Chapter 4
The first brushstroke took eleven minutes.
Not because the paint was wrong or the canvas was wrong or the light was wrong.
The light, in fact, was perfect — morning through the east-facing window of the co-op studio, the kind of clean, cold February light that RISD students used to fight for.
Andie had given me the corner station, the one with the best window and a view of the harbor and a work surface scarred with ten years of other artists’ paint and resin and dried clay.
The brushes were Andie’s loaners, the paint was Andie’s spare tubes of acrylic, and the canvas was a stretched twelve-by-sixteen she’d pulled from a stack in the storage room and leaned against the wall without comment.
Everything was ready. I stood in front of the canvas with a loaded brush and eleven minutes went by before I could make it touch.
It wasn’t fear. It was something closer to muscle memory in reverse — the body remembering what it used to do and discovering that the pathway between seeing and making had gone overgrown.
Six years. I hadn’t held a brush in six years.
I’d arranged art, curated art, funded art, hung art at forty-two inches to center.
I’d managed an empire built on other people’s making and I’d been so close to the work that I’d forgotten I wasn’t doing it.
Standing in Andie’s co-op with a loaded brush and a blank canvas, the distance was obvious.
I’d been running a museum from the inside and calling it a life.
The first stroke was a horizontal line. Cerulean, slightly diluted, laid across the upper third of the canvas where the sky met the water outside the window.
It was tentative and slightly crooked and the pressure was wrong — too light, the mark of a hand that had been holding clipboards and phones and seating charts and was remembering, too late, what it felt like to hold something that mattered.
I made another stroke. And another. The paint went on ugly — muddy where I mixed too fast, thin where I pressed too hard, the colors wrong for the water, which was gray and green and silver and nothing like the cerulean I’d started with.
I stood there for two hours and painted a harbor scene that looked like it had been made by a first-year student on her worst day, and when I stepped back and looked at it I thought: this is the most honest thing I’ve made since I left school.
Andie came by at ten. She looked at the painting, looked at me, and said, “Good.”
“It’s terrible.”
“It’s paint on canvas. Yesterday it wasn’t. Good.” She set a mug of tea on the work surface and left.
That was the first day. The rest of the first week followed the same shape: walk to the co-op in the cold, paint badly for three hours, eat lunch at the counter of the fish market on the dock — a place called Harborside, run by a woman named Linda who didn’t ask questions and poured chowder into paper cups and charged four dollars and looked at you like that was the whole transaction — then walk the harbor, come home, sleep.
The rhythm was simple and physical and had no meetings in it and no board dinners and no caterers to call and no one’s schedule to manage but my own.
I ate when I was hungry. I painted when the light was right.
I walked the harbor in the late afternoon when the boats came in and the lobstermen unloaded their traps and the gulls screamed over the scraps and no one in any direction knew who Beckett Aldridge was or cared.
The silence was the hardest part. Not Rockport’s silence — that was good, clean, the silence of water and wind and a town that went to bed at nine.
The silence I mean was the absence of the schedule.
For six years I’d been tethered to a calendar that started before breakfast and ran past midnight, a grid of obligations and logistics and small fires that needed putting out, and the constant low hum of being needed.
Being needed was the drug. I understood that now.
Not being loved or being seen or being valued — being needed.
The one you can’t quit because everyone around you has organized their lives around your supply.
For the first three days I kept reaching for my phone to check a calendar that no longer existed. My hand would move toward my pocket before I caught it, a phantom reflex, the ghost of a life I’d amputated. By day four the reaching stopped. By day five I’d stopped counting.
The phone was a problem. I’d turned it off the morning I left Boston and turned it on once, two days later, to confirm my bank transfer had cleared.
The screen filled like a dam breaking — forty-seven texts, nineteen missed calls, six voicemails.
I didn’t read or listen to any of them. I turned the phone off again and put it in the drawer of the nightstand next to the dried flowers and let it sit there like a grenade with the pin still in.
Andie screened the rest. Beckett called the co-op’s landline on day three — Andie’s co-op had a landline, because Andie was the kind of person who believed that a phone attached to a wall was a phone you could walk away from — and she answered it and said, “Marsh Co-op, this is Andie,” and then listened for about ten seconds and said, “She’s not available,” and hung up.
