Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

The door closed, echoing through the front room. A simple sound, a small sound, it bounced from uncurtained windows, off hardwood floors, and through the cathedral space between open beams.

Davis sat in a hard-backed chair in the middle of the nearly empty room. The LPN’s footsteps clipped down the path as she walked to the street. The rain tapped on the glass, asking to be let in. He breathed deeply, smelling the happy, familiar aromas of a new house—fresh paint and sawdust—mixed with interloping scents of alcohol and death.

He turned from the vista of rain-clad Seattle, the chair scraping on tongue-in-groove. A hospital bed, the room’s only other piece of furniture, stood in the shadows, an unwelcomed guest. Bags hung from gibbets above the occupant. Tubes and fluids flowed into and out of the small woman. Davis turned back to the gloom, choosing the somber over the morbid. He heard Megan’s slow, regular breathing. He closed his eyes and imagined the two of them, not as they were—in an empty house, the veil of death being woven between them with every moment—but as they had been a year before:  up in her apartment on Phinney Ridge, hawthorn trees a pink explosion outside the brownstone window, sun streaming, siamangs at the zoo whooping to the burgeoning day and, beside him, the slow quiet breathing of a Megan still whole, still dreaming. The brightest spot in a bright morning.

Davis looked at the large wall to his left. The lower half was stark and pale, an arc of whiteness, while the upper half was filled with blue and green and gray. Cans and trays and brushes and rollers littered the dropcloth that protected the wood flooring. Shadowy forms were blocked out in the incomplete mural. Sinuous and dark, they chilled him. Megan’s talent would have sent them through a metamorphosis, from Faustian nether-spawn to beautiful forms of light in natural darkness.

Now, they would remain as they were—foreboding, vague—until he found the courage to paint them over, and bury them as well. Davis hid his face in his hands and did not look at anything for a long while.

---

On Megan’s third night home from hospice he awoke, snuffling at the strong smell of fresh paint and turpentine.

Where am I? he thought and then, Oh, yeah, as his brain shifted templates and saw the front room around him, felt beneath him the futon he’d dragged out from the studio.

A sea of moonlight lapped against the hardwood shore. Waves crashed as cars drove by on the still-wet street outside.

Davis reached out to touch the wheel of the hospital bed with a tentative hand.

“Sure you don’t want it upstairs?” the hospice facilitator had asked when Megan came home. “Up in her own room?”

Davis shook his head. “We had just moved in when we had the accident. She only slept up there twice. There’s more of her out here.”  He pointed to the mural. “In that.”

“I see. You designed this place, didn’t you?”  Davis nodded. “It’s beautiful,” she said. Davis looked around at the unfinished interior:  sheetrock walls and plywood flooring. Only the red jatoba floor in the living room and the kitchen’s marble countertops held any semblance of beauty.

“Thanks,” he said.

The portly woman flashed her pleasant smile and walked over to the collection of cans and brushes on the floor. “Megan was the artist of the family?”

Was? he asked himself. “Yes,” he answered aloud. “She was.”

“What was this going to be?”

Davis regarded the half-done mural. “I’m not sure. She never spoke about it. An undersea scene, I’m pretty sure. She loved nature.”

“Such a talent.”

“Yes,” Davis had agreed.

Now, as he lay in the darkness, matching his breathing to his wife’s, the pungency of spilled paint washed over him again.

“Damned cat,” he said, rising to stand. “Hedley, what are you—”

He stared at the figure that stood on the dropcloth, then looked at the bed. Megan lay there still, sleeping her sleep of the dead. Hedley, her huge Himalayan tom, lay snuggled between her arm and the curve of her waist.

Megan stood, too, before her unfinished work, dark and elfin in the moonlight. She was barefoot, and wore the same oversized Greenpeace T-shirt as her brain-dead twin. Her black hair sparkled, star-filled, and in her hand she held a wide, long-handled paintbrush. Davis watched as she dipped into the closed paint can at her feet and pulled across the wide center of the mural in confident, colorless strokes.

Davis stood, mouth slack, throat tight, afraid to dispel the vision. Megan stepped back, inspecting her invisible work and Davis glanced there, too, so real was her manner. When he looked back, she had begun to fade.

An animal sound broke from his throat and his muscles finally heard his brain’s call. He leapt across the room toward the last twinkling of her form, got tangled in the blanket at his feet. Cans crashed and clattered. He hit hard on his side and slid on the dropcloth. He slid through the last vapors of her form, felt an electric chill as his torso passed through her legs. She looked down as if surprised. Davis looked up at her, the same. He reached up, but she was gone.

He spent the rest of the night sitting by her bedside, holding her hand, waiting for the apparition to re-appear.

