Chapter 17
Isabelle and Bruno walked me home. I asked to be alone. Inside, it was thick with silence. Silver lay in my arms with her nose nestled in the crook of my elbow, her belly still bloated with saltwater.
I debated whether to call James with the news or wait until he returned the next day to deliver it in person.
If he knew, he’d probably skip the pitch and return to Holme at once.
It was probably kinder to let him have one more day of ignorance.
One more day where it was just the two of us, me and Silver, and she didn’t really have to be dead.
In the guest bathroom, I knelt by the tub and turned on the tap, pouring shower gel into the rush so the bath frothed with bubbles.
Silver’s fur flared in the soapy water. I cupped her head with my palms and thumbed the sand carefully off her eyes.
I scratched the divots behind her ears, patting down the fur so it went in one direction, shiny and neat.
I brushed her teeth. I rubbed her feet. Then, when she was clean, I unplugged the tub.
Tufts of fur swirled lazily around the drain hole.
I spoke to her, briefly and quietly, until I became sleepy.
We went to the bedroom. The floor was warm from the day’s sun.
Dust motes swiveled freely below the window with nobody there to catch them.
I curled onto the bed. Light fell through the blinds, sliding off the mattress and pooling on the floor. I pressed Silver’s soft body against the cold, empty plate of my chest and, with a sense that something more than her life had ended, I wept.
The bed shook. I had the strange yet gratifying sense that weeping here, on this bed, was the first real thing I’d ever done. For just a moment, it was the only thing I would ever do. And then I fell asleep.
When I woke, it was evening, Silver was still in my arms, and I had a missed call from my mother.
My mother picked up on the second ring. “Katie,” she said, and I thought it was strange that I felt nothing.
“Mom.”
“I’m calling to tell you happy belated birthday.”
My body felt distant, small. I observed it from above, a smudge like spilled ink on bleached sheets. She didn’t sound angry. She didn’t sound like herself, either.
I forced myself to speak. “Thank you.”
“I know I’m late.”
“It’s okay. I missed yours.”
“You did,” she said. “You were punishing me. I know you.”
She always said this: I know you. But I also knew her, enough to understand why she’d ignored my most recent call. She wanted to punish me, too. I relaxed. We were finally even.
“Did you feel punished?” I asked.
“Very much. You punish me very well.”
I could tell her who taught me. “Why are you calling me now?”
“I was cleaning.” Her voice softened. “I found all these paintings you made. The one of the sheep. The water lilies. You were so talented, did you know that? And you won a prize for the water lilies, do you remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“You used to spend all these afternoons painting. You refused to eat or drink. Sometimes you even wet yourself, remember?”
“Yes, I remember.” I did all that because she did it first.
“I wonder why I never put you in classes. You were good. I always wanted to.”
Whatever anger was left in my body waned into disappointment. We would not discuss our silence. My mother’s only way of connecting with me was reanimating the child I no longer was, would never be again. Once, our relationship was an alive thing. Who was responsible?
I said, “I know.”
She asked if I would come home. I replied that I would stay in New York for a while longer. A silence formed. Finally, she spoke. “How are you paying for it?”
I told her about Lou’s cousin’s place. “And I had my school job.”
“Are you still working for the school?”
“No.” I began to feel uneasy. “But I’m looking for a new job.”
“Do you need money?”
“No.” Then, “Well, yes, but you don’t need to worry.”
“Why didn’t you ask me?”
I used the hand that wasn’t holding my phone to pinch the one that was. Silver’s head, previously perched on my forearm, drooped against my thigh. “James,” I said, “is very generous.”
“James?”
“My boyfriend.”
“Your boyfriend. I didn’t know you had a boyfriend. You’re taking other people’s money?”
“No, it’s not like that. You make it sound dirty.”
“It is dirty, using somebody else’s money when they don’t even love you.”
“James does love me.”
She laughed. I squeezed Silver’s paw. “Do you love him? You’re taking advantage of him, that’s what you’re doing.”
“He said he loves me,” I said.
“He loves you, okay. That’s what you require. Tell me, does Lou’s cousin love you? Would she think twice before kicking you out when she needs her place back? What are you going to do if that happens? Move in with your new boyfriend, because you love him? Katie, this is humiliating.”
“It’s not humiliating to be in a relationship.”
“I wasn’t talking about you. It’s humiliating for me.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m your mother,” she said. “You should’ve asked me.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, but it was no use, I was already crying. I tilted my head up so the tears wouldn’t drip onto Silver. “I didn’t want to ask you.”
