Wishful Thinking (21 page)

“Let’s take a break,” Rosanna said, interrupting her wayward thoughts yet again.

She straightened the painting and gestured for Hazel to follow her back inside the studio. Hazel’s arms were starting to ache from lugging the heavy canvases back and forth across the lawn, and she was relieved to rest for a moment.

Rosanna stood in the middle of the open room, which felt big and light now that there was hardly anything in it. She pointed at the far wall, empty but for a shelf in the corner.

“I was thinking we could put your photographs there,” she said. “How does that sound to you?”

Hazel swallowed. In all of the drama of the past few days, she’d forgotten about her photographs. She hadn’t chosen the ones she wanted to display, or done anything to arrange them in any interesting ways. In fact, she wasn’t even sure she knew where they were.

“Rosanna,” she said, her shoulders tight. “I don’t know if it’s still a good idea.”

But Rosanna just waved her off and leaned over the desk. She pulled open a drawer and removed a thick folder, spreading it open on top of the table.

“Have a look,” she said, crooking a finger over her shoulder and beckoning Hazel close.

Hazel glanced down and saw that Rosanna had chosen a few of her photos and matted them together on pieces of crisp, white foam. Set apart like that, Hazel hardly recognized them as her own. They looked almost professional. They looked good.

“Wow,” Hazel gasped. “I… I don’t know what to say.…”

“You left these in here the other day, and I knew you were having trouble deciding, so I chose a few that I liked best. Just tell me where you want them,” Rosanna said, turning back to the wall. “I’ve spent all day ordering you around. Now it’s your turn to show me.”

Rosanna walked to the wall with an armful of photographs, holding up a few at different angles. Hazel watched her, this woman who had taken her in, no questions asked, when she’d showed up at the studio less than two months before. This woman who had believed in her, for reasons Hazel still didn’t completely understand. This woman who was about to leave behind the home, and the people she loved, to fight an illness
she didn’t deserve, and hadn’t spent a moment feeling sorry for herself because of it.

The tears were running down Hazel’s cheeks before she knew to expect them. She sniffed and Rosanna turned, her eyes suddenly wide and concerned.

“Oh my God,” she said, dropping the photographs and rushing to Hazel’s side. “What’s the matter? Did I go too far? I should’ve asked first. I’m sorry. If you really don’t want to show them we don’t have to.”

Hazel shook her head and tried to speak, but the sobs were choking her now, trapped in the bottom of her throat. Rosanna led her to the armchair by the window and settled her inside of it, rubbing her back in small, comforting circles.

“I always do this,” Rosanna admonished herself, grabbing for a tissue from a box on the table. “I just get so excited when I see something I like. I want other people to see it, too. But it’s totally up to you, Hazel. I promise.”

Hazel smiled and dabbed her eyes with the tissue. “It’s not that,” she hiccupped. “Really. I’m happy you want to show them, I am.”

Rosanna looked at her skeptically. “You look thrilled,” she said, before smiling and hugging Hazel’s shoulder to her side.

“It’s just…,” Hazel began, taking a deep breath and dropping her hands helplessly to her lap. “I don’t want the summer to be over. That’s all.”

Rosanna nodded and squeezed Hazel’s arm. “I know,” she said.

“And I feel terrible complaining about it to you,” Hazel continued. “Because I have no idea how you’re handling all of this so well. I mean, you’re leaving tomorrow. You’re selling
the farm. You’re…” Hazel stopped herself and looked at the floor.

“I’m sick,” Rosanna said, perching on the arm of the chair. “You can say it. And you don’t have to feel bad about anything. Of course you’re sad about leaving. Look out there.” She pointed through the window at the open lawn, the jagged line of cliffs and the blue of ocean and sky beyond them. “Who wouldn’t have a hard time leaving this place?”

Hazel picked at a hangnail and stared at her fingers. “It’s not just that,” she whispered. “It’s… it’s what I’m going home to.”

Rosanna pulled back and looked down at Hazel, her green eyes warm, urging Hazel to go on. “My parents…,” Hazel started, and stopped. What could she say? It was too much, and too much to ask of Rosanna to understand.

“Your parents aren’t traveling in Europe,” Rosanna said simply.

Hazel wriggled out of Rosanna’s grasp and turned to look up at her. “You knew?” Hazel asked.

