Foreigners

Every December 12, this is how it happens.

It is raining this afternoon, and they are running a little late.  Angela sails the big Buick back and forth along the curved desert road.  They are away from the Pacific now, and the car moves gently up and down, back and forth in the northern California hills.  The rain spatters the windshield with a soothing rhythm, and chip-chunk go the wiper blades.  Miguel's head falls back and he begins to snore lightly.  Some nights he has trouble sleeping, and Angela feels him stirring next to her, grumbling in Spanish and English through the night.  But car rides always put him to sleep.  She drives on, smiling to herself.  She feels there isn't another car in the world.

They're heading for a showing of Miguel's paintings at Berkeley: Expatriate Painters and Resistance, or something like that.  Angela never can keep track of such things.  Relaxed and happy, moving blithely along the empty highway, Angela can almost forget herself.  It is a grey drizzly morning, just as so many were in England.  The countryside is yellowed and parched, not like the verdant landscapes of Britain, but the feeling is the same.  Mists float low in the recesses of the hills, and it isn't until she sees the lights straight ahead of her that she realizes she is driving on the left side of the road.

The car is coming far too fast for Angela to understand what is happening.  So many things she has never gotten used to.  By instinct she swerves to the left instead of the right, too late, and the oncoming car strikes them on a diagonal, smashing in the passenger side.  She feels herself upside down, then everything is gone.

On the ninth anniversary of his death, this is still how it happens.

* * *

This year, she decided, she would break the cycle.  Ten years was long enough, and anyway, she could use the money, the company. She would take a boarder, perhaps a young artist, someone who could use Miguel’s studio.  She found Jason, a boy in his twenties, about to do a semester in residence at UC Santa Cruz.  He seemed a sweet fellow on the phone, if a bit taciturn.  He was driving cross-country, he said.  He’d pull in today.  That’s what he had said. Pull in.

It was August now, but the rains were here early.  It had been raining for a straight week, but Angela was unconcerned.  It would stop when it was good and ready.  Anyway, the apple trees in the back were getting a fine soaking, and she imagined the otters were playing happily down the street in the Pacific.  Probably, the weather kept the rollerbladers and runners and cyclists away from the shore, and it would be quiet.  Later, perhaps she'd even take a walk.

That was, if her bones could take it.  In her thirty-some years in the States she’d grown used to dryness; the damp got into her joints sometimes these days.  Angela imagined the clinging succulents along West Cliff Drive exhaling softly as the rain hit their swollen and rubbery leaves.  She could see the wide Bay, the brown kelp beds undulating on the troubled waves, the water’s variegated tones: deep blue, gray-blue, turquoise—leaping with raindrops.  The black shrouds of cormorants would be huddled on their high and narrow rocks, wings folded and pelican-beaks tucked tight to their chests.  It would be cold.

In London springs she used to walk, chill and rain and all, umbrella fearlessly hoisted, though at times the wind threatened to carry her away like Mary Poppins.  That was when she was young, that was years ago.  London’s wide streets: Whitehall, Charing Cross, converging in Trafalgar Square, carried the sheen of endless rain from March to May, and before and beyond that some years.  Lord Nelson stood bravely against the spring rains on his ridiculously phallic column, which Miguel had always called El Pesado—The Weighty (or Obnoxious) One—for its seeming omnipresence.  He pronounced it in the Cuban manner: ElPesao, fast, barely skimming the s, dropping the d entirely.  Miguel’s rangy form striding beside her kept her warm, though it might have only been that she had to take two steps for each of his just to keep up with him.  At times he would simply scoop her tiny frame into his arms and run, and her shrieks of feigned protest echoed in the streets.  Elderly ladies would click their tongues at them, blushing in secret, remembered pleasure or burning with envy at what they’d never known.

