Chapter Eleven
Addison tossed and turned all night, her firing playing over and over again in her mind, along with the unfortunate interaction with her neighbor that night at the block party. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she turned on the light, opened her laptop, and pulled up Zillow. After checking off all of her preferences in the real estate app, images of ideal apartments filled the page. She hearted half a dozen of them and fell asleep dreaming of parquet floors and river views. While falling asleep mulling her urban options was pleasant, she had to admit that waking up at the beach was pretty delicious. She de-escalated, to simpler decisions—should she brew a pot of coffee or ride to the market for an iced version and a fresh-baked corn muffin? She was wary of leaving the house, not wanting to bump into Ben now that she knew he lived next door. It had been a while since she had allowed an untrustworthy man to fool her with his charm. But she really wanted a muffin, so defiance won. If she saw him, she would just ignore him.
With that in mind, she threw on cutoffs with the tee she slept in and hopped on her bike, barefoot and braless, like a real Fire Islander. She felt light—possibly even airy—and noted that her brief experience of practicing meditation was perhaps the source of her newfound buoyancy. The feeling, however, was short-lived.
“What the fu—” she began, but was quickly cut off by a flurry of curses from You Again right outside her house. Holding on to the dwindling lightness that was Paresh’s gift to her, she quickly renamed him—Not You Again. She smiled at her own wit—but that too was short-lived. It was clear that some kind of animal had gotten into her garbage cans.
Not You Again’s pails were sitting off to the side without a speck of garbage around them. The name Silver was sharpied on their sides.
Not You Again—real name Ben Silver, apparently—was furiously picking up her trash from the sidewalk while his dog, Sally, looked on anxiously. Of course Sally was his dog! Probably a part of the play—maybe there was a bug in Sally’s collar.
As much as she wanted to run back inside, she addressed the situation.
“I’m sorry. I clicked closed the covers, I’m sure of it,” Addison asserted.
“You didn’t use the bungee cords correctly! It’s so freaking…irresponsible!”
She helped pick up the trash, but was not about to cower to his tantrum.
“Take a moment,” she said patronizingly.
He held an empty box of tampons in the air and matched her sarcasm.
“?‘Take a moment’? What are you, an Apple Watch?”
It was funny. Addison pressed her lips together, suppressing a smile.
Ben looked up at the tampon box in his hand, then back to Addison. His face turned a bright shade of red.
He looked back up at the box and tossed it in the can. “I don’t want to be picking up your shit.”
“Then don’t. I got this.”
“Obviously you haven’t. You know, you may not care about this block, but we all do—very much.” He motioned to the surrounding houses. His anger clearly went beyond Addison’s not properly securing the garbage.
“Is that your dog?” she asked.
“Yes. Sally.”
“So you think I should be able to control the raccoons and the deer, but you can’t even control Sally?”
Sally sighed and lay down on the sidewalk, clearly insulted by Addison’s tone, if not her words.
Shep observed the hoopla from his window and thankfully arrived, interrupting the heated argument. He attempted to bring down the temperature with a joke. It seemed to be his go-to tactic.
“What does a deer with no eyes call themselves?” he asked Addison.
“No idea,” she said with zero enthusiasm.
“Exactly,” Shep laughed. Addison did too. She couldn’t help herself. Ben did not.
“C’mon, son.” Shep put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “It’s a rookie mistake. I’ll teach Addie how to use the bungee cords.”
“It’s Addison,” she mumbled uselessly under her breath.
Ben turned and walked away with little more than a grunt.
“Don’t mind him. He’s not a morning person,” Shep advised.
“That’s a generous way to put it.”
He had come prepared and handed her a black plastic lawn bag.
“He takes some getting used to—your aunt adored him, you know. She hoped you two would be friends.”
“Friends? You know, he never even introduced himself to me,” she complained as she shook the bag open, trying to exonerate herself for any rudeness on her part.
“He wouldn’t even know how—he hasn’t been himself for a long while.”
She didn’t care to ask him to elaborate. Whatever this guy was going through, it was inexcusable to first play her, then berate her. Shep here was the one who had lost his wife, and even though he couldn’t keep her name straight, he was at least being nice to her.
