Thomas tried gently to explore the topic of her children, whom she’d mentioned only in the past tense, and her mouth became a strictly measured line.
“My daughter,” she said, and waved her hand above her head like poof.
“Dead?”
Her head wobbled in what seemed neither confirmation nor dissent.
“And Owen?”
“Can’t be bothered. Very, very busy.”
He tabled the issue, but it ate at him, the thought of their desertion in her decline, of Owen surfacing just to shelve her in some facility, and his idea of Edith’s past life acquired an unsettling tinge he grew afraid to address. What kind of children had they been, to leave her so completely, and what kind of mother had she been, to let them go?
Thomas grew determined to engage her in some new way. He took out the media of color and shadow late one night, unlocked and removed and wondered at the paints and the bristles and charcoal nubs spread out wide. He would make Edith feel like an agent of her body and brain again, show her what it was to look back at your own effort. Perhaps, he thought wistfully, caught up in the dusted-cocoa smell of a sable brush, he would remember his own relationship with production, find the lesson there. Could the wisdom he’d acquired from all those years of making really have vanished with the abilities of his left forearm and long fingers, like an ex-lover who vows never to speak to a certain chapter of her past?
A year and five months had passed since the stroke had entered him and left him changed, and nearly as long since the days he shoved so much of his life into closets: limp rolls of unstretched canvas, folding cotton cases of pencils, a wooden box of acrylics covered in half-inch tests of blues and grays. Thomas had not told anyone what he was doing, suspecting they would protest and intervene, and so he’d strained to carry the boxes of rulers and pastels and oils, the bouquets of pencils short and long, the paintbrushes of varying thicknesses, and shoved them in whichever way he could manage, sometimes with his temple, sometimes with the arch of his back. He had collapsed, damp, on the floor, admired the smooth lines of the hardwood planks leading out and away.
So much later, used to the quiet of a space free of clutter, when he finally released the doors of cabinets and closets, he held his breath for the inevitable tumble and crash. But the instruments, pressed together so long, came out shyly, adjusting to the newly available space with small sounds, like the creaking of frosted branches, the meeting of utensils over a plate.
The brown paper grocery bag, which Thomas cradled with his arm and chin as he descended the stairs, held a modest sampling: a watercolor set he’d never used (he thought Edith might like to just see colors bleed into each other), a set of crayon-pastel hybrids whose smears always felt forgiving, some glue to accompany a number of rice paper scraps of emerald green and pink and cyan he couldn’t remember acquiring. Feeling confident and duplicitous both, Thomas strode purposefully into Edith’s increasingly chaotic space and set the bag down on the tablecloth, which still held stains from the party, clouds of oil that had spread and set.
“Edith!” he said, grinning. “It’s art day!”
As he’d hoped, she blinked but believed readily, and brought her palms together as in prayer.
“Oh my: oh my oh my oh my.”
Edith’s hand gripped the brushes and sticks as though she had limited experience in manipulating objects towards her will, her fingers curled but not tensed, so he coaxed them. She would get distracted by a blue once she picked up a gray — her focus broad, as though surveying an ocean — so he asked her to tell him the story of each. And what is that one doing? Where have you seen that green before? What will that orange become?
Edith liked this very much: at least it kept her pressing on the paper, at least it kept her talking. But then he took it too far. And what will they all do together, that washed blue and that sharp emerald and that ripened yellow? Edith halted her shaky but expanding line and looked down at the page as if it were inaccessible, a codified to-do list written by someone else.
“Dear?” she said. “I’m tired, now.”
Thomas suggested that he help. He wrapped his right hand over hers. He looked at the lines she’d put on the page and simply went about solidifying them, feeling the familiar movement of his wrist as he matched curve for curve, created thicknesses of hues that scored the thin paper. He did not see how she leaned in, how her eyes grew wet as she reached for a dangling memory, and they sat there like that, orbiting each other.
~ ~ ~
BECAUSE HE HAD A DIFFICULT TIME looking right at him, or acknowledging the way Paulie made him feel, which was happy and panicked both, Edward started filming. Capturing Paulie in a frame, no less keeping him there, was a task Edward met with varying dedication. So often the footage took the pattern of Paulie on-screen, his bright and tiny teeth exposed and shining, his body forever batting like a moth to keep up with his wilderness of thoughts, and then the picture instantly as empty of him as it had been full. In one of Edward’s first attempts, Paulie discussed Canada geese.
He’s sitting on his kitchen counter, dangerously close to the plastic vase of fresh flowers Claudia places there each Monday, wearing a turquoise zip-up sweatshirt with the strings pulled taut so that the hood forms a circle of tension around his cheeks and chin. (“Like an Eskimo,” he says earlier in the tape, when Edward asks about it, “with a new style.”)
“They fall in love only one time, Eddy. These guys and gals are for keeps with their feelings. Once they know, they know. But if one of them goes away, and by that I mean dies, Ed, the other says, no way can I abide this”—here Paulie spreads his arms to indicate the wingspan of lone eternity that lies ahead, and the camera zooms out to reveal it—“and instead of staying with the gaggle, which is what their friend group is called, Ed, the sad goose flies alone for the rest of his life. He stops grooming so his feathers get to looking like monsters, he moves over all kinds of trees and lakes without ever getting to say, again, ‘Hey, do you see that? Do you see how green that is?’”
Paulie lets the strings of his sweatshirt go slack; his face opens while he considers the gravity of this, and the camera hovers on his eyes and lips again. Then the great hole of his mouth flaps open and in a flash he’s gone—“What is that bug?” yelled from just off-screen — and replaced by a peeling patch of paint. The camera, exhausted, remains in place while exclamations continue. There is, inevitably, a bang, a silence. Edward’s sigh fills the sonic space. The film cuts.
Over weeks and then months, the cache of recorded bits of life accrued. Paulie in full color, making his way down their street in the first hints of spring, backpack so high it almost meets his head, stopping to crouch at chalky, budless flowerboxes and yelling, “Hey in there, unborn motherfuckers!” and the sound of Edward’s sniggering at his influence on Paulie’s vocabulary. Paulie in a quiet moment on the stoop, leafing through Popular Science with eyes wide: “Ed, do you think you could really trust something that reproduced with itself?” Paulie prone on Edward’s visibly lumpy red cotton couch, asleep, one arm dangling off as though to exhibit his watch, the arms of which forever circle a miniature Aldrin and Armstrong taking a giant leap for mankind. Paulie on his thirty-third birthday, wearing a conic and glittering hat as well as the tie Claudia has fashioned him from streamers, standing at his keyboard, triumphant, hammering away.