Now she sat in her chair at the dining room table, staring out the picture window at the rain coursing over her shockingly un-English garden.  It was wild, almost overgrown, she knew, but preferred it that way.  It matched the house: small, tight and cluttered with the trappings of a long life of two people, now one.  The tiny dining room barely held the table for six, upon which she kept a large, round, cobalt-blue vase filled with fresh flowers, whenever she could get them.  The table, and the china closet that covered one wall, prevented all but the thinnest of people from sitting on one of its long sides.  It hardly mattered: it had been years since Angela had had more than two other people in at a time.  The glass-fronted china closet, seven feet tall and nearly as wide, held every precious thing she owned, except the paintings that lined every other wall in the house.

The paintings were big, too big, she often thought, but what was one to do?  They hadn’t been in a gallery or show in years, but they papered the house with Miguel’s presence, and they were beautiful: abstracts in vibrant colors, oil thickly laid on with wide brushes and palette knives, filled with Miguel’s movement, Miguel’s hands.  They kept him alive in here, however dusty they might be along the top edges, where Angela couldn’t reach to dust.  She didn’t want to think about what the walls underneath them looked like, nor what the sun, usually streaming in California, was doing to fade the colors of those hanging nearest the windows.

And the rain streamed down the panes.

Soon, once again, her home would be filled with movement and color, the sound of stretching canvas and the brushes against its grain, the smell of oil paints and turpenoid.  A male voice in the house again.  Another person’s clothes on the bathroom floor, another person’s foreign idiosyncrasies.  The smell of coffee again, perhaps, perhaps.  Jason would arrive, Jason would paint, and Angela would go on living.  Surely Miguel would forgive her that.

She thought of the days that would follow when the rain left, slow, lovely Santa Cruz days.  Fog that lowered in the evening, flowing in from the ocean like some medieval spirit or pagan god, creeping up the land.  If you went down to the water around six o’clock on any summer night, you would see it, like a fleet of ghost ships trawling for shore.  It overtook the amusement park, with its wooden roller coaster; then the seal rocks; then the kelp beds and then the fingerlike protrusions of rock that were the fallen arches of Natural Bridges State Park.  Then it would climb, consuming the beaches, the low cliffs, the valley streets, then heedless, quickly now, it would flow up the hill, all the way to the University, and lay like pudding in a bowl until 10 the next morning.

By then the sun would have emerged, blinking slyly through the cover at first, then beaming powerfully, rinsing the mists away, revealing a sky like a sapphire.  The days would blaze, June, July, August, September, and relief would lie in the shade, 20 degrees cooler most days than the sun.  The sun would soak up the Pacific all day, tide in, tide out, and then the sun would sink, brazen orange and purple, into the Bay.  It wouldn’t be long, then, before it all began again.

So she sat in her picture window, the kettle boiling over on the stove, feeling her new boarder’s approach like the fog.

 

Jason stood in the overgrown garden.  The rain had left over a week ago, and the sun beating on the top of his head made light gather in the corners of his vision.  He watched a bee wobble between the wild roses cascading down Angela’s white wooden fence.  He hummed softly to himself, some mixture of familiar airs that crowded his mind when he worked: Clair de Lune, Moonlight Sonata, a bit of the Toreador Song when he really got going.  He dipped into the ultramarine blue, then into the medium, smoothing them together on his palette.

This painting was fighting him.  He had never seen a sky this color.  And he knew the woman watched him, staring out the dining room window, creeping back and forth with cups of tea and little cookies and the occasional bowl of chili or split-pea soup or whatever she occupied herself with making.  She embarrassed him, though he couldn’t see why.  She was like a caricature, he thought, like a giggling teenager trapped in a prim old Englishwoman’s body.  He looked up and sure enough, he saw her faded blond head hurry away from the window.  She distracted him.

