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“I need a space to draft a new piece. Not sure how long I’ll be staying—maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe the summer—but once the piece is done, whether I complete it here or not, I’ll donate it to Stanford to do with as you like. Put it in your collection, sell it, burn it.”
The vice president for the arts at the university accepted my proposal with gratitude and gave me full access to a space that’s even nicer than my studio back in Texas.
I’m still in the sketching stage of this new piece, a series of sculptures based on da Vinci’sVetruvian Man. Spending my days sketching variations of Eric and aVetruvian Woman—not me, to be clear—eases the hole I feel from his absence.
My nights have been filled with distractions from Sammy and their friends since I’ve been staying at their place. It’s nice to be immersed in that youthful energy of opportunity and exploration where the only wrong decision is one made without love and respect. They’ve landed in a safe space and built a community that loves them for who they are. There’s not much more I can hope for as a mom.
I cradle my custom Fabergé egg and spend a moment setting an intention, as Eric had instructed me to do before I opened it for the first time. Like all good eggs, it’s filled with magic and potential. But, unlike every other egg made in this style, the contents were not created by the artist (or the Kinder Surprise factory), but by Eric.
He’d written short, personal affirmations meant to make me smile or think or feel. A phrase that he thought would inspire a positive reaction, like a fortune cookie or Magic 8 Ball, but so much better.
I’ve pulled twenty-eight strips from the egg, one for every day sinceNestrogen’sopening night. They’re all pinned to the wall with my sketches so I can look at them as parts that create a whole. Everything about the messages bring me joy, from Eric’s careful handwriting to the ridiculous puns and mixed metaphors and heartfelt encouragement.
You can’t make an omelet without ruffling some feathers.
You can’t change the world without breaking some eggs.
Nestrogen + fertilizer = nestosterone.
“Before you open the egg, focus on a question you’d like to answer or an idea you’d like to tickle, then reach in and let the Universe give you the perfect message.”
It’s pretty woo-woo for a structural engineer, but Eric is nothing if not a man overflowing with surprises.
As I turn the egg, feeling the filament that’s wrapped around its exterior, my mind glimpses an image of Eric holding a baby. Instinctively, my belly contracts. I have a flash of panic before my rational brain reminds me that I’ve had a hysterectomy so if Eric has a baby in the future, it won’t be mine.
My relief last less than a second before it’s replaced with a punch of grief that some other woman will convince Eric that he actually does want to be a dad again in his forties.
I reach into the egg and my spirit is squashed—there are only two strips left and I’ve become addicted to the little hit of dopamine I get from cracking the wax seals and connecting to Eric’s mind. I carefully peel the closure apart and read my second to last message from the Universe.
“Make the personal political —> challenge outdated norms —> question your own assumptions —> make the personal personal again.”
Eric’s drawn a check mark above the first two items, underlined the third, and circled the last one. Below the circled text, in a much smaller font, he’s written “please” and added a heart.
I add his message to my wall and stand back to examine all of the sketches and notes, pondering what would make the personal personal again, because he’s right. My art is infused with the personal as political, with my beliefs and values, my mind, my spirit and my voice. But I’ve intentionally kept my heart and my broken bits out of my art, aside from the piece I made that Will Power rightly called autobiographical.
Twenty-one Paths.
It was an interactive installation built as a maze, like theChoose Your Own Adventurebooks I used to read to Sammy. Designed to be a traveling art piece, it could be installed in a high school gymnasium, for three years it travelled the United States and was incorporated into the grade ten Life Skills curriculum.
As I stare at the wall of Eric-inspired sketches and me-inspired words, I realize that I’ve spent my life trapped in that maze I created when I was twenty-eight and still reeling from all the betrayals that shattered my world when I was twenty-one.
It was created for young people to help them see choices that might otherwise be hidden to them. And I didn’t include space on any of those paths for another person since I believed, at the time, that all paths were safest if traveled alone. That’s how I designed not only the installation, but my entire life.
The implication hits me as ridiculously obvious, now that I see it. The realization that unless I forge a new set of paths I will never find my way out of the maze, knocks the wind out me, like a crow flying into a window at full speed.
My knees go weak. I know exactly what I have to do.
17
ERIC
Thack,thack, thack, thack, thack.
The sound of the scaffold rolling across the lobby pulls my attention from my sketch. I check the time. It’s only five-twenty.
I have plans for dinner with Colt and assume he’s early so I don’t get up from my desk. He can come up and wait. I’m in the zone, working on a new project, something personal that’s stretching my skills and reminding me of what I used to love about my work.
“Got room in this nest for a dodo?”
