We managed to avoid the reporters on our way into the house, and after we’d had a lunch of ham salad sandwiches—I was taking Jake’s advice about eating healthily—I sucked in a deep breath and opened the garage door.
There was a reason why our car was always parked outside the house on the drive. It wasn’t that we didn’t use the garage, it was that the car wouldn’t fit. Rob was right about the house being absent of colour, and that was because all the colour had been left in the garage. This was where we created. This was our artistic home.
I flicked on the switch and it all came to life.
“It’s okay, Aiden, you can come in. It’s all safe.” I wanted to open the front to the garage to let in the sunlight, but I was all too aware of the reporters still hanging around our house. We had to make do with the light from the kitchen doorway. “I want to show you something.”
The walls were lined with canvasses. Most of the paintings were mine, created after the flood and spanning up to a few years ago when I finally let go and accepted Aiden’s ‘death’. After a deep breath, I held Aiden’s hand and walked him around the garage. It was strange to hold his hand now. It was so much bigger than the hand I’d held ten years ago. Though he appeared so much younger than the young men at school, I had to remember that he was a teenager now. He was almost an adult.
“This is you and me,” I said, pointing to a portrait of a young girl with big eyes holding a tiny baby in her arms. “I was scared when you arrived, but I loved you so much that it didn’t matter. This is you in your Superman cape.” I grinned. I’d painted it from memory six months after Aiden’s disappearance. There was something painful in the reds and the aggressive brush strokes, but I’d captured Aiden’s cheeky face perfectly. Then, I moved onto another portrait and the smile faded. “This is a difficult one. I was in a bad place back then. I missed you so much that I didn’t know what to do with myself. I felt useless.” It was a zoomed in portrait of my own face. I was snarling. My eyes were sunken. My skin was red and patchy. There were dark, bruised marks above my cheekbones. This was from a year after the flood. I was angry.
I squeezed Aiden’s hand and moved on. At least he was getting used to me touching him. Slow steps. The next series of paintings were all the same. “You see these?” I pointed to each one in turn. “These are the birthday cakes I made for you every year. I never forgot. The third of April. This was the first year. I made you a Superbatironman cake. See? He had a cape, an iron suit, and bat ears. You would have loved it. It was sunny that year. Then, this one was a winged Ferrari. You always said you wanted a flying car for every birthday. Then I made you a dragon cake, just like Walnut. It was a walnut cake, too, with vanilla buttercream.” I cleared my throat, forcing away the emotion. “Do you see what I was trying to do? I painted my feelings out. That was what I did when I lost you. I painted all of these.” My eyes trailed along the wall of paintings, reaching the very last one. The one that had been torn all down one side. I didn’t look at that one for very long. “It’s okay if you want to paint out your feelings, too. I’m going to set up a canvas for you. There are some paints here. I want you to paint like you used to when you were little.”
I moved an easel into the centre of the garage and lowered it to Aiden’s height, then pulled across a small table to set beside it, and put a chair in front. Then I brought in jam jars of water and arranged all the paints and paintbrushes next to the water.
Part of me itched to join him, and I wondered whether it would help him start, to see someone else working with him. But in the end, I decided this was all about Aiden. He deserved to be left alone. So once I had set him up, I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. When I leaned my head around the door into the garage, Aiden was leaning over the canvass, moving his paintbrush in an arc. I smiled, and took a sip of my tea.
* * *
There weretimes I believed Aiden almost wanted to talk to me, and after he finished his painting was one of them. He walked up to the kitchen door and stood there in the space where the kitchen and garage connected.
“Have you finished?” I asked.
This time I waited. I sensed that he wanted to speak. He wanted to tell me that he was done. He was proud, I realised. Instead, all I got was the slightest of nods, almost imperceptible. That was enough to get my heart soaring. Progress, at last.
I followed him into the garage where he proudly displayed another terrifying piece of art, and I tried my best to not seem horrified by it. This time he’d painted in blues and greens. They’d been mixed together into a spiral, which narrowed to a dark point in the centre. It reminded me of the tunnels in my nightmares.
“It’s beautiful, sweetheart,” I said.
Later that afternoon, while Jake was still at the school—he’d taken time off for the first few days as we’d dealt with the issues with the reporters, but I could tell he was itching to go back, so I let him—I took Aiden to see his dad and grandma, not just to get Aiden out of the house, but also to get away from Denise, who came to our house every day with a forced smile that made me itch.
In the living room of the B&B, Rob spread the newspapers across the table. Aiden was listening to Sonya read himThe Hobbit.
“Look at what those scum have been saying.” Rob indicated the newspapers.
“I don’t really want to, Rob. I’ve been trying to keep all this away from Aiden, to be honest. I don’t think it’ll do him any good.” Bump kicked on my bladder and I shifted my weight, stroking the top of my stomach.
“I’m not going to show him, Em. What kind of a bloke do you think I am?”
“Okay, well, he’s only in the other room.”
Rob fixed me with his intense, brown eyes. “I’m aware. I just wanted to show you.”
I got it. Rob was a talker. When something bothered him he needed to talk it out. He needed to share the burden with another person. I was always the opposite. I kept things buried inside until they threatened to burst out of me. I tried not to think about the time I’d allowed everything to erupt out of me. It had only happened once in my life, and it hadn’t been a pretty sight.
“Look, there’s that photo of me. ‘Ex-officer Robert Hartley,’ they’re calling me. I’m not an ex-officer. They want to make it sound like I’ve lost my job. While you’re some sort of saint this time around. They all feel sorry for you.”
“Oh, I don’t care, Rob.”
“And look at this, they’ve even printed a copy of the thing Aiden drew in the hospital.”
I snatched the newspaper from his hand. “What? How did they get that?”
“Probably one of those nurses. I bet they sold it for hundreds. People’ll do anything to earn a quick buck, won’t they? God, I need a drink. They think he’s a nutter. They’re calling our son a nutter. And have you seen what they’re writing about Jake?”
Even though I was still staring at the full-page print of Aiden’s disturbing artwork from the hospital, I still noticed the slight change in Rob’s tone. It was quieter. Less agitated. It made me wonder if this was what he had wanted to show me all along.
“What are they writing about Jake?”
