Painting Naked (Macmillan New Writing)

by Maggie Dana

  So why didn’t I see it? The evidence was right there, all along. Colin’s obsession with the past—our past—and his need to turn back the clock. The way he brushed off my questions about our future with a kiss and a promise.

  Always a promise.

  Never a plan.

  He had no intention of settling down over here. I was confusing reality with a movie star I once had the hots for. I’m exactly what Lizzie said I was. A nineteen-fifties cliché with her head in the clouds.

  Love gave me wings, then took away the sky.

  I remember reading this somewhere, but never thought it’d apply to me. I mean, I never really expected to fall in love. Not the way I fell in love with Colin. The joy I felt with him is hard for me to imagine now that he’s gone. All I feel is pain, as if someone has wrapped my chest in bands of steel, like a barrel. They tighten and I fight for breath.

  Lizzie tells me to put my head down. Lower Jill, between your knees. That’s it. Now relax and breathe deeply. Her strong hands comfort my shoulders.

  In, one, two, three … out, one, two—

  I remember the lessons I learned in Lamaze class with Harriet, and more tears well up. Another loss. Shit, how many more do I need?

  “Thanks,” I say, once my breathing is steady. God, I hope this doesn’t happen again. I fumble in my pocket for a tissue. My hand closes around a soft, familiar lump, and I wipe my eyes with Anna’s yellow socks. “You must think I’m dumber than a bag of hammers.”

  “No, I don’t,” Lizzie says, “because this was Colin’s fault. Not yours. He charged into your life, turned it upside-down, and broke your heart.”

  If I knew why he’d left, it might be easier to deal with. At least it’d give me something to mourn and put behind me so I could move forward. But the not knowing, the niggling doubt that somehow it could have been my fault he bailed out is eating at my insides like rats gnawing on cheese.

  Lizzie voice is soft, gentle. “It’s been what, a year, since you met? Three-hundred-and-sixty-five days. How many of those did you spend with Colin? Thirty, forty? Most of them making love, walking the beach, and watching old movies in bed. Celluloid, Jill. But not real life.” She pauses. “You had a fabulous affair, and now it’s over. He isn’t coming back and you have to move on.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Yes, you can, but it’ll take time,” Lizzie says, “and remember that the guy you fell in love with last year isn’t the same one you remember from childhood. He doesn’t exist any more.” She drains her glass. “Have you told the boys about any of this?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “Why?”

  “Because kids, even grown up ones, don’t want to know everything about their parents. So, for what it’s worth, I suggest you tell your sons about Katie—”

  “I already did.”

  “—and Emma Katherine,” Lizzie says, “but leave the rest in the past. Where it belongs.”

  * * *

  Lizzie leaves and I keep busy, loading the dishwasher, wiping the counters. I scrape egg off a plate and wonder what it’d feel like to chuck it across the room, watch it shatter on the tile floor. Would it help? No, because I’m not angry. I’m fucking miserable, and miserable people don’t throw crockery. They curl up in a corner and cry.

  Biting back more tears, I have a sudden, overwhelming urge to hear another friendly voice, so I pick up the phone and call Dutch. If he’s surprised to hear from me, he doesn’t say. He asks about Colin and I hesitate because I really don’t want to whinge.

  “Come on,” Dutch says. “I can hear something’s not right.”

  So I tell him.

  “Then I’ll be expecting you here tomorrow,” he says, “for vintage champagne, good conversation, and straightforward sex.”

  I close my eyes. “Thanks. I needed that.”

  “One hundred days,” Dutch says.

  “What?”

  “A hundred days. That’s how long it’ll take you to recover.”

  I count the weeks. “I’ll come down right after Thanksgiving.” I won’t, of course, but it’s nice to be asked.

  “For you,” Dutch says, “the porch light will always be on.”

  After a much needed shower, I pull on shorts and a t-shirt and head for the beach. A chill wind walks up my spine and I shiver. My arms are covered with gooseflesh and I’m about to run back to the house for long pants and a sweatshirt when somebody calls my name. I turn. Damn, it’s Tom Grainger and he’s alone. No sign of Molly or the dogs.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” he says.

