Chapter Twenty-Six Luke
Chapter Twenty-Six
Luke
Sera doesn’t want to talk about her fight with Abbi. I don’t want to press her, but I do want to help, so when she asks me to take her to her doctor’s appointment in Boston, I say yes.
The waiting room is full of older people, spouses waiting for their partners, some people my parents’ age flipping anxiously through stacks of paperwork.
Sera leaves me with a sketchbook, because she’s thoughtful like that.
I sit and doodle while I think about the awkward visit with my dad yesterday.
The boys wanted me to go, so I said yes, but there was a woman over.
Someone new. She was young, pretty, and shocked to see me.
“No need to tell your mother about her yet, okay, boys?” he said to Adam and Oliver, giving me a nervous look over their heads as the woman slipped on her shoes and left. She was clearly shaken by the fact that my dad has an eighteen-year-old.
“We don’t lie to Mom,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. Dad just changed the subject.
“Do you boys want to go out on the new boat?”
The whole thing had sat heavy on my chest since, reminding me of how fleeting love can be. Sera and I won’t be like that, I tell myself.
Sera’s gone about an hour, which she told me to expect, so I hope that means things are good. But when she steps back into the waiting room, the look on her face tells me the appointment hasn’t gone well. Her eyes are red, her cheeks splotchy.
I jump up and hug her, breathing in the sugar-lemon smell of her and holding her slightly trembling body tight. If I could hug the sadness and the worry and the sickness right out of her, I would. She nestles her forehead into my chest, like she can hear my thoughts.
“Not good, huh?” I say, my throat thick.
“No.” Her voice is small. “Not good. I have to come back next week.”
“Do you want to tell me?” I ask.
“Ejection fraction is still low.” She swallows. “They’re submitting my name to be moved up the list.”
My stomach sinks. “Let’s get out of here.” I reluctantly let her go and loop my arm around her waist, hoping she’s up for the plan I threw into place while waiting.
She leans into me and we head for the door.
Sera is quiet the whole way to the garage.
In my truck, I grab her hand across the bench seat and kiss each of her knuckles, like she’s been in a fight, which she has and still is.
She leans across the bench and gives me a butterfly-light kiss on the lips, whispers a thank-you, and then settles in against the window.
I hope she’s not too tired for her surprise.
It takes her about ten minutes to realize we’re not going home.
“Wait.” She stirs and sits up, swinging her head to look around the part of the city I’m taking us through. “Where are we going?” She looks at me with curious anticipation, and I know I’ve chosen right. I try to keep a lock on my grin, but she pulls it out of me.
“A surprise,” I say, making sure she can’t see the directions I’ve put up on my phone, which is resting against the dash by my always-a-little-off speedometer.
Fifteen minutes later, I’m walking a slack-jawed Sera into the blissfully air-conditioned lobby of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I pull the tickets up on my phone, purchased in the waiting room of the hospital, and then tug Sera into the building.
“I’ve never been here,” she manages to say as we’re directed past the gift shop to the long glass hallway that leads to what our ticket taker says is officially called “The Palace.”
“Me neither, but it’s supposed to be cool.
” I grab a map and then we step into a moody and dark European-looking entryway.
I look at the pamphlet. “So, she built this entire building as a museum to house her personal art collection. She even collected a lot of the architecture, like the pillars and some of the ceilings, not just the paintings and statues and stuff.”
“That’s awesome,” Sera says.
As we move out of the entryway, the sun reappears, beaming through intricate pillars surrounding a lush courtyard.
I lean over the rope keeping us off the beautiful mosaic floor and squint up at a massive skylight.
It doesn’t look that big, but there are people at every open window and balcony on the first three floors.
It’s bustling with tourists trying to get out of the oppressive heat.
“This is the place that was robbed, right?” Sera asks as we head into an area labeled The Spanish Cloister to get away from the crowd around the courtyard.
“Yeah”—I flip through the pamphlet—“in 1990. They still haven’t found any of it. The empty frames are upstairs.”
“They left the frames? That’s…a statement.” We fall quiet as we continue deeper into the museum. Directly ahead is a huge painting, and it brings us both to a halt.
“Wow.” The painting is taller than me and probably ten feet wide.
It features a woman dancing in front of a group of guitar players in a sparse room.
The movement of the piece is incredible; I can almost feel the ruffles of her skirts whipping around her.
There are a couple of women who must be friends of hers watching with delight from the right.
“What’s going on with her hand?” I ask, finding the limb twisted in a way that looks uncomfortable.
“She’s dancing. No, reaching for something,” Sera says, a little breathless. There’s a twang in my chest, the thrill of sharing her artistic interpretation. “Beckoning.”
“She looks so…focused,” I say quietly.
We observe her for a while longer, as other guests come up and take photos and look at the strange collection of pottery and stools that decorate the space in which the painting hangs.
“She’s absorbed,” Sera decides. “Her hand is interesting, though. It looks like it’s about to move, like we’ve just caught her in this one strange position by chance. It reminds me of the heron you drew. Like it was about to take off, like we’d caught him unaware.”
I startle at the comparison. Sera’s always too nice to me about my work. But I try to humor her, gazing back at the painting and its moody lighting. “Really? This is so much more skilled.”
“It’s the motion, or the promise of it. I feel like you see that really well.” She shrugs. “Should we keep looking?” she asks, turning around and pointing to a small line into another room behind us.
I agree, and we join the flow of people moving through a contemporary gallery into a yellow wallpapered room smaller than my bedroom in Northport and crammed with art. Sera lets out a chuckle of disbelief.