Rosanna nodded solemnly. “I had a feeling.” She shrugged. “I could tell there was something you were hiding from. A past you didn’t want to define you,” she said quietly. “I see it all the time.”

Rosanna stood and walked to the empty wall, crouching over Hazel’s photographs. “But what I
don’t
see all the time,” she continued, “is this.”

Rosanna held up a mounted Polaroid and gestured for Hazel to join her. Hazel squinted across the room, trying to recognize the image in the frame. It was a photo she’d taken of the garden, she could see that much. Late one evening, after
she and Jaime had been weeding. She’d been so upset about accidentally uprooting the strawberry plant that she’d gone back to take its picture.

“Look at this,” Rosanna said, bringing the photograph closer to Hazel and placing it in her lap. The edges were blurry but the center was green and focused, and the one upsidedown plant, its dirt-covered roots reaching toward the sky, stuck prominently out of the bottom corner of the frame. It looked like arms stretching for a hug, or a mouth open wide, raw and sore from screaming.

“You see things that most people don’t,” Rosanna went on, kneeling in front of Hazel. “Small things. Stories that aren’t usually told, stories that need you to tell them.”

Hazel looked closer at the photograph, trying to see it through Rosanna’s eyes.

“Do you remember what you said to me at my show?” Rosanna asked. “You were talking about my portrait of Adele. You said you saw a story there. But it wasn’t her story. And it wasn’t mine. It was yours.”

Hazel remembered the look she’d recognized in the woman’s eyes, and how the painting had made her feel.

“It’s the same story I see here, in this photograph,” Rosanna said, waving the Polaroid in her hand. “And the only reason you’re able to tell this story, is because of who you are. And where you’ve been.”

Hazel looked back at the plant in the picture. She hadn’t realized it before, but there
was
something there. Something more than just a pile of dirt. It was a story. Hazel’s story. And maybe it was worth telling.

“We all hit bumps on the road to where we’re going,”
Rosanna said. “But it doesn’t mean we’re on the wrong road.”

Hazel looked up at Rosanna. She reached her arms around her neck and hugged her close. She suddenly wanted nothing more than to tell Rosanna everything, if only so she wouldn’t have to worry about how much time she had left.

But maybe that was the point, Hazel thought, her eyes squeezed shut and her face buried in the warmth of Rosanna’s long hair. Rosanna had to travel her own road, just as Hazel had to travel hers.

Hazel leaned back and wiped the remaining tears from her eyes. “Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”

Rosanna smiled and nodded, before climbing carefully to her feet and starting toward the door. “How about I let you hang the rest of these?” she said. “Billy will have a fit if I don’t lie down before everybody gets here.”

Hazel stood and watched Rosanna go. “Rosanna?” she called, just before she’d closed the door.

Rosanna turned back. “Yes?”

“I just want you to know,” Hazel said, “I have this feeling.… I have a feeling your road is a lot longer than you think.”

Rosanna stood framed by the screen door, staring back at Hazel. Her eyes glistened and she looked like she wanted to say something, but instead she just nodded and raised her hand in a wave, before softly closing the door and making her way across the lawn.

Hazel took a deep breath and watched Rosanna disappear. She turned back to the empty wall, and looked at the mounted photographs in the folder. For the first time, she noticed a loose pile of pictures, and bent down to look through them. They
were the ones that hadn’t been mounted. All of her thwarted attempts at portraits, and the pretty panoramic shots she’d taken around the estate.

Rosanna hadn’t chosen any of these to frame.

Hazel looked again through the mounted photos on the floor. They were all of seemingly everyday things. Jaime’s shoelace, that morning they’d come back on the boat from the clinic. Luke’s fingers as they worked the fraying rope. The shark’s tooth in Jaime’s open palm. Small, as Rosanna had said, and focused.

She’d spent so much time trying to be like other people, she hadn’t noticed she had her own style, all along.

Hazel thought back to the last day she’d spent in San Francisco. The shot she’d snapped of the crooked books on the side of the road. Suddenly, she remembered Jasper. She saw his face as he admired her photograph. She remembered what he’d said about Miss Lew. They’d believed in her from the beginning. She just hadn’t believed in herself.

