The Long Way Home(27)

There was a lot that was obvious about Bean. The child was polite, quiet, clever. Observant.

What was not clear was whether Bean was a boy or a girl.

Marianna Morrow, finding she couldn’t worry her parents into noticing her, had taken another route. She’d produced, out of wedlock, a child. She’d named that child Bean. And in a coup de grace, had not told her family if Bean was a boy or a girl. Marianna had produced both a child and a biological weapon.

Clara had assumed Bean’s sex would become obvious after a while. Marianna would either tire of the charade, or Bean her/himself would give it away. Or it would be clear as Bean matured.

None of those things had happened. Bean remained androgynous and the Morrows remained in the dark.

They ate dinner in near silence, Marianna apparently regretting her invitation almost as soon as it was issued. After dinner, Bean took them upstairs to show them the color wheel Uncle Peter had taught Bean how to make.

“Are you interested in art?” Myrna asked, following the child up the stairs.

“Not really.”

The door to Bean’s bedroom opened and Myrna’s eyebrows rose. “Good thing,” she whispered to Clara.

Bean’s walls, instead of being covered with posters of the latest pop idol or sports star, were covered with paintings, tacked up. It looked, and felt, like a neolithic cave in downtown Toronto.

“Nice paintings,” Aunt Clara said. Myrna shot her a warning look.

“What?” Clara whispered. “I’m trying to be encouraging.”

“You really want to encourage that?” Myrna jabbed a thick finger at the walls.

“They’re crap,” said Bean, sitting on the bed and looking around. “But I like them.”

Clara tried to suppress a smile. It was pretty much how she’d felt about all her early works. She knew they were crap. But she liked them. Though no one else did.

She looked around at the bedroom walls again, this time with an open mind. Determined to find something good in what Bean had done.

She moved from painting to painting. To painting. To painting.

She stood back. She stood close. She tipped her head from side to side.

No matter how she looked at them, they were awful.

“That’s okay, you don’t have to like them,” said Bean. “I don’t care.”

It was also what the young Clara had said, when watching the all-too-familiar sight of people struggling to say something nice about her early works. People whose opinions she valued. Whose approval she longed for. I don’t care, she’d said.

But she did. And she suspected Bean did too.

“Do you have a favorite?” Aunt Clara asked, side-stepping her own feelings.

“That one.”

Bean pointed to the open door. Aunt Clara closed the door to reveal a painting there. It was, if such a thing was possible, more horrible than the rest. If the others were neolithic, this one was a large evolutionary step backward. Whoever painted this almost certainly had a tail, and knuckles that dragged on the ground. And through the paint.

If Peter had taught Bean the color wheel, he was a very, very bad teacher. This painting flaunted all the rules of art and most of the rules of common courtesy. It was a bad smell tacked to the wall.

“What do you like about it?” Myrna asked, her voice strained from keeping some strong emotion, or her dinner, inside.

“Those.”

From the bed, Bean waved a finger toward the painting. Clara realized that with the door closed Bean would see this painting last thing at night and first thing in the morning.

What was so special about it?

She looked over at Myrna and saw her friend examining it. And smiling. Just a grin at first, that grew.

“Do you see it?” Myrna asked.

Clara looked more closely. And then something clicked. Those funny red squiggles were smiles. The painting was filled with them. Lips.

It didn’t make the painting good. But it made it fun.

Clara looked back at Bean and saw a large smile on the earnest face.

“Clearly the artistic gene hasn’t been passed to Bean,” said Myrna as they sat in the cab back to the hotel.

“I’d give a lot of money for Peter to see what his lesson has produced,” Clara said, and heard Myrna grunt with laughter beside her.

* * *

“What did you two get up to today?” Reine-Marie asked Annie and Jean-Guy as they ate dinner on the terrace in their back garden.

“Dominique and I took the horses through the woods,” said Annie, helping herself to watermelon, mint, and feta salad.

“And you?” Armand asked Jean-Guy. “I know for sure you didn’t go horseback riding.”

“Horse?” said Beauvoir. “Horse? Dominique says they’re horses but we all know there’s at least one moose in there.”

Reine-Marie laughed. None of Dominique’s horses could be considered show-worthy. Abused and neglected and finally sent to the slaughterhouse, Dominique had saved them.

They had that look in their eyes, as though they knew. How close they’d come.

As Henri sometimes looked, in his quiet moments. As Rosa looked. The same expression she sometimes caught in Jean-Guy’s eyes.

And Armand’s.

They knew. That they’d almost died. But they also knew that they’d been saved.