Song of Renewal (22 page)

Garrison uncovered the canvas that evening, recalling the afternoon at the hospital. His abrupt departure had hurt Liza. He’d seen the disappointment in her eyes, in her very posture. He hated to see that beautiful dancer attitude flatten and wilt.

But what did he do with the agony-kick he experienced when faced with the violence of Troy’s death and Angel’s life-or-death trauma? It refused to go away. The kick had bulk and weight – enough to squash Garrison down deep inside himself when he glimpsed that replay of Liza sending the teens into harm’s way.

God. What must he do? He had not yet dug himself out. Didn’t yet know how.

They ate dinner, a quiet affair of deli rotisserie chicken and salad, before the television. He recognized it as Liza’s ploy to deflect the tension and silence that marked their evening time together. To a degree, it did help.

Both were obviously relieved to retreat upstairs to their individual nocturnal pursuits. Tonight, Garrison gazed intently at the black-and-white family photo from which he worked, the one he’d taken years back while pursuing artsy photography for portrait subjects. In the painting, Liza already lounged in their secluded wooded oasis. He pondered which figure to add next. At the same time, he was suddenly certain that he’d not completely captured Liza.

He looked at the subjects in the photo awaiting transition to canvas. They now narrowed to Garrison and the completion of Angel’s evolution. He’d begun sketches of her. Without the distraction of color, it suddenly became much easier to identify the light, middle, and dark values. Sometimes myriad colors in a photo distracted him from distinguishing values clearly.

Adding Liza’s figure to the landscape scene had forced him to work through the process of placing her in the strong sunlight reflecting off the lily pond. He knew that the figures would command attention wherever he placed them in the painting and he knew just where he wanted them.

Concentrating on technique soon relaxed and focused Garrison and, as he readied pencils and paints, his mind wandered back to his golden heyday of youthful success and the promise of things to come.

“Garrison Wakefield’s talent,” wrote one
Greenville News
art critic, “is to accomplish a fine balance between the subjects and the landscape.” After the recall, confidence buoyed his vision and approach.

Rather than being monochromatic, this painting’s landscape scene was colorful and lively, with sunlight reflecting over the pond, whose rippled multi-blue surface sprouted white and crimson water lilies with green, green pads. Liza’s rosy, sunlit face came forward in space where the dark, abstract reflection of trees in the water cut behind it, leaving a sharp outlined edge.

“The Three-Dimensional Artist,” noted artist and art critic Laurel Hart had called Garrison. “Garrison Wakefield’s expertise in using diffused, abstract background shapes contrasts nicely with the sharp, in-focus figures, making the subject the eye’s main attraction.” That was one of the highest compliments of his life.

He’d been blessed with the opportunity to study with Hart one summer, learning her techniques and applying them to his own. Slowly, intently, he reviewed all he’d learned and applied it to what lay before him.

Something deep, deep inside him told him that this was the single most important project of his lifetime.

He squinted at the canvas, absorbing the overall blend of detail. Then it hit him – this painting’s subject was light, particularly the way it illuminated Liza’s figure, revealing fluid form and enhancing warm flesh tones. He stood back and gazed in awe, remembering an artist’s proverb.
Light gives life to everything it touches and makes whatever it falls on more beautiful. It is, in itself, a master artist and is the force that guides my brush.

Light. Life.

That force would propel him. It would give Liza life. He willed it to fill her with life. When light framed and consumed his world once again, only then would he be whole.

In that moment, he lived it. The force moved him, guiding his brush and his vision. He added depth to Liza’s eye color, recalling Henry Theodore Tuckerman’s words, “The eye speaks
with an eloquence and truthfulness surpassing speech. It is the window out of which the winged thoughts often fly unwittingly. It is the tiny magic mirror on whose crystal surface the moods of feeling fitfully play, like the sunlight and shadow on a quiet stream.”

Ahhh. Garrison agreed. The eye is the mirror of the soul. That’s why the artist in him must get it right.

