The city had thawed while I was gone. I could walk along the beach without my breath being taken away, my cheeks at the end pink from exertion and not the frosty weather. Spring had painted everything hopeful and green. Flowers appeared in people’s window boxes as they brought their plants out from hibernation. College students hurried to class in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, their skin tender and raw against the air, as though they could bring summer weather by pretending it was already here. Women wore dresses with floral prints instead of the muted grays of winter, and the sky hovered, wide and blue, dotted with clouds, above us.
I told myself it was my best option to try to make things better with Phillip. But when it came down to it, I seemed unable to force myself into anything more than politeness, as though we were overly solicitous acquaintances who happened to be living together. I had become strangely modest, dressing in the bathroom, sleeping in heavy winter pajamas. The distance and alienation between us had not melted with the warmer weather.
Sometimes I watched him, eating dinner or cursing at a game on the television, and wondered who he was, who he really was. For a long time I had assumed I was the only one with a deeper heart I kept hidden, the only one with private wishes. But of course we all have secrets. If I had not known that before, my grandmother’s diaries had illuminated it for me. Imagine carrying the secret she had—her child belonged to a man other than her husband. I had a million questions I wanted to ask, and no one to ask them to. Why had Robert Walsh agreed to raise my mother as his own? Had my grandmother ever told Sebastien? Did my own mother know? I didn’t know how to bring up the topic. What if she really didn’t know? She’d said she hadn’t read my grandmother’s journals, and given their chilly relationship, I wasn’t surprised. And I wasn’t going to be the one to break the news to her.
I buried my questions and my confusion and the endless rounds of self-doubt in work. I doubled my hours at the Stabler Museum, working in the gift shop as well as leading tours. I went to committee meetings and when I caught myself doodling in the margins of my notes, I would force myself to raise my hand and volunteer for something, which was how I ended up on the registration committee for the library’s annual fundraiser and responsible for finding speakers for the next three Women’s Club meetings. At first I felt proud of those jobs, and I understood why my mother loved what she did. I had a purpose, a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
While I surprised myself with my own efficiency, my own competence, all of those tasks didn’t solve my problems. So I dug in harder, I laughed louder at Phillip’s colleagues’ jokes, and I pasted a smile on my face when I worked the registration desk at the Stabler auction, handing out name tags and bidding numbers with such aggressive cheer I think I scared a few people.
And none of it made me feel any better. I ate antacids like candy, lining up the empty containers in a kitchen cabinet where they stared at me accusatorily every time I went to get a plate.
I tried to remember a time when I had been wholly happy, outside of those few weeks in Magnolia. A time when I had felt connected to what I was doing, and was heartbroken to think of how few of those there were. Volunteering at the Stabler. Living alone in Magnolia before I was married.
And before that, in school. I had painted sets and cut backdrops, watching something emerge from nothing, and then seeing the magic of theater transform it into something different altogether. I had made signs for Ashley’s elections, lettering her name over and over again until I knew it better than my own. I had helped make the mosaic that spread its broken, glittering way across the school’s front hall, pressing glass and tiny ceramic squares into plaster again and again until calluses formed on the tips of my fingers and my hands were sticky with mortar. I had helped lay out the art and literary magazine, bent carefully over the pages with a knife sharp as a scalpel to cut away the wayward edges, flipping through the order again, looking for the story it told. I had done things that felt like a part of me, not like wearing a Halloween mask that made it hot and hard to breathe underneath.
One afternoon, when the sun had shone high and bright in the sky long enough to warm the entire city, people carrying their coats instead of wearing them, turning their faces toward the sky as they walked, blinking into the light like moles, unsure and slightly fearful, as though they had never seen it before, I found myself wandering through a street full of warehouses in Bucktown, a questionable neighborhood teetering on trendy. In a clean window on the bottom floor of a wide, low, brick building was a sign reading: Artist’s Studio for Rent.
I remembered Miss Pine’s invitation to the painting class, and wondered if this was the same place. And something inside me made me stop, made me press my hand against the new glass doors and push my way inside.