Exposed (VIP 4)

My throat closes, and I have to take a sip of tea. Warmth slides down my throat and floods my belly. Maybe there is something to the ritual of tea. Shaking my head, I stare down at the cup—a pretty little thing of hand-painted fuchsia flowers and gold edging. “You ever think of how it might be if you couldn’t do your art?”

My mother is a world-famous artist, known for her enormous portraits and stylized urban landscapes. She spent her twenties and early thirties in obscurity. Then, when I was five, a local dealer featured her works. She took off, and our life went from quietly wealthy, due to Dad’s work, to famously rich, with her doing portraits for royalty and movie stars. But Mom never changed. She is an artist obsessed with her work, through and through.

“Why would you…” She bites her lip as if to physically stop the question. Slowly, she sets her hands on the table and presses them against the wood. Her concerned gaze meets mine. “I’m trying to decide if you’d like the easy answer or the difficult one.”

I huff a laugh. “You have to ask?”

A smile creases the corners of her eyes. “You always took the hard path.” Lightly, she touches my forearm. The skin there is dark with intricate ink. Most of the tats were first drawn by her. Doodles I’d taken from pieces of paper she left around the house, sketches she did when she was with me. I put them on my skin to honor her, my family, my history.

She traces a hothouse lily in full bloom. “Well, my sweet son, the truth is, my art is the deepest expression of my soul. Without it, I think something inside me would wither and die.”

Wither and die. It drops like a stone in my gut, and I swallow twice.

“Are you afraid of losing your music?” Mom asks softly. She’s trying pretty damn hard not to show her horror, but I see it lurking in her eyes all the same.

Everything inside me clenches tight and churns. I wrap my sore hands around the teacup, but it’s too tiny to provide much warmth. “I’m…I just…” I sit forward, wanting out, wanting to confess everything. “When Jax was sick and having a time of it, we all dissipated.”

Mom nods, because she was there. She knows how much it affected me, all the times I came home to sprawl on her couches and read or listen to old music while she painted, anything to get away from the sorrow clogging my chest and eating at my skin.

“Your art,” I continue through numb lips, “is solely yours. But I’m part of a group. A cog in a machine.”

“You are not a cog!”

I smile weakly at her instant rise to defend her baby. “It’s not a bad thing, Ma. I like being part of something.” With a sigh, I rub my hair and try to ease the tension riding me. “But sometimes, I can’t help thinking about the future. As much as I love my music, I can’t picture hauling my seventy-year-old ass on stage like the Stones do.”

“Hey!” Mom swats my arm. “Old people can kick ass too, you know.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” I say, laughing. “Or maybe I do. It’s exhausting, you know. Getting on that stage and doing what we do. I’m thirty-one in a few months, and already I find it draining.”

Mom sniffs, slightly mollified.

“I don’t want my entire existence to be dependent on my ability to make music.” I lean in, gripping the edge of the table as her eyes widen. “And it is, right now. I either play or I’m…It’s like I’m not truly here. I don’t…”

Frustrated, I break off and rub my hands over my face.

“You’ve finally discovered you need more,” Mom says.

Hunched over the table, I look at her with a helplessness that has my jaw clenching. But I nod. “When the stage lights go off, when the music stops, what am I? Where do I go?”

God, I hate this. I’ve been avoiding these very thoughts for years. They’ve built up like water against a dam, rising and rising. My body breaking down and weakening is the final straw. I can’t hide anymore.

Mom sees it. She knows me too well. And her hand grabs mine again. Gently. Does she know I hurt? I don’t ask; I can barely hold her gaze as it is.

“I know I said art was the expression of my soul.” Mom shakes her head, a wrinkle forming between her brows. “But that’s not the entire picture. Art, the soul, it needs to be fed. And I know you’ll accuse me of being hokey…”

“Me? Never,” I tease weakly.

“But love is what feeds me. Your father, you, the family—although not so much Uncle Jay and Aunt Lydia.”