This time he does look at me, brown eyes molten like honey and warm like the earth. Something stirs in my heart, like it did before on that bench outside Central Park. The thought that occurred to me in Washington Square Park. And I know what this could mean, but I don’t want to think it. There’s no place in my life right now for whatever this is. Even if, with him now being Muslim, I could let myself think about something like that.
But I do let myself say one thing. Just to see what it’ll do. “You know the first thing I thought of when I saw the color of your eyes was that I’d like to paint them.”
“Really?” he breathes.
I take a small bite from my cupcake to avoid answering. He lets it go but doesn’t stop staring at me like he’s counting every eyelash and freckle on my face.
“Are you going to tell your parents?” I ask, scratching my knee.
This sobers him up. “Not sure. Not now, though. They’re barely home, so springing this on them when the last proper conversation we had was which classes I’ll be taking this semester will give them a heart attack for sure.”
“Will you tell your bà ngo?i?”
He smiles, nodding. “Yes. She’s coming over during Christmas. I think I’ll tell her then.”
He inhales the last part of his cupcake, then says, “You have a sister, right?”
The familiar lump appears back in my throat, and I try to swallow through it. “Yeah. She, uh, she moved to Qatar last weekend.”
He sits up. “Oh.”
I stare at the gravel in front of me, feeling the heaviness of my phone in my pocket, where her messages live. Where she lives now.
“I’m sorry. I know what it feels like,” he says quietly.
I nod, biting my lip. “It’s hard living sometimes. I have all these emotions, all these feelings and thoughts and conversations I thought I’d have with Mama, and now she’s gone. Thoughts or conversations I wish I’d had earlier and there’s no place for them to go but inside me. They just wander about lost. Now Amal’s moved to another country, and she left me to deal with everything. And it’s justsolonely.” The cupcake sits like a stone in my stomach. “Those murals are a lifeline for me. A way for those feelings to go somewhere.”
Jamie turns toward me, crossing his legs. “When Bà Ngo?i first came here, she said she hated it. She felt she’d moved through universes and there was no way to go back home. Back then, she didn’t really know if the war in Vietnam would end. Or how it would end. If she’d ever see her family again. She had so many unspoken thoughts with nowhere for them to go either.” He clasps his hands, pressing his lips together. “Grandpa was… he was a good man for his time. But he didn’t get her. Not with the basic Vietnamese he learned. Not in the way his heart wasn’t a match for hers. She eventually found a way for those thoughts and stories and conversations to be told. She told them to the ancestors, to the sheep, to the sky, and to me. She found that closure in me when she taught me Vietnamese.” His features are softer than I’ve ever seen them before, and there’s a gnawing ache in his eyes.
My eyes prickle with unshed tears.
“I think there’s so much to see in this world,” he continues. “So many people to meet. I didn’t know you a year ago. And you didn’t have those murals. Did you ever think you would be here in October in a city that can’t stop talking about the murals you’re painting?”
I draw in a shaky breath. “No.”
The smile he has is full of serenity. “So imagine what more is out there for you. For the world. Maybe you’ll remember me saying this when you’re thirty.”
The words open up pockets of imagination in my mind. Likelooking through a telescope and glimpsing a possible distant future. And even though it’s hazy, blurred in and out of focus, I know it can be mine.
Hope is a fragile bird nesting in my ribs. I press my palms against my chest, praying it doesn’t fly away.
“Your paintings will sell for millions,” he says. “Do you ever think about that? The type of art you’d make?”
I nod, my gaze anywhere but at him.
It’s strange talking about the future when the past has wrapped itself around my arms and legs like twine. “Some time ago, when I could still see the colors, I came across this one post online of a destroyed house in Homs in Syria. Among the rubble, there was this painting with a broken frame. There was dust on the painting, but you could still see what it was supposed to be. It was the middle of the ocean, and it had every shade of blue. It was mesmerizing. I could see all the shades and how they merged with one another. It was alive. I think about the person who painted it because the talent is incredible. The post didn’t say who it was. Whoever did it must have passed away or left. But I imagine they lived in that house. Had a whole life and loved to paint.” I look up at the sky and can see the painting so clearly in my mind. “I’d like to recreate it. It’s strange to say, but it gave me hope. Like this painting persisted even with all the pain.”
“You should do it,” Jamie says instantly. “You should paint it.”
I smile. “Where doyousee yourself at thirty?”
He lets out a low whistle. “Still in Wisconsin with Bà Ngo?i. But I’ve been thinking about doing something big for the farm.”
“What do you have in mind?”
He looks shy. “I was thinking about what you said. Studying something that helps the farm. Agricultural science sounds interesting, and I think focusing on horticulture would elevate it.”
“Horticulture?”
