It happened by accident. Believe me, I never saw school as an escape. I hated it almost as much as I hated being home. Then, in ninth grade, I ended up in an art class. I hadn’t signed up for it. My parents never went to freshman-year orientation and I don’t even think I knew I was supposed to fill out a course selection form. Instead, some guidance counselor I had never met put together my schedule. I certainly would not have picked art over one of the shop classes. Not back then.
On the first day of class, I sat in the back at a small round table, all by myself. Mr. Steinmetz, this heavyset guy with a dirty-looking goatee and wispy long hair pulled back in a ratty ponytail, was the only teacher who would let you wear a hood in his class. So mine was up. He noticed, I’m sure of it, but never seemed to care.
I pretty much crapped the class on purpose. I’d never done anything even close to art before, and I had no intention of starting. But something changed over the weeks. At home, things got worse. Mom’s health, the way Drew treated me after the model incident, and, most of all, how my father used my brother against me. Or, worse, how they had become some kind of horrible team. The physical side of the abuse had waned. Instead, their true art took center stage. Both would ignore me for weeks. Then, when I craved any attention at all, my brother’s whispers would start.
You did this.
You’re killing her.
That stuff haunted my mind while I sat back there, hiding in my own hood but watching Steinmetz as he demonstrated brushstrokes on a huge canvas.
“Depending on the size of the brush, its bristles, and the amount of pressure you apply, you can create different effects with the same color.”
It was this deep blue, the color on his brush, almost black. As he moved, his hand so confident, his movement compact and thoughtful, something new and amazing seemed to escape onto that field of white. I saw dark, cutting texture. Fading brightness. I felt sad and exposed. I leaned forward and slipped my hood down. I think the teacher saw that.
In the days following, he seemed to be speaking to me as he demonstrated technique and color mixtures. When he handed out supplies, he moved an easel up to my table.
“You have room back here. You might like using this instead of the tabletop.”
He set up a still life in the front of the class, a strange pile of fruit and books and earthen jugs. For the first time, I tried. I mixed colors; I moved my brush. Quickly, though, I grew frustrated. What I did looked nothing like what sat in front of me. When I looked at other students’ paintings, that feeling grew. I withdrew and put my hood back up.
Then, he was there. Steinmetz looked at me and looked at my palette.
“Forget that,” he said, pointing at the fruit. He tapped his chest. “Paint whatever’s in here.”
THAT DAY, I came home to a mostly empty house. I had no idea where my father was. Nor did I give a shit. Drew was at lacrosse practice. I was thankful for that. Ever since the day I destroyed my father’s model, Drew had gotten worse and worse. Some days I thought his vacillation between cruelty and utter disregard came from my father. On some occasions, I’d see him watching how Drew treated me with that goddamn smile on his face. Other days, though, when I didn’t think I had crossed my father, Drew still wouldn’t look at me. Even acknowledge my existence. Or worse, he would come to my door and talk at me, into me, telling me how useless I was. How embarrassing. Those times I wondered if it just came from Drew. If he just hated me that much. So, whenever either of them wasn’t home, I felt lighter.
At that point, I’d taken to checking on my mom every day when I came home. So I crept up the stairs and eased her bedroom door open. That smell escaped, fruity and sour, but so familiar by then that I barely noticed. My stomach rumbled from hunger as I peered around the door. I expected Mom to be asleep, like she usually was, and I was shocked to see her sitting up in bed.
“Liam, baby,” she said in a gentle slur.
My stomach rolled again, but that time I wasn’t sure it was hunger. And it wasn’t just her voice. Even from that distance, I could see how yellow the whites of her eyes had become. They almost glowed in the perpetual gloom of her bedroom. When she lifted her hand from the duvet, beckoning me into the room, her long fingers were no thicker than pencils. Worse, flecks of deep red paint dangled from her nails, exposing the jaundice underneath.
“Come here, baby,” she said.
I swallowed it down, all of it, and smiled. Moving quickly across the room, I sat on the edge of her bed. Taking her hand in mine, I looked into her eyes, through them at the mother she used to be. The one I spoke to every night in my dreams.
“How was school?” she asked.
“Good,” I said, gently rubbing the thin skin on the back of her hand. “Did I ever tell you I’m taking an art class?”
“Yeah,” she said distantly. She blinked, and for a second that cloud that hovered on the surface of her eyes seemed to part. A ray of clarity shined back at me and my heart fluttered. “What, what did you just say?”
My smile broadened into something real. “I’m taking an art class . . . at school.”
She sat up straighter. “You are? Really?”
I hadn’t seen her like that for so long. It was at once hopeful and terrorizing, like the calm at the center of a hurricane. But I needed it so badly that I clung to every second. Unwilling to let it go.
“Yeah,” I said. “I like it, I think.”
Her eyes changed again. That focus remained, but it seemed to turn back, peering deeply into the past.
“Oh, I loved to draw,” she said.
“You did?”
“All the time.” Her lips rose into a smile that seemed to match my own. “I still dream about it. Oh, how I just loved Christmas Eve.”
