Leo's Blues

Léonie didn't consider herself a superhero, even though she had a superpower. The reason she had never put any thought into devising a secret identity and stitching up a costume was that she didn't consider her ability extraordinary at all. It was just something she had learned from her grandfather, and what other grandparents must have taught other grandchildren, surely. She didn't speak of it with anyone because there was no need to share all the details of one's household routine with one's friends. Like whether you put trousers or a shirt on first, or if you happened to be a blanket-thief.

If she ever married, her husband would learn to accept it as just another one of her quirks. Because that's what it was, truly. A minor quirk.

So, when the twelve-year-old Léonie stumbled upon Jim Laramie kissing Clara Bell behind the school gym, she didn't cry as much as she might have because she knew the pain would last only for the ten minutes it took to get home. She shambled by the rows of well-known house-fronts, hazy with tears, and the pieces of her heart jangled in her chest with every step.

When she reached her number, Léonie hurried upstairs without greeting her family, anxious to reach the relief hidden in her closet.

It was an old mahogany box, painted turquoise and garnished with wavy carvings. Two bucks in a souvenir shop, courtesy of grandma's magazine-won free trip to Bali.

The box was a beauty, but the content was truly important. The content wasn't pretty to look at.

Léonie breathed in, urging her hands to be still. She wanted to get it done as quickly as possible, not even because of Jim Laramie and that blasted Clara Bell, but because she didn't like to look at the muddle within the Indonesian box.

She got up to close the door and returned to the box. Concentrate.

Léonie opened the lid and closed her eyes. She touched the sore spot on her chest and drew out the hurtful parts, quickly deposing them in the blue box. The lid slammed down, and Léonie peeked with one eye, inspecting the state of affairs beneath her neck.

Good. All out in one scoop.

Léonie sighed and stretched. Her inside was still sensitive a notch, but that was normal. The pain had blistered the tender tissue, leaving traces in the softness of the soul. It would grow a little callous, then pass. All in its time.

Léonie changed into the fashionless mismatch of colours she allowed herself to wear around the house and joined the rest of her family.

* * *

By the time Léonie turned seventeen, the dolphin-blue mahogany box wasn't big enough. Its contents spilt from the edges, leaving bitter burn-marks on the closet bottom. Léonie frowned at the ruined wood. Tears weren't only salty. Apparently, they were acidic, too. 'Good thing it didn't drip on the clothes'.

She needed a new container because by the time Léonie turned seventeen, both grandpa and grandma had died, Laney moved to California, and her brother fell out with her parents.

Her grandparents' death was not welcomed, but it had been anticipated as a prerequisite of old age, and even her best friend's parting was acceptable thanks to the perks of communication technology. But Rick slamming the door shouldn't have happened. She couldn't take the pain of his leaving them out at once. It peeled slowly, layer by layer, slowly trickling into puddles she had to empty regularly.

Rick didn't stay in touch.

There were a couple of empty cardboard boxes in the garage, but after seeing what the locked-up pain could do to the wood in the closet, Léonie thought better than to try her luck with nothing more than stiff paper.

She had just been rummaging through the house, debating whether to entrust her bitter cache to mum's Tupperware, when she spotted the door to her brother's former room. The door wasn't locked.

The curtains were drawn, but the bed had been made, and the furniture faces were dust-free. Léonie dragged her finger across Rick's work-table. 'So typical of mum. Won't call him first, but she cleans up each week anyway.'

Tears sloshed at the bottom of her soul, and Léonie knew she had to drain them soon. Like a malfunctioning bladder, her soul couldn't hold it in as well as before.

Her eyes fell on Rick's nightstand. It looked sturdy and scratched enough as it was. For once, the top was free of clutter, revealing the scarred surface. Rick had been above using coasters.

Léonie kneeled beside the nightstand, inspecting its dimensions. Not that she was thrilled, but it would have to do.

Léonie touched the sore spot, this time occupying the lower part of her stomach, and deposited the sadness. In the next half-hour, she had managed to rinse every drop out of grandma's mahogany box and transport it onto Rick's nightstand's top-shelf.

Mum had no reason to look inside, and if Rick returned, Léonie would be happy to find it some other place.

* * *

Léonie's relationships never lasted long. Whether with men or with friends. She started to think her bond with Laney would have worn our rather quickly, too, had the other girl stayed in their hometown.

Of course, it didn't get to her as much of a burden, because she was quick to lay away burdensome stuff. In her new apartment, Léonie dedicated a whole closet to the safe-keeping of the troublesome.

Over time, she devised several theories on her evident lack of popularity.

'Wholesome.'  Maybe that was what other people searched for. 'I am not wholesome, because a part of me lies in the closet at home, and they can feel it.' After all, it took her long enough, but Léonie had finally learned that the great majority of people had no idea how to get rid of the hurting. Some piled work upon it, others tried to wash it with alcohol, and there were such who wore it openly on their sleeves. Léonie didn't really understand how anyone could fail at taking the pain away – the process was really simple – but then again, others might have wondered how she could smile at the hospital bedsides and acquaintance's funerals.

„Nothing ever gets to you, does it?“ her suddenly repentant brother had asked at their parent's wake. 'No, because I don't let it. How about you try for a change?!' She stopped herself before saying it out loud.

