Chapter 36
Wyatt finally leaves to get Clementine from school.
Shelby is out with a friend, doing some early Christmas shopping, even though we’re still a month away from celebrating.
I insist that Wyatt not call her. I don’t need a babysitter, I say.
Let’s not make this a bigger deal than it is.
How ironic that he’s suggesting Shelby keep an eye on me, versus the other way around.
Eventually he lets it go, after I promise to call him every fifteen minutes until he’s back home. Finally, I am alone.
I head to my studio the moment the door closes behind him. Once inside, I take a look around. Everything is as it should be; everything is where it should be.
My relief is short-lived, however, because on the heels of it comes the memory of seeing my mother at the clinic. Let’s hope this is truly as simple as a low-iron issue, but even as I think this, I understand it can’t explain everything. Not even close.
It isn’t wise to keep the artist waiting.
Again, my mother’s words infiltrate my mind and my hands begin removing the painting’s cover.
I watch in awed confusion as my fingers peel away the cover, corner by corner.
I can’t feel my hands or the rest of my arms, all the way up to my shoulders.
It’s as though they’re under another’s control. As though they belong to someone else.
The cleaning is nearly two-thirds finished, the subject (another hit of relief, seeing her in place) exposed up to her neck. I know the final third will be difficult—the fire damage more extensive toward the top of the painting. It’s going to require a delicate, steady approach.
The feeling suddenly returns to my arms and hands, the pins and needles all-consuming. I shake them out, grimacing with the pain, until the tingling eases.
Do not think of her, Tilly. Do not think of her.
How can I not think of her?
—
I was twenty-one and home from Queen’s University in Kingston. I was halfway through my third year of a four-year bachelor of science degree, with an eye toward becoming a conservator, like my mother. So far the break had been about sleeping in and spending time with my mom.
We visited the Distillery’s Christmas market, went to see the decorated windows downtown, had a festive-themed high tea at the Royal York hotel.
There was a big snowfall, something that was becoming a rarity with the current climate woes.
Out of childhood nostalgia I convinced my mom to build a snowman with me on the front lawn.
She tied one of her painter’s palettes onto the snowman’s stick arm, and then we dressed it as a Parisian artist, complete with a beret and mustache made of hairs from an old brush.
Though Mom had no French heritage, she was a self-proclaimed Francophile.
After that we made salted-caramel popcorn balls and ate them for dinner, in honor of my grandmother.
It was a wonderful holiday.
Then, two days before Christmas, I met friends downtown for brunch.
We had mimosas and caught up on gossip and news, after which I meandered home tipsy.
Mom was taking advantage of the quiet house to put final touches on a presentation for a CAC—Canadian Association for Conservation of Cultural Property—conference two weeks later.
I let myself in the back door. I didn’t want to disturb my mom, but I also didn’t want her to know I was day drunk. Even though we were years past lectures about such things.
Everything appeared normal at first, though in retrospect I remember thinking the house felt oddly empty.
Too quiet. But Mom was upstairs in her studio with the door likely closed, as it often was.
I paused, listening closely, and heard something faint through the ceiling…
as though someone was sweeping the hardwood floors above. Maybe she was tidying up her studio.
I shuffled into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water, then grabbed a sugar cookie from the batch we’d decorated the night before.
It was a holiday wreath with bright green and red icing, and silver candy balls.
My plan was to chill on the couch until Mom came downstairs, maybe scroll through my phone for a social media dopamine hit while the mimosas wore off.
But I never made it to the living room.
Three steps out of the kitchen I stopped abruptly, staring uncomprehendingly at what lay on the floor a few feet away. The cookie and glass dropped from my hands, and for a long moment I stood still as a statue. Then I screamed.
My feet were like concrete blocks as I closed the gap between us. I didn’t know what to do. I was crying, then choking on the bite of cookie caught in the back of my throat. My eyes watered as I gagged.
My mother was on the floor at the bottom of the staircase.
Flat on her back, her head tilted to the right at an unnatural angle.
She was motionless. No rising chest, no twitch of a finger, no signs of life whatsoever.
But her eyes were open, staring unseeing toward the ceiling.
Her expression was not one of surprise or terror.
Her face appeared…strangely relaxed. Resolute.
I was afraid to touch her and so hovered my hands over her body, as though that might somehow patch her back together. My tears dripped onto my mom’s blouse, my panic rising. I shouted her name, again and again, sobbing over her lifeless body. Finally, I called for help.
The police and ambulance arrived quickly.
I sat on the bottom stair, my knees pulled up to my chest as I shook uncontrollably.
My house was considered a crime scene until proven otherwise, so I stayed with a friend for a couple of nights.
I have very little memory of the weeks after my mom died.
My brain went offline, likely to protect itself.
Officially, her death was the result of a broken neck. An accident, the police investigation soon concluded. She died instantly, the coroner’s report stated. It was speculated her foot got caught in the fabric of her long skirt, causing her to lose her balance at the top of the staircase.
I hadn’t noticed the skirt when I found her, but later, when I read the report, I couldn’t move past that detail.
See, my mother never wore skirts. Didn’t even own one, as far as I knew, her closet filled with fitted trousers, leggings, one pair of skinny jeans she wore on Sundays.
Mom found dresses and skirts impractical for her type of work.
All that extra, unnecessary material piled around her legs while she sat on her work stool.
“So fussy,” she’d say when I asked why she never dressed up. “Who needs it?”
I had no idea why she was wearing a skirt that day—white, billowing fabric, paint-spattered, returned to me with her other belongings from the hospital—and would never be able to ask. But it was odd, out of character. It unsettles me to this day.
“A tragic, horrible accident,” her colleagues and friends, as well as my friends, kept repeating at the funeral. They clutched my arms in sympathy, offered tight hugs that stole my breath. I longed to run away, but to where? Even then I understood grief follows you everywhere.
A couple of weeks after the funeral I returned to university, then the house was sold, and I went backpacking in Europe with two school friends for the summer.
My grief came with me, my constant companion, but somehow I kept my head above the surface.
Until we arrived in Italy, where I saw a familiar saying on an apron, of all things.
Hanging innocently in a tourist shop near the Stazione di Venezia Santa Lucia—Venice’s central train station.
Non tutti le ciambelle riescono col buco.
(Not all doughnuts come out with a hole.)
My mom was trying to tell me she was with me, would always be with me.
I bawled like a baby while I clutched the apron, scaring the hell out of my friends and the shop’s owner, who insisted on giving me a steep discount. I still have that apron—I wear it in my studio, and every time I tie the strings around my waist I think of my mother.
But I never thought I would see her again. Not in this lifetime, anyway.