Chapter 15
MARY CATHERINE
He left before the city did.
I heard him moving in the dark—quiet, efficient, the sounds of a man who knew how to leave a room without disturbing it.
The soft drag of denim. The zip of something.
A pause at the sofa where he crouched down and I felt his hand in my hair, one slow pass of it, before he straightened and crossed to the door.
"I'll be back," he said. Low, into the dark.
"I know," I said.
A pause. Then he came back to the sofa, crouched down, and held out his new phone. "Put your number in."
I took it and typed it in without comment, handed it back. He looked at the screen for a second—something passing across his face that he didn't bother to contain—then, he stood.
"I'll be back," he said again. Like the number made it more true.
"I know," I said again. Like I'd believed it the first time.
The door closed. His footsteps on the stairs, then nothing.
I lay on the sofa in the studio and looked at the ceiling and waited for the thing to arrive—the hollowness, the morning-after accounting that should have come for a woman who had left her wedding yesterday and slept with a stranger the same night.
I waited for the shame, the Catholic guilt, the voice that had narrated most of my internal life in a tone borrowed directly from the Baltimore Catechism.
It didn't come.
What came instead was the light. Slow and gray at first, then gold, moving through the east-facing window and across the floorboards, touching the canvases stacked against the walls one by one.
My work. My room. My mess of turpentine and old coffee cups and the disorder of a space where nobody else's preferences had ever had to be accommodated.
I pulled the blanket—a studio blanket, paint-stained, wholly unglamorous—around my shoulders and sat up and looked at it all in the new morning light.
I felt extraordinarily fine.
The faith question was one I turned over while I made coffee on the hot plate, watching the street below come awake through the window.
It was Sunday. Across the city, Saint Sebastian's was filling up for the nine o'clock Mass. My mother would be in her usual pew with her back straight and her hands folded and a space beside her where I was supposed to be.
I was not going to be there.
I thought about that. About what I believed and what I had been told to believe and where those two things overlapped and where they didn't. It was a question I had been avoiding with some dedication for years, because it was the kind of question that, once you started pulling the thread, had implications for a great many other threads.
I believed in God. That was the bedrock, and it was real. I had felt it in this city, in Saint Sebastian's light falling red and gold through the stained glass, in the hush of the church before Mass began when the building seemed to hold its breath.
That wasn't nothing. That had never been nothing.
But I had also spent twenty-nine years allowing someone else's interpretation of that belief to govern every significant choice of my life.
Last night, I had felt something I could only call grace. Not the official kind. The real kind. The kind that arrived without permission and didn't ask you to be worthy of it first.
I didn't think God was upset with me.
I thought, if anything, God had been waiting rather patiently for me to make a decision that was actually mine.
My mother would disagree with that theology. We would have that conversation, eventually, probably over her kitchen table with the handkerchief in her hands, and I would listen and love her and hold my own ground. That was a bridge I would cross when I came to it.
For now, I drank my coffee and watched the light and felt—for the second day in a row, which was beginning to seem like a pattern—like myself.
By eight, I had showered and dressed and stood in front of the canvases for a while, just looking.
I did this sometimes—stood in front of the work and let it tell me things.
This morning, it told me I had been painting loneliness for years without calling it that.
The colors, the negative space, the figures that appeared in my larger pieces always slightly outside the frame, always at the edge of something they hadn't entered yet.
I had been painting toward a door I hadn't walked through.
I picked up my sketchbook and my good charcoal pencils and my keys and I went to my car.
Folly Beach in the morning was a different creature from Folly Beach in the afternoon.
The Saturday crowds were gone and the Sunday ones hadn't arrived yet.
The island in the early hour had a stripped-down quality, a realness—the surf shops still shuttered, the taco place chairs up on tables, a pelican standing on a piling with the conviction of a thing that owned the place.
The air was cool off the water and smelled like salt and wet sand and something green and alive.
I stood in the parking lot for a moment and just breathed it in.
The pier was open.
I walked out onto it barefoot again—shoes left in the car—and found the bench built into the railing near the midpoint, the wide one that faced south along the shore. I sat down and opened the sketchbook across my knees.
I didn't plan what I was going to draw. That was the rule I'd made for myself years ago, in the early days of the studio, when I was still fighting the part of my brain that wanted to organize everything in advance. No planning. Just let the hand go and see what arrived.
My hand went.
For a while, I didn't look at what it was doing.
I watched the water instead—the way the morning light came at it sideways, making the waves look like hammered metal—and let the charcoal move across the paper, and let myself think about nothing in particular, which was a skill I was still learning and was getting better at.
