Fic: Song to the Siren, PG-13
Disclaimer: Person of Interest does not belong to me.
Genre: back story, character study, angst, gen, het (I could add romance, I suppose?)
Length: 5700+ words
Characters, Pairing(s): The main character is a spoiler for 1.22. So is the pairing (Finch is involved--basically, if you've seen the episode, you can probably guess who it is. The character's name is the second word of the story, so you can back-space easily if you need to).
Spoilers: 1.22 - 'No Good Deed'
Rating: PG-13, language, a few non-specific adult situations, character death
Notes: I apologize for all of the things that are probably highly inaccurate in this (arts programs in New York City, for example). This is an extrapolation of the five minutes of information we were given on this character. It's entirely possible that it's completely wrong. I don't even really know where this fic came from, but I just couldn't stop writing it.
It's also in present-tense, a fact I would have changed had I known it would be this long. Unfortunately, it wasn't until I was at 3500 words that I realized it would be.
Summary: A day in the lifetime of an artist.
Song to the Siren
by ALC Punk!
When Grace is four years old, her mother tells her she's going to be a big sister. From her very grand age, Grace informs her mother that she's just fine being an only child, thank you very much.
Her mother only laughs.
Grace doesn't really know where babies come from yet, but she's overly-suspicious of her mother's new boyfriend, a man who doesn't seem to have time for children while simultaneously expecting her mother to drop everything for him. At four, she doesn't quite understand much of their relationship, only what it means to her.
A baby that she doesn't really want to share her mother with.
-=-
The problem with babies (aside from the very fact of their existence) Grace decides, when her brother appears, is that they're noisy. And loud. At six, Grace has the wisdom of the ages to back her up and she's very certain that she never wailed the entire night away.
Not like her sister did, and certainly not like her brother does.
Her mother just says he has good lungs, and that Grace should be proud of him for being so voluble.
Grace stumbles her way through the old college dictionary (a gigantic thing that is slowly falling apart) of her mother's to find out what 'voluble' means. She puzzles out the spellings of the words in the definition and finally decides that it means 'loud'.
Why her mother couldn't just say that, she doesn't know.
It's more interesting and absorbing to sit down with her crayons and coloring books, shading carefully between the lines.
-=-
At eight years old, Grace has become a fan of sketchbooks. At first, it was any piece of paper her hands could come by that got filled with tiny, unrealistic and frequently awful drawings of anything she saw. Flowers, trees, people walking by in the street, cars, castles in the air and more.
Then her mother bought her an actual sketchpad filled with blank paper and some colored pencils, and her world changed (she had to hide the pencils from her sister, who kept trying to eat them. At three, Alice isn't exactly well-mannered). Now the images are easier to capture, and she can scrawl gigantic pictures or tiny little sketches.
On the weekends she has off, her mother takes the three of them to the park and Grace sits on a bench, precious sketchpad propped on her knee.
Sometimes, she lets her mother see the results, other times, she doesn't. She still hasn't quite forgiven her mother her brother and sister, though at her age, she's begun to learn that children are something that happens, try though you might to resist them.
-=-
Grace likes the school library, when she can get in--half the time she sneaks in when she should be at something else. But the room is the quietest, and she can hide herself in a corner, a piece of paper or a notebook in hand, and build the pictures in her mind.
They're still not very good, but as she's only ten, she'll allow the imperfections.
Practice, after all, makes perfect.
-=-
Grace sometimes thinks that her mother is lonely. There have been boyfriends, and even one man who almost became their new father (but he raised a hand to Alice, and Grace told on him), but her mother doesn't seem to mind the lack. She works hard at her job, and they manage.
When her mother isn't too tired, she will sit on the couch and read stories to them. Grace pretends she's too old for such things, but she still curls in the dilapidated easy chair and draws while she listens.
-=-
At fourteen, Grace decides that to be an artist, one must suffer in some way. It's childish and silly, but it's not the normal practices of the smart girls in her classes. The teenagers who appear to suffer most in her school are usually those dressed all in black. So she lurks on the edges of their group, writing reams of horrible poetry and dressing in greys and browns (Alice gleefully steals all the pink and blue from her wardrobe, parading around like a princess in a castle).
Muddy colors don't suit her, but she perseveres, determined to fit in.
Neither does bad poetry. When she reads it aloud they laugh at her and it. Grace has never been one to give up, but eventually she's at her wits' end. It eventually falls to one of the older girls to suggest an alternative. Drawing dead animals is almost as valid as writing poetry about death.
Her mother doesn't freak out about all of the sketches of dead fish, but she does arrange a meeting with a counselor. The verdict is that Grace stops drawing fish and moves onto flowers.
They're dead once they're picked anyway.
-=-
When she graduates high school and moves to college in the city, she applies where her heart wishes to go. Her mother says they'll manage when the financial papers come in, but Grace wonders if that's true.
She knows she's lucky to get into the arts program--she doesn't feel like the others there, not flamboyant or different enough to fit in properly. But her portfolio (worked on tirelessly all her last year of high school, with proper critiques and everything) is good enough for the first year.
As long as she improves, she hears over and over.
It's tough work, and she hates the very idea of sitting in a classroom learning corporate design strategy and being told precisely what she can or shouldn't draw. But it's also the only thing she's ever wanted out of life.
There are other clasess, though. Life drawing is a better fit, and she likes to watch the play of shadow of their subject versus the shadows of the room they use.
She turns in her work on time, she keeps herself on top of papers and mathematics. On weekends, she goes home to see her family.
-=-
The second year is full of student loan mess-ups, and the need for a job to cover the extra expenses. Her mother can't help her with housing this year, so she hunts for a roommate.
Melissa is bubbles and laughter, a whirlwind who switches her hair color almost as often as she changes lovers. But her design sense is top-notch, and her way with a camera might just see her as a fashion photographer yet.
It's early days, though.
-=-
Everyone always asks how she and Mel get along with each other given their different personalities. And it's true--Mel is slightly crazy and ridiculous, and constantly on the move. She's a member of six different clubs at school, president of an internet society of amateur photographers, and generally outgoing and presentable.
Grace is quiet and calm, prone to long bouts of silence and hiding in rooms alone to work on her art.
They work, possibly, because they are different. They argue when Grace leaves piles of paper sketches around, or Mel brings home her third lover in as many nights. But nothing really seems to come between them and they continue to room together without really seeing a reason to stop.
-=-
After graduation, it's almost an anti-climax to get her first gallery showing. She and Mel are still sharing, and their apartment hasn't moved very far from their student digs--just enough to put them in a more 'arty' community. Mel is always very concerned about image, after all.
Grace just mocks her, but enjoys that she can stand in a side-street and sketch one-handed and no one looks at her twice.