  I shrug, digging at the sand with my heel.

  “I’m by myself for the next few days,” Tom says. “Would you like to have lunch with me?”

  Lunch? Is he mad?

  More gooseflesh erupts on my arms.

  “How about tomorrow?” Tom says. “We could—”

  “We could not,” I say, glaring at him, “even stampede in the same direction. Much less go to lunch.”

  His brow wrinkles and for a second or two, he looks genuinely puzzled. Then he turns and walks off, hands in his pockets, shirt tails flapping loose in the wind.

  I stare after him. The toad. The unspeakable toad.

  * * *

  On Monday, Iris tells me what I’ve already figured out for myself. The bank won’t refinance my loans unless I have a steady source of reliable income.

  “How long can you give me?”

  “A week. Two at the most,” Iris says, with the look of someone who suddenly hates her job. “I’m sorry, Jill. If it was up to me, I’d—”

  “That’s okay.” It isn’t, but what else can I say?

  Lizzie takes charge. “You can’t go looking for work with scratches on your knees and clothes fit for the trash,” she says, forcing me to wear pantyhose for the first time in almost a year. I turn around in front of the mirror. My body, accustomed to t-shirts, shorts, and no shoes, feels unwieldy in the blazer and black linen dress Lizzie has unearthed from the depths of my closet. I’d forgotten they were there.

  She hands me a brush.

  I drag it through my hair and adjust the tiny gold earrings that Lizzie has also insisted upon. I glance down at my dresser. The bracelet, whose intolerable presence I have yet to deal with, lies in a mocking curve behind my candles.

  Lizzie reaches for it. “What are you going to do with this?”

  “Leave it. I haven’t made up my mind.”

  “Why don’t you put the damned thing out of sight?”

  I stop brushing, place both hands on the dresser, and lean my head against the mirror. “Just leave it, okay?”

  There’s a small, complicated silence.

  “Lizzie, I’m sorry. Forget I said that.”

  “Said what?”

  There are times when I wonder why Lizzie puts up with me.

  * * *

  As I suspected, the local job market sucks. Nobody needs help, at least not from me, so I look farther afield and wind up with a three-month assignment doing data entry for an insurance company in West Hartford. Fifty-two miles away.

  This is going to kill my car.

  Alistair phones from North Dakota. His work-study program has been extended another month and he won’t be flying back for Labor Day weekend. How about Columbus Day instead? Fine, I say, and then I call Jordan in Washington to make sure his plans haven’t changed as well.

  They have. He’s bringing home a new friend.

  Her name is Bridget. Like Jordan, she’s a virtual reality programmer, and I spend most of the holiday weekend trying to understand what they’re saying. Finally, they switch to a subject I know something about. Jordan’s found a small house in Bethesda—a fixer-upper—and he wants to buy it, then rent out the extra bedrooms to help cover the mortgage, and I wonder if Bridget will be in one of those rooms or sharing my son’s. I hope they’re planning to share because I rather like this young woman with auburn hair, freckles, and emerald green eyes.

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nbsp; Of course, seeing them together, holding hands and finishing one another’s sentences, reminds me of what I had and what I lost. I plaster a smile on my face and keep my sadness firmly under wraps. I will get through this, I know I will. Hearts aren’t like eggs. They’re like rubber balls. Unfortunately, mine seems to have lost its bounce.

  Late Sunday night I snatch a moment alone with my son. I tell him about Emma Katherine and we kneel on the floor in front of my cedar chest, looking inside her treasure box and crying. I show him Katie’s letters and we shed even more tears.

  I say nothing about Colin. I mean, what’s the point. It’s over, well and truly over, and I’m not about to upset my son in exchange for a shoulder to cry on. Besides, Lizzie told me not to and right now I’ll take her wisdom over my own.

  Jordan hugs me. “Poor Mom. You’ve had a horrible time.”

