Chapter Twenty-Seven Sera
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sera
Friday morning, I wake up early and go for a walk on the beach before my parents are up.
It’s my last day teaching camp. Iris is back on Monday.
I collect rocks for each of the kids as thank-yous and then come back home and make a pot of coffee.
The spitting of the machine is the only sound in the house.
Even though Abbi is still in Maine, I can feel the tension between us.
I’m sitting with my allotted share of caffeine on the porch with the fan blowing the humid air around as best it can when Mom comes down and joins me.
“You were up early.” She swats at my feet until I move them, then sits on the other end of the love seat and puts my feet in her lap.
“Feeling good today,” I admit, even though doing that makes me nervous, like I’m going to jinx it.
Mom squeezes my knee, her eyes sad. “I’m glad. Can I take you to camp today?”
“Sure.” I lift my mug up to cheers with hers and she smiles, then tucks a strand of hair behind my ear.
I watch the sun catch on the freckles across her nose, so much like Abbi’s, and wonder if I’ll get to keep any memories when I die.
We’re not religious, and when pressed about their beliefs my parents shrug, atheists to their core.
Abbi is spiritual, but I don’t think any of us expect there’s going to be anything more than their memories of me when I’m gone.
And it does now feel like when is soon. Funnily, I thought I’d be angrier, but I’m just wildly grateful for whatever time I have left.
I push the sad thought away and pull my phone out to show Mom the new pictures Iris sent me from Paris until we have to go.
*
It’s my last day, but not the kids’, so I have a schedule for them to do presentations of their weekly projects in the morning and then free art in the afternoon. I don’t know what Iris will want to pick up with them next week, and they haven’t had a free day in a while.
Maddy shows up right when Jayda picks the kids up for their time down at the beach.
“Lunch in town?” she asks, giving me a quick hug and taking a turn around the room, admiring the kids’ work. “I remember making these at school.” She’s looking at one of the self-portrait outlines that haven’t been taken home yet. “Was it fun? Teaching?”
“Yeah. I’m going to miss it,” I admit, grabbing my bag and following her to her car. “Though not as much as your milkshakes.”
Maddy sighs dramatically. “Are you talking about when you’re dead?
Stop it. You only got the news about moving up the list yesterday.
You don’t know what’s going to happen. You could get a heart this year.
Plus it’s still summer. Let’s enjoy it. Your application was due this week, right? You turned it in?”
“I did.”
“Good. Your birthday is coming up, and there are still beach days to enjoy. Let’s make the most of it.”
I smile. Maddy’s reminders are a helpful distraction from the occasional arrythmias that have me scrambling for a breath a couple times a week. I tap at my watch to check its battery level.
“You’re not sick of me yet?” I ask.
“Definitely not. I only wish you were better at sharing the details of what’s going down with Luke. Like how good of a kisser is he, really?” she asks.
I roll my eyes. “How’s Sienna?” I ask in return.
“Top-notch kisser,” Maddy says, beaming. “So, Luke?”
I zip my lips and toss the fake key out the window.
“That bad, huh?” Maddy shakes her head, and I make a face to show her just how wrong she is. “God, you’re a tease!” Maddy shouts, laughing, cranking her radio up for the end of the song as we pull up in front of Earl’s Sandwich Shop.
After lunch, Maddy drives me back to camp. I’m surprised to find the big garage door to the studio closed—it’s never closed.
“I’ll get it!” Maddy steps forward and heaves open the door.
The kids burst out at me, shouting “Surprise,” their little limbs fighting toward me all at once.
Iris waves from the back of the room, and I do a double take.
As I field a hug from each of my students, I finally manage to put together that they’ve made me a gift.
“It was Miss Iris’s idea,” Rose tells me. “Do you like it?”
I’m holding a thick paste paper book full of their drawings and thank-you letters. I hug it to my chest even though part of it is still a little sticky.
“I love it,” I say. “I have something for each of you too.”
Once I’ve given the rocks out to each kid, it’s time for free art, which Iris and I co-monitor. Then it’s pickup, and the studio is empty and quiet. I walk around, tidying here and there and taking in the smell of crusty paint and old clay. I’m going to miss coming here.
Iris asks if I’d like to come over for dinner as a thank-you for filling in.
“Bring your pieces. And I want to tell you all about Paris.”
I text my parents and Luke to let them know, and ride with Iris to her place.
She lives in one of the tiny one-bedroom cottages close to Northport Beach, but she’s expanded it by adding a personal studio off the kitchen.
She even has a fancy air filtration system so she can work in the winter when it’s too cold to open the windows.
The front of the house is practically drowning in wildflowers, and she’s got a little garden where tomatoes and squash are starting to come in.
We go in the front door, and I kick my shoes off, following her through the tidy blue living room/dining room and out the back of the tiny kitchen to her studio.
“Wow.” I admire the pieces she’s been working on in Paris as she unpacks them.
She has me help her set them up. She’ll be using them to apply to a couple gallery shows in the fall and winter.