-=-
The run-up to the showing is a headache--Grace takes double shifts at her new job, determined not to let her loans drag too far behind. It gets in the way of sketching and painting time, and she's still got paint drying when she hustles her canvases up onto their hooks.
She tries to write notes, to explain what she was thinking when she was leaning over to sketch the fish, or sitting on her bench while the birds chased each other for the scattered bread crumbs.
It all sounds too trite and ridiculous.
"Don't be an idiot," Mel tells her when she tries to duck out of it. "Everyone needs some explanation. Just leave them wanting more."
Great advice, but Grace has never felt the need for mystery. She's always drawn or painted exactly what she sees. Perception may be in the eye of the beholder, but she's never been much for impressionism.
She'll leave that to Mel's new boyfriend, who thinks everything is stark greys and reds.
-=-
Inevitably, the gallery show is a disaster. Not enough people come, no one buys a thing, and renting the space takes up more money than she'd thought it would. Worse, the one review marks her work as Uninspired, uninteresting and unsold.
Grace finds herself locked out of the apartment when she returns home, with a note on the door from Mel. It's congratulatory, but nothing like the ice cream in the freezer or the hot shower she desperately wants.
The shouting match through the door probably doesn't endear them to their neighbors, but it does net Grace an unlocked door and her own bed to sleep in again.
-=-
Two months after the failed showing, Grace is back in her favorite park with the pigeons as a subject. She's always liked flocks and schools of animals, giving her so much variety and yet all the same shape to work from.
When she finishes and stands up to stretch a little, she finds a man watching her. He apologizes, and offers her his card, saying something about publishing.
Grace believes him not at all.
-=-
Her siblings get along better with each other than her, but Grace dutifully goes to each of their graduations. Greg becomes an accountant (no surprise), and Alice goes for computer science (math was always her strong suit). They go for drinks afterwards each time, awkward little meetings that leave Grace heaving a sigh of relief when she's back in Manhattan, back on her own street and with people who don't suggest things like, I'm sure you'll meet a nice guy, soon.
Coming home is almost never her family, these days.
-=-
"Who's this?" It's inevitable that Mel would find the card, something Grace had forgotten about weeks before.
"Oh, just some guy."
Mel laughs--and grabs for the phone. "He's with a publishing company, Grace. Or didn't you even look at this?"
Reaching for the card Mel's waving, Grace does manage to notice the publishing company. But only after Mel is talking cheerfully to a secretary, then handing the phone over.
-=-
It's a short-term contract. One series of six illustrations for a bi-monthly magazine. Grace takes it, because it's a paying job. But also because Mel is entirely against it.
"You're selling yourself short."
"Tell that to my bank balance."
They'll never see eye to eye on something like this. As amazing and good as it is to share an apartment with Mel, she's never had to work for anything in her life. Scholarships, lovers, the photos she takes, the art she sells--they all just fall in for her. Grace doesn't want to stunt her art with corporate philosophy, but she does want to keep eating.
-=-
"Uninspired pablum," Mel decrees when she sees the first of the approved sketches in actual print.
"Fuck you."
"Only on Wednesdays, darling."
But the anger that suffuses Grace over the insult to her work swiftly fades. Mel has never been particularly complimentary, after all. But maybe she'll see, one day.
-=-
Grace keeps the good news from her family until all six are finished and out in circulation. She sends a copy of each to her mother.
It's Alice who calls, shrieking about being the last to know--but also proud and excited. And it's every emotion that Grace could have wanted, save for the source. She's grateful, though, and understanding that her mother was too busy to call.
They're family, but in some ways, none of them has ever been close.
-=-
A second contract, and then a third from a different company keep her busy. She's surprised to find that the work comes thicker and faster for a short time before petering off again. But the money is enough for now, and she puts some of it back into more charcoal, more acrylics, more canvas.
This time, she plans no goal for the art she creates, merely putting images on the page for her own amusement.
"Some of your best work," Mel tells her, when she shows off the grey and green daffodils edging a brook that doesn't exist in the middle of their living room.
-=-
Work picks up in the spring, and Grace saves up enough to do something she's been considering for a while. Mel is sorry to see her go, and they part with promises to keep in touch and hugs, and even a kiss or two.
But Grace knows they won't, she knows that time will pass and they'll be involved in their own lives and their work.
Keeping in touch will become that thing they'll mean to do come evening or the weekend, but they'll put it off and put it off until a month will have passed. Guilt will set in by then, and the time will stretch further and farther.
-=-
Sometimes, Grace misses trying to guess what new ridiculous color Mel is planning to dye her hair. She doesn't miss the disdain over her sketchings or the complaints when she's left charcoal and paper everywhere.
-=-
A solitary existence isn't as hard as she'd heard it would be. She likes setting her own schedule, taking her easel or sketch pad wherever she wants with no one sitting over her shoulder, muttering critiques or little gibes.
There's no random underwear that doesn't belong to her strewn over the couch, or half-awake men wandering into the kitchen naked (Mel had never lived that one down. Either time). She doesn't get phone calls at every hour of the night, or hear her roommate cursing up a storm as she breaks up with or finds herself another lover.
No one forces her to eat her green vegetables out of some sense of what's healthy.
She litters the apartment with art paraphernalia. Whole shelves get devoted to books on the subject that she's stored in boxes or waited to buy for the lack of space. Paint pots get scattered wherever she feels best for leaving them.
There's a system, though she tries to pretend it's chaos.
-=-
She's sketching a pigeon in the park, trying to catch both the light and shadow of it in the grey-ness of the winter day when she turns her head to find herself being watched again.
The man is eating an ice cream cone, and looking utterly content.
It's been so long since she's seen such a look that she pauses before turning back to the pigeon. She adds a few more lines, but finds that she wants to make the pigeon smile and stops again.
"Would you like an ice cream cone?"
-=-
Plunging into the world of dating and people is hard. Grace knows she mis-steps several times, but Harold doesn't seem to mind. And he's sometimes just as awkward. None of the books or movies she's read and seen work exactly like this.
Their first date is an utter disaster. She wore the wrong thing, he was late, and neither of them is truly happy over the food selections. She laughs at all the wrong moments, he seems oddly tongue-tied.
Dismally, she lets him drop her at her door.
"I'm sorry," he says.
And she thinks that if she were in his shoes, she'd never want to see herself again. "It's all right, I'm just--I was so nervous, I wanted it to be nice, and--"
"So did I." The interruption is quiet and she realizes he looks as scared as she feels.
She kisses him because it's always seemed the right thing to do in the movies.
-=-
Their second date is almost worse than their first.
