9. Stella
STELLA
The easel has to go by the window.
I’m very particular about this. When you’re painting, light matters more than almost anything. The window in Tristan’s spare room faces east, which means morning light. That means I’m putting the easel here and no one’s arguing with me.
Not that Tristan argued. Besides, up until this morning, this room contained nothing but a single folding chair and what I’m pretty sure was a box of ammunition. I would consider painting supplies a step up from that.
Marco brought everything over last night.
My canvases and paints, brushes, my palette.
My clothes, too, which fit into two duffel bags with room to spare.
Socks’s cushion, his pellet bag, his hay and water bottle, the crate.
Then there was Socks himself, who arrived in Marco’s arms with the expression of a hostage who has accepted his fate with dignity.
Now it’s all here, in this small house on the edge of a compound belonging to a man who runs a crime family.
My rabbit is in the living room. My paints are in the spare room.
My toothbrush is in a cup next to Tristan’s toothbrush, which is the most intimate thing I’ve ever experienced. And yes, I’m including last night.
This is crazy. I’ve known this man for practically no time at all, and I’m living in his house. If any of my online friends told me they had done this, I would send approximately forty-five concerned messages in a row and probably google “signs you’re being kidnapped but like it.”
Funny how everything changes when you’re the one things are happening to. For once, I’m not reading about somebody else’s life, standing on the outside looking in. I’m in the middle of it, and it’s crazy and unpredictable, and it feels very right.
Here I am, standing in the morning light with a brush in my hand and Socks on a towel in the corner because he followed me in here the way he follows me everywhere, and I’m not afraid.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. There’s no fear.
Not of the house or the property. Not of the men I sometimes see by the main gate or the fact that there was an ammunition box in here only a couple of hours ago.
For the first time in as long as I can remember, the noise is off and the walls aren’t leaning in, and my chest isn’t tight.
I’m just... here. Existing. Taking up space in the world and not apologizing for it.
I didn’t know it could feel like this. I didn’t know there was a version of me capable of living without constantly checking the wind velocity.
One by one, I squeeze paint onto the palette.
Cadmium yellow. Titanium white. A touch of burned sienna, a bit of red ochre.
I don’t have a plan. Sometimes the best paintings come from not having a plan, from just letting my hands move and seeing what shows up.
The brush hits the canvas, and I start blocking in color.
Warm tones, golds and ambers, something bright at the center.
My hand knows what it’s doing before I do.
It always works that way. The conscious part of my brain is just along for the ride while the deeper part, the part that stores things I can’t access on purpose, does the actual work.
The gold becomes sunlight. The amber becomes sand.
All at once, I am no longer in Tristan’s spare room.
I’m at a beach.
The memory comes in pieces, the way memories do when you were too young to hold them properly.
I’m small enough that the cooler my dad is carrying is almost the same height as I am.
Mom walks ahead, sandals in one hand, her hair catching the wind.
Red hair. Long, like mine, blowing sideways in the breeze.
She’s laughing at something Dad said. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember the sound of her laugh the way you remember a song you haven’t heard in years.
You can’t quite reproduce it, but you would know it anywhere.
The sand is warm under my feet. The ocean is loud and close.
I remember being nervous about the waves—they seemed so big.
Dad picked me up and carried me to where the water was shallow and calm.
I remember his hands; how enormous they felt wrapped around my ribs.
I remember feeling completely, entirely safe.
The brush keeps moving. I’m not controlling it anymore. The gold brightens. A shape is starting to form in the center of the canvas, something I’m not looking at directly because I’m afraid that if I look, it’ll disappear.
We’re in the car now. I’m in the back seat, strapped in.
I have one of those juice boxes with the bendy straw.
The straw keeps collapsing every time I suck on it, going flat and then popping back.
I’m fighting with it, trying to get the last of the juice.
The straw jabs the roof of my mouth in a sharp little stab.
I remember pulling the straw out and looking at it as if it had betrayed me.
It was windy that day. The car kept getting pushed—not hard or dangerously, but enough that I could feel it, an invisible force shoving us sideways every few seconds.
The trees along the highway were bending.
Mom said something about the weather turning and about how glad she was that we decided to head home early.
Dad said we’d be there before it got bad.
And then a bird came out of nowhere. Suddenly, there in the windshield, a dark shape, hitting the glass with a sound like a hand clapping.
Mom gasped. I dropped my juice box.
The boy was on a bike at the edge of the road where there shouldn’t have been a bike.
Dad swerved to miss him. I remember the feeling of the car moving wrong.
Not forward, not the way cars are supposed to move.
Sideways. Tipping. The juice box was on the floor, and the straw was under my shoe, and outside the window, the world was spinning.
I don’t remember the impact. I’ve been told this is normal.
The brain protects us from things it can’t process.
Maybe that’s true. What I remember is after.
The awful quiet. The wind, still blowing, pushing through the broken windshield.
The bent, crushed straw on the floor. And the boy on the bike, who couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. He had a mullet.
I’ve never put this together before. Not like this, all at once.
