Twenty-Five
Meg woke in the pitch dark. There was a half moment of sea-legs confusion before she made sense of her surroundings. She was in her bed at the inn, still fighting the drunkenness and leaning toward hungover. The clock read three fifteen a.m. She tried to fall back to sleep, but instead, her brain began a comprehensive list of her failures: She’d blown her shot at kicking Vance’s ass on the courts. She’d lost her chance at finding solace in Ethan’s arms. And to boot, inspiration refused to strike on the fence that lurked out there in the night, mocking her with its blank pickets.
Annie snored softly in the other bed, and Meg concentrated on listening to her friend’s measured breathing. The sound helped her relax. As she walked the bridge between wakefulness and sleep, her mind found its way out of the maze of self-pity.
Seventy percent asleep, her imagination threw splashes of color onto the empty fence. Her freely associating brain erased them, tried geometric shapes, and rejected those, too. A dream paintbrush laid down a realistic, pebble-filled shoreline that blended into the landscape. A sort of trompe l’oeil that blurred the lines between art and reality. A bucket of water washed it off. Next, her imagination painted a Rousseau-reminiscent fantasy, set in the rainforest rather than the jungle. Then an expressionist design: jolts of color like street-art graffiti that came to life with its vibrant story. It wasn’t fully formed, but she felt the muse within her stir, and the seed of that idea soothed her to sleep.
She woke to the jingle of her ringer. Jumping on it before Annie startled—of which there was little likelihood, with the way she was snoring—Meg answered.
“Hello?” Her greeting came out raw and scratchy. Her head pounded.
“Who is this?” the voice on the line demanded.
“Mom? It’s me. You called me,” Meg clarified.
Dina Bloomberg softened. “Oh! I thought you were a man. You sound terrible.”
Meg squinted into the light that poured into the room. What time was it? Before she could orient herself, her mother barreled forward. “I saw your post last night and I thought to myself, Dina Bloomberg, your daughter is having a crisis. And when a girl has a crisis, she needs her momma.”
Meg rolled her neck to the side and felt a sharp pinch. Stars danced in front of her eyes. The embers of a dream flared up in her head. Something about the fence. Had she come up with the idea? Had her dream offered her the solution and now all she had to do was reach back into her memory and—
Dina said, “And I hope you brought a shovel to the beach this morning.”
Meg sat upright in bed. “What?” She was fully awake.
“According to your post, yesterday you drank margaritas. And today you were going to the beach to—”
Oh no . “Hold on.” Oh please, please, please , Meg thought. Her fingers stamped at her phone, and she pulled up the post. Oh no, no, no, no, no. The cruise ship plan. The post read, Tomorrow taking a big shit on the beach . Drinking and texting. Surely there was a lesson there.
“And don’t get me started on that video. What are you and Annie getting up to?”
“Hold, please.” Again, Meg switched to her post. The camera swayed as Meg videoed from her barstool. In the glass blender, a peeled cucumber stood upright, with two small tomatoes cradling the base—until the machine whirred the contents into mush. “Blend it up. Vroom!” Meg’s voice slurred through her laughter.
“Mom.” Her stomach churned like the contents of the blender. “I have to go. But I’m fine. I’m glad you called.”
“I can come home. If you need me, I’ll come home.”
“That’s sweet, Mom. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.” Of course, she did want her mom to come home and comfort her and hug her and tell her she’d always suspected that Vance was a horse’s ass and that one day she would find love again and that her whole future was promising because she was strong and smart and resourceful.
But she also wanted her mom to live the life she’d never gotten to experience when she was nursing Dad at the end while raising Meg and working full-time. At last, her mom was living the life she dreamed of. Dina Bloomberg might be thousands of miles away, sleeping in a village where the nearest cell tower was an hour’s ride through the jungle on an ancient motorcycle, but…
“Wait a minute. How are you getting through? Where are you?”
“It’s a funny story, actually. So, months ago, Annie friended me. You know I get online whenever I can. And I’ve been following her story. All that pickleball. It looked like so much fun I thought I’d try it.” Her mom paused before the big reveal. “I’m on a pickleball vacation in Arizona! What a hoot. I am an absolute addict.”
At last, Meg’s smile broke through her hungover haze. Only one person in the world had worse hand-eye coordination than Meg Bloomberg, and her name was Dina Bloomberg.
“So how ’bout it? Should I come back to Seattle? I can hit it around with you.”
Meg hated to get her hopes up. Since her dad’s death, her mom’s behavior had been so unpredictable—one day she might say she would return to Seattle; the next morning she would change her mind. But if she did come…
Meg visualized hitting a pickleball to her mom. Dina would smack it into the net or send it over the fence or whiff it altogether. It sounded wonderful.
“I’d like that, Mom,” she said. “I’d really like that.”
·····
How many people had already seen that post? While Annie was still downed like pre-Roosevelt, old-growth forest, Meg deleted both posts. Annie would be none the wiser—unless one of the 341 people who’d liked the post had already reposted it. But that was unlikely, right? Next, Meg waffled for several minutes before opening the string of texts from Ethan. Her stomach twisted the moment she read the first sentences. What happened? Did I say something that upset you? I thought we were…
How dare he pull the innocent act? She tossed her phone onto the bed.
