A Five-Minute Life

For the next twenty minutes, I attacked the canvas with different colors, using drips, or swipes, or handprints. Letting the paint speak for me. A Jackson Pollock-like mess of pure emotion. I cranked my music up higher, let the paint flow as it would, an extension of me.

Purple that wept for my parents.

A snake of black that might suffocate me back into amnesia.

Yellow for the hope that it wouldn’t ever again.

And swirls of paint, a riot of color for all that I felt inside me. For Delia and Rita. And for Jimmy. For freedom on the other side of these walls and a life I might have with him if we were brave enough to explore all that lay between us.

He is so much more than he knows.

I sat back on my heels, paint smearing my clothes and my palms covered in yellow. I wiped a sweaty lock of hair off my forehead with the back of my hand and studied what I’d done.

It was a pretty, messy, chaotic painting, reflecting all that was inside me… and going nowhere.

I should have painted another pyramid.

A tomb.

Chapter 24

Jim

My shift started with a spill of maple syrup in the dining room. Minor catastrophes continued through lunch and I was kept busy for hours. My thoughts were on Thea every other minute.

“She’s in the rec room,” Rita said as she rushed by me in the hallway, as if reading my mind. “Can you check on her?”

Thank you, Rita.

“Sure.”

In the rec room, Thea crouched over a canvas, drizzling yellow paint on it with her hands. She worked feverishly, as if someone were timing her. It was a beautiful mess of big bold splashes of color, spilling over the sides of the canvas and onto the floor.

Her gaze flicked to me as I approached, then back to the paint. Sweat glistened on her chest and made her little necklace with the pale green stone stick to her skin.

“No more painter’s block,” she said.

“I can see that.”

“This is what I feel, Jimmy,” she said, swiping her hands, covered with yellow paint, across the top. “And this little canvas is the sanitarium. It can’t contain me.”

She gave her painting a final swipe, then rose to her feet. We stood, side by side, over it.

“Have you ever been to New York City?” she asked.

“No.”

“Me neither. I always wanted to, ever since I was a kid. I want to see the lights of Times Square. I want to go to the top of the Empire State Building and see how the world looks from up there. I want to walk in Central Park and eat a hot dog from a street vendor. I want all that and I don’t want to wait.”

“Thea…”

She turned to face me. “I wanted this before the accident. That’s always been my vision of life. But I was put on pause for two years and the vision kept growing. Outgrowing me. The life I’d had while I was away has been building up, and I’m going to burst if I don’t live it.”

“I want it for you, too.”

“You do?”

“But I think you should wait a little longer and see—”