She had seemed normal enough whenever he talked to her on the phone, and the arrangement had been perfect—$400 a month for a room, breakfast each day, and use of the studio space that stood empty on one end of the little house.  Funny thing was, he hardly used it; he dumped his supplies there and brought his light folding easel in at night, but the bright dry days, almost surreal in their clarity, drew him outdoors to try and capture them.  Angela kept a pitcher of iced tea and a glass on the delicate white wrought-iron table that sat under an apple tree in her yard.  Sometimes she came outside, drank a glass and watched him work.

He was impressed with her late husband’s canvases.  The sweep and scale of his abstracts was astonishing, and Jason had no doubt they had been made in this very environment, this very climate.  Their oils glinted in this light, as though they were made of it.  They’d crumble sooner, he knew; the sun would destroy them, but he couldn’t imagine them behind cold museum walls, terse descriptions engraved on plaques by their sides, never revealing any truth about the work.

So naturally, in a way, this woman interested him too.  She seemed buried beneath some great weight, more complicated than grief.  She was obscured by her enthusiasm for caring for him.

He heard the screen door swing open, then hiss back on its pressurized hinge.  There she was, small, a little plump, sprightly, carrying sandwiches of some kind on a white china plate, hurrying down the back steps, smiling in her ruffled blouse and smart linen trousers.  He smiled back, but felt his afternoon suddenly wasted.

“I thought you’d be hungry,” she called as she approached.

“Yes, actually, thanks.”  She was before him now, gazing up.

“Will you take a break?” she said.  “I don’t mean to bother you—never mind, I’ll just leave them here if you like—”

“No,” Jason said, and touched her arm.  She looked at his hand, and he took the plate of sandwiches from her as it began to tip toward the ground.  Gently, he set it on the little table, and pulled out a chair for Angela.  She sat slowly, her eyes on his.  So many secrets, Jason thought, and forgot his irritation.

Angela seemed to recover herself, smiled, and looked up at the tree shading their space.  “These apples are wonderful when they’re like this,” she said, and pulled two medium-sized green apples from a branch near her head.  “It’s early, but they’re lovely and tart.”  She polished one on her shirt and bit into it.

Jason grinned and couldn’t suppress a small laugh.  “Aren’t you worried about worms? Or, I don’t know, dirt?”

“This is the natural way,” she said. She affected a wicked grin and held the other apple out to Jason.  “Care for some original sin?”

Now she’s flirting with me, he thought.  But her eyes were laughing, self-aware.  He took the apple and thanked her.  He bit; it was hard, dripping with juice, cold and tart and exquisite.

“My husband used to eat these right off the tree,” she said, and her eyes went to some neutral place.  Jason noticed the classic lines of her profile.  “He was never really happy until we moved here.  England...it was too damp and cold for him.  He was drowning there, he said.  He needed a little sweetness and light, he said, that was all, and he already had his sweetness, so we came here for the other.”  She looked back at Jason, smiling, blushing at the remembered compliment.

“I’ve never seen so much light,” Jason said into the silence.  He felt at a loss for words.  He dropped his eyes, searching for a focus.  He looked back at his canvas, stood.  “I...cant seem to get this sky,” he said.

She looked up at him.  Jason’s profile was carved against the blue above him, his lost, searching expression, so familiar to her, made her dizzy.  She stood, and had to grab the back of the chair for balance.  After a moment, she took a half-sandwich from the plate and moved slowly to the house.  “Titanium white,” she said over her shoulder, her hand on the screen door. He looked at her.  “There’s no yellow in the sky here. Lighten it with titanium white—it’s all blue.”  The screen door hissed closed behind her.

Jason looked after her.  He felt defeated by the sun, though it was nearly three o’clock.  He waited until Angela was quite inside the house and, he imagined, occupied with something.  His head was too full for more conversation.  He gathered up his supplies and headed for the side entrance.

Up in his attic room, Jason pulled his sketchbook from under the little bed.  It was half-filled with charcoal sketches: faces he saw in diners along the road, strange South Dakota landscapes, tin-roofed houses alongside New Mexico railroad tracks.

