Cleaning Kattar’s apartment takes less time than expected. I always forget he’s so much more put together than I am. 

For all his childish pranks, and bad-boy fashion, you’d expect him to be the kind of person who has dirty laundry scattered every which way, hanging over chairs and in great, stinking mountains on the floor, but the empty place is immaculate.

We change the linen - clean the bathroom - which is dustier than it is dirty, working in relative silence. Mrs. Moon is certain, at this point, that something is wrong - something beyond the obvious. I watch the gears churning in her head, behind the pretty mask slowly slipping into a picturesque frown, furrowed with worry, but she doesn’t say anything, for my sake.

When there’s nothing else to do she insists on washing what little laundry there is, weeks old, and musty with the scent of aged sweat, but since that will take a while, she suggests I head home, and I’m grateful for the bailout. My face burns up to my ears. I shove my mittened hands deep into the pockets of my trenchcoat, bidding her goodbye, and make my way out into the snow. I feel her gaze shining down on me like a candle in the window until I turn the corner out of sight, but I don’t look back.

It’s only 5:30 when I get home. Kattar is still in surgery, so he won’t have seen the flowers just yet.

I’m tempted to go back to the peonies.

The painted ones call to me from the canvas like the living ones did at the florist's shop. They’re almost perfect, but I know good and well there is no such thing as a “perfect” piece of art. I’ll probably just ruin it by trying to add something else.

As a countermeasure against the mistake, I lead my body into the kitchen and set a kettle to boil for some tea. That done, I return to the living room in search of a clean canvas.

Nothing clean, canvas or not, is to be found in that quarter. Tripping over a disassembled folding chair, I head upstairs to interrogate the closet.

The door sticks, gummy paint clinging like glue to the frame. I manage to jiggle it free, and it swings open with such violence that I have to jump forward to keep it from smacking into the trashbag behind the door.

There I find a row of canvases arranged neatly on the grated metal shelf, tie-dyed with big globs of paint in suspended animation that opted against joining their brethren in the dizzy red giants and crescent moons on the carpet.

The first two canvases are largely invisible, draped from head to foot in the folds of my blood-red dress slipping rakishly from her hanger. I shy the skirt to one side with my shoulder and take one canvas in each hand. The dress gives up any attempt at living upright and slips to the floor in a sanguine pile, so vivid, that it seems to leach its color into the walls and bleed on the carpet.

The only light in the closet comes from the dim LED bulbs oozing their way in, half-heartedly, from the bedroom as if they think they have something better to do. My eyes scrounge about in the black until they can make out the details of each piece. The first is a half-finished acrylic, lackluster, and smutty, the other, the original ‘Damsel in the Red Dress,” weeping in repulsive splendor.

I run one finger lightly over the dehydrated emotions, scabbed onto the canvas.

It’s hard to believe anyone wanted this - that it went as far as it did. Won anything. My pretty pity party.

The Damsel doesn’t stare back at me like the flowers do, like the sun splattered on the ceiling. She ignores everyone, self-absorbed, in her own little world, staring into the glass, with her head down, wine dribbling over her fingers, and soaked into the bodice of that pretty red dress, she was so proud of - staining like nobody’s business.

I almost forget I’ve moved on - that I’m not going back to that black hole. For one horrible moment, the painting is yesterday, instead of 8 months ago, and the promise to come out of the dark and try to start living again is scratched out of the sand. Kattar won’t be coming to save me this time. I stand alone as the singular point.

Oil and water. The darkness starts to push the light back out under the door, resenting life’s advance on its age-old domain - every moment I spend in this closet, with the red-hot canvas burning my hands.

The kettle whistling from the kitchen breaks me out of my trance. I need a time-out. 

Leaving the paintings where I left them, I force myself down the stairs and into my steamy kitchen - set the tea to steep - grab the two-week-old milk from the back of the fridge. 

But even as I do, the painting seems to glide into my field of view, ghosts of Tragedy, at the edge of my peripheral, though I pretend I don’t see them, and imagine, I can ignore the way my hair stands on end.

I age backward and forward through time. Too gray. Too raw. I just want to go to sleep, but I have to call Kattar when he gets out of surgery at 6:30. 

Time moves at half speed, just to spite me.

*

 “Did you like the peonies?” The voice says, with an air of energy and brightness, but the tone rings artificial, even to me. Kattar must be able to hear it from his end.

