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My father looked at me with a smile from his colored chair. “You sure you know? If there’s anything else you might like to do…”
“Like what?” I laughed.
“Astronaut, maybe?”
I sucked on the lollipop in my mouth. “Or candy sampler. That would work for me.”
“Diving instructor, you’d like that, right?”
“Yeah, I love diving. But I’ve decided. I want to paint. I’m studying art.”
My father took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with his shirt edge. I could see a glint of pride in his small vivacious eyes. “You know better than anyone that the world is a tough and complicated place. But you’re amazing, Leah, and your mother and I will support you in whatever you want to do. You know that, right?”
“I know.” I got up and gave him a big hug.
66
_________
Axel
Silence. total silence. so much silence that it seemed like a different house. I felt tired and I set aside the commission I was working on. And I don’t know why, I knew it was wrong, but still…still, I got up, opened the door to Leah’s room, and looked around for the notebook she’d been carrying under her arm those past few weeks. I wanted, needed, to see it.
I ignored the guilty feelings in my chest as I went through her drawers. But I didn’t find anything. Just a wrinkled piece of paper. I grabbed it and sat on the bed looking at the drawing of Leah I had made years before on the envelope for the concert tickets for her birthday. It was one of the few times I’d drawn something without anyone hiring me, without it being work. I looked at the round red cheeks, the enormous eyes, the braid that fell over the shoulder of the caricature, and the paintbrush she had in her hand while she smiled.
Perplexed, I put it back in the drawer.
August
* * *
(WINTER)
67
_________
Axel
Leah came back. and with her, the fleeting looks, the silence full of words already pronounced that seemed to weave a net around us, the tension, the prudent distance. Or that’s how it felt to me. Unsettled. Alert. Trying to understand what I was feeling, what was happening.…
The problem was that, though I might have spent half my life viewing her as a girl, almost as a little sister, I couldn’t ignore the fact that she wasn’t that anymore. That if I’d bumped into her on the street one day, I would have gawked at her or flirted with her without caring about the ten years that separated us. Because that wasn’t the real barrier. It was something else, something higher: how we knew each other, the life we’d shared up to then, the fact that wanting her made me feel guilty.
Because I couldn’t deny it. I wanted her. And I loved her. I always had loved her, since the day she was born. Leah could have asked me for anything and I would have done it with my eyes closed. It wasn’t something just physical, an impulse. It was more. I missed her when she wasn’t there and I wanted to know the girl she was now, not just the memory I had of her in the years past us. I struggled to separate my feelings: My desire to bite her lips versus the calm I felt on those nights we spent on the porch talking or listening to music. Leah’s naked silhouette and the curve of her hips versus the image of her as a little girl running through the yard, shouting my name in her high-pitched child’s voice…
When had all that changed? When was the exact second she stopped being invisible to me and invaded every nook and cranny of my mind?
“You all right?” She had sat down in the hammock.
No, I wasn’t all right. Not at all. I took a deep breath. “Yeah. I’ll be right back, I’m going to make a tea. You want one?”
She gave me an amused look and raised an eyebrow. “When are you going to stop asking me? It’s been almost half a year now.”
“I don’t know. Maybe when you finally say yes.”
“Fine. Make me one. Let’s get this over with.”
I went into the house smiling and shaking my head. I put the kettle on and waited for the water to start to boil. I came out calmer, more myself, and sat down in front of her on the ground. Leah wrinkled her nose when she noticed the distance between us. She took a sip of tea.
