Symptoms of Forgiveness
by Philip J. Lees
Looking into Abby’s face was like looking into a mirror, May thought. Except that the mirror was also a portal in time, fetching shapes and colors from thirty-five years ago and painting them into today. The expression Abby wore reminded May of her own feelings the time her little girl caught meningitis and for a few days it was touch and go.
“I have to go now,” Abby echoed, her lips hardly moving, her forehead tight with worry, or maybe guilt.
“It’s okay,” May breathed. It didn’t seem odd that Abby was the one who needed comforting, because she always did. In that they were very different. All along, May had been strong enough for both of them. Abby had been a sickly child and the meningitis was just the worst in a series of medical crises that came and went, punctuating her life in the way that birthdays did for most kids. Each recovery earned a present for Abby and for May was a gift sufficient in itself—until the next time.
May smiled. Now she felt light, as if her wasted body was evaporating, spreading into nothingness in tendrils fine as gossamer. It was the drugs, of course.
The bed creaked as Abby pushed herself upright. The recoil of the mattress displaced May’s body enough for her to feel the tubes that fed into her wrists. Abby’s face—her face from all those years ago—was frowning now, as it turned from side to side, looking for something, a coat, a hat, no, a purse that Abby now picked up and slung over her shoulder. Even after a night sleeping in a chair Abby still looked chic. Despite the unbrushed hair and the smudged makeup she exuded an air of smartness; her manner declared she was this way by choice, not by accident, and if it wasn’t the height of fashion today then the “up all night” look would certainly be “in” tomorrow.
Abby stretched, pushing her chin up and her arms stiffly out to the sides as she arched her back. Ladylike. Discreet. She walked to the window and pulled one of the drapes aside.
“Getting light,” she said. She fussed at the edges of the hidden window, getting it wrong the first time before she found the string to pull that rolled both the drapes back from the center. It was as if she was finding excuses not to leave right away.
From her pillow May could see nothing but the pallid slate sky, feathery cirrus brushed with the first pink of dawn. A crescent moon lingered as a faint reminder of the night, soon to be chased away by the sun. It was still summer, May remembered. So why did it feel like fall?
“I’ll see you this evening,” Abby said. She was tugging at the sides of her jacket, straightening them so they hung level, not looking at May until the lapels were smoothed to her satisfaction.
“Have a nice day,” May whispered, smiling. It was an old shared joke from Abby’s childhood. A secret code they kept from the doctors and nurses, meaning “Hang in there. I’ll be back later. Trust me.” Except that now it should be Abby saying it, not her.
At least Abby recognized the remark and stopped fiddling with her clothes long enough for a quick smile.
“You too,” she said. Her cheeks blushed with more than makeup. May sighed.
“I just wish I could see the sunrise again,” she said. “Paint it one more time.”
Abby glanced towards the window, lips pursed. The sky had already lost its predawn shading, the moon faded almost to invisibility. The colors washing over the clouds were brighter, more vibrant. May felt even lighter now, so light that if Abby were to open the window she might just blow away on the breeze.
A nurse entered the room without knocking, acknowledging Abby with a tight smile and a nod of the head. She bore a tray and an air of brisk efficiency.
“Bye,” Abby said. She leaned to kiss May on the forehead, then she left.
“How are we today?” the nurse asked, as she put the tray down on the low table beside the bed. Her name was Clara, and she repeated the same ritual every morning she was on duty, as if May might suddenly get better; as if she wasn’t going to be stuck in this room until she died.
Clara checked the drips that supplied May with nutrients, that kept her discomfort to a bearable level. She took a syringe from the tray and injected its contents into a valve on one of the tubes. Then she helped May move herself into a more upright position, with minimum effort and the ease of long practice. Everything about Clara was round, from the curls in the blonde hair that struggled to escape from beneath her white cap, to her brown eyes and baby cheeks, to her buxom figure and her plump forearms and calves. A sketch of her would be curves within curves within curves.
“Breakfast,” Clara said brightly, sitting herself on the chair that Abby had recently vacated. Breakfast was three pills—one red, one white, one blue: liberty, equality, fraternity, May counted them off to herself in mock formality—washed down with a pale green liquid that smelled and tasted vaguely antiseptic. Clara supported May’s head as she swallowed the tablets down one by one.