Now he proceeded with all the passion of an artist’s heart, exaggerating the color of Liza’s flesh tones in sunlight, gaining momentum as his brush stroked, teased, and coaxed, while his heart took wing and he soared above all the darkness of recent days.

Light gives life.

He flew like an eagle, up, up into the light.

Temperatures had not fallen below ninety-four degrees for the past five or six days and the world seemed sun-bleached to a blinding paleness. So the thunderstorm that rumbled in today was welcome, even though it did not break the heat but rather exhaled a smothery wetness into it. Through the hospital window Liza watched the angry clouds’ slow surrender to the savage sun.

“Where’s Angel?” Coming in the door, Charlcy looked around the hospital room. “Her bed’s gone.”

Liza blinked back fatigue and shifted in her chair. She’d almost buzzed off before her sister’s appearance. “Ummm. She’s having hyperbaric oxygen therapy.” She squinted bleary-eyed at her watch. “Should be back soon.”

“Oh.” Charlcy plopped down in a chair. “How do you know if that helps a comatose person? I mean – she’s been having HBOT all along, hasn’t she?”

Liza nodded her head. “She has, from the first week. Unfortunately, improvement isn’t always immediate. Comes more gradually. I only know that it’s pretty customary treatment in these comatose cases.”

Charlcy opened a Snickers bar and bit off a big hunk. “Missed lunch,” she said, chewing with relish. “They put Angel in that chamber thing to do HBOT, don’t they?”

“Yeah. Way I understand it is the pure oxygen administered during therapy ups the concentration of oxygen in the bloodstream – six times over what a person normally gets breathing. It’s supposed to carry healing to all parts of the body, even to bones and tissue the red blood cells can’t reach. It improves the white blood cell function, too. It’s even used with burn victims, I understand. You get the picture.”

Liza stood and stretched her stiff legs. “This hospital sitting is not for sissies,” she grumped and took a bathroom break. When she returned, she asked, “Got another one of those things?”

Charlcy cut her eyes balefully and fished out another Snickers bar. “I didn’t know you ate such crap, Miss Ballerina.”

Liza snatched the bar from her. “Thou shalt not hoard goodies. No, I don’t usually eat stuff like this. But what the heck?” She shrugged, ripped off the wrapper, and commenced tackling the chocolate-nougat-nut comfort. She leaned back in the chair and munched contentedly, enjoying the incomparable succor it doled out. “How was Dad?”

“He was there. Two hundred percent there.” She burst into bawdy laughter and flipped a used disposable wipe into a small trash can. “You’ll never guess what he was doing.”

Liza laughed at the gleam in her sister’s mischievous eyes. “No. Tell me.”

Charlcy scooted to perch on the edge of her seat. “They were sitting on the front porch at the nursing home. I came in
the side entrance and went to Dad’s room, which overlooks the porch, y’know? Well, I saw them through the window. Like on a dad-blamed movie screen. There they sat on the bench, right in front of the window, he and this gray-haired lady patient – you know the one I said he was sweet on when he’s here, right?”

Liza nodded, gurgling with anticipation. Charlcy continued. “He had his arm draped around her shoulder and then he leaned over and blew on her neck. Can you believe that? Pulled out her collar, at the nape, and blew on her neck.”

“No!”

“And then he leaned and kissed her neck. Nuzzled it. The lady loved it! Looked at him all smiles. And I thought, whoa, where is this going? Then he reached over and they kissed, sis! A lock-lips, suck-face kind, as Lindi would put it.”

Liza’s hands covered her mouth to stem the laughter. “Heavens…to…Murgatroyd.”

Charlcy leaned in, arms on denimed knees. “Hey!” She spread her hands and shrugged eloquently. “They don’t have to worry about what anybody thinks anymore, don’tcha know?”

“No.” Liza wiped her eyes of mirth tears, ones that felt good. “They don’t.”

