Page 6 of All That We Never Were

She looked at me with immense blue eyes and shook her head before putting her suitcase on the bed and opening the zipper to take out and arrange her things.

“Whatever you need, I’ll be on the porch.”

I left her alone and took a deep breath.

No, it wasn’t going to be easy. Within my chaos, I had a set routine. I got up before dawn, had a cup of coffee, and went surfing, or swimming if there weren’t any waves; then I made myself lunch and sat down at my desk to organize my work. I usually made some progress, doing a little of this and a little of that, never in an especially organized way unless I was on a tight deadline. Later, I had my second and last cup of coffee for the day, normally while I looked at the landscape through the window. I wasn’t a bad cook, but I rarely turned on the stove, more because I was lazy than anything else. In the afternoon, same story: more work, more surfing, more hours of silence sitting by myself on the porch, more peace. After teatime came my nightly cigarette, a little reading or music, then bed.

So that first day Leah showed up at my home, I decided to stick to my routine. I spent the afternoon working on one of my latest commissions, concentrating on putting together a linear image, adding details until I thought it was perfect.

When I put down my pen and got up, I realized she still hadn’t emerged from her room. The door was half-closed, just as I’d left it. I went over, knocked, and opened slowly.

Leah was lying in bed listening to music with her hair spread over the pillow. She looked away from the ceiling and took off her headphones as she sat up.

“Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

“What were you listening to?”

“The Beatles.”

There was a tense silence.

I would venture that everyone who knew the Joneses knew the Beatles was their favorite group. I remembered long nights at their house dancing to their songs and singing aloud. When I started accompanying Douglas Jones, Leah’s father, years later while he was painting in his studio off the backyard, I asked him why he always worked to music, and he replied that it was his inspiration, that nothing is born inside you, not even the basic idea––what you bring to it is the way you portray it. He explained that the notes marked the way for him, and the voices shouted every brushstroke. Back then, I used to imitate everything Douglas did, admiring his paintings and the easy way he smiled at all hours, and so I followed in his footsteps and tried to find my own inspiration, something that would get inside me, but I never did, and that’s probably why, halfway down the road, I wound up taking an unexpected detour and becoming an illustrator.

“You want to catch some waves?” I asked.

“Surf?” Leah was tense as she looked at me. “No.”

“Okay. I’ll be back soon.”

I was nervous as I crossed the few feet between my home and the ocean, looking at the orange bike leaned against the wooden railing of the porch. Oliver had left it there after taking it out of the car. It was just an object, but one that represented changes I still hadn’t absorbed.

I waited, waited, and waited until the perfect wave came. Then I arched my back, positioned my feet, and rose, coming down along the wall of the wave and, once I was really going, surfing away from the break and finally jumping down into the water.

When I got back, the door to the guest room was closed. I didn’t knock. I showered and went to the kitchen to make some dinner. I had gone––unusually––to the store the day before. I rarely bought much, but I had tried to bring some variety into the fridge. All I knew that Leah liked were strawberry lollipops; she always had one in her mouth when she was little, and she’d spend hours chewing on the plastic straw. That and the cheesecake my mother made, but that was no surprise, everyone knew it was the best in the world.

While I cut a selection of vegetables into strips, I realized I didn’t know Leah as well as I thought I did. Maybe I never really had. Not deep down. She was born when Oliver and I were ten, and no one expected another addition to the family. I still remember the first day I saw her: she had chubby pink cheeks, little fingers that grabbed on to anything in arm’s reach, and hair so blond it was almost transparent. Rose, Leah’s mom, spent a long time telling us how from now on we would have to take care of her and act right when we were around her. But Leah spent the day crying or sleeping, and we were more interested in hunting bugs on the beach or playing.

When we went off to college in Brisbane, she had just turned eight. When we returned after staying there awhile to work and go through our internships, Leah was almost fifteen, and even if we came back a lot, we had the feeling she had grown up all of a sudden, as if one night she had gone to sleep a girl and had woken up the next day a woman. She was tall and thin, with few curves, like a beanstalk. She had started to paint while I was away, following in her father’s footsteps, and one day, when I crossed the yard and stopped in front of the painting on the easel, I couldn’t help but wonder at the delicate lines, the dashes of almost quivering color. My hair stood on end. I knew it couldn’t be Douglas who had painted it, because there was something different about it, something…I couldn’t explain.

She walked out the back door of her home.

“Did you do this?” I pointed at the painting.

“Yeah.” She looked at me warily. “It sucks.”

“It’s perfect. It’s…so different.”

I turned my head to look at it from another angle, absorbing the details, the life throbbing in it, the confusion. She had painted the landscape there out front—the curved branches of the trees, the oval leaves, the thick trunks—but it wasn’t a real image; it was a distortion, as though she had grabbed all the elements and mixed them in the blender of her mind and then thrown them out all jumbled, with her own special interpretation.

Leah blushed and stood in front of the picture with crossed arms. Her sweet angel face frowned and she looked at me reproachfully.

“You’re kissing up to me.”

“I’m not either, damn it. Why would you think that?”

“Because my father asked me to paint them,” she said, pointing at the trees, “and I did this, and they don’t look anything like them. It started out right, but then…then…”

“Then you did your own thing.”

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