Out on the bay, the sailboat scuds along, a slim triangle, a wrist flick of paint. A gestural, painterly rhythm beats through the water and the sky, not stopping at the edges of the forms but continuing the pattern in color. The girl’s toes curl in the sand, the tops of her feet brown from the sun. The light plays over her dress, a floral pattern of exquisite detail, tiny pink daisies and bluebonnets tied with red ribbon, row after row of them following the pleats and smocking, the contours of the child’s body, the wind blowing the fabric. There is a kind of transference happening, like the sea is made of cloth and the dress of flowered water. Color murmurs through the eddies of blue-brown surf and the folds of the dress as though they are one surface, hiding the same unfathomable depths.
The girl holds out her hand, pinches a live crawfish between her fingers. The creature is a locus of red, a color like nothing else in the landscape. It comes off the wall, or rather, everything else recedes, declines, as in a curtsy. The fingers holding it turn white at the knuckles. The hectic angles of the crawfish’s eyestalks and antennae organize the entire beach around it.
Sea oats and palmettos jut in clumps from the dunes. A few gulls dive. Brown pelicans rest on the pilings of a washed-away pier. Two slashes of paint indicate a great blue heron on the far shore, fishing below a stand of pines. Hermit crabs bury themselves in the sand at Louise’s feet and minnows dart in the shallows. Every surface skims a mass of life beneath it.
The house huddles around this girl. It loves her as Lane loved her, helplessly, endlessly, through time and out of it. The painting looks into the room and in looking opens it up. The wall is no longer a wall. It stretches backward to the horizon of this beach and this girlhood. The air in the room relays leaf shadow from the windows and pulls sun from the million fractal surfaces of the bay. Throws beach light onto the hardwood floor, scratched and speckled with paint. The house breathes color and sea air. It keeps the painting safe and waits for Ava.