He looks down at his lap and smiles.
“The two of you would go from tears to laughter just like that.”
He snaps, and an image of me sobbing on my teal comforter after my first boyfriend broke up with me fills my blurry vision. She came into my room dressed in black and told me there were tires to be slashed.
“I could never do what she did for you. But I knew how to push you. So when you finally emerged—that’s what I did,” he says with a shrug. “I was terrified that you’d fall back into that hole if I stopped pushing—stopped planning. And I was terrified I’d fall right in there with you. So I worked and helped you work. That kept us afloat.”
I can barely meet his gaze. The pain I see there behind his eyes is raw and real and unnerving. Some part of me needed to see that pain after she passed, to know that I wasn’t alone. Was he hiding that to protect me? I reach for my water to stop the hiccups, then realize it was my heart that hiccupped.
All this time—all the controlling and the hard love and the insane hours spent at work—it was all his way of keeping me from falling back into my depression while he was avoiding his own. Just like my way was filled with plans and checklists and tunnel vision. The tears come harder now, and he reaches across the table and places his hand on mine.
“Ava, I don’t care what you do for a living. I don’t even care where you are while you are doing it. If you aren’t happy, then you are wasting time,” he says, studying me. “And you know better than most how important time is.”
I nod. I know that fact so deeply that I feel it in every breath I take.
“I met her at the hospital,” he whispers. He’s staring at his water glass like he can see the past on the surface of the water. “I was the last thing she wanted, and she was the last thing I expected to find. I had just been brought on by St. Mary’s legal team and she was in her final round of chemo there when we ran into each other in the hospital lobby. We physically collided, me in my brand new suit and her in her head scarf with her romance novels, and God did she dislike me from the onset.”
He laughs and I lean forward, imagining every detail of the scene he’s painting for me. They’d always told me they met in a doctor’s office, but the edges of that half-truth were always blurry.
“She was too young for colon cancer. I can remember being in a state of suspended disbelief every time I found her during my lunch break during her treatment. She told me to go away the first three times, but I made her bet that if I could make her laugh during this awful experience, then I was worth keeping around. Even with that poison inside her she was stronger than anyone I’d ever met.”
He swallows hard and lets out a long breath.
“She stopped telling me to go away by my fourth visit, but she told me that letting me stay was the most selfish thing she’d ever do,” he says. “We were married a year later. And you came shortly after that. You were a miracle in so many ways, Ava. She wasn’t supposed to be able to have children.”
The tears are falling into what’s left of my tiramisu, but I’m holding onto my smile with everything I’ve got. This is the most he’s spoken of her since she passed.
“There’s no right way to go through what we went through,” he says, squeezing my hand. “Your mother—” His chest rises as thecorner of his mouth pulls upward. “She was a force. Watching her lose that battle—”
He shakes his head.
“No words can describe what it’s like to sit by while your soulmate wastes away. But I would gladly have taken that suffering and loss over and over for the years we had together. She gave me a trillion happy moments. She gave me you,” he says softly.
I wipe at my face with my napkin while I squeeze his hand. I want to tell him I love him. Tell him I’m grateful for all of his support, no matter how misguided. But I can’t get words out.
“When you find someone like that,” he says, looking over my head into another time, “you don’t let it go.”
He takes a sip of his water and meets my eyes, then adds, “You fight for it. No matter what.”
The waitress appears in my blurry periphery and puts the bill down on the table. My father nods at her but doesn’t let go of my hand.
The tears don’t stop. They just keep coming from whatever watershed of pain I’d been keeping dammed up these last few weeks. But these tears aren’t for my father. They aren’t even for my mother. God knows I cried for her.
These tears are for the one I didn’t fight for.
SESSANTADUE
Ava
I’ve been in this storage container for well over three hours, and there are still dozens of paintings to unwrap. Every time I move from the swivel chair that the man at the front desk rolled out to me when he saw me sitting crisscross applesauce on the cement, a small tornado of dust swirls in the air above me in the glow of the single light bulb. The musky scent of things left too long in darkness still pervades the space despite the fact that I have the red garage door pulled all the way up on its track to let in as much natural light as I can. Every time my fingers peel back the edges of the butcher paper to reveal my mother’s work, a mixture of grief, guilt, and awe sweep over me, and I force myself to remember that we all heal at different times. It might have been a crime to keep these paintings locked up, but now I’m ready to get them out into the light.
I glance at the first row leaning to my left. This pile is for my dad. Sweeping landscapes of the places they traveled together,portraits of me and him that I can remember complaining about and squirming away from while she laughed at my impatience, and beautiful still moments of our family home, painted in a way that makes me think she dipped her brush in love and caressed the canvas while she created them. There isn’t a question that they belong with him.
Pile two is for Urbino and Alessandro. This pile might be the most difficult for me to part with, but there are so many paintings filled with the essence of Italy that it feels wrong for them to exist anywhere else. Each person who touched her life—and my life—will receive one, and this feels like the least I can do after they opened their arms to me without hesitation. My heart aches with every painting I stack atop this pile, but when I unwrap the piece that I know immediately belongs to James, that ache cascades out of my heart and into my chest like rapids after a dam release.
It’s the perfect complement to the painting of Urbino that hangs in his kitchen. The point of view is identical, the angles exactly the same, but where the sky was an eggplant-colored bruise, now it bursts with the brightest cerulean blue. And where the ground was shrouded in snow and the stones looked gray rising from it, now an emerald green covers every inch of the earth and the stone is the softest pink, the same color I touched my first time in town when I ran my hand along that archway.Urbino Under Sun. I can see it hanging directly across from his Nonna’s counterpart in his apartment, that space that made me feel like I was drowning in him.
I run my finger over the soft brushstrokes and imagine that James can feel my fingers wherever he is, then I place it in the Italy stack and shove all that pain back into its bottle and pick up the next painting.
