“Yeah, but it’s a crazy smile. Like you’re gonna pour me tea and make me a hat.”
“I just feel like I’m on the right path,” I say, breathless with the body-slamming, finger-burning cold and with something else entirely. With this small balloon of excitement rising in my stomach.
“And you think this because . . . ?”
On the third level, I spot my Civic. We heave ourselves inside the car and I fumble to turn on the heat. How can I tell her about Valentine’s Day and the lie of my parents’ marriage and stone hearts? About the stars and the constellations? I can’t, not even close. “It’s—hard to explain.”
“Uh-huh.”
She sounds dubious, but I’m only half paying attention as I ask myself what I know.
My mother grew up in Fitchburg.
My mother was good at art.
My mother was troubled waters, like her mother before her.
“Hey, you want to, like, take a break tonight?” Jessa asks. “I mean, where are we gonna go on a Sunday night, anyway? Just a little break. My parents are visiting my grandma, so the soccer team’s coming over.”
The soccer team she’s talking about doesn’t exist as an actual soccer team anymore. It’s just a few guys from Chad’s old team, the Sugarbrook Sandpipers, who went to Boston colleges. They hang out in his basement bedroom with beer, the WiiU, and the secretive scent of weed drifting off them.
Dad avoids social gatherings even in the best of times, and when I can’t get out of them, I fulfill my very important duty of shoring up the wall. I fold my arms and cross my legs and try to find a cool position that communicates I am perfectly happy jammed in my corner and have a lot of clever things to say, but there’s no need to talk to me to make me prove it. When the glittering Times Square ball dropped on the big screen at the Prices’ New Year’s Eve party last year, I was at the snack table with a pig-in-a-blanket in my mouth so it didn’t look like I expected anyone, much less Chad Price, to make with midnight kisses.
“Um, possibly.”
“Jeremy’s bringing Yuengling just for me.”
“That’s gallant.”
I hand Jessa the photos to hold, but flip through a few loose pages at the bottom of the pile. I unfold a brittle piece of butcher paper to find drawings in thick, dark pencil. As soon as I realize what they are, I tuck them into my coat pocket to pore over in private. This is a part of my mother I’m not ready to share.
The other item in the pile is safer, an exhibition brochure for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It looks old, the paper fingerprinted and thin. I’m not sure why it’s in the stack—maybe a souvenir from when Mom worked there—until I skim the section on special exhibitions. There’s a bit about a Masters of Fantasy show, the collected works of artists who “explored the worlds of the imagination, the inner reality of the subconscious, and of dream.”
Above the caption is a shot of the exhibit.
“You’re not listening to me, are you?” Jessa objects.
Had she been talking? “Yeah, okay, whatever. But first I need to see something.”
Lindy is out when I get home. I knew she would be. She left a message on my phone that she had errands to run, and encouraged me to take a break from my marathon hangout with Jessa and stop home. Encouragement to the tune of “Imogene Scott, if you aren’t sitting across the kitchen table from me in the next twenty-four hours, you’ll be eating every lunch for the entirety of February break in my office at work.”
Lindy’s always given me my space, but I’m beginning to suspect she’s losing patience.
It’s just as well she isn’t here; it would feel wrong to walk unapologetically into Dad’s office with my stepmother around. Settling into his rolling chair, I turn on his computer and reach into my bag while I wait for it to boot up. My knuckles scrape against the rough rind of the stone heart. But it’s not what I’m after, and I dig deeper.
I punch in the password, wondering if Dad meant it to represent Miles Faye, or my mother. I make up my mind when the desktop brightens and floods with the familiar background. I never paid much attention to the picture. Each time I snuck on to Dad’s computer, I was rushing against the clock. Now that I’m squinting at it with my face inches from the screen, I see the details of the painting. There aren’t many—it looks like a watercolor and ink done in gray, and it’s all pretty fluid. Black scrawls for clouds, a slightly grayer wash to separate the rain-scratched sky from steely seas. Men in flat-bottomed wooden boats haul up fishing nets, robes billowing in what must be a strong, dark wind. Inside the scribbled nets, the shapes of fish like small sea monsters.
Pulling out the old Boston MFA brochure, I open it to the prints and drawings section and flatten it on top of Dad’s desk calendar. There it is: the young woman examining a framed work of art on the wall, awe in her eyes. It’s a gray picture of men in little wooden boats hauling up full-to-bursting fishing nets before the storm hits.