AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She remembered once standing with her mother on a street corner in Georgetown and watching a painter at work. Her mother let her watch for a long time, and as they were walking away, Lena remembered asking how come he used so much brown.
As a child, you were taught to see the world in geometric shapes an
d primary colors. It was as if the adults needed to equip you with more accomplishments. (“Lena already knows her colors!”) Then you had to spend the rest of your life unlearning them. That was life, as near as Lena could tell. Making everything simple for the first ten years, which in turn made everything way more complicated for the subsequent seventy.
And now her feelings about her father made a mask over his actual features. She had thought that her challenge would be to paint his anger, to confront it. But now she knew that wasn’t the challenging thing. The challenging thing was to see past it.
She stared at him without blinking until her eyeballs dried and her vision blurred. She wished she could turn her father upside down. Sometimes you could see things more truly when you forfeited your normal visual relationship with them. Sometimes your preexisting ideas were so powerful they clubbed the truth dead before you could realize it was there. Sometimes you had to let the truth catch you by surprise.
Lena looked away and closed her eyes. She opened them and looked back at her father’s face, but only for a second. It could catch you by surprise, or maybe, if you were bold, you could catch it.
She turned away, and then turned back for a little longer. She was seeing more now. She was holding on to something. She took a deep breath, carefully keeping herself in this other visual dimension. This place where she saw but didn’t feel.
Her hand was finally connecting charcoal to paper. She let it fly. She didn’t want to bog it down with thinking.
Her father’s face was no more to her than a topographical map. The mouth was a series of shapes, nothing more. The downturned eyes were shadings of darkness and light. She stayed there a good, long time. She was careful not to blink too hard or too long for fear that this new way of seeing would abandon her.
She wasn’t afraid of him anymore. The scared part of her was waiting out by the mouth of the cave; the rest of her had gone in.
She saw something in her father’s mouth. A little tick. Another tick, and then a sag.
She wasn’t scared anymore, but was he?
The trick of drawing was leaving your feelings out, giving them the brutal boot. The deeper trick of drawing was inviting them back in, making nice with them at exactly the right moment, after you were sure your eyes really were working. Fighting and making up.
And so her feelings were coming back in, but they were a different kind this time. They were guided by her eyes, rather than the other way around. Tentatively, she let them come. A good drawing was a record of your visual experience, but a beautiful drawing was a record of your feelings about that visual experience. You had to let them come back.
She saw her father’s fear, and it so surprised her, she could barely contemplate it. What was he afraid of?
She could imagine if she tried. He was afraid of her disobedience. He was afraid of her independence. He was afraid of her growing up and not being the kind of girl he could feel proud of—or the kind of girl Bapi would be proud of. He was afraid of being old and powerless. He was afraid she would see his vulnerability. But also, she suspected, he wanted her to see it.
She felt her fingers softening around the charcoal. Her lines got looser. She felt sad and moved by these things she saw in his face. She didn’t want to make it hard for him to love her. But at the same time, she couldn’t deny who she was to make it easy.
Her fingers were flying. The muscles in her father’s neck quivered slightly with the great effort of holding still for her. He was trying. He really was.
That moved her too.
After almost two hours she set him free. “Thank you,” she said earnestly.
He pretended he didn’t notice so much.
She held the drawing board facing out as she left, so he could peek at the results if he wanted to. He didn’t peek.
But later that night, when she was going to bed, she tiptoed past the kitchen, where she’d left her drawing of him propped on a chair. He stood alone in the quiet room. And even though she just saw his back, she knew he was looking.
Win offered to take the wheel so Carmen could work the phone. Half an hour into the drive they had to stop for gas. He bought two Cokes and a bag of Corn Nuts. Carmen had never had Corn Nuts before, and she loved them. They could barely hear each other over the crunching, so they found themselves shouting, which they both thought was incredibly funny once they realized it. The laughter made Carmen’s eyes start running again, and the salt made her lips burn.
She was tired and punchy and worried and also happy that they were driving toward David and doing everything they could.
By her calculation they had four hours to find David and get back to her mom. He was only an hour away now. It would work. It had to work. She felt confident that Tibby could keep her mom company for the waiting part, and David and Carmen would be there in time for the inducing part, when the real drama started.
