“Then your teacher was very bad at his job. It’s not true. No one is bad at art, art is what makes us human.” A gentle smile plays on his lips. Fascinated and scared at the same time, I watch as he squeezes swirls of different coloured paints onto a fresh palette and presents me with a bouquet of brushes. “You have designed some of the most advanced technology in the world. That all began with an idea and having the courage to try. So just try, why not?”
He raises one dark eyebrow in challenge. He knows I can’t back out, dammit.
Taking the canvas, I sit down crossed-legged and rest it on the grass, looking at the scene before me: the beautiful symmetry of the castle, the bottomless blue sky, the rich green grass. It’s lovely, but that’s not what I’m feeling in this moment. It’s the deep longing for that delicate memory of my mum, and that almost faded sense of what it was like to be loved by her and to love her with all my heart that is wrapped all around me.
I’m not even really thinking or looking when I pick up a brush and dip it into the paint. I’m just feeling, and everything I’m feeling is finding its way onto the canvas somehow. The way the brush slides and catches is soothing, and how the colours sing and blend gives me a sense of satisfaction that I don’t think I’ve felt since the early days designing FreeThought.
So, when just thirty minutes later I put down my brush and see a canvas full of yellow spirals of many different shades, each one interlocking, I don’t really know how it got there, only that this is the best I can do to describe what it feels like to miss a woman I barely knew with all of my heart.
At some point during the last few minutes Forrest sat down on the grass next to me, watching silently over my shoulder. When I turn to look at him, I see tears in his eyes. His hand reaches for mine, and I let him take it.
“That’s beautiful.” His voice is almost a whisper.
“It is?” I ask him. The sensation of a single tear tracking down my cheek makes its way to my jaw. Forrest catches it with the ball of his thumb.
“You know it is,” he says. “It’s moved you to tears too, see?”
Something so unexpected is happening here, and it has got nothing to do with art or even attraction, it’s something much deeper than that. Something between Forrest and me has made contact and joined. I’m not sure I understand what it is; it almost feels as if it has nothing to do with me or him. It’s just that in the last few minutes the world and everything in it changed, just a little, because now we really see one another.
“Tell me about it,” Forrest says, his eyes lingering on the horizon, and I know he feels the connection too.
“It’s about my mum,” I say, looking past my canvas and to the castle. “I don’t know much about her, but she was a bit of a wild spirit, I think, ran away from home when she was Megan’s age. Got pregnant with me when she wasn’t much older. I was taken into care when I was three. Mum died not long after.”
“God, Ava,” Forrest says.
“Susie, that was her name, she did her best, you know, and she loved me. But she had addiction problems, mental health problems. It was a struggle for her to stay alive every day, at least that’s what they told me years later. I don’t remember much but”—I look at my painting—“I remember that feeling.”
Forrest nods. “Maybe your head doesn’t remember everything, but your body does, and your heart. The good and the bad. Every minute you had with your mum is locked away in here.” He hovers his fingertips over where my heart is beating. “Art is a great way to access those feelings in a safe way.”
“I hardly knew her,” I say, pushing the feeling of longing for her way into the box I made for it when I was a child. “I’ve been alive a lot longer without her in my life than with her. And yet... I miss her.”
“It doesn’t matter how the connection you have to her is measured, whether it’s in years or seconds. It’s still real. That’s what love is, it’s a connection of souls.”
Our eyes meet, and this time neither of us looks away. Instead, I feel my torso moving a little closer to his, drawn in by something I don’t understand. Then I realise my hand is still in his. None of this is right, and yet it feels right. But what about Hal, Hal who is made just for me? Feeling disloyal, I gently pull my hand from his, shifting slightly to put a more comfortable distance between us.
“What’s yours?” I ask, before I understand myself exactly what I’m asking.
“Oh, it’s just the house,” he says, looking at his canvas. “Chocolate box art.”
“It’s not that, but that’s not what I mean. I mean what’s your memory? That feeling or memory that made you who you are? I think I see it in your expression sometimes, when you think no one is looking.”
Forrest drops his head, his hair falling over his eyes.
“Not sadness,” he says. “It’s not that, more gratitude. Gratitude for Gem, that I got to be there while she was alive in this world, and that my daughter is her daughter. I’ve grieved her, of course, part of me always will. But now my memory of her is one of such... gratitude.” He chuckles. “I’m an emotional man. River says I’m a hot mess, but I am a crier, I can’t help it. Movies, books, music, Megan’s poem. My Artie, I do all this for her. So that when she grows up there will still be a world made for people like her.”
“I get it,” I tell him. “I admit that when we first met, I did not get it. But then I didn’t realise how much we had... our disciplines... have in common. We both want a better world for Artie and her generation. So, yeah, I get it. I’m sorry about the nemesis thing.”
“Don’t be,” he says, smiling broadly. “You had your reasons.”
“Daddy!” Artie hollers from down the hill, her arms full of drawings. “I have great works of art to wow you with!”
“I hope she never loses that confidence,” I say, with a laugh.
“She won’t, not if her family has anything to do with it,” Forrest tells me, and Artie makes her way towards us, stopping everyfew steps to retrieve a stray piece of paper, dropping another in the process.
“Family is good,” I say. “Rani is my family, and I accidentally upset her this morning, and now I don’t know what to do about it.”
This confession startles me. I haven’t shared a problem with anyone but Rani and FreeThought in just about forever.
