Page 93 of None Of Your Business

“Since you’re staying,” I say before we cross a line we can’t uncross, “are you going to put those muscles to use and help me, or are you just going to sit there looking pretty?”

He barks a laugh, but steps back and rolls up his sleeves. “Tell me where you want me.”

Twenty-Seven

Hudson

I went out for takeout around five o’clock, right after she moved on to the second canvas. I ate mine standing at the workbench so I wouldn’t interrupt whatever was happening on the other side of the room, and left hers on the crate beside her. She ate three bites over the next hour without once looking away from the canvas.

I gave up trying to work two hours ago.

Rowan is distracting on any given day, but Rowan lost in her work is something else entirely.

I’ve seen a handful of her smaller pieces, the ones she keeps upright on easels. I assumed that was how she painted generally.

This is not that.

These two canvases are huge, laid flat on the floor. She works around them rather than in front of them, crouching, kneeling, at one point lying on the floor to reach the middle. It’s physical in a way I didn’t associate with painting until tonight.

She’s barely spoken all day. The only exception came when I asked about the smaller painting she kept looking at.

“It’s not mine,” she said. “My mother painted it after I was born.”

She didn’t explain further, but she didn’t need to.

Twice, I’ve watched her wipe at her face with the back of her wrist, leaving a streak of paint along her cheek before she lowers the brush and goes back to work.

Whatever that painting means to her, it hurts.

Her hands have been trembling for twenty minutes. I’ve watched her steady one with the other twice now, fingers closing around her wrist until the brush stops shaking. Her limp has worsened too, the left leg dragging more heavily each time she crosses the studio.

I asked her to stop once. Then again ten minutes later. Both times, she looked at me and said, “Not yet.”

So I keep water within reach, watch the tremor in her hands, and stay close.

If her body eventually makes the decision for her, I’d rather be ten feet away than ten miles.

I walk a slow loop around the canvases.

It’s two figures facing each other, submerged in deep greens and grays, both reaching upward with one arm toward the surface. Their other hands are locked together between them, fingers laced.

I can’t tell if they’re helping each other out or holding each other down.

One figure’s outline keeps splintering at the edges, fracturing into separate lines. The other figure is whole in outline but broken straight through the middle, joints bent at impossible angles, color pooling dark at the hip, the shoulder, the wrist.

If Rowan had spent the last hour sitting across from me, deliberately handing over every secret she has, I’m not sure I would understand as much as I do standing here.

A tear slips from her chin and lands in the wet paint.

She just drags her brush through the mark and works it into the green until I can’t tell where it landed.

It’s her and her mother.

I’ve been around Donna Callahan enough, professionally and otherwise, to recognize a fractured mind when I see it rendered in paint rather than in clinical notes.

This is Rowan’s therapy.

I’ve spent almost two years building a research study designed to get people talking about this kind of trauma, yet none of it has produced anything half as honest as what’s happening on this floor.