“Good. Your birthday is coming up, and there are still beach days to enjoy. Let’s make the most of it.”
I smile. Maddy’s reminders are a helpful distraction from the occasional arrythmias that have me scrambling for a breath a couple times a week. I tap at my watch to check its battery level.
“You’re not sick of me yet?” I ask.
“Definitely not. I only wish you were better at sharing the details of what’s going down with Luke. Like how good of a kisser is he, really?” she asks.
I roll my eyes. “How’s Sienna?” I ask in return.
“Top-notch kisser,” Maddy says, beaming. “So, Luke?”
I zip my lips and toss the fake key out the window.
“That bad, huh?” Maddy shakes her head, and I make a face to show her just how wrong she is. “God, you’re a tease!” Maddy shouts, laughing, cranking her radio up for the end of the song as we pull up in front of Earl’s Sandwich Shop.
After lunch, Maddy drives me back to camp. I’m surprised to find the big garage door to the studio closed—it’s never closed.
“I’ll get it!” Maddy steps forward and heaves open the door. The kids burst out at me, shouting “Surprise,” their little limbs fighting toward me all at once. Iris waves from the back of theroom, and I do a double take. As I field a hug from each of my students, I finally manage to put together that they’ve made me a gift.
“It was Miss Iris’s idea,” Rose tells me. “Do you like it?”
I’m holding a thick paste paper book full of their drawings and thank-you letters. I hug it to my chest even though part of it is still a little sticky.
“I love it,” I say. “I have something for each of you too.”
Once I’ve given the rocks out to each kid, it’s time for free art, which Iris and I co-monitor. Then it’s pickup, and the studio is empty and quiet. I walk around, tidying here and there and taking in the smell of crusty paint and old clay. I’m going to miss coming here.
Iris asks if I’d like to come over for dinner as a thank-you for filling in.
“Bring your pieces. And I want to tell you all about Paris.”
I text my parents and Luke to let them know, and ride with Iris to her place.
She lives in one of the tiny one-bedroom cottages close to Northport Beach, but she’s expanded it by adding a personal studio off the kitchen. She even has a fancy air filtration system so she can work in the winter when it’s too cold to open the windows. The front of the house is practically drowning in wildflowers, and she’s got a little garden where tomatoes and squash are starting to come in. We go in the front door, and I kick my shoes off, following her through the tidy blue living room/dining room and out the back of the tiny kitchen to her studio.
“Wow.” I admire the pieces she’s been working on in Parisas she unpacks them. She has me help her set them up. She’ll be using them to apply to a couple gallery shows in the fall and winter. Iris is a fan of oils, which have that distinct tacky smell. Just like her pieces from the winter show I saw in February, these paintings are close-ups. Put together, though, they form one image of two people, one sitting, the other standing, staring out a window in a beautifully sparse bedroom. Each piece is a slice of their bodies in relationship to each other, all from different angles. I stop and stare at one of a hand hovering over a bare shoulder. The tension in it makes me shiver. The hesitation is heavy and worrying, which conflicts with the bright and colorful brushstrokes.
“It’s…” Iris waits. I know she wants to see what I’ll say before she tells me anything. “It’s like snapshots of their whole relationship over time,” I decide. “Here”—I point to where a hand grips an elbow, the other hand over it gently—“the person sitting needs comfort and is grateful the other is there. But here”—I point to the one that chilled me—“the second person is hesitating, like they might not be welcome. Like they’re fighting.”
“You have a good eye, Sera.” Iris is smiling. “That’s the goal. That one moment doesn’t just hold the present but the past and the future too.”
“Are they a couple?” I ask, turning to the next, a cheek pressed against a stomach in a thin blue dress. There’s an intimacy, but it doesn’t feel like love, like the way I feel pulled toward Luke even when he’s miles away.
Iris brings me a cup of tea and stands next to me, looking over her pieces. “Sisters,” she says quietly. She gestures to thegold velvet sofa across the room, and we sit. “Now, tell me about what I’ve missed.”
I tell her about the kids and their amazing creations. I fill her in about Luke a little, and she cheers. I blush and change the subject to our trip to Boston, and the painting Luke loved at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “He always did like a darker palette,” she says.
“I’ve been getting him to do a little more artwork, but he’s not very serious about it.”
Iris shrugs. “Art doesn’t have to be serious.”
I think about that for a minute, looking past her paintings to the waving grasses between the marshes outside the window. Everything has become serious in the last couple years for me. Art in particular. It was all I had left that made me feel like I still had control in my life. But I guess it’s silly to expect every minute of your life to be important.
“Those are very cool,” I say again, pointing at her paintings.
She smiles. “It was just such a treasure to go. I’m so grateful. And I’m so glad to see you enjoyed your time too. The kids really took to you. I was looking at some of their work. You did a great job. I’m so proud of you.”
“Thanks, Iris,” I say, smiling at her.
