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Was there once a time when I thought of her as pliable? Maybe even weak? What a fool I was to think that.
What a fool I was to want it.
57
DMITRI
The smell of oil paints and turpentine assault my nostrils as I walk into her art studio for the first time in years.
It feels like a time capsule, pulling me back into a past where she’s still alive, singing in the doorless bathroom off to the side as she rinses her brushes clean under the faucet. If I concentrate hard enough, I can picture her standing there in her blue overalls and her white apron, stained with every color on her palette.
“Came to watch me paint, baby?”
“It’s my favorite thing to do,” I whisper to the empty room.
I imagine Elena walking across to the room to her easel. She always had it set up by the window, next to the stained wood table that I used to refer to as a disaster site. It’s covered in gunk and paint and scrapes, years’ worth of layers.
“Don’t be cruel about my table. I like that it’s ugly.”
I chuckle sadly and wander over to it. Stray sheets of paper litter the surface, all scarred with the half-abandoned pencil sketches of her next great idea. Birds on a power line; waves breaking against a barnacle-clad rock; a dancer in flight, one leg kicked up, hands high over her head, a haunted look of bittersweet nostalgia on her face.
The pages have turned sallow, curling in at the edges. When I pick up one sketch, the paper feels like it’s moments away from disintegrating in my hand. “You were so damn talented.”
“You’re biased.”
“Not true. Your paintings made me feel things.”
“Then why did you take them all down?”
I glance to the side wall, where dozens of her paintings sit propped up with their backs facing out, so all I can see is wood frames and the ragged edges of unpainted canvas.
“Because they made me feel too much,” I admit.
A draft passes through the door, kicking up the acrid tang of acrylic and sawdust. I used to bury my nose in her hair at the end of the day and breathe that in. On her, the scent was beautiful. Now, it just makes me wrinkle my nose and wave it away.
“I created these paintings for you, you know. Everything I did, everything I was, was for you.”
Moonlight spills across her empty canvases, casting dots of bright white that dance across the blank surfaces. If I squint, I can almost see her ghost sitting in front of me, paintbrush poised with the tip of the handle pressed against her lips as she thought.
“I know. And I couldn’t do the one thing that I promised you I would do. I couldn’t keep you safe.”
She half-turns to me, enough to illuminate her profile in the moonbeam. That little cleft in her chin—I haven’t thought about it in so long.
“You should have learned by now, Dmitri: don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“I was so sure I could do it. Even after I held you there, frozen and lifeless, I was sure I could bring you back through sheer force of will.”
“You held me, yes. But you never cried for me. Not once.”
“What would tears have changed?”
“Nothing. Except for the wall around your heart. Except for the dam you locked your grief behind.”
“Some things are too painful to feel.”
“Is that why you’re so drawn to her? You see in her all the pain you’ve refused to let yourself process?”
I pluck up one of her sketches and move to the window. “She wears her heart on her sleeve and she doesn’t apologize for it.”
