Elizabeth read the letter three times, then carefully folded it up, slipped it back into its violet-scented envelope.
She walked over to the French doors and stared out at the ocean. In those few words, Anita had managed to shake Elizabeth up, to cause a subtle shift in perception.
For years, she had monitored the progress of women—friends, strangers, celebrities—who’d left their marriages. Often, she’d watched with envy as these women picked up stakes and started over. She imagined them living shiny new lives, as different from her own as a quarter from a bottle cap. And she’d thought to herself, If only I could start over.
She’d never paid much attention to the women who stayed in their marriages, who hacked through the jungle of ordinary life and found a different kind of treasure.
At some point, Anita had left Edward. She’d packed a bag and moved away from Sweetwater. What had she been looking for … and what had brought her back? Had it really been as simple, and as infinitely complex, as true love?
Elizabeth felt a spark of kinship with her stepmother. She wished they could sit down and talk about their disparate and now oddly parallel lives.
She picked up the phone and dialed Anita’s number. The phone rang and rang. Finally, an answering machine clicked on.
Her father’s slow, drawling voice started. “Ya’ll’ve reached Sweetwater. We aren’t here right now, but leave a message and we’ll return your call.” There was a muffled sound on the tape—Anita’s voice—then Daddy went on: “Oh … yeah … wait for the beep. Thanks.”
Elizabeth was so rattled by the sound of her father’s voice that she hung up without leaving a message.
Tears stung her eyes. She didn’t bother trying to hold them back. It was a thing she’d learned in the last weeks. Grief would have its way. If she gave in to it, wallowed around in the loss for a while, she could go on.
She sat down on the edge of her bed. On the bureau, she saw a framed photograph of a little girl in a frilly pink dress, white tights, and black patent Mary Janes.
Her seventh birthday party. Later that night, Daddy had taken her to see the musical South Pacific in Nashville.
After the show, when he’d tucked her into bed, he’d said, Sugar beet, you were the prettiest girl in the theater tonight. I was danged proud to have you on my arm. Then he’d pulled her into his big strong arms and made her feel safe.
She needed that—needed him—now.
She sat there a long time, talking to her daddy as if he were sitting right beside her.
The week flew by.
After years of trudging through a gray, wintry landscape of other people’s choices, Elizabeth had finally emerged onto a sunny blue day of her own.
Each morning she woke with a sense of expectation that made her smile, hum even, as she went about her daily chores. Then, at noon, no matter what else pressed at her to be done, no matter what was on her mental To Do list, she ignored everything and painted.
At first, she’d tried to fix her class project. She’d added brushstrokes and dabs of color, layer upon layer, trying to add a complexity to the image that she couldn’t quite achieve.
Unfortunately, the old saying was true. You couldn’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
The problem with the orange was that it wasn’t hers. The best in art revealed something of the artist’s soul, and Elizabeth’s soul had never cared much for fruit.
When she trolled around for something else to paint, she saw possibilities everywhere—and only one true choice.
The ocean.
She started slowly, methodically stretching the canvas in the way she’d been taught more than two dozen years ago. It came so easily, this beginning of it all, that she wondered if, for all these years, she’d been painting in her sleep, dreaming of primed and stretched canvases, of mixing medium and pigment, of colors slurried on a well-used palette.
The sun had been bright and shining on that day she began to put her love of the sea on canvas. She took her new easel and primed canvas and her paints and brushes out to the edge of the yard. There, she laid out an eight-by-ten sheet of thick blue plastic and set up the easel on it.
The sleeping blue ocean stretched out as far as the eye could see. Today, she saw it in tiny increments, in slashes of hue and texture, in light and shadow. She saw each component that comprised the whole; and just that, seeing it as she’d once been able to, made her feel young again—hope-filled, as opposed to the lesser, more common, hopeful.
She held a brush in her now steady hand and stared out to sea, noticing the blurry shapes that came forward and those that remained background. She studied the various tints of light that coalesced into sand and water, rock and sky, then, very slowly, she looked down at her palette and chose a base color.
Cobalt blue.
The color of Jack’s eyes.
The thought came out of nowhere and surprised her.