The windows and doors are wide open like he usually leaves them, letting in the rain-cooled air and the ocean breeze. I hear music playing inside on the stereo in the living room, not too loudly but enough that he probably didn’t hear me pulling up in the cab or he might’ve come to answer the door already.
I stand in the doorway, looking into the living room through the screen, but Luke’s nowhere to be found. I knock lightly and wait. He never comes. Finally I open the screen door and let myself inside, feeling a little weird about it but knowing that Luke doesn’t mind and might even complain to me if he found out I stood out here and didn’t let myself in.
Unless he has a girl in there … No, I don’t even know why I thought that—Luke doesn’t seem the type.
“Luke?” I call out in a normal tone, walking through the living room. I set my purse down on the recliner as I walk by and slip down the hallway in my flip-flops.
A shadow moves along the wall from the room at the farthest end of the hall where Luke keeps his paintings. I step up to the open door to see him inside, wearing just a pair of running shorts, a paintbrush in one hand; a large canvas with familiar scenery stands nearly finished in front of him on an easel. There is paint everywhere—it looks and smells like fresh paint—even on Luke. A few splatters of green and yellow and brown are smeared across his shoulders. Paint streaks run down the backs of his hands as one moves furiously over the canvas; the other hangs at his side, his strong fingers arched. There’s paint on his muscled calves, clinging to his leg hairs. Little glass jars filled with paint are set on the floor beneath the easel. One has been knocked over, a puddle of blue pooling near Luke’s bare feet.
To see him standing there like this, I don’t just see a guy in front of a painting. I see a broken heart in front of a memory. As I study the scenery being created by his brush I quickly begin to realize where I’ve seen it before. At the community center. The enormous painting of the sheer rock wall covered by green that seemed to reach into the sky forever. A valley below, shadowed ominously, beautifully, by the rock around it. The painting I named the Bottom of the World. I wonder what Luke calls it.
My eyes move slowly about the room, the overcast light bathing the other paintings in a somber ambiance, most of which are of mountains and cliffs and the sky and the ocean seen only from above. But most of all, there are paintings of the Bottom of the World. Different sizes. Different angles. Different viewpoints. Some with sunlight beaming in thick, bright rays. Some with yellow trees instead of green. Some with fog. Some with rain. But all of them of the Bottom of the World.
This place, wherever it is it, holds a painful memory for Luke, and it tears me up inside to know that he’s still trapped there, that no matter how much he paints it, or how hard he tries to perfect it, it won’t relent and give him the closure he seeks. That’s what I see as I look at him; that’s what I feel.
With his back to me, I wonder if he even knows that I’m standing here, but he’s working on that canvas with so much passion and intensity that at first I can’t bear to interrupt him.
Then I see his strong shoulders rise and fall seconds later, just as his paintbrush falls away from the canvas and rests in his hand down at his side. I sense he knows now that I’m here, but he has yet to turn and face me.
“Why didn’t you tell me,” I say softly, “about your brother’s death?” Tears begin to well up in my eyes, already taking on his pain, but I choke them back.
“Because these two weeks were supposed to be for you,” he says in a quiet voice, still with his back to me. Thunder rumbles amid the gray, cloud-covered sky outside. “I wanted it to be special.”
With my heart steadily breaking and filling up with guilt, I step into the room and approach him, trying to hold down my tears.
“But, Luke … it was special. Everything about being here with you has been … It’s been more than I ever imagined it could be.”
“It wouldn’t have been if I’d laid my problems in your lap, Sienna. I didn’t want that. I just wanted you to have a good time. And because—”
He stops.
He still hasn’t turned around, and as I draw closer I hear tears in his voice—faint, but I hear them as clearly as I hear my own—and they cut off what he had wanted to say.
I lay my hands on his shoulders from behind, carefully at first, not sure if he’s in the frame of mind for such comforts, and when he doesn’t reject me, I lay my palms flat against his skin, moving them down the length of his arms, before wrapping them around his waist from behind and resting the side of my face against his warm back.
Then suddenly, as if human touch has triggered a side of him he’s been keeping down for such a long time, Luke falls to the floor, sitting on his bottom with his knees bent, and he lets the tears roll right out of him. His strong hands grip mine around his waist as I go down with him. One fierce sob rattles uncontrollably through his body, and that’s all it takes to make my own tears rush from my eyes, causing my vision to blur. I hold him as tight as I can from behind, wanting to wrap him up within my arms and hold him here forever, but his strength is more palpable than mine, his hands gripping the tops of my fingers, pressing my arms against his hard body with so much force.
He turns around to see me, his hands touching the sides of my face, and I don’t care that I might become a canvas too. I never want him to move them away. He looks deeply into my eyes, his filled with moisture and emotion, my cheeks warm beneath his hands. “I didn’t want you to go, Sienna,” he says and another repressed sob fights its way through his chest. His hands tighten on my cheeks as he holds my fixed gaze. “I wanted to tell you the truth, to make you understand, but—”