“Yeah, thanks, Lise. The room feels so much brighter now. My mom says you’re making a painting too. I’d love to see it when it’s finished if you’d bring it to the hospital.”

“I’ll do better than that,” I smile, as the idea surfaces, “You can just have it. It’ll go well with that mural I bombed on in your room.”

“That’s assuming I WANT the painting. It might be terrible.”

I scoff louder than necessary, to be sure it comes through the receiver, “How dare you.”

“Okay, okay, I’m joking,” his laughter causes the receiver to clip, making it sound like, 'The Count's’ ‘ah, ah, ah’ evil laughter.

“I’m sure I’ll like it. You’re long past your ‘mural catastrophe’ days. The sunset turned out pretty well. Do you still have that painting of the girl in the orange grove on the wall next to your desk?”

“I took it down,” I say shortly, “I’m going to sell it or throw it away.” I try to make my tone sound final but it comes across as frazzled instead.

“You shouldn’t sell your originals." Concern sits in his voice like a deep stain. “They’ll be worth a lot when you’re big and famous.”

I don’t even want to reply, seething in my stubborn silence.

His gentle sigh crackles through the phone, and I pick at the carnation pattern spinning like pinwheels on my quilt.

“At least let me hold onto it if nothing else,” he says finally. “You might change your mind later, Lise.”

I want to throw a tantrum and tell him that that will never happen, but instead, I say “sure,” for some reason.

I’d rather talk about anything else, and he knows it, changing the subject with an affected naturalness that grates on me like sandpaper.

“You know, all the nurses think you’re my girlfriend.”

My heart stops.

“They keep asking when the pretty girl with the dark hair is coming back to visit.”

“They’re talking about your mom,” I laugh uncomfortably, only half joking.

“Hah. But no, they specified the short one.”

I start to pull a face and he laughs through the phone.

“I can hear you rolling your eyes.”

“I’m not that short,” I ooze.

“Look, Lise, if the Filipina nurses noticed you’re short, then you’re short. Even with those horrible platform high heels on your last roommate was more than a head taller than you. My mom used to comment that any man you wanted to kiss would need a high tolerance for back pain...”

He stops when he realizes I’m not laughing.

Two seconds.

“How is your back doing,” I scratch into the silence.

For the first time in my life, I recognize the unmistakable timbre of loss in his tone, as his voice answers, “Doesn’t matter. I’m not very likely to have any lover at this point.”

*

God has a blind spot.

There’s a hole in the just scales of Fate where we specks of dust get lost - overlooked and forgotten.

It was never supposed to go like this. What happened to the idea of guardian angels?

Maybe angels don’t get angels.

There’s no reason Kattar should be the one losing everything. If anyone ever deserved to find love someday, to live his dreams and be happy, it’s him.

Now both of us will breathe and drown in this black haze of an Existence. The difference is that I chose it. It hurts easier…

Despite the flirting beauties, the siege of phone numbers, and the painful pick-up lines, he’s never dated anyone. Always made excuses for why he turned down this one or that.

I remember berating him about it in a poor imitation of his mother’s signature line, “Yah, viejo, por que tu no tiene novia?”

And hearing him parrot, just to get on my nerves “Vieja, por que tu no tiene novio?”

“Because you haven’t found me one." Eye roll. “I keep asking you to introduce me to your hot movie friends and you never do,” shoving him sideways for good measure, watching his eyes laugh even as he rubbed his shoulder in mock aggravation.

“Okay, okay, sorry. I’ll get to it.”

He never did. When I finally got a boyfriend, he had nothing to do with the film industry, and Kattar, who was in LA shooting a movie at the time, didn’t find out until a week or so after.

We lay on the floor of his bedroom watching the end credits of an action flick I barely remember, and I rekindled the old joke, “Viejo…”

We’d repeated this so many times he laughed before I’d finished the sentence. “Vieja…” he shot back.

“I have a boyfriend now.”

Complete, expressionless silence.

I sat up, resting my weight on my elbow so I could see his face, but there was nothing readable in the line of his mouth, his dark eyebrows.

“When are you going to get yourself a girlfriend?”

He looked at me without emotion, only the black clouds, gathering in his midnight eyes, “Somewhere between yesterday and never.”