“She hoped I wasn’t like them. She hoped I was kind, like her. But I was already cold and arrogant, and too young to know better than to tell the truth. I told her how little worth I saw in the people who scrubbed our toilets, cleaned our house. I told her how our gardener disgusted me because he was stupid and could barely read, while I was already finishing entire novels. I could see that I was smarter than other people, richer, better looking. At four years old, I was already a little monster.”
“You were a child,” Mara says.
“That’s what she thought, too. She bought me a rabbit. A large gray one. She named him Shadow, because I didn’t care to give him a name. I hated that rabbit. I hadn’t learned how to use my hands and my voice yet. I was clumsy with it, and it bit and scratched me. I couldn’t soothe it like my mother did, and I didn’t want to. I hated the time I had to spend feeding it and cleaning out its disgusting hutch.”
Mara opens her mouth to speak again. I bowl over her, my lungs full of all this fresh, green air, but the words coming out dead and twisted, falling flat between us.
“I took care of that rabbit for three months. I loathed every minute of it. I neglected it when I could, and only fed and watered it when she reminded me. The way it loved her and the way it hated me made me furious. I was even more angry when I’d see the disappointment in her eyes. I wanted to please her. But I couldn’t change how I felt.”
Now I have to pause because my face is hot and I can no longer look at Mara. I don’t want to tell her what happened next, but I’m compelled. She needs to understand this.
“One morning, we went down to the hutch and the rabbit’s neck was broken. It was laying there, dead and twisted, flies already settling on its eyes. My mother could see it had been killed. She didn’t chastise me … there was no point anymore. Looking in my eyes, she saw nothing but darkness. She hung herself that afternoon. Years later, I read the last entry in her journal: I can’t change him. He’s just like them.”
Now I do look at Mara, already knowing what I’ll see on her face, because I’ve seen it before, in the only other person I ever loved. It’s the look of a woman gazing upon a monster.
Tears fall silently down Mara’s cheeks, dropping down on the soft green moss.
“You didn’t kill the rabbit,” she says.
“But I wanted to. That’s what you have to understand. I wanted to kill that fucking rabbit every time I held it in my hands. I only didn’t because of her.”
I’m still waiting for the disgust, the repulsion. The understanding that what my mother believed was true: at four years old, I was already a killer. Heartless and cruel. Held back by my affection for her, but who knows for how long.
“But you didn’t do it,” Mara says, her jaw set, eyes locked firmly on mine. “You were a child—you could have been anything. She gave up on you.”
Mara is angry, though not at me.
She’s angry at another mother that failed in her eyes. A mother that looked at her own child and only saw ugliness.
“She was right to give up on me,” I tell Mara. “I didn’t kill the rabbit, but I killed many more.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you’ve done!” Mara cries. “I only care what you do now that someone loves you!”
She flies at me, and I think she’s going to hit me. Instead, she grabs my face between her hands and kisses me, as ferociously, as passionately as ever she’s done.
“I love you!” she cries. “I fucking love you. Your life starts here, today, now that I’ve told you.”
I look at Mara’s furious face.
I touch the tears running down on both sides. I kiss her again, tasting the salt on her lips.
In that moment, I finally realize what Mara knew all along:
She won’t die like that rabbit. I WILL keep her safe.
11
Mara
I understand now why Cole has always stayed in this house.
He destroyed his father’s office but not the garden. He kept the garden living and growing for his mother, long after she was gone.
I wonder if that one act kept a spark of humanity burning inside him, in all the years that followed.
Cole seems strangely light since he told me this last piece of his history. He’s unburdened—finally understanding that I do see who he is, without judgment.
I can’t judge anyone. I’ve been a fucking mess for most of my life. A literal crazy person at times.
Everyone is a mix of good and bad. Can the good cancel out the bad? I don’t know. I’m not sure I even care. If there’s no objective measure, then all that matters is how I feel. Cole is a shade of gray I can accept.
He suits me like no one ever has.
He understands me.
How can I reject the only person I’ve ever felt connected to?
We were drawn together from the first moment we saw each other, when neither of us wanted it. Like recognized like. We bonded in place, like mercury atoms.
If Cole is wrong, then so am I.
When he pushes me to change, the change feels good.
It’s like his corrections to my paintings—once he points out the improvement, I can see its merit just as clearly.
He’s been encouraging me to promote myself more openly on social media. I was always hesitant to post anything too personal, too specific. Still plagued by that old fear of exposing myself as weird, broken, disgusting.
“You think the painting is the product, but it isn’t,” Cole tells me. “You’re the product: Mara Eldritch, the artist. If you’re interesting, then the work is interesting. They have to be curious about you. They have to want to hear what you have to say.”
“I’m the product?” I tease him. “You know who you sound like …”
“There’s a difference between creating a fake version of yourself for market,” Cole says, sternly, “and simply understanding how to show people who you really are.”
Cole encourages me to dig out my old Pentacon and take photographs of my paintings in progress, before they’re perfected, before they’ve even fully taken shape. I photograph myself at work, in moments of frustration, even breaking down in front of the canvas, laying on the floor.
I photograph myself in front of the gloomy plate-glass windows, thick with fog, tracing my finger through the steam.
I photograph myself eating lunch, food scattered amongst the paints, hands filthy on my sandwich.
When I need a break from painting, I pose naked and streaked in paint. Wearing a sunburst crown of paintbrushes, swaddled in a canvas drop-sheet like the Madonna.
The pictures are moody and grainy. Sometimes melancholy, sometimes charged with ethereal beauty.
I don’t worry about my privacy or if I might look unhinged. I post the pictures and I tell the truth about my mental state, for better or for worse, as I update my progress on the new series.
At first I’m mostly doing this for myself, a digital diary.
I have few followers, and most of the interaction comes from friends and old roommates.
Slowly, however, I start to pick up more friends. At first, it’s people I’ve begun to follow myself: a girl who sews hand-drawn patches onto vintage shirts. A guy with phenomenal spray-painting techniques. A woman documenting her heartbreaking divorce with a series of self-portraits.