I didn’t move until I heard a familiar voice: “I promise I won’t tell.”
I turned. Axel arched an eyebrow and grinned.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I was hanging out with your dad. Don’t look at me like that, I wasn’t spying on you. He seems like a nice kid, the kind that cuts your grass on Saturday mornings and follows his girlfriend to the door. I like him. You’ve got my approval.”
“I don’t need your damn approval.”
“Well, now! Don’t tell me you’re mad!”
I repressed my desire to cry, went inside, and closed myself up in my room. My mother came up a while later with a carton of ice cream. She sat down beside me in bed, her legs crossed, dried paint all over her smock, and passed me a spoon before plunging hers into the chocolate. I swallowed and imitated her.
Later I realized a mother always knows more than it seems. That there are things, things to do with feelings, you just can’t hide. That even if she respected my silence, she often knew things before I had even started to realize them.
36
_________
Leah
In the background, “ticket to Ride” was playing, and every note produced another line, more precise, sharper, as though they were trying to pierce the rough surface of the canvas.
I painted without stopping. Almost without breathing. Without seeing anything else.
I painted until the sky was as dark as the picture.
I didn’t even pay attention to Axel, who was lying on the hammock with a book. His eyes veered toward me when I took a strong breath. He got up slowly; he reminded me of a lazy cat, stretching out softly as he came over.
He looked at the painting and crossed his arms. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“I don’t know. What do you see?”
The painting was black, absolutely black.
“I see you,” he responded, then lifted his hand to point to a sharp corner that remained white. “You left this. Give me the brush.”
He tried to take it from my hands, but I stepped back and shook my head. He raised a brow, curious, waiting for an explanation.
“I didn’t leave it. Or I did, but on purpose.”
Axel smiled when he understood why.
37
_________
Axel
“Ready for our excursion?”
Leah looked at me and shrugged.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said.
It was the second-to-last Saturday of the month, which meant Oliver would be back in two days, and for some reason that made me feel we had no time to spare. We walked out of the house and continued on in silence. I was carrying a backpack and had made a few sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. We went around a mile down a muddy path toward the city. When we reached my family’s café, we went inside and said hi to my brother.
“Where you going?” Justin asked.
“On a field trip, like kids,” Leah responded.
He seemed surprised to hear her joking. A tense moment passed, and he served her a slice of cheesecake.
“To keep you strong,” he said, amused.
“I already made lunch,” I complained. “Anyway, what about me?”
Satisfaction gleamed in Justin’s eyes. He leaned an elbow on the bar. “Order one from me, please. And be nice.”
“Eat shit.” I sat down on a stool and took Leah’s fork, stabbed a piece of cheesecake, and brought it to my lips.
She was indignant, but then she laughed. My brother watched us with curiosity.
I went into the kitchen to say hello to my parents, then we left. The streets of Byron Bay, with their low brick and wood buildings, were full of kids skating and people coming back from the beach with their boards under their arms after surfing through the early morning at Fisherman’s Lookout. We passed in front of an aromatherapy shop and a hippie truck painted in all colors with a phrase from John Lennon: “Everything is clearer when you’re in love.” And we took the trail to Cape Byron, the easternmost point of Australia.
“Don’t go so fast,” I told her.
Leah stayed by my side while we climbed the trail with its alternating stairs and dirt. The edge of the cape was covered with a blanket of green grass that contrasted with the blue of the sea. We walked around the cliff in silence. The air was tranquil.
“Are you here?” I asked her.
“Here?”
“Really here, in this instant. Stop thinking and just enjoy the path, the views, everything around us. You know what happened to me one time in Brisbane? I was an intern at a company twenty minutes from my apartment, and I passed every day down this pedestrian-only street. I don’t know if I was just looking at my own belly button, if getting to work was all that mattered to me, or what the fuck, but I had been taking the same route for two months before I noticed the graffiti on this wall. I had seen it, I’m sure, out of the corner of my eye or something, like one of those things you don’t bother paying attention to. That morning I stopped and contemplated it for no reason in particular. It was a tree with branches stretching out to all sides, and at the tip of each of them was a different object: a heart, a tear, a sphere of light, a feather… I stayed there so long I showed up late to work. Fascinated by an image I hadn’t noticed, even though it had been on that wall for who knows how long, and that made me think how sometimes the problem isn’t in the world around us, it’s in how we see ourselves. Perspective, Leah, I think everything depends on perspective.”
She said nothing, but I could almost hear her thoughts and see her trapping the words and hiding them away.
We kept going up Cape Byron, attentive to every step we took. I had been there many times, walking or watching the sunrise, but every occasion was different. This time because Leah was beside me and had a pensive expression, eyes centered on the waves murmuring to the left.
A half hour later, we reached the lighthouse, which rose more than three hundred feet above sea level. We stayed there awhile looking at the landscape, then decided to take a trail that bordered the bottom of the cliffs. We stopped when we found a herd of wild goats.
“I’m dying of thirst,” she said, sitting down.
“Here. Take a sip.”
I passed her the bottle of water and sat on the ground in front of the sea. When a wave broke against the rocks, the water came in, sliding forward until it almost touched our feet.
“Should we eat here?” she asked.
“Why not?” I took the sandwiches out of my backpack.
“You know? I think you’re right. That sometimes we don’t look at things the right way. I did when I used to paint. It was inevitable that I’d fixate on details, you know, tones, shapes, textures. I liked that. Absorbing it. Interiorizing it.”
I looked at her profile, the slightly oval line of her forehead, her prominent cheeks, the curve of her lips, her button nose, how soft her skin looked beneath the sun, and the golden tone it took on.
“We can’t do it all the time. Just in certain moments,” I said.
“I guess.” She took a bite of her sandwich.
I had finished mine, so I took off my shoes and got comfortable on the rock lying next to her. The sky was clear and a soft breeze was blowing. If this wasn’t happiness, tranquility, life, I didn’t know what could be. I closed my eyes and felt Leah moving, lying down too. I don’t know how long we were there like that, if it was ten minutes or an hour, but it was perfect, and all I did was breathe.