The Singing Trees by Boo Walker
Chapter 15
A STRAITJACKET
How do you leave someone who might need you now more than ever? And how do you leave someone that you love so much that it hurts? Those were the questions that plagued Annalisa in the days following Emma’s suicide attempt. Nino was the one who ended up giving Annalisa a ride back to Payton Mills that day. She was so shaken up that she barely spoke to him or to Nonna before rushing to her bedroom and climbing under the covers.
For days she cried, feeling like any progress she’d made in the two years since losing her parents was lost. It was as if all the pain she’d felt watching her father scream at her mother and all the sadness she’d felt at her parents’ funeral had been dug up and dangled in her face. To think that all she’d done was love someone, and that she’d even tried to help a girl who was going through similar circumstances.
As she went yet another day without eating, without painting, her love for Thomas scraped her hollow insides. Nonna was so kind to her, bringing her food, letting her skip school, knowing she was in tremendous pain.
Other than going to the bathroom, the only time she left her room was to watch the coverage of the Kent State shootings, which seemed to prove how devastatingly awful life could be. Nixon was still breaking his promises, sending more men to die, now even pushing into Cambodia. Kids Annalisa’s age had tried to stand up for what they believed in, which was a right of every American—or at least so they thought. The National Guard had shot them down in cold blood, just like the FBI had shot the Black Panther Fred Hampton.
Why should Annalisa ever get out of bed?
Annalisa had spoken by phone with Thomas a few times. Emma was okay now, safely back at home. Thomas wanted to come see her, but Annalisa told him she wasn’t ready yet. She knew he needed her, but she couldn’t be there for him.
At night, she could still see Mr. Barnes’s eyes glaring at her, his tongue spitting angry words, thrashing her. When she’d finally told Nonna what had happened, her grandmother rolled out a long string of Italian curses, praying that God would deliver vengeance.
After a week of missed school, Nonna gave her a stern talking to, telling her that she had to get back to her life. “All you’ve talked about is graduating, and here you are, weeks away, and you’re hiding. You can’t keep lying in bed all day.”
“Why not, Nonna? What’s the point?” When she said that, she remembered Emma saying the same thing. Oh God, was she on the same path, one of hopelessness and despair? She thought about the poisonous bite of love. Who could blame Emma for shutting down and choosing the easy way out?
When she asked Nonna that question, she responded, “The point is that God will help lift you up, but you have to take the first step.”
Annalisa pulled the covers up higher. “And what would that be?”
“You have to get out of bed.” As if it were that easy.
It took a few hours for Nonna’s advice to settle in, but Annalisa knew she was right. She’d spent so many days staring at her work space, the paints and brushes, wondering what it would feel like to get a brush into her hands, wondering if painting could be the salvation she needed.
Annalisa finally climbed out of bed and knelt. With steepled hands, she said a long prayer, asking God for direction. Nonna was right; she couldn’t keep lying in bed. As she pressed up, she turned back to her easel. She had no idea what she would paint, but she knew she had to do something. It was the only way. Though she’d been painting outside all of April, she wasn’t ready to be sprayed down by sunshine—or hear the song of her and her mother’s wind chimes.
With what felt like great courage, she sat and faced the blank paper clipped to the easel. She stared inside, wishing she could jump into it, wishing she could start over. Finally finding the urge, she chose a forest green and a jet-black and squeezed them onto her palette. Taking her large flat brush, she dipped the bristles into her colors, working them into a deep dark green that felt like greed.
Satisfied with her color, she gathered a generous portion and took it to the canvas. She had no idea what she would paint, but that was okay. Like getting out of bed, she had to take the step of putting paint on paper. Not having done a color wash, she put a long stroke of this dark green across the white. She wished that had been a moment of awakening, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like a waste of paint, a mindless swipe at the enemy.
She painted another stroke and then another, feeling like a ship with plenty of wind in her sails but no compass on the deck. A pang of sadness hit her so hard that she swung her brush at it, spraying dark paint across the paper and rug. Her throat tightened as if she were being strangled, and she swung the brush again and again, a mad Jackson Pollock splattering her entire room.
A primal urge came over her, and she screamed like a wild animal, letting everything bottled up inside rush out of her, both through her mouth and off her brush. This wasn’t art, though, and she wasn’t making some kind of breakthrough. She wasn’t finding her voice with abstraction. What she was doing was losing her mind.
She threw the brush, and it spun like a knife across the room, splattering the covers of the bed and ceiling. With bright-red rage burning her skin, she reached for the easel and flung it to the ground. Then she swatted at the items on her desk, sending her palette with that putrid green and the other paints and the jars of brushes to the ground, all one big crash that signified exactly how she felt inside.