He turned to a fresh new page and sharpened a charcoal pencil. From memory, he began to sketch out the lines of Angela’s face.

 

Angela sat shivering at her dining-room table. The light, almost unbearable, streamed in.  She’d nearly fainted outside.  She was a fool.  On the table, pink gladiolas wavered in front of her.  She thought for a moment that they might open one of their tightly folded blossoms and speak.  She shook her head.  Across from her, the sunlight revealed a film of dust on the china closet doors.  To her left, a painting of Miguel’s, Angela’s favorite, revealed its splendor.  She had always bemoaned the fact that pictures were kept shut up in galleries and museums, away from natural light.  Miguel’s paintings were emboldened by sunlight; he was meant to paint in California.  Vermilion whorls with cadmium yellow centers sprang to life.  Angela rose from the table to trace them with her fingers.

She was 19 years old and completely naked.  It was a chilly way to be in a drafty East End studio, rain pelting the windows, the perpetually grey English sky letting in what light it could.  Miguel stood before his canvas, bristling with energy.  He was grumbling to himself.  The rain always made him cranky, but at the time, Europe was the safest place for him, and since he only knew Spanish and English, London seemed like the best city for a young exiled artist.  That was how he always thought of himself, “exiled from Cuba.”  He had left on his own when the censoring of his work became too odious to bear.  America seemed too immediate, too complicit, he always told her, and the old world beckoned to him with its rich arts tradition.  Now he stood muttering and cursing the humidity for warping his canvas frames, the rain for keeping his paints from ever drying.  He rubbed his hands together and blew.  It was March, and not quite yet spring.

Even then, Angela’s body had had some extra padding to it; she was self-conscious about it, but Miguel said it made her una mujer verdadera, and so she did her best to sit up and shine for him.  It was freezing, though, and her shoulders kept curling inward.  She watched Miguel begin at last, swiping broad strokes, prepping the ground.  He was furious with the brush, over an inch wide, scooping up gobs of color and smearing them on the canvas with ferocious muscularity.  She couldn’t help but wonder what it was she inspired in him; to herself, she was short, cold, English, with dishwater blond hair and little to recommend her to an exotic Latin painter, except perhaps a laugh that her family always thought too boisterous for a proper girl.

Miguel looked at her critically, then moved to her. His mouth speeding with Spanish mutterings too fast for Angela to decipher, he grabbed her left shoulder and shifted it backward, straightened her left arm and put her hand on the block behind her.

“No te abraza así, amor,” he said, “stop eslouching, lift your chin for me, así, like this.”  He took her chin in his calloused hand and gently raised it.  She smiled at him, a bit weakly.  He smoothed her hair with his other hand, smiled back at her.  His dark eyes softened and filled with light.  She felt pink spread all over her body.  He took his brush, vermilion-dipped, and placed a daub of oil at the end of her nose.  She laughed.  He kissed her, then released her, bringing his brush down to her breasts, painting the center of each with brilliant red circles.

“Te quiero,” he said to her, kissing her ear, her neck, her shoulder, her collarbone.  She shuddered, feeling the cold leave her.  He took her left hand in his, turned her small palm up, and put the tip of his brush to the place where her ring finger met her hand.  Carefully, dexterously, he painted a ring all the way around the base of the finger, then, holding her hand, looked up at her face.

“Yes,” Angela said to him after a moment.

“I have to paint you now,” he said, and released her.

She was filled with him then, waiting for him just to say the word.  They had made love before, but she wanted more than anything for him to put down his brushes and palette and take her, there on the model’s platform.  She felt a bit ridiculous in her burning, like the paintings of women, breasts heaving, heads thrown back, on the covers of the romance novels her mother read in the summers.  But she couldn’t help it, and his making her wait made her sweat in the icy room.