-=-
For their third date--something she wasn't sure would ever happen--Harold drives her to the docks, with her easel. He sets it up and says, "Draw something."
So she sketches the way the sky is turning oranges and pinks, the way the lights bounce off the buildings behind them, the way the ships glide in and out. It's not abstract, but it's not her usual style and she truly hates it when full-dark has fallen and the light from the street lamps shine down on them.
Harold helps pack up her pastels, then stands looking at the paper for a time before quietly telling her about the first program he ever designed.
It's only after, setting the page down in a stack of discarded drafts that she realizes he was trying to give her something of himself. She wonders if he would let her watch him code something.
-=-
It goes better after that--it certainly couldn't go worse. She drags him to the opera, and he takes her to some truly awful movies where he criticizes the computer technology.
They make each other laugh, which startles her. Harold with a smile on his face is different to Harold eating ice cream is different to Harold telling her about himself.
Opening up is something he'll never be good at; she can respect that. She often finds herself wondering why she doesn't press him harder for those details that Mel used to know about everyone she slept with. She has his phone numbers and favorite movies, she knows what his favorite ice cream is and believes his claim that he doesn't snore.
And she can makes guesses as to what his job is, but doesn't need to know.
-=-
Some days, they're content to simply sit in the park while she sketches and he watches.
Ice cream is optional.
-=-
It shouldn't come as a surprise that he proposes--he's been acting just a little too careful the last few weeks, darting glances at her as though he's planning something.
But it is a surprise, and she shrieks just a little and then is very glad he asked in the middle of her apartment where the only ones who hear will be the fish he bought her for their second anniversary.
"It's not too soon, is it?"
And her heart breaks just a little at the worry in his glance. So she kisses him, because that always seems a better bet for the words she's never entirely sure come out the right way.
-=-
Her second gallery show is better attended than the first. Harold arrives a little late and out of breath, but she doesn't care. The way he smiles at her glee over selling her first painting is enough to make her thinks of running away from her own show.
Responsibility makes her stay another hour and then she goes, because she can and because she's sold three pieces so far, and because she wants to drag Harold's too-neat tie off his neck and kiss the little spot just to the side of his throat that makes him jump.
-=-
Harold hides all the papers from her in the morning, and then password-locks her computer before she can check any online sites. "For your own peace of mind," he says.
It's not the first argument they've had, but it is the first one where she's thrown his clothes at him and tossed his shoes out the door.
She settles down to read the reviews--awful or mediocre--with a bowl of oatmeal and the certainty that nothing can be worse than shouting at Harold at nine in the morning while the sun was shining.
-=-
"I'm sorry," he says through the closed door. It's been exactly two days, to the hour, since she slammed that door in his face.
She wonders if he had a time-table set for when it would be safe to apologize. It's a silly thought, but would be like him. With her forehead on the door, she says, "They weren't awful, Harold."
"I know, I just..."
Surprisingly, the reviews had been nice. Not spectacular, but nice--she hadn't expected nice, and the warm glow from them still lingers.
Opening the door is easier than waiting for him to finish his sentence, and he waits until she's locked it to murmur, "I didn't want to share you."
Looking at him in the grey light from her front windows, she can understand that a little. Sharing him with his work, with the whole life that he doesn't talk about--it's hard, but she manages. "You'll have to." One side of her mouth slides upwards, "I'm a commercial artist, after all."
He doesn't get the art-school joke, but it doesn't matter.
-=-
The call comes on a Monday. Grace has just seen Harold out the door (running late, very unusual for him) when the phone rings. It's a number she doesn't recognize, but she answers anyway. New numbers could mean new clients. She's grown in her networking abilities, though she doubts she'll ever reach Mel's old casual standards of walking up to strangers and introducing herself.
"Grace?" Alice sounds wrong, unhappy, different. She runs on with her words before Grace can ask her anything, before she can even sit down. "Mom's in the hospital. They don't think she'll last the day."
Blunt, to the point, that's their Alice. The world spins for a moment, but then Grace steadies, her gaze on the half-finished painting on her easel. "I'll come at once."
-=-
Grace's mother dies on a Wednesday, two days later than the doctors thought she would. She's spent the last few days staying in the old house and visiting the hospital, trying to keep her own spirits up. Her mother seems resigned to it, as though she's been waiting for death to swallow her up for years.
The three of them, Alice, Greg and her, divide up the duties. Alice plans the funeral (a quiet ceremony, then cremation), Greg deals with the lawyer and the entails (the house was left to the three of them, divided equally), and Grace starts going through her mother's things, packing them away and figuring out what they can sell and what should just be junked.
She finds old sketches of hers, an entire box filled with ancient paper full of the meanderings of a child.
Remembering what it had been like to be that child, she wonders that life seemed like such a simple thing. Her fingers smooth out sheet after sheet until she sneezes. Practicality returns and she packs the box up, labeling it swiftly to be sent to her apartment.
It's only when she's boxing up her mother's ancient desktop for sending on to a recycler that she thinks of Harold and hopes he isn't worried about her.
-=-
She calls Harold to help her shift the few boxes she wants back to her own apartment. When she tells him the news, he's silent for a moment.
"I'm so sorry, Grace."
"I know." Her mouth twists, and she thinks of course it's now I want to cry. The tears slide down her cheeks and she chokes on the sudden sob in her throat.
Harold says something she doesn't catch, and then he's hung up. Probably uninterested in dealing with feelings, or something. It's a wild surmise, and she tries to tell herself it's a stupid reaction.
But she's still crying into the sweater her mother knitted for her tenth birthday when he arrives. It's pink and horrible, and everything she'd wanted in a sweater at ten. She'd forgotten about it until now. There are holes where the moths have gone at it, and she thinks about how it should have been donated somewhere long ago.
"It's all right," Harold murmurs from behind her, and his hands are gentle on her shoulders.
She thinks wildly of hitting him for being so bland, but it's not worth the effort.
-=-
Two weeks pass, then three, and she's lying in bed staring at the ceiling and wondering why they always go back to hers and not his. "Is it wrong of me not to miss her?"
Harold shifts next to her, his fingers brushing against her arm, then finding her hand. He links their fingers together and tugs them over to where his heart beats. When he finally answers her, she's almost forgotten what she asked. "We all grieve in our own ways."
Pulling her hand free, she rolls to push up on her elbow. A smile lurks at the corners of her mouth as she teases, "Did you get that off a newspaper column?"
"Yes," he admits. But it's oddly endearing, and she thinks that neither of them are reacting quite as they should.
Letting herself down, she allows their fingers to link again, flattening her palm over his heart. "Well," she finally says, with her head on his shoulder and wondering if she should demand he sleep without a night-shirt one of these days (kissing cotton when you're half asleep isn't the same as kissing skin), "It's not awful advice."
