Chapter 18: North Facing Windows

The studio smelled like fresh paint and possibility.

Not the kind of paint I worked with. The walls kind. Someone had been in here recently and repainted everything white, a clean particular white that was not the tired yellowed white of my Bronx apartment walls but something alive and deliberate, the kind of white that understood its own purpose which was to get out of the way of whatever was going to happen in front of it.

I stood in the doorway on a Tuesday morning three days after Sunday and looked at the space and did not move for a full minute.

It was not enormous. It did not need to be. Long enough to pace in, wide enough to work in, with a wooden floor that had the pleasant imperfection of something that had existed long enough to have a history. And the windows.

The windows were everything.

North facing, as promised, the full length of the longest wall, and the light that came through them was the particular quality of light that artists spent their entire lives chasing and rarely found. Steady. Honest. Without the drama of direct sun or the flatness of no sun at all. The kind of light that showed you things as they actually were rather than as the angle of the hour wanted them to appear.

I walked to the windows and stood in that light and felt it on my face and closed my eyes.

Behind me I heard Damien set down the box he had carried up from the car.

“Well,” he said.

“Don’t say anything,” I said. “Give me a moment.”

He gave me the moment. He was good at that. Giving moments without filling them.

I opened my eyes and looked out at the park below, green and gold in the October morning, and the skyline beyond it and the particular endlessness of a city that had been indifferent to me for years and was now, from this window, breathtakingly beautiful.

“Okay,” I said. “You can say something.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” he said.

I turned around.

He was leaning against the wall beside the door with his arms folded and his eyes on my face and the expression he was wearing was the large quiet certain one that still had no name but that I had stopped trying to name because some things communicated more clearly without language.

“You’re going to be insufferable about this window aren’t you,” I said.

“I have no idea what you mean,” he said.

“You’re already doing the face.”

“I don’t have a face.”

“You absolutely have a face,” I said. “You are doing it right now. It is the face of a man who is very pleased with himself and is pretending not to be.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “I am simply observing that the light is good.”

“The light is extraordinary and you know it and you are going to remind me of it approximately forever.”

“Only on days ending in Y,” he said.

I laughed. A real one, unguarded and immediate, and he watched it happen with that expression and I turned back to the window before it did what it usually did to my ability to think clearly.

We spent the morning setting up.

Damien had sent someone ahead with shelving that was now along the eastern wall, clean and simple and exactly the right depth for canvases. There was a large worktable in the center of the room that had appeared from somewhere and was the right height and the right surface and I had not asked how he knew what the right height and surface were because I was learning that Damien paid attention to everything and used what he learned and asking him how he knew things only resulted in answers that were devastatingly specific and did considerable damage to my composure.

I unpacked my paints. My brushes. The particular chaos of my tools which had a logic that was entirely internal and that I had explained to no one and did not intend to explain because the explanation would not make sense to anyone who was not me.

Damien watched me arrange things without comment.

“You’re not going to ask why the cadmium yellow has to be next to the raw umber,” I said.

“I assumed you would tell me if it mattered,” he said.

“It matters,” I said.

“Then it goes next to the raw umber,” he said simply.

I looked at him over my shoulder.

“You are very easy to be around,” I said. “For someone so complicated.”

Something moved across his face. Quiet and warm. “You are the first person to say that to me.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“You would be surprised,” he said, “how few people are interested in being around the actual version of a person when the headline version is more convenient.”

I turned back to my paints.

“I’m interested in the actual version,” I said quietly.

“I know,” he said. “That is the thing about you Mia that I cannot get used to and do not want to.”

I kept my eyes on my brushes and breathed carefully and told my heart to behave with the full knowledge that my heart had stopped taking instructions from me approximately eleven days ago.

By noon the studio was arranged in the particular way that was mine. My chaos in my order with my logic that made no external sense and perfect internal sense and I stood in the middle of it in the north facing light and felt something I had not felt in longer than I wanted to admit.

Ready.

“I’m going to let you work,” Damien said from the doorway. He had his jacket on and his phone in his hand and the assembled daytime version of himself fully in place. “Noah has a thing at two. I’ll be back by six.”

“Go,” I said.

He looked at me in my studio in his building in his light.

“Lock the door when I leave,” he said.

“Damien.”

“Humor me,” he said.

