He washed both bowls and turned off the kitchen light.
The house was quiet. His house was always quiet. But tonight the quiet had her in it—the place on the couch where she’d sat, the mug she’d drunk from, the smell of his mother’s chicken still in the room.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sam was already on the phone when Bea came into the kitchen.
It was the third morning. Stella had gone for her walk at six-thirty—the text on Bea’s phone said back by ten, don’t eat all the cardamom rolls—and Sam was leaning against the counter in her cardigan with the phone pressed to her ear, talking to someone in the easy, familiar voice she used with people she’d known for a long time.
“Thursday’s perfect,” Sam said. “She’s been studying your glazes in reproductions and I think she might actually cry when she sees the real thing.” She listened. Laughed. “I know. I’ll bring coffee. The good kind, not the gas station kind.” She hung up and turned to Bea, who was standing in the doorway with her hair uncombed and one sock on.
“That was Carmen Sandoval,” Sam said. “She poured a second mug of coffee and set it on the counter for Bea. “She said come by Thursday. She wants to meet you.”
“Thursday is tomorrow.”
Sam smiled. “She said she’d have the studio open.”
Bea steadied herself on the doorframe. Her hand went to her mouth and stayed there for a second, pressing against her lips,and her eyes filled before she could stop them. Her body had understood before she had.
She picked up the coffee and drank half of it black without noticing—no cream, no sugar, nothing she usually added—because tomorrow she was going to be in Carmen Sandoval’s studio.
Carmen’s studio was at the end of a gravel road on a mesa above town. Sam drove them up in the Subaru—Bea in the front, Stella in the back with her bag. The gas gauge sat where it always sat, just above the line. Sam was telling Bea about the first time she’d seen Carmen’s red rock series—the one in the Santa Fe gallery, the one that made her pull the car over and go inside. Bea was turned in her seat asking questions, and Sam was answering with her hands off the wheel more than Bea would have liked, describing the size of the canvases and the way the glazes caught the gallery light. In the back, Stella had her camera in her lap and her eyes on the formations.
The road turned from pavement to gravel to dirt, and the canyon walls got closer and redder and taller until they were driving between them.
The studio was a converted adobe barn with high windows on the north side and the red rocks filling the view on every other side. Wind chimes hung on a hook by the door. A pair of boots sat on the step, covered in red dust.
When Bea got out of the car, Sam wrapped her arm around her and whooshed her toward the entrance. Carmen met them at the door. She was small, maybe sixty, with gray-streaked dark hair pulled back and paint on both hands that she didn’t apologize for. She hugged Sam—brief, no ceremony.
“And this must be Bea,” Carmen said, taking her hand. “Sam tells me you’re chasing light.”
“I’m trying,” Bea said.
“Good. Don’t stop trying.” Carmen squeezed her hand once and stepped back. “Come in.”
The studio smelled like linseed oil and turpentine and the dry warm air of the adobe itself, baked into the walls by decades of desert sun.
Sam grabbed Bea’s hand and led her inside, following Carmen. Bea glanced back once. Stella had stopped just inside the entrance, settling onto a bench by the door.
Then the far wall hit Bea and she forgot about everything else.
Three paintings—the red rocks, the canyon light. But they weren’t landscapes the way other people painted landscapes. Carmen was painting with glazes so thin the linen showed through underneath, layer after layer of color that looked like nothing from across the room and like everything when you got close. She wasn’t painting the rocks. She was painting the light on them. The light itself.
Bea walked toward the far wall with Sam on one side and Carmen on the other and the room behind her fell away.
By the time she was three feet from the middle painting, the underglazes were coming through the upper ones, the linen visible in places, the surface catching the studio light and shifting depending on where she stood. In reproductions this looked like color fields. In person it was alive. It breathed. The reds weren’t red—they were six reds layered so thin they became something that didn’t have a name, something between rust and blood and the light outside the studio windows right now. Bea’s fingers itched. She wanted to touch the surface, wanted to feel the layers under her hand, wanted to understand with her skin what her eyes were trying to tell her brain.
She stood in front of it and did not say anything for a long time.
“You see it,” Sam said.
“Yeah.”
“Took me about that long the first time too.”
“She’s painting light,” Bea said quietly. “How does she get the linen to do that?”
“Ask her,” Sam said. “She’ll tell you. Carmen’s generous that way.”
