Lay Your Hands On Me

 The room smelled of floor wax, crushed carnations, and the unmistakable, flat dryness of air that had passed through too many aluminum ducts. It was three in the morning—that dead-water hour when the hospital seemed to contract, the corridor lights buzzing faintly behind wire-reinforced glass, the rubber soles of a nurse’s clogs squeaking three turns away down the linoleum labyrinth like a distant mouse.

Julian didn’t look at the monitor. He knew the rhythm of it. The machine was letting out a drone of beeps—a flat, electronic counting that had nothing to do with time as he’d known it for the past forty-eight hours, and everything to do with the stubborn machinery of Clara’s lungs trying to find a door that wouldn’t open.

He sat by her just so he could lay his hands on her one last time.

Her hand was on the white quilt, palm up, fingers curled slightly like a fern frond that had stopped unfolding before the rain. It didn't look like Clara’s hand. Clara’s hands had been perpetually dry from clay and turpentine, the skin beside her thumbnails forever stained a pale, stubborn umber from the burnt sienna she used for old brickwork and shadows. Those fingers had been strong, capable of twisting the lid off a stubborn turpentine jar or holding a #4 filbert brush with the casual grace of someone who didn't know she was being watched.

Now, the skin was translucent, the color of skimmed milk over blue porcelain. The veins stood out like dried lavender stalks under parchment.

He slid his palm against hers. The contrast was ridiculous—his skin large, freckled, still smelling faintly of the motor oil from the truck he’d driven across three states to get here; hers small, cool, feather-light. He laced his fingers between hers, feeling for the familiar heft of her knuckles, but there was nothing to grip anymore. She was leaking away into the pillows.

"You're making that face," she murmured.

Julian blinked. Her eyes hadn’t opened—not really. Just a sliver of gray iris showing beneath lids that looked as though they had been painted with lead-white by someone in a hurry.

"What face?" he asked. His voice was too loud; it grated against the quiet like a shovel on gravel. He cleared his throat, pitched it down. "What face am I making?"

"The one where you look like you’re about to argue with a plumber," she whispered. Her voice was like dry leaves being dragged across concrete. "The heavy one. Don't do that. It ruins the light."

"There isn't any light, Clara. It's three in the morning in a room with twelve-watt fluorescent strips."

"There's light," she insisted, her thumb making a microscopic twitch against his wrist—a ghost of a gesture. "You just have to look at the way it hits the drip stand. It’s cadmium yellow if you squint."

Julian didn't squint. He looked at her mouth. Her lips were dry, split slightly at the corner where she always bit them when she was trying to get the perspective on a gable-end right. He reached out with his free hand—the left one, clumsy and thick-jointed—and touched her cheek. The stubble of his own jaw scratched against her temple as he leaned down, burying his face in the space between her ear and the crook of her shoulder where she still smelled, faintly, impossibly, of lavender water and cedar shavings.

"Don't go yet," he said into her collarbone.

"I’m not going anywhere," she lied. Her breathing hitched—a little wet catch that made the monitor skip a beat, the green line stuttering like a hiccup. "I’m right here under the sideboard. Looking for the tube of flake white you lost in seventy-eight."

"That was seventy-nine," he muttered, closing his eyes. "And it wasn't flake white. It was zinc."

"It was white. Everything was white that summer. That blinding, terrible white off the salt flats."

"You loved the salt flats."

"I loved the Dodge," she corrected, her voice fading slightly on the tail of the sentence. "The Dodge had a heater that worked if you kicked the dashboard twice."

They had met in a basement studio on 4th Street thirty-four years ago, back when the city still smelled of roasted coffee from the harbor and coal smoke from the brownstones. Julian had been twenty-six, wearing a surplus Navy pea coat that was three sizes too big, carrying a portfolio of charcoal sketches that looked like they’d been drawn by a drowning man. Clara had been twenty-four, sitting on an upturned milk crate with a cigarette dangling from her lower lip, wearing a man’s linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up past elbows that were dusted with charcoal dust.

She hadn't looked at his drawings. She had looked at his ears.

"You’ve got Van Gogh ears," she’d said, blowing a thin gray stream of Pall Mall smoke toward the exposed radiator. "Too big for the rest of you. Means you either hear too much or you’re lying about what you heard."

"I don't lie," Julian had said stiffly.

"Everyone lies. The good ones lie with turpentine." She had stood up, wiping her hands on a rag that was stiffer than a shingle, and poked him right in the sternum with a charcoal-blackened finger. "You want the north light? It's forty dollars a month. But you have to sweep the landing on Tuesdays."

He had taken the room. He hadn't painted a damn thing for three weeks because he spent the entire time watching her shoulder blades move beneath that linen shirt as she stretched canvas over cedar frames she’d built herself with a hand saw and a mouth full of carpet tacks.

Now, those same shoulder blades were pressed flat against the mattress—two dry ridges under a thin cotton gown that smelled of autoclaved soap.

