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-13-
The wine made gulping sounds as it flowed from the bottle. After refilling my glass, I held the stem like a single rose and headed toward the stairs. I paused at the five-foot Sabzi that hung encased in a shadow box built into the vestibule at the base of the stairs. It was part of Scott’s art collection, a piece he’d purchased before we married. I studied the automaton figure rendered faceless. The vacant look belonged to a woman richly clothed in royal purple, with careful detail given to jeweled accessories and the embroidered cuffs and collar of her dress. I’d always found the blank-faced image unsettling. What if James Joyce was right? What if art foretells the future? I thought of a Picasso lithograph, a disjointed depiction of a figure crying steel tears, and how it foretold the shift to piecemeal work and industrial assembly lines. Artisans turned into moving parts, to repeat singular, mindless tasks.
What future does this empty, expressionless face represent? I wondered. The thought turned my skin cold. I pictured my own work, the multitudes, dull and spiritless, who wandered isolated and eclipsed.
I’d grown tired of questioning the trips down the hole, just like I was tired of questioning why I felt compelled to render the scenes in two-dimension. I’d heard too many convoluted suppositions...an overactive imagination, temporal lobe epilepsy, alien abductions. One of my many foster parents, a Jehovah’s Witness as I recall, declared it a clear case of demon possession.
Dreams are just dreams—random static—and paint is just paint. Color and form on surface. One is just as unreal as the other, just angles and shapes. I wanted to believe that. I climbed the stairs to retreat to my studio. Angles and shapes, angles and shapes, angles and shapes.
Shortly after we purchased the home, we had a wall between two bedrooms opened to create one great room for my art studio. Large windows on each side of the space bathed the room in light for most of the day. We’d had the floor laid with white maple—in retrospect, an impractical choice—and the entire length of one wall was mirrored from floor to ceiling. A dance bar cut a horizontal stripe along the mirror. The room was empty of furniture except for a desk and two easels next to a bathroom splattered with paint and heaped with stained rags.
I shut the studio door and placed the wine glass on my desk. I pulled up the window frame to let the breeze swirl in from the bay. After I settled in the chair, I opened the desk drawer and traced my fingers beneath scraps of Indian silk I might employ for some collage project in the future. I extracted a foil packet and peeked inside. Scott frowned on me smoking weed. Whatever, he was mad already.
I pressed a pinch from a bud into the mouth of a stone pipe, fired the bowl, and inhaled. I held the smoke in my lungs, took a velvet sip of wine, swallowed, exhaled the smoke, and fired the bowl again. The skunky incense created a purple streak across my visual sphere and curled out the window.
Now that I was two or three degrees to the left on the perception dial, I started to ask myself existential questions that only troubled me when I was high.
Why? It was a recurring question about the car crash that left me an orphan. The events before and after the crash were an unreliable haze, memories of memories. But one slice of time was etched in my mind with lucid precision. I’d felt myself floating through air, remembered looking up mid-flight. How enormous and glinting silver the stars were. I felt the ground as I hit and skidded against gravel, the loud thwack my head made on impact. And this is the moment that is branded whole, as indelible as bone fossilized in rock. Howls of collapsing metal, shattered glass, the groan of the oak as the branches shook from the car impact, the hiss of its leaves. That violent percussion is so etched in my memory, I wanted to cover my ears. Those terrible sounds, I heard them after I was thrown from the car.
It was as if an invisible hand had reached in and yanked me safely from the back seat before it folded in pleats into that massive tree. The doctors called it episodic amnesia. It’s typical with concussions, they explained in consoling tones. Only, I didn’t have amnesia, not about that. As a girl, I’d lie awake in strange rooms, looking out at a dimmer version of those same stars. Why me? I wanted to know. Why didn’t that invisible hand take hold of the steering wheel, or pull my father’s foot off the gas pedal? Why couldn’t it have taken a chainsaw to that old tree? And sometimes, why couldn’t I have died too?
“Don’t you see? God sent you one of his angels.” Ellie, my first foster parent, had sat beaming beside me on the bed. She insisted on being called Auntie Ellie. The woman’s expression was blissful, out of place given my recent loss. “God must have a very special plan for you.”
