Say Yes by Kandi Steiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Art of Hope

“So, I have some news,” Angela said to me that weekend. We were on the floor of her dorm room, her half-finished model of an art museum in the corner while we painted our toes.

Or rather, while she painted her toes. I just sat there and stared at mine.

“Please tell me it’s good news, because I don’t think I could handle bad right now.”

“It is good… but also kind of bad.”

My shoulders sagged. “Oh God, what?”

“Well,” she said, pulling her shoulders back as she applied another coat of strawberry-red paint to her big toe. “My professor has been hired to work on a project in Shanghai, a commercial skyscraper. The bank behind the project wants it to have a futuristic feel, and since that’s become my style… she’s asked me to go with her.”

I balked. “Go with her? As an intern?”

“More like as a partner.”

“A partner?!”

“I don’t want to get ahead of myself,” she said, holding her hands up, the paint-dipped brush between her knuckles. “But… yeah. She said this is the perfect project for me, and she thinks we would collaborate well on it. She’s going to pay me. Like, an actual architect’s salary.”

“Angela, this is huge,” I said, reaching over to squeeze her wrist. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” she said with a shy smile, but it slipped as fast as it appeared. “That leads me to the not-so-great news.” Her eyes met mine. “The project starts next week.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand, we still have two weeks before the program here ends.”

“I know. They’re having another professor step in to finish out the term for her, and if I want to be on the job, I have to go early, too.”

I swallowed. “How early?”

“Wednesday.”

I closed my eyes on a stinging breath, my chest burning, eyes watering beneath the lids. I was supposed to have time to mourn the inevitable loss of Angela. We were supposed to go through our final projects together and get our grades together and go to the airport together before we went our separate ways. Even then, I knew we’d be lifelong friends. I would never lose her.

Some of that hadn’t changed with her news, but a lot of it had.

I didn’t have weeks with her now.

I had days.

“Well,” I said when I blinked my eyes open, forcing a smile. “We should celebrate. And we need to go shopping. What’s the weather like this time of year in China?”

Angela frowned. “Are you okay?”

“I am,” I promised her, and when she gave me a look that told me she didn’t believe me, I laughed and crawled over to wrap her in a hug. “I am, you brat. I’m okay, and I’m happy for you — ecstatic, really. But I’m also going to miss you, and that’s okay, too. I’m allowed to be sad you’re leaving me early, and also happy for the opportunity at the same time.”

“Yes,” she said on a sigh, nuzzling into me. “I would feel the same way.”

“But we do need to celebrate,” I said, pulling back. “Put a top coat on those nails and let’s go get some wine.”

“Deal!”

Angela shook the bottle of clear coat before carefully removing the brush and covering her fresh polish with the quick-dry.

“So,” she said with her eyes on the paint. “How are you? It’s been a week now since…”

“Since Liam left without a trace,” I finished for her, leaning back against the wall and folding my arms over my chest. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I think I’m… numb. I’m going through the motions every day, but it feels like watching a movie or a music video, as opposed to living my actual life.”

Angela’s lips tugged to the side. “That makes sense.” A pause. “And you still haven’t heard from him?”

“No. I tried getting his personal email from the registrar, but they can’t give out student information unless you’re family. His school email was shut down. I never got his phone number… I never even thought to ask for it.” I shook my head. “He was always just here, you know? We were together. It seemed like we had infinite days ahead, and I never thought about what came next because, at least at first, I didn’t think there would be a next. It was just here and now. This summer.”

“It’s a romantic notion covering up a haunting reality.”

“That’s exactly it. That’s exactly how it feels. Haunting.” I frowned. “It’s only been a little over a week since I last saw him, but sometimes I wonder if I imagined him, if he was ever real at all. He’s like my own personal ghost.”

“He was real,” Angela assured me. “Everything between you was real, too.”

I nodded, falling quiet as I clasped my hands in my lap and let my gaze fall there, too. “I don’t even know where he lives,” I whispered. “Other than somewhere in Connecticut. And even that’s a maybe. He grew up there, and his mom still lives there, but that doesn’t mean he does.” I rolled my lips together. “He said some really scary things to me before he left, Angela. About not wanting to live…”

“He wouldn’t do that,” she said.