Win was a good driver. He was confident and sharp about it, and yet effortless too. For some reason, the look of his hands on the wheel (at ten and two—Valia would have approved) struck her as masculine and even sexy.
Furthermore, he had an excellent profile. Not a Ryan Hennessey profile exactly—Win’s nose was a tiny bit crooked, and his upper lip went out a little farther than his bottom one. But on him, it worked. It was fun how you could get away with watching someone when they drove. He concentrated on the road, and she braved a full look at him.
They barely knew each other, and yet they always had a project together. It was the opposite of most of her romantic relationships, which were all form and no content. Carmen was infamous for writing out talking points to use with the boys she dated. She never searched for things to say to Win.
“You’re close to your mother, huh?” he asked her thoughtfully.
“Yes.” It was the Good Carmen answer instead of the Whole Carmen answer. “What about you?”
“I’m close to both my parents,” he said. “I’m the only one, so it gets intense sometimes.”
“Me too,” Carmen chimed in. Then she remembered. “Until today, I guess.”
“Pretty strange, becoming a sister at the age of…how old are you?”
“Seventeen,” Carmen said.
“Seventeen,” he echoed.
“Almost eighteen. And you?” she asked. These were questions they could have gotten out of the way on an awkward date two months ago, but somehow they hadn’t.
“Nineteen.”
“And yeah, it is strange. Stranger than I can say.”
“I had a sibling for a short while.” He tried to say it lightly and conversationally, but it didn’t come out that way.
“What do you mean?” Carmen wanted to know, but she didn’t want to demand anything. “I mean, if you want to tell me.”
“I had a little brother. He was born when I was five and he died just before I turned six.”
“Oh.” Carmen’s tears were so near the surface these days, even a fourteen-year-old tragedy concerning a person she didn’t really know called them up. “I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago. But he is part of my identity, you know?”
She didn’t know, but she could try to guess. She nodded.
“I still think about him sometimes. I dream about him too. I try to remember what he looked like. It’s hard to remember, though, either because of time or because of strong feelings. I sometimes think the stronger you feel about someone, the harder it is to picture their face when you are away from them.”
Carmen’s tears were falling now, and she tried to hide them from Win. He would interpret her tears as belonging to Good Carmen. He would think she was crying selflessly, for him and his family’s pain. Whereas Bad Carmen was crying because Win had spent a lifetime missing a baby who’d been lost, and she’d spent a summer resenting a baby who hadn’t yet come.
Tibby was learning something about her future. She was learning that it would not include having children. Not unless she adopted some.
Christina was in he
ll, and Tibby could barely watch it. With each contraction—and they seemed like they were coming all the time now—Christina seemed to lose some of herself. When she came down she was less focused, less coherent, less recognizable. Tibby glanced at the printout. One line followed the baby’s heartbeat and the other followed the quaking of Christina’s uterus. It reminded Tibby of a seismogram. Christina had gone from a five on the Richter scale to about a twenty. If Christina’s stomach were California, then California would be under the ocean by now.
Tibby tried calling her mother again, but there was no answer. Alice would know all about this stuff. She would know how to help. She was punching in Carmen’s cell number when a nurse appeared in her face.
“You have to put that away,” she snapped, pointing at Tibby’s cell phone. “It interferes with the equipment. You could get thrown out of here.”
Tibby considered that possibility with a certain amount of longing.
“Can you give her some medicine or something?” Tibby asked Lauren when she popped her head in. Tibby was afraid of this much pain. She didn’t know how to get close to it.
Lauren came over and put her hands on Christina’s shoulders. “You doing okay, honey?”
Christina tried to focus. It didn’t look like the question made any sense to her. The answer was so profoundly no that the question hardly applied.
“In her birth plan she specified natural childbirth. That means, basically, no drugs,” Lauren explained to Tibby. “That’s partly why she’s working with me instead of an OB. Midwives don’t prescribe the heavy stuff.”
It didn’t seem a good sign that they were talking about Christina rather than to her. “An OB is…a doctor?” Tibby asked, wondering for a moment if a doctor wouldn’t be a good idea right now. If she were Christina she would want the heavy stuff. She would want the heaviest stuff, and every bit of it they had. She would want them to knock her out so completely that she wouldn’t wake up for a week.
“It seems like you should make that plan when you’re actually giving birth. Then at least you know what it feels like,” Tibby opined, but Lauren wasn’t listening.