Hazel looked back at the discarded pile at her feet. The landscapes were beautiful, but they weren’t hers. They didn’t tell her story, not the way the others did. The others were less glamorous and more contained, but together, they were pieces of something. They were pieces of Hazel, of where she’d been, what she’d seen and who she’d become.

She thought of home, the pieces of the life she’d left behind. She thought of Roy, and the apartment he’d kept just so she’d have a place to come back to. He’d been trying so hard, and she hadn’t even given him a chance.

She thought again of Jasper. The way he was always popping up, inviting her places. The way he refused to give
up, even when she gave him nothing but reasons to do so.

She though of Miss Lew, who had done everything she could to make sure that Hazel wouldn’t miss an opportunity to follow her dream. Even before Hazel realized that she had a dream to follow.

They were all pieces of Hazel, pieces of her life. And maybe they were the right pieces, after all.

Hazel reached down for the picture of the strawberry plant and held it up in the center of the wall. She picked up a hammer from the table and nailed the foam board in. It wasn’t until she was hunched over the picture, centering it between the wooden panels, that she noticed the root in the corner.

While most of the scene was wild and chaotic, the scraggly weeds scattered and abandoned in the dirt, in the far corner one root had already found its way back into the earth. It still looked delicate and wounded, like parts of it would always stay broken. But there was no question in Hazel’s mind that there in the corner, all by itself, one stubborn root was quietly starting all over again.

H
azel was walking back around the main house when she spotted Jaime on the porch. She was balanced precariously with one foot on each arm of a patio chair, reaching up to the trellis with a long string of white lights. She hadn’t spotted Hazel and for a moment Hazel wondered if she should just keep going. The conversation with Rosanna had left her feeling solid and prepared, but she still wasn’t completely sure for what.

Just as she was ready to quietly step away, Jaime turned to bend down for a tangled pile of wires on the table. “Oh,” Jaime said, surprised. “You scared me.”

Hazel cleared her throat and moved out of the shade of the house. The sun felt like a warm bath on her skin, not stinging hot as it had been for the past few days.

“Sorry,” she said. “Want some help?” Hazel picked up another string of lights and passed them up to Jaime, who took them in her outstretched hand.

“Thanks,” Jaime said, studying the wires for a few
unnecessary seconds, before reaching back up toward the arched wooden structure.

Hazel fiddled with the lights in her hands. A thick silence hung between them.

“Jaime,” Hazel started, lowering herself into one of the chairs. It was made of ornate metal and dug at the tender undersides of her legs. She shifted forward, leaning into the fabric of her denim shorts, and steadied her hands on her bare knees. “I just wanted to say—”

“You were right,” Jaime interrupted, swinging the last loop of lights around the trellis and stepping down from the chair. She clapped her hands together, heaved a giant sigh, and stood with her hands on her lower back.

Sitting down, Hazel was staring directly at Jaime’s belly, which had finally started to show a bit, rounding the front of her minuscule frame.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Jaime continued. “You were right. I was wrong. End of story.”

Hazel looked up from the bump in Jaime’s belly to the shadow of her face. Her arms were folded beneath her chest and she was staring fixedly at the wooden planks on the porch. Her dark eyes were unblinking and her small mouth was pinched and severe.

Hazel smiled. Jaime was trying so hard that it almost hurt to look at her.

“Jaime,” Hazel said. “You don’t have to do this. I was—”

Jaime waved her hands in the air between them and slowly settled herself on the ground, sitting cross-legged. “Stop,” she said. “It’s done. I don’t know what I was thinking before. I can’t do it. You’re right, it wouldn’t be fair.”

Hazel shook her head, ready to interrupt, but she felt her
breath becoming shallow again. She knew it wasn’t right, what Jaime was proposing, but hearing her say the words out loud still made Hazel’s heart ache with possibility.

“I thought about it last night,” Jaime continued. “I thought about what you said. About how you never really knew where you came from or who you were. I can’t be responsible for somebody feeling that way. I thought I could go through with it. I thought I’d be okay. But I won’t. I can’t. I just can’t.”

Hazel swallowed the lump that reappeared in her throat. “What about the scholarship?” she managed to ask quietly.

Jaime shrugged. “I can apply again later. Just because I’m having a baby doesn’t mean that my life will be over.”