I shrugged. “I want to think he wouldn’t, but when he’s like that…” I shook my head. “I can’t imagine carrying around all the guilt he does, all that pain. On the days he was his real self with me, his old self, the boy who existed before the accident?” I smiled. “He was light, carefree, charming and fun. He had hope, even if he tried to deny it. I could see it.” My smile slipped. “But on the bad days, he was someone else entirely. Cruel. Miserable. Completely shut down.”

“He wouldn’t take his own life,” Angela said again.

“I was checking obituaries for a while,” I admitted.

“Harley…”

“I know, I know, I just… I was terrified. I still am.”

Angela shook her head. “It just doesn’t make sense. I get that he was upset, hurt, scared… whatever. But to just leave without saying anything? Not even a goodbye? He had to know what this would do to you. To Thomas.”

I pressed a hand over my chest, as if I could soothe the raging fire the word goodbye had just sparked to life there. “I’m not sure which would have been worse.”

“At least that way, you would have known.”

Silence fell between us, Angela finishing her coat before blowing on her toes and waiting for them to dry enough to move.

“You know what else I was researching?” I asked after a while. “The librarian helped me find the latest census. There are three-point-two million people in Connecticut.” I shook my head. “Even if I did want to find him, the odds are nearly impossible that I ever would.”

“He knows where you are, though.”

“For the next couple of weeks,” I countered. “After that… he’ll have no idea. We’ll be lost to each other. And let’s be honest, he’s not coming back.”

“He might.”

I flattened my lips. “Angela.”

“Okay,” she conceded. “It’s not likely. But it is possible.”

“I won’t hold my breath,” I said. And as the words rolled off my tongue, my head fell back against the wall and I laughed. “You know, he said to me one time that hope was the most dangerous thing of all. I thought that was such a foolish thing to say. I didn’t understand what he meant.” I lifted my head to look at her again. “I get it now.”

“I’m so sorry, Harley.”

“Me, too.”

“Okay. Topic change!” she announced, snapping her fingers. “How’s your final project going?”

“The assignment is to paint my current emotions,” I deadpanned. “How do you think?”

“Ugh… bad topic change.”

I chuckled, using the wall to help myself stand before I reached down for her hand. “Are your toes dry yet? I think the best way to change the subject here is to turn it back to your project and get some wine in us.”

“They’re dry enough,” she said, taking my hand for the assist. “And we’ll definitely need wine for the next part of this conversation, because I need some advice.”

“On what, how to dress in China?”

“More like how to not make a move on my hot Italian professor slash new boss.”

“Oh, shit…”

“Yeah, you’re not the only one with problems, okay?”

I snorted. “Glad to be in good company. Let’s get changed and be somewhere with a full wine glass in fifteen minutes or less.”

“Last one with her shoes on pays the bill.”

Angela left five days later, and a new kind of loneliness sank into my bones like a chemical invasion.

Without her in the apartment, I couldn’t tell reality from my dreams, couldn’t tell what had been true from what I’d made up in my head. Everything about my time in Florence had been uprooted and stolen in a flash, and I was left behind.

She felt as distant a memory as Liam did.

With both of them gone, my internship at the museum completed, and class on hold until presentation day, the days bled into the nights and the nights into the mornings. Painting was my only reprieve, and I worked tirelessly on my final project with a mixture of love and hate and pure apathy for what I was creating.

Some nights, I’d sit back with a glass of wine and laugh, eyes wandering the canvas and marveling at the impeccable edges and creative blends, the brilliant colors and the mesmerizing texture. I was a genius, a prodigy, a legend in the making.

The next day, I’d be so close to slashing the canvas with the dull knives in our kitchen that I’d have to leave the apartment just to keep myself from doing so. I was a failure, a fraud, a pathetic excuse for an artist.

Most times, I painted with a distant suspicion that it wasn’t actually me doing the painting at all. I was ethereal, detached, moved to tears and yet not moved at all.