---

“Dick, I need some more time.”

“Davis, it’s been a month. I mean….”

Davis let the conversation get up and stretch its legs. He let it smoke a cigarette. By the time it came back, Dick’s voice had lost its panicked edge.

“We all understand, of course, how hard this must be on you. It’s just that I’ve been under some pressure.”

“I know,” Davis said.

“The Acton people are breathing down my neck. I told them you’d be back by now.”

“Well, I’m not. And I won’t be. Not for a while yet.”

“But they have revisions. Lots of revisions. They want you involved. They trust you, Davis.”

Davis sighed. “Lester can handle it all, but I’ll double-check his estimates if it will make them feel better. Deal?”

“Great,” Dick said. “Thanks. Oh, do you need anything?”

Davis thought: Aside from a good psychotherapist?

“No,” he said. “Thanks anyway.”  He hung up.

The coffee maker cleared its throat and gurgled. Davis went in, got a cup, and walked back, sipping through the hot, moist steam. He coughed, burning his lips and scalding his hand.

Megan was painting.

Davis put his cup down and walked slowly into the front room. He checked the sleeping Megan as he passed, touched her warmth, saw the slow rise and fall of her breast.

“Hello?” he asked the arrival. No response.

The other Megan dipped her brush again into the closed can. The same can. Royal blue. Davis noted that the can was not in the same place as it had been the night before. It had rolled over toward the window when he had fallen, and now rested near the wall. If this was a mental aberration, it was not a simple repetition of the previous night’s activity. The ghostly Megan returned to the can of royal blue, dipped her brush, and returned to paint the same blank section she’d been working.

Davis did not know what to think. While she had seemed solid enough in the dim moonlight, the slanting sunbeams showed her to be definitely translucent. The light passed through her, and she cast a colored shadow like a stained glass phantom.

“Megan?” Davis said from next to her. He leaned over and looked at her face.

Large dark eyes, small chin, mouth pouting at something she disliked on the wall. She looked past/through/beyond Davis. He shook his head.

“I’m in trouble,” he said, shaking his head.

He leaned close and smelled paint mingled with her gardenia perfume. His eyes swam with tears when he opened them. She stepped forward and he moved aside, unable to think of her as anything but solid flesh, liquid blood. When she vanished, he felt a storm surge relief, followed by a hurricane of guilt.

Later, when she reappeared, he watched her from the kitchen, a tumbler of Scotch in his hand.

“I’m in serious trouble.”

---

She came every handful of hours. No pattern. She never came during the LPN’s visits, a fact that convinced Davis that she was a product of his stressed mind.

She continued to paint the same section, always royal blue. He moved the can during her absences. She found it, even when he took it into another room. He knew it proved nothing about her nature, but used it as a barometer to measure how crazy he was. When Megan’s ghost came in from the bathroom, freshly dipped brush upraised, a stream of silent profanity bubbling from her see-through lips, Davis decided that he was pretty damned crazy.

He heard the sound of the dropcloth crinkling and turned. Hedley sat down on the foggy plastic, tail twitching. Megan stood near him, and Davis felt the hair on his arms stand up as he watched the cat watching the movements of the ethereal woman. Emerald eyes tracked the brush, following it back and forth across the wall. The cat gave a muffled mowl and, when Megan did not respond, he got up and walked away.

“You see her,” he said, open-mouthed. The woman faded. Davis closed his mouth and thought. Hard.

A few minutes later, he was pacing back and forth along the window’s expanse of glass. He sipped from a tumbler, not caring that it was still morning. He looked out at the city on the Sound. His focus shifted, and he caught sight of himself reflected in the pane:  unshaven, drawn, large circles of blue-gray beneath his eyes. Behind him, dimly seen in the struggling sunlight, were a bed-ridden Megan and the half-ellipse of unpainted, unfinished creation she was desperately trying to complete.

He turned, bent, grabbed a screwdriver, and popped the top of the can of royal blue. He took up a brush like the one Megan had been using for the past three days, dipped it as he’d seen her do, stepped to the wall and, with a glance to his wife’s dying body, drew a long, sure swath of color across the blank section of her work.

---

Hedley was sprawled across Megan’s stomach, and Davis was barely able to keep open his eyes. The house was quiet. The brushes all stood ready, sorted by size and stiffness, cans of paint had been grouped by color. A pencil and pad of paper threatened to fall from Davis’ hands to the floor.

Davis did not see her arrive, only looked up to see her there, painting a new section of the mural.

“Damn,” he said and started sketching. She was on to the greens now, blocking out large sections. Davis noted the colors and the areas she used them, building a large paint-by-numbers schematic of the mural in progress. She worked longer this time, using three colors to lay the base of the right half of the blank area. After a quarter hour she stepped back, appeared satisfied, and faded from view.

