Gran drew out a long acrylic strand from the canvas knitting bag and continued her day’s work: the rhythmic yarn-over and loop-through motions of her crochet hook. The telly was airing a documentary. Lives of Master Painters: Winslow Homer. Painted seascapes exploded onto the big screen as the camera, like a lover’s eye, caressed the textures and colours of Homer’s paintings. It zoomed in on brushstrokes of waves, then zoomed out to show the people. Desperate people! Men trapped on flimsy boats on stormy seas. Murky blues, jagged whitecaps. Men peering into towering thunderclouds, their eyes squinting against the driving wind and the stinging sleet. Gran squinted.

She, too, had stared down death.

She drew out more yarn. Held her breath as she saw the mariners’ clothes plastered by waves against their bodies. Torment engraved their faces. She could see the scars on the backs of their straining arms. She could hear the lightning crack, feel the pitch of the water under the boat. Cold, clammy despair.

No question: that Homer fellow sure could paint.

Gran tied off the strand of lime green yarn and began hooking a new line of electric blue. The yarn colours had the peculiar effect of making the small muscles around her eye-sockets ache. Outrageous colours, she thought, grinning as she remembered Joey knocking the skeins off the shelf in Wool-Mart. Gran’s living room was furnished in beiges and greys, a palette favoured by rental agents the world over. But children were different. Children adored drama and colour. The younger the child, the wilder the hue. So she had silently cheered for Joey’s shocking choice.

Gran had purchased the necessary eight skeins of blue and green, and phoned her persnickety daughter-in-law to forewarn her that Joey’s choice was exactly that: his choice.

 “Electric blue? Lime green?” Josephine enunciated with a familiar tightness in her voice.

Gran pictured Josephine’s fingers whitening as they squeezed the phone. “Joey doesn’t really need an afghan, does he?” Josephine pointed out. “It doesn’t match the décor.” She had wallpapered a lovely forest scene in Joey’s room: oaks and maples, with a sprinkling of conifers to provide winter shelter for birds—primordial, suitable for calming down hyperactive kids, according to the interior designer. The soothing image, the coordinated drapes, the handmade wooden furniture were admired by adults—but were “improved” with markers and crayons by Joseph. He stuck garish metallic decals at eye level and taped up Pokémon and Transformer posters over choice locations in the forest canopy. His toys, jagged mounds of plastic and die-cast metal widgets liberally distributed over the sculpted wool carpet, looked like dump sites in the middle of an old-growth forest.

Lime green, electric blue: Gran scarcely saw the yarns now. She was doing most of the crochet work by touch while the daguerreotypes of Winslow Homer’s family and contemporaries flashed on the screen. Very serious looking folk: exactly the type you would expect to survive disasters at sea. A plain and God-fearing lot, not the type to raise a sensitive boy. “Art? Art? What is the worth in daubing colours when your brothers are already learning good solid trades?” she could imagine Winslow’s Papa saying. Gran laughed softly. Oh, yes, she’d had the arguments, too. Her son Richard had pursued a traditional career—and look at how bone-grindingly dull he was. Last Mother’s Day he’d cornered her at the barbecue: giving her “advice” on home equity loans. Something about “freeing up some cash”; no doubt that money-grubber was after what little she had. Fortunately her daughter Lisa, patchouli oil wafting from her tanned arms, had interrupted Richard’s bla-bla-bla and saved her.

The program was now slicing back and forth between actual meteorological snapshots and Homer’s painted thunderclouds. “Huh,” said Gran, deeply absorbed. While the camera focused on the storm-ravaged crews, Gran snuggled under the ever-lengthening afghan. She was making her grandson’s wish come true.

Joey’s older cousins all had Gran’s afghans on their beds. He knew he was next in line to get a big cuddly homemade blanket—but his mother Josephine had delayed …deferred…denied. Meanwhile, cousin Colton, who was a year younger, and a whiny little suck, had begged for a tiger-striped afghan.

“But Gran, it’s not fair. I have to start Grade One a whole year before Colton,” he had pleaded. Dear Joey, he was a treasure. A boy so jealous of another because of her handiwork. So she had tucked away Colton’s black and orange yarns and had started work immediately on Joey’s.