Nonna burst into the room. “What in God’s name?”
Annalisa looked at her like she’d just broken out of a straitjacket. Annalisa had no reply, but she knew she’d found her answer. Without any shadow of a doubt, art and love could not coexist.
“You’re breaking up with me?” Thomas asked, caught off guard. They were walking along the sidewalk in her neighborhood the next day. He’d tried to hold her hand, but she’d sheathed hers in the pocket of her red gauchos.
Having escaped mud season, they’d welcomed spring. The grass of each tiny lawn had sprung up in brilliant green. Gardens showed sprouts of life. Though her heart was ripped out, a part of Annalisa Mancuso was right there with them, a flower finally coming to bloom, perhaps a flower growing out of ashes.
“Yes,” she replied, looking at him like he was a casualty of war. Not the war of Vietnam, no. He was a casualty of the war of love, as so many young couples were. And he was a casualty of the war of art, because she’d been forced to make a decision. Whenever she doubted herself, she thought of Sharon Maxwell. Sharon was in her position today because of an unwavering devotion to her craft.
There was that word: devotion. Thomas was no doubt devoted to her, and in almost all ways, Annalisa to him. In fact, she was so devoted to him that she was setting him free because of it, saving his life from getting worse. A few weeks or months later, he’d move on and be glad they’d parted.
Seeing him hurt, though, was agony defined. What did he think Annalisa was going to say when she’d finally called? Oh, what have I been up to? Just painting and studying, and . . . you know, hanging out . . . the thing with Emma and then your dad screaming at me? No biggie. You and your dad slugging each other? Hadn’t thought another second about it. Everything’s great. You about ready to leave for Portland?
It had been two weeks since Emma’s suicide attempt, and she was as sure as ever that she loved Thomas—and Emma—enough to put them first. Ending her relationship with Thomas was excruciating, but it was the right choice, the best move for all three of them. She kept telling herself that if you love someone, you must set them free.
From a selfish point of view, Annalisa hadn’t painted one single stroke since having her breakdown. So not only was she getting in the way of Thomas’s family, but her love for him had stifled her art.
But! And there was a but . . .
As she’d come to the decision to leave him, she could feel the need building back up inside like a volcano rumbling. The paper clipped to her easel with dark-green smears was no longer taunting her. It was pulling her in. She was ready. The only thing stopping her now was ending this relationship and moving on. This breakup hurt, more than she was letting on, but she also felt a sense of pride rising up. She was making the hard choice, but the right one. The Sharon Maxwell choice—the choice Annalisa’s mother should have made. No more being vulnerable, setting herself up for further pain.
She had a job to do, a commitment: to herself and to her destiny. She was to go, brush in hand, to Portland and realize her calling. She was to do whatever it took to get onto the walls of Sharon Maxwell’s warehouse for an April show.
“Don’t tell me you think this is working,” Annalisa finally said, crossing her arms, knowing nothing he could say would change her mind.
He was so frustrated that he balled his hands into fists. “Of course I think it’s working. None of what happened has changed how I feel about you. And I’ve thought long and hard about leaving, and I’m still in. I’ve spent my whole life—or a lot of it, anyway—trying to find you. No way I’m letting you go. Emma will be okay, and she’ll find her way—we’ll help her. But I want to go to Portland with you. I want us to start our life.”
They crossed the street together. “Thomas, you want a normal life with a wife and kids and a dental practice and a picket fence. I can’t give you that. Don’t you get it?” Maybe that wasn’t exactly true, but she needed to put up a wall that he couldn’t break down.
“Oh, I get it, and I’ve already told you . . . I can let all of that go.”
Telling him that she couldn’t paint wasn’t enough, nor was assuring him she wasn’t worth the cost of letting go of his family and education—her point proven by his last statement.
When they reached the other side, they swung a left to circle back to her house. “That’s what you think now, but trust me, one day you will grow to resent me for it. When we’re fighting for having gotten in each other’s way, and when you’ve lost your family for good—and your inheritance—you will resent me.” She quieted as they passed a shirtless man putting up a new mailbox. When they’d gotten far enough away, she whispered, “And I would resent you and hate myself.”
“Don’t you see?” he asked. “You’ll never be a great artist until you open yourself up to—”
She stopped and turned to him. “To what? To love?” As brilliant as he was, he was still naive.
“Yes, to love,” he said with certainty, nothing short of stabbing her heart with a dagger.
