Chapter Fifty-Seven
FIFTY-SEVEN
It’s hard to listen to the end of a long story. Especially if you have a really important question that you don’t dare ask.
It’s a beautiful night, the air is light and clear and full of promise. Soon it will be warm, soon summer will be here, soon everything will be better. Joar and Ted and Christian’s mother sit there on the roof under the stars and take turns telling Louisa everything.
They tell her about the car ride home from the museum. How Christian’s mother asked if Kimkim had done any other paintings, and when he shook his head she whispered in astonishment:
“This was the first? What a gift to the planet, all the things you’re going to create…”
Honestly, no one in the car understood what the hell that meant, but then she asked: “Have you done any drawings?” and then all four teenagers looked at her as if she were completely crazy.
Had he done any drawings ?
When Ted’s mom got home that evening she found to her horror that there was a strange lady in her basement. Ted’s room was full of Kimkim’s drawings, hundreds of them, carefully spread out across the whole floor, like a map of a boy’s heart.
Ted’s mother stood in the doorway, uncomprehending, and Christian’s mother turned around and smiled: “One day you’ll brag to everyone you meet that this young man once sat in your basement, drawing.”
In Ted’s mom’s defense, she never did. Not even when Kimkim became world-famous. She just left the room, and saw that Ted, Joar, and Ali were sitting on the stairs so as not to be in the way, so she asked if they were hungry. Ali couldn’t help herself from blurting out: “Is there any lasagna?”
Then Ted’s mom did something incredibly unusual: she smiled.
“Are you the one who’s been eating all my lasagna? I wondered where it was going. Neither of my boys have ever been that fond of it.”
“It’s my favorite food in the whole world,” Ali said shyly.
“Lasagna?” Ted’s mom repeated, surprised, because she had never heard a teenage girl say that.
But the teenage girl shook her head and corrected her:
“Your lasagna.”
Then Ted’s mom wrung her hands and didn’t know where to look. That happens if you’re not used to compliments.
“I can teach you,” she said.
Ali stared at her as if Ted’s mom had just promised to teach her how to conjure up kittens out of thin air.
“Teach me? To make… lasagna?”
“It isn’t difficult,” Ted’s mom smiled, and that was the first time in years Ted could remember two smiles from her in the same evening.
Then she went up to the kitchen, followed by Ali, and a better lasagna has never been made, in that house or any other. Ted and Joar sat on the stairs listening to their laughter, then they heard Ali talk about her mother’s death, and Ted’s mother talk about Ted’s dad’s death. Ted hadn’t heard his mom talk so much since long before the funeral.
“Did you love him a lot?” Ali asked.
“Still. I love him a lot still,” Ted’s mom replied.
“Is it horrible being an adult?” the girl asked.
“Unbearable,” the mother replied. “You fail with almost everything, all the time.”
“Not with lasagna,” the girl pointed out.
“No, maybe not with lasagna, perhaps that’s why I make it. One single thing I’m not bad at,” the mother admitted.
Then Ali said, as if it were an altogether objective observation:
“You’re not bad at being a mom. Everything works in your house. The lights all come on when you click the switch, the toilet’s clean, and there’s always food in the freezer.”
Ted and Joar sat on the stairs and heard Ted’s mom answer:
“You only know me through my son. So of course you think I’m a good mom. But Ted isn’t my doing, he’s… a small miracle. The truth is, he’s given me far more love than I’ve given him.”
Ali thought for a long, long time before she said:
“Ted gives everyone more love. But I think you’ve both given each other the same amount: everything you had.”
Then they ate lasagna.
Christian’s mother gathered together all of Kimkim’s drawings from the floor of the basement and carried them carefully out into the morning light, out into the world, and so the next adventure began.
A week or so later Kimkim was sitting with his friends at the crossroads, promising “tomorrow.” It was Ted’s idea to write their names on four rocks and bury them in the grass there between the houses where they had grown up, and when they all met again, they would dig them up. They sat beside each other with dirt on their fingers and Ali whispered:
“It wasn’t me.”