They finished cleaning up, and Shep showed Addison how to secure the cans with bungee cords—assuring her this would never happen again if she did it correctly. The sky turned dark, and a hankering for a cup of warm tea replaced her yearning for iced coffee. She washed up, put the kettle on, and brought her now favorite mug—the one from the Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur—out to the studio to work on her painting of Paresh. Once she was there, the meditation corner beckoned.
She sat down with her back against the wall and took a few sips of her tea before deciding to give it a go on her own. That man, Ben, had really taken away the zen that Paresh had left her with, and she was determined to get it back.
Putting the tea down, she swung one leg over the other like a yogi and practiced meditating. And while her mind ran to the things she needed to do for the renters (remake the beds, bake scones), how they were faring at work without her (she had received more than a few texts asking for her help, and Emma reported in almost daily) and replaying the incident(s) with her neighbor (jerk), she managed to reel it in each time and spent a few minutes emptying her cluttered mind. She was left with a single thought.
Addison stood, went inside, and called the real estate agent.
“I want to sell.”
When she hung up from the lengthy discussion, she was determined to make a dent in cleaning out the house. One step back into the studio, though, and she put it off.
Gicky had left what looked to be a thirty-by-forty-inch blank canvas on the easel, a photo of a beach scene taped to the top. The scale of the project made Addison wonder about her aunt’s state of mind before her death. It was a big canvas. Had it been sitting empty for months, or had Gicky set it up recently? If Addison had been living with Gicky’s diagnosis—leukemia, the bad kind—she would have set up something half the size. She bet that her aunt would have described the sidewalks as wide rather than saying the streets were narrow. It amazed her that life had not squashed Gicky’s natural optimism, and Addison made a silent pledge to be more like her, or at least to try.
Despite the overcast day, the light in the studio was fantastic. Addison thought about abandoning the painting of Paresh and taking a stab at the beach scene, but the vat of clay in the corner had been calling out to her ever since she arrived. Sculpting had always been Addison’s true passion. She even came home one winter break from college with an entire “I am a sculptor” speech memorized. It didn’t go over well. Her parents refused to pay for the rest of school unless she majored in something employable. Her mother, especially, could not bear her daughter being in the same field as her “wretched” sister-in-law. When Addison won the most prestigious award in the department for sculpting, her mother hardly acknowledged it. Addison had felt so guilty about winning it. She knew her peers were pining for the illustrious honor to jump-start their careers as artists, while for her it became a symbol of what could have been.
Paresh had spoken of Gicky describing sculpting as a form of meditation—how while her hands were busy, her mind could remain quiet. Addison placed a block of clay on Gicky’s turntable and kneaded it with her hands until it became malleable. She felt a connection while working the mud-like material between her fingers, relishing the texture and weight of the clay in her hands in a way that was almost intimate.
In her first attempt at forming an object (since college, that is), Addison created a small bud vase. When she was satisfied with its shape, she meticulously carved ridges on it with a scalpel-like instrument she found sitting in a jar on Gicky’s table, as slowly as a surgeon performing surgery. She had been collecting cockle shells on beach walks, and they inspired the ridged pattern she imprinted in the clay. The cockles brought up a precious memory of collecting shells with her grandfather on the shores of Lake Michigan. He had taught her that each line across the width of the shell represented one growing season—not unlike the rings of a tree. So, a mollusk in a shell with two bands across it would have died somewhere between its second and third birthday. Addison had purposefully never googled this. She didn’t want to be disappointed in him again, if it turned out not to be true. One betrayal was enough.
Addison became lost in it, lost in the clay, lost in herself. She wondered if she would ever be found.
It was nearly dinnertime when she realized she hadn’t even eaten lunch.
The crappy weather held on the next day, and Addison continued to sculpt. Again and again, she became completely absorbed, losing track of time and the world around her. She felt a connection with the clay as she brought it to life that she had not felt in a long while about anything. Even creating her most successful campaigns, with their endless hours of planning and perfecting, did not compare to working with this lump of clay, giving it shape and texture and detail. How had she ever let this all slip from her hands?