The house was empty upon Lane’s return. She opened the kitchen door and stepped onto the balcony to smoke, surveying the narrow backyard below, weedy and neglected. She had gardened once, years ago. Such a fruitless task—you could wear yourself out weeding and the weeds came back, you could water and deadhead and then the whole goddamn place would flood and everything in it would die.
Lane wondered if she might be dying. Going to a doctor was unthinkable: scans, needles, condescending looks, the medicines with their awful side effects. She wouldn’t do it. She couldn’t spare the time, anyway. She realized she had been thinking of this mural as her last piece. Her final, best work. Now it might not happen.
Lane emptied the ashes from her pipe into the patchy grass below the balcony and stepped into the air-conditioning. Somewhere she kept a list of people, potential clients. Perhaps one of them might have a small project for her that she could complete while she waited for the restaurant to get their shit together. A nursery, a dining room, something manageable and ready to go. On a building that was already built, for god’s sake. She would not make that mistake again.
Where did Oliver keep that list? She flipped through piles of papers in her studio, then tried to search the files on the computer, but Oliver had updated the operating system, and the screen looked unfamiliar. Lane would have to wait for him. He hadn’t been by lately. It was unlike him, slacking off. She opened her sketchbook, turned to a clean page, wrote the date, Philip’s and Myrna’s names, the restaurant where they met for lunch, the words “Project delayed 3 months? Possible redesign.”
She drew an arrow pointing left, to the previous pages. She shaded it, gave it volume and texture. She loaded her pipe and smoked. Her stomach growled, she’d barely eaten that silly food at lunch. In the pantry she opened a cabinet, took down a can of noodle soup, poured its gloppy contents in a pot. She turned on the burner, tidy blue flames in a circle, and stirred the soup with a wooden spoon. The girl was gone but she had been here; she had a particular way of arranging the clean dishes in the drying rack. Her tidiness, her hesitancy, infected the walls.
Lane stepped away from the sink and the clean plates the girl had washed, the folded dish towel hanging over the oven door. She went down the hall, back to her studio. Papers everywhere, disorganized. Lane paged through them, invoices and receipts and forms and letters. They seemed both familiar and not. She opened her sketchbook to the first few pages, examining each image, birds and bonnets and filigreed carriages.
“Forget it,” she said aloud. “The project is delayed.” She spoke to the drawings. “You will never be a painting.”
Anger roiled in her stomach like hunger. She half-noticed an unpleasant smell and rose to close the door against it. She turned to a clean page and began to draw, from memory, the face of a child, a girl about twelve with shrewd, kind eyes. Straight hair, chin length, combed. Louise was dead. But her face was indelible. Lane knew every facet of it, at every age until seventeen, when she left.
That Katrina fall, Lane was in Missouri and Louise brought Ava to visit. Lane barely registered her granddaughter, a tiny, shy four-year-old—she’d never cared much for small children. Instead she looked and looked at Louise’s face. Lane watched her daughter’s expression warm when she spoke to Ava. Louise was softer, prettier than she’d been as a girl. They talked about their lives, about the storm, the city, about the farm where Louise and Ava lived. How absurd, living on a farm. Lane always figured that wouldn’t last. She hadn’t cared about the news, the catching up, even the granddaughter, who hid behind Louise the whole time, apparently getting over some preschool illness that left her recalcitrant.
“She’s normally more outgoing,” Louise had said. “Still under the weather, I s’pose.”
All Lane cared about was her daughter’s face, and while they talked in the lobby of this wretched residence hotel, rainlight coming through the window, Lane did not blink, did not avert her gaze for one moment. She was memorizing. Who knew when she would get another chance?
Little Ava started to whine and Louise prepared to go.
Lane said, “You can come visit. You can always come. Bring him, too, your farmer. Once the city comes back.”
“Okay, Mama,” Louise said.
And maybe she would have. But it took too long for the city to come back. And Lane was still traveling constantly, and then the farmer died and everything got harder. Louise’s face. She longed to stare at Louise’s face and nothing else until her mind was gone.
Before she finished the drawing a decision had taken hold within Lane. She wouldn’t paint on anyone else’s walls. Or with anyone else’s money. She would use the time she had left to make what she wanted. What she wanted to leave behind. She turned the page and began again. Louise, younger, a different angle, nine or ten years old, long arms and legs, face turned away, gazing at some distant object, one ear and cheekbone defining her face, indelibly Louise, Lulabelle, all the fanciful names.
Lane experienced the confidence and calm that came from knowing the work was right. The details still had to be determined, of course. Canvas? What size? She hadn’t painted on canvas in years. But what else was there, without other people’s walls?
Her own. The house. Of course. The legacy left her through four generations. The house.
Somehow the house answered, like it could read her thoughts. Maybe she really was going nuts. The front door banged, the house called to her: Lane! Lane! Where are you? Lane opened the studio door to the smell of burning, of plastic fumes and shouting. The girl called again, “Lane!” Ava running down the back hall.
More shouting from the kitchen. Lane went in that direction.
“I’m here,” she yelled through the smoke.
Ava had already turned off the range and thrown the broken pot in the sink. She was aiming the spray nozzle at a blackened dish towel and a can of Tony Chachere’s, melted and burning. The water hit it, sending out enormous plumes of smoke that smelled like cayenne and turned the air to acid. Ava’s mouth and nose were tucked into her shirt and she was yelling, “You’re okay? You’re okay? Open the windows!” Tears poured from Ava’s eyes.
Once the danger had passed, Ava collided with Lane in a fierce hug that caught her off-balance. The girl was stronger than she looked. Her youth was like a brilliant animal.
“Everything’s alright,” Lane said. “Everything’s fine now.” Even though Ava had been the one to put out the fire, she seemed to need to hear this from Lane.
They went together through each room, opening windows and turning on the ceiling fans. Lane found a couple of box fans in the basement and set them facing out the door and the window in the kitchen.
“What were you making?” Ava said when they finally sat down on the couch, sweaty in the heat.
“Something new,” Lane said, thinking about Louise, the new painting, the walls. But which room should it go in? Compositions suggested themselves between every window and doorway, dazzling Lane with possibility.
“Weren’t you cooking something?” Ava said.
“Was I?”
Why was the girl focused on these insignificant concerns? The child Louise’s face shone out, perhaps here next to the fireplace, perhaps by the tall windows that overlooked the old live oak out front. Louise used to climb that tree and throw beads to the neighbor kids on the sidewalk. Playing Mardi Gras, just as Lane had done at that age.
“So you probably didn’t eat?” Ava persisted. “Me, either. Let’s order something.”
“Whatever you feel like, hon.”
Ava called for delivery from the Lebanese place and poured them each a drink. Wine with ice for Lane and milk for herself.
“What happened?” Ava asked again.
“The project is over,” Lane said. “The restaurant job is canceled.”
This was not the answer Ava had been looking for, but she understood the gravity of it.
“No,” Ava said. “It was going to be so good.”
Lane studied her granddaughter, felt an urge to paint her. The house and whatever she made next would belong to Ava. She allowed a wash of gratitude for Louise to ease through her. Thank you for sending me this girl.
They slept with the windows open and the fans running. Lane dreamed of her daughter, she dreamed of painting. Ava slept fitfully in the heat, worried about the fire and what it meant.