So he painted her, or so he said.  He painted a canvas six feet wide by four and a half feet tall, swept it over with reds and pinks and cascades of yellow energy.  He said he was painting their desire.  In the corners of the painting, surrounding the bright shapes, were shadows of sienna and umber, rumbling with Prussian blue clouds ready to break.

They were married that September.  She was twenty then, and when they moved to America five years later, that painting was the only one that came with them.

It hung on her living room wall, now, brimming with the energy it had taken from her over forty years ago.  It had always been a secret between Miguel and her, that she was the model for it.  But people noticed it, they were drawn to it, “viscerally,” they usually said, or sometimes even, “sexually.”  Angela would just blush and smile, say something like, “Miguel is a very energetic painter. His work just seethes with life, doesn’t it?”

She put her hands on the painting and lay her cheek against it, closing her eyes.  She could feel him, feel herself, pulsing there in the brushstrokes, pushing to get out.

 

By October the days were growing shorter, and Jason painted inside more often, though the garden still attracted him.  His landscapes were improving each day, but by night, he startled himself by filling pages of his sketchbook with Angela.  Each night she got younger, the lines in her face closing, the flesh beneath her chin lifting.  The eyes always stayed the same: youthful, bright, searching, but deep with years.

He thought of how she looked, the first time she had opened the door to him. In a moment the color drained from her face, and she made no move to invite him in.

“Mrs. Valdes?”  He held out his hand to her.  She stared at him, though it seemed she stared straight into him, or through him, he couldn’t decide which.

Angela put her hand against the doorjamb, pulling back from his touch.  This boy was so like Miguel that she felt herself floating.

“Come in,” she said at last.  “Come in, I’m sorry, Jason, hello.”  She shook his proffered hand, gave it a small squeeze, stood aside as he moved his tall, thin frame through the door.

His hair, dark and grown past his collar, stuck in wet strands to his face.  She was relieved to see his walk: relaxed, slouching, unlike Miguel’s loping, mountain-climber’s gait.  Still, his proud nose, strong jaw, his eyes, intense and almost black, his lips, full and with a slightly imperious curl—the resemblance was striking and terrible.  Her mind filled with the blank and possessed thoughts of her 18-year-old self: he is so beautiful, he is so beautiful, he is so beautiful.

Jason looked around the room at the paintings, took the seat Angela offered.  He had been driving the entire day in the rain, and had been reminded by the radio, over and over, how odd it was at this time of year.  Late August should be filled with sun.  He felt the rain beginning to dry on his face.  He was confused.  This woman made him monstrously uncomfortable.

Now, he’d been with her nearly two months.  She seemed to watch him more and more as he worked, and the more she watched him, the more his paintings seemed to grow, swimming with color, teeming with life.  His portraits of her had progressed to the point where she looked close to his age, and each drawing revealed her beauty to him more.  Yet seeing her in person distanced him, and he tried to deny the energy she brought to his creation.

Angela had eased into Jason’s presence slowly, enjoying her role as caretaker, unaware of her role as muse.  She tried to restrain the strange obsessive impulses that overtook her at times, but when she offered to do his laundry for him, she found herself secreting smells of his shirts, searching for the scent of Miguel.  But this boy smelled of soap and vanilla, soft, and Miguel had been coffee, the mint sprigs he chewed, cigar smoke, the medium he used to thin his oils, the tang of sandalwood.

One night, near Halloween, Angela rose from her bed, unable to sleep.  The moon spilled into the room so that it was almost daylight.  She wrapped her satin dressing gown about herself and crept to the kitchen.  The house was filled with the blue-white light, latticed by apple trees, filtered by her gauzy white curtains.  She saw her painting, all of its darkest ambitions afoot.

She mounted the stairs slowly, as though asleep, and glided into Jason’s room.  She didn’t know what she intended to do there.  She kept thinking: I’m 61 years old.  She felt certain her heart, which swished in her ears, would wake him.

She sat lightly on the foot of the bed.  Jason shifted slightly, breathed out, rolled onto his back.  His face seemed carved out of light.  Angela watched him sleep.