Davis got to work. Old draftsman’s techniques were resurrected. He sectioned off the mural and began painting. It took him seventy minutes to do what Megan had done in fifteen, but at the end he too stepped back and was satisfied.

The knock on the door was small and timid. Davis answered it and found the hospice facilitator and the LPN.

“Ms. Beekman,” he said as the older woman entered. “Marjorie,” he nodded to the younger.

Marjorie got to work on Megan, emptying bags, filling bags. Beekman walked through the room, looked at the mural, then at Davis.

“I thought Megan was the artist.”

Davis smiled. “She is. Can I get you something to drink?”

Her look of measured appraisal made Davis uncomfortable. “No, thank you,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you about Megan. What are your plans?”

Davis looked at Megan. “I’m not sure. It was hard enough to okay the ventilator being turned off. I’m not ready to think beyond that. I need a little more time,” he said.

“For what?” she asked and pointed to the mural beyond his shoulder. “For that?”

For a brief irrational second Davis thought that Beekman knew about the visitations, suspected something. He realized the absurdity of the notion, saw what she really meant.

“Yes. For that.”

Beekman nodded. “I think I understand. I don’t want to seem cruel. I’m mostly just concerned about you. There’s nothing we can do for Megan anymore. Without nutrition, what’s left of her will soon begin to shut down.”

“Yes,” he said again. “I know that.”

“I’m sorry to be so blunt. I just want you to be prepared.”  She was studying him again. “Are you sleeping?  You look rather pale. I could prescribe something, if you wished.”

“No. Thank you. I’ll get along fine.”

“Very well,” she said. Marjorie had finished with Megan and was gathering up her things. Beekman followed her toward the door, stopped at Megan’s bedside. Davis watched as the older woman put back in place a stray hair that had drifted across Megan’s face.

“It’s good of you to care so much,” Davis told her. Beekman looked at him, unconcerned at his having seen her in a moment of futile tenderness.

“It’s easy,” she said. “Call me if you need anything.”

“I will,” he said.

---

The rest of the blocking went quickly. Davis worked through the night, following the movements of his ghost wife, mimicking them after she had left. As dawn colored the sky above the heights of Queen Anne, Davis stepped out onto the deck.

He inhaled deeply, smelling the salt air. Gulls lofted in the breeze off the Sound and below he heard the preparations of people making their way to work. The neighborhood sloped away beneath him, down to the water. Along the shoreline, skyscrapers marched, their heads lost in the lowering clouds. He saw his office building, topped with green copper, and wondered after Dick and Lester and the Acton project. He looked down at his paint-spattered shirt, at the spectrum of sea-hues on his hands, and shook his head.

“Dick would plotz.”

Hedley mowled and Davis saw Megan’s ghost, a small brush in her hand, working away on one of the shadow shapes that hung like dark angels in the seascape.

Davis swore and went to his pad, trying to reconstruct her moves. “Slow down, Honey. You’re moving too fast.”  She painted on, pulling paint from several cans and daubing it on a plywood palette. Davis felt his heart sink. What had seemed a simple task of follow-the-leader had become a complex dance of color and movement, light and shadow. He put down the pad.

“I can’t follow you. I don’t have a clue what you’re doing.”  Megan painted on.

Hedley stood and stretched, first both front legs, then his hind legs, one at a time. He sauntered over towards Megan’s phantom and attempted to rub his length along her shins. He met no substance, however, and passed right through, but as he did so, Megan stopped and looked down. Davis saw her lips smile and form the cat’s name. She bent and ran fingers across/through Hedley’s back. Davis recalled that first night he’d seen the ghost, how he’d tripped and fallen. He recalled the look on Megan’s face as he slid through her, the look of surprise.

He stepped forward, reaching for her hand. The moment of contact was electric, just as it had been that first night. He felt the barest hint of his hand’s passage through hers, and found himself suddenly looking into the wide, dark eyes of his wife.

“Davis,” she said in her Carolinian drawl. “Wherever have you been?”  Her voice was soft, calm, and the sound of it tightened his throat.

“I’ve missed you,” was all he could find to say.

Several minutes later, they sat on the dropcloth, holding/not holding hands.

“Dead?” she asked again.

Davis shook his head. “Not really.”  Then, “Almost. Come, I’ll show you.”

He took her to the hospital bed, lifted the limp thinness of her body’s hand, brought the two into contact. Megan drew a sharp breath and starry tears welled up in her eyes. A little upside-down v formed between her brows and she took a step back, breaking contact with them both. Davis reached after her, but she recoiled, retreated, faded, vanished.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the empty air. “I’m sorry.”

