Wish You Were Here(33)

Beatriz glances at me. “When did you know you wanted to sell art?”

“In college,” I admit. “Before that I thought I’d be an actual artist.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. My father was a conservator. He restored paintings and frescoes that needed fixing.”

“Like the Banksy?”

“I guess, although that wasn’t glued back together. Conservationists usually focus on really old art that’s literally crumbling to pieces. He’d bring me to his sites, when I was little, and let me paint over a tiny bit that wouldn’t mess anything up. I’m sure he didn’t tell his bosses. The best days of my life were the ones where I got to go to work with him, and he’d ask me things as if my answers really mattered: What do you think, Diana, should we use the violet or the indigo? Can you make out how many claws are on that hoof?”

I feel the same black shadow that always comes on the heels of a memory of my father: the acrid smoke of unfairness, the knowledge that the parent I wish was still here is gone.

“Does he still let you do it? Paint with him?”

“He died,” I say. “He’s been gone about four years now.”

She looks at me. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“I am, too.”

We walk a little further in silence. Then Beatriz says, “Why don’t you paint anymore?”

“I don’t have time,” I reply, although that’s not true.

I haven’t made time, because I haven’t wanted to.

I remember the exact day I put away my painting supplies, the shoebox with its arthritic tubes of acrylics and the palette with layer after layer of dried moments of inspiration, like rings on a tree. It was after the student exhibition at Williams, when my father said my painting reminded him of my mother’s work. But I somehow couldn’t bring myself to throw away the tools of the trade. When I moved to New York, the shoebox came with me, still unopened. I set it on the highest shelf of my closet, behind sweatshirts from college I no longer wore but couldn’t bear to donate to Goodwill, and the winter hiking boots I bought but never used, and a box of old tax records.

Beatriz is looking at me with sympathy. “Is it because you weren’t good at it?” she asks. “That you stopped painting?”

I laugh. “You could argue that any time someone intentionally leaves a mark behind, it’s art. Even if it’s not pretty.”

She tugs her sleeves down over her wrists. Even in this heat, she has chosen to hike in a sweatshirt, rather than show me the scars on her arms. “Not every time,” she murmurs.

I stop walking. “Beatriz …”

“Sometimes I can’t remember her. My mother.”

“I’m sure your father could—”

“I don’t want to remember her. But then I think …” Her voice trails off. “Then I think maybe I’m just easy to forget.”

I reach for her arm and push her sleeve up gently. We both stare at the ladder of scars, some silver with age, and some still an angry red. “Is that why you cut?” I ask quietly.

At first I think she is going to pull away, but then she starts speaking, fast and low. “The first time I did it, I guess. And then … ?I stopped for a while. At school, it was easier to distract myself. But then, right before I came back here …” She shakes her head, swallows. “How come the people who don’t even notice you exist are the ones you can’t stop thinking about?”

“My mother was never home when I was a kid. In fact, I used to think she looked for reasons to travel so she could get away from me.”

The words come out in a rush of air, a popped balloon of anger. I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud before to anyone. Not even Finn.

Beatriz stares at me as if all my features have rearranged. “Did she run off with a photographer from a Nat Geo ship?” she asks drily.

“No. She just decided that everything in the world—literally—was more important than I was. And now she has dementia and has no idea who I am.”

“That … ?sucks.”

I shrug. “It is what it is,” I tell her. “The point is, if someone abandons you, it may be less about you and more about them.”

I stop speaking as we come upon a wall that rises from the scorched earth. It’s made of volcanic rock and towers over us a good sixty feet, stretching further than my eye can see. It does not, I realize, enclose anything. “The inmates built it in the forties and fifties,” Beatriz says. “It wasn’t for any real purpose, except to create work for punishment. Tons of prisoners died while they were building it.”

“That’s grim,” I mutter.

There are two ways of looking at walls. Either they are built to keep people you fear out or they are built to keep people you love in.

Either way, you create a divide.

“They only got one ship full of cargo a year—the prisoners and the guards were all starving. To stay alive, they hunted down land tortoises to eat. There’s rumors that the place is full of ghosts, and you can hear them crying at night,” Beatriz says. “It’s creepy as fuck.”

I step closer, walking the length of the wall. Some of the stones are etched with symbols, letters, dates, patterns, hatch marks to count time.