Chapter 5 #2
Evenings I read to her. Board books with thick pages she could turn herself, stories about boats and fish and a bear named something I’ve already forgotten because Hazel only cared about the pages with blue on them.
She’d point at the blue and say “boo” and I’d say “blue” and she’d say “boo” and we’d go around like that until she fell asleep with her finger on the page, and I’d carry her to the crib and stand at the window and watch the harbor go dark and listen to her breathing, steady and unworried, the breathing of a child who has never been afraid because the world has never given her a reason to be.
She didn’t know her father’s name. She didn’t know she had a father, in the way that twenty-two-month-olds don’t know the things they haven’t been told.
Her world was the apartment, the co-op, the beach, Andie, the fish market, the Saturday class, and me.
That was the whole of it. I was the whole of it — the mother, the provider, the painter, the person who decided what she ate and where she slept and which colors were available on the floor — and the responsibility of that was vast and simple and had nothing in common with the responsibilities I’d carried in Boston, which had been vast and complicated and had belonged to someone else.
I was solvent. Not comfortable — the paintings sold well for Rockport, but Rockport is not Chelsea and a cooperative show is not a gallery representation, and a painter with a toddler in a three-room apartment is not a woman with margin.
The six months of savings I’d taken from the joint account had lasted almost exactly six months, and after that it was paint sales and the occasional commissioned piece and a frugality I’d never practiced in Boston but which turned out to be simple when every dollar spent was a dollar you’d earned yourself.
But I paid rent. I bought groceries. I took Hazel to Dr. Nguyen for her checkups and paid out of pocket and didn’t flinch.
I’d built a life on the thing I’d been told I was giving up temporarily and had almost given up permanently, and the life was mine, and it ran on my hands and my eye and the fact that somewhere in the years between leaving RISD and leaving Boston the ability to see light on water had survived the erasure and come back, rougher and stranger and more itself than it had been at twenty-three.
Andie came to dinner three nights a week.
She brought wine and bread and opinions about everything, and we ate at the kitchen table while Hazel sat in the high chair and conducted her nightly experiment in gravity by dropping pasta one piece at a time over the edge and watching it fall with scientific interest.
Andie talked about the co-op’s finances, the town council’s new parking ordinance that was killing foot traffic to the waterfront, which artists in the regional circuit were overrated and which were underseen, why the gallery system was a racket that extracted value from makers and redistributed it to people who’d never held a brush, and why she would never leave Rockport even if a Chelsea gallery offered her a solo show and a penthouse.
“They wouldn’t,” she said once, refilling her wine. “I make things out of driftwood and scrap metal. Chelsea wants conceptual. They want a paragraph of explanation next to every piece. I want someone to look at the thing and feel it in their chest. Different markets.”
I listened the way I’d once listened to Beckett at the kitchen island — completely, with attention — except this time the conversation wasn’t about someone else’s empire.
It was about ours. The co-op, the studio, the small economy of makers and doers who woke up every morning and put their hands to work.
Andie never asked me about Boston. She never brought up Beckett unless I did first, which I didn’t.
She treated the past two years the way she treated a finished sculpture — it existed, it was done, it didn’t need to be revisited.
I did not need Beckett Aldridge. I could write that sentence now and mean it in a way I couldn’t have meant it the day I left, when the not-needing was a decision and not yet a fact.
The decision had hardened. It had become structural, like a wall I’d built and then forgot I’d built because the room around it had filled with enough life to make the wall invisible.
Hazel, the paintings, the co-op, the apartment with its twelve-dollar dresser and its harbor view and its carpet of shells — all of it was the room.
He was on the other side of the wall. I didn’t think about the other side.
I had thought about him, in the beginning.
In the first months after Rockport, when Hazel was growing inside me and I was painting badly and the texts were piling up in the drawer, I’d thought about him constantly — not with longing, but with the compulsive attention of someone monitoring a threat.
Where was he? Was he looking? Would he find me?
The pregnancy insulated me; by the time Hazel was born, I was so deep in the new life that the old one felt like a documentary I’d watched about someone else.
He’d stopped texting after three months.
Andie reported this with the neutral satisfaction of a weather forecaster announcing the end of a storm system.
The calls to the co-op had stopped earlier — after the fourth time Andie hung up on him, he’d apparently learned that the woman who ran the cooperative was not going to be a channel of communication.
I didn’t know what he’d done after that.
I didn’t know if he’d hired lawyers or private investigators or grief counselors or if he’d simply gone back to his boards and his galas and his infinite options and filed the marriage under “the thing that happened when I was too young.” I didn’t ask.
I didn’t look him up. I painted, and I raised Hazel, and I let the distance do its work.
Two years. In two years I’d gone from a woman standing in a hallway with a Target frame and a blueberry-sized secret to a painter with a sold-out show and a waitlist and a toddler who knew eleven colors and could say “boat” in a way that made it sound like the most important word in the English language.
The distance between those two women was not measured in miles or months.
It was measured in paintings — the four bad harbor scenes on the drying rack in the first week, the seventh one that finally got the light right, the domestic interiors that a critic called “the architecture of absence,” the canvas on the wall of my apartment that I’d never sell because it was the first thing I’d made that felt like me.
I stood at the studio window on a Tuesday afternoon in October with Hazel on my hip and a brush in my hand and watched the light change over the harbor — gold to amber to the deep blue that meant the day was ending — and I thought about the hallway in the Back Bay and the word “infinite” and the man who’d said it, and I felt nothing.
Not anger. Not grief. Not satisfaction. Nothing.
The wound had closed. The scar was there — it would always be there, in the way I flinched when someone praised Hazel’s jawline, in the way I never introduced myself as Aldridge, in the specific care I took to ensure that no photograph of me or Hazel appeared anywhere connected to the name — but the wound itself had healed, and what was underneath it was a woman who painted and a child who said “boo” and a life that ran on its own power.
I didn’t need him. I didn’t want him. I didn’t think about him.
That was about to change.