I thought about Dublin. About the trip I was not going on. About the Ring of Kerry and the countryside I had circled in a travel guide with a pen and would not see, at least not this spring, and whether that loss felt like what I thought it would feel like.
It felt smaller than I expected. It felt like a rain check rather than a door closed.
Somewhere in my recent history, the thing I had been moving toward had stopped being Dublin and started being something else, and it had happened so gradually that I was only now catching up to it.
I thought about the gallery owner. Her voice on the phone, warm and certain: I think you're the real thing, Mary Catherine, and I think you know it, and I think it's time.
I had said no so fast.
I thought about what it would mean to call her back. To say: I've reconsidered. The timing is different now. I'd like to talk.
I thought about what it would mean to actually do this—to show work publicly, to stand in a room and let strangers look at the things I had made in the private dark of a studio over a frame shop and decide what they thought about them.
The exposure of it. The vulnerability of handing your truest thing to the world and waiting.
The thought made my stomach tighten.
It also made something else happen, lower and steadier—a pull, a current, the same thing I felt when I stood in front of a blank canvas and understood that it was about to stop being blank.
I thought: I could make a living at this.
Not easily. Not quickly. Not without the savings and the studio and the two weeks of clear calendar and whatever came after them.
But the gallery owner had said representation, not charity.
She had said show, not favor. She was a businesswoman and she had seen the work and she had called it the real thing.
I had spent five years pretending I was only painting for myself, which was partially true and also a lie I told so I didn't have to risk being wrong about what it was worth.
I was so tired of the lies I told to keep things safe.
I looked down at the sketchbook.
I had drawn Charleston.
A specific corner of it—East Bay Street, the angle of it just north of Liquid Courage.
The live oak that threw its arms across the width of the lane, the iron gate of the building beside it with the pattern I'd never consciously memorized but apparently had.
And in the foreground, two figures on the sidewalk.
One of them was unmistakably large. Broad-shouldered, hands in pockets, that quality of stillness even in charcoal lines on paper.
The other was me. Or close enough to me that there was no pretending otherwise.
We were not touching in the drawing. We were standing beside each other looking at something I had left off the page—something ahead of both of us, something the composition suggested without showing.
His shoulder angled toward hers. Her face turned up slightly, three-quarters profile.
A distance between them of about six inches that read, somehow, as smaller than six inches.
I looked at it for a long time.
I had drawn this without looking. Without deciding. My hand had gone and this was where it had arrived, which meant something, because my hand knew things my brain took longer to process.
Nobody else, I had said, in the dark. And meant it.
I had known Brock for one day. One extraordinary, unplanned, completely structureless day that had begun with me running out of my own wedding and ended with his hand in my hair in the dark of a studio.
That was not a relationship. That was not a foundation.
That was the kind of thing you made sense of slowly, carefully, with your eyes open—not the kind you built a future on before the weekend was over.
And yet.
I traced the outline of the larger figure in the drawing. The jaw, even in the rough lines of charcoal. The set of the shoulders. The precise quality of his presence, which, apparently, my hand could reproduce without reference.
I had been drawing alone for five years.
I had never drawn another person into my work before.
The pelican on the piling took off suddenly, wings broad and unhurried, dropping out over the water and catching a current and riding it south. I watched it go until it was a dark shape against the light and then nothing at all.
I turned to a fresh page.
This time, I drew the studio. The canvases against the walls, the hot plate, the window with the city behind it. The sofa.
I drew it empty. Just the space. Just the room that was mine.
Then I drew, very small, in the corner near the door—a pair of boots on the floor. Large. Facing inward.
As if they belonged there.
As if whoever had left them planned to come back.
I closed the sketchbook.
I sat on the bench with the Atlantic moving below the pier and the March sun rising over the dunes and thought about a phone call I needed to make to a gallery owner, and about a man who was somewhere in this city right now dealing with something I didn't have the full shape of yet, and about the word darlin' said in a Texas drawl in the dark of a room that smelled like turpentine and the sea.
I had two weeks.
I had a car and a studio and savings and a sketchbook full of things my hand knew before my brain caught up.
I had—for the first time in my life—no plan. No structure. No map of the expected.
I had just this: the pier and the ocean and the light, and somewhere across the city a man who had said I'll be back like he was informing me of a fact rather than making a wish, and the gallery owner's number still in my call history.
I was not afraid of the same things anymore.
I pulled out my phone, found the number, and pressed call before I could talk myself out of it.
It rang twice.
"This is Diane."
"Hi," I said. "This is Mary Catherine Donovan. You called me about representation." I looked out at the water. "I was wrong about the timing. I'd like to talk, if you're still interested."
A pause. Then, warmly: "I've been hoping you'd call."
I smiled at the Atlantic.
"Good," I said. "Me, too."