But of course it was. So then they all farted. They put the rocks in the ground and that was the last burial that year. And summer was over.
Ted sits on the roof and says to Louisa:
“It might sound like an unhappy ending, but only if you forget how many times during this story we’ve told you that someone laughed. How many really good nows is that? How many people ever have more?”
When autumn came, the Owl taught art at the high school again, but Kimkim never went back to his classroom. Christian’s mother visited her son’s grave every day, but suddenly one morning she wasn’t there. She was standing in a schoolyard in a town many hours away, waiting for Kimkim. It was an art school, the principal there had done her a big favor, but she had insisted that she was doing the school one. The principal laughed then, but one day he would thank her. He would brag about that student every day for the rest of his career.
Kimkim said good-bye to his mom with a handshake, but she did something miraculous: she hugged him.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t understand,” she whispered in his ear. “Don’t be like all the other children! Don’t be normal!”
Kimkim didn’t want to let go of her then, she had to force him to by wriggling out of his grasp. Children aren’t responsible for their parents’ happiness, but they still try. Inside her apartment lay a heap of his drawings, Christian’s mother had been there and dropped them off, because she wanted the woman to understand. The woman did, eventually, and even the demons in her head probably got it then. They almost made their peace with her after that.
Kimkim’s dad drove him to art school in his rusty old car. They didn’t say much, but just as they were driving into the schoolyard, his dad mumbled:
“I hope you know I was never ashamed of you. I’m ashamed of myself.”
Kimkim wanted to explain everything he felt then, but he didn’t have enough words, so he said the biggest ones he knew:
“I love you and I believe in you, Dad.”
His dad would no doubt have said the same thing back if he knew how. He had to take the bus home. He still had his son’s drawing from the hospital chapel, it hung on his kitchen wall as a great treasure, but the rest of the apartment was almost empty. It wasn’t until much later that Kimkim found out that his mom and dad had sold just about everything they owned, including his dad’s car, to be able to buy everything he needed for art school. Christian’s mother helped a lot too. When the men in the harbor found out, they organized a collection of their own, his dad would never brag about his son, but all his workmates down there would do it for him. One single good deed can’t outweigh a lifetime of bad ones, but those men were prepared to give it a try. They were hard people who had lived hard lives, but one damn Saturday they would go to a damn museum and see a damn painting, and that feeling would be like a damn sunrise in their chests: that they had been part of something beautiful.
Kimkim’s mom would never be entirely whole, some people never are, she got lost on her way home from the supermarket more and more often. She spent her last year living in a nursing home. Kimkim sent drawings every week, and she papered the walls with them. He was there when she died, he had just graduated from art school then, and sat by her bed for a long time afterward, holding her hand. As if the demons fell asleep on his lap.
A week later he went for a walk with his dad. They didn’t say much, but there were little smiles here and there. They parted with a hug. When his dad went home that evening, he sat in the chair in his kitchen, surrounded by his son’s drawings, and fell asleep calmly and gently. Kimkim buried both his parents on the same day. Then he left the town and never came back. The world was waiting.
The starry sky above the houses is making Louisa dizzy, after a while her eyes don’t know if they’re staring up at the universe or down into it. So she closes them and breathes slowly and then, at last, she asks the question she really doesn’t dare ask:
“What happened to Ali?”
Joar and Ted lie there in silence, as if they are both hoping the other will say it, then they both start talking at the same time, the idiots. Ali would have liked that.
When she and Joar parted for the last time, they were sitting on the steps outside her house. Ali explained that her dad had found a job in another country, also by the sea, but not like here. By that sea there were long, chalk-white beaches. Summer never ended there.
“I’m going to learn to surf!” Ali said.
“You’re probably going to be the fucking best at it,” Joar nodded.
She grinned, wild and happy.
“You think?”
“When we met, you could hardly swim, now you swim better than any of us. You can learn to do any damn thing you want.”
