Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
It was no surprise to Jasmine that Walton demanded to stay in the house.
He reasoned that he’d bought the place. It was all in his name.
He had earned most of the money that had gone into it, and so on.
It was a weak argument at best, given the fact that Jenny and Walton had been married for decades and had three children together.
But Jenny told Jasmine she was too tired to fight him about the house—a house that had more painful memories than good ones, especially as of late.
The only thing she planned to fight him on was custody.
She wanted to be there for Alyssa and Jade, to help them through their final years of high school.
She knew that Walton didn’t have the emotional capacity to care for two teenage girls.
The day Jenny came over to Jasmine’s and announced she was leaving Walton, Jasmine and Jenny picked up Alyssa and Jade from school and told them their plan.
Alyssa, Jade, and Jenny would move into Jasmine’s apartment for a while, just until they could save up for a bigger place.
Chase could crash for a bit, but he’d eventually need to find his own place, either with roommates or alone.
He’d been saving up for an apartment for long enough, Jenny and Jasmine reasoned. Jasmine prayed he wouldn’t be far.
When they called Chase to explain to him what was going on, he’d just finished up a surfing lesson and told them he was proud of them for hatching a plan. “Things couldn’t continue like that,” he said gently, with more empathy and kindness than Walton had offered in his entire life.
Alyssa and Jade packed two backpacks each, full of stuff, and came to their grandmother’s right away.
They cried quietly in the spare bedroom before joining Jasmine and Jenny for dinner.
Jasmine found within herself the strength to tell stories and make jokes, trying to distract her granddaughters from their parents’ impending divorce.
Eventually, Alyssa smiled, and Jade told a few stories from her day at school.
By the end of the night, the four women had a rapport that felt easy and sweet.
At the beginning of March, Jasmine was hard at work in the convenience store when a storm brewed over the horizon and began to charge directly for the island.
Tourists took cover in their swanky hotels and abandoned the beach.
Jasmine stood at the window of the convenience store, watching the rain pelt.
Something about the scene floored her. It activated an emotional core that she’d forgotten she still had.
Within a few minutes, she set herself up at one of the little tables near the coffee maker. She set a pencil to a pad of paper and began to sketch what she saw. Love flowed through her as she tore through page after page, trying to “see” with her fingers, with the pencil, with her heart.
It was four thirty, and Alyssa and Jade entered the convenience store, their hair drenched from the rain.
They’d walked from school to see their grandmother.
When they saw their grandmother’s sketches, they were shocked.
It was bizarre to Jasmine that they’d never known her artistic soul, that she’d never shown it to them. Why had she hidden it away for so long?
“I used to love to paint,” Jasmine explained tentatively. “But back then, painting supplies weren’t as expensive as they are now.”
Alyssa and Jade eyed one another mischievously. By the following day, they’d stolen a fair bit of painting supplies from their school art department: paintbrushes, acrylics, oils, and even an entire canvas, which someone had stretched across a frame.
“How did you get this out of school?” Jasmine asked, mystified. She knew that a better grandmother would have told them that stealing was wrong and that they shouldn’t have risked their school lives for her. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell them to take it all back.
That night, as Jade, Alyssa, and Jasmine watched television in the living room, Jasmine set up her paints in the kitchen and got to work.
She decided to paint the same scene she’d been sketching the day before—a stormy beach, an angry sky, palm trees tossing themselves right and left.
It was difficult at first to get the base color exactly right.
But she was surprised at how quickly everything seemed to come back to her.
As she worked, she thought back to her first years of painting in Colorado, back when she’d had a very different name and a very different life.
What she’d seen out the window of her cabin had felt so spectacular, so grand.
She’d never thought anyone would ever see her paintings.
She’d never thought that anyone would ever care to see them.
Since discovering Larry’s rise to fame, Jasmine had avoided every headline and search bar. She didn’t want to know what his paintings sold for, how wealthy he’d become, or how perfect his life appeared now, years after she’d been forced to run from him just to survive.