Anger was easier to handle than sadness, but it tended to get out of hand in the long run, so Léonie learned how to catch it by its sharp, spindly legs and drag it out. It raged in the closet at night, rolling mini-thunders, but Léonie was a heavy sleeper.

Years passed, and Léonie changed places. Her career progressed, and so did her salary. Nobody ever objected to an ever-smiling art-custodian, so in time she could afford herself an apartment where a whole room could be given over to discarded tumults. In an homage to that first container – the sea-blue mahogany box – she painted the room's door blue. The sign on the door read Leo's Blues.

She would make herself lemonade on early summer evenings, put on some Lady Day's bluesy tunes, which did not touch her, and watch the dusk creep along the walls, painting them into the shades of the locked-away things.

She would allow herself a touch of melancholia, tinged with loneliness.

Loneliness was easily extractable, but Léonie started to think there were other ways of coping with it. Like counter-measures. Maybe if she tried out this wholesomeness, she would prevent the forming of the pesky emotions. After all, Leo's Blues was quite spacious, but the unshed tears had started seeping into the walls, and she dreaded mildew.

For the first time in almost half a century, Léonie unlocked the blue room to take, not to give. She had taken in only half a handful, but it did horrors to her digestion. Léonie tried to hold it in for a day, but after a lousy day at work and a few gulps of Pepto-Bismol, she had to admit: the sadness didn't sit well with her. As if she had completely lost the ability to digest it.

It bothered Léonie, but she frowned and shook her head. After all, a woman well nearing her fifties ought to be more careful with her health. Changes were for the young. And, once she took out the uglies, there was nothing but joy and content to bask her from the inside. She was full.

But not to the brink.

There was an echo to her soul, half-empty as it was.

* * *

In Léonie's seventies – marked by well-earned retirement – the time seemed to stretch into an endless array of dusky evenings, jazzy music and lemonade pitchers. Unsweetened. She had developed diabetes, and wondered whether the fault lay in the sugary emotions that ravaged through her stomach.

The levels of loneliness rose, and the blue room was almost crowded with its whitish mists.

'This won't do', Léonie frowned. 'I'm too old to move.'

Too old, too bored, and yet too lazy to search for a change of scenery. She liked the scenery she had.

The apartment was high enough for her to see a good part of the park across the building. Léonie loved watching children feed a small flock of tame geese that glided up and down a narrow stretch of glittery water. She ate up the marvellous autumnal browns and reds, and lightly drank in the winter mists which resonated so well with the content of Leo's Blues.

Her seventy-fifth birthday was on its way when one January morning, huddled into a blanket and holding a cup of warm tea (unsweetened and yucky), Léonie questioned one of the truths she had embraced in her earlier years: Those who cannot do – support.

She had always been fond of art, but admired it from the sidelines. She loved looking at other people's work, and weave her own patterns into their interpretation. For the first time since early high school, Léonie wondered whether she had been denying herself and whether there was more to her wrinkled, sepia-spotted hands than phone-call doodles.

The days were long, the vista beautiful, and Léonie bought canvas.

The Léonie's Early Squishy-Squashy Phase didn't last for long, and after a while – much to her amazement – pictures sprouted from the tip of the brush. Vibrant, yellow, red and green – scenes both of the park and imagination – the images burst with laughing energy, but old Jones from the Gallery wasn't amazed.

„Hm“, he tilted his head left and right, stepping up and away from the painting in a rendition of some art-appreciating two-step.

„Well, Jones?“ Léonie was both amused and annoyed. „Say what you have to say.“

„Hm“, Jones said.

„Not half so bad for an old girl like yourself“, he winked, „but something is... I don't know how to put it...“

„Lacking.“

„Hm. ... I guess you could say that.“

When she closed the door behind old Jones, Léonie had nothing to extract, because what she felt was not-surprise.

Wholesomeness. It always came down to wholesomeness.

Léonie took her chair by the balcony and stared ahead, not bothering with beverages.

The park was dreary, washed out with cheerless February rain. Naked branches loomed out of the whitish fog and the sky was the colour of empty hallways.

Léonie reached for her palette. She looked up and down, searching for the shade of empty hallways. Barren, with echoes. Not quite white, not quite grey, and certainly not this smiling, lively, summerful blue.

Léonie slowly lowered the palette, and glanced at the entrance to Leo's Blues. She stood up and reached for the knob of the door painted in the wrong blue.

She paused at the threshold and gently applied the tip of a clean paintbrush to the slow whirlpool of the right blue that circled up and down Leo's Blues. It limply hung onto the bristles until she carefully smeared it across the white panel of a canvas.

The blue of empty hallways was tinted with a perfect amount of lonely white and livened up with an occasional jarring, surprising, angry lightning bolt.

'The sky before the break of a winter storm. Yes. I think I could work with this.'

Léonie moved the easel closer to Leo's Blues, keeping the rectangle of the balcony in sight.

She stuck out her tongue, and smiled to herself, then took out more of the sorrow and put it on the white field. Careful not to touch it.

February sky slowly spread across the canvas.

'Yes', Léonie thought, glancing up at the model. 'Yes', there was enough material to outlast her, there, in the blue room. She couldn't wait for old Jones to see this.

'The second phase begins', Léonie added a portentous cloud.

'Yes, yes...Yes.'