The sunlight tickled her face as it fell in swathes through the kitchen window. The morning light lay languidly over the table, coating papers and paints with a golden lustre.
Her mother had always been the arty type. Drawers stuffed with watercolours and hundreds of paintbrushes, half-finished canvases panelling the walls of every room in the house. It was a release; she had always thought. A way to be absorbed entirely without murmurs of doubt creeping into the corners of her mind.
Blues and greens swirled symbiotically in a glass of water, deposited by saturated brushes. A swishing sound, as regular as a heartbeat, as her mother diligently layered paint upon paint beside her. It made her feel safe, watching her mother. It was a time of quiet connection when guilt and cross words couldn’t get in the way.
But her mother never wanted help. Every time a little hand tried to add a stroke to the growing picture, it was swatted away with a gentle sigh. She never had been able to understand why this boundary existed when she was a child, why was her mother’s art something separate that she was not allowed to touch? It was as if she was guarding it, not necessarily just from her daughter, but from intrusive eyes everywhere.
She never sold any of it. No one else in the world ever saw her mother’s work. And she was really talented. She always thought it a shame that the paintings couldn’t be shared when they would have moved even the harshest of critics with their muted colours and expressionistic style. She had once put one in her school bag to bring to show and tell, but it didn’t have the chance to leave the house before her mother confiscated it with a pained look. She saw that look again only years later when her mother was deteriorating.
So, seeing it inside the box, perfectly folded, was a surprise. A creamy white page broken up by greys and purples, speckled and splashed with a bright cobalt blue. She hadn’t seen this one before. From the look of the creases, this had been kept in a book or a drawer for a long time. It was, however, unmistakably her mother’s: her characteristic melancholy laced with a beauty that only she could master. A perfect sadness.
It was a girl. The painting. She saw a girl in some sort of water, the sea perhaps, being dragged down into the depths. But she looked further. The sky was bright, and the sun cast a gleaming light on the surface, an age-old symbol of hope and renewal. She didn’t cry when she saw it. It was uncanny, how her mother had depicted her on this page. Her inescapable sense of ache and overwhelming longing that the grief brought. How could she have known?
She must have felt it too. This heaviness. It never showed in her face, encapsulated, and immortalised in her art instead. But she painted light too. She wanted light.
She turned the page over and smiled at her mother’s swirled cursive. “These are yours now. Look after them. Show them to people. I love you.”
And she delved further through the box’s contents.