  “I’m okay,” I say, feeling good just being held by someone who loves me.

  * * *

  One evening, after work, I bump into Beatrice at the library. She asks after Colin.

  “Things didn’t pan out,” I say. “He went back home.”

  “I’m sorry, so sorry,” Beatrice says, looking down at her feet, festive in orange socks and blue plastic sandals. “Despite everything, you guys were good together.”

  And we were. For a while we had it all.

  “Give Anna and Harriet my love,” I say.

  She nods and trundles off, arms full of books, her dayglo feet a startling contrast to the library’s somber gray carpet. But Harriet doesn’t call so I send her a card that says MISSING YOU. It worked once before. Maybe I’ll get lucky again.

  Joel calls to say his marketing guys have finally decided they’re interested in Claudia’s squirrels. They’ve pulled my mockup to bits and rebuilt it with several improvements, and it’ll tie in nicely with a line of educational toys and books they’re developing for their English market. It all sounds rather exciting. Should they talk to me about this, Joel wants to know? Best to call Claudia, I say. She’s in London with Sophie. I give Joel the number and hang up with a sigh of relief.

  At least something’s going right.

  Lizzie talks me into attending a surprise party for her next-door neighbors. Ruth and George have been married for sixty years. Some of the guests look as if they’ve been married even longer and as I observe the silver-haired couples, frail and stooped and leaning on one another for support, I think, why them and not me? Why couldn’t I have looked forward to sixty years of memories with the same man?

  Fergus hands me a glass of wine and tells me the old geezer in the corner is making eyes at me. I glance toward him. He raises his cane and grins, exposing oversized false teeth.

  “You have an admirer,” Lizzie whispers.

  “Christ, Lizzie. He looks about ninety two.”

  “Perfect,” she says. “You’d be the younger woman for a change.”

  * * *

  September slides into October and suddenly it’s Columbus Day weekend and Alistair fills my life with dirty laundry and stories of his adventures among the fossilized rocks of North Dakota. After I show him Katie’s letters and tell him about Emma Katherine, Alistair gets choked up and hugs me till I can barely breathe.

  “Mom, what can I do to help?”

  He bristles with energy, a need to let off steam with hard labor, so I point him toward my clogged gutters, the peeling paint on my bedroom ceiling, and the tool shed’s broken window. He fixes them all while I bake cookies and apples pies for him to take back to college.

  The parrots are busy, too, ferrying twigs to a large, untidy nest they’re building on top of a utility pole at the foot of Tom Grainger’s driveway. Like me, they’re getting ready for winter, except they don’t have to put up with a soul-destroying job that requires them to spend endless gray days in a cubicle half the size of my bathroom.

  Renee Dodd, my supervisor, is ruthless. Behind her back, people call her Atilla the Hen. Last week, she fired a temp for surfing the Web. Another was shown the door because she used the company’s computer to update her resume. I could be next, so I watch my back when I call home during lunch to retrieve messages.

  Today, I have two. The first reminds me that my phone bill is overdue; the second chills my blood.

  “Nothing serious,” says the nurse at Anna’s school, when I return her call. “Just a tummy ache, but she’d be better off at home. We can’t reach her parents, and you’re next on the list.”

  Obviously, Harriet didn’t take me off. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Renee’s not in her office, so I scribble a message—sick child, will make up time later—and leave it taped to her computer.

  * * *

  Anna sits, hunched over, on a plastic chair in the nurse’s office. She looks at me with frightened brown eyes and tries to smile.

  “Has she been throwing up?” I ask.

  “Not so far.”

  Her brow feels cool and damp beneath my fingers. No fever. “Did you try reaching her mother again?”

  “Yes, but her cell phone doesn’t answer.”

  “Then she’s probably in court.” I pause. “What about Bea French?”

  “Her office said she’s at a conference in New Orleans.”

  “The nanny?”

  In a small voice, Anna says, “We don’t have one any more.”

