“Alice is doing great,” Rhoan said. He was encouraging by nature; he attended college track events just to cheer on the slowest runners. “You and I can look for men together,” he said to her. “Or I can look, and you can keep me company. You do you, baby.”
Part of Alice warmed at Rhoan’s kindness and the attention of these friends, new and old. Another part of her, though, was uncomfortable. This afternoon was exactly what she’d been afraid college would be like. Too much unscheduled time, too many hours at loose ends with your peers, inventing dramas out of perfectly fine lives. “To be clear,” she said, “how I live has nothing to do with my mother. I love her.”
Carrie met Alice’s blue eyes with her own. “I didn’t say anything about you not loving her.”
Alice frowned, to signal that she was done talking about this. Carrie knew that Alice was touchy when it came to her mother, so Carrie usually kept her thoughts to herself. But Carrie had told her friend once, during high school, not to model herself on Julia. “I like your mom a lot,” Carrie had said, “but anyone that dresses and does their hair as carefully as your mom does every single day is unhappy on the inside. She’s trying to hide all her messiness, and I want better than that for you.”
* * *
—
One Tuesday afternoon in the middle of February, Alice returned to her room after a class and found her mother there. Julia was standing by Alice’s desk. She was wearing a suit, and her hair was in a fancy layered bun.
Alice stopped in the doorway. Her mother hadn’t been back to campus since dropping her daughter off at the beginning of the school year—Alice had traveled home for long weekends and holidays—and Julia never showed up anywhere unannounced or unplanned. “Mom?” she said. “What are you doing here?”
Julia didn’t look at her daughter. She leaned closer to the wall. “These images,” she said, in a tight voice. “Where are they from?”
Alice felt something sink inside her. She walked into the room, shut the door, and slid off her winter coat. The wall above her desk was covered with photographs of Cecelia Padavano’s murals. Rhoan was an aspiring art archivist, and he’d helped Alice collect the images from various art magazines. They’d had to send away for a few of them, mailing a check for a couple of dollars to pay for an obscure Chicago art journal that seemed to cover most of Cecelia’s work. Rhoan had blown up some of the smaller images with equipment they had in the art department. It was an ongoing project; Alice was currently waiting on the arrival of a magazine that featured a mural Cecelia had painted for a city school.
“They’re your sister’s,” Alice said. She hadn’t raised the topic of Julia’s family in years. While Alice was in high school, both she and her mother had behaved as if they had no other relatives. Alice visited Rose in Florida but upon her return barely mentioned the trip to her mother. Julia had shut that door between them so many times that Alice had locked it.
It was Rose who’d once mentioned, while her granddaughter was visiting, that her aunt Cecelia was an artist. Alice had tried to find her aunt’s paintings during high school, but she’d had no idea where to look. Cecelia’s work wasn’t in museums or art history books. Alice had also known that, while she was living at home, anything she did find would have to be hidden from her mother. She’d decided that she would renew the search in college, when her belongings and pastimes would be out of her mother’s purview. The promise of searching for Cecelia’s art and being able to display it was one of the carrots Alice had used to convince herself to look forward to life at college, and it had delivered; the wall above her desk was her favorite view. When Gloria went out to parties, Alice stayed in their room, reading or just gazing at the wall in front of her. The more images she was able to add, the more satisfied she felt.
“She’s gotten so good,” Julia murmured. She was leaning against the desk now, to get as close to the display as possible.
“Did you notice?” Alice could feel her heart beating in her chest. “You and I are in the murals.”
Julia gave her daughter a look that was difficult to read—there was incredulity and fear in it—and returned her attention to the images.
Most of the murals, and therefore most of Alice’s wall, were portraits of women. They were close-ups, painted with bright colors on brick walls. There was one particular woman’s face that appeared on a few buildings and on the underside of an overpass. In most of the paintings, her eyes were open; on one wall they were closed. There was something ancient about her face—she looked like she was from another time. The murals weren’t all individual portraits; there was one image that Rhoan had enlarged of a group of children, perhaps twenty in all. The caption said that the mural was located in a Chicago playground. The children were smiling; they looked like someone had just told them great news. In the back row of the group was a white girl with blond-brown hair that was unmistakably Alice, around the age of ten.
“I sent Cecelia pictures of you when you were little,” Julia said, again in a muffled voice, as if she weren’t speaking to the people in this room.
“There’s you,” Alice said, and pointed. The picture showed a wall that had been painted bright blue, overlaid with the outline of a woman’s face. Ferocious curls flooded the space around her. Her chin was held high. This portrait was different from the others—more spare. It was Julia, unquestionably, but only those who knew her intimately would ever know.
The room was quiet; Gloria was at a biology lab and would be gone until dinner. Julia looked pale, and Alice knew that if she touched her mother’s hand, it would be clammy. “Sit down if you feel faint,” she said.
“I’m not going to faint.”
“I just like her art,” Alice said. “I haven’t contacted her or anything. You don’t have to worry.”
Julia looked from the wall to her daughter. Her lipstick was bright against the pallor of her face. She looked like she was going to speak, but she didn’t. She nodded instead.
The mother and daughter walked quietly through the cold to a nearby Italian restaurant. Once they were seated, the restaurant buzzing around them, Julia started to revive. She seemed to remember who she was and why she was there. “I took on a client in Boston,” she said. “I met with them today. Of course”—she smiled at her daughter—“my decision was helped by the fact that this gives me a reason to come to Boston and see you. It’s lonely for me in New York.”