I took down the ugly paintings and dug out my art supplies from under the bed. With your pencil, I set to work on the white wall. When the sun rose, I tore down the gold curtains and opened the door, the air fresh and painful, like the river in spring. The rain had stopped three days earlier. The water had stopped rushing, slowed to a trickle, soaked into the porous earth, and the sun reappeared as suddenly as if it had tunneled through a brick wall. Back to normal. I didn’t open the front office, left the phone number in the window, but no one called. I painted until my shoulders and arms ached.
It was late afternoon by the time I sat on the bed and looked at what I had done. The colors sharp and lush, reds and violets and golds. A woman, alone, standing on the rim of a low canyon, a suitcase by her feet. The woman, tall and round at the hip, standing sideways to the viewer, her face turned away. The canyon, a gouged bowl, slashed with shadow, a gash in its core. The woman, looking past the canyon at the sky, which was a deep burning orange tinged with black and brown. No. She was looking past the sky, into the long distance.
When I wandered into the HealthCo some time later, Tom was at the counter.
“My goodness. Are you all right?” he asked. “Are you hurt? What can I do?”
In the security mirror, I saw myself. My hair was knotted in place with a paintbrush, my full face exposed. Veins and patches of red stood out on my skin, and wild paint colors streaked my arms, legs, even my feet in their flip-flops. The neckline of my T-shirt scooped low, my nipples clear against the thin fabric.
“I’ve been working. Drawing, painting.”
“You look cold,” Tom said.
I shrugged and looked him in the eye. “I’m not cold here.”
“Oh,” he said, looking down. He looked up and smiled a little. I saw it in his eyes then, the pity. I don’t know how I’d missed it in the first place, as clear and shining as it was. I could see everything now.
I said, “I’m not what people say. I’m not crazy.”
He shook his head. “No.”
Tell him, I thought. Tell him about the car. About the coat. Ask for his advice.
Instead, I lifted my chin and pointed at my cheek. “What does this look like to you? What do you see in it?”
Say the world, I thought. Say you see the world.
“Stevie,” he said, “are you okay?”
“I’m asking you what you see,” I said. “Do you see me at all?”
“I see you fine,” he said. “I think you look fine. But I think you better go home now. You need to take care of yourself.”
I said, “I’m going.” I hiked up my bra strap. For no reason—or maybe because I was thinking of that woman on the wall with the suitcase at her feet—I said, “In fact, I’m leaving town today. This’ll be the last time you see me.”
For a second, I hoped he would say, No, wait, or, I’ll come with you, but he didn’t. Of course he didn’t.
My nose started to run, and I wiped it on my wrist. I was angry at myself and terrified of what I knew, of that coat under my bed, and of you, still missing. I pointed at his seahorse scar. “God. What happened to your face?”
He looked down at the counter. “Go on now, Stevie,” he said.
“That’s not my name,” I said.
He said, “Go on.”
As I walked out the exit, I saw the first missing poster. There you were, fluttering in the breeze, invisible tape across your perfect cheek.
I sat shivering in my car in the HealthCo parking lot for I don’t know how long. When the sun hit the horizon, I sat straight up and stared at the colors, which hovered and bled and shifted. I thought of the colors on my wall, that low canyon. I recognized it then, the gouge in the earth. I had seen it. It was real.
I drove to the old lake and stepped out to its emptiness. There was the gash at the bottom, the same one on the wall of my room. I looked at all the exposed cracked dirt in the bowl of the lake, and I wanted to protect it somehow, keep it safe, make it beautiful. The rocks and patterns took shape behind my eyes. I climbed down into the basin and started at the center. At the heart, and moving outward. That day I placed three stones. One for each day I didn’t tell. One for each day I didn’t chase after you. One for each day the red coat beat under my bed, poetic in its telltale fervency. One for each day I wish I’d known what to say to make it okay, to make you stay, to drive you home to safety. And I’ve placed one every day since. Marking the days: 6,669 as of last week, from the day we got the news. Circling, circling, feeling my heart expand even as I continue to live small.
It’s a terrible truth that I found my art when we lost you. I made the lake, with its 6,669 stones. I painted every room in the motel with its own themed mural: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, Earth, Fire, Water, Air, Sunrise, Sunset. I painted the doors in bright citrus hues, restored vintage metal porch furniture, updated curtains and bedding to make each room its own. I turned my car into a mosaic, with bottle caps and wine corks and shards of colored glass. In “The Best of Indie Motels” in the latest Arizona Highways, there’s me, standing atop the motel in the rooftop garden, with a streak of purple dye in my hair, my whole face exposed to the world.
That painting in my room has faded in the last few years, its colors grown softer, less luminous, but it is still there. Still that woman stands on the precipice, looking into the distance. Is she you? Or me? I have never been sure what I intended. What does she see out there in the burning sky? What is she waiting for?
Today, I grab a felt-tip pen and sign my name in the lower right corner of the wall, near the woman’s foot. Prentiss. I haven’t called myself that in years. Not since the day I made this painting. Only Father Tom still calls me that. The pharmacist turned priest, the man who I believed saw me for the first time, who sees me now at the grocery store and waves, kindly, because he was always kind.
But it was you who saw me first.
Today, I see something else in the painting. This time, the woman does not look past the sky at the distance but sees herself inside the distance. A place where old dreams and desires rise.
I watch the woman on the wall. I see myself letting go of the wheelbarrow that strains my back, whose handles leave deep marks and splinters in my palms. I see myself letting go of the rocks I carry so carefully in the curves of my arms. I stop marking the days. I stop trying to cover the injured earth. Stop trying to save it, transform it, make it beautiful again. I see myself turn away from the edge. I see myself turn toward a new horizon.
Go on, Father Tom said to me that day.
Maybe I can. Maybe I can go now.
Thank You for Calling