Jenny gave her a pointed expression. “I recognize these paintings,” she said, gesturing at the photographs of the paintings a woman named Henrietta had made so many decades ago: the little girl on the mountain and the man reading a book by a stream. They were snapshots of Jasmine’s memories. But they didn’t feel as though they belonged to her any longer.
“You’ve seen the paintings before?” Jasmine asked.
Jenny stuck out her lower lip. “I know they’re yours, Mom. I’ve been watching you paint for a couple of months now. I can feel you behind these paintings. They can only be yours. The thing that gets me is how you stopped painting for so long! Imean, you’re so…” Jenny couldn’t bring herself to say anything more.
Jasmine sat back, stumped at how sure of this her daughter sounded. How could Jenny “feel” Jasmine behind each painting? She wanted to call her bluff.
But at the same time, how could she keep lying to her daughter? Especially when she’d already told her so much?
Too miffed to say anything, Jasmine remained quiet and turned her head to look at her new painting of Chase, her beloved grandson. She felt her daughter smiling beside her.
“I called the woman who discovered you,” Jenny said.
Now, Jasmine twisted her head around to glare at her daughter. “I beg your pardon?”
“Oriana Coleman,” Jenny explained. “She’s an art dealer who ‘discovered’ Larry’s paintings in New York City and brought him to fame. As soon as she realized he wasn’t the painter behind the pieces, she dropped him like a hot potato and told the world what he’d done. She assumed it was you who painted the paintings—paintings that have sold for millions upon millions of dollars, Mom. But she didn’t know how to find you.”
The back of Jasmine’s neck was hot and sticky. Rage bubbled up from the depths of herself. “You called her?” she whispered in disbelief.
“I saw them talking about it on the news the other night,” Jenny said. “I looked up Oriana’s contact details and had her on the phone a few hours after that. She’s a wonderful woman, Mom. She wants to help you. She wants your name to be everywhere. I mean, she wouldn’t have ruined Larry if she didn’t believe in your work more than anything.”
Jasmine was on her feet, pacing back and forth in front of her canvas. “I never wanted my name to be anywhere,” Jasmine whispered, too angry to speak loudly.
“Mom, listen,” Jenny said, mystified. “Nobody’s coming after you any longer. You can be out in the open. You can announce yourself for who you are, whether that’s Henrietta Johannes or Jasmine or whoever you want to be next. And Larry—my father—is old! He’s too old to do anything to you.”
Jasmine gaped at her daughter. She realized that she hadn’t told Jenny enough about her struggles and her heartaches. It meant that Jenny couldn’t fathom how difficult it had been to build a brand-new life around a brand-new name. Jasmine had had nobody. She’d met Cynthia and been “adopted” into island life—but it had been a lonely existence, one of fear.
She couldn’t turn her back on everything she’d built. It was all she stood for.
Jenny got up and followed Jasmine across the room, where she scooped Jasmine into a hug that Jasmine didn’t want but didn’t know how to refuse. Jasmine shook in her daughter’s arms. “I can’t,” she said. “It’s been too long. I’m someone else now.”
Jenny pulled away from Jasmine and looked in her eyes. “I don’t want him to take credit for all the incredible work you’ve done,” she said. “I hate that he took this from you. I hate that he forced you to run away and live your life alone. You married him because you loved him and wanted to build a life with him.”
“I married him because I was too young to know I shouldn’t,” Jasmine said. It was the same reason plenty of women had married plenty of men throughout the twentieth century (and before, going back countless centuries).
“Your story will inspire millions of women to be brave,” Jenny declared. “Remember how you helped me leave Walton? You could do that for so many others.”
But Jasmine shook her head ever so slightly, willing Jenny to recognize how personal this felt. Jenny let her shoulders slump, then rolled up her newspaper and went to the door. Right beforeshe opened it, there was a wild thumping of feet on the stairs. Alyssa and Jade were coming up to find them because they said, “We have an idea!”
An hour later, Jasmine, Jenny, Chase, Alyssa, and Jade were on the beach with ice cream cones, watching as the orange sun dripped into the ocean. Jasmine still felt vaguely irate about Jenny calling Oriana Coleman, but she was putting on a decent show in front of her grandchildren, as she didn’t want them to see any more strife in their family. They sat on a long, blue blanket with their feet in the warm sand and chatted about everything from Chase’s girlfriend to Jasmine’s paintings to Jade’s belief that she was going to fail Algebra II.
“You’re not going to fail,” Alyssa shot back, her tongue vaguely pink from her ice cream. “You’re always so dramatic.”
Jasmine stifled a giggle. It was ripe to hear one teenage girl tell another how dramatic she was. How could they gauge who was more dramatic than the other?
A married couple, probably from the mainland, moseyed out in front of Jasmine’s family, speaking in Southern-twang accents about something Jasmine couldn’t make out. At first, she dismissed it. But as Alyssa, Jade, and Jenny quieted, narrowing their eyes to listen harder, Jasmine realized that the married couple was bickering about the wife’s career.
“I thought that was our plan from the beginning,” the husband stammered. “When we met, you said you wanted a kid more than anything.”
“I don’t remember it like that,” his wife returned, sorrow dripping from her voice. “I remember telling you I wanted to graduate more than anything. I remember telling you that I hadmy eye on my dream job. Again, that dream job is this very dream job, the one they’re offering me at Samson. I can’t turn my back on it.”
Her husband’s eyes glinted with the reds and oranges of the sunset. He looked like he wanted to rip into her. Maybe he was resisting his most sinister tone here in the “beauty” of Hawaii. Maybe he was afraid of what Jasmine and her family would think.
“You need to ask yourself what’s more important to you,” he said under his breath, barely loud enough for Jasmine to hear. “When you’re a little old lady, decades from now, what will make you happier?”
His wife tried to interrupt, to state what she really needed, but he interrupted her. “You’re going to look back at your life and remember being a mother. You’re going to recognize being a mother as the single greatest thing you've done in your life. You won’t remember some silly job you either took or didn’t. You might take the job at Samson and decide you hate it! And then what?”
“And then we’ll have a baby after that!” his wife cried, her hands in fists.