"Do you remember the porch in Maine?" Julian asked. He needed her to stay here, in the room, with him. If she drifted back to seventy-eight or the salt flats or wherever it was her mind was quietly packing its bags for, he’d be left alone with the monitor.

"Which porch?" Her eyelids fluttered. "The one with the wasps?"

"The one where the floorboards had those big knot-holes. We dropped the wedding ring through the southeast corner while we were drinking that cider."

"We didn't drop it," she corrected, a tiny, dry rattle of a laugh catching in her throat. "You dropped it because you were trying to show off how fast you could skin a mackerel with a pocketknife."

"It was a very nice mackerel."

"It was greasy. And the ring was brass anyway. We bought it at the five-and-dime in Ellsworth for four dollars."

"It was gold-plated," Julian said stubbornly.

"Brass, Julian. It turned your finger green for three weeks. You looked like you’d been poisoned by an apothecary."

He smiled against her hair. Her hair was thin now, soft as thistle down, but it still had that peculiar, stubborn wave at the nape of the neck that no amount of hospital pillows could quite flatten out. He remembered washing it in the kitchen sink of that house in Burlington, using the spray nozzle while she cursed because the water was either scalding or freezing with no middle ground. He remembered the soap getting into her eyes and her swearing she’d never let him touch her head again—and then five minutes later, sitting on the edge of the clawfoot tub with a towel around her shoulders, letting him comb it out strand by strand while the light through the frosted window turned the color of weak tea.

"Clara?"

"Hmm?"

"The sink is still leaky."

A pause. The monitor went beep... beep... beep... steady as an old clock in an empty hallway.

"Did you call the plumber?"

"I couldn't find one who knew how to pack a washer. They just want to replace the whole brass assembly now. Everything’s modular. Nothing has any grain to it anymore."

"Throw it out then," she whispered. Her fingers gave his a pathetic little squeeze—just enough to remind him she was there, anchored by skin and bone to a world she was slowly losing interest in. "Put in a pump. Or go down to the creek. We don't need pipes."

"We live on the third floor, Clara."

"Details," she muttered. "You were always too fussed about details. A painting doesn't need every shingle on the roof. It just needs the weight of the roof."

Julian looked up. On the wall opposite the bed, past the plastic tray with its congealing cup of orange gelatin and the paper cup of ice chips, was a square of white plaster where the sunlight—now turning the pale, greasy grey of dawn—was beginning to make a hard-edged shape against the baseboard.

He thought of all the canvases they’d hauled around in the back of that old Dodge—the ones left in rented rooms in Providence, the ones traded to dentists for bridge-work in Vermont, the ones stacked three-deep against the damp stone walls of the cellar in upstate New York like old window sashes. Most of them had her name in the corner in that sharp, angular script she used before her wrists started giving out. C. Vance. Not Clara. Just C. Like she was trying to hide herself inside the alphabet.

"You were the better one," he said quietly.

Her hand went still in his. The tiny twitch in her thumb stopped.

"Don't start that," she said, her voice dropping an octave, losing its dry rasp for a second and sounding—just for a second—like the girl in the basement on 4th Street who had told him his ears were too big. "You had the color sense of a drunken carpenter, Julian, but you knew where the horizon went. Most people put it right in the middle like a fence rail. You knew it belonged down in the dirt where the worms are."

"I wanted it to be big."

"It was big enough."

She let out a long, slow sigh—a sound like air escaping a bicycle tire that had been punctured miles back down the road. Her head rolled three degrees to the left, toward the window where the first truck was shifting gears down on the bypass, its diesel engine roaring in the grey dawn.

The machine didn't change its tune yet. It was still doing its work—pumping, counting, measuring the interval between one heartbeat and the next with the cold impartiality of a pocket watch.

Julian didn't look at the screen. He didn't need to. He knew the weight of her hand in his. It was growing cooler, the heat leaving the knuckles first, then the palm, retreating up the wrist like water sinking into dry sand.

He shifted his weight on the metal-framed chair, his knees cracking in the silence. With his right hand still locked in hers, he reached out with his left and touched the corner of her blanket, smoothing it down until there wasn't a wrinkle left across her chest. He did it slowly, carefully, the way he used to square up a canvas before he put the first coat of gesso on it—making sure the edges were clean, the surface taut, ready for whatever came next.

"Clara?"

The monitor gave a long, wet-sounding click. The green line didn't break—it flattened out into a thread as straight and thin as a pencil mark drawn with a ruler on a brand-new sheet of Strathmore paper.

Julian didn't call the nurse. Not yet.

He kept his hand where it was, his thumb pressed against the blue-veined wrist where the pulse had just finished its last small errand. Outside, the streetlights clicked off one by one along the bypass, and the sky turned that particular shade of pale, cold grey that painters called silver-point, before the sun came up and burned the shadows out of the corners of the room.

"I've got you," he said to the empty pillow. "I've got the light."