Meg’s temples pulsed. Her dreams were spinning away from her. She inhaled, a long, slow pull through the nose, and stilled her mind. When she felt at odds like this, she tried to focus on the things she could control.
The fence. That was one thing entirely in her own control.
With heroic effort, Meg dragged herself from her bed and hobbled out to the yard. She surveyed the task before her. You can do this , she reminded herself, and gathered her brushes and paint from the shed.
She sat on the cool grass and leaned back on her palms. Squinting at pickets, Meg concentrated until her eyeballs began to jitter. In this outwit-and-outlast fence vs. Meg contest, the fence was winning. The damn thing had not suggested a single idea of its own. Beside her, the hardware from the dismantled gate lay on the lawn. Mayumi had given her free rein to do as she pleased, and although she still did not have a vision for the big picture, she knew it had been necessary to remove the concept of an enclosure from her makeshift canvas. Now that the gate was out of the way, maybe an idea would strike her.
“How’s it going?”
Meg sprang to her feet to find Mayumi ambling across the lawn. “It’s going,” she said, feeling like she’d been caught tiptoeing through the back door after curfew. Here she was, entrusted with this worthwhile project, and she had made not an iota of progress. Unless she counted taking apart the gate. Which, really, was more about destroying than creating. Essentially, she was making backward progress.
Mayumi sidled up alongside her. Hands clasped behind her back, Mayumi nodded at the blank fence. “When I’m stuck on something,” she said, “I like to step away from it for a bit. Then come back to it fresh.”
Meg didn’t have the wherewithal to reveal that she had stepped away from it plenty, to climb a mountain and be inspired by nature, but that sidetrack had resulted in nothing more than a cringeworthy morning after and some misguided drunk texting. Mayumi said, “Or sometimes a cup of tea helps. How about it?”
“All right.” Grateful, Meg followed Mayumi up the porch steps and into the bright kitchen. When the green light appeared on the electric kettle, they chose tea from a tin and took the steaming mugs to the table. Meg’s eyes followed Mayumi’s gaze to the evacuation photos and documents displayed beneath the glass.
Mayumi swallowed her tea, her eyes rife with emotion. She tapped the photo of the mother and her preteen daughter. “You are probably about my grandmother’s age in this photo. And my mom was only eleven.” Meg glanced up in surprise. “My grandmother died not so long ago at a hundred and three, can you believe? I would think it would be hard not to be angry, but instead, she channeled her energies into higher purposes. After the war, she became an activist.”
Meg looked at the girl in the photo and saw traces of Mayumi’s chin and lips in the image. “So your family came back here, after the war?”
“It was our home. No matter what. You can’t just give up on something because parts of it caused you pain. If it’s worth it, then you work on it. That’s how my mom felt about this home. She wanted to bring it back to life.” Meg blew on her tea, and then, together, they sipped. When the cups were empty of tea, they sat longer.
“My friend Marilyn says you are a pretty good pickleball player.”
Did everybody on this island know one another? “I wouldn’t say I’m good. I’m working on it.” Meg shrugged.
“I’m sure you’re being modest.”
Letting out an awkward chuckle to cover her discomfort, Meg muttered, “Thanks,” but she did not feel like a good player. Or a good painter. Or a good anything right now.
When the guest bell at the front desk dinged, Mayumi excused herself. Meg wandered back outside. Stalling, she plopped down on the grass and scrolled through her photos, viewing different angles of the fence and noting how it settled with the landscape. This time, when she arrived at the photo of her failure face, she saw something new.
Behind Meg’s misery in that very same photo, the courts were alive with the vibrant joy of pickleball—players consumed with passion, absorbed by the moment, and carefree.
Like Rooster had suggested, she tried now to connect to the memory, not of her own pained expression, but of the photo’s background players. To remember the way she felt on the courts when she hit a great shot, or when she won a point. When she played well, everything else faded. Pickleball was rejuvenating. It was thrilling. It was downright fun. And, like Marilyn had said, wasn’t that the point?
She had forgotten fun. Forgotten that one could have a fresh start. Six months ago, she’d never imagined that she would be here on Bainbridge, playing pickleball and working on a legit painting project. But here she was, doing it, starting anew, making progress—even after her wasted years of marriage and the setback with Ethan. Like forests that burned to make way for the green saplings; like Mayumi, who had preserved her family’s painful history beneath the glass and still rebuilt her home into a place of warmth and welcome.
Hard things happened, but good things could come of them.
When Meg glanced up again at the blank pickets, the tabula rasa no longer caused her angst. The empty canvas was a fresh start. She closed her eyes and inhaled, allowing the crisp scent of grass and the cool air on her cheeks to wake her senses. Meg pictured the fence on the canvas of her eyelids. She could sense the muse’s approach. Inspiration knocked. Meg let the door swing open.
In her mind’s eye, she grabbed hold of the phantom mural before it got away. Her brain sharpened the images and shaped her vision. With each stroke of her dream brush, the colors grew bolder until her vision solidified, and the mural appeared as clearly and completely as if she stood beside it. Invigorated by her creative awakening, she let a smile twitch in the corners of her lips.
Mayumi had given her a gift today. She knew exactly what she would paint.