A Blue So Dark (9 page)

"And it seems to me," she says, pausing to take yet another sip of her Dr Pepper, "it seems that I remember another Ambrose-maybe at the art museum? Is there some talent that runs in the family?"

There's something absolutely menacing about the way she's smiling at me, something horrific, like she's got me in her clutches. Like she knows every single last awful detail about my crummy life. Is that what this whole thing is about? The apple doesn't fall far from the tree?

"Yeah, well, I don't have any inherited ability, all right?" I snap. "And I don't like it. Drawing, writing, whatever. I hate it. I don't want any part of it. Thank you for your time." These last few words should sound polite, but I say them with such hatred it's like I'm telling her Fuck off you fat cow. Cradling my notebooks, I stomp out of her office and down the hallway.

I'm so pissed off, I can't stomach the thought of going back upstairs and sitting next to Angela Frieson while she licks her chops and sharpens her dissecting knife in her mind. So I veer straight toward the back exit and push the bar on the door, which trips the alarm. I make a run for it before Mr. Groce can arrive, walkie-talkie in hand, and find that it's Aura Ambrose who's just broken free.

While some mad geniuses " enjoy great success, many do not. ,Inspired often, creative nut jobs don't have the focus of mind needed to complete projects. As prolific as van Gogh was, just imagine what he could have accomplished if he hadn 't been such a damned fruitcake.

he music is blaring again as I race up the driveway, which means Mom's probably interfering with the Pilkingtons' hangovers. Mrs. Pilkington will be on our porch any minute, banging on the door and slurring her threats. I throw the front door open, stomp down the hall. But as soon as I hit Mom's bedroom doorway, everything I was going to scream at her disappears, like water down a drain.

Mom's painting-I hate, hate, hate this expressionlike mad. She sounds like she's been jogging, her breath raspy against her throat as she pushes her brush against the paint blobbed on her palette. Mumbling to herself, she spits the occasional "Fix. It'llfix."

Canvases that've been painted on and abandonedsome of them halfway gessoed-over-are strewn everywhere, like a stack of paper that's been tossed into the air and allowed to flutter back down to the ground. They lie face-up, face-down, crooked. They've stained the bedspread, and their corners poke into the walls or dresser. Some look like they've been attacked by a tiger, with long thin slices running lengthwise.

The curtains are splotched with paint, too-even handprints, like someone's been held captive here. Like someone's desperately been trying to claw their way out.

Books-textbooks, art books, coffee table editions-lie open and decimated, their torn-out, wadded-up pages dotting the carpet. And at my feet, right there at the toe of my sneaker, is Mom's old portfolio, dusty and frayed. With the music squirming inside my chest, I squat, open the portfolio, and look inside, flipping through the pages of Mom's work-the drawings Mom sent to art schools back when she was applying to colleges. But that was before she ran away from Nell and moved in with Dad, the summer after she graduated from high school. Before she wound up settling for the college here in town.

Pieces, artwork is called. Pieces of artwork. But I can't think of the pictures in Mom's portfolio as pieces at all. Actually, I think the portfolio ought to be titled What It Was Like When Mom Was Whole. I mean, the person who did this, I think as I flip through the pages, the wild colors, the vibrant swirls, nothing shy, nothing tame, nothing backward about any of it-the woman who painted this isn't some dandelion seed. She's a lion. And lions don't get tossed about willy-nilly by the wind. She'll be back, I tell myself. You just wait. She'll open her eyes and yawn and growl. And then we'll drown ourselves in champagne to celebrate her return.

An electric guitar beats its way past my eardrums and works its way deeper into my brain. I realize Mom's got Pink Floyd on the turntable. "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" is turned up too loud for the speakers; notes buzz like killer bees.

I try to go back to the portfolio, which has always amazed me. To think, my own mother was responsible for these strange, fearless images that refuse to be caged by any -ism. These works aren't just abstract, or expressionist, or impressionist. They are somehow a blend of all, with odd angles, incongruous details-broad, fanciful strokes of color breaking up blurry, out-of-focus faces that peer out from windows or cafes or cars or moon craters, each setting so ornately detailed that it seems far more like a photograph than something created entirely by hand.

The more I leaf through it, the more her portfolio taunts me. These pictures are telling me Look, Aura, right now, you're okay, just like she was. But soon, you won't be. Soon, you will start to fall to pieces, see? Because even these piecesthis artwork-it doesn't make any sense. That's the schizo mind at work, Aura. Tiny little pieces, shards, fragments-that's all you'll be. Enjoy being whole while you can. It won't last forever.

"Goddamn it," Mom snaps, yanking the portfolio from my hands. Her eyes, wild, accuse me of horrible things. "Are you going to get your hammers and bolts?" she screams. "Are you trying to fix me? Are you? Who asked you?" She races to the dresser, grabs something off her vanity mirror, and shoves it in my face. The crystal I'd tried to drop in her housedress the other night. "I'm not broker, broking, broke, broke," she says, her mouth twisting as she fights for words.

"Mom-crystals, right?" I blubber. "Just like when I had mono."

Her face ages, like a film on fast-forward. Lines etch themselves beneath her eyes, around her mouth. Her cheeks sink, creating pools of shadow. "You think I'm sick?" she whispers. "I'm less?"