-=-
"I love you." Grace doesn't say those words often--with Harold, there never seems a need to. But sometimes, she just feels as though the silence begs for them to be said.
It's mid-afternoon, a Saturday that he was supposed to be working. But the work had ended earlier than he'd thought it would, or he'd just decided (for once) to tell his boss to stick his overtime policy where the sun didn't shine. Either way, he's sitting in one of her kitchen chairs, bent over some model that her neighbor's son had broken and tossed. Harold had found it when he took the garbage out earlier and brought it back for something to do while she worked.
He looks up while she ducks down over her sketchpad (the smaller one, which gets ideas first). "I know."
They share a smile, and she goes back to her work.
When he leaves early the next morning, he pins a note to the pillow next to hers. Opening it later that day, she finds a jumble of ASCII codes. Using the laptop he'd recommended for her minor word-processing and spreadsheet needs, she searches them out, finally puzzling out I love you, too after ten minutes.
The note goes into one of her favorite books, and she settles down to finish off the preliminaries for her newest commission.
-=-
"Why don't you ever sketch me?" Harold doesn't actually sound curious, but as she's finishing a finalizing sketch before drawing the picture of her siblings together (Alice's high school graduation, the three of them mugging ridiculously for the camera), it could just be something to talk about.
Her pencil makes another shading stroke and she frowns at it, then shrugs. "I've never thought about it, I guess."
From where he's quietly reading through a book on architecture (she's offered to give him library space for whatever computer texts he wants to bring, but he's never taken her up on it), he shrugs. "Perhaps it doesn't matter."
She just shakes her head to rid her thoughts of his distraction and returns to the shading. It's not quite right, and she's hoping to make three versions--one for each of them.
-=-
Harold lets her paint him four days later, complaining about the coldness of the acrylics as she swipes green and blue over his shoulder. "If this is a new version of art therapy..."
A chuckle escapes her as she steps around him to delicately detail a poppy in yellows just below his left shoulder blade. "Think of it as the portrait I've never done of you." It's different, having a human canvas, and she takes advantage of Harold's stillness to turn him into a multicolored statue for no other reason than because she can.
Once finished, she takes pictures--discreet, careful ones.
Then she strips and drags him to the floor, where the paper and plastic prove less than adequately comfortable, but more than enough for purposes other than keeping paint off her wooden floor.
-=-
It takes them both over an hour to wash all of the paint off, and the hot water runs out halfway through. Grace gets used to the sting of the icy spray while Harold mutters about what effect the acrylics will have on their skin.
Non-toxic doesn't seem to reassure him, but there's enough soap to get the job done.
Afterwards, she combs her hair while he checks every inch of himself in the floor-length mirror on the bathroom door. There are more flakes in places neither of them looked, and she giggles a little as she imagines him discovering them on his own sometime after the fact. But it's unkind to mock a naked man who's been so splendid a canvas, so she helps him remove the last of it.
They go to bed early that night, tangled with each other in a way that's almost casual.
-=-
"I might be late back tonight," he tells her one morning.
She's in the midst of another commission--almost late, this time--and not really paying attention to him. It's been two years since she agreed to marry him, and he hasn't set a date (she hasn't pushed, either). Sometimes, she thinks they're waiting for something momentous to happen.
What, she has no idea.
Perhaps he's the one waiting.
She grunts an acknowledgment, but remembers to kiss him before he leaves--careful not to leave any tell-tale cherry (her favorite flavor) chapstick smudges on his mouth.
-=-
They tell her it was an accident. They don't tell her details. They say words like: "He didn't suffer," and "We regret to inform you." and "I'm so sorry."
She doesn't know if she was his emergency contact, or if there was some sort of legal stipulation to contact her. There's a diamond and sapphire ring on her finger, but it's useless without Harold.
One of the police officers touches her shoulder and gives her a card. "Call me if you need anything."
Grace has never needed anything in her life like she needs this to all be a dream. A nightmare that she'll wake from, and Harold will be there in her bed, in his careful, studied sprawl that seemed to be all angles and numbers instead of a natural progression of muscles.
-=-
For six months after the accident, she doesn't draw. No sketches fly from her fingers, no paint smears onto canvas. Some days, she starts to open her supplies or reach for a piece of paper--and she can't.
It's too much to consider just yet, the pain is too raw.
Instead, she walks the city. Going nowhere and everywhere, striding across sidewalks and pavement until she almost thinks she's worn her shoes down.
Some days, she goes to the park and just sits on the bench. People walk around her, a whole city thrives around her, but all she can feel is the emptiness of being alone.
Her brother and sister aren't much help--they don't get the gulf of understanding between them and she can't make herself try to explain.
They've always had it easy. Greg has two children and a wife he adores, Alice has her computers and commitments, her ridiculous need to always make something happen. Neither of them has ever been truly alone.
When she gets tired of self-pity, she draws a crude heart on their bench and then angrily scuffs it out.
-=-
One year after the accident, she stares at herself in the mirror and says, "This is the first day of the rest of my life."
It's a pity it sounds as stupid aloud as it does in her head, but it's enough of a spur to move her to the canvas she's supposed to be working on. The publishers don't call for commissions so often (she'd thought it was privacy at first, now she wonders about the digital age that has exploded across the art scene while she wasn't looking), but they've called enough.
She's gone back to working evenings in the coffee shop, though she still doesn't feel any connection to the people she serves.
They've become shadows moving against the background of her life, light and shade that seem meaningless until she's reaching for another idea to draw. Sketches only hold a semblance of reality, but she feels them opening her to new possibilities.
-=-
She wonders if she's always going to have anniversaries like this. Sad little moments when a shift of the sun or a movement of a bird in the window will remind her of something Harold said.
To honor his birthday, she buys herself a cup-cake and stares at it as though it holds a secret.
Last week, she'd talked to Mel, who'd sounded cheerful and distant and just the same all at once. "Would he have wanted you to go on with your life?"
That they're talking again sometimes startles Grace. Mel hadn't looked her up entirely out of the blue, though she hasn't come quite out and said that Grace's family contacted her. She thinks she might be angry about that, but if there was one thing Harold had taught her, it was that life was far too short to let grudges go with you to the grave.
-=-
It's been over two years, and she's still getting work. She jokes about a guardian angel to those that seem surprised (she doesn't take it as an insult; quiet little sketches and paintings of animals and plants in profusion aren't very popular), but sometimes, she wonders.
There are better illustrators out there, better designers, yet someone always asks for her. Just enough to keep her in charcoals and oils, just enough to keep her on her toes.
