life.
The first spring Taylor was with us, I bought her a sketchbook and she and I had started a bird list. At the beginning, she had drawn pictures of the birds she spotted, and I had written their names. In later years, Taylor had recorded her finds herself, but she continued to draw detailed miniatures of the birds she identified: the rare ones that swooped down for a moment in the course of their great migration, and the usual suspects that were part of our everyday lives: western grebes, cormorants, mallards, mourning doves, thrashers, warblers, blackbirds, and the faithful and ubiquitous sparrows. She began her bird record anew every year – seven books so far. The eighth, pocket-sized and bright orange, was waiting on her plate with the rest of her forgotten birthday gifts.
Taylor pulled underwear, socks, blue jeans, and a shirt out of her dresser drawers and went into the bathroom. When she came back, she was dressed and she’d run a comb through her hair.
“Ready to go?” I said.
She hesitated. I could see the uncertainty in her eyes, but she knew she couldn’t stay in bed forever.
The world we walked out into was the shade of half-mourning that grieving Victorians used to affect after the blackness of the first grief was fading. Earlier, the sun had sent out a few tentative beams, but they’d been extinguished by the weight of a November sky. Underfoot, the wintry earth was leached of colour. A skim of ice covered the silent creek.
With no particular plan, Taylor and I sat on the bench we favoured and looked around us. After a while, she pointed across the creek to a tree, leafless and gaunt against the scudding clouds. “I saw a Japanese etching like that at the Mackenzie Gallery,” she said. “Just earth, tree, and sky. Ink and paper. The lines were so simple, but every stroke was right. I wanted to make art like that.”
“You still can,” I said. “Taylor, that tree is still there.”
“And it’s still beautiful,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s still beautiful.”
From the outset, Taylor was determined to go back to her old life, and all the external signs indicated that she had succeeded. The phone kept on ringing, the round of birthday parties and sleepovers continued, and as always, she was diligent about the schoolwork that she saw as a necessary evil to be dealt with before she could get back to her art. But she was edgy, easily startled, with a new and worrying habit of staring into space. For the first time ever, she asked me to sit with her in her studio while she worked. I brought in a folding chair and cleared a place for my laptop at the end of the table where she stored her paint tubes and brushes. Most of the time we worked in comfortable silence, but occasionally she asked about Ethan, and I passed along what I’d heard from Zack. The news was never good, and one afternoon I asked Taylor if she’d rather I didn’t tell her what was happening.
“I need to know,” she said. “It’s worse just imagining.”
Creating a mural for the walls that enclosed our new pool was therapeutic. Working at her sketches, Taylor seemed able to transcend the anxiety that had dogged her since the terrible morning of her birthday. When, finally, it was time to start painting in earnest, she was eager. The construction crew put up scaffolding so that Taylor could reach the tops of the walls and the ceiling, and as she climbed it, I could see her old confidence returning.
Taylor had made several small paintings of our old pool and I was curious about how the pool would figure in the new mural. As it turned out, it was the vibrant colour of the tiles that had attracted her. Before she began the mural Taylor covered the walls with a gem-bright paint that had the opalescent sheen of sun bouncing off turquoise. To stand in that room with the sunlight pouring through the windows of the room’s west wall was to experience a joy that was uncomplicated and unquenchable. Then Taylor began to add shadows and half-tones, and the mood changed. Some of the areas she shaded were small. Like the missing tiles in our old pool, these splashes of black made the blue around them sparkle with greater intensity. But there were larger areas of shadow too; spaces that seemed to beckon and threaten like the mouths of underwater caves. The fish Taylor painted swimming in the sunlit water were jewel-bright and playful, but the mud-coloured fish that swam through the curling plumes of weeds in the shadows were menacing. More eloquently than words, Taylor’s mural conveyed the truth that the sweetness of life can be taken away in an instant.
She waited almost two weeks before she painted the human swimmers on the mural, and the figures were unlike any she’d drawn before. Faceless, strong-bodied, wearing simply cut suits in bold primary colours, their powerful limbs propelled them effortlessly through sun and shadow alike. When I watched them come to life, the relief washed over me. My daughter was recovering.
Taylor had wanted to keep the mural a surprise for Zack until it was finished. When the big day came, she made him close his eyes as he wheeled himself in.
“This isn’t a joke, is it?” he said. “I’m not headed for the edge of the pool.”
“No joke!” Taylor said. “And you can open your eyes now.”
It was the only time in our relationship that I ever saw Zack at a loss for words. He looked around, shook his head in disbelief, and turned his chair to face Taylor.
“This is brilliant, Taylor. You must know that.” He held his hand out to her. “Could we look at it together?”
She shrugged, but I could tell she was pleased.
I watched as they moved around the mural. Occasionally, Taylor would point something out or Zack would ask a question, but mostly they simply examined her work with the care and the seriousness it demanded.
When they came back, Zack slid his arm around my waist. “How lucky can we get?” he said.
Taylor was standing on the other side of Zack’s chair, and when I looked into their faces, the words formed themselves. “I was just asking myself that very thing,” I said.
The weeks leading up to Christmas were full. My research on the values war was coming together, and Jill asked if I’d be interested in writing a documentary on the subject for NationTV. I’d sketched out a proposal, and it was a rush to sit at my laptop and lose track of time because I was having so much fun.
Zack was busy too, but his work wasn’t fun. Ethan’s case was viciously depressing – in large part because Ethan didn’t care what happened to him. His despair was exacerbated by guilt. Given what we had come to know about Ethan, it wasn’t a surprise when he confessed that, in an attempt to prove his worth to his mother, he had planted the bomb that blew up Zack’s office. Kathryn died without knowing how desperate her son had been to gain her approval. Now her son’s only lifeline was the man he tried to kill, and that painful truth was driving Ethan into a vortex of self-loathing and depression. Zack had managed to get Ethan committed to a mental health facility in
