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Before Ella and Will fell asleep, they sang a song together, one they’d been working on that they planned to perform as the closing act at the Nantucket Music Festival in a few weeks. Just as always when they sang together, Ella felt as though her soul left her body and floated somewhere above them; like her limbs were water, and she was no longer slightly worn and weary in her forties. It was as though time stopped.
As Ella and Will cuddled next to one another, waiting for sleep, Ella thought again of Aurora, of that voice that had shaken her core when she’d first heard it.
“Maybe Aurora would like to perform in the music festival,” Ella suggested sleepily.
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“Maybe I will,” Ella said as Will’s breathing became deeper, louder, and he left her alone in the dark, gazing at the stars through the window.
ChapterFive
Aurora awoke on her first morning at The Copperfield House residency in a fresh and clean bed glowing with the light from the sun. For sleep, Aurora had donned a pair of shorts and a big t-shirt, one she’d taken from one of her mother’s boyfriends before her mother had had to stop dating— and it read: “Detroit Pistons” on the front, although Aurora and her mother had never lived in Detroit. They’d lived just about everywhere else, it seemed like. Places like Nashville, Pittsburgh, Austin, and Miami.
A mirror in the bedroom showed Aurora to be slightly rough around the edges from her trip— her makeup still caked on her face and smudged around her eyes and her hair like a tumbleweed. Because she hadn’t had a chance to in two or three days, she stepped into the shower in the bathroom she shared with the other two women of the residency, letting the warm water cascade down her as she washed her hair and shaved her legs, feeling as though all the chaos from the hard trip to Nantucket ran down the drain. She was here. She could breathe again.
Aurora made her way into the kitchen with wet hair, wearing a long maroon dress, then made herself a coffee, listening to the house shift and creak in the morning winds. Just then, a woman a little bit older than her burst into the kitchen, smiling excitedly. “Are you Aurora?”
“I am.” Aurora raised her mug of coffee, sipped it, then said, “I’m sorry I missed everything last night.”
The woman rolled her eyes jokingly and said, “I’m just jealous you don’t have a hangover like the rest of us. Bernard made us some stiff cocktails.” She smiled, then added, “I’m Barbie, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you. What are you here to work on?”
“I’m a writer,” Barbie explained, just as two more sets of feet thumped down the hallway to join them— two men, one in his forties and another in his thirties. They introduced themselves as Tom and Andy, an experimental musician and an experimental filmmaker, respectively. Already, they’d begun to talk about working on a project together while there, which struck Aurora as wonderful yet odd. It was very rare for her to make friends so easily. Working with others was even more difficult than that.
“And you?” Barbie asked as she poured herself a mug of coffee.
“You’re music, too?” Tom guessed.
“Music and painting,” Aurora said. “I really, really wanted to be accepted, so I applied with both.”
“Amazing,” Barbie said, nodding. “But it’s only a month! How will you make time for two different projects?”
Aurora considered this, remembering that her days had once been set aside exclusively for caring for her mother. She’d hardly had a moment of time for herself. Imagining entire twenty-four-hour periods for her art and music was exhilarating and almost difficult to believe.
“I’m going to paint today,” Aurora said. “Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll do music.”
“She’ll make it up as she goes along,” Tom said. “I like the spirit.”
Aurora set herself up in the painting studio, which the Copperfields had supplied with sketchpads, canvases, oil and acrylic paints, and several random objects, presumably so that their artists could practice drawing or painting by setting up a still life. Aurora had never worked well with still life drawing, as she’d felt fruits and jars and plants were boring. Art teachers in the past had scolded her for this, telling her that if she couldn’t draw an apple, she couldn’t count herself as an artist.
Aurora wasn’t one to waste time with sketches. She supposed this made her arrogant, in a way. She set up a canvas on an easel, then prepared her oil paints, her mind whirring with images of her mother. All throughout her journey to Nantucket, she’d burned with memories of her, thinking of what she’d told her over the years and how that might have affected her emotionally. Still, Aurora didn’t want to blame her mother for how she’d behaved. Aurora’s grief was still paramount, something she wore over her shoulders like a cloak.
“Knock, knock.”
Aurora turned to find the older woman from last night in the doorway, wearing a beautiful apron and a lavender button-down dress. Her silver hair was regal, glowing in the light, and she was trim and intelligent-looking, proof that age was just a number.
“Mrs. Copperfield, hello,” Aurora said, jumping to her feet.
Greta waved her hand. “You don’t have to stand for me. And please, call me Greta.”
Aurora sat back down nervously as Greta joined her, eyes on the partially blank canvas upon which Aurora had smeared several rounds of black. She hardly remembered doing it now.What was her goal with the piece?She wasn’t sure.
“I like to just jump into a piece,” Aurora explained timidly, worried that Greta would pick at her process.
“I used to do the same,” Greta said. “I hated humming and hawing about what I was going to do next. I feel that art has to be instinctual, in a way.”
Aurora had never heard her own beliefs echoed so precisely. “I don’t always know what I’m going to put on the canvas. But the surprise is part of why I like painting in the first place.”