No ruts for her to stand still in, and she thinks maybe that's how it should always be.
-f-
Genre: back story, character study, angst, gen, het (I could add romance, I suppose?)
Length: 5700+ words
Characters, Pairing(s): The main character is a spoiler for 1.22. So is the pairing (Finch is involved--basically, if you've seen the episode, you can probably guess who it is. The character's name is the second word of the story, so you can back-space easily if you need to).
Spoilers: 1.22 - 'No Good Deed'
Rating: PG-13, language, a few non-specific adult situations, character death
Notes: I apologize for all of the things that are probably highly inaccurate in this (arts programs in New York City, for example). This is an extrapolation of the five minutes of information we were given on this character. It's entirely possible that it's completely wrong. I don't even really know where this fic came from, but I just couldn't stop writing it.
It's also in present-tense, a fact I would have changed had I known it would be this long. Unfortunately, it wasn't until I was at 3500 words that I realized it would be.
Summary: A day in the lifetime of an artist.
Song to the Siren
by ALC Punk!
When Grace is four years old, her mother tells her she's going to be a big sister. From her very grand age, Grace informs her mother that she's just fine being an only child, thank you very much.
Her mother only laughs.
Grace doesn't really know where babies come from yet, but she's overly-suspicious of her mother's new boyfriend, a man who doesn't seem to have time for children while simultaneously expecting her mother to drop everything for him. At four, she doesn't quite understand much of their relationship, only what it means to her.
A baby that she doesn't really want to share her mother with.
-=-
The problem with babies (aside from the very fact of their existence) Grace decides, when her brother appears, is that they're noisy. And loud. At six, Grace has the wisdom of the ages to back her up and she's very certain that she never wailed the entire night away.
Not like her sister did, and certainly not like her brother does.
Her mother just says he has good lungs, and that Grace should be proud of him for being so voluble.
Grace stumbles her way through the old college dictionary (a gigantic thing that is slowly falling apart) of her mother's to find out what 'voluble' means. She puzzles out the spellings of the words in the definition and finally decides that it means 'loud'.
Why her mother couldn't just say that, she doesn't know.
It's more interesting and absorbing to sit down with her crayons and coloring books, shading carefully between the lines.
-=-
At eight years old, Grace has become a fan of sketchbooks. At first, it was any piece of paper her hands could come by that got filled with tiny, unrealistic and frequently awful drawings of anything she saw. Flowers, trees, people walking by in the street, cars, castles in the air and more.
Then her mother bought her an actual sketchpad filled with blank paper and some colored pencils, and her world changed (she had to hide the pencils from her sister, who kept trying to eat them. At three, Alice isn't exactly well-mannered). Now the images are easier to capture, and she can scrawl gigantic pictures or tiny little sketches.
On the weekends she has off, her mother takes the three of them to the park and Grace sits on a bench, precious sketchpad propped on her knee.
Sometimes, she lets her mother see the results, other times, she doesn't. She still hasn't quite forgiven her mother her brother and sister, though at her age, she's begun to learn that children are something that happens, try though you might to resist them.
-=-
Grace likes the school library, when she can get in--half the time she sneaks in when she should be at something else. But the room is the quietest, and she can hide herself in a corner, a piece of paper or a notebook in hand, and build the pictures in her mind.
They're still not very good, but as she's only ten, she'll allow the imperfections.
Practice, after all, makes perfect.
-=-
Grace sometimes thinks that her mother is lonely. There have been boyfriends, and even one man who almost became their new father (but he raised a hand to Alice, and Grace told on him), but her mother doesn't seem to mind the lack. She works hard at her job, and they manage.
When her mother isn't too tired, she will sit on the couch and read stories to them. Grace pretends she's too old for such things, but she still curls in the dilapidated easy chair and draws while she listens.
-=-
At fourteen, Grace decides that to be an artist, one must suffer in some way. It's childish and silly, but it's not the normal practices of the smart girls in her classes. The teenagers who appear to suffer most in her school are usually those dressed all in black. So she lurks on the edges of their group, writing reams of horrible poetry and dressing in greys and browns (Alice gleefully steals all the pink and blue from her wardrobe, parading around like a princess in a castle).
Muddy colors don't suit her, but she perseveres, determined to fit in.
Neither does bad poetry. When she reads it aloud they laugh at her and it. Grace has never been one to give up, but eventually she's at her wits' end. It eventually falls to one of the older girls to suggest an alternative. Drawing dead animals is almost as valid as writing poetry about death.
Her mother doesn't freak out about all of the sketches of dead fish, but she does arrange a meeting with a counselor. The verdict is that Grace stops drawing fish and moves onto flowers.
They're dead once they're picked anyway.
-=-
When she graduates high school and moves to college in the city, she applies where her heart wishes to go. Her mother says they'll manage when the financial papers come in, but Grace wonders if that's true.
She knows she's lucky to get into the arts program--she doesn't feel like the others there, not flamboyant or different enough to fit in properly. But her portfolio (worked on tirelessly all her last year of high school, with proper critiques and everything) is good enough for the first year.
As long as she improves, she hears over and over.
It's tough work, and she hates the very idea of sitting in a classroom learning corporate design strategy and being told precisely what she can or shouldn't draw. But it's also the only thing she's ever wanted out of life.
There are other clasess, though. Life drawing is a better fit, and she likes to watch the play of shadow of their subject versus the shadows of the room they use.
She turns in her work on time, she keeps herself on top of papers and mathematics. On weekends, she goes home to see her family.
-=-
The second year is full of student loan mess-ups, and the need for a job to cover the extra expenses. Her mother can't help her with housing this year, so she hunts for a roommate.
Melissa is bubbles and laughter, a whirlwind who switches her hair color almost as often as she changes lovers. But her design sense is top-notch, and her way with a camera might just see her as a fashion photographer yet.
It's early days, though.
-=-
Everyone always asks how she and Mel get along with each other given their different personalities. And it's true--Mel is slightly crazy and ridiculous, and constantly on the move. She's a member of six different clubs at school, president of an internet society of amateur photographers, and generally outgoing and presentable.
Grace is quiet and calm, prone to long bouts of silence and hiding in rooms alone to work on her art.
They work, possibly, because they are different. They argue when Grace leaves piles of paper sketches around, or Mel brings home her third lover in as many nights. But nothing really seems to come between them and they continue to room together without really seeing a reason to stop.
-=-
After graduation, it's almost an anti-climax to get her first gallery showing. She and Mel are still sharing, and their apartment hasn't moved very far from their student digs--just enough to put them in a more 'arty' community. Mel is always very concerned about image, after all.
Grace just mocks her, but enjoys that she can stand in a side-street and sketch one-handed and no one looks at her twice.
