The room is small and octagonal, part of the turret of the Victorian house. Heavy velvet curtains cloak it in darkness until Win walks toward a window and yanks it open. Dust swirls in the stale air like magic. She goes to the other two windows and pulls back their drapes as well, and light fills the bowl of the room.
The only furniture is a stool and a squat table spattered with paint. An empty easel.
Lining the hitched walls are dozens of canvases, stacked and balanced. Some face away, with a handprint of color smudged onto the wood stretchers offering a backward glance. Others boldly stare me in the eye.
I crouch down to examine one painting. It features a brown boy with an explosive halo of white hair, holding a dandelion with a matching crown. The technique makes me think of the Impressionists we saw at the MFA—slurry, drugged, color hinting at an object but no defined edges. Win’s lines are wavy and rippled and in some places the paint is caked thick enough to stand away from the canvas. It reminds me of the way the world looks when you sink to the bottom of a pool and try to find the sun. To really see this picture, you can’t be close to it. You have to step away and let your mind fill in the rest.
It isn’t just a painting of Arlo. It is a picture of a wish, the moment before you make it. The moment before you risk being disappointed.
I sort through the canvases, seeing more pictures of this boy—clearly her favorite subject—but also a study of hands that might belong to Felix and a landscape that looks like Maine. I’m filled with grief—not just for Win’s loss of Arlo, but for the forfeit of her art. For all these beautiful moments of a life, which are rotting away in a locked room.
“I would love to bring some of these downstairs,” I say.
“I wouldn’t,” Win replies, and that’s that.
She brushes her hand over a palette, her thumbnail picking at a splotch of black that looks like an eye passing judgment. “Did you know that the origin of art is a love story?” she asks. “Pliny the Elder says that the daughter of Butades was upset her boyfriend was leaving town, so she traced the outline of his silhouette on a wall while he slept, and that was the first line drawing. The thing is, when she drew him, he was already gone. You can’t look at your subject and at what you’re drawing at the same time. She was only sketching his shadow.” Win looks at me. “Art isn’t what you see. It’s what you remember.”
She sinks down to the floor, touching her fingers to one of the paintings. Arlo is older in this one, floating in an inner tube at the horizon, as if he could sail off the edge of the world.
“I want the blanket from Arlo’s bed with me when I die,” Win says.
“I’ll make sure you have it,” I promise.
I make a mental note to ask Felix where to find the blanket. While Win steeps in her memories, I riffle through a stack of canvases on the other side of the room.
One looks nothing like the others.
For one thing, it’s classically rendered, a nude. It’s so real that I can see the indentation of the teeth where they bite into the lower lip; I can feel the heat of the sun pressing its cheek to the window in the far corner of the piece. One hand is flung across the subject’s eyes, the other moves between her own legs. The pose reminds me of Manet’sOlympia,but with such excruciating detail that it may as well be a photograph. The artist’s rendering is so accurate that I can hear the hitch in the woman’s breath.
It is Win. Back when she had hips and breasts instead of hollows and angles; back when she was whole and healthy and in love. In spite of what she has just told me, I can almost feel the tickle of the brush on her skin as the artist brought her to life, and not just her memory.
“Who painted this?” I ask.
For a moment, Win doesn’t answer. She gets to her feet and pulls the canvas out of my hands. Her face flushes. “That shouldn’t be here.” She turns it away from sight, jamming it into the back of a stack of art.
My watch vibrates against my wrist; an alarm I’ve set. “It’s time for your medicine,” I tell Win, and she looks so relieved that I feel guilty. She locks the door behind us, and instead of slipping the key back into the desk, she puts it inside her bra.
It isn’t until after I bring her the dose of medication that Felix measured out and left in the kitchen that Win speaks again. “Do you think Arlo will be…wherever I’m going?”
“I don’t know,” I admit.
“I’d like that. Seeing everyone I’ve lost.”
It isn’t until much later that I consider the word she used.Lost.
Someone does not have to die for you to miss them.
—
WE ARE WATCHINGa terrible Hallmark movie when the CBD gummies finally kick in, and Win drifts off to sleep. I sit with her for a while until I hear Felix’s car pull into the driveway. I watch him for a moment from the front door: checking his rearview mirror, putting on his parking brake, collecting his belongings from the passenger seat. I wonder what it would be like to be cared for by someone whose profession was all about safety.
When he sees me waiting, he walks faster. “Is everything okay?”
“Fine.” Well, as fine as it can be when your wife is dying. “She’s sleeping.”
His shoulders relax as he realizes that he is not about to hear the news he dreads most. “Oh. Oh, good.”
I follow him into the kitchen and give him a quick rundown of the medications Win has taken, of her food intake and her urinary and bowel movements. This is the caregiver passing of the baton. “Win showed me her paintings today,” I say.