“It’s your building.”

“Lock the door Mia.”

I sighed. “Fine.”

He almost smiled. “Thank you.”

He left.

I locked the door.

And then I stood in the middle of my studio in the north facing light and picked up a brush and looked at the blank canvas on the easel that Damien had set up without being asked and I stayed like that for a long moment.

Then I began.

I did not plan what came out.

That was the thing about painting that I had tried to explain to people who did not paint and had never fully managed. The planning was for other things. For the practical decisions about size and medium and surface. The actual painting, the real work, came from somewhere below planning. Somewhere that had been accumulating things quietly while the rest of you was busy managing your life, and that spoke most clearly when you got out of its way and let it.

I had a lot of accumulated things.

I painted for four hours without stopping.

I did not eat. I did not check my phone. I did not think about Marcus or Caleb or board meetings or threatening messages or headlines that reduced me to a list of absences. I thought about nothing except the thing happening between the brush and the canvas which was the closest thing to peace I had ever known.

When I finally stepped back my shoulders ached and my hands were covered in paint to the wrist and the light through the north facing windows had changed character from morning to afternoon and the canvas in front of me was something I had not expected.

I looked at it for a long time.

It was Damien.

Not a portrait. Not his face or his figure or anything that would have been recognizable to someone who did not know him. It was the feeling of him. Dark and warm and lit from within by something that the careful composed exterior did not advertise. The colors I had used were the colors of that first night. Rain grey and lamp gold and the particular deep blue of a wet Manhattan street after midnight and in the center of all of it something warm and amber that had no name but that I understood completely.

I was still looking at it when the door opened.

I had not heard him come back.

Damien stood in the doorway of my studio and looked at the canvas and went very still.

I watched him look at it the way he looked at everything that mattered to him. Completely. Without the performance of reaction. Just genuine absorption of a thing he was encountering for the first time and intended to understand fully.

The silence stretched.

“Mia,” he said finally. Quietly.

“I know,” I said.

“This is.” He stopped.

“I know,” I said again.

He crossed the room and stood beside me and we looked at it together in the afternoon light that was doing something complicated and beautiful with the colors and the silence between us was the fullest silence I had ever stood inside.

“Is this how you see me,” he said quietly.

I looked at the painting. At the warm amber thing at the center of all that careful darkness.

“It’s how you actually are,” I said. “Underneath everything.”

He was quiet for a long moment.

Then he turned and looked at me with an expression so completely undefended that I felt it move through me like the light through those windows. Honest and steady and showing everything as it actually was.

He reached out and touched my face with a paint free hand, gently, and I leaned into it and his thumb moved along my cheekbone and his eyes were on mine and the painting stood behind us in the north facing light like a truth that had been there all along waiting to be seen.

“Stay tonight,” he said softly.

“Noah,” I said.

“Noah has been asking since Sunday when you are coming back,” he said. “He has reserved you the seat next to the Brachiosaurus at dinner.”

Something happened in my chest that was becoming alarmingly familiar.

“That is a significant honor,” I said softly.

“He does not give it lightly,” Damien said.

I looked at him.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll stay.”

He exhaled slowly and bent his head and kissed me softly and I kissed him back with paint on my hands and the north facing light all around us and the painting standing witness behind us.

When he pulled back he looked at me with that warm certain expression.

“Come down when you’re ready,” he said. “Noah is attempting to teach Felix to sit up and is encountering significant resistance.”

I smiled.

He left.

I turned back to the painting.

I looked at it for a long moment.

Then I picked up my brush and added one small thing to the bottom right corner that had not been there before. Something I had not planned and did not question.

Two figures. Small and barely there. Standing close together in the rain on a dark street.

The beginning.

I stepped back and looked at the whole thing and felt the particular satisfaction of a piece of work that had told you the truth without being asked to.

Then I cleaned my brushes.

And went downstairs to help a four year old teach a rabbit to sit up.

And I was almost at the elevator when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

A number I did not recognize.

Again.

I stopped.

I looked at the message.

It was not a threat. It was not a photograph or a headline or a name I was not prepared for.

It was four words from a woman I had never spoken to, whose name I knew, whose face I had seen in a photograph on Rosa’s phone on a morning that felt like a different life.

Three words from Serena Voss.

Noah’s mother.

We need to talk.