-=-
The run-up to the showing is a headache--Grace takes double shifts at her new job, determined not to let her loans drag too far behind. It gets in the way of sketching and painting time, and she's still got paint drying when she hustles her canvases up onto their hooks.
She tries to write notes, to explain what she was thinking when she was leaning over to sketch the fish, or sitting on her bench while the birds chased each other for the scattered bread crumbs.
It all sounds too trite and ridiculous.
"Don't be an idiot," Mel tells her when she tries to duck out of it. "Everyone needs some explanation. Just leave them wanting more."
Great advice, but Grace has never felt the need for mystery. She's always drawn or painted exactly what she sees. Perception may be in the eye of the beholder, but she's never been much for impressionism.
She'll leave that to Mel's new boyfriend, who thinks everything is stark greys and reds.
-=-
Inevitably, the gallery show is a disaster. Not enough people come, no one buys a thing, and renting the space takes up more money than she'd thought it would. Worse, the one review marks her work as Uninspired, uninteresting and unsold.
Grace finds herself locked out of the apartment when she returns home, with a note on the door from Mel. It's congratulatory, but nothing like the ice cream in the freezer or the hot shower she desperately wants.
The shouting match through the door probably doesn't endear them to their neighbors, but it does net Grace an unlocked door and her own bed to sleep in again.
-=-
Two months after the failed showing, Grace is back in her favorite park with the pigeons as a subject. She's always liked flocks and schools of animals, giving her so much variety and yet all the same shape to work from.
When she finishes and stands up to stretch a little, she finds a man watching her. He apologizes, and offers her his card, saying something about publishing.
Grace believes him not at all.
-=-
Her siblings get along better with each other than her, but Grace dutifully goes to each of their graduations. Greg becomes an accountant (no surprise), and Alice goes for computer science (math was always her strong suit). They go for drinks afterwards each time, awkward little meetings that leave Grace heaving a sigh of relief when she's back in Manhattan, back on her own street and with people who don't suggest things like, I'm sure you'll meet a nice guy, soon.
Coming home is almost never her family, these days.
-=-
"Who's this?" It's inevitable that Mel would find the card, something Grace had forgotten about weeks before.
"Oh, just some guy."
Mel laughs--and grabs for the phone. "He's with a publishing company, Grace. Or didn't you even look at this?"
Reaching for the card Mel's waving, Grace does manage to notice the publishing company. But only after Mel is talking cheerfully to a secretary, then handing the phone over.
-=-
It's a short-term contract. One series of six illustrations for a bi-monthly magazine. Grace takes it, because it's a paying job. But also because Mel is entirely against it.
"You're selling yourself short."
"Tell that to my bank balance."
They'll never see eye to eye on something like this. As amazing and good as it is to share an apartment with Mel, she's never had to work for anything in her life. Scholarships, lovers, the photos she takes, the art she sells--they all just fall in for her. Grace doesn't want to stunt her art with corporate philosophy, but she does want to keep eating.
-=-
"Uninspired pablum," Mel decrees when she sees the first of the approved sketches in actual print.
"Fuck you."
"Only on Wednesdays, darling."
But the anger that suffuses Grace over the insult to her work swiftly fades. Mel has never been particularly complimentary, after all. But maybe she'll see, one day.
-=-
Grace keeps the good news from her family until all six are finished and out in circulation. She sends a copy of each to her mother.
It's Alice who calls, shrieking about being the last to know--but also proud and excited. And it's every emotion that Grace could have wanted, save for the source. She's grateful, though, and understanding that her mother was too busy to call.
They're family, but in some ways, none of them has ever been close.
-=-
A second contract, and then a third from a different company keep her busy. She's surprised to find that the work comes thicker and faster for a short time before petering off again. But the money is enough for now, and she puts some of it back into more charcoal, more acrylics, more canvas.
This time, she plans no goal for the art she creates, merely putting images on the page for her own amusement.
"Some of your best work," Mel tells her, when she shows off the grey and green daffodils edging a brook that doesn't exist in the middle of their living room.
-=-
Work picks up in the spring, and Grace saves up enough to do something she's been considering for a while. Mel is sorry to see her go, and they part with promises to keep in touch and hugs, and even a kiss or two.
But Grace knows they won't, she knows that time will pass and they'll be involved in their own lives and their work.
Keeping in touch will become that thing they'll mean to do come evening or the weekend, but they'll put it off and put it off until a month will have passed. Guilt will set in by then, and the time will stretch further and farther.
-=-
Sometimes, Grace misses trying to guess what new ridiculous color Mel is planning to dye her hair. She doesn't miss the disdain over her sketchings or the complaints when she's left charcoal and paper everywhere.
-=-
A solitary existence isn't as hard as she'd heard it would be. She likes setting her own schedule, taking her easel or sketch pad wherever she wants with no one sitting over her shoulder, muttering critiques or little gibes.
There's no random underwear that doesn't belong to her strewn over the couch, or half-awake men wandering into the kitchen naked (Mel had never lived that one down. Either time). She doesn't get phone calls at every hour of the night, or hear her roommate cursing up a storm as she breaks up with or finds herself another lover.
No one forces her to eat her green vegetables out of some sense of what's healthy.
She litters the apartment with art paraphernalia. Whole shelves get devoted to books on the subject that she's stored in boxes or waited to buy for the lack of space. Paint pots get scattered wherever she feels best for leaving them.
There's a system, though she tries to pretend it's chaos.
-=-
She's sketching a pigeon in the park, trying to catch both the light and shadow of it in the grey-ness of the winter day when she turns her head to find herself being watched again.
The man is eating an ice cream cone, and looking utterly content.
It's been so long since she's seen such a look that she pauses before turning back to the pigeon. She adds a few more lines, but finds that she wants to make the pigeon smile and stops again.
"Would you like an ice cream cone?"
-=-
Plunging into the world of dating and people is hard. Grace knows she mis-steps several times, but Harold doesn't seem to mind. And he's sometimes just as awkward. None of the books or movies she's read and seen work exactly like this.
Their first date is an utter disaster. She wore the wrong thing, he was late, and neither of them is truly happy over the food selections. She laughs at all the wrong moments, he seems oddly tongue-tied.
Dismally, she lets him drop her at her door.
"I'm sorry," he says.
And she thinks that if she were in his shoes, she'd never want to see herself again. "It's all right, I'm just--I was so nervous, I wanted it to be nice, and--"
"So did I." The interruption is quiet and she realizes he looks as scared as she feels.
She kisses him because it's always seemed the right thing to do in the movies.
-=-
Their second date is almost worse than their first.
-=-
For their third date--something she wasn't sure would ever happen--Harold drives her to the docks, with her easel. He sets it up and says, "Draw something."
