Mostly it comes in glimpses, that period.
Time shrunk down to moments.
Sometimes they’re scattered broadly—like winter, and her learning to drive. Or September, and hours of music. There’s a whole November of his clumsy attempts at her language, and then December through February to April, and a few visits at least, to the town he grew up in, and its sweat and surging heat.
In between, of course, there were movies (and he didn’t check her for laughter), and a love she found for video—likely her greatest teacher. When movies were on TV, she recorded them for practicing English: a 1980s catalogue, from E.T. to Out of Africa, Amadeus to Fatal Attraction.
There was continuing The Iliad and The Odyssey. Cricket games on TV. (Could it really last five whole days?) And countless salted ferry rides on that bright, whitecapped water.
There were the slipstreams, too, of doubt, when she’d see him disappearing, to some place, held doggedly, within. The inner terrain of not-Abbey again, a landscape both vast and barren. She’d be calling his name from next to him:
“Michael. Michael?”
He’d be startled. “What?”
They stood at the borders of anger, or foot holes of small irritation; both sensing how soon they could deepen. But just when she thought he might say to her, “Don’t come for me, don’t call,” he’d place a hand down onto her forearm. Her fears, through the months, were calmed.
* * *
—
Sometimes, though, the moments stretch out.
They stop, and unfold completely.
For Clay, they were the ones Penny told him about in the last few months of her life—when she was high and hot on morphine, and desperate to get everything right. Most memorable was a pair of them, and both occurring in evening; and exactly twelve months between them.
Penelope saw them as titles:
The Night He Finally Showed Me.
And Paintwork at the Piano.
* * *
—
The date was December 23, the eve of Christmas Eve.
The first year, they’d eaten together in Michael’s kitchen, and just as they’d finished, he’d said to her:
“Here, I’m going to show you.”
They walked out into the garage.
It was strange that in all the months they’d known each other, she’d never set foot inside it. Instead of taking the side entrance, he used the roller door out at the front. A noise the sound of a train.
Inside, when he hit the light, and removed the curtain of sheets, Penny was amazed—for amongst the kernels of floating dust there were countless sheets of canvas, all stretched over wooden frames. Some were enormous. Some the size of a sketch pad. On each of them was Abbey, and sometimes she was a woman, sometimes a girl. She could be mischievous, or buttoned-up. Often her hair ran all the way to her waist. In others it was cut to her neckline; she held the streams of it in her arms. Always, though, she was a life force, and she never left you for long. Penelope realized that anyone who looked at these paintings would know that whoever painted them felt even more than the portraits could suggest. It was in every stroke before you, and every one left out. It was the precision of the canvas stretch, and the mistakes kept perfectly intact—like a drip of mauve at her ankle, or an ear that floated next to her, a millimeter from her face.
Its perfection didn’t matter:
All of it was right.
In one painting, the biggest one, where her feet sank into the sand, Penny felt like she could ask for the shoes she held out, in her open, generous palm. As she looked, Michael sat by the gaping doorway, his back against the wall, and when Penny had seen enough, she sat herself down beside him. Their knees and elbows touched.
“Abbey Dunbar?” she asked.
Michael nodded. “Formerly Hanley—and now, I have no idea.”