Some stories were safer left unopened.
It was Larry who called the doctor in Boulder to inquire about his fertility services.
Jasmine—who went by Henrietta at the time—listened from the living room, her head pounding, as her husband stood at the kitchen phone and secured an appointment for the following week.
“We look forward to it, Doctor,” Larry said.
“My wife and I want a family terribly. We’ve been trying and trying. It feels like you’re our only hope.”
It was true that they’d been trying to get pregnant for years and years.
Henrietta was now twenty-eight years old and far older than most women when they had their first. But at this stage of her life, she’d begun to daydream about another reality, one in which she didn’t have Larry as a husband, wasn’t his prisoner, who was made to cook and clean for him.
They left for the doctor at nine thirty in the morning on a blustery Tuesday in February.
Henrietta was quiet throughout the drive, willing her body to fight whatever “science” or “magic” the doctor performed on them.
She didn’t know a thing about fertility.
Maybe something within her body was protecting a potential child from having a father like Larry. Maybe this was nature’s way.
When they arrived, things only seemed to get worse.
The doctor was a terrible man of fifty who made jokes about Henrietta’s body and mind in a way that made Henrietta feel she wasn’t in the room with him and her husband.
Henrietta sat with her arms crossed over her stomach, listening as men made up their minds about her future.
It was soon decided that they would perform a brand-new surgery on Henrietta, one that she couldn’t refuse, as refusing was the same as saying she didn’t want what her husband wanted.
She felt her heart break with fear. She’d never been cut open before.
The surgery was scheduled for the following week.
During the days leading up to it, Henrietta couldn’t sleep and daydreamed about escaping her life in Colorado.
She imagined walking to the side of the road and sticking up her thumb.
She imagined somehow getting to Denver, where she’d board a bus and take it anywhere it was headed.
She didn’t dare name a place she’d rather be.
She’d never been anywhere but Colorado before.
She’d heard about New York City and Maine and Washington, DC, and New Mexico.
She’d heard about other countries, other continents.
But imagining herself as far away as one state to the east or west terrified her.
I can’t stay. I can’t go. Her thoughts were twisted up. Time passed regardless. She felt as though her life would carry her forward, like a river.
On the day of her surgery, Henrietta lay in a hospital bed and watched her husband and the surgeon discuss what was going to happen to her insides.
She’d never felt more disconnected from herself.
She realized, at that moment, that she hadn’t painted in months, not since Larry had discovered her paintings and called them his own.
Even now, as the surgeon prepared to leave, Larry mentioned that he was a painter and that he had numerous paintings for sale if the surgeon was a collector.
The surgeon seemed intrigued and said that they should talk about it later.
Under her breath, Henrietta said, “You’re shameless, Larry Johannes.”
“What was that, sweetheart?” Larry asked, leaning forward to kiss her on the brow.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise that the surgery was a grand success.
Against all her previous prayers, her damaged fallopian tubes were now primed and ready for fertilization.
And fertilization was what happened to Henrietta just a couple of months later.
Against all odds, she was pregnant. She panged with mixed feelings of loss of joy.
She hadn’t realized how much she’d always wanted a baby, how often she’d kept those dreams at bay because she’d assumed it couldn’t happen.
Now, she had to do something about Larry, about her circumstances.
She had to do it for her baby's safety and happiness. Lucky for Henrietta, Larry wasn’t yet aware of the pregnancy, which gave her a little time to think.
By then, Larry was fully immersed in the opening of his very first art exhibition—an exhibition that he saw as his first step into the grand world of art.
He was often in Boulder, overseeing the hanging of her paintings and chatting with other local artists, all of whom saw him as an exciting new talent to watch.
Henrietta marveled that she wasn’t overwhelmed with jealousy.
The truth was, she was grateful that Larry was out of the house so much.
Maybe she’d painted those works to push Larry away from her. She just hadn’t known it at the time.