In Sight of Stars(58)

“Klee,” she says, nodding at the couch, so I sit. “Have I told you how much I like your name?” I don’t say anything because I’m not sure what to say. “Clay,” she says, then, “Clay,” again. “Simple and solid, and appealing.”

I shift uncomfortably. I don’t give much thought to my name. I mean, I do, but not that way. It’s a burden at times. And I was never a fan of Paul Klee.

“My mother liked him,” I say. “My father and I preferred the Impressionists and Postimpressionists, obviously. Manet, Gauguin, Van Gogh. But my mother, she likes the Bauhaus painters, and abstracts, too, Kandinsky, Klee, and more modern ones.”

“I can imagine why you wouldn’t love it, then, but it’s a great strong name they chose for you. Though I imagine the mispronunciation drives you crazy.”

“I guess,” I say. “I’m used to it.” I twist and look out the window. The rain has intensified. A spring storm, thunder and all.

“Believe me, I get it. It’s strange, you probably don’t know this yet—or maybe you do?—but my first name is Ail?n, circumflex over the second i.”

She’s right, I didn’t know her first name. Never even thought about it. In fact, her having a first name never really occurred to me. I just think of her as Dr. Alvarez.

“So, see? I do get it, which is why I felt so bad when I realized I’d been mispronouncing your name. Although, no one really calls me Ail?n anymore. Not for a long time. My close friends and family all call me Lynnie or Lynn, and my mother passed away two years ago … She was the only one who called me by my proper name.” Her voice turns sad, and I realize we have more in common than I knew. She lost a parent recently, too. Though I’m guessing from something more normal than mine. “Anyway, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, my name means ‘transparent’ or ‘clear,’ which makes me like it better than I might. It’s a Mapudungun name, a language isolate spoken in south-central Chile. Don’t ask me what any of that means.”

She winks at me and moves around the coffee table to sit in her chair. “My mother was Chilean,” she says, “but I’ve seen Gaelic derivations, too. My father, now he…” She laughs at some funny thing I’m not privy to. “He was from San Salvador.”

“Oh, wow,” I say, twisting back to look out the window again. A low rumble of thunder is followed by a quick succession of lightning flashes.

“Boring, more like it.” She laughs softly. “I guess my point is, I like names. I’m interested in them. I often wonder if and how they shape us. I’ve tried to do some research on what our names may have to do with who we are—who we become—if anything.” Another crack and rumble of thunder, this one louder and closer, and the rain opens up, stretching down in an almost deafening sheet.

“Anyway, I looked up your name, because I was curious. I mean, it sounds like Clay, but I was curious if I could find an exact reference. Besides Paul Klee in particular. I wondered if it had a distinct meaning.

“As you can imagine, you don’t find a lot of references for the version with your spelling, and most do, in fact, relate to the painter. There seems to be a Greek reference, too, to clover, or someone who lives near a field of clover. I like that a lot, because if you think of clover you might immediately think of good luck. But I wasn’t satisfied. That wasn’t the thing that I was looking for.

“So, I went with the English translation, Clay, which is how you pronounce it, after all. And, well, do you have any idea of the meaning?”

I try to focus over the din of the storm. I’m agitated; it conjures up Dunn’s house, and all I want to know at this point is how I get from here, to better, to home.

“Some kind of dirt or mineral or earth, I would think?” I ask halfheartedly.

“Aha, see? Right, you would think. And there is that version, short for Clayton, derived from Old English. But there’s another meaning altogether that I found in my search.”

She pulls out a folded piece of paper from her sweater pocket, and presses it onto her lap. “I couldn’t find the origin. But it’s the spelling with the k, and they say it means ‘He who is immortal.’” She pushes the piece of paper across the table to me. My eyes go to hers. “Not a bad choice, all things considered, right?” I nod, swallowing down the lump in my throat. “So, now that we’ve talked about all that other stuff, what happened with Sarah, what happened with your mom, perhaps it’s time we talk about your dad.”

So we do. With the rain and the thunder pounding in the background, and the paper with the word “immortal” squeezed in my hand.

We talk about him before, and we talk about after. And we talk about the afternoon I found him. And when we’re finished, Dr. Alvarez says, “That’s a lot to handle, a lot to take in, stuff that very few of us could process on our own. We should and will talk more about it. Talk about tools, ways you might handle it, and let go. Ways you can truly allow yourself to heal.

“But before all that,” she says, “I want to tell you that I’m sorry. I’m sorry for this tragic thing that happened to you. And I’m sorry for your pain. I can only imagine how awful it must have been.”

Her words sit there between us, kind and gentle and true. The rain has stopped. The room has grown quiet. My eyes shift to the wall, above Dr. Alvarez’s head, where Daubigney’s Garden hangs, constant.