Then she kissed him so hard he fell off the step. When she left he gave her a red blanket, like Superman’s cape. Then she flew.
They wrote letters to each other every week for several years. Not to brag, but Joar was right, she did end up being the best at surfing. She wrote to him that she had never felt so happy as when she was paddling out to sea, straight into the sunrise. Then she felt like she knew what she was doing on Earth, she wrote. How many people find something that makes them feel like that? How lucky was she?
Early one morning, not long after her eighteenth birthday, she went out into the water and never came back.
When Louisa hears that she cries so hard that the whole roof sways. She bitterly regrets asking. Because who can make someone grieve for a person they never even knew, so that it hurts this much? She cries so it feels like her ribs are breaking. Joar gets so unnerved by her tears that he eventually mumbles:
“It was… it was over twenty years ago.”
“Not for ME! For me she died NOW!” Louisa snaps.
That’s the worst thing with stories.
“For me too,” Ted whispers.
And then Joar sits there under the stars and he too loses Ali all over again. That’s the worst thing about death, that it happens over and over again. That the human body can cry forever.
“What is that thing you always say? About people living quietly…?” Joar whispers.
“That’s Henry David Thoreau,” Ted whispers back through the darkness. “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Joar nods slowly.
“Well, you can say a lot of things about Ali, but that’s one damn thing she definitely didn’t do. She wasn’t quiet for one single damn day of her life.”
They laugh. You’ve lived a pretty remarkable life if you can still make your humans do that, more than twenty years later.
“Hope she and Fish find each other in Heaven,” Louisa says.
“Hope not! Or there won’t be any Heaven left by the time we get there…,” Ted answers.
“Can I ask something?” Louisa asks, then asks immediately: “How do you cope with death?”
It’s Christian’s mother who answers:
“It’s art that helps me cope. Because art is a fragile magic, just like love, and that’s humanity’s only defense against death. That we create and paint and dance and fall in love, that’s our rebellion against eternity. Everything beautiful is a shield. Vincent van Gogh wrote: ‘I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.’?”
“It’s cool that we happened at all,” Louisa whispers.
“Something like that,” the mother smiles.
Then Ted tells Louisa the story of how Kimkim came home to bury his parents, not long after he left art school. And how he and Joar and Ted made a grave for Ali too, so they had somewhere to leave adopted flowers. They picked out a large rock and snuck into the churchyard at night and found an empty spot. Kimkim painted her name on the rock and surrounded it with small wings. Then they stole a shopping cart outside the supermarket and rode down the steepest hill in town, almost killing themselves in the process, and then Ali was with them. She was with them forever.
It was when they were sitting on the pier in the darkness that night and Kimkim whispered, “I think I’ll stay here now,” that everything changed.
“And do… what?” Ted asked in surprise.
“I don’t know. Work in the harbor, maybe?” Kimkim said, shrugging his shoulders.
That’s when Joar exploded in a rage like they’d never seen. He yelled at Kimkim for so long and so angrily that even Ted got upset. There was a terrible argument among all three of them, and in the end Kimkim and Ted stormed off, leaving Joar sitting alone on the pier.
Joar sits curled up on the edge of the roof now. Mumbles:
“If I’d asked him to stay, he would have stayed forever. Hell, I wanted him to stay. That’s why I had to… yell terrible things at him. I shouted that I’d had to fucking look after him since preschool, but that I couldn’t do it anymore, because I can’t look after an infinite damn number of people! Now he had to damn well look after himself! I was as cruel as I could possibly be…”
Ted leans his head as close to his friend’s shoulder as he can without touching him, and admits:
“It took me a long time to realize why you did that. But you knew that the only thing keeping Kimkim in this town was the fact that he didn’t want to leave you. So you drove him away. He cried that night, but I know you cried more. And I told him that he ought to go traveling, see the world, and in the end he agreed. So he went. And I saw you, you’d climbed into a tree and sat there watching the taxi as it drove away.”
