25 THE INIMITABLE GIFT
25
T HE I NIMITABLE G IFT
“I don’t think I need to remind you how important these final months are,” Moody said from her perch on her stool. “By now, you’re all aware of the limits of time. I suggest you plan accordingly and spend it wisely.”
Time always, time forever. It was the burden we returned to without fail. February was an awful month that flickered into March like flashing slides—blink open to a world laden with gray mornings, blink again for black nights that came too quickly. The first sprigs of green began to push through the sluice, and I still couldn’t let go of anything.
It was impossible to hold myself accountable for hope. I slept in desperate snatches and worked my body past its limits at all other hours. Every day it was canvas after canvas, painting after painting, depictions of dreamscape that fell into image like they’d been yanked out of my head through a muculent eye. I painted Saz in her bed with the duvet drawn to her chin and early-morning light coating her in pastels. Amrita on the couch, pulled into a New Year’s kiss. The glowing lights of the Manor, Finch and Caroline illuminated in the throes of the crowd and leaning closer as if trying to hear what the other was saying. Every painted iteration felt more incorrect than the last: skin pallid and wrong, uncanny limbs akimbo, colors running muddy.
On the canvas, they were still friends suspended forever in the moments before violence. In reality, Finch and Caroline hadn’t spoken more than a few words to each other in more than a month.
If I thought I knew the way tension could tear us apart before the party’s unraveling, the studio environment that came after taught me new meaning. Even Moody could see the way we were fractured. Unless they involved her, Phoebe was densely unconcerned with studio politics. Veda and Yejun were impasses without much to offer other than a benign comment in critique, and Thea spouted off notes that appeared to be complimentary until further inspection. She always claimed the seat to Finch’s right. Sometimes, if I was feeling brave, I claimed the one to the left. Amrita ran on the laser focus of obsessive perfectionism. Saz participated in discussions halfheartedly, more interested in scrolling house-hunting apps on her phone where Moody couldn’t see in search of what she called “Saz’s Dream House.” Mars and Cameron existed in their own world—one where Cameron clung to the hope that Mars might be the one to Solo, leaving the rest of our collective in the dust. I thought that Mars just wanted their hard work to show for something.
We had three critiques left before Solo selection, and Moody wielded them like weapons. She wouldn’t accept a lack of participation. We still showed our work as a class despite the Survey-narrowed list, so every Friday was a cycle through five or six sets of paintings where commentary was required. Most of us could barely look each other in the eye without dissolving into an argument. Caroline stood the whole time as she always did, preparing for war with her arms crossed over her chest.
We’d all been buried in our studios, even Saz, who took the lack of pressure as permission to explore. The paintings she hung before us were violent abstractions. She swung her brush with her whole body, emotion leaving marks. The pieces she created now felt entirely unconcerned with betterment. They were consumed with feeling, even if that feeling came out ugly.
“They’re muddled and confusing and intense,” Moody said to Saz in critique that Friday, “and that’s why I enjoy them. You’re no longer trying to make a ‘good’ abstract painting. You’re letting us feel the same emotions I imagine you experienced while creating. It’s a difficult thing to convey, and I think it’s a direction you should continue to follow.”
We could all see how impressive Saz’s new paintings were. The understanding that only one or two of them would show in Grainer was disheartening. It seemed like such a crushing thing, to have spent her life working for one goal just to find it snatched away. Reality was too near and fragile. I was afraid to find myself on the other end of it.
“Finchard?” Moody called, tapping her rolled-up list against her knee. “Care to hang your work next?”
The paintings Finch hung on the wall looked like extensions of her body. She handled each canvas with confidence, hair pulled away from her face and a pencil tucked thoughtlessly behind an ear. On anyone else it would have been ridiculously affected. On Finch, it was a natural part of her operation—she would need the pencil. It would have to be accessible.
I thought about what Caroline had said at the party about Finch’s posturing. About the way Caroline’s head rocked back with the impact. Caroline weeping in my lap like she couldn’t stop, reckoning with the aftermath of their resentment for one another. How it razed me to nothing to imagine that we’d never go back to our unified five.
I would have done anything. Snared any animal, stuffed any scarecrow, slit any palm open and drunk to the point of exsanguination if I thought it might knit us together again.
