Entropy (32 page)

I turned another page of the catalogue and let out a gasp. In the painting was the small, white house where her body was found.

Page 27
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What made you revisit the tragic surroundings of her murder so soon after what happened? Was it an act of catharsis? Were you unable to deal with your grief and hoped that you could rid yourself of that emotionally violent purgatory?

I had wanted to touch upon the doors of that small white house in the months after our daughter had gone. I wasn't sure how many times I had walked along the deadened silence of that street, waiting for our daughter to come running out of the trees, shouting with excitement that she was fine, that she was just hiding, and wasn't really hurt.

At first, the police were unsure of the details of the accident. Following their investigation, it turned out that someone had placed her body there after the fact. I had never before feared for her safety because you were always with us. Our daughter adored you. When she was young and woke in the middle of the night, even if I went to her side, she would always want to hold your hand, as if I was feeble and ineffective. Although it was wrong of me to be jealous and to resent you for that, it was the way that I felt.

Despite all that had happened, your painting was so sterile. The wires and tress were all in their places. Nothing was even slightly disturbed. It was as if nothing had happened there, and that innocence and joy were still living in the freshly cut grass. But in reality, nothing that existed there that was happy. I couldn't find any resemblance to the peace that you had portrayed in the stillness of the almost colorless milieu.

Suddenly my thoughts were broken by the sound of raised voices on the bus. The disabled man was standing up, holding a gun over his head. A moment later, he pulled the trigger. As I tried to cover my head with my hands, the catalogue dropped from my lap onto the floor.

Why did God continue to punish me?

***

Ever since the hijacker let the driver off the bus, the passage of time was interminable. Despite the unbearable heat, the hijacker had not opened any of the windows. The glare from the lights of the emergency vehicles, along with the stagnant heat inside the bus, reddened my eyes. Each one itched, but I was terrified to close them, even though I was feeling exhausted from crying. I could just see the police standing behind a makeshift barricade in the fading light.

I wished that the police knew who we were, inside here. Someone on the outside might have called you, told you what had happened. But I doubted it. I wasn't sure if I would have wanted them to have called you. The risk that you wouldn't have come regardless of knowing I was in trouble, would have been too much for me to bear.

After they had discovered our daughter and we saw her lifeless body at the morgue, you started to spend increasing amounts of time away from our home. On the occasions when you did call because you needed something, I could sometimes hear her in the background. That broke me. You didn't even respect me enough to try to hide
that
woman from me anymore, nor did you care about how difficult it had been for me. We had lost
our
daughter. It was
our
daughter's fragile body that lay on the cold slab. You should have had the decency to have left me completely alone, or at very least to call me without her there, where I wouldn't be able to trace the scent of her traveling past your lips.

I leaned back against the window and wiped away some of the condensation. But then I quickly lowered my hand. I didn't want the hijacker to think that I was trying to signal someone. It was hard to make out what people were doing outside. There was so much movement, and all of it seemed scattered and haphazard: no shapes, no substance, a sad crisis of circumstance. There were fire trucks, two ambulances and other emergency responders. I thought I could make out a local news van. The man holding us here just sat towards the front of the bus, his head bent forward, tapping the tip of his gun on the floor. The sound scraped in my head, like grinding car brakes. He had been in that position for almost a half an hour.

Dropping my head, I saw the opened catalogue on the floor.

The edge was covered in blood. It came from one of the men sitting behind me, with his head buried in his hands. His hands were also covered in blood. The hijacker had struck him above the right eye on his temple. I felt bad because the man was just trying to convince the hijacker to let me go. A siren bellowed beyond the trees behind me. I looked down again and could still just make out the image on the opened page.

Page 28
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The colors on that page dripped our anguishing history across the floor of the bus, revealing when I first learnt the truth about who you really were, and the time I remembered feeling even more hopeless than right now. Seeing the image in the reflected glare of the lights from the emergency vehicles, I could recall the glare of the fire and the smell of the chemicals, and how their stench overwhelmed the normally sweet smelling evening air down on the bay.

Before the death of our daughter, we used to frequently go to stay at our boathouse in Maine. Yet despite the amount of time that we spent down on the coast, it wasn't often that I could get you to sit on the beach and ignore your work. However, there were occasional evenings when you would indulge me, and we would sit together, alone on the beach while we listened to the whimper of the dying waves pour out across the cooling sand. The footprints of children, who had been making castles during the day, had long been digested into the stomach of the sea.

At that time in the evening, the restaurants were all closed except for one place, Norah's, a quaint cafe where they rented out blankets and picnic baskets. On the occasions when you agreed to meet me down on the beach after your work, I would go the Norah's and order a bottle of wine and a late dinner that we could enjoy on the sand.

Sometimes we would stay on the beach all night and watch the sun rise. It was nothing extraordinary. The sun rose everywhere, but I loved how you would comment about how you would interpret the changing colors on the horizon, as if you were trying to capture the scene on canvas.

Waiting for you once, I stood at the top of a dune and took in the atmosphere of the beautiful twilight. A new hotel was being constructed about three miles in the distance. To my left was a handcrafted furniture warehouse, built in the 1940s, that still prospered. I shielded my eyes and turned to face the water. It was then that I understood why you painted so much, and why it was hard to get you to focus on little else when there was so much around to inspire you.

It made me sad that our daughter rarely joined us. You said that her presence would interfere with your work and being able to paint me freely when the need struck you. Looking back now I wonder if we had spent too much time away from our daughter, selfishly nurturing our own needs, and whether our daughter's loss was Fate's cruel punishment for our selfishness. However at the time, your mother was always happy to have Jenni stay with her.

