The smell of paint and time and lingering hints of the Nag Champa incense Beryl burned adds a layer of almost instinctive calm to the sense of well-being from the long sleep. I feel her presence, almost hear the songs she would sing under her breath, the easy way she talked about life and nature and human traits and God and prayer and faith, the latter three in ways that my father might have called heretical.
She came to his church a few times. It surprised and thrilled me to see her there. She didn’t dress up as much as some of the women, but she wore a skirt and blouse, and wove her hair into a tidy braid. It didn’t change the tan she always sported, especially rare in coastal Oregon, but she spent so much time outside, studying nature, seeing to her flower farm, communing with the hawks and finches and starfish that she was always deeply tan. The memory of her in the pew, giving me a wink, reminds me how much I was loved.
Maui leaps up from his corner and comes over to offer his greeting, back end wiggling his whole body. I bend to kiss his nose and he slurps a kiss over my chin.
“Okay, Maui, that’s enough, baby,” Phoebe says. “God, he loves you.”
“That’s because she saved his life!” Jasmine says. She’s wrapped in an apron, too, and she’s painting something.
I amble over. “What are you guys working on?”
“Mine is a girl!” Jasmine says. “With a cat like you had once. A tuxedo.”
The drawing is quite good, with an anime feel. The cat is black with a white ruff, his green eyes tilted. I look at Phoebe. “You told her about Peter?”
“I thought of him this morning for some reason.”
I measure her, and she doesn’t meet my eye. What I remember about the day I asked Beryl to let him live here was that she was so jealous. Unreasonably jealous. Was that when the trouble started between us?
But I’m not going to stir the waters here. Mildly, I say, “He was a great cat. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”
Jasmine asks, “Did he die?”
“He did,” I say, “but not until he was a very, very, very old man.”
“How old?”
“Twenty, which is something like a hundred and two in human years.” I point to her drawing. “You did a great job. Is the girl from a game?”
“Kinda. I mean, she was, and then I drew her my way.” She pats the empty stool next to her. “Do you want to draw, too?”
I glance at Phoebe for permission and she gestures like a game show host—it’s all yours.
First I wander to her side of the enormous table to see what she’s working on. It’s an elaborate, detailed design, yellow and white vines against a forest-green background. I can see where she’s used her fingers to make round spots of yellow along the edge of each big leaf. “Very William Morris,” I say. “Fabric?”
“Wallpaper, actually. It’s become very popular the past couple of years.”
“I love it.”
“Thanks.” She dips a thin brush into a pool of paint and draws a tiny line along a petal. “You sleep well?” Her tone is impersonal, as if she’s talking to a shop clerk. Beneath it, I feel the swirling of all that’s unresolved between us.
I answer in the same tone. “Understatement.”
“Good.” She examines my face. “You look a lot better.”
“I guess Yul Brynner and I will have to move in with you.”
She snorts, and although I was kidding, it stings. I sip my tea.
“Jasmine wants to go to the Pig ’N Pancake for lunch in an hour or so,” Phoebe says. “Want to come?”
I can’t read in her eyes whether she really wants me to, but I’m desperate not to be alone. “That sounds so good.”
“Come draw with me,” Jasmine says. “There’s paper over there, and”—she gestures her hand in a swirl, just like her nana—“all those things. Crayons, pencils, whatever.” She pulls a black metal tin, long and narrow, from the jumble. “Watercolor if you want.”
I settle my tea on the lower table so that it won’t spill on the art, as Beryl taught us, and peel off my sweater and sit down with a fresh piece of paper, feeling the old lure of calm. In those days, I never lacked for ideas and would be drawing before I fully sat, but now I look at the paper and feel frozen by all the years I haven’t done this, by all the bad drawings I will do again until I get the hang of it.
“Just paint color,” Phoebe says, picking up on my discomfort.
I glance at her. As if she feels it, she looks up. “Purple,” she says, her mouth lifting on one side.
“Purple,” I echo, smiling. It was Beryl’s favorite. “The color of morning glories.”
“And pansies!” Phoebe cries.
I raise my hands, spreading them across the horizon. “Sunrises and clouds!”
Phoebe lifts her hands, palms to the sky, and imitates Beryl’s voice exactly: “Sea stars, the beauties of the tide pool.”
I crack up, and so does she, and for a long moment Beryl is in the room with us, and nothing has ever gone wrong.
“Purple,” Phoebe says, and bends over her vines to trace a dark line with a brush no wider than a single hair.
I nod, and begin. But it’s not purple that calls me. Instead, I choose billows of phthalo blue, so bright and water-struck, then some orange, some Mars black. Dots of magenta, too light, so I let the water saturate the cake of watercolor more completely and try again. Better.
Time moves around me in eddies and waves. It’s both now and many other times. Beryl and Phoebe and I painting woodland creatures, learning to draw feathers, playing with patterns. She directed us loosely, gave us little lessons in all kinds of things, offered encouragement and praise. When Joel joined our little crew, his work was head and shoulders above ours. Phoebe was always the better of the two of us, but Joel was in a class apart and Beryl treated him accordingly. A memory of the pair of them bent over one of his nature scenes comes back to me. His black hair loose on his shoulders, Beryl standing next to him, one hand on her hip as she points to something. I wonder if he became a fine artist. His mother left town shortly after—
Well, after everything. After I was sent away. After he burned the church down.
In the today studio, music is playing, something with flutes, and Jasmine swings her foot, tilting her head this way and that. I dip my brush and let go of the outside world. I splash color on the paper and splash some more. I think of Peter, who traveled with me all over the world, and how he comforted me, sleeping on my pillow with me when I wanted to die of sorrow, right upstairs in the room where I slept last night. Beryl gave me refuge in a world that had been extremely harsh.
What a blessing she was in my life. I suddenly wonder if I could write about her. Lately I’ve been feeling the call to write, more than the journals I still keep.
But what? An essay, maybe? My gut resists. A short story. No, not that either. A letter? Yes, maybe. A letter of gratitude to Beryl.
We’re all startled when the door opens and Ben comes in. His hair is wet, springing up in curls. “You guys about ready to take a break?” He asks all of us, but Phoebe is where his eyes fall. I noticed last night that his eyes are all for Phoebe, just as they were that long-ago summer when everything went so horribly wrong. He was on the periphery, a little younger than us, and his crush on her was like a clutch of flowers he carried around for all to see.
“Sure.” Phoebe starts to wipe her hands and realizes she has many colors layered on her fingers, her palm. “Let me wash up.”
“Yeah, do that,” he says, pausing to look at Jasmine’s work. He taps the edge of the page. “Dude, this is really good.”
“Thank you. I messed up her eyelashes on this one a little bit.”
“They look great to me.”
Jasmine sucks her cheeks in, giving her a fish mouth, and I grin. Phoebe used to do the same thing when she was concentrating. “Time for the Pig ’N Pancake?”
Phoebe nods. “Sure.”
Pig ’N Pancake is an Oregon institution, known in part for their pancakes, served with buckets of whipped cream. I haven’t eaten there in ages, and while I don’t know that I want to wander out in public, I also don’t want to be alone. I want to be with Phoebe and Jasmine and Ben more than I want to hide. I wash my brush and wipe paint from my fingers.
“You’re coming, right?” Jasmine asks, taking my hand. I love how physical she is. Always hugging, touching, leaning.