So she sketches the way the sky is turning oranges and pinks, the way the lights bounce off the buildings behind them, the way the ships glide in and out. It's not abstract, but it's not her usual style and she truly hates it when full-dark has fallen and the light from the street lamps shine down on them.
Harold helps pack up her pastels, then stands looking at the paper for a time before quietly telling her about the first program he ever designed.
It's only after, setting the page down in a stack of discarded drafts that she realizes he was trying to give her something of himself. She wonders if he would let her watch him code something.
-=-
It goes better after that--it certainly couldn't go worse. She drags him to the opera, and he takes her to some truly awful movies where he criticizes the computer technology.
They make each other laugh, which startles her. Harold with a smile on his face is different to Harold eating ice cream is different to Harold telling her about himself.
Opening up is something he'll never be good at; she can respect that. She often finds herself wondering why she doesn't press him harder for those details that Mel used to know about everyone she slept with. She has his phone numbers and favorite movies, she knows what his favorite ice cream is and believes his claim that he doesn't snore.
And she can makes guesses as to what his job is, but doesn't need to know.
-=-
Some days, they're content to simply sit in the park while she sketches and he watches.
Ice cream is optional.
-=-
It shouldn't come as a surprise that he proposes--he's been acting just a little too careful the last few weeks, darting glances at her as though he's planning something.
But it is a surprise, and she shrieks just a little and then is very glad he asked in the middle of her apartment where the only ones who hear will be the fish he bought her for their second anniversary.
"It's not too soon, is it?"
And her heart breaks just a little at the worry in his glance. So she kisses him, because that always seems a better bet for the words she's never entirely sure come out the right way.
-=-
Her second gallery show is better attended than the first. Harold arrives a little late and out of breath, but she doesn't care. The way he smiles at her glee over selling her first painting is enough to make her thinks of running away from her own show.
Responsibility makes her stay another hour and then she goes, because she can and because she's sold three pieces so far, and because she wants to drag Harold's too-neat tie off his neck and kiss the little spot just to the side of his throat that makes him jump.
-=-
Harold hides all the papers from her in the morning, and then password-locks her computer before she can check any online sites. "For your own peace of mind," he says.
It's not the first argument they've had, but it is the first one where she's thrown his clothes at him and tossed his shoes out the door.
She settles down to read the reviews--awful or mediocre--with a bowl of oatmeal and the certainty that nothing can be worse than shouting at Harold at nine in the morning while the sun was shining.
-=-
"I'm sorry," he says through the closed door. It's been exactly two days, to the hour, since she slammed that door in his face.
She wonders if he had a time-table set for when it would be safe to apologize. It's a silly thought, but would be like him. With her forehead on the door, she says, "They weren't awful, Harold."
"I know, I just..."
Surprisingly, the reviews had been nice. Not spectacular, but nice--she hadn't expected nice, and the warm glow from them still lingers.
Opening the door is easier than waiting for him to finish his sentence, and he waits until she's locked it to murmur, "I didn't want to share you."
Looking at him in the grey light from her front windows, she can understand that a little. Sharing him with his work, with the whole life that he doesn't talk about--it's hard, but she manages. "You'll have to." One side of her mouth slides upwards, "I'm a commercial artist, after all."
He doesn't get the art-school joke, but it doesn't matter.
-=-
The call comes on a Monday. Grace has just seen Harold out the door (running late, very unusual for him) when the phone rings. It's a number she doesn't recognize, but she answers anyway. New numbers could mean new clients. She's grown in her networking abilities, though she doubts she'll ever reach Mel's old casual standards of walking up to strangers and introducing herself.
"Grace?" Alice sounds wrong, unhappy, different. She runs on with her words before Grace can ask her anything, before she can even sit down. "Mom's in the hospital. They don't think she'll last the day."
Blunt, to the point, that's their Alice. The world spins for a moment, but then Grace steadies, her gaze on the half-finished painting on her easel. "I'll come at once."
-=-
Grace's mother dies on a Wednesday, two days later than the doctors thought she would. She's spent the last few days staying in the old house and visiting the hospital, trying to keep her own spirits up. Her mother seems resigned to it, as though she's been waiting for death to swallow her up for years.
The three of them, Alice, Greg and her, divide up the duties. Alice plans the funeral (a quiet ceremony, then cremation), Greg deals with the lawyer and the entails (the house was left to the three of them, divided equally), and Grace starts going through her mother's things, packing them away and figuring out what they can sell and what should just be junked.
She finds old sketches of hers, an entire box filled with ancient paper full of the meanderings of a child.
Remembering what it had been like to be that child, she wonders that life seemed like such a simple thing. Her fingers smooth out sheet after sheet until she sneezes. Practicality returns and she packs the box up, labeling it swiftly to be sent to her apartment.
It's only when she's boxing up her mother's ancient desktop for sending on to a recycler that she thinks of Harold and hopes he isn't worried about her.
-=-
She calls Harold to help her shift the few boxes she wants back to her own apartment. When she tells him the news, he's silent for a moment.
"I'm so sorry, Grace."
"I know." Her mouth twists, and she thinks of course it's now I want to cry. The tears slide down her cheeks and she chokes on the sudden sob in her throat.
Harold says something she doesn't catch, and then he's hung up. Probably uninterested in dealing with feelings, or something. It's a wild surmise, and she tries to tell herself it's a stupid reaction.
But she's still crying into the sweater her mother knitted for her tenth birthday when he arrives. It's pink and horrible, and everything she'd wanted in a sweater at ten. She'd forgotten about it until now. There are holes where the moths have gone at it, and she thinks about how it should have been donated somewhere long ago.
"It's all right," Harold murmurs from behind her, and his hands are gentle on her shoulders.
She thinks wildly of hitting him for being so bland, but it's not worth the effort.
-=-
Two weeks pass, then three, and she's lying in bed staring at the ceiling and wondering why they always go back to hers and not his. "Is it wrong of me not to miss her?"
Harold shifts next to her, his fingers brushing against her arm, then finding her hand. He links their fingers together and tugs them over to where his heart beats. When he finally answers her, she's almost forgotten what she asked. "We all grieve in our own ways."
Pulling her hand free, she rolls to push up on her elbow. A smile lurks at the corners of her mouth as she teases, "Did you get that off a newspaper column?"
"Yes," he admits. But it's oddly endearing, and she thinks that neither of them are reacting quite as they should.
Letting herself down, she allows their fingers to link again, flattening her palm over his heart. "Well," she finally says, with her head on his shoulder and wondering if she should demand he sleep without a night-shirt one of these days (kissing cotton when you're half asleep isn't the same as kissing skin), "It's not awful advice."
