Page 44 of We Fell Apart
“I brought it up here,” says Meer, “because it’s like a proper picture of the sister I used to draw when I was a kid. Like he pulled you out of my imagination. But I’m even happier for you to have it.”
“It’s scary how much it looks like me,” I say.
“It really does.” He sits down next to me, stretching his legs out along the floor, his bare feet sandy.
“But is that how you imagined I would look?” I ask. “I’m out on a raft in the middle of the sea.”
“Well, I imagined you happy, actually. But yeah, on boats sometimes. Or on planes or trains. Or in cars.”
“In transit? How come?”
“I’d imagine you coming to visit.” Meer looks at me eagerly. “Do you like it? Do you like the painting? I want you to like the painting.”
“I love it,” I tell him. “But it makes me sad.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s right.”
“What do you mean?”
“About where I am. How it feels in my head.”
Meer nods. “He’s almost always right about that,” he says. “If he’s painting.”
—
Next time weaccess electronics, I email Kingsley. I don’t tell him I saw the portrait, because Meer said he wants to give it to me himself, but I try to put into words how desperately I want to seehim.
Come back soon, if you can.
There’s so much I want to know and understand about you—I want us to know and understandeach other.I’m here in your beautiful home, waiting.
If you won’t be back today, could we talk on the phone? I have mine with me until 2 p.m.
I add my number, but Kingsley answers me fifteen minutes later with an email.
Matilda,
Sadly, I am getting on a plane to Italy right now. My work there will take some time and I will have bad cell service. I hate the phone anyway, so it would be better to write.
I’m very glad you’re here at Hidden Beach. So glad! Really. Please stay as long as you can. Meer loves having you. /K
He’s a busy man, I guess. Artists have to travel—I know that from having lived with so many of them. But couldn’t he spare a day, at least, to come back and meet his daughter before going toItaly?
I want to plead with him, but I’ve already done that. More begging won’t make a difference. He absolutely knows what I want and he’s choosing not to give it.
But I also know he cares, or he wouldn’t have made a portrait of me. He wouldn’t have offered me that painting.
What was it my mother said about him?Strange. Obsessive. Wounded.
The only thing I can think to do is try to make himwantto come back even more than he wants to go to Italy. Kingsley speaks in images, not in emails or phone conversations, so I photograph a page in my sketchbook.
It’s my design for the tentacled chandelier that comes to life to battle Hamlet—the one based on the chandelier in the dining room here at Hidden Beach. In the drawing, the monster is throwing a chair across the room with one arm, wrapping another arm around a table leg, and, with a third, threatening a small female warrior with a mane of dark curls.
Will Kingsley think I’m a terrible artist?
Sure. He might think a thousand rotten things, but he didn’t become a famous artist by being afraid to show people his sketchbook. And I shouldn’t be afraid to show people mine, either. After all, he might look at what I’ve drawn and see his daughter, in his dining room, working her imagination on the world he’s built. A person with a mind that’s alive.