The straw jabbing my mouth. The wind pushing the car.
The bird hitting the glass. The boy with the mullet who made Dad swerve into the tree.
They were always separate things, separate fears.
Unconnected, stupid, like a broken alarm system going off for no reason.
Grandma never talked about the details of the accident.
She only talked about the lesson. I told them to be careful. They didn’t listen.
I never knew what set it off. I never knew why my body picked those things. Why straws, why wind, why birds, why mullets. They seemed random and crazy. I seemed crazy.
But they were never random. They were all there that day, in and around the car where my parents died and my life changed forever.
The brush has stopped moving. I don’t know when it happened. All I know is I’m standing in front of the canvas and my face is wet.
“Stella?”
Tristan’s voice makes me jump and spin on my heel. I don’t know how long he’s been standing in the doorway. I do know his voice is careful. He’s reading me, scanning my face.
“Hey,” I manage. My voice is thick, maybe a little snotty.
He doesn’t seem to mind as he takes a step into the room. “Who is that?” he asks, nodding at the canvas.
I turn and look at the painting. Really look at it for the first time, like I’m seeing it instead of making it.
It’s a woman. She’s standing in golden light. Her hair is long and red and blowing sideways. She’s laughing. The brushwork is loose—I can see where my hand moved fast, almost recklessly.
The face is clear, though. The eyes are clear.
I know this face. “It’s my mom,” I whisper as he steps up beside me, and I lean into him.
My mom is here. For once, the tears on my face aren’t because I’m afraid.
They’re because I found something I thought I lost. “I haven’t seen her in so long.
I don’t even have any pictures of her. I started to think... I mean, I was afraid that I...”
His hand cups my shoulder. “I understand. But there she is. And she’s beautiful. Just like you.”
I close my eyes, sending fresh tears rolling down my cheeks. But they’re happy tears, this much I know. They’re the tears that come after you’ve found something you didn’t know you were missing so desperately.
We stand that way for a minute, maybe longer. Me leaning against him, both of us looking at her. He sounds regretful when he murmurs, “I came in here to tell you something.”
I probably smear paint across my cheek when I wipe my face with the back of my hand. “What?”
“The rabbit’s crate is open.”
I spin around. The towel in the corner where Socks was sitting is now empty. “He was right there. He was literally right there five minutes ago.”
“He’s not there now.”
“Oh, god.” I push past Tristan into the hallway. “Socks? Socks!”
“He’s a rabbit,” Tristan reminds me very unhelpfully, trailing along behind. “He’s not going to answer you.”
“He might. He’s very smart. Socks!”
We search the living room first. The sectional is enormous and has approximately nine thousand crevices where a small rabbit could wedge himself. I check under the coffee table, behind the bookshelf, even inside a pair of boots by the front door.
The kitchen is mostly empty, which should make this easy, but Socks has a talent for finding spaces that don’t seem like they should exist. I open every ground-level cabinet while Tristan opens the ones above.
I check the oven because he once climbed into my oven at the old apartment and sat there for an hour like he was waiting to be roasted.
“Bedroom,” I announce before heading that way.
“He better not be in the bedroom.”
“He goes where he wants, Tristan. He’s a free spirit.
” Sure enough, that’s where we find him.
Well, technically, we find him in the closet, sitting behind a pair of dress shoes.
He’s chewing something green and papery, working on it with the single-minded focus of a creature who knows he’s not supposed to have what he has and is determined to finish it before anyone can take it away.
Tristan crouches down and reaches in to extract the thing from Socks’s mouth, which Socks does not appreciate. He even thumps his back foot, which is the rabbit equivalent of a strongly worded letter.
Tristan holds up the remnants of a hundred-dollar bill. “Your rabbit,” he says slowly, “ate my money.”
“He didn’t eat it,” I point out. “He sampled it. Most of it is still left.”
“His teeth went through a president’s face.”
“Benjamin Franklin was never a president. He was a diplomat and inventor.”
“Your rabbit ate a hundred-dollar bill,” he nearly growls. “President or not.”
“I’ll pay you back,” I offer, scooping up Socks before he can find another bill. Where there’s one, there’s probably more. “He has expensive taste. What can I say?”
The corners of Tristan’s mouth twitch. I get the feeling he’s trying to suppress a grin. Let’s just say he’s not succeeding.
Dropping the bill on the dresser, he takes Socks from my arms and holds the rabbit up to eye level. Socks stares at him. Tristan stares at Socks. “You and I are going to have a conversation about boundaries,” he growls.
Then he looks at me. “The crate stays closed from now on.”
“Agreed.”
“And I’m moving the cash.”
“Also agreed.”
His almost-smile starts to spread, and it changes everything about him. It lights up his face, making him look softer. Now I can actually believe he’s the sort of man who will cohabitate with a rabbit so long as it makes me happy. “You good?” he asks.
All I have to do is think about my painting and about the memory of Mom that was always there, waiting for me to find it. “Yeah. I’m definitely good.” Better than I’ve been in years.