One touch, she thought, that’s all.  I’ll just touch his face and then Ill go downstairs, and none of this will have ever happened.  She reached her left hand out to him, her wedding ring shining silver on her softly wrinkled hand.

His face was warm, and the feeling traveled up her arm.  In his sleep, Jason smiled, and Angela felt like a balloon was inflating inside her.  Her vision blurred; she covered her mouth with her other hand.

Jason dreamed of a woman in a silk nightgown, her hair pale blond and cut in an old style.  She laughed, and her laugh was a visible current of color, flowing into him.  At once there was a canvas behind him, or perhaps he was the canvas, and as the woman touched him, her laughter splashed onto it in patterns of formless beauty.  He closed his eyes and let it wash over him.

When he opened his eyes again, the current was still flowing from her mouth, but it seemed to drain her; she began to age before his eyes, her face falling, her bright hair fading.

He was awake.

“What—what’s going on?” he said, sitting up too fast.  He hit his head on the vaulted ceiling.  Angela stood in a flurry of satin and remembered herself. “Angela…” he said, but had no words.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, shaking.  “I’m ridiculous, oh God…”

“Angela...what were you—”

“I just—I just wanted to touch—oh God,” she said again.  She hurried down the stairs as Jason stood, pulling on sweatpants.  In a moment he heard her bedroom door close, the sound of crying.  He didn’t follow her, but lay awake, trying to separate dream from the moon that moved slowly across his ceiling.

She stopped watching him in the garden.  He stopped drawing her at night.  He only had a month and a half left in this house.

 

That day came around again, as it always did.  12 December again, she thought.  It was the tenth anniversary of his being gone.  Jason’s presence.  Jason’s eyes.  Jason’s paintings.  It had only made it worse.  It always rained on this day.  She sat at her dining room table and watched her painting, waiting for the memory to come again.

Jason drove along the slick streets that afternoon.  Everything seemed dark.  Winter in Santa Cruz was quiet, misty, vaguely cold.  He missed snow.  He sped his little Civic up and down the hills of the University, high, dry grasses soaked by the rain but still brown, tall, thin redwood trees, soft bark the color of brick.  The buildings peeped in and out of view.

He had left Angela alone around noon.  She was moping about, not at all her usual self.  Even after the “incident,” as he had come to think of it, she had been conciliatory, cheerful, hospitable, even funny, if with an edge.  Today she was blank, almost motionless, and she stared at one of her husband’s most magnificent paintings, drinking cup after cup of Earl Grey.  He felt she was transparent then, like a person ready to die.  He couldn’t stand to be close to her, her truth oozing from her like fog, her age painfully apparent.  He had a moment where he longed to draw her, just like that. Instead he drove.

It was the end of the semester and the roads were deserted.  The usual foot-traffic was scarce as well, and the landscape was grief-stricken.  The rain drummed lightly on the windows, and the wiper blades bump-swished comfortingly.  He felt he was the only conscious being for miles.

Jason drove the empty University byways aimlessly for an hour or more, until he reached the main road again, down the hill to town.  His driving was lazy, too fast, distracted.  He was thinking of coming out here, painting these hills.  First clear day, he thought.  He turned right onto the main road. He didn’t see the bus coming down the hill.

The first thing was the horn.  It came from behind him, too close.  The bus swerved to the left to keep from hitting him as he turned onto the road.  Jason swung to the right as the bus, narrowly missing him, veered onto the shoulder.  All he saw was the wall of water the bus kicked up, then he was off the road on the opposite side, rolling down the hill.  When he finally stopped moving, he could barely see the road from where he was; the windshield wipers had stopped.  He tasted blood and rain.

Angela stood up from the table, almost knocking over her chair.  She stood and listened, as though the rain would bring her an answer.  She felt panicked, and had been pulling on the edge of the tablecloth rhythmically until she realized that the other side of the table was now exposed.  The gladiolas were dipping their heads toward the ground.

