“So tell me, do you have a boyfriend, dear?”
I felt myself stiffen, afraid of the tirade Izzy might go on, invoking words likeassumption, patriarchy, gender identity.
But she didn’t.
“No,” she said, a disembodied voice behind the camera. “Actually, I have a girlfriend. Her name is Theo.”
My mother didn’t pause or show any sign of trying to suppress a look of shock or dismay. She only nodded, smiled. “And do you love this girl? This Theo?”
Izzy chuffed out a little laugh, the camera moving.
“Was that a funny question?” my mother asked.
“No. It’s just… no one’s ever asked me that. Not even Theo.” She paused. My mother stared at her, clearly still waiting for an answer. “But yes, I do love her.”
A piece of my heart broke just then, listening to my daughter’s voice, listening to her confess her truest feelings to my mother. I knew they were words she’d never dream of speaking to me. Was it being behind the camera that made it easier for her to open herself up? Or was it knowing that she was talking to a dying woman?
“You should tell her,” my mother said.
Izzy said nothing.
“I was in love once,” my mother said.
“With our grandfather? The man you were married to?” I could hear Izzy’s voice catch. “I don’t even know his name.”
“His name was David. David Russo, and I loved him, yes. But I wasn’t madlyin love with him. Not that deep and desperate love they write songs and poems about. I’ve felt that true love only once.” My mother looked away from the camera. Were those tears in her eyes?
I hovered my finger over the trackpad, knowing I should hit pause. Iought to shut the computer down, stand up, and walk out of my daughter’s room. But I couldn’t make myself. I had to know what she was going to say next.
“Who was it?” Izzy asked.
My mother turned back to Izzy. “Her name was Bobbi.”
HER NAME WAS BOBBI.
I’ve told you about her, Isabelle. The one who found the stone back in Mexico, remember?
God, she was beautiful. Not just pretty in the traditional sense, but charismatic. She turned heads. When she walked into a room, she had this… this radiance, this aura, that made people turn and look, and once she caught your eye, it was hard to look away. She was mesmerizing. That’s the word I would use.
I remember that last day I painted her. The painting that everyone talks about, the one that would one day jump-start my entire professional career. Do you know the painting I mean? Has your mother ever told you about it? Shown you? No, I didn’t think so. Well, it’s not hard to find. Just jump on your computer and type my name in. It’s one of the first things to come up. The piece I’m most famous for. Like Warhol’s Marilyns.
But we had no way of knowing the places that painting would take me back then. We were just kids, really. Two kids in love, wanting so badly to hold on to what we had.
It was after we got back from our trip. Bobbi had the stone, of course. We were up in my bedroom, up in the converted attic at my parents’ house that I’d turned into an art studio. I really wanted to paint her that day—she complained she wasn’t in the mood, but I talked her into it. It was our last day together. Bobbi was flying out to a family wedding in Colorado the next morning, and after that, she was heading for California. It was always her dream—Hollywood. For as long as I’d known her, ever since we were little girls, she said she was going to go off and get famous, be an actress.
We’d been talking about this forever, how Bobbi would leave. But it hadn’t felt real. Not until that moment.
I’d felt her pulling away from me the last few days of our trip. She seemed strangely distant, withdrawn. Even when she curled up next to me, ran her fingers down my throat to my chest and left them resting there just above my heart, even when she whispered, “I love you,” I could feel something, a shadow there. I understood that it was just Bobbi starting to pull away, a little at a time so it wouldn’t hurt as much when she left. Bobbi, imagining her life without me. The life she’d always dreamed of in California.
I had to keep reminding her to hold still. Bobbi had never been good at holding still, at posing.
She asked why I couldn’t just take a bunch of photos and do the painting from those, why we had to spend our last day together doing this.
But that was exactly how I wanted to spend it. I wanted to capture that moment forever: Bobbi just as she was right then, the sun coming in the attic window behind her making her seem to glow, the way she stared so intensely at me. It was this look. This look that I told myself meantyou will always be mine.
It was Bobbi’s idea, to put the stone in the painting.
I was just going to paint her standing there near the window, but then she grabbed the stone, held it up just over her chest where her shirt was unbuttoned. “Make the stone my heart,” she said.
