“What’s your biggest fear?” Grace said.
“Not seeing anything beautiful again.”
“You will.”
“Not leaving Monta Clare. Working someplace darker than here.”
“There’s no place darker, Patch.”
“Someplace where I don’t even have your…you.”
“You’ll see everything. All the beautiful places. You’ll see them all. I’ll make sure of it.”
Patch woke drowning, the sheets balled in a knot. Slick with sweat he walked to the bathroom and christened his nightmares with cold water.
Her face came back to him.
He took the stairs fast, his heart drumming as he ran through the streets and let himself into Monta Clare Fine Art.
In the studio he found a ream of paper and started with a color chart and mixed everything from cadmium yellow through viridian to carbon black. Only two brushes, a Goldenedge size three and a Simmons zero, both a little chewed. A set of Pelikan Watercolors. All stolen from Goodwill as he swept their floor hours before. He dabbed them and smoothed the tip with his fingers.
He did not know to hydrate the pigment, to blunt with a spoon, to blot before selecting darker tones. From school he had learned basic mixing. His mind cast back to Miss Frey as she took them through masters, spoke of ink wash and stippling, cubism and Postimpressionism. He did not know the delicacy of contouring, to divide what was light from what was dark until dimensions were eked out.
Patch knew feeling and nothing more. He knew to close his eye until his world was her, and then reach through what seemed too dark until he could pull free the shades of her voice. The delicate way she formed vowels, the heat when she grew angry, the cool of her quiet. He raised his hand and remembered the soft trace of skin, the bow of her upper lip, the fine of her jawbone. He felt around each of her eyes, the soft brow above, the impossible rise of her cheekbones. And her hair, the gentle heat from her parting, the depth of her eyelashes.
And so he began to build her outward on each page. He gave little thought or care to structure, instead devoted thirty prints to each of her eyes, again and again until he could see what he had never seen.
He moved on to her hair, and in some she was lit with a fiery red and in others a dulcet auburn. A blonde that met white, a dark that mixed each of his blacks. Sometimes long and flowing, other times so short he could outline her skull.
As dawn broke his fevered night he sat back and looked at fifty or so pictures he had drawn. Abject, abstract, some consisted only of a single ear and the hair that fell over it. He gripped them tightly and slowly began to place them together. It took a long time, the pieces of a puzzle that had no completion. He knew nothing of creation, of how incomplete was often its own end. He could barely lift his arm, and he sat back on the hard floor surrounded by pieces of a stranger, and he tore at his hair and skin and cursed, and he took each piece and balled them in his fists.