The last couple of weeks had flown by. The crew had kicked it into gear to get it finished before the end of July, and they had really pulled through. The homeless crew started working as if they had been employed with this type of work their entire lives, and a swell of pride overcame me as I watched them go through and find studs to hang the hooks from. I walked through everything one last time to make sure all we had done was ready to go, and then my eyes began searching for Hailey.
But all morning, she had been absent.
I knew Hailey better than to think she wouldn’t be here, but there were only two places she could be. She was either in that back room that housed so many wonderful memories for us, or she was out in that storage shed. I poked my head around into the room to see if she was working on one of her paintings, but when I didn’t see her, I pushed myself out back.
The storage door was open, but she was nowhere to be found.
“Hailey?” I called out. “You around?”
The door creaked open, and I walked around to see what was going on. I poked my head into the storage unit and looked around, thinking maybe Hailey had lost herself in figuring out which paintings she would hang first. She kept talking about how she wanted her first gallery to be of paintings her art therapy students had done, so I knew she was probably digging through everything, trying to make decisions on which ones to hang first.
There were paintings everywhere. Landscapes and portraits. Some abstract paintings and some that were very primal and caveman-like. I was mesmerized by all of them as I picked one up, studying the brushstrokes of the person I didn’t recognize in the painting. It was a raven-haired woman with hazel eyes and a bright smile. Her dark skin jumped from the canvas as the light blue background played well against her features. I wondered what kind of life she might’ve led. I wondered what put such a broad smile on her face.
I wondered what she did that had landed her in Hailey’s art therapy classes.
I put it down and picked up another one, surveying the sunset that was painted across the canvas. With the sun setting over the ocean, it had to be someone from L.A., and I smiled as I surveyed all the colors that bled into one another. Even though the colors were vibrant and awe-inspiring, there was a darkness to the ocean that shouldn’t have been prevalent. If anything, the sunset should’ve been reflected in the waters.
But it wasn’t.
Instead, the ocean was dark. Almost black in nature. It pulled a sadness from deep within my soul. A sadness I didn’t quite understand. Even with the beauty of this sunset before them, this person still felt as if the waters would drown them, open up and swallow them whole.
It brought back so many familiar memories that I had to put it down.
There was something achingly familiar about all of them. The ebony-skinned woman. The darkened ocean. I picked up another one that caught my eye. Geometric patterns with lines that weren’t completely straight. Sloppy shading done with colors that didn’t quite blend together. I turned it around in my hands, trying to find the focal point. Trying to find the top of the painting so that the image the artist was trying to convey would finally come together as my eyes searched for its purpose.
But the moment the tattoo on my arm came into view, I realized why the geometry stood out so brazenly to me.
It was too sloppy to be Hailey’s work, but it was too intricate to be a simple finger painting, as my parents put it. I stared at my tattoo as my gaze fluttered from my arm to the painting. How in the world were they so similar? Had I run into one of her art therapy students during my trips to L.A.?
Then, another painting caught my eye, the painting of the cabin in the woods.
I dropped the canvas I was holding and quickly picked it up. I’d studied it once before, back when I’d first met Hailey. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but now there was something gnawing at my gut, something that was telling me I knew who this artist was.
And it was killing me that I couldn’t find a name on these pieces.
Every si
ngle one of them spoke to me. Like a distant song being whispered in my ear. They resonated with a part of me that pushed tears to my eyes, except I had no idea why I wanted to cry. I had no idea why it pulled such a deep-seated sadness all the way to the surface, but as my eyes danced over the cabin painting my blood began to run cold.
The Jeep sitting beside the cabin.
The trees blowing in the wind.
The logs that were polished and shone against the light streaming through the windows and out into the summer sun.
The summer sun.
The leaves were all green, even the ones on the ground. The sun was high in the sky as it shone through the thick brush of trees, casting a deep shadow onto the ground. My eyes followed the shadow as the tattoo on my back came to the forefront of my memory. They weren’t identical. Not completely. But they were close.
They were so close they could’ve almost been ...
I studied the shadow the cabin was casting off to the side. There was something painted in the shadow. Something I hadn’t caught before because this damn storage unit had no fluorescent light. I stepped out of the shed with the painting in hand as the San Diego sun started beating down onto my back, and the moment I saw what my eyes didn’t register before I felt my entire body trembling.
There were two small boys, crouched down in the shadows with smiles on their faces.
“Bryan?”
I heard her voice, but my mind was whirling. My fingertips danced across the two boys in the painting. They were so small compared to the cabin but filled with so much life.