“Give it a rest, Wils,” Truman said from the sofa, where he sat reading a newspaper full of headlines about the turmoil in Europe.
The telephone rang then, and I was happy to answer it and tell Wilson that the call was for him.
Wilson took the receiver from me and let his gaze linger on me as he did so. He could obviously tell I wasn’t being truthful, but I could also tell he didn’t seem to mind. It was almost as if he liked that I was being vague, because it was like we were playing some kind of game.
I turned from him, wanting the relative privacy of the kitchen. Seconds later I was at the sink pondering the situation. I wanted very much for Wilson to be interested in me, but his fascination about what I’d apparently told him when we were little didn’t feel like attraction as much as a desire to satisfy his curiosity—even at the expense of embarrassing me. There likely weren’t going to be stolen kisses from him anytime soon. My half-spun dream of Wilson and me falling in love, and me one day sitting at Celine’s table as her daughter-in-law and not her maid, felt as though it was floating away from me like a cloud on the wind.
And I couldn’t help but feel silly for having allowed myself to imagine it.
Later, just before Alphonse arrived to begin supper preparations, I took a walk in the vineyard to calm myself. The vines were heavy with young fruit and the air was electric with the buzzing of summer insects. A dappling of peaceful blue spheres soothed me as I walked. I came upon Truman, talking to Sam, the new vinedresser, as they studied a cluster of unripened grapes. I smiled and nodded as I walked past them. Truman called out to me to hold up a minute.
I waited until he joined me.
“Is it all right if I walk with you for a bit?” He asked as if he understood I cherished my private moments alone in the vines.
I said yes, but inside I was reluctant. I suspected that Truman had been able to tell there was some truth to what Wilson had said the night before, and again in the living room.
“Look,” Truman said after we’d taken a few steps away from Sam. “If you don’t want to talk about this, we don’t have to, butI could see you were upset by what Wilson was talking about. You don’t have your parents to go to, and you’ve not had any friends come up to the house, and you haven’t gone anywhere to visit with old school chums, so I just wanted you to know that if you want to talk to someone about this, I’m here.”
The kind way he said this made me immediately want to tell him everything, but the pledge that I’d made to my mother on her deathbed came pulsing back to me at the same moment. I’d promised to be careful, and I knew what Momma had meant when she’d extracted that promise. But had she meant I must live the rest of my life without telling anyone about the colors? Ever?
When I said nothing, Truman went on. “What Wilson said today in the living room, is it true? Do you see colors and shapes no one else can see?”
It was a question that ordinarily I would’ve been afraid to have asked of me, but his words were wrapped in a tone I hadn’t heard before. It was almost as if he wanted me to say yes. Almost as if he needed to believe magic still happened in the world, because he had stopped seeing evidence of it. Before I could think about what I was doing, I turned to him and nodded.
“When do you see them?” he asked.
“All the time. Whenever I hear a sound, I see them. Even silence has a sound, so I always see them.”
“Like, hovering in the air?”
It had been a long time since I had described what the colors were like. So long that I couldn’t remember how best to do it. I was quiet for a moment.
“No, not like that,” I finally said. “It’s more like, I see them in my mind. Like if I told you to picture a running horse, you would see it inside your head. It would have color and shape and it would be moving. But no one has to tell me to picture the colors. The sounds make them come, all on their own.”
“Every sound does that?” Truman said, intrigued.
“Yes, but it’s not just sounds that have colors. Names and places and numbers have colors, too.”
“What do you mean, they have colors?”
“They have a color that doesn’t change. It’s like it’s been given to them. Your name is mint green. Celine is pale peach. Wilson is red. The number seven is red, too. June is gold. Tuesday is white.”
“That’s amazing,” Truman said. “What happens when you close your eyes?”
“I still see them. Sometimes different colors appear, but they still come.”
“And they never stop?”
“Sometimes if there are many sounds at once, they will dissolve and fold into one another. Sometimes one set of colors lasts longer than another. Sometimes if I concentrate, I can make them brighter.”
“You talk about these colors as if... as if you’re fond of them,” Truman said.
“I guess I am. They can be so beautiful. But... but they caused a lot of trouble for me in school. I had a difficult time concentrating, and arithmetic with all those numbers was just... it was too frustrating. When I was younger, the other students teased me, and teachers didn’t like it when I told them they wrote the names of the days of the week in the wrong colors. My parents told me to stop telling anyone about them. I didn’t like school, for lots of reasons.”
“That’s why your parents let you quit.”
“I wanted to quit. They wanted me to be happy. And they were afraid for me. They were afraid if it got out that I was still claiming to see the colors, people might think I was crazy.”
