We Are All the Same in the Dark - Julia Heaberlin Page 0,36
of years of personal anguish than of objective professional effort. I never showed it to Finn because I knew he would never look at me the same way again. I never showed it to my father because I was afraid it would be the grenade that blew us up.
The coffeepot is spitting out a last death rattle. I need to leave for the meeting at the lake soon. But I want to shore up last night with a kiss goodbye. I want to make us work. I don’t understand my marriage but neither do I understand anybody else’s.
The longer Finn takes, the more it feels like the room is creeping in on me. Betty Crocker, incognito on the shelf. Santa, leering from the lid of Daddy’s box. Jesus, conducting The Last Supper on the wall.
The least I can do for Finn is get rid of the painting he hated. I lift it off its hook, laying it facedown on the table.
Finn doesn’t know that this painting and I have a very personal history. My father always chose this chair and the view of this wall when he thought I needed to think about what I had done.
I had plenty of hours to memorize every stroke of this da Vinci, down to the salt Judas knocked over, making it forever bad luck to spill salt.
One of my uncle’s most effective sermons was called “Devil and Salt.” He preached that when you spill salt, the noise wakes the devil, who sleeps on your left shoulder. But if you throw a little extra salt over your shoulder, the devil is blinded. Just don’t forget which shoulder he sits on. And don’t miss. After that sermon, my uncle bragged that half of the congregation gave up salt for a month.
To this day, I toss salt over my left shoulder without thinking. More than once, I’ve hit Finn in the eye.
My father called da Vinci one of the great detectives. He told me I’d learn everything I’d ever need to know about body language in the brushstrokes that captured this second after Jesus told his apostles he would be betrayed. A head turn, a quirk of the lip, a betrayer’s jerk of an elbow.
While I recuperated from the accident, da Vinci hovered in my bed. I read about his obsession with the human body while I obsessed over mine. Drawing after drawing, autopsy after autopsy. Da Vinci was documenting the physical puzzle of man long before a drop of blood could tell us the color of skin and eyes, the shape of a nose.
“When a man sits down, the distance from his seat to the top part of his head will be half of his height plus the thickness and length of the testicles.”
Finn and I tested that out once after a few margaritas.
In the bedroom, he swishes a broom across wood. Glass clanks into a trash can. A window glide squeaks. The mattress whines like a knee is punched into it, like Finn’s making the bed, even though he never does.
I restlessly flip through my voicemails. Rusty is asking me to meet up outside the station house around ten tonight so we can talk. Maggie is going to take Lola and Angel to the movies and orders me to get some more sleep.
No more sounds from the bedroom. In my own house, I absorb the humiliating feeling of a one-night stand. Finn is waiting for me to leave.
“Sometimes, I think Odette is all titanium.” I overheard Finn say that once.
But I’m not.
I telegraph my goodbye as loudly as possible. I rinse and clank my coffee cup into the rack, “accidentally” set off the alarm on my iPad before I plug it in to recharge, slam a cabinet shut. On the chalk message board, I squeak out a one-legged stick figure blowing a kiss, my private signature for him only.
I tuck the painting of The Last Supper under one arm and use the other hand to grab the Santa box. In the hall by the front door, I yank open the coat closet, still crammed with my father’s old uniforms and hunting jackets. I slide The Last Supper upright against the side of the closet wall and let a coattail fall over it. Kneeling, I shove the Santa box as far as I can to the back, but something’s in the way.
It was Maggie who stormed through the closets in this house after the funeral. She insisted. Every pocket, every box. But my father’s uniforms—I