“That was your husband,” she said, coming into the studio where I was painting the harbor for the third time, still badly.
“I know.”
“He sounds confused.”
“He’ll figure it out.”
“He also sounds like a man who’s used to people picking up the phone when he calls.”
“He’ll figure that out too.”
She nodded and went back to her sculpting and didn’t mention it again.
That was the arrangement: she would handle the incoming fire, I would handle the painting, and neither of us would talk about the thing we both knew, which was that somewhere in Boston a man was discovering that the woman who ran his life had taken nothing but a suitcase and left behind a photograph of a baby he didn’t know about.
Constance called on day five. Andie picked up, listened for four seconds, and hung up mid-sentence.
“The mother,” she said.
“What did she say?”
“She got as far as ‘Do you have any idea who—’ and then I hung up. I know who she is. I don’t care.”
I almost smiled. It was the first thing close to a smile in five days, and it hurt the way smiling hurts when the muscles have forgotten the shape.
The texts I didn’t read arrived in waves. Andie, who had the moral flexibility of a woman who’d lived alone for eight years and answered to no one, turned my phone on while I was in the shower one morning and read them to me through the bathroom door in a flat, narrating voice.
“Tuesday, 7:14 a.m.,” she said. “‘Where are you? Called the house, no answer. Your car is here. Call me.’ Wednesday, 8:02 a.m.: ‘Arden, I’m worried. I found your ring. Please call me.’ Wednesday, 2:15 p.m.: ‘I don’t understand.
Whatever this is, we can talk about it. Please just tell me you’re safe. ’”
I stood in the shower with the hot water running and my eyes closed.
“Wednesday, 11:47 p.m.: ‘I saw the photo. The ultrasound. Arden. Jesus. Call me.’ Thursday, 6 a.m.: ‘Are you pregnant? Is that what this is? Where are you? I’m calling the police.’”
“He called the police?”
“He threatened to. Thursday, 3 p.m.: ‘The police say you’re not a missing person because your car is here and the ring is here and you took your suitcase. They say this looks voluntary. Arden, was this voluntary?’”
I turned off the water. Stood in the steam. The question hung there: was this voluntary?
Yes. Every part of it. Every canceled order, every transferred dollar, every step down the stairs in the dark, every second I stood in that hallway and didn’t open the door. All of it was a choice, made by a woman who’d been told she was an option and decided to stop being one.
“Keep going,” I said.
“Friday. This is where it gets interesting.” Andie cleared her throat.
“‘I talked to the foundation. The Spencer gala has no run-of-show. Nobody knows where the caterer files are. The board liaison says you were the only contact for four sponsors. What the hell, Arden?’ Saturday: ‘Mother called. She says the donors’ event is a disaster. The museum can’t find the insurance certificates — she says you handled those?
When were you going to tell someone where the files were? ’”
I reached for a towel. Wrapped it around myself and opened the bathroom door. Andie was sitting on the bed with my phone in her hand, scrolling.
“Sunday,” she said, not looking up. “‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did, but I’m sorry. Please come home. We can fix this. Whatever it is, I’ll fix it.’”
“He doesn’t know what he did.”
“No. He genuinely does not.” Andie set the phone down and looked at me with the expression she reserved for things she found both unsurprising and unforgivable.
“That’s the thing about men like this. They think the earthquake is the problem, not the fault line.
He felt the house shake and he can’t figure out why, because the crack’s been there for six years and he’s been standing on the nice side of it. ”
“He saw the ultrasound.”
“He saw the ultrasound and his first thought was still ‘call me.’ Not ‘are you safe.’ Not ‘I understand.’ Call me. Like you’re a vendor who missed a delivery.”
I sat on the edge of the bathtub. The porcelain was cold through the towel. Andie was right, and it didn’t make me feel better because being right about the man you married is never a relief. It’s a receipt.
She turned the phone off and set it on the nightstand. “I’m putting this back in the drawer. You don’t need to hear the rest.”
“What’s the rest?”
“More of the same. Confusion, then anger — there’s one from Monday that starts with ‘This is insane, Arden’ — then bargaining, then confusion again. He cycles. He called the co-op twice more. I didn’t answer.” She stood up. “He sent flowers.”
“To the co-op?”