A Blue So Dark (7 page)

Famous schizos: van Gogh, painter. Jack IKcrouac, author. Syd Barrett, musician of Pink Floyd fame. 'haclav Nijinsky, dancer. Every single freaking one of them an artist of some sort.

ura," Janny sighs. "It's not like I can just take offto-what? Hang out?" In the background, Ethan is screaming like somebody's put a knife through his skull.

"Your mom'll babysit," I say, selfishly. "I just-I need somebody else to look at her, you know? Just come over for dinner-real quick-and you can take off."

"Now, Aura? You're handing me this now."

I get tight inside, defensive. It's not like I planned this. It's not like I want to have a mother who's in her room, starting canvases and leaving them half-finished, paint flying everywhere. It's not like I want a mom who wakes me up like she did last night, rustling me out of bed, hissing, "AuraAura-I need some green. Are you listening? You need to get in the car, okay?"

What I wanted to say was, Yeah, Mom, this town is full of all-night art supply stores. Because everybody knows that at two a. m., you just might find yourself needing a bottle of cough syrup, some ibuprofen, a jug of milk, or a tube of acrylic kelly green #304. Right. But I just peeled myself from my sheets and tried to placate her by mixing up some green myself. Yellow and blue, Mom. Don't you remember?

"Ten minutes," I tell Janny. "Five," I try to bargain. "You can just pretend to eat." I feel like some wayward stray at her back door, scratching and pawing and begging. And that makes me angry, too. Hadn't I let Janny cry into my shoulder for a week solid when the stick had turned pink?

"Fine," Janny sighs, exasperated, just the same way she sighs at her mother. I figure, judging by her tone, I even get an eye roll.

I mix up a tuna noodle casserole, and while it melts into a bubbling, canned-fish blob, I head into the living room and sit down on the bench of the Ambrose Original, our family piano. I really don't play the old upright very well. I can read the treble clef okay and can form a few chords. But the real reason I love it-as pitiful as it is-is because I built it with Dad. Because he bought it for my tenth birthday. Because I came home from school, and there it was, all scraggly and chewed up, looking like it had been through every major battle of World War II. And for more than a year, we spent every Saturday going to Piano Pete's-an old music store just across the street from the skankiest used car dealership in town-to buy pedals, hammers, felts, damper pads, strings.

When I sit on the bench, I remember how Dad and I used to laugh about the belt buckle Pete wore, the gold thing in the shape of a baby grand. I remember how Mom sanded the mahogany down to the nubs so that she could paint it up in her own amazing style. She did, too-angels and sinners and street performers and love and pain and fear and lust and everything everybody ever played a song about-she painted it all, an absolute masterpiece, right there on the piano. I think about how we got it done in time to play carols on it. All Christmas Eve long.

I stare at the Ambrose Original lettering Mom freehanded over the Kimball that was branded to the front when Dad first brought it home. I touch the perfect, straight, strong, gold brushstrokes while my eyes wander over the rest of Mom's painting. The way the colors swirl across the top of the piano, it's always reminded me a little of the van Gogh that shows up in all the print stores-Starry Night.

Yeah, van Gogh, schizo as they ever come. Some say that's why he cut off his ear, you know-because he was tired of the voices. And they-the ever-present THEYso-called experts who probably can't even tie their own shoes-they say that Starry Night shows how light's texture can change with the onset of a psychotic episode.

Damn, I hate that picture.

I wonder sometimes why some people are geniuses, and some are just nuts. What's so different about Mom and van Gogh? What's in the sunflower paintings that didn't make it to any one of the hundreds of canvases Mom's stacked everywhere-the garage and the living room and the attic? Why isn't my room considered a masterpiece? Why aren't vacationers from Pittsburgh and Little Rock lining up at our door in their Bermuda shorts, salivating over a chance to get a glimpse of the garden Mom painted all over my bedroom walls? Why am I not standing at the door every single weekend, taking money and telling everyone, Remember, no flash photography, thank you?

The clunkerty-clunk of the engine in Janny's rattlebang p.o.s. makes me remember dinner. She throws open the front door just as I rush back into the kitchen to pull the casserole from the oven.

"Where is she?" Janny sighs, rubbing at her face. She looks like she's forty, the way that pretty face of hers has been stretched and bloated with the pain of a mistake that never gets undone.

"She's been painting ever since we got home yesterday-her eyes," I start to babble, explaining about the car ride and how I had to drive.

"That's really dumb," Janny says, pulling a pack of cigarettes from her floppy, bargain-bin purse-the kind of thing we would have made fun of a couple of years ago, made from scraps of mismatched leather sloppily patched together. She shoves aside the back screen so that she can smoke through the open door. "You don't know the first thing about driving," she grumbles, because she's already had her license for a year and a half. Pre-Ethan, the twenty months in our age difference (caused by Janny getting held back once and me skipping a grade) never seemed like it even existed, since, from the time we met, we were always in the same class. Now, though, she's holding those twenty crappy months over my head. Like somehow she's already seen it all, and I'm just this snot-nosed little kid.