“I bet it doesn’t feel like this in Paris,” she says, standing inches from a painting of a ballerina.
“Like what?” I ask as I’m drawn to a painting in the corner that looks like nothing more than a black rectangle.
Sera follows me, gesturing at the small space. “So personal.”
“You think?”
“I’ll ask Iris, but all the photos of Paris she’s sending look like you’re in these huge rooms with tons of tourists.
” She glances around again. “Not in a tiny room with only six other people.” She sighs.
“Maybe this is better, and Paris would just be disappointing. Maybe it’s good I won’t be able to do the fellowship. ”
I wince and bite down on the instinct to beg her to take it back.
What happened at her appointment is fresh.
She can feel however she feels, but I also want her to know I’m not going anywhere.
I slip my arm around her and hold her to my side, continuing to stare at the dark rectangle in its gilded frame until it begins to reveal its secrets.
Slowly, details start to emerge as my eyes get used to the black, and then it’s not black but gray, silver, blue.
“It’s a foggy ocean.” Sera gasps. “Like the Beach at the End of the Universe at night.” She sidles closer.
I nod, pointing out two small lights. “I can see two boats now.”
“And those lights, in the distance, maybe a lighthouse, or another ship?”
“Wow.” I’m floored, almost giddy with how impressed I feel from this one small painting. I shake my head. “I mean, I know there’s a lot of great art here, but wow. I could stare at this for hours. I bet you’d see something new every few minutes.”
“We could steal it,” Sera whispers, and I laugh too loud. All the other people in the room whip their heads at us.
“Sorry, sorry,” Sera says, laughing with me as we leave.
We weave our way back out into the courtyard and into the next set of rooms. Sera’s immediately drawn to a painting hanging in the far left corner of a woman with long, curly red hair. She drops my hand and moves to look closer. I can tell she’s thinking about Abbi.
“Have you talked since she left?”
She shakes her head. “I should text her.” She sighs. “Apologize…but not today.”
“Whenever you’re ready, she’ll understand.”
“Maybe.”
*
Over the next hour we make our way up through the building’s three available floors and then back down.
The top two floors are much quieter and more open, with a lot of high ceilings, including a painted one.
There’s so much gilt and gold, and so many little trinkets and letters.
We talk about how we know we’re missing things as we move along, but you have to keep moving so you don’t get overwhelmed.
You see what you can see, and you appreciate it before you’re swept up in the next thing.
I snap a selfie of us in one of the open balcony windows and text it to her. She turns quick and presses a kiss to my cheek, just shy of the corner of my mouth, and I take another.
“This is my new background,” I say, quickly making it so. Sera kisses me again and then asks if I’m hungry.
“Wicked, actually,” I admit, thinking of the last bite of eggs I managed to get before Oliver and Adam ate them all this morning.
We go down to the café and order giant iced teas, two sandwiches, and a few desserts. Sera sends a photo to Maddy.
“This might be the best date I’ve ever been on,” she says, reaching across the table and poking the back of my hand with her fork like I’m on the menu. “Are you having fun too?” she asks, taking another bite of the coconut cake.
“Yes. I wish it didn’t have to end.” I keep my hand in hers, Sera’s heartbeat in my fingertips.
“I saw a studio out there.” She tips her head toward the main hall. “I think anyone can use it. We could draw for a while?”
I take a bite of cake, then nod. “I’d love that.”
We settle into the studio with our sketchbooks. The quiet hum of visitors passing by the room reminds me of being in the open studio at Blue Honeybee, and it’s easy to fall into our normal rhythm of working and glancing over at what the other person is doing.
I’m sketching the courtyard, a woman standing in the shadows, thinking about the way the light moves playfully around the plants. We both lose ourselves in the task for a while, until a tour group goes by, and I see Sera flinch at the rise in chatter.
“We can go,” I say, closing my sketchbook. “I’m just going to use the bathroom first.”
“Okay.” Sera smiles. “I do feel the beginning of a headache coming on. I’ll just finish this and wait for you here.”
When I’m back, Sera has packed up everything and is watching a group of kids shuffling down the hall, following behind their camp counselor. Two at the back are giggling and poking each other.
“They remind me of Oliver and Adam.” She nods in their direction just as the counselor comes over and separates them, moving one to the middle of the line.
“Yeah, but probably less annoying,” I joke, taking her hand.
As we exit back into the hot sun, a sign on a building to our right catches her attention.
“Oh, look. It’s MassArt. I think they have a small design museum. Do you want to go look?” She’s pointing across the long green lawn outside the museum, to a gray and modern building with the words Massachusetts College of Art and Design across a long window wall.
“Maybe another time?” I suggest. I don’t want to look inside a school I would’ve been applying to before everything with my dad went down. And Sera has a headache anyway.
“Really? You’ll come back and go with me?”
“Of course.”
Sera’s eyes light up even as she takes her bottom lip between her teeth.
I reach up and free it, rub my thumb across her soft pink lip, then leave a small kiss there.
I want her to be gentle with herself, so I’ll be gentle, even though I immediately want to get us back in the truck with fewer people around.
I take a slow, deep breath and push the desire back as Sera licks her lips and looks at me like she knows exactly how naked I’m picturing her right now.
Then she pulls away and moves toward where we parked the truck.
“Whoa, slow up,” I say as she drags me down the sidewalk.
“Nope. Come on. I want to make out with my boyfriend in his truck.”