But Moody didn’t let me dwell for long. Finch returned to her seat with two new paintings waiting on the wall, and Moody said, “Thoughts, everyone?”
One painting was a wash of light. It was rare for her to use such a pale palette—the surface was mostly thin golds and light yellows, paint applied in transparent layers until dimension began to build. Atop that faint color was a goose-like bird, lovingly rendered in near-black shades of deep brown. Surrounding the bird was the gentlest outline of a hairless head leading down to sloping shoulders. And emerging from beneath the bird’s wings were two exquisitely rendered eyes in piercing shades of ultramarine. It reminded me, unwittingly, of Caroline’s blown-out pupils and the way her eyes tore into you until you had to look away.
And the other painting was me.
I prickled with awareness. I felt the moment the others realized, too, a wave resounding through the room, Caroline stiffening until her spine could have rivaled iron. The portrait was a deep blue silhouetted bust. The hair was my hair, perfectly rendered in waves of brown terminating where it hit my bare shoulders. One eye was entirely gone—the other was a muddy hazel ring framed by a perfect circle of flesh and lash and sclera and pupil, like peering through the hole in a hagstone and finding a new world past its opening. Behind me was an expanse of field, this one darker, richer, fat strokes of paint applied with a palette knife.
Amrita hummed with appreciation, leaning forward with her elbows propped on her knees. Finch fidgeted with the ring around her middle finger. Moody circled each painting, spent time up close. The cloud of her hair blocked out most of my portrait. When she stepped aside, it was jarring all over again to find my eye glaring back.
“These certainly feel more personal,” Moody said when she’d finally returned to her stool. “You’ve never painted anyone we could recognize before.”
She smiled in my direction. I sank down in my seat as Caroline scoffed. Moody quirked her head at Caroline. “Want to chime in, Ms. Aster?”
Always Ms. Aster, as if the weight Caroline’s name carried couldn’t be ignored. Caroline remained still. She didn’t even shake her head, just let the silence ring.
Mars raised their hand. “I might be wrong, but I think this is also the first time you’ve showed some of the flesh on the portrait’s face. Typically, it’s just the eyes that you give more detail to.”
Moody nodded. “Great observation, that’s right. You’ve allowed us to be privy to something concealed, Finchard. It’s a good direction. It keeps the story of your painting speaking on, even when you’re not around to tell it.”
Her eyes dragged across the two paintings. I wondered if she could see what I saw in the bird portrait; Caroline’s echo leaving feathers in its wake, like her Grotesque swan and the one in her burned painting. Finch shifted beneath the scrutiny.
“Now that I’ve seen what you’re capable of imbuing in these paintings, I’d like to see you push your process in this direction,” Moody said. “I want it to feel like something only you are capable of. I don’t want to look at a painting and believe that the artist behind it could be an interchangeable entity. Show me why we should care that your hand was the one that crafted these.”
Finch sat with her head held high, thigh bouncing beside mine. I wanted to touch her knee and still the shaking. But I didn’t know how to breach the wall between us. I kept missing the right moment, kept forgetting the language.
“Alright, Ms. Aster, you’re up next.”
Caroline replaced Finch’s paintings with one of her own. They still wouldn’t look at each other—they moved as if the two of them were apparitions, flitting through the space, circumventing the boundaries of their bodies.
Caroline’s painting was an autopsy. It was a canvas she’d shown before—the one with the damage right at its heart—but she shredded the outline of the burn, expanded and mutilated it, caked layers and layers of burgundy paint around its edges until it made a wound out of the piece. She’d painted a transparent image across the whole thing. It was another bird, one of her own, but the widened hole lived in its chest. She stood and stared it down until I expected the painting to blink and turn away, unable to meet her gaze.
“Wow,” Moody said. “This is much more violent than your previous pieces.”
Caroline’s frown etched into her face. I could tell she was weighing the words, trying to decide if the intention behind them was positive or negative.
Cameron’s laugh was dark. “If that’s the kind of work you’re hoping to Solo with, you must be thrilled that your dad gave Rotham a $500,000 Christmas gift.”
Moody asked Cameron to be respectful. I felt Finch stiffen beside me.
