He drew in a breath and took my hand. “See.” He moved it to his leg, below the knee. Through the fabric I felt wood and metal joints.
I nodded. “See,” I said, and moved his hand to the hollow of my chest. “I understand broken.”
Something had to change, I knew it. I couldn’t be alone the way I’d tried to be, pretending such self-sufficiency, pretending that there was a prosthetic for my heart. Finlay’s hand uncurled against my chest.
I went with him that night, to the rough room he rented, bare and impersonal apart from a pencil drawing of a Highland cottage tacked above the bed.
“It’s okay,” he whispered once, mostly to himself, and then pulled me close and didn’t speak again. We didn’t have to open our eyes, we didn’t have to give excuses or explanations, we just had to be there. We fumbled nervously, until he lay back on the bed with me on top, until my hands at his waistband found instead the leather strap holding on his prosthesis. He stopped and pushed me away.
“It’s fine. You can leave.” He rolled away. “I shouldn’t have expected…”
I rested a hand on his back. My lips still tingled. “You didn’t.” And he didn’t. He didn’t ask me up to his room. Neither did he stop me when I followed him up.
But he said, “I can’t help but think of tomorrow.” Beneath my fingers, his back tensed. “You called me ‘impulsive,’ but nothing done on impulse is without consequences.”
Consequences.
My hand fell away.
Consequences, like the ones Mother and Madame fell with. One chose her child over her art, the other, art over her child. If I learned anything from them—from the years abandoned by my mother and from the summer watching her friend stagnate behind a desk—it was that a woman couldn’t have both family and passion.
“I wasn’t thinking.” I pushed my skirt down over my knees.
“Tomorrow you will. You’ll wake up then and you’ll wish that you were never here with me tonight.”
I realized then that he wasn’t talking about the same consequences. I worried that one night could change my fate; he worried that one night wasn’t enough to change his.
I reached across and took his hand. “Sometimes tonight is more important than all the tomorrows that come after. It lets us face the morning.”
He turned back, his eyes black pools. “Stay?”
Half undressed, we lay in the dark and talked as the shadows lengthened. How his girl turned away from him and towards his brother. How his sister just turned away. Impulsive moments that had changed his course. I told him I knew. I’d lost my mother to her restless dreams, I’d lost my father to his heartbreak, and, now, I’d lost Luc, the only person who truly knew me. And, though I knew that life was full of loss, the little girl in me couldn’t help but feel left behind.
When the moonlight came through the window, across my bare legs, across his unbuttoned shirt, he sighed. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. It isn’t right, is it, for me to take advantage of you and your kindness. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” I rested my head on his chest. “Sometimes we just don’t want to feel alone.”
He exhaled and my hair stirred. “I never used to feel so alone.” He shifted on the bed and I could hear the fabric of his trousers catch on the prosthesis. “But then your best pal dies, and then what?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “And if you don’t know whether he’s dead, is that worse? Or have you saved yourself knowing?”
“Oh, lass.” He drew a hand through my hair. “I don’t know which the blessing is.”
“That’s why I draw.” I caught his hand. “It’s me reaching out to the world. Behind all of this—the lies, the loss, the loves lost along the way—there’s still beauty. Color, lines, perfect shapes. When I draw, it’s me telling them I understand.”
“You told me you paint France.”
“The most beautiful place in the world.”
And, as we fell asleep, he sighed, and said, “Not anymore.”
—
That one desperate, fumbling night was our introduction, and the days after were the belated getting to know each other. He let me draw him with his trouser legs pushed up, over his wooden leg lashed to the smooth stump, and somehow that felt more intimate than any lovemaking could.
Finlay became my anchor, the one mooring me to real life. At the School of Art, all was imagination. A woman wasn’t just a woman under our brushes; she was a queen, a goddess, a sylph. Of course we learned the basic techniques, those shapes and lines that always made me think of shadows beneath the old chestnut tree, but, after our first years, we were meant to aspire to more. Everyone innovated. They took those lines and curved them, shaded them, twisted them, until they were anything but basic.