Jason sat gripping the steering wheel.  He breathed in, then out.  His breath was steam; steam rose from the hood of his car; steam lurked in the recesses of the hills.  He had only bitten through his lip when he left the road.  He wasn’t hurt.  He breathed in, then out.

There was a noise outside his window.  He rolled it down.  The bus driver was yelling at him.  “Are you okay?  What were you doing back there?  Are you hurt?  What are you, drunk?”  He seemed ready to strangle Jason to death, as long as he wasn’t injured.  Jason laughed.  He was alive.  He looked up: people were spilling out of the bus and onto the narrow road.  Everyone seemed okay.

Police cars and ambulances wheeled up the hill.  The scene filled with red and blue light, flashing, flashing.  Jason stepped out of his car and into the rain.

 

After hours of paperwork, Jason walked through the door of Angela’s house.  Instantly, she was there, touching him, his face, his arms, checking him all over as though he’d come back from the dead.  “What’s all this?” he said, but her worry touched him.  He stopped her roving hands, holding both her shoulders gently.

“You’re okay,” she said. “You were spared.”

“Yes,” he said, puzzled.  Her eyes were deep in the past.  “How did you…”

Jason glanced at the dining room table, where Angela had been sitting.  There was an album open there, the pictures clearly grey and frayed-edged even from where he stood.  “May I?” he asked, and she nodded. He moved to the table.

“Wait,” said Angela, and moved to the kitchen.  She returned with a clean dishtowel, which she handed to Jason.  He wiped his face, his hair, his hands dry, before touching the pictures.  When he at last looked, it was as though someone had shoved aside the veil for a moment, and shown him the strange secret truths of the world.

A young man stood leaning on one leg in the picture.  His mouth was in a broad smile, his eyes crinkled at the edges.  They sparkled, black in the black-and-white photo.  His jeans looked paint-spattered, his hair, disheveled.  He was surrounded by the sharp light and shadow that Jason now knew so well.  It was as though he were looking at himself.

“My God,” he said, for there weren’t other words.

Angela sat in the chair at the end of the table, close.  She put her hand on the album, in Jason’s line of sight.  He raised his head.  “My husband died on this day,” she said.

Jason sat for a few moments with this knowledge.  He looked into Angela’s eyes, troubled, but clear.  Free of something they hadn’t been before.  He looked at the picture again, then up at Angela.  “I want to show you something.”

 

The portraits were rough, filled with the energy of drawings done quickly, passionately.  She turned the pages of the sketchbook over, over, reluctant each time, somehow afraid to go back.  He’d gotten it almost right, every time, right down to her in her early twenties, fey, almost pixieish, a touch of mischief in the eyes.  He’d taken off her extra weight, but no matter.

“I couldn’t stop drawing them,” he told her.  “I didn’t know why.  I still don’t.  But here they are.  I suppose that really, they’re yours.”  He looked at her, and her face looked soft, almost radiant.  They were sitting side by side on the couch.  In the silence, he could hear that the rain had stopped.  He leaned in and kissed her.

He was warm and full of darkness.  His mouth was young and a little inexperienced.  She allowed herself to bury her right hand in his hair.  Then she broke the kiss.  She looked at his young and tender face.  There was a scar above his right eyebrow that she had never noticed before.  His eyes were clouded, unsure and pleading.  He had so much to go through yet.  He was Jason.

“Do you see that painting?” she said to him.

He saw it.  It had drawn him from the first time he laid eyes on it.  “It’s amazing,” he said.  “It’s so alive.”

“That is my portrait, too,” she said.  “That was when I was young.”  She gathered herself up, taking the book of sketches from where it lay, between them, on the couch.  Jason looked up at her.  His face was unreadable.  “Thank you,” she said to him.  It seemed the only thing to say.  “Thank you.”

And over the space between them, they looked at each other.