“He’s glad I’m actually taking risks with my work,” Caroline said pleasantly, her eyes boring into the side of Cameron’s head. “What do you have to show us? Let me guess. A guy on a horse. Toxic masculinity. We get it.”
Cameron started to snap back, but Finch cut him off. “This isn’t a risk, it’s garish,” she said. “Feels like you made it for shock value. It lacks all the nuance of your previous work and turns it into a spectacle.”
Caroline wouldn’t acknowledge her when she said, “I had to make use of someone else’s attention-seeking destruction.”
“Enough,” Moody interrupted. “If you all can’t be civil, then we’re done for the day. Please take a break and use this time to consider the impact of constructive criticism. If you don’t understand what constructive means, I encourage you to look it up. You’re dismissed.”
Caroline looked ready to lash out as she stalked forward and snatched the canvas off the wall. We milled away from the mess of critique, Veda and Yejun lingering in conversation in their seats. It was still early afternoon. I didn’t want to go home yet.
Amrita stopped me before I could step into my studio. “Saz and I are going to grab coffee. Want to come?”
I shook my head. “No thanks, I’m going to try to do some work. I’ll meet you guys later.”
The look she fixed me with was disappointed, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I needed to be alone. I was exhausted and entirely unprepared for my critique next week. There was always something new to complete. Another opportunity for me to let Moody down.
She let me go, but I only had a moment of isolation in my studio before Finch darkened the doorway.
“Did you know?” she asked.
“Know what?”
I opened my laptop and scrolled through my thesis document as she stepped closer. She leaned against my desk and crossed her arms over her chest, making herself impossible to ignore. I was eye level with her hip. I wanted to lean forward and press my forehead there, feel the heat of her through the fabric. But we hadn’t touched more than cursory hellos in the past few weeks. We were strangers again, with far too much knowledge of one another.
“Did you know about the donation?”
My pulse picked up. “Of course, it’s the Asters. They drop money on Rotham all the time.”
Finch scoffed. “Yeah, sure, but this is $500,000, Jo. Right before Solo selections. You think administration is going to ignore that?”
“Is that why you tried to tear her apart in crit today?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s a bad painting. It’s too obvious, and she knows that.”
She wouldn’t quite look at me. I knew we were both thinking about the painting Finch had shown the class, and the way my eye had looked out of it.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were painting me?” I asked softly. Finch stuffed her hands in her pockets and stared at the floor.
“Dunno, didn’t want to make it weird.”
“I paint you all the time.”
Finch shrugged. “Yeah but ... yours are different. I don’t know. Sorry, I should have warned you.”
This time I did touch her. I couldn’t help it. Index and thumb encircling her wrist, tugging the hand out of her pocket. Fitting our palms together. Fingers interlocking. She sighed, a low exhale out of her nose. Voices carried in the background, studio life continuing behind us.
“I liked it,” I whispered. “You made me look brave.”
Now she shook her head and smiled, that beacon I loved. “Oh, come on,” she said, and that was how I knew I had pleased her. I imagined Thea stumbling upon the image of us. I hoped she would appear, that I could make myself evident.
But beyond that, I wanted a chance to set things straight and stop the endless back-and-forth of Finch and Caroline’s war. So I said, “I wish you two would work it out.”
Finch didn’t have to ask who I meant. She immediately slid her hand out of mine and leaned back on my desk again, as if preparing to snap something scathing. Her hand went down behind her and landed directly on my uncapped X-Acto knife.
“Oh shit,” I exclaimed as she gasped, lifting her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry about that, shit shit shit. Are you okay? Let me see it.”
There was a slice all the way down her ring finger. It twisted from tip to knuckle in the soft bends of her joint. She hissed with pain as I felt around the wound. The sound devolved into cursing as I scrambled for a rag, settling on the paint-stained one I kept in my apron pocket.
“You’re probably introducing a million new toxins to my bloodstream,” she joked faintly, her face going white as the blood stained the few places of the cloth that weren’t yet oiled and colorful. The irrational part of me wanted to bring her finger to my lips, to taste it clean too. Instead, I just squeezed the rag harder. Watched her blood spread and spread.
