Until it wasn’t.
Marianna had been circling the room, stopping at each easel, offering her observations quietly. When she reached Harper, she stood there for a long moment, tilting her head.
“You’re thinking too much,” Marianna said.
“Well, I’m a thinker,” Harper said. “It’s what I do. It’s my primary function.”
“No, your primary function right now is to paint, not plan a painting. There’s a difference.” Marianna picked up a wide brush, dipped it in a warm orange color, and handed it to Harper. “Do something with this that you can’t take back.”
Harper stared at the brush, then at her canvas. Then at Marianna, who waited with patience.
Harper dragged the orange brush in a long, uncontrolled stroke across the center of her painting, right through all the geometric shapes. And somewhere in the middle of it, she made a sound that was either a gasp or a laugh.
“No,” Marianna said, “keep going.”
So Harper kept going. She added yellow and then red. She layered color over architecture until the sharp lines were visible underneath, but no longer the dominant part of the painting.
The painting was messy and imperfect, and it was probably the most interesting thing Harper had produced in a long time.
She stood in front of the painting with paint on her silk blouse that she had again worn to a painting class because she was Harper, and her expression was that of a woman who had just discovered something about herself that she didn’t quite understand.
“I ruined it,” she said.
“You started it,” Marianna said. “The ruining is where art begins.”
Claire looked at Harper’s painting and thought about Jordan’s workshop and the table he was building for her with reclaimed church wood. Harper was a woman being slowly, carefully taken apart and reassembled by a man with patient hands and a spare key that he’d kept for four years. The painting looked like what that probably felt like, structure giving way to warmth.
Nina painted a marsh scene, because of course she did. She painted it from the angle of the kitchen window on Edisto at sunrise, the view that David had fallen in love with, the view that she saw every morning when she made her one cup of coffee. She worked slowly, mixing the colors with the same patience she’d learned at Señora Morales’s stove. She didn’t paint David, she didn’t paint the boots by the door, or any of the other artifacts of his presence. She painted the view he loved in his honor. The painting was basically of David without David, and it was beautiful in the way loss sometimes is.
Marianna stopped at Nina’s easel and didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Who taught you that? Who taught you to see light like that?” she said.
“My husband. He used to photograph this view almost every morning. He said the light was different every day and it was never wrong.”
“He was correct,” Marianna said. “The light is never wrong.”
Nina painted for two hours without stopping. She barely spoke. She didn’t even look at anyone else’s canvas. She just stood there in front of her easel and moved the brush, and the marsh appeared inch by inch.
Finally, she stepped back and looked at the whole thing, pressed her hand over her mouth, and stood still.
Claire watched her from one easel away and recognized that expression. It was the same face Nina had made when she tasted the mole, the same face she’d made reading her letter at the grief retreat. It was a woman encountering something she had made, something that had come from within her, and finding that the outside version was true.
“It really looks like home,” Nina said.
“It is home,” Claire said.
Claire’s painting was the most time-consuming, and she initially thought it made the least sense, but she loved it. She began with a beautiful blue, and the waves transformed into something abstract - not water or any clear image - just layers of color: blue, green, and gold. A deep rose hue, almost the same as her fridge napkin, blended into the colors without strict boundaries, and the shapes were loose. If she tilted her head and squinted, she might see a woman, a porch overlooking water, or a doorway - but she might not see anything at all. Claire didn’t care. This realization was profound. She’d spent 27 years avoiding painting for fear it wouldn’t be good enough, yet now she stood before a messy, abstract canvas - something unlikely to be displayed in a gallery to impress anyone - but she didn’t care. This painting was for herself. It was the first piece she’d created in years that existed purely because she wanted it to.
Marianna came to her easel last. She stood behind Claire, looking at the painting for a long time. Claire had been through this before in college, so she braced herself for the critique, for some suggestion about her composition or color theory.
“This is brave,” Marianna said.
Claire blinked. “It’s actually just a big mess.”
“It’s abstract, and it’s honest. It came from somewhere real inside of you, and that is not a mess. That’s called art.” Marianna tilted her head. “How long since you’ve painted?”
“About twenty-seven years.”