  The nurse hands me Anna’s knapsack bulging with books, papers, and spare clothes. I bundle Anna into her jacket and carry her out to my car.

  “My belly button hurts,” she says, curling up.

  That’s it. I’m not taking any chances. We’re going straight to the clinic. I tear out of the school’s parking lot, hit a speed bump, and my car bottoms out. Anna groans and clutches her stomach. Maybe I should go to the hospital instead. It’s a twenty-minute drive. The clinic’s less than a mile from here, but it’s just a clinic, and if this is serious, they’ll send her straight to the hospital.

  I stomp on the gas and head for the highway.

  Chapter 34

  Sands Point

  October 2011

  “You saved her life,” Harriet tells me later, much later, after we’ve paced the floor and drunk too many cups of bad coffee from the hospital’s vending machine. I tell her she’s exaggerating, but have to eat my words when the doctor informs us that Anna’s appendix was close to bursting and it’s a good thing I bypassed the clinic and brought her in right away.

  “But she’ll be fine,” he says, smiling. “Kids her age are tough.”

  Harriet sits by Anna’s bed trying not to look scared, Beatrice calls every half hour from New Orleans, asking if she ought to fly home, and I feel faint when I think what might’ve happened if I hadn’t phoned home for my messages. The only one not terribly fazed by all this is Anna, despite being hitched up to IVs and a tube that goes from her nose down to her stomach. “To prevent vomiting and gas,” the nurse says.

  Anna begs for stories about Archibald and as I embellish my tale with details about the diva and the evil mayor, I catch Harriet’s eye, but there’s no need for words because her face says it all.

  Forgive me?

  And I’m okay with this because while Harriet’s a verbal wizard in the court room, she’s hopelessly inept at coping with simple apologies. I see her struggling, trying to find the right words, and I wait because maybe she has a need to say them.

  She does.

  “I hate that it took all this,” Harriet says, waving her arm at Anna’s hospital bed, “to get us back together again.”

  “Me too.”

  “Jill, I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Did Colin leave because of—?”

  “He left for a lot of reasons.”

  If only I could figure out what they are.

  * * *

  We spend the night in Anna’s room, and I doze, fitfully, in an armchair while Harriet alternates between the cot they set up and lying beside her daughter, the two cuddled up like a pair of spoons. In the morning, Anna’s in be
tter shape than we are. I offer to stay because I know Harriet has another grueling day in court with needy clients and a demanding judge. She doesn’t want to leave, but I shove her out the door, remind her the courthouse is less than five minutes from the hospital.

  At nine, I call my office and leave a message for Renee that I won’t be back till tomorrow, but when I show up for work the next day, I discover I no longer have a job, because, as my supervisor informs me, she takes a dim view of employees who go traipsing off to cope with somebody else’s child.

  “You can’t fire me for this.”

  Renee looks at me. “I just did. Now please get your things and leave. Right now.”

  * * *

  Driving home, I wonder how the hell I’m supposed to find another job with a black mark like this on my résumé. Should I even admit to having had this job? It was only temporary; on the other hand, it’s the only current reference I have, and I’m so busy worrying about my lack of options, that I’m halfway down Bay Street before I notice the festival decorations.

  Oh, my God, the colors.

  Red and turquoise bunting droops between the lamp posts; matching posters leer from shop windows. A banner the color of cat vomit hangs from a telephone pole, and I’m wondering who’s responsible for such appalling taste when a gunshot glues my hands to the steering wheel.

  What the hell was that?

  I glance back. Clouds of exhaust hang over the trunk of my car. Dammit, my wretched muffler has let loose.

  The driver behind me honks his horn. I press, tentatively, on the gas. Another explosion rents the air, followed by a throaty roar that propels me down the street and into Dave Norton’s garage.

  “Are you practicing for the Indy Five-Hundred?” he asks.

  I have to yell. “No. I need a muffler.”

  “So does your car.” Dave grins, wipes his hands on a cloth, and bends down to investigate. “That muffler’s got a hole the size of a baseball and the pipes are rusted out.”