At first, I thought I’d lost her. But then Mom continued her story. I hung on every word, not because of their beauty, but because they offered a glimpse into my mother’s past.
“I was the youngest of four. So it was like I was always reaching to try to keep things the way they were. As everyone grew up and got busy with school and jobs, they wouldn’t be around as much. But on Christmas Eve, everyone would come home. We’d be together, and it was so much fun.”
She laughed and squeezed my hand.
“The thing I remember the most,” she said, her voice clear, “was the waiting. Isn’t that funny. I loved the party, but it was the hours before, when I was home alone with Mom and Dad. The minutes passed so slowly. I used to get paper out, and my oil pastels. Dad used to call them adult crayons.” She laughed again. “He would sit in the living room with me sometimes. And I would spread out the paper right under the tree. The lights would shine down through the pine needles in a rainbow. And I would draw and draw. And Daddy would tell me how much he loved my pictures. He . . .”
No, I remember thinking when her words slowly faded away. The look on her face changed, too. But I needed her to continue. I needed to hear more.
“You were close to your family . . . then?” I asked, desperate.
A tear formed in the corner of her eye. As it spread across her iris, it seemed to drag that cloud back, extinguishing her sun. One of her long, thinning fingers, painted such a fiery red, caught a wisp of free hair and tucked it behind her ear.
“I was,” she said.
“But I thought . . .”
“He never got along too well with them,” she said so softly that I could barely hear it.
I leaned down, my face not far from hers. “Who? Dad?”
In that instant, she changed, becoming something amazing yet frightening. This woman who sat up looking me in the eye was a stranger. Yet, at the same time, I’d known her forever. I’d felt her under the suffocating weight of her condition. Trying to break free. Trying to survive, to live. Most of all, to love me.
As she looked at me, her hand touched her stomach. “I remember when I was pregnant with you, Liam. I was so happy. I could feel it, even then. Even before I held you. Or looked into your beautiful eyes. I knew what you were going to be like. I knew it.” She smiled slyly. “I knew you’d be my favorite.”
“Mom!”
“Sometimes we get caught up. Sometimes, life seems to take a turn that we didn’t see coming. And maybe people judge that. They wonder how we end up like this. How can we be so weak? But they don’t understand. Love makes us weak, baby. Because we stop caring about ourselves. Because we care for someone else so much more. Then . . . we can never be free again.”
I felt my entire body shaking. Her words didn’t make sense to me. Not completely. But I could feel them settling into the deepest part of me, slowly entering my soul, changing it forever in ways I wouldn’t understand for a long time.
She nodded again. And I watched the moment blink out. Her focus faded to nothing. When she spoke next, she sounded worse than I had ever heard her. “I’m tired, baby.”
I sat there, needing to know more. At the time, though, it was what she said about our family that grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go. I’d never met my uncle or aunts, and had only seen my grandparents a few times. I didn’t even know where they lived, actually. So my mother’s story came out of nowhere and rocked what little history I had.
“Mom?”
Her eyes fluttered. Then closed.
“Tired,” she whispered.
Gently, I placed her hand down on the mattress. Holding my breath, I got up off the side of the bed and left her alone in what seemed my mother’s endless effort to sleep it off.
I WENT TO the kitchen for a snack next. I was starving, I remember. All I really wanted was an apple. But I knew we wouldn’t have any fruit. I checked the pantry first. We had cans of soup, Campbell’s Double Noodle. My mother bought it for us when we were sick. It had to be five years old. There were other cans—beans, stock, tuna. Nothing that sounded great. We were out of cereal. In fact, we had been for a while.
I got pretty pissed off at that, actually. I slammed the pantry door and yanked open the refrigerator. There was no milk, anyway. We had some sticks of butter in the back. A pizza box left over from a few days ago. I opened that and it was freaking empty.
“Goddamn it!”
I slammed that door, too. And then I kicked the fridge hard enough that a pain ran through my foot and up my leg. I knew I wasn’t really upset about the food. The kitchen had been like that for years. In fact, I ate more at school than I ever did at home. Even in the moment, I knew that it had nothing to do with empty cupboards and everything to do with what my mother had said. I closed my eyes and remembered the clarity in hers. I needed it to come back. Just one more minute. That’s all.
Spinning, I rushed back up the stairs. I pushed her door open. Right away, I could see she was asleep. But I moved to her bed, sat back on the edge. I touched her hand as I had before.
“Mom?” I whispered.
Then I noticed how cold her skin felt. I leaned over her, agonizingly closer and closer. My dry lips touched her forehead. She felt like a glass of ice water.
“Mom?” I said, louder.
Her hand shook first. It seemed to run up her arm, into her chest. Her torso thrust up off the mattress and fell back down, shaking more and more violently.
“Mom!”
Her eyes never opened. Her head turned slightly and she vomited onto the bed. The stain it immediately left was burning yellow like the sun. Then she went utterly limp.
“Mom!” I screamed.
But no one heard. I was all alone.