When Liam was in my life, time was precious. It stretched long and slow when we were apart, and whizzed by at lightning speed when we were together. Perhaps that was why my time with him felt like a dream, because it all happened so fast, so suddenly, so purely that I hadn’t thought to remind myself it would be gone one day. I could only think of the here and now, the present, the moment in the making — not the future me who would long to rewind.

Now that he was gone, time had changed into an unfamiliar concept, as foreign and complicated to me as the laws of physics. Hours meant nothing. Sunrises and sunsets no longer marked the beginning or end of anything. I didn’t eat certain foods at a particular time of day, or chastise myself for having wine before the bells chimed dinnertime. I slept when I felt like it, and painted every moment I was awake.

I found comfort in the numbness, in the lonely, in the disturbing peace I’d created.

When it came time to turn in our work, I dropped my canvas off and left promptly.

I didn’t stay behind to watch Professor Beneventi as he observed it for the first time, or to hear his critique, or to see what the other students had created. When I signed my name on the bottom right-hand corner, it symbolized the end of my dream, or nightmare, or sleepwalk, or whatever the last few months could be considered.

I left who I was before the summer of 1996 behind me, standing there with that canvas, her eyes on my back as I walked away.

I didn’t know who I was now.

But I knew there was no going back to the girl I used to be.

It was nearly midnight on the day of turning in my project when two firm knocks sounded on my front door. I should have been surprised to see Professor Beneventi standing there when I opened it, but surprise wasn’t an emotion in my wheelhouse at the moment.

“Sorry to disturb you so late,” he said, eyeing the half-empty wine glass in my hand with an amused smile. “May I come in?”

I nodded, opening the door farther so he could step inside before I closed it behind him.

“Forgive me for coming to your dorm,” he said quickly. “I realize it’s inappropriate for a professor to do such a thing, but since you neglected to stay for the grading of your final project and since classes are now complete, I had no choice.”

I nodded, and again, his eyes fell to the wine in my hand. I cleared my throat, gesturing to the bottle on the kitchen counter. “Would you like some?”

“I believe that would be even more inappropriate.”

I shrugged.

Something of a laugh came from the professor before he clasped his hands behind his back, watching me curiously. “You are a very different young woman from the one who flew to Italy three months ago,” he assessed. “And you are a very different artist. It’s rare to see such a transformation in such a short amount of time.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just took a sip of my wine and waited for him to get to his point.

“When I told you to let go of your need to be perfect, I didn’t expect you to take the assignment seriously. I will be honest, I saw potential in you, but I didn’t imagine I would be able to ever see it before you left. I thought, if it ever did come to fruition, it would be long after you left here.”

“Thank you?”

He chuckled. “I don’t mean to offend you, Miss Chambers. What I mean to say is that whatever it was that woke you up and lit this fire in you, I’m thankful to have been around to bear witness to it.”

My sandpaper tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and no sip of wine could release it. A flash of Liam’s smile sparked in my mind, and I winced, the memory as painful as if he were really here.

“Your final project was phenomenal, Harley,” he said, his voice softer, earnest.

I blinked, bringing my gaze to his. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” he said on a laugh. “You left the entire class stunned. It was all they could talk about today. In fact, other than when I was at their easel grading their own projects, they were gathered around yours discussing it.”

“They were?” I asked incredulously.

“We all were.”

My mouth hung open for a long pause before I thought to close it, and I blinked, shaking my head as I digested his words. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, let me get to the point, then,” Professor Beneventi continued. “First, we debated our own interpretations, but if you’d be so kind, I’d love to hear your intention.”

I blew out a slow breath, drinking the last sip of wine from my glass before I set it aside. I leaned a hip against the wall, closing my eyes and recalling the colorful canvas that had taken up my life for weeks now.

“I’ve always found rain to be strangely comforting,” I started. “So, when I began painting, a woman walking on a rainy street was the first thing that came to me. But I didn’t want the rain to be portrayed as gray or dark or bleak, but rather bright and golden, a baptism of sorts.”

I could see it all so clearly — the woman in the distance, umbrella over her head, boots splashing on the wet street as she walked among streetlamps and trees. The water puddled on the street she walked on, reflecting the light and colors.