May hated feeling so helpless. As she gulped the liquid she had a sudden vision of feeding pills to Abby during one of her long illnesses. Why could she remember things like that with such clarity, May wondered, while the time (weeks? months?) she had spent in here all seemed to blend into a featureless monotony, like a gray wash on a fresh canvas, the background to a nonexistent image?
The last tablet went down and May produced a small, spluttering cough that made her wince. Clara dabbed her lips and chin with a tissue and helped her settle back into the pillows.
“Better?” Clara asked, and May nodded. It was fully light outside now, the sun was well up and the sky had lost the blush of daybreak.
Another day, May thought. Well, that’s something. But she felt weak, so weak.
§
She’d never painted someone in a hospital bed. As usual the stray thoughts came and went as if they belonged to somebody else. Never painted anybody who was dying. May composed the image in her mind: herself as seen by someone standing at the door, or a little further away, the wall of the room removed to allow a clear view.
What a dull picture it would make, though. Bare cream walls, metal bed frame, white sheets, pale patient, gray hair, sandy canvas drapes. The afternoon was too bright and nurse Marge, Clara’s relief, had lowered the blind and slanted the slats against the sun, slicing the view—such as it was—into meaningless abstract slivers of brown ochre, cadmium green and cerulean blue.
She could have brightened the place up with a few of her own paintings, but for some reason that wasn’t allowed: hospital regulations. Posters, yes; photographs, yes; but original art, no. Unhygienic, they said. Nonsense! May thought. No reproductions, though. She was firm on that, the one compromise a snapshot of Abby smiling in a small frame on the bedside table. A self-portrait in miniature, printed in sepia with a trick that made it blur around the oval perimeter.
But photography wasn’t art, no matter what they said. It was mechanical, soulless; point and click. There were times she had thought Abby had chosen it as a career just to spite her. Contrived photos of anorexic models dressed in not much of anything, posing under spotlights, bodies twisted into grotesque parodies of the human form—where was the art in that? where the creativity? How could it compare with a Degas ballerina, a Monet lily pond, a Picasso nude?
It was an argument that had run for years, until Abby had become mature enough—or angry enough: afterwards May couldn’t be sure—to taunt her mother by claiming that her given name was really just a short form of ‘abstract’.
“You’d prefer it that way, wouldn’t you?” Abby had shouted. “I’m too real for you.”
The recollection left May exhausted, so she let her mind clear, felt herself floating, floating, free as a cloud, a diaphanous veil blown by the breeze
§
“Sorry,” Abby said. “Lost track of the time.”
She pecked May on the cheek, but didn’t meet her eyes. Unusually, Abby seemed flustered, unsure of herself. She wore a velvet band that kept most, but not all, of her auburn hair back off her face. May had been dozing and now dragged herself back to consciousness, looked at the clock on the table. Almost seven; Abby was late.
“Sorry,” Abby said again. “I’ve brought you something.”
She was bent double, rummaging through a large portfolio. She pulled out a large, stiff sheet of paper, about three feet by two, and held it by the corners. The side facing May was plain white.
“I hope you like it,” Abby said. She sounded edgy, petulant, as if she had been accused of something. She was sliding a slender, plastic clip along the top edge of the sheet, then she rotated it and did the same for the other long edge. All the time she kept the same side of the paper towards her.
“Close your eyes,” Abby said in that same curt tone. She crossed to the window and raised the blind. May did as she was told, listened to the rustling as Abby did something over by the far wall.
“You can look now.”
May opened her eyes and blinked. For a second she thought it was morning again and another window had opened in the room. Facing her was a sky of pale aquamarine, tufts of cirrus rose and turquoise; above them a bank of darker clouds barely touched by the sun, copper and pewter. A Turner sky, rich as oil.
“I took it this morning,” Abby said defiantly. “Wide angle, polarizing filter. I spent this afternoon doing prints and I like this one the best.”
May said nothing, bewitched by the image. It seemed to move as her eyes passed over it, to come alive as if the still hidden sun was poised to breach the horizon. She was aware of Abby standing to the side, hands clasped awkwardly in front of her. But the picture filled her vision, filled her with light, raised her from her failing, helpless body.
“It’s lovely,” May said, feeling the wetness on her cheeks. “Thank you.”
Then Abby opened the window and May blew away on the breeze, into the infinite sky.
- End -
© Copyright Philip J. Lees 2006