work soon as he got to the bottle of cheap whiskey or moonshine he kept in the cabinet.