A couple of months after Jenni's death, you said that you had a commission to paint a mural near the boathouse that would take several weeks to complete and that you would need to be away for a while. The idea of being out of the house appealed to me and I suggested that we should go together. You had seemed hesitant at first, claiming that I would cause you to lose focus on work. However, you finally, albeit begrudgingly agreed to let me come with you after I begged you to take me with you because the thought of being left alone terrified me.

It was a few weeks before that fire, and despite it being cold outside, we sat close together under a cobalt blue blanket and watched the stars turn on and stun the blackness. They punched through the night sky like a gifted featherweight boxer jabs at the body of a larger, slower opponent. Since coming to the boathouse, I had hardly seen you. You had been busy, even by your standards. If you weren't closed up in your studio, you were working away at the site for days at a time. We quickly finished our bottle of wine and we were tipsy. As we went back home, it reminded me of happier past days when we would walk home a little drunk, hand in hand along the thin sidewalks, wishing that the evening would never end.

Once home, we barely made it through the front door before I had to touch you. The light was still on in your studio. Tall racks held dozens of colors of paint and brushes, some were thick and hairy, others thin, like an underdeveloped moustache, or the hairs on your forearms. White tables housed discolored jars of water and newspaper. Half-empty tubes of paints rested on a smaller table, and a huge roll of butcher paper stood ominously in the corner. The faint smell of turpentine mixed with the wine made me feel slightly light headed. On top of one of the shelves was the pumpkin that you had painted for me when I first met you. You were more beautiful to me now than when we first met. There was no question.

I stopped you from turning off the light.

Still numb but certain, I let you embrace me tightly and lay me down onto one of the large tables. It was where you had started on the design of the large mural that was to be painted onto the wall of an elementary school. Local kids had sprayed graffiti on that wall, but instead of just whitewashing over it, you thought that if the wall was made to be more beautiful, that people wouldn't abuse it and make it ugly or unapproachable. The outline was drawn in pencil and parts of it were filled in. None of the paint on it had completely dried.

I pushed your jeans down to the ground and removed your underwear. There was paint on the inside of your ankles. It had been months since we had been like this, and I wanted your stench all over me, soaking into the pores of my hands and lips. I took your swelling into my mouth and cleansed you with my tongue. You fucked me there, my naked body absorbing the colors of your spectrum. I was a beautiful stencil. I grabbed your open hands tightly and told you that I wanted another child. All you did was lean in closer and kiss the side of my neck.

Then the fire happened.

The intensity of that fire burned so much that for days afterwards, I could lean against the balcony frame bordering our deck that was some 300 yards away and feel the heat of the smouldering ruins against my flesh. The air was suffocating if I took too deep a breath. I touched my fingertips to the charred wood on the balcony railing that had been scorched by the blaze. Pieces of it broke loose like artist's charcoal. It got deep into the lines on my hands and stained them. I must have washed my hands until they were blistered, but my body always felt dirty after that fire.

I had spent that afternoon alone at Norah's, waiting for you to come home from finishing that project at the school. The air was bitter because of a cold wind coming in from the ocean. However, even when I was alone, I adored coming here. The flames of the candles fixed inside tin lanterns on the counter stuttered in the early twilight. You had been gone since the previous day, working on that elementary school project about an hour and a half away.

When the explosion happened, it sounded like a loud collision. Looking out the window, I could see spouts of flame rising above the tree line where the furniture factory was. I extinguished the little candles at the restaurant and watched in horror with the other patrons.

When the local radio station announced the impending evacuation less than an hour later, all I wanted to do was find you, clutch desperately to the tendons in your forearm, and feel your lips through the woven masks the medical personnel were placing over everyone's mouths to protect their lungs from potential contaminants. The factory stored stains, paints and other materials which could be considered hazardous if inhaled in large quantities. The luminescence burned on the current of the water like a napalm sunset. I felt so alone at that moment. I could not lose you as well.

I walked down a side street with other people, past that bakery where you could smell the bagels every morning. Police had begun to block off entrances to the oceanfront and some of the streets. Some people remained calm, while others ran by, reaching for the fleeting hands of their children. My stomach knotted as I thought of Jenni. Another fire alarm sounded. I turned around and watched the factory burning, the thick, black smoke blanketing everything.

And then I saw you.

The anxiety of seeing you in the embrace of another woman as you were escorted out of a local apartment complex blighted the already decaying forest of my ego. I didn't fully understand what was happening at the time. A paramedic stopped and handed you one of those white masks. The woman clutched at the side of your arm above your elbow, her body supported by your embrace. People bumped into me as they hurried by, and a man knocked me over completely. Bruised and hurting, I raised myself up and leaned against the window of a closed store. At the end of the driveway, you grabbed her hand and started running away from the chaos, running away from our life.

Looking now at that image in the catalogue, I noticed that you even possessed the artistic and emotional audacity to personify her there, in the lower right-hand corner of the painting, giving her mystery by concealing her, cloaking her in privacy and excluding the intricacies of her countenance.

***

The hijacker's cellular phone rang out from inside his pocket. It must have rung at least ten times before he answered it. Considering our circumstances, I assumed that it was probably a hostage negotiator. In a way I felt sorry for him, sitting there wondering if there was someone reaching out to him, like I wanted to reach out to you. He studied the phone for a minute and then held the receiver up to his right ear. The caller only said a few words and I couldn't hear what the hijacker was saying in return.

I stole a quick glance in his direction and saw him place the gun across his lap. Any emotional sympathy that I felt at that moment was lost. The sight of the weapon brought back the interminable tension that made my skin pale and unattractive, and caused beads of perspiration to trickle down to the small of my back. It was difficult to tell what he was feeling because he remained nearly immobile, the muscles in his face never wavering or changing.