It’s raining again when I step off the plane on Kauai, and it rains on the taxi ride all the way back to Luke’s house. I pay the driver and step out into the downpour, covering my head with my hands until I make it up the steps, my purse hanging on one shoulder. My heart is beating a hundred miles a minute. I knew I’d be nervous to see him again after leaving the way I did last night, but things are so different now. I have so much to say, but, more important, I hope that Luke will give me so much to listen to.
The windows and doors are wide open like he usually leaves them, letting in the rain-cooled air and the ocean breeze. I hear music playing inside on the stereo in the living room, not too loudly but enough that he probably didn’t hear me pulling up in the cab or he might’ve come to answer the door already.
I stand in the doorway, looking into the living room through the screen, but Luke’s nowhere to be found. I knock lightly and wait. He never comes. Finally I open the screen door and let myself inside, feeling a little weird about it but knowing that Luke doesn’t mind and might even complain to me if he found out I stood out here and didn’t let myself in.
Unless he has a girl in there … No, I don’t even know why I thought that—Luke doesn’t seem the type.
“Luke?” I call out in a normal tone, walking through the living room. I set my purse down on the recliner as I walk by and slip down the hallway in my flip-flops.
A shadow moves along the wall from the room at the farthest end of the hall where Luke keeps his paintings. I step up to the open door to see him inside, wearing just a pair of running shorts, a paintbrush in one hand; a large canvas with familiar scenery stands nearly finished in front of him on an easel. There is paint everywhere—it looks and smells like fresh paint—even on Luke. A few splatters of green and yellow and brown are smeared across his shoulders. Paint streaks run down the backs of his hands as one moves furiously over the canvas; the other hangs at his side, his strong fingers arched. There’s paint on his muscled calves, clinging to his leg hairs. Little glass jars filled with paint are set on the floor beneath the easel. One has been knocked over, a puddle of blue pooling near Luke’s bare feet.
To see him standing there like this, I don’t just see a guy in front of a painting. I see a broken heart in front of a memory. As I study the scenery being created by his brush I quickly begin to realize where I’ve seen it before. At the community center. The enormous painting of the sheer rock wall covered by green that seemed to reach into the sky forever. A valley below, shadowed ominously, beautifully, by the rock around it. The painting I named the Bottom of the World. I wonder what Luke calls it.
My eyes move slowly about the room, the overcast light bathing the other paintings in a somber ambiance, most of which are of mountains and cliffs and the sky and the ocean seen only from above. But most of all, there are paintings of the Bottom of the World. Different sizes. Different angles. Different viewpoints. Some with sunlight beaming in thick, bright rays. Some with yellow trees instead of green. Some with fog. Some with rain. But all of them of the Bottom of the World.
This place, wherever it is it, holds a painful memory for Luke, and it tears me up inside to know that he’s still trapped there, that no matter how much he paints it, or how hard he tries to perfect it, it won’t relent and give him the closure he seeks. That’s what I see as I look at him; that’s what I feel.
With his back to me, I wonder if he even knows that I’m standing here, but he’s working on that canvas with so much passion and intensity that at first I can’t bear to interrupt him.