Water from Stone - a Novel (8 page)

The single-story house in the photo is small, but neat. There is a ramp up to the front door, presumably to help the man who lost the use of his legs for his country. Standing in front of the house is a laughing young woman. Even in black and white, it is easy to see that Esther Burrows had been a beauty in her youth.

As she had, Sy flips through a few pages. As time passed, Esther smiled less and less and her beauty began to fade. Suddenly, there she is, a middle aged woman with a baby. The toll her pregnancy had taken on her body and spirit is obvious.

“Yes, sir, it was hard. I had to switch my schedule around to work nights while the baby slept so’s I could take care of her during the day. Earl, he tried, but he wasn’t very good at babying. More’n twenty years in the chair had drained him and he needed to take lots of naps. Elie, though, you’d take your eye off her for a second and the house might be burned down or she’d’ve disappeared. She did that, you know, disappeared a lot. I think it was a trial for her, too, having parents so much older than she was. We tried, but we couldn’t keep up. By sixth grade, she was takin’ off least once a month. She’d be gone a day or two, stay at a friend’s house, not bother to tell us where. Pretty soon, the police wouldn’t even come anymore, I’d filed so many missing person reports. One time, a lady from Social Services come by and Elie got scared. She behaved for a while after that. Eventually, though, her spirit was just too big for that little house. When Earl took real bad, Elie was about fifteen. I had to quit my job to take care of him. Elie couldn’t stand the ‘smell of sickness,’ is what she called it, and took off for good. Haven’t seen her since.”

“Have you heard from her since then?”

Esther retrieves a cookie tin from on top of the small television, removes the lid and hands the tin to Sy. It is full of postcards. Sy glances through them. From their postmarks, he can tell that they’d arrived every few months for years. “How long has she been gone?”

“A little over eight years.”

“And she’s been writing all that time?” Sy glances up.

“She was real good about it at the beginning. Sent me one every now and then to let me know she was doin’ OK. After Earl died, I moved down here to be near my sister. The couple that bought the house’ve been sending me her postcards over the years. But the last one I got was about two years ago.”

Sy sifts through them until he finds the latest postmark. He flips it over. The Statue of Liberty stares back at him.

Ten

Mar.

“You’re going to have to paint her awake sometime, you know.”

Jumping at the sound of Diane’s voice, the paintbrush flies from Mar’s hand. “Jesus! Don’t do that.”

“I made enough noise to start a stampede,” Diane says. She shakes her head and her shoulder-length gray hair brushes the collar of her denim shirt. Denim shirt over blue jeans, Diane’s standard outfit, broken up today by a bright, multi-colored scarf around her neck. She moves into the studio and stands in front of Mar’s canvas, tilting her head first one way and then the other, her eyes narrowing as she scrutinizes the painting. Mar picks up the brush, wipes the smudge of paint off the floorboard with her fingers and wipes her fingers on her jeans. There is nothing she can say to discourage Diane’s inevitable critique, so she doesn’t try.

“You really need to paint her with her eyes open,” Diane finally says. Still staring at the painting, she holds a craft store bag out to Mar. “I brought you paint.”

Mar takes the bag, glances inside, sees the twenty or so tubes of various shades of blue, and drops it onto the table next to the easel.

“You could say thank you,” Diane says.

“Dee…”

Diane turns to Mar, her hands fisted on her hips, and though she is half a foot shorter than she is, Mar feels cowed. “Look,” Diane says, “it’s time.” She gestures to the canvas. “This is the, what? The twentieth time you’ve painted Lizzie? Asleep?”

Turning away, Mar drops the brush into a jar of water and sloshes it around.

“Her eyes are blue. There’s no getting around that. I saw what you did, tried to paint her eyes brown and even purple. That’s not Lizzie. If you’re going to paint her, awake, you’ve got to use blue.”

“It’s...”

Diane waves Mar’s comment aside. “Aw, hell, I know what it is. I’m the choir and all that. Look, I think I know how to ease you back into using blue.”

***

Mar had been living in Boulder for almost a month before she met her first neighbor. “I waved to an old man today,” she told her father during one of their nightly phone calls. “The one in the yellow house with the green shutters? He even waved back.”

“Come home, Mar,” her father said. “You’ve got friends here. And family.”

She turned from the window and surveyed the large, open room she’d had carved out of several smaller rooms on the first floor of the house. “I’m OK.”

“We need you here.”

Mar tucked the phone between her shoulder and ear and reached for the razor blade she’d been using to open boxes. “The paintings got here,” she said.

