Chapter 46 #2
She shakes her head as she sets down her sketchpad.
She gets her water bottle and climbs a few rungs of the stepladder to offer me a sip.
“I think you’re too besotted to remember properly,” she says as my lips close around the straw.
The water is ice-cold—perfect, because I’ve just reached the sweating phase of being strapped to the cross. “You’ve only known me seven years.”
She’s climbing down to put the bottle on a nearby table, and her back is to me when I say, “No, Birdie. Nine years. You may not have known me, but I knew you.”
She sets the water bottle down and turns to face the cross, looking up at me. “How?” she asks. “I would have—” A blush. “I would have remembered meeting you.”
“We didn’t meet.” I know how all this will sound, but I go ahead anyway.
She needs to know if she’s ever going to understand the way I feel about her—understand that it won’t and can’t end.
“There was a gallery exhibition two years before I took your class. Do you remember? It’s one of the only ones you’ve ever done. ”
She blinks. “I do remember. You were there?”
“Dragged by Sean for some reason I can’t recall.
I’d just finished my second year at KU, and my grades were bad, and my behavior was so awful that they made the grades look great in contrast. I could tell Sean was gearing up for a lecture, so I ducked away the minute we got to the gallery, hoping I could find some free wine and avoid the talk about how it wasn’t enough to be well-liked, I had to focus too, and college couldn’t only be about partying.
And when I was hiding from him…that’s when I found your Saint Catherine of Siena ripping out her own heart. ”
She steps closer but stays far enough away to easily watch my face, carefully following every word.
“It felt like something I’d seen in a dream.
Or hearing a language I’d forgotten how to speak.
And then I saw the Our Lady of Sorrows, with the seven wooden swords piercing her, and it was so technically flawless but also so alive and vivid and anguished, and it was more than recalling something about myself, it was recalling something about God too.
So I had to see you, had to know what kind of artist could make those pieces, and I remember weaving through the gallery until I spotted someone sitting completely alone.
In a far corner, hiding between two of those movable gallery walls, looking miserable. ”
I can tell from her rueful expression that she has no trouble remembering this.
“You looked up from the floor, and I saw your face, and I stopped knowing and prophesying in part. The partial ended and the complete came, and it was you. You were everything. The end of the world. And those eyes… My God, I don’t think I can do justice to your eyes or what it felt like to see them for the first time.
I might say that I fell in love with you in that moment so it’s the kind of thing other people understand, but it wasn’t anything nearly so normal or civilized.
Time itself ruptured. Everything was transformed.
The trumpet sounded, and I was changed.”
“I had no idea,” she whispers.
“By the end of the night, I learned you’d be doing Evelyn’s first artist residency, that you’d be starting in the fall.
I found Sean, and before he could tell me to get my life together, I told him I had a plan to do exactly that.
I wanted to transfer to a new school. Fresh start.
A nice Catholic college closer to home where he could keep an eye on me.
He agreed, and I spent the next two years trying to find a way to spend time with you.
When I saw you were teaching that class, I bribed a kid in the registrar’s office to make sure I was enrolled. ”
“And the apples?” she asks. “The pomegranates?”
“It was a fantasy,” I admit. “The apples at least. But once I started giving you the pomegranates and you started eating them, the only reason that remained was watching you eat those pomegranate seeds.”
“You had fantasies about me before I’d even met you?”
“Yes.” My muscles are shaking now, sore from yesterday.
“For a year and a half before I met you?”
“Yes.”
She doesn’t seem to know what to make of this, her face moving from relief to apprehension to desire and back again. I watch the emotions filter through those lovely eyes, tense that mouth I love so much, and she deserves to know.
“I’m sorry,” I say. Sweat slides down my spine, and the effort it takes to keep my body like this is evident in the graveled edges of my apology. “For Evelyn. For all of it. For what happened in the studio. I pushed you too far. You said no. It was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
Her eyes stay on mine. “But you like pushing.”
“I do, but I should have asked permission first. I didn’t know—” My mouth twists.
Everything tastes bitter. No number of years on this cross could make up for the handful of moments before we were caught.
“I didn’t understand us, not fully. I could see where we matched, but that paired craving of ours was like a smear of starlight across the sky.
I needed more time, more exposure, to see it clearly.
And then everything that happened after…
it was my fault. I forced you, and then you lost everything. I’m so sorry, Birdie.”
She looks down, and for a moment, I think she’s retreated from the discomfort of this to protect herself. But she looks back up at me and nods.
“Thank you,” she says. “For apologizing. I wish…” A complicated smile.
High cheeks, sad mouth. “I wish we had done it the right way. I wish it had been like it was at the barn, when you told me you wanted to push me, that you would be rough. I didn’t know those were things people could want, that they could choose.
And since I didn’t know, it made me feel sick inside that I had wanted it, that I wanted worse things, and it was so lonely too, because I had no one who would understand it except for you, and you’d been responsible for the end of my entire life, so how could I talk to you and not hate myself for it? ”
A tear streaks down my cheek, hot and fast, and I can’t move to wipe it away. It just has to fall in its own time.
“I’m sorry,” I breathe. “I want to make it better now.”
The complicated smile uncomplicates itself. Her eyes are soft. “It is better now, Ry. I only wish we could do it over and skip the pain we don’t want and only keep the pain that we do. I wish we could go back to the studio that day and you could feed me pomegranate seeds before kissing me.”