"What was I supposed to do?" I snap while Janny flicks her half-smoked cigarette onto the patio. "Out there in the middle of some ditch."

Janny flashes me a principal face, like I should know better. I feel a little like slapping her for it, actually.

While Janny sets the table, I head down the hall, saying, "Mom? Mom?" my voice as soft as the fur on a tottery young kitten.

"Mom," I say again as I slip into her doorway.

But she doesn't answer. I just stare at her awhile, covering my mouth, because after a full day of painting she seems as wasted as Joey Pilkington after a night out. My eyes travel across the paint she's smeared up her arms and under her fingernails and all over her face. She's tied her hair in a knot, too-an honest-to-God knot, and it's been so long since she's put any conditioner on her hair, I figure she'll probably have to whack it all off. I figure her hair, dry as yarn, won't ever come out of what she's done to it.

I guess that's the beauty of a knot, really. It never comes undone.

Mom's taken her jeans off and is wearing some crazylooking housedress, fourteen times too big. I wonder where it's come from-it looks old, like she could have found it in the attic, but also stained with grease, like Dad used it as a rag when he was still around to work on the car. And it hits me that it looks like a maternity dress. Like she wore it when she was nine months pregnant with me. I get the hot chills all over again, because as she glances up, I'm not sure who she thinks I am. I wonder if she's somehow lost in time. I wonder if she even remembers that I was born, that I'm hers.

Then again, I try to tell myself, maybe she grabbed the old dress because it looked like a comfortable thing to paint in.

As we stare at each other, I find myself wishing that Mom could somehow pretend to be sane. It's a wasted wish, like squeezing your eyes shut and hoping that when you open them again, poof You'll have traveled back in time.

Still, though, the whole world is full of posers. People who lie on Internet dating sites. People who fudge their real weight on their driver's licenses. People who drive rented sports cars to their high school reunions, acting like they're more successful than they really are. So maybe, just maybe, me and Mom could pretend to be normal.

My eyes settle on the pockets on her housedress. Big pockets, open at the top. And because I can feel desperation knocking on the door of my heart, I quietly slide one of her drawers open and pull out a crystal from her collection-one of those rocks she swears she can feel vibrate, she swears has power, can heal. I slip it into one of her enormous pockets.

I mean, even if I'm not exactly sure I believe in this stuff, she does. And that's what makes all the difference, isn't it? Her belief? Isn't it what's governing my whole damn life-the shadows Mom believes in?

I finally manage to steer her out of her room, down the hall, and into a kitchen chair. An October evening breeze comes through the screen door, rattling the driftwood mermaids above the table. I pull the sliding glass shut, dole out heaps of steaming casserole.

"We can't sit long," Mom insists. "The world will stop.

Janny's fork pauses midair.

"Our feet. Everyone's feet," Mom says. "We all take steps, only we're not just pushing ourselves forward. We're pushing the world, see? We're pushing the whole world forward. If men and women and animals die from the world completely, the earth will stop moving. It takes us to move the world, to propel it forward. Like how you pedal a bicycle, see? We've got to pedal the earth!"

"Mom," I say. "Let's eat dinner, okay?"

Mom leans forward, her eyes wild. "What about her?" she whispers, pointing at Janny. "Do you see her? Because I do, I can, but I might paint her later if she's okay to be real for a little while."

"Mom," I say quietly. "That's Janny. You know Janny."

I can hear Janny gulp even from across the tablewhat's harder to swallow, I wonder, my mom or my tuna?

Janny sucks in a deep breath and pushes her scraggly brown hair behind her ears, and she does try. God love her, in that moment, she smiles and says, "Could you please pass the salt? Grace? Pass the salt, please."

Mom stands up, her face lighting up like she's just had the biggest epiphany of her entire life. "You know, if I tried hard enough, I think I could change the course of the whole world. Think," she says, stepping out into the middle of the linoleum. "If I just spin hard enough, fast enough, in the opposite direction-"

She starts twirling in her bare feet, squealing like she's the fastest thing on the whole planet-faster than bullets or pain or fear.

Janny makes this terrible face as she fights her tears. God, she fights as hard as some people battle cancer. But the tears break through, anyway.

"I just want the salt," Janny cries out. "Salt." She screams it with such power, I think for sure she's ripped her vocal cords right in two. She jumps up and throws her napkin on the table, still screaming-not words, just screaming, like a woman in a haunted house.

I grab the shaker where it's still sitting beside Mom's plate. But Janny's already snatched her purse up and she's heading for the door.

Wait wait wait wait wait.

Janny races down the front steps and I follow, like a dope, the salt shaker still in my hand. Here, Janny, here's your salt, take it, I want you to have it always and forever.

"I can't anymore," Janny says. "I can't be around her, all right?"

"Why? What's the deal? You used to stand up for me, you know."

"God, Aura, because-because it's too hard for me, okay? I can't deal with her anymore. Not now, not with everything else."