The Black Painting. Neil Olson
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anyone else was awake,” Teresa said as she reached him.
“Me, neither,” James replied. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“And I’m all slept out.” She nearly mentioned the dream, then did not.
“Kenny snores.”
“What, Mister Perfect?” she laughed. “Don’t tell me you were in the same room.”
Kenny and James had shared a bunk bed those summers when the house was full.
“No, but I could hear him through the wall.”
“He had a lot of wine,” Teresa remembered. “I guess we all did.”
“Not me.”
“You still don’t drink?”
“A little,” he conceded. “People make a big deal if you refuse. But I don’t like the feeling it gives me.”
“I didn’t used to,” she said. A fallen woman. “Now I like it too much.”
“You seem the same.” The words surprised her. “I thought you would have changed, but you seem the same to me.”
“Is that good?”
“Yes.” He smiled bashfully. His smiles were so rare that it felt like a gift to get one. “I think it is.”
“We’ve all changed, but I’m glad that I seem familiar. You also seem the same, except for being too freaking tall.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Couldn’t help it.”
James had never cared for small talk, and Teresa waited for him to seize this chance to speak of what troubled him. Yet he showed no inclination. Last night’s urgency had vanished, or been suppressed.
“You’re brave to walk the woods on a morning like this,” she said, taking his arm and starting them forward again. “Must be spooky.”
“They’re just trees,” he said with a shrug. “I was looking for our old tree house.”
“My God, is it still there?”
“Sort of. The roof and one wall are gone, but the rest is intact.”
“I don’t remember how we got up. There was a ladder?”
“Wooden rungs nailed into the trunk.”
“Right,” she said, the memory coming back.
“They looked kind of rotted. I didn’t try to climb.”
“That was wise. Audrey would have,” she said, at the same precise moment that he did. They both laughed. Even his laugh was awkward, a high-pitched gurgle that pulled on her heart. She squeezed his arm. “How is school?”
James was in medical school in Boston. Doing well, Teresa had heard, which was no surprise. He tested off the charts in IQ and everything else. But he did not do well with other people, and needed five years and three colleges for his undergraduate degree. Then he left law school after one year, hating it. No one in the family had gone into medicine before.
“Good,” he said firmly. “I like it, especially the labs. I like doing things instead of talking about them.”
“Have you dealt with cadavers yet?”
“It doesn’t bother me. Everyone is afraid of them, but you can’t hurt the dead.”
“That doesn’t make them fun to spend time with,” she said, fighting another shiver.
“There’s no better way to understand the human body than to open it up and look inside. I want to help people. No one knows that about me. Nobody believes it.”
“I believe it,” Teresa said.
“They think I’m crazy and can’t take care of myself. But I want to help people. You have to be willing to do the hard things.”
They were near the mudroom door, and James shuffled to a stop. As if he could not bear going inside. Teresa tugged him the other way, toward the front of the house.
“What did you want to talk about last night?”
He looked away, then shook his head quickly.
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I’m not going to call you crazy. Trust me.” But he would not speak. The yew hedges beside the garage had grown rangy and brown. The sun was beginning to cut through the mist. She tried a different tack. “What happened yesterday, with Grandpa?”
James tensed up instantly.
“Do you mean the day before?” he asked.
“Yes,” she sighed. “Sorry, I’ve lost track.” It seemed one long and shapeless day since she had stepped onto the platform at Langford Station. It also seemed like a week.
“It was bad,” said James, biting off the words. “We argued.”
“About what?”
“My erratic behavior. I think that’s the word he used. One of them.”
“Such as?”
“You know,” he said impatiently. Assuming that Teresa had heard the family gossip. “Temper tantrums, as if no one else has those. As if Audrey’s aren’t ten times worse than mine.”
“What else?” she asked.
“Pointing a knife at her. At Audrey. I wasn’t going to hurt her, but you know the things she says. Threatening a professor.”
“Really? How did you threaten him?”
“This was years ago,” he insisted, as if she was missing the point. “At Amherst. The guy was a condescending jerk. I don’t remember what I said, but I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t going to do anything.”
“Okay.” Teresa squeezed his arm again. “It’s okay, I believe you.”
“I guess Grandpa was writing it all down,” he said bitterly. “Keeping track of everything I ever did wrong. And not only me, all of us.”
“So we’re all behaving erratically?” she asked, trying to lighten the mood. The things he said should have disturbed her, but she had witnessed such behavior when they were children. She knew what Grandpa Morse was getting at, but she also knew James. He did not understand people, didn’t get their jokes, became easily frustrated. Instead of taking that into account, friends and family taunted him. For their amusement, maybe, or simply because it’s what people did. James’ own father, Fred, was a terrible tease. Miranda, too. And of course Audrey was the worst. She knew how to send James into a fit with just a few words. He would cry and yell and break things. Hurt himself, perhaps. But never hurt anyone else. She had never heard of his doing so, and could not imagine it.
“Kenny argued with him, too.” James spit the words out, as if ashamed of speaking.
“He told you that?”
“Yes. He left before I got here, but after my talk with Grandpa I went to the city to find him. He was staying with a friend, in the place he rented when he used to live there.”
Which answered a question that Teresa had been meaning to ask. Why had James arrived with Kenny from New York instead of coming from Boston?
“I couldn’t remember where it was,” he went on, “so I wandered around for a long time. It’s a big city.”
“It is,” Teresa agreed, imagining James wandering Manhattan’s late-night streets. He was lucky he didn’t get mugged.
“I slept on a bench. When I woke up I remembered the address, so I went there.”
“In the middle of the night?” she laughed. “I bet he was thrilled to see you.”
“It