Pulling out the forty-eight by forty-eight inch canvas, she peeled the protective paper from its face. This one was a close-up of an anemone, a
condylactis gigantea
, the Giant Caribbean Sea Anemone, rendered in acrylic paint. Clinging to a vivid orange coral, the anemone’s off-white, purple-tipped tentacles wave in turquoise water. A solitary, googley-eyed red-and-white striped cleaner shrimp peers out from among the tentacles.

Mar closed her eyes. The sea-scape faded. In its place, she saw Joaquin perched on the side of the small, white boat they’d rented during their dive vacation in the Bahamas. His deep green eyes held hers through the glass of his dive mask. She grinned and lowered her mask over her eyes, settled it into place. The boat rocked gently. Mar looked past Joaquin. Turquoise water stretched to the horizon, flat as a mirror, chips of sunlight dancing off its surface. The sky overhead was cloudless. Terns glided on thermal updrafts. Mar closed her eyes and inhaled, filling her lungs, felt the heat of the sun. When she opened her eyes, Joaquin was adjusting the regulator in his mouth. He blew out and then sucked in a deep breath, his eyes crinkling in a grin. Mar lifted her regulator to her mouth, blew, inhaled.  Joaquin reached out a hand. His fingernails glowed white against the deep tan of his skin. Sun-golden hair peeked out from the wrist of his wetsuit. Mar looked into his eyes, settled her hand in his, bit down on her regulator. With their free hands, they pressed their masks against their foreheads, nodded at one another and, as one, flipped backwards off the side of the boat.

“Anyway.” She leaned the painting against the wall and cleared her throat. “I met a neighbor. Diane. She used to be an art teacher at the university.” 

“Mar?”

“Daddy? I’ll call you back,” she said. She hung up the phone and let gravity release her to the floor. Curled around her clenched hand, she cried.

***

“This is going to sound silly, but I want you to think about it, OK?” Taking a deep breath, Diane exhales in a bang-lifting huff. “OK, look, ever since you got here, you’ve been figuring out how to do cowboy art. That’s all well and good, but it’s not you. Mar, people want your reef paintings. I’ve got an email list downstairs of people who want me to tell them as soon as you get back to your sea-scapes.”

Mar dries the brush on a rag and drops it bristles-up into one of her brush jars. This is not what she wants to hear. Just the thought of the ocean fills her with anxiety. She crosses the studio to check on Lizzie, who is asleep in the play-yard Mar set up for her.

“What if you still painted these western landscapes,” Diane gestures at an unfinished painting on the smaller of Mar’s two easels, “but you filled them with reef life?”

Mar, who had been reaching in to run her fingers over Lizzie’s cheek, turns to Diane. “You’re kidding, right?”

Diane shakes her head. “I’m dead serious. Think about it, a crab crawling up a butte, or a herd of seahorses racing through a canyon…”

Diane, who has been managing Mar’s small gallery for the past several years, is not a crazy person. At least, that is what Mar tells herself as she waits for the older woman to smile, to do anything to indicate that she’s not serious. “A crab,” Mar allows the sentence to dangle.

Diane nods. “Crawling up a butte.”

“Seriously?”

“Well, what the hell are you going to do?” Diane taps the canvas. “Paint a couple of horses? Maybe stick an Indian over here? Dammit, Mar, it’s been done. And, I hate to say it, but by a lot of better cowboy artists than you.”

Mar’s face warms in embarrassment, though Diane is not saying anything she herself has not thought. She feels nothing when she sketches a horse, or a buffalo, or, god forbid, another teepee. She has vague memories of the excitement she used to feel, the energy, when she painted ocean scenes. When she’d turn up the music so loud that the air would vibrate with Dave Matthews or the percussive thumps of Maná. When Joaquin was alive.

She looks at the uninspiring, dust-colored landscape Diane indicated. She’s lucky to clear a few hundred dollars on her western art and, because of that, two years before she’d had to open her gallery up to other artists when it became apparent that her own paintings wouldn’t pay the bills. “It’s crazy.” She shakes her head.

“This whole state used to be under the ocean. It’s not so crazy as all that. Paint a school of tuna swimming through a dry wash.”

Against her better judgment, Mar pictures this. The fingers of her right hand begin to tap against her thigh. She closes her eyes, willing the temptation to disappear.

A small sigh sounds from the play-yard, a sign that Lizzie is beginning to wake up. Diane crosses to Mar’s side. Mar bends forward, unaware that she is holding her breath. The baby’s eyelashes flicker, once, twice, and then open. Cornflower blue eyes find Mar’s, and Lizzie smiles and reaches for her. Mar exhales and grins back. “Hi, baby,” she says and reaches for her, but Diane waves Mar away.

“I’ll get her,” Diane says. “You go paint some fish.”

Eleven

Jack.

