From GABRIEL
In the spring of the same year and countless miles away on Cumberland Island, Snorri Hegelson, a man with a wild beard, blew bubbles through a plastic wand. They quivered over the pier, gusted into the Clairemain fish shed and popped against boat riggings. Outside the harbor, the sea, seasonably rough and blue, forced boats to give up their destinations and face the waves. An April storm was stirring. At the pier, trawlers began to rock.
One of Snorri’s bubbles lived long enough to be snapped up by a seagull, which rose and swept northwest, opening its bill to be rid of the soapy taste. And when it careened along the cliffs of Crayle Island, the gull scawed, and a boy named Gabriel, sitting in the doorway of his great Aunt Alice’s house, marked the bird in his sketchbook, then held the pages tight against the wind.
He was ten years old and a mapmaker. There are many ways of being lost and this was his; when he was six, with a cornflower blue crayon, he began to record where he lived; a blue ocean, blue islands, blue far away mountains and a blue moon. When he drew the same map with burnt orange, the map became memory. The moon was the sun, and the ocean, grasslands. He added the orange flat-topped mountain on the ranch where he once lived a long time ago, with his brother Luke and his grandparents, outside a town he couldn’t name.
He’d constructed maps with pebbles on the beach and with sticks in forest moss. When he became older, when he could spell their names, he labeled all the places nearby—Cook Island, Winfrey, and the high saddleback of Cumberland. Many of the islands were inhabited only by birds and wild mink. Others had a house or two, or a small town, but not all had electricity. His didn’t.
His great aunt called from inside, but he ignored her and flipped back through the pages. The wind was inconvenient, and as he turned each sheet, he leaned on his forearms to keep his book quiet.
Here was a map of his island, the outline of an upside-down sock with a toe ending in a series of rocks. A square marked his house on the cliff, and another square showed the only other home, two miles away on the sock’s instep, belonging to an un-neighborly old woman, Mrs. Ruth. With all his ten years, he believed she was a witch. He spied on her. She terrified him. Sometimes the two of them, she at her window, and he in her yard, stopped to stare at each other. Between the two houses, Gabriel had drawn the only road, rutted and mossy, created by the island’s rust-bitten truck.
Here was a map of tidal pools. The highest were lifeless holes that rarely caught more than rainwater. A few feet lower, they became complete aquariums with limpets, bullheads, and tiny starfish submerged every twelve hours, then abandoned by the tide to the sky and his fingers.
A jay shrilled. Another answered. When he’d made a map of their cries, he showed them as arrows, but for now he was only interested in gulls. Wherever each one called, he drew a worm shape. The map took place over a month.
His great aunt summoned him again, and because the wind was picking up, he closed the book and went in.
Alice Brown was fussing at a canvas covered in black impasto. A zinc moon, the size of a bottle cap, floated in the bottom left quadrant. Deserted efforts surrounded her in every available space. The subject came to her painfully, repetitively–a black sky, the moon, sometimes larger than the canvas, sometimes small as a poppy seed, paintings painted over paintings, painted over others.
“What do you think?” she asked Gabriel without taking her eyes from her work.
“I like it.”
“But what do you think?” She held her arms by her elbows. “It’s a cliché, isn’t it, the moon?”
Gabriel stood squarely in front of her recent effort. “I like it,” he repeated and shrugged.
She reached for his shoulders but he moved away, as usual, so she sat on her stool, lit a cigarette and leaned to snatch a stack of envelopes from the floor.
“Clichés aren’t my fault.”
He’d heard her say this before. “I know.” After a moment he added, “I think the sky doesn’t end in that one.”
“Yes?”
“And the moon is shrinking.”
“If you were a little older, you could be an art critic,” she said dryly.
She was at an impasse with her life by the sea, the cliff they lived on, the self-enforcing isolation of the island. It had seemed such a good idea, to force herself to create something magnificent, but the gambit hadn’t worked. She’d been willing to play it out but now the time had come to accept what she couldn’t do. The same with the boy. She’d tried, but he stayed slippery, untouchable, even as she felt touch was what he needed. All this time and the best she could manage was to let him be. She sat on the couch and tried to see one painting she didn’t hate, while Gabriel retrieved a soft deck of cards and sat on the floor.
He faced away from her and laid out the deck, his legs in a V as her restlessness washed at his back. One up and six across, face down. One up and five across. Red on black. Running out of probabilities.
She withdrew a letter from an envelope marked The Spencer Gallery and reread it, then tore it into tiny pieces. The boy looked up at the sound. He watched as she cupped the fragments in one hand, and with the other, poked them into the thick paint of the recent canvas.
“The Spencer Gallery doesn’t like moons. I can’t say I blame them.”
He turned back to his game without responding.
“You’re mad at me.”
He turned over another card. “I’m not mad.”
She pulled the bottom most button, dangling from her painting smock, and tapped his shoulder with it. “For your collection.”
He twisted to take it, pink with green threads. At separate times, he’d found buttons on the beach, banged and shaped by the tide, and had started a collection in a jar. He hadn’t opened it in months.
“Thanks.” He put his great aunt’s gift in his pocket.
When Alice struggled out of her smock, straightening her cigarette to get it through the sleeve, he moved to her place on the couch and opened his map book to the latest page.
“What are those?” she asked, leaning over him.
“Seagulls. These are from this morning.” He pointed.
“Let me see.” She took his book and sat beside him. “Show me the seal one again.”
For months, he’d marked a thick bar every time he’d seen a seal between the Ames Spit and Crayle.