We hovered like that, in the silence. There was so much to say, nowhere to begin. When the bleeding finally slowed, she dropped the rag beside my laptop and stepped out of my reach, injured hand cupped in the one she’d once purposefully cut open. “I’m gonna go wash this,” she said. “I’ll find you later.”
I let her go with my questions unanswered, my mouth unkissed and her blood stiffening the rag on my desk.
The studio was nearly empty that night, mostly everyone packed up and gone, with only me and someone else unseen shuffling around in the background past midnight. I kept my headphones on to block out the sound—half of me wanted to explore and see which one of them it might be, but I was terrified to go looking and find something inhuman dragging itself around Grainer’s sixth floor. Fear was teaching me how to finally mind my business.
The critique of Caroline’s work instilled new insecurities. The latest painting pinned to my studio wall was the portrait of Caroline and Finch at the party. Neither of them had acknowledged it—by now it seemed they were content to pretend it had never happened, that they had never been friends in the first place, that they would never be friends again. I thought it would take time. Amrita said that maybe they were just too similar to let it go. Saz said they were both embarrassing, and that it could have been a great party if everyone just chilled out.
I lifted the painting from the wall. In its place I tacked up a fresh canvas. Despite how frustrating painting had become, there would never be another sensation in the world like this one—the blank belly of new potential, clean fabric under my hands. I began to sketch a new image with a hunk of terracotta charcoal. The earth tone marked out a faded depiction, like an old photograph buried beneath the bed: Finch sitting on her fire escape with the woods behind her, jacket pulled close and her eyes on my mouth just out of frame. I wondered if the others would look at this and know—the same way they must have known the moment she hung that painting of me, the two of us claiming each other’s image.
I rubbed my hands across my jeans and left smears of earth. Stared into that monochrome replication of her face. Felt it brand me somewhere evident, skin prickling with awareness. My satisfied angle of her mouth, the same one that set me alight every time I saw it. Self-control was a fable meant to warn me away from the edge of her.
Would it have been better to be warned?
Under my music, I heard the studio door swing shut. The resounding bang froze me in place, and I listened for feet. I couldn’t tell if I was alone or if someone new had joined me.
“Hello?” I called. Silence answered.
It would be embarrassing if it were Cameron or Thea coming in to work, to have them hear me call out like a child. But I couldn’t help it. Midnight had long since come and gone. Anxiety prickled along the nape of my neck.
I ran my fingers over the edge of the canvas, a shiver prickling up my spine. I scratched my tattoo through my sweatshirt. The skin slid in an awful way, like a newly forming scab.
I reached for the back of my sweatshirt and yanked it over my head. Without it I was left in a thin tank top, cold raising the hair on my arms. The tattoo still oozed along Finch’s carefully inked lines, the skin around it wrinkled in a state of forever wound. The slice on my palm was the same way. Always scabbed halfway over, incapable of righting itself. I didn’t understand my body’s failure—how the others had healed just fine and yet my skin wouldn’t stitch back together. I dragged my fingers across the tattoo’s rippled edge. The crusted flake of blood and serous fluid slid away with my touch. A corner of my skin went with it.
Corner wasn’t the right word. It was the tattoo’s boundary, the place where redness and rot had spread across my arm, the skin simply falling away from my body. I dragged in a horrible breath. Sucked it down over and over again and pulled my hand away, looking at my fingers as if they had the capability to separate muscle from bone.
I could feel my heartbeat in my teeth and the hot, swollen wound. My hand dragged back up to it and pressed over the tattoo, pain prickling through the soft tissue. Skin slipped under my touch. Flesh sloughed off in one ruined piece. The hyacinth fell away.
Instinct was to scream, but the sound came out more like a gasp, constricted in my throat and pushed through clenched teeth. I dug jagged nails desperately into the ditch of my elbow, and the ache brought me back into my body.
“Oh fuck,” I breathed, “fuck, what do I do? What the fuck do I do?”
My shouts echoed in dead air. Grainer creaked quietly, the moan of an old building shifting in the wind.
