My phone buzzed. I didn’t look at it right away, resting my hot forehead on my cool wrists. Even though my scars were pale and barely noticeable now, I felt the throb of the lines as if the wounds were fresh.
For the first time in years, I heard the siren call of the razor blade. To damage myself. To bear visible scars.
Jesus. How far we can fall so fast. It was just a baby. Jenny having one didn’t change anything about me or my past. I needed to get my shit together.
I picked up my phone. It was Darion, asking if I was all right. I typed off a quick note that I was going to visit Albert and that I could catch a ride back to the condo. He said he’d wait. He always had something to do up at the hospital, and now that his sister was staying part-time with their dad, we had more time to overwork ourselves to an early grave. We needed to get that habit in check.
At some point we needed to plan the wedding. Get a life. Make one. Our painting together tonight was one of the things we were doing to ensure we had some life balance.
The chair rolled away from me as I stood. My body blocked the light from the window, leaving half my desk in shadow. I shifted so I could see my mermaid sculpture, one Albert had made for me. He was one of my first art therapy patients, an elderly artist with Parkinson’s.
I’d been working with him for several weeks when I discovered that he was a famous artist who had been reported dead from suicide by his assistant, and he’d been paying someone to keep his Wikipedia entry updated with that erroneous information ever since. When I almost lost my job at the hospital due to my lack of qualifications, he endowed my position with the stipulation that I could work there as long as I wanted.
He was my mentor, and these days, one of my best friends.
But the end was coming. I headed out of the art therapy room and to the elevator. For the first months Albert was in the hospital, he could still paint and sculpt on good days, when the meds were working on his muscle tremors. But his decline had begun to accelerate, and no cocktail of Levodopa/Carbidopa seemed to really help anymore. His weakness and trembling meant he mostly lay in bed, his ladylove by his side, and talked me through my problems with my current art projects.
His ward was quiet and dim. Regina, the charge nurse, glanced at me and nodded as I passed. When I arrived at Albert’s door, I eased it open gently to make sure I didn’t wake him if he was sleeping.
Layla was long gone this late, so Albert was alone in the room. I could see her simple touches even in the semidarkness. A dried flower wreath over the bed. A crocheted doily beneath a hand-painted vase. She was a crafter, an artist who dabbled, as she liked to say. The two of them had met in my therapy room, and I was more than thrilled to see the late-in-life romance bud between them. Even as we were facing the end, we needed love and hope.
Albert wasn’t asleep, and his pale eyes followed me as I approached. He opened his mouth to speak, but the words didn’t come right away. After a couple more attempts, he finally got out “Tina.”
I sat on his bed and took his trembling hand. His tremors were extra bad today, his entire hand rocking as if keeping beat to some tribal rhythm. Even my holding it did not calm the spasms. Such a horrible disease. The worst for someone whose lifeblood flowed through his talented fingers. Albert’s art had been sold the world over, when he could still make it.
“Jenny had her baby,” I said. “A girl.”
He almost smiled, but I could see him remembering, and his fingers squeezed around mine. “Sad, then?” he asked.
I nodded. “About the same as if you saw someone butchering one of your famous clowns.”
His mouth twisted in a wry smile. “That’s…called greeting cards,” he managed to get out. “Every day.”
“They put your grim little clowns on greeting cards?” I asked.
Another smile. “And calendars…damn agent.”
I tried to picture the maniacal characters gracing someone’s day planner. I guessed there was a market for anything. They’d made Albert famous enough that he went into hiding. And when his assistant found him with his wrists cut and told the world he had died, he was relieved to be out of the public eye.
He spoke slowly, with great deliberation. “What are you working on?”
“Still the cliff painting,” I said. It had been months since I had been inspired to paint my baby, Peanut, at the age he would be now, standing on a cliff over the ocean here in San Diego.
“Perspective right yet?” he asked.
“I’m on attempt number eight,” I said with a sigh. His hand felt papery and thin in mine. The tremor ran through his muscles like a heartbeat.
“Just getting started,” he said.
I pushed out a rueful laugh. “I know. I’ve totally let go of the idea that I can do anything worthwhile on the first — or twentieth — try.”