“Yes, she helped me focus, to see all the colors.”
Mother nods and stares at the painting, as if deciphering how Kammi captured the glints of light on the water, how much is Kammi’s work and how much mine.
“It’s good. A study in contrast.”
For Mother, that is high praise. Kammi beams.
Mrs. Bindas pats me on the arm, as if she’s known all along I have an artist’s soul, and then she flits away to greet her friends.
I take that chance to snag a cold drink and some finger food. A chicken wrap, with some exotic sauce oozing out the wrapper bottom. An odd-looking green, but edible.
When they come into the room, Mrs. Bindas’s guests approach Mother with awe, standing close to her but not daring to make eye contact or say anything to her. Then they wander away to study Mother’s painting in depth or to size up the competition for gallery space.
Mother walks over to stand by me. For once, she doesn’t say anything about the amount of food I’ve taken from the buffet. She looks out at the crowd, smiling and nodding at people as they catch her eye. Her public face. “What’s Kammi talking about, you helping?”
“You didn’t think I could?” I answer Mother’s question with my own.
“I didn’t say that. I didn’t think you wanted to enough.”
“Enough to what?” That’s what I’ve always wondered.
“Enough to give art everything you had—and then more. To give up love.” Mother swirls a slice of lemon in her sparkling water. This time without alcohol.
“Is that what you did?”
“Yes. My mother had this notion that painting was only for children. Adult women had to give up certain things to be successful in other, more important areas of our lives. She said that the life of an artist was a selfish way to live.”
I look at Mother, puzzled. Her mother, my grandmother Betts, plied me with paints when I was very small. Mother was the one who discouraged me. Grandmother always said I could be anything I wanted.
“Your grandmother mellowed with age,” Mother says, as if reading the protest forming in my mind. “But to me, that’s what she said. Every day of my childhood, practically.”
“So why repeat that?” I ask. “When you didn’t believe it?”
“Because what my mother said and did made me tougher. I was tough enough to deal with not having enough money early on to pay my bills.”
Mother walks around Kammi’s painting again. “Not bad,” she says.
“That means great, right?” I ask.
Mother nods. “For a first-timer. Guess she had a tube of ultramarine?”
I feel myself blush, something I rarely do anymore.
“And what about Philippa?” I ask, my voice low.
Mother stands still next to me, almost as if she hasn’t heard me. As if she’s heard a memory whispering.
“Mayur told me there was a note,” I say. “From Pippa. To Dad.”
Mother stiffens. Maybe she’s going to lie to me. She sips from her glass and sighs. “Was that what happened on the hiking trip?” She turns to me. “I thought Mayur was up to no good.”
I nod. “Mayur said it was a love letter.”
Mother holds out her hand, as if steadying the easel holding Kammi’s painting.
“Yes” is all she says.
“That day ... the day Dad went out in the boat. Did you know about the letter?”
She shakes her head. The air goes out of me. “Not the letter.”
“Then why didn’t you go?” I wonder if she revises the trip over and over in her mind like I do. Whether, in the new version, she says yes.
“Your father and I had drifted apart. He’d come back to reconcile, he said. I wasn’t ready. At first, I didn’t know about Philippa. But your father told me she’d seen him in Italy. Looked him up. Been with him. Pippa. I should have seen it coming.” Mother seems far away from me.
She doesn’t ask me about the note, what it said, whether Mayur gave it to me. I remember the words about there being only a single color in the world—not blue, not yellow, not pink. Only the color of love. I don’t tell her that I held the note for a moment in my hand, that I lost it in the cave at Mount Christoffel. Maybe someday.
“Why’d she send the postcard?” I ask. The Bridge of Sighs, for lovers.
“I think it’s a kind of apology.” Mother’s voice is soft, softer than I ever hear it. I almost don’t breathe, because this is like a magic spell that will break if I talk too loudly, if I ask another question. If a cloud moves in front of the sun.
If it was an apology, did Mother accept it? Would I?
When the last guest leaves, Mother collapses her easel, keeping the canvas clipped to it to transport it back to Maine.