-=-
"I love you." Grace doesn't say those words often--with Harold, there never seems a need to. But sometimes, she just feels as though the silence begs for them to be said.
It's mid-afternoon, a Saturday that he was supposed to be working. But the work had ended earlier than he'd thought it would, or he'd just decided (for once) to tell his boss to stick his overtime policy where the sun didn't shine. Either way, he's sitting in one of her kitchen chairs, bent over some model that her neighbor's son had broken and tossed. Harold had found it when he took the garbage out earlier and brought it back for something to do while she worked.
He looks up while she ducks down over her sketchpad (the smaller one, which gets ideas first). "I know."
They share a smile, and she goes back to her work.
When he leaves early the next morning, he pins a note to the pillow next to hers. Opening it later that day, she finds a jumble of ASCII codes. Using the laptop he'd recommended for her minor word-processing and spreadsheet needs, she searches them out, finally puzzling out I love you, too after ten minutes.
The note goes into one of her favorite books, and she settles down to finish off the preliminaries for her newest commission.
-=-
"Why don't you ever sketch me?" Harold doesn't actually sound curious, but as she's finishing a finalizing sketch before drawing the picture of her siblings together (Alice's high school graduation, the three of them mugging ridiculously for the camera), it could just be something to talk about.
Her pencil makes another shading stroke and she frowns at it, then shrugs. "I've never thought about it, I guess."
From where he's quietly reading through a book on architecture (she's offered to give him library space for whatever computer texts he wants to bring, but he's never taken her up on it), he shrugs. "Perhaps it doesn't matter."
She just shakes her head to rid her thoughts of his distraction and returns to the shading. It's not quite right, and she's hoping to make three versions--one for each of them.
-=-
Harold lets her paint him four days later, complaining about the coldness of the acrylics as she swipes green and blue over his shoulder. "If this is a new version of art therapy..."
A chuckle escapes her as she steps around him to delicately detail a poppy in yellows just below his left shoulder blade. "Think of it as the portrait I've never done of you." It's different, having a human canvas, and she takes advantage of Harold's stillness to turn him into a multicolored statue for no other reason than because she can.
Once finished, she takes pictures--discreet, careful ones.
Then she strips and drags him to the floor, where the paper and plastic prove less than adequately comfortable, but more than enough for purposes other than keeping paint off her wooden floor.
-=-
It takes them both over an hour to wash all of the paint off, and the hot water runs out halfway through. Grace gets used to the sting of the icy spray while Harold mutters about what effect the acrylics will have on their skin.
Non-toxic doesn't seem to reassure him, but there's enough soap to get the job done.
Afterwards, she combs her hair while he checks every inch of himself in the floor-length mirror on the bathroom door. There are more flakes in places neither of them looked, and she giggles a little as she imagines him discovering them on his own sometime after the fact. But it's unkind to mock a naked man who's been so splendid a canvas, so she helps him remove the last of it.
They go to bed early that night, tangled with each other in a way that's almost casual.
-=-
"I might be late back tonight," he tells her one morning.
She's in the midst of another commission--almost late, this time--and not really paying attention to him. It's been two years since she agreed to marry him, and he hasn't set a date (she hasn't pushed, either). Sometimes, she thinks they're waiting for something momentous to happen.
What, she has no idea.
Perhaps he's the one waiting.
She grunts an acknowledgment, but remembers to kiss him before he leaves--careful not to leave any tell-tale cherry (her favorite flavor) chapstick smudges on his mouth.
-=-
They tell her it was an accident. They don't tell her details. They say words like: "He didn't suffer," and "We regret to inform you." and "I'm so sorry."
She doesn't know if she was his emergency contact, or if there was some sort of legal stipulation to contact her. There's a diamond and sapphire ring on her finger, but it's useless without Harold.
One of the police officers touches her shoulder and gives her a card. "Call me if you need anything."
Grace has never needed anything in her life like she needs this to all be a dream. A nightmare that she'll wake from, and Harold will be there in her bed, in his careful, studied sprawl that seemed to be all angles and numbers instead of a natural progression of muscles.
-=-
For six months after the accident, she doesn't draw. No sketches fly from her fingers, no paint smears onto canvas. Some days, she starts to open her supplies or reach for a piece of paper--and she can't.
It's too much to consider just yet, the pain is too raw.
Instead, she walks the city. Going nowhere and everywhere, striding across sidewalks and pavement until she almost thinks she's worn her shoes down.
Some days, she goes to the park and just sits on the bench. People walk around her, a whole city thrives around her, but all she can feel is the emptiness of being alone.
Her brother and sister aren't much help--they don't get the gulf of understanding between them and she can't make herself try to explain.
They've always had it easy. Greg has two children and a wife he adores, Alice has her computers and commitments, her ridiculous need to always make something happen. Neither of them has ever been truly alone.
When she gets tired of self-pity, she draws a crude heart on their bench and then angrily scuffs it out.
-=-
One year after the accident, she stares at herself in the mirror and says, "This is the first day of the rest of my life."
It's a pity it sounds as stupid aloud as it does in her head, but it's enough of a spur to move her to the canvas she's supposed to be working on. The publishers don't call for commissions so often (she'd thought it was privacy at first, now she wonders about the digital age that has exploded across the art scene while she wasn't looking), but they've called enough.
She's gone back to working evenings in the coffee shop, though she still doesn't feel any connection to the people she serves.
They've become shadows moving against the background of her life, light and shade that seem meaningless until she's reaching for another idea to draw. Sketches only hold a semblance of reality, but she feels them opening her to new possibilities.
-=-
She wonders if she's always going to have anniversaries like this. Sad little moments when a shift of the sun or a movement of a bird in the window will remind her of something Harold said.
To honor his birthday, she buys herself a cup-cake and stares at it as though it holds a secret.
Last week, she'd talked to Mel, who'd sounded cheerful and distant and just the same all at once. "Would he have wanted you to go on with your life?"
That they're talking again sometimes startles Grace. Mel hadn't looked her up entirely out of the blue, though she hasn't come quite out and said that Grace's family contacted her. She thinks she might be angry about that, but if there was one thing Harold had taught her, it was that life was far too short to let grudges go with you to the grave.
-=-
It's been over two years, and she's still getting work. She jokes about a guardian angel to those that seem surprised (she doesn't take it as an insult; quiet little sketches and paintings of animals and plants in profusion aren't very popular), but sometimes, she wonders.
There are better illustrators out there, better designers, yet someone always asks for her. Just enough to keep her in charcoals and oils, just enough to keep her on her toes.
No ruts for her to stand still in, and she thinks maybe that's how it should always be.
-f-