"No-that's not-I don't mean-"

Mom tilts her head toward the light, erasing the shadows in her cheeks. Youth pops across her face as quickly as a kernel of popcorn, replacing the hard shell she'd been the moment before. The vacant hollows of her eyes fill. The stranger steps aside to show me the real her, who still lives, so deep down. "You'll understand someday," she informs me, her voice as clear and unclouded as tap water. "When you're grown, you'll understand these things."

Her words zip through me like electricity. She knows exactly what she's saying. The room spins, my stomach churns, my skin burns. Oh, my God-it is true. We're just alike.

I shouldn't leave her. I'm not stupid. My brain knows I shouldn't. But my feet are moving, running, like the house is on fire. It's self-preservation that sends me racing. I grab the keys to the Tempo, got to escape, got to escape for a little while.

I tell myself that if I have the car, she'll be safer. It guarantees she won't be behind the wheel. Before I leave, I even turn the deadbolt on the front door and lock the sliding glass door in the kitchen. Maybe, I think, maybe, like a caged hamster behind the safety of wire walls, she won't be able to figure out how to get out.

And then I'm steering the Tempo, chewing on the inside of my bottom lip, praying I won't get pulled over for the headlight Mom knocked out in the whole mailbox fiasco. Yeah, okay, I shouldn't drive without a license, all right, but it's not like it's brain surgery. It's driving. I mean, take a look at the dopes who leave the DMV with licenses sometime. Besides, it's midmorning, and traffic is down to a murmur. Hands at ten and two, seat belt locked, I remind myself it's no different, really, than steering the riding mower. I avoid the main thoroughfares, taking the side streets to Zellers Photography.

"What the hell?" Nell shouts when she sees me. My heart practically shatters, because this is how I wish it could be at home-I want a mother who gets after me for showing up in the middle of a school day, obviously cutting class. I want a mother who puts her hands on her hips and frowns just like Nell, as she shouts, "You'd better get your butt back to school, kid. I'm not tolerating crap like this."

But I shake my head, tears coating my eyes the way rain hangs onto a car windshield in a downpour. A serving of normalcy isn't really what I've come for-not today. Details, that's what I want. My sneakers squeak as I hurry across the floor. "That picture," I say, pointing at the beach scene-Nell and her daughter in a crumpled heap on the sand. "Where was it taken?"

"Florida," Nell says, eyeing me like I've flipped my freaking lid. The red of shock and embarrassment starts to creep around the base of my throat.

"No, it wasn't," I argue. "I've been to Florida."

Nell chuckles as she falls into the chair behind her desk. "You ditched school to come debate me on Florida. At least you're not boring, I guess. Worst thing you can be in life, boring. Worse even than being selfish."

"What was he like?" I want to know. "Your husband."

Nell sighs. I get tense, because I figure I'm being completely transparent-and because Nell's the kind of person to call me on it. But she just says, "He was brilliant," as straightforward and matter-of-fact as if I'd asked her where she'd gone to college or what her dad had done for a living. "Was going to write the Great American Anti-Novel, or so he called it. Was going to invent a brand-new art form, one that would make guys like Burroughs and Vonnegut scratch their heads and stroke their chins in amazement." Her eyes go distant.

"But he didn't."

"No," Nell whispers, her eyes going all windshield-inthe-rain, too. "He never did. He tried, though."

"So what happened to him?" I ask, even though I know. I know it, without anyone ever having told me straight out. Dead was all anyone had ever said, as if that word answered questions instead of filling a mind up with a hundred new question marks.

`A lot of mentally ill people take their own lives," she says, then bites down on her bottom lip so that it won't wobble, so that her mouth becomes a sort of dam against the sobs that want to break out. My mom's got the same habit.

But I don't-my tears, once started, can never be held back. Streams are already rolling down both cheeks when I tell Nell, "Look, I probably won't be back to work again, all right? So don't think anything about it if I don't show up." My voice is thick and low, and full of more history, suddenly, than the wooden floor in Nell's studio. My voice carries every disappointment I've ever felt, and Mom's, too, and even those of a grandfather I've never met, because it's all becoming so clear to me. Generation after generation of madness hits my shoulders like rain made of concrete blocks. It's verifiable, like one of those damned geometry proofs-this disease comes to artists as surely as lung cancer comes to a person who's been smoking three packs a day for thirty years straight.

Because art is a drug. One that destroys the mind, breaks it, leaves it black and withered and useless. And here I've been surrounded by art my whole life. I've got to quit; I've got to get away from it; I've got to run before it swallows me, the way addiction has swallowed two generations of the Pilkingtons.

"Wait. Aura-what do you mean? Are you quitting? What for?" Nell tries. But I'm out the door, away from her photography, away from art, away, because I know that someday, if I'm not careful, I'll be standing in front of some white-coat, drugged into a stupor, my arms frozen like tree branches, a trail of slobber falling out between my lips.

"Forget it," I shout back at her, terror racing through my chest. "Forget it, forget it, forget it," even though what I mean is, forget me. And I turn away, stomp toward the Tempo, which I rev to life.

I hightail it away from Nell's studio. Slam the car into drive and gun it.