“The edges of the canvas are dark,” Professor Beneventi noted. “Deep blues and greens in the leaves, black trunks.” He paused. “But as your eye wanders closer to the main subject.”

“They begin to glow,” I finished for him. “The cold hues grow warmer, from blue to red, from green to orange, from black to yellow.”

I smiled, but when I blinked my eyes open, the tears growing behind the lids were free to glide down my cheeks, silent but steady.

“There is a storm of emotion inside each of us,” I whispered. “So many reasons to be sad, to be angry, to feel cheated. So many experiences that have rubbed us raw, broken us down, and begged us to believe their insistence that life is nothing but a miserable prison we are forced to endure.”

Professor Beneventi swallowed, as if he were recalling his own life experiences that made him feel that way.

“But we mustn’t forget we have a choice,” I continued. “We can surrender to those thoughts, those reasons, those dark clouds… or,” I countered. “We can take the lessons they offer us, and we can choose to find gratitude for experiencing them, for having felt such a terrible grief that we come to appreciate joy for the truly magnificent emotion that it is.”

“It’s a reminder to choose happiness,” he remarked.

An amused laugh left me. “No,” I said. “It’s a reminder that the true beauty in life is that we experience both tremendous anguish and remarkable exuberance in tandem, and that neither could exist without the other. We would be numb if we only ever felt happy, and we would be equally as numb if we only experienced pain. It is the fact that they walk together hand in hand that makes life such a wondrous thing. Such a precious thing.”

I shook my head, looking down at my feet with a soft smile as a full summer of memories played out before me.

“I have experienced heartbreak like never before in my life these last few weeks,” I explained. “But I have also come to deeply understand what gratitude feels like. I have felt hope and despair in equal measure.” I lifted my eyes to meet his. “And in this painting, I wanted the viewer to see the beauty in both, and to realize it’s okay to surrender to pain, as long as we don’t get swept away in it. Just as it’s okay to surrender to immense joy, so long as we appreciate its impermanence.”

“Impermanence,” he echoed. “Is that the name of your work?”

“No,” I said with a smile. “I call it The Art of Hope.”

Professor Beneventi’s head snapped back slightly, as if my words had physically hit him and knocked the growing smile on his face.

“Well done, Miss Chambers,” he said after a moment, shaking his head. “Truly. Well done.”

I smiled, cheeks and neck flushing as I dipped my chin to my chest and stared at my shoes once more. “Thank you, Professor.”

“It is my sincere pleasure,” he said. “It is also my honor to inform you that at the end of every summer, the school hosts an art exhibition, and your piece has been selected as the Leonardo da Vinci Award winner for most innovative and skilled artist of the summer session.”

I snapped my gaze back to his, but found I didn’t know what to say.

He chuckled. “It will be displayed in a special award-winning portion of the exhibit, along with a photograph of you and a plaque with a short bio and summary of artist intent.” He paused. “You will also receive a five-thousand, US-dollar prize for the accolade.”

My jaw dropped at that. “You’re… you’re serious?”

“I am,” he said with a smile. “We’ll work on the details later, but I wanted to tell you in person. This is a high honor, Miss Chambers,” he said, reaching over to squeeze my shoulder as his eyes leveled with mine. “And you have earned it. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” I said, but I couldn’t control the tics on my face as I tried to wrap my head around everything he’d just told me.

When he released me, he straightened the lapels of his jacket and said, “Well, I’ll be going now. But before I do, I want to leave you with one last thought.”

He waited until I blinked out of my daze and looked him in the eye.

“In your letter of intent for this semester, you mentioned that you were unsure if you could have a career as an artist, or if you would return home to be… an accountant, I believe?” he asked with a smile.

I nodded, swallowing as my parents’ concerned faces flickered in my mind.

“Well, let me be the first to tell you that crunching numbers behind a desk all day would be a terrible waste of your exceptional talent.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Let me also be the first to tell you that life as an artist is far from easy,” he added, holding up his finger. “Some days, you will wonder if it’s worth it. But I hope at the end of every one, you always remember that it is.”

We shared a smile, and then with a tip of his imaginary hat, he was gone.