They settled into a comfortable silence. Lulled by unrivaled sisterly camaraderie, Liza reached way inside herself for other good recollections to sustain the pleasure, so seldom there these days. “Remember when Mama took us to the circus that year when I was in second grade?”

At Charlcy’s distressed grunt, Liza inwardly groaned and attempted to veer into a safer direction. “Daddy was determined that we go, remember? Wanted us to experience – ”

“Something good in our lives,” Charlcy flatly injected, October blue eyes now wounded. “But he sent us off with that crazy woman, knowing good and well that – ”

“She wasn’t crazy, Charlcy,” Liza softly but firmly objected.

“Y’know, you sure could’ve fooled me, when she started cursing and challenging one particular clown to a duel to the death,
for Chrissake
?” With visible effort, Charlcy reined in her temper. Liza knew it was for her benefit that Charlcy did so.

“She was sick. There’s a difference.” Liza heard the desperation in her voice but didn’t care. How many times had they gone round and round this stupid hill with the same results? Like a dog’s tail-chasing – always coming up short, yet always idiotically and enthusiastically pursued. How she wanted her sister to remember their mama with love, not bitterness. Or at least allow Liza to entertain some healthy memories.

Charlcy, whose face was now flooded with the flush of suppressed fury – which Liza had learned to dread all during those early years – curled her hands into fists, a sign that she battled demons of recall.

Her voice was low and controlled, edged with steel. Implacable. “Liza, sick or evil, it all adds up to the same thing. A cobra, whether treated kindly or not, when it strikes, it’s venom is just as deadly. That was our mother. I’m proud that you want to see the best in her, but it’s just not in me. I can’t betray the veracity of my existence by romanticizing our mother’s tragic, ravaging, earthly jaunt. Too much carnage left behind, y’know?” Vented, she sagged back in her chair, eyes haunted, features slack and tired, looking suddenly older than her forty-five years.

“I’m sorry, Charlcy,” Liza whispered, tears pushing against the back of her eyes, stinging her nose. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.” She should have known that Charlcy, a capital R Realist, could not deal, close-up, with the harsh replays of yesterdays – except when she sat at the controls.

Charlcy snorted and shifted herself upright, recovering as quickly as she’d lapsed, “Shoot. You can’t know what’ll set off your nutty sister, honey. Even I don’t always know.” She shrugged elaborately and smiled that big old
Charlcy-with-the-world-by-the-tail smile. “Hey! Maybe I have a strain of the same crazy-bug as Mama Mia
.
”

“No.” Liza blinked back tears and murmured, “you had it so much worse than me. You always protected me and all.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how you endured it.”

Fully recovered and distanced from the angst of moments earlier, Charlcy lifted her shoulders. “I’ve learned to live beyond myself, honey. Simple as that. And I’ve grown quite adept at denial, doncha know?”

Liza felt herself relaxing, descending slowly to her comfort zone. She’d weathered those chaotic years of balancing her emotions, which depended upon the moment’s happenings, and to some degree, had maintained a modicum of reasoning. Charlcy’s plight had been more severe and now, looking back, she was passionately grateful for the hedge of safety Charlcy had built around her little sister.

“You helped Dad stay sane, too, you know?” Liza sighed and looked at her. “Many a day I watched you coax him back from the very end of himself. You really did. And that helped me, too, to have him to, you know – keep it all together. The family, I mean.”

“Mmm,” Charlcy agreed.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Liza sighed sadly. “Just when he was able to have peace of mind, his mind started leaving.”

“Yeah.” Charlcy looked at her and melted back in her chair, her face going solemn. “He comes back when you least expect it.”

Liza’s features, too, settled into somber lines. “I pray that will be the case with Angel.”

Liza shared the incident of Angel’s fingers curling and her disappointment at the nurse’s reaction.

“Huh. What does she know?” Charlcy grunted with characteristic cynicism. “Sis, she’s gonna make it. Y’hear me?” she said in her brook-no-nonsense way.