“I know we aren’t close right now. But I can’t believe you’d sooner beg the generosity of a stranger than turn to your own mother.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. But she had already hung up.
Not even a minute later, my banking app pinged me.
My mother had sent me two hundred fifty dollars.
I wondered how she’d arrived at this number, whether the fifty was a stroke of petty generosity tacked on to two hundred, or a punishment carved out of three.
Either way, she would’ve deliberated on the number seriously.
In the end, she would’ve worried it wasn’t enough.
I didn’t know how to explain why I didn’t want to ask my mother for money.
In college, my tuition and housing were covered by the school, and I had my work study income.
But it was wrong to say I relied solely on that to get by.
Lou often paid for my things—drinks, a bag we both liked—with neat, self-aware logic: “I want the points, so you’re doing me a favor,” or: “It makes me happy to see you wasted.” Later, when she realized I did work study for the money and not my résumé, she’d cover larger costs when she wanted company.
Sometimes the cost was as simple as a rideshare home.
Other times it was a concert ticket for an artist I didn’t know.
But there were a few times when I genuinely wanted what she wanted and let her pay for me anyway.
My mother’s income from the lab was so low that, when reported on financial aid forms, it triggered the largest package of aid the university had to offer.
But they didn’t know about the folders of cash left from Bill beneath the bed.
As I grew older, it became clear that this was the money we relied on, the lab more a means for my mother to occupy her time.
I never knew how much Bill left her, though I gleaned from public university salary reports that he didn’t make much.
The more familiar I became with Lou’s and James’s relationship with money, the more I feared my mother had even less than I believed.
They never talked about the money itself, but rather its potential, formless and adjacent.
Having money meant you could have more, only how you got more wasn’t by earning it but mysteriously multiplying what you already had.
“It’ll pay off, eventually,” Lou said, about her paltry salary as a gallery assistant.
James’s favorite maxim: “If you don’t invest your income, you’re losing it. ”
At first, it felt cruel to make my mother pay for my choice to leave home, one she didn’t want me to make.
Eventually, asking my mother for money simply felt wrong, like taking from a piggy bank.
I used to imitate her paintings on printer paper.
Now, I went to museums and looked at the originals.
There was a threshold. I had crossed it. Our lives would continue to diverge.
I pushed myself upright. In my head there was a growing pressure, numbing and total. I readjusted Silver’s unmoving body so she lay curled, as if sleeping, on my lap, and reached for my laptop. Then I began to seriously look for a job.
—
When I shut my computer a few hours later, I’d sent over twenty applications. I tucked Silver under the duvet and perched her head on the pillow.
The watercolors remained where she’d demolished them by the foot of the bed.
Though pierced, the paints remained mostly full.
They bore abstract, fantastical names that seemed to have nothing to do with the colors themselves: Bright Yellow Lake, Opera Rose.
Where in the world were lakes yellow? Were opera houses pink on the inside?
Early in our relationship, James and I had a debate while trying to hail a cab. He said that the sky was gray, but I saw it as blue. When he pressed me to describe why I thought it was blue, I could find no explanation other than the fact that it simply was.
But James said he could prove it was gray.
It was an unsaturated shade, he said, nearly the same as the clouds.
I agreed. And clouds were white, he said, to which I again agreed.
And white is a lighter shade of gray, not blue, he concluded, and then I looked up and saw that it was true, the sky was gray, not blue, and right at that moment it began to rain.
You assumed colors were the same for everyone else until you realized there was no way to be sure.
Looking at the paints, I felt a familiar anticipation grow.
There used to be nothing better than finishing a painting and waiting to show it to my mother.
I was good, she knew I was good. I knew she made me that way.
I filled a cup of water in the bathroom and brought it to the bedroom.
Blindly I chose a color, Imperial Violet, and dipped the brush.
The pigment blossomed on the palette. The color was as beautiful as I thought it would be, but it didn’t give me pleasure.
The tapered wood of the brush was soft against my fingers, and it did not give me pleasure.
The paper slackened, then stained, after catching the lamplight for a flash of a second, and this, too, the extraordinary act of color being transferred, the start of that private journey in which a painting became, gave me no pleasure.
Inside me was a total lack of movement. With these materials my mother would’ve bent low on her knees and made beautiful things, but not me.
I put away the brush and, closing the box, understood I would probably never paint again.
This realization felt like a hard and fast little ball that had been making its way toward me for a long time.
I was surprised to finally catch it, surprised that catching it only hurt a little bit, far less than it did to run, to believe I could still make my mother happy by doing what she did. What a childish trick.