Joar’s voice swings between two different ages, fifteen and now:
“And then he called me, months later, from somewhere in Asia. In the middle of the night! He didn’t understand that there was a time difference, the moron. He’d found a mural, or whatever the hell it’s called. He sounded like he was in love, he said that the first person he wanted to tell about it was me. And then apparently he forgot that I was an asshole. And I remember him talking, and I just thought that he sounded so… happy. He could be happy. Just not here.”
“Did you ever meet again?” Louisa asks, and Joar smiles a broken little smile.
“I had problems for a few years. I was a damn idiot. I was drinking a lot. I stood at the airport a couple of times, but I never dared get on the plane. I didn’t want him to see me so messed up. I wanted him to remember me young. Remember me… beautiful.”
“It’s hard to be an adult,” Ted says.
“It’s hard to be a child too,” Louisa points out.
“Speak for yourself, I was awesome at being a child!” Joar says.
“Yes. Yes, I can imagine,” Louisa admits.
Then Joar glances at Ted and says:
“I thought I’d managed to scare Ted here away too. But he kept coming to visit me, the whole damn time, even though I was drunk and told him to go to Hell. He’s bad at that, Ted is, he really can’t go to Hell…”
“He doesn’t like traveling,” Louisa says.
Joar laughs so hard he’s shaking, and part of the roof comes loose. Now the rain will get in. He’s bound to blame it on Ted.
“And Kimkim never came home again?” Louisa asks, and Ted answers:
“No. He stood at the airport a few times too. But it’s scary to go back to a place where you hurt so badly and felt so small as he did here, you think you’re going to become the same person again. Maybe you’ll understand that when you get older.”
“I understand it now,” Louisa says, and Ted feels ashamed.
“Yes, you probably do. I’m sorry about that.”
“What about at the end, then? When he got sick?” she wonders.
Joar waves the leg with the ankle monitor.
“I couldn’t travel then. Good excuse for a coward.”
“Did you talk on the phone?”
“Yeah. The last time was just a few weeks before he died.”
“What did you say?”
“We talked about Ali. We told stupid jokes. I told him I loved him.”
“What did he say?”
Joar glances at Christian’s mother and replies:
“He said that thing that you always said, the thing that painter said. That you should paint like the birds sing. But Kimkim said it was never like that for him. He said he painted the way we laughed.”
In a few hours the sun will rise, the air will be a degree or two warmer, summer will be on its way. It’s probably just her imagination, but Louisa could swear she can hear a cat meowing out there in the darkness, sleepy and happy and on its way home. It’s probably Ted’s imagination too, but he can hear both the cat and the sound of birds taking flight, the gentle rustle of wings. Then he suddenly hopes that the cat doesn’t sound so happy because there’s one bird missing. That ruins the romanticism of the moment, it really does.
Soon the world will smell of rain. As the first drops land on the roof from the sky, the four people get up and crawl back into the house.
Ted is obviously a little taken aback when he sees Louisa’s drawing of Kimkim on Joar’s fridge.
“You gave that to me!”
“You gave it back, you had your chance!” Louisa flashes back.
“You can’t just do that!” Ted snaps, as if he’s considering contacting a lawyer.
“No? It was super easy! I just did it!” she points out, like a five-year-old inventing her own rules in a game.
They carry on like that for a while, and will carry on carrying on, because Joar is right. Ted will never abandon her.
“Little brat,” Ted mutters.
“Miserable old bastard,” she grins.
Joar carefully lifts the painting out of the box while this is going on, just as Christian’s mother walks into the kitchen. She has to lean against the wall then, the old art history teacher.
“Dear God… it’s incredible… completely incredible,” she exclaims in delight.
Louisa doesn’t understand her reaction at first, because it looks like Christian’s mother is seeing the painting for the very first time. It takes a handful of seconds before Louisa realizes that the woman isn’t looking at the painting at all. She’s looking at Louisa’s drawing.