---

At somewhere near four in the morning, exhaustion crept up behind Davis and struck him with a large, soft hammer. He crumpled and slept. He dreamt of water awash with greens and blues, light shifting above him, deepening to darkness below. He swam, pulling up towards the light, fighting panic. He heard the regular beep-beep of a heart monitor and the click and hiss of a ventilator. He swam, drowning, aching to reach the surface. His limbs became seaweed, his body stone. He sank, unbreathing, unable to struggle towards the life he so desperately desired. His last thought as darkness closed above him was of clouds in a hidden sky.

He woke to a knocking at the front door and Megan walking through the room, arms wide, searching for him. He reached out and touched her hand. She whirled on him, took two steps forward, and entered him entirely. Davis felt a twisting inside him that was not physical. He felt Megan’s arms stretching out through his own, felt her grab control of his body from within. He tried to step back/out/away, but could not. Megan/he took a clumsy step forward, then another.

The knock at the door was repeated. He/Megan turned.

Who is that? she asked.

The nurse, he managed.

Hunh. Megan took him to the mural and picked up a brush. She wiped sleep from his eyes and began collecting paints.

Megan, she’s here to take care of your body.

Let it rot, was the response, and Davis felt the bitterness in her. She cracked open cans of brown and blue paint.

That body may be the only thing keeping you here, he offered. That stopped her. He felt his body sigh. They turned to the door.

Marjorie entered, concerned.

“Is everything all right, Mr. Halvonic?”  Davis/Megan nodded and walked back to the wall, hesitating as they passed her body.

Am I still in there? Davis heard her wonder.

No, there’s nothing of you left in there, he told her.

She grabbed more cans and opened them:  creamy white, yellow, olive, carmine. Colors flew, blended. Davis saw the artist’s mind from the inside. Visions swam through imagined seas. She saw them there, hanging in space, and drew them forth with color. She built from shadow to light, from shape to form, while Davis marveled. Seals and dolphins leapt from the water, sparkled in sunshine. He heard the cries of distant whales and somewhere amidst the ebb and flow of creation, he heard Marjorie call his name.

Words came to him, Marjorie’s words, from afar. Only part of him heard.

“It’s started,” she said. “Her kidneys are starting to fail.”  He did not react, was not allowed, could hardly had he wanted to. The visions and art before him consumed his mind, but somewhere, deep within, part of himself—and part of Megan, too—showed gritted teeth.

Davis was enrapt as he watched his hands paint creatures of substance with color and brush. He felt, too, a rising tide of sadness, a building dissatisfaction. It roared in the distance, cried, shrieked; a selkie’s keening, a mermaid’s wail. More brushes came out, more pots came open. Hues spilled across the wall, covering others. Through tears both Megan’s and his own he/they painted. Fighting off exhaustion, they painted. A sense of urgency, of peril, pursued them. A lioness stalked the living room.

They painted, each knowing the other’s thoughts, until there was no Davis, no Megan, only Megan/Davis, an aggregate being with only one desire in life:  to paint, to realize, to finish.

Hours passed, night fell. The world was the smell of paint, the sweep of colors, the drip of sweat, and the sound of slow, regular breathing. Time blurred as did their vision; days, hours, lost shape, flowed, became one. And when they finished, Davis wept.

---

Davis sat in the straight-backed chair next to the bed. He held Megan’s hand. Outside, the sun broke through the covering clouds and crept into the room. It fed the room with warmth and velvet brightness. It grew and sharpened until it blazed, leaving ghosts to ply shadows made dark by its presence. It warmed Davis’ toes and burned the fog from his mind.

The mural glowed. A depth of water presented itself, fathoms from top to bottom. The water’s under-surface shimmered like silvery scales of some vast, glassy fish, while the deeps hoarded light, letting none escape. A shaft of painted sunlight pierced the water, firing black to green, green to blue, blue to yellow, yellow to white. The column of light descended, to be swallowed by the dark. Up from the gloom swam a woman, long tresses of shadow streaming behind her. Kelp hands strained after her, but she escaped them, her arm upreaching. Down from above swam a man—no god, just man—his flesh pale and thin. A cloud of tiny fish swirled above him, guarding.

The two met in light, their hands so brightly lit as to become one. No whales. No seals or dolphins. Just sea, light, and the two.

Davis looked down at Megan’s thin hand, at the dark skin drawn tight along her wrist and fingers. The hand was cold, had been so a while.

Still, he held it, and would hold it for some few hours more before he could bear to let it—and Megan—go. But as he looked at the mural, at the realization of her final vision, he knew that now, finally, he could.