She patted the page. “Your maps are calendars.”
She retrieved an Advent calendar from a bottom cupboard to show him. Yes, that was a map too, different from the seal map. “Time maps,” she murmured. The indented windows had once been filled with small chocolates that led to the baby in the manger. With it was the one annual calendar in the house. Outdated,1955. He looked at where she’d marked August 9th as his fifth birthday, and November 23rd as hers.
“How old were you?” he asked.
“Too old.”
She returned to the painting embellished with snippets of rejection. Gone was the delusion that if she took herself apart, like Gauguin, if she was selfish enough and big enough, that she could deliver a truth. Devotion alone couldn’t make the leap.
“I am done with moons,” she announced.
She hoisted the canvas from its easel and headed toward the door. “Take that one.” She lifted her chin in the direction of a smaller piece against the wall.
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
Dodging boulders that stuck up through moss, she raced towards the cliff holding the wet painting away from her, and Gabriel followed. The rising wind grabbed at his canvas as if it were a sail.
He wouldn’t say at this moment that he loved her, but he wouldn’t say that he didn’t. In those times when she’d worried about not being a good mother to him, he never contradicted her. How could she be a good mother when she was his great aunt? She could have been a good great aunt. And she had, from time to time, been good. But they were both most comfortable when he was invisible, a talent he exercised frequently.
She didn’t wait for him, so that by the time he reached the cliff edge, she had attempted to throw the big canvas to the ocean and the painting was caught on a crag above the water, face up and staring back at them.
“Give that one to me.”
“Aunt Alice…”
“Give it.”
This time, she waited for the wind to gust and sailed the smaller painting horizontally and hard. It landed face down with a smack on the sea. She watched for a moment to check which way the tide would carry it, and when it dipped and rolled away, she clapped her hands. “That’s better. Come on. All of them!”
They ran back to the house to collect more, and he laughed because she laughed, and for minutes it was as funny as anything they’d ever done. Gabriel made three trips before his humor wore out, then he stopped to watch as she emptied the house of paintings.
They stood still, looking down. Moons, and the back stretchers of paintings that had landed face down, bobbed away, a small armada. But the first one, the largest, with its fragments of rejection, still rested at the bottom of the cliff.
“I don’t suppose you can climb down and get that into the water?”
He took the trail to the right, to a place where trees grew in a wash and provided handholds, until the cliff became pockmarked with lava-stone, enough to hang onto. When he reached the base, he grabbed the top of her painting and flipped it over twice before it launched to join its fellow moons, large and late on the tide.
When he returned, he found her sitting on the moss, watching the slow progress of her paintings and making infinity symbols with the tip of her cigarette. He settled beside her.
“So, we’ll go to the desert.” She listened to the wind in her left ear and his lack of reply. The water passed below them in deep troughs, proving the paintings sea worthy. “Aren’t you going to ask why?”
“Because of the rock formations.” They had had this conversation before too.
“Because of the rocks. Wait until you see them. Like a different planet….
“…like Mars,” he finished. “Are there towns in the desert?”
“Sure.”
“I’d like to try one.”
“I was thinking a trailer—no town.”
“If there was a sidewalk, I could ride a bike.”
“You don’t really want to live in a town, do you?”
“I’d like to go to school.”
“You’d hate it. Kids are mean. We could try, I suppose. A little town. We’ll need sandals.”
A cold breeze needled through the fabric of Gabriel’s shirt and he wrapped his hands around his upper arms.
“This time, we’re really going,” she said. They would catch a ride with Snorri the next time he delivered the mail. Enough money was left to buy a used Airstream. Then what? She was too old to start waitressing.
“Or we could go back to Sacramento. I wonder if Pacific Card would have me back.”
“We could go to the ranch…”
“You know we can’t.” She searched his face. “You really don’t remember?”
He shook his head. “I remember you honked the car horn. Something about chickens.”
Alice laughed. “Chickens didn’t have much to do with it. Your grandmother and I had a fight and she doesn’t want to see me ever again. She was so mad, I thought she was going to kill me. Both of us.”
“But why?”
“Oh, nothing really. I hadn’t minded my own business. You were an innocent bystander.”
She didn’t want to return to Pacific Card. The desert might hold new and yet unknown inspirations and she still felt the stirrings to create something consummate. The canvasses were still in view but floating away rapidly. She’d finished one cigarette and started another before she made a small animal noise of distress and stood up, looking over her shoulder towards the house and back to the scattered paintings.
He twisted to study her.
“I need them back.”
He sighed. “You don’t like them.”
“Liking and needing are different. I need them.”
“Then why did you throw them away?”
“Be quiet. Just. Be quiet.”
She turned to the house, turned to the sea, and turned to the house again. “I’m so stupid! They’re maps! Like your seagulls.” She began to trot toward the inland road. “Maps of time. I can do something with that!”
He half-heartedly started to accompany her. As she gained ground, he gave up and called, “What are you going to do?”
“The Ruth’s dinghy. I can catch them.”
She was about to disappear behind the first cedars. “You can’t!”
“I can! The tide is running their way,” she shouted without turning.
“That’s crazy,” he muttered.
He slowed to a walk and then went back to the house, fingering her button in his pocket.
Hours later, as dusk was losing to night, he walked home from Mrs. Ruth’s dock. No dinghy. No Aunt Alice near the coast or in the distance with her oars raised in surrender. Winds gusted under a heavy sky and shoved at him. The inland sea, often glassy, was rising to a heavy chop.