Iris is a fan of oils, which have that distinct tacky smell.
Just like her pieces from the winter show I saw in February, these paintings are close-ups.
Put together, though, they form one image of two people, one sitting, the other standing, staring out a window in a beautifully sparse bedroom.
Each piece is a slice of their bodies in relationship to each other, all from different angles.
I stop and stare at one of a hand hovering over a bare shoulder.
The tension in it makes me shiver. The hesitation is heavy and worrying, which conflicts with the bright and colorful brushstrokes.
“It’s…” Iris waits. I know she wants to see what I’ll say before she tells me anything.
“It’s like snapshots of their whole relationship over time,” I decide.
“Here”—I point to where a hand grips an elbow, the other hand over it gently—“the person sitting needs comfort and is grateful the other is there. But here”—I point to the one that chilled me—“the second person is hesitating, like they might not be welcome. Like they’re fighting. ”
“You have a good eye, Sera.” Iris is smiling. “That’s the goal. That one moment doesn’t just hold the present but the past and the future too.”
“Are they a couple?” I ask, turning to the next, a cheek pressed against a stomach in a thin blue dress. There’s an intimacy, but it doesn’t feel like love, like the way I feel pulled toward Luke even when he’s miles away.
Iris brings me a cup of tea and stands next to me, looking over her pieces. “Sisters,” she says quietly. She gestures to the gold velvet sofa across the room, and we sit. “Now, tell me about what I’ve missed.”
I tell her about the kids and their amazing creations. I fill her in about Luke a little, and she cheers. I blush and change the subject to our trip to Boston, and the painting Luke loved at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “He always did like a darker palette,” she says.
“I’ve been getting him to do a little more artwork, but he’s not very serious about it.”
Iris shrugs. “Art doesn’t have to be serious.”
I think about that for a minute, looking past her paintings to the waving grasses between the marshes outside the window.
Everything has become serious in the last couple years for me.
Art in particular. It was all I had left that made me feel like I still had control in my life.
But I guess it’s silly to expect every minute of your life to be important.
“Those are very cool,” I say again, pointing at her paintings.
She smiles. “It was just such a treasure to go. I’m so grateful. And I’m so glad to see you enjoyed your time too. The kids really took to you. I was looking at some of their work. You did a great job. I’m so proud of you.”
“Thanks, Iris,” I say, smiling at her.
She puts her mug of tea on the coffee table and claps her hands together. “All right, time to eat!”
For dinner, she’s prepped a tarte she learned to make in her French cooking course, and we eat our way through quite a few of the cheeses she brought back.
“Okay, this one smells like an old dirty sock”—I laugh—“but it tastes like…I don’t know what—but it’s delicious,” I say, scooping up another piece of the offending goop with some baguette. “Maddy’s going to love stuff like this.”
“That seems to be the trick—the stinkier, the better,” Iris says. “You’ll be well prepared to find the good stuff when you go.” She winks. “Your application is in, right?”
I sigh and feel the tears rise up. I let them. Iris scoots her chair closer to me at the kitchen table, a concerned look in her eyes. “It is, and I do want to go,” I start, wiping my eyes, “but—”
“You’ll get in! I know it. I’ve already submitted my reference and showed the photos of your work to one of the directors, and she loved it.” She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand, and I place my other one on top of hers, steadying us both as I finally tell her the truth.
“It’s not that,” I say. “Iris…I’m sick. My donated heart is failing, and my treatment options have run out. All that’s left is a new heart, which…well, it can take years to get off the heart transplant list. I probably won’t be able to go next year. If I’m even still around.”
Iris tries to hold it together, but like everyone in my life she’s shocked, heartbroken, and all the things I feel too but am perhaps just used to.
I let her dissolve into tears for a few minutes.
I hug her and assure her how grateful I am for the job, her mentorship, and the great memories she helped me make this summer.
When she gets ahold of herself, I ask her if she’ll critique my application paintings in person.
“Might make you feel better,” I say, with a sad smile.
“Looking at your art always makes me feel better,” she says. “Show me.” She blots the last of her tears away with her cloth napkin.
I get my pieces and set them up on easels she brings in from her studio.
“This one is my favorite at the moment.” I put the future me painting in the center.
“It’s beautiful, Sera. The underwater theme is so interesting to look at. You have such a good eye. And your technique has really improved. Maybe you can defer if you get in but can’t go next year.”
I nod, wiping my own tears away, and we switch to talking about the kids and who might have some real talent and should stick with it.
“I always saw it in you, and Luke too, when you were younger. There was something advanced about the way you both saw things. I thought it might be because you went through something so big when you were infants, that it maybe gave you a broader perspective, an ability most of us have to wait a lifetime to access. Now I’m sure that’s true. ”
“I don’t want my art to be seen as good or more valuable just because I might die young,” I say slowly. “And Luke’s work blows me away and he doesn’t even practice much. I hope he picks it up again.”
“Tell him,” Iris says. “Sometimes it just takes someone we love telling us what they see in us for us to take a chance on ourselves.”