I expected blood to pour down my arm. But beneath the wound was just the raw red of exposed interior, rippled pink and veined white, the marble of meat. Saliva filled my mouth. I was going to be sick. I needed to get out of here. I needed to do something. I needed to—
I scrabbled at the materials on my desk. The knife that had cut Finch rolled away, the rag already stiff with her blood. A pincushion perched among the mess with a needle poking out of its center, red thread trailing from the head, the same red we’d sewn the Boar King into life with.
I could put myself back together.
I tried to hold the skin in place. The needle’s first puncture flashed white-hot—I cried out, the sound carrying throughout the room. I pulled thread to its knotted end and made another stitch, teeth clenched against the sting.
Now the blood ran. Fat drops fell from the new wounds I’d made within the first. Somehow, that was what destroyed me: that red, weeping line. I grabbed the rag with shaking hands and pressed it over the tattoo, watching my blood soak into Finch’s.
“I can’t,” I whispered to the air, head dropping down between my knees and the rag falling to the ground as my trembling grip loosened. “It hurts.”
My whole body pulsed. With one hand still gripping my arm I staggered to the sinks and ran the water, slipping my arm beneath it and crumpling at the basin, eyes closed and forehead digging into the metal curl of the faucet. The water erased the pain for a moment and brought me back to my skin and my awareness of it, of the way my bones fit beneath the muscle.
When I opened my eyes, the tattoo rippled beneath the spitting water. The skin was right again. The wound was nothing more than irritated black lines, pink around the edges. Flesh fitted back where it belonged, and a single stitch of red thread punctured through the inside of my bicep. I let out a sob and scrabbled for something to hold on to. I landed on a cup of brushes at the sinks’ edge. A long pair of shears poked out of the cup among all the oily brushes—I yanked them out and snipped the thread, needle clattering to the bottom of the sink. I pulled the rest of the thread out. Now the only sign of the wound was two perfect punctures.
The studio’s door remained shut. The room was silent. I rocked back on my heels and stumbled back to my studio in dazed shock. Endless white cubicles, dirty wood floor, pale lights overhead. Shadows moving with my footsteps. The empty cutout of my doorway, the sign beside my studio that said Joanna Kozak, Studio 11 . Inside, Caroline, sitting on my stool.
I didn’t question where she’d come from. Part of me believed she wasn’t really there. The rest tried weak excuses—that she’d been here the whole time, that she had been the one to slip in with the door’s slam, that she had come to finish me off, that she was the only merciful thing I had left in the world. I just waited there in the doorway, staring, afraid to speak and hear her answer with a voice that didn’t belong to her.
“What happened?” she finally asked.
I started to cry. I couldn’t stop the flow once it began.
“I’m falling apart,” I said thickly, the words sticking to the roof of my mouth. “I’m going fucking crazy, Caroline. I’m so scared. I don’t know what to do.”
The look she gave me was unreadable. Her pupils were the heavy black of a sated snake, the irises a thin band of blue. Dark circles beneath them dragged me down, down, down. “I know,” she said at last. “Me too.”
She reached for me. I went to her, let her pull me into her solid arms, my blood-spattered shirt pressed between us. I wondered if she thought the stain was just paint. If she knew the truth and let me get away with it unsaid.
“I’m going to fix it,” she whispered against my head. “You won’t have to worry about anything anymore, I’m going to make it all better. We should go away, don’t you think? Let’s get off campus for a while, go somewhere different.” Her fingers stroked over my head. I’d made the shoulder of her shirt wet. “My parents are going out of the country during our spring break. We can go to their place, spend some time by the water. All of us. I’ll even ask Finch.”
I let my eyes shut and breathed in her close warmth. She gave me a squeeze. “Let’s go home and you can sleep. In the morning we’ll tell the others. I’ll work out all the details, and we’ll plan to leave for the week. How does that sound?”
I nodded. She fixed me upright, led the way out of my cubicle. At the last second, I turned back for my laptop, still waiting on my desk with the cursor blinking on my thesis paper.
The desk was a disaster: papers and brushes and fabric and tubes of oil paint and empty bottles of solvent and the half-closed glow of the laptop screen. Red thread lay across my mess like a vein. Beside it, there was a blank space in the calamity signaling where Finch’s blood-soaked rag had been. My eyes dropped down to the empty floor. The rag was gone.