Jack steps off the curb, head bowed, hands clenched in the pockets of his jeans. Months ago, unable to sleep as the shock slowly settled to the dull, throbbing ache now centered deep in his chest, he’d taken to walking. The city, which had once thrilled and emboldened him, now leans in on him, threatens to smother him, to crush him beneath the weight of its indifference.

On these almost nightly excursions, Jack makes it a point to avoid the places he’d been with Lindsey. He’s learned the hard way that memories, rushing at him from the darkness, catching him unaware, have the ability to suck the air from his chest and leave him gasping for breath. Where some might take comfort in memories, in routine, for him they serve more as a reminder of what could have been, what should have been, what can never be again.

He’s also learned to avoid parks, schoolyards, any place children might gather. Seeing a young mother once, her long, blonde hair swinging softly as she reached in and lifted her child from its stroller, had almost done him in. He’d reached for them. Filled with a greedy need, he’d stumbled forward and reached for them. The woman, catching sight of him, pushed the baby back into the stroller and hurried away. “Don’t let her out of your sight,” Jack yelled at her retreating back. “It’s not safe! She’ll never be safe!”

Jack has even gone down to Florida. Not that he doubted Sy had mined every bit of information from Esther Burrows, but he’d had to see for himself, had had to look her in the eye and believe for himself that she wasn’t hiding anything that could help him find Mia.

***

“I’m telling you, I don’t know where Elie is,” Esther said, her ultra-whites clacking away, snapping each word off like it was spring loaded. “Besides, I already promised your friend, that detective? I already promised him I’d let him know when I hear from her.”

Jack leaned forward on the sofa, sought out her eyes. He wanted her to see him, to see the hurt and bewilderment in his own eyes, to feel the pain that washed off of him in waves. “Mrs. Burrows,” he said, “I know you’ve already talked to Sy, and I appreciate it. I’m just hoping there might be something, anything, no matter how small, that you may have remembered since he was here.”

Esther sat primly on the edge of her chair, her perfectly-ironed housedress buttoned to the top, red Keds cutting into her swollen feet. The look she gave him was not friendly. “I’m beginning to think you think my Elie might have something to do with taking your baby.”

“I don’t. Believe me. This has nothing to do with hurting your daughter. It has everything to do with finding mine.”

“She’s not that kind of girl. She’s a good person.”

“Mrs. Burrows, look, I understand that. I don’t doubt that, but if she knows anything, can point me in the right direction, I need to talk to her.”

“She wouldn’t take your baby.”

Jack sighed. He’d done nothing more than spook the woman. “Look,” he said, trying another tack. “Did Sy tell you about the reward? There’s a big reward for whoever can help me find my daughter. No questions asked. Here, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.” Jack opened his wallet and pulled out a check. “I brought you a check for five thousand dollars.”

“What the heck for? I didn’t do anything, and I don’t take charity.”

“It’s not charity. I’m giving it to you for expenses, in case you need to make phone calls, whatever, to try to find your daughter.”

“Who am I gonna call?” she asked. “I told you, I don’t know where she is.”

Jack signed the check and held it out to her. “In case you think of someone, then. I want it to be there in case you need it, in case you have to go somewhere to find her, or in case Elie contacts you and she needs it. And, if you find her? If she can help? There’s another fifty thousand dollars waiting for you for putting me in touch with her.”

***

As part of his policy of avoidance, Jack disregards friends and family, has abandoned the Legal Aid office where he’d once so freely given his time, and has even shut himself off from The Farm, the outreach program where he’d first met his Little Brother, DeJon. He can’t stand the questions and, even after everyone learned not to ask, he sees the desire to know in their eyes. Having nothing to give them leaves him emptier than before.

In the first months of walking, rage had fueled Jack’s momentum. Rage at the taxi driver, at the doctors, the hospital, the candy striper. He’d funneled that anger into blame, into litigation, but when the taxi company and the hospital had fallen all over themselves to settle, he’d been left hollow. He’d craved the fight, the righteous anger of it, the focus. He hadn’t needed the money. Lindsey’s trust had left him with more money than he could spend in a lifetime. He’d thrown that money at the search for Mia and had opened up a trust account for her, using his own salary to keep up the apartment, to pay the bills. When his parents urged him to return to Ohio, he’d patiently explained that he needed to wait for Mia to come home. To himself, he’d admitted that more so, he needed to hang onto the belief that one day she would.

“That’s quite a reward,” the anchor said the first time he appeared on
The Today Show
.

“She’s out there,” Jack said. “Somewhere, someone knows what happened to her, who took her. I just want her home.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Sy had yelled at him later. “You’re going to have every nut job in the world calling in now.”