Waves of Light by Naomi Kinsman Page B

having anything?”
    “Being alone helped, to tell you the truth. I felt like a turtle that needed to hide in my shell while I got used to the idea of not having the house anymore.” She rinsed her brush and dipped it into the black paint.
    “But how can you get used to the idea of losing all of that art?”
    She stopped and looked at me. “It wasn’t the art that hurt, Sadie. I can make new art. The memories are what I can’t bear to lose.”
    It was a punch to my stomach. Yes. Vivian and her husband had lived in that house for a long time before he died. Every room would have held memories. The way you can find a forgotten ornament from last Christmas and how the smell of cinnamon makes you feel like you’re back in your pajamas opening presents around the tree.
    “So you’re just accepting that the house is gone?”
    “The house is gone, Sadie, whether I accept it or not. Right now, I feel particularly angry about losing something bigger than a house. My life, I guess.”
    “You don’t seem angry.”
    “Because I’m painting.” Vivian removed a drop cloth from a nearby easel, revealing a red canvas with jagged black slashes across it.
    The next drop cloth covered a completely black canvas with deep blue slashes. On they went, canvas after canvas, each with angles and colors that screamed, “Why? Why? Why?”
    “This helps you?” I asked.
    “If I didn’t paint it out, I’d explode.”
    Explode
was the perfect word. All the calm from yesterday — after seeing the cub and reading Penny’s story — had evaporated the minute I’d walked into Vivian’s apartment. Anger billowedlike storm clouds inside of me, making me wonder if I might just explode. Right here. In Vivian’s fabric-strewn living room. The locked box that I’d drawn at the bottom of the ocean floated into my mind as I looked at the blank canvas Vivian had set out for me. The mess inside the box rattled around, trying to get free, but I knew I couldn’t handle any more than I had to deal with already.
    You don’t have to open it, not now. It’s enough to know it’s there
.
    The thought slipped into my mind like smoke seeping under a door, surprising me with its clarity. I hadn’t been willing to draw or even talk to God these last few days. I hadn’t considered that he might still be close by, watching, caring about what was going on. I’d convinced myself he didn’t care, actually. Now, after seeing the spirit bear yesterday and having this thought arrive, uninvited, I wasn’t so sure.
    I realized I was staring, unseeing, at Vivian’s canvas. “You always tell me to draw what I see. These are just lines and colors.”
    “These are the images I see in my head,” Vivian said. “So instead of letting them jab me, I’m throwing them out onto the page.”
    “And then they’re gone?”
    “No. But when you can see something, it’s much less intimidating than when you feel something you can’t define.” She handed me brushes and pointed to a canvas. “That one’s yours. Make anything you like.”
    I hadn’t worked with brushes and paint since second grade. Was I supposed to copy Vivian, just lay down a bright color and then start flinging paint around?
    “This kind of painting isn’t about planning or thinking, Sadie.” Sometimes it was like Vivian could read my mind. “Just let yourself go.”
    I took a can of aqua paint over to the canvas. The deep-sea color stood out against my paintbrush’s black bristles. Thinking of my locked box rattling around, I suddenly wanted to paint waves — crashing and foaming and tearing. My hand moved on its own, splashing paint in waves and swirls across the canvas. Over and over I dipped my brush, letting the strokes fill the canvas with color. They didn’t look exactly like waves, but they moved around the page, up and over one another.
    At the bottom of the canvas, I’d left a calm spot in the middle. I found a smaller brush and some black paint. Instead of drawing the box and