“How do you know?” I asked. I hadn’t expected an answer, but Ellie had it figured out.
With that intoxicated expression, she took my hand in hers. “All goodness comes from God, and you were saved by His grace. Your parents and your little sister are waiting for you in heaven, where all good people go when they die.” Ellie’s world was such a tidy place. Her hands were red and shriveled and smelled like ivory soap.
I’d looked down and contemplated the beige high-low carpeting. “If all goodness comes from the grace of God, then the good people wouldn’t be good if it weren’t for Him?”
“That’s right.” Ellie picked the lint off the wool of her pants.
“But that’s not fair. Why would God choose some people to be good and get into heaven and not others?”
Ellie cocked her head and smiled as if to say, ‘poor ignorant child’. “God is constantly calling out to us. We have the choice to listen or turn away.”
“Oh,” I frowned. “But if all goodness comes from the grace of God, and choosing to hear his call is a good thing, then why would he give some people the ability to choose to hear him and not others?”
Ellie’s squeeze tightened around my hand. “My, you’re so full of questions, aren’t you? I know this is all new to you, but you’ll learn.” She leaned her head close to my ear and spoke in a whisper, “Remember, we must never, ever question the will of God.”
For the most part, I did stop questioning such things. Now the queries only surfaced occasionally, usually after smoking a bowl. I sometimes had the restless sense there was something I needed to do, an obligation I had to the angels for pulling me from that car. It was a sense I usually managed to ignore or medicate away. Still, down deep, a part of me had always wondered, what if...
We can’t know what we can’t know. They were The Coach’s words. I reached for my wine. His memory produced a storm of confusion, thunder and lightning, shock and awe. I’d been just sixteen when I was sent to The Shoe. Hubbard House was a group home in Mountain View run by Coach Hubbard and his sister. The Coach was unpredictable, a paradox of craggy, no-nonsense on one hand and shifty trickster on the other. His sister was a round and cheerful zealot whose hands were always busy polishing things that were already shiny. The Hubbards had a track record of setting troublemakers straight, and by then, I was labeled a habitual runaway.
The Coach took an immediate interest in me. I liked the attention—at first. I’d appreciated his matter-of-fact way with the world, his focus on the here and now, what could be seen and heard. He said exactly what he thought. No guessing, no whispers. It was a relief.
“I’ll make you a little Ranger,” he’d said. “You ever hear of survival training?” It started harmless enough, tests of endurance, mind over matter. The pinches, the candle flames, the needles, it was a game. Just like real survival training, the endurance tests escalated.
My breath grew shallow as my mind flashed on The Coach’s workshop, shades drawn closed, the orange scent of tequila on his breath. How his eyes ignited with a shine whenever he touched an exquisitely tender nerve. I’m the mister, a trickster, a craftster. Fucking song.
The song made me think of the chipped desk, and the desk made me think of Scott. I wrung my eyes closed. My life is orderly because my mind is orderly. With Scott, I was finally home. Everything he touched turned to order. Our attraction was like Velcro, complementary opposites. From the moment we’d met, it was as if he knew me. I talked in pictures, sketches in the air that only he could read. We shared a secret body language.
The thought of Scott called up every emotion...love, lust, belonging, jealousy, passion, often fury, and sometimes fear. The fear had always existed close to the surface. It was a whisper of a thought that teetered overhead. That, in the future, lurked some calamity that would crash down and change everything. I always felt as if a boulder was about to fall through the roof of my life.
Cinderella is a lie, I’d always told myself, a myth leveraged by marketers to sell eye makeup. Yet when I’d met Scott, my life changed as magically as Cinderella’s. I’d gone from Chloe Louise Cooper, an artist on the marginal edge, to Chloe Stanton, a woman people cared enough to spread rumors about in some circles. He believed in me, and Scott’s beliefs were contagious. “You have to dare to be great, Chlo. It’s a dare.” It’s as though his name had been a charm around my neck. But down deep, little Chloe Cooper—it had always seemed to me—was unworthy of Chloe Stanton’s life.
I pulled the yellow slip of paper from my jeans pocket and spread it open on the desk. A wind fanned through the window. The paper scrap levitated in the air and glided on a wind current before landing hidden beneath the desk. An omen. Out of sight, out of mind.