She looked up into his eyes, trying to show him. “Don’t you see that I do love you? I love you so much that I’m doing what’s best for you and your sister—even if you don’t know it.” Making the decision earlier had been much easier than telling him now, and so much of her wanted to leap into his arms. But she pushed it all away with the reminder that love required sacrifice.
“It’s not your job to decide my life,” he argued. “Or to protect Emma’s.”
She sliced a hand through the air, forcing herself to be strong. “Trust me; one day we’ll know that ending us now was the right thing, and I’ll always look back on these days, remembering how much I loved you.”
He ran a hand through his hair, pulling at it. “I’d never look back at us with regret; that’s for sure.”
Desperately hoping she was making the right decision, she started walking again. The problem was so much easier to wrap her head around when he wasn’t by her side.
As he started to follow, she said, “I’m worried that I would regret us if we didn’t end it. Look, I’m making the responsible decision. For both of us. I am going to Portland by myself, and you are going to finish Weston and go on to dental school in New York, and then you’re going to find a woman a million times better than . . .”
She stumbled through the last of her words, choking on them. Her heart bled as she said, “Better than me.” The idea of Thomas being with another girl was hell, pure hell, and she batted away the thought.
His agony collected between his eyebrows, and his cheeks quivered. “You don’t believe any of this, Anna, and I don’t know whether it’s because of your parents or because of mine—or because you’re just afraid—but you don’t break up with someone you love.”
She stopped again and faced him. “You do, Thomas.” She took his hand, his touch like that dagger twisting in her heart. “That’s exactly what you have to do sometimes.”
Shaking his head, he said, “And who makes you the expert?”
“Oh, I’m no expert. But I’m not an idiot either. All you have to do is look at what’s happening. Your sister is suicidal and needs you. Your mom probably does too. And you’re talking about abandoning them and your education and your inheritance for a girl who can’t promise you the things you want. I have to keep painting; that’s all that I know right now.”
Thomas pressed his eyes and lips closed and let his head fall. She’d crushed him. Who was she kidding? She’d crushed herself too.
After a long breath, he said, “To break up with someone you love is nothing but the wrong decision. In every case. It’s never going to be easy. Jesus, Anna. If it wasn’t your parents and mine, or my sister, or me leaving Weston, it would be something else.”
“Maybe.” He should have gone to law school because he sure could lay out a case with emotion, and she was dying inside.
“The thing is,” he continued, “when you love someone, then you have each other, and you can face all these things together. That answer isn’t in ending us; it’s in finding a way through it together.”
A tear slid down her cheek. “I don’t see it that way. Things change. What if we fall out of love? Then all the destruction we’ve left in our path will be for nothing. I’m not ready to give up painting, and if we stayed together, I’ll lose my drive, and I will grow to resent myself for not being strong right now, and I’ll certainly come to resent you. I love you too much to ever let that happen.”
His eyes were blue today, and it was the saddest blue in the world.
“Let me go,” she whispered, letting his hand fall from hers.
“How could I ever let you go?” He looked like he’d just lost everything.
She couldn’t bear to see him this way for much longer. “By loving me that much. I know you do. So let me go . . .” It was the hardest thing she’d ever said.
Her words drifted into the air and lingered like the last notes of a lone piano reverberating at the end of a piece. It was sad as all hell, as painful as losing her parents, but she had to be strong. Dammit, she had to.
By the time they returned to Nonna’s house, she was utterly depleted and defeated, a girl so let down by the world and by God.
Standing by his car, he drew in a long breath and let it out audibly, as if he was trying to let out all the pain. Standing only a few feet away, she couldn’t look at him and wished he’d just go. Before her legs gave out on her.
“Take care, Anna,” he finally said, swinging the ax down on the last of their relationship. He’d finally conceded, and it was over.
She forced herself to look at him one more time. Words wouldn’t come, though, as she opened her mouth to speak. It had all been said, and he had to go before she took them all back. She loved him. That was what she wanted to say . . . but she couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t be fair. Wasn’t that ironic? She loved him so much that she couldn’t tell him that in this moment.
Finally, tasting the ashes of their love on her tongue, she said, “Goodbye, Thomas.”
He turned and climbed into his car, and her tears spilled even before he’d pulled away. She hid herself from him, though, and walked away, using the last of her strength to climb the stairs.
And then he was gone.
She collapsed into a chair on the porch and cried—cried like she’d cried after losing her parents—cried tears that seemed to pull all the life out of her, like a mortician draining the blood from a body. Her lips shuddered with loss, and she hoped to God she’d made the right decision.
The wind chimes pinged lightly above her head. Was her mother affirming her decision, telling her to get up and keep fighting?