“You let Joey order you around like that?” Josephine said.

“How else does a kid learn to debate?” said Gran. “If he makes a better argument, then I give in.”

“You’re always giving in.” Josephine snorted. “First he tells you to hurry up and make his afghan before Colton’s and next he tells you what colours.”

“I let him figure out his own likes and dislikes,” Gran clarified.

“Nonsense,” said Josephine. “How else does a child learn esthetics? He has to be taught good taste.” Josephine was a specialist in seventeenth-century Flemish artists before she took up corporate law. Her mother-in-law had not completed high school and could not define the word “esthetics” much less bandy it about in a phone conversation.

 “Well, all his cousins except Colton have one now,” Gran said, wondering, were esthetics akin to prosthetics?

“I’ll bring over a swatch of wallpaper this weekend so you can exchange the skeins you bought for some appropriate forest shades,” said Josephine.

There was that word Gran hated: “appropriate.” They used it on the very young and, now, they sometimes used it on her. “No, dear, I’m sorry, but part of the tradition is that my grandchild chooses his own colours. No one can do that for him,” said Gran.

She laughed to herself. Little did Josephine know that each child also got to choose what superpower she crocheted into it. Most chose Strength but Joey chose Invisibility.

Every time he visited, Joey ran to inspect the afghan-in-progress, like a farmer checking crop growth after rain. The warmer Joey grew about the afghan, the frostier his mother became.

Gran hated discord; it gave her heartburn if she thought on it too long; but something about Joey made her dig in her heels. He was delicate, shy. Prone to bouts of asthma that got really scary when his breath whistled. But he had a strong imagination and secret passion, like a spiritual pilot light, that flared up when he was with her. Sometimes she chanted as she worked. “Endurance… insight…” she repeated.

Gran snipped off the electric blue yarn and completed the knot. Then she tugged out the lime-green strand, anchored it with a knot and began to crochet the edging. She fed loop after loop from her J-hook until her hand throbbed. She felt a peculiar urgency to finish the afghan.

After an hour, the credits of the documentary scrolled by. Her whole arm felt sore, like the heartburn had blossomed and sent out new shoots. Must have been going at it too hard. She felt light-headed one moment, and then heavy-chested. Like something was pressing on her. Too thick, too hot, she thought. To hell with the edging, I’ll finish that in the morning. To hell with this whole damn thing, it is really weighing me down like Jupiter. Gran put her hands up, to push away the leaden afghan on her chest, and discovered there was nothing there. As she pushed upward and away, she twisted her body off the sofa where she had been working—off the sofa, over the hassock, onto the floor.

*   *   *

The arguments, which used to be at moderate volume and late in the night when Joey was smaller, were now occurring at high volume in the middle of the day. The parents’ only concession to the boy was not to yell when he was in the same room.

Joey began to spend inordinate amounts of time with his Pokémon cards on the floor of the upstairs laundry room. Dust from the lint and chemicals from the Febreeze tended to choke him up, but at least he could shut the door. He learned which Pokémon could evolve into more powerful forms. He knew the levels, the allowed moves and countermoves, and the resistance— he knew all the information on his Pokémon cards by heart now. If only he knew addition and subtraction. But he didn’t, and so the older boys still skimmed his best cards. “For all the money we’ve spent on Pokémon,” his father Richard used to joke, “I’d like to know why he’s got only loser cards in his pack.” But lately he had stopped making jokes like that.

Joey wandered into the kitchen, a sagging lump in his pocket. “When’s dinner?” he asked.

“Any minute,” his ruddy-faced mother said.

“Soon,” snapped his father.

“Go sit at the table.”

“Go wash your hands.”

They were talking at him in that rapid-fire way. How could he sit at the table and wash his hands at the same time? At least their loud voices were gone.

Joey pulled out his cards. “I got a question first. What’s fifty and eighty? Is that more or less than ninety?”

“It’s one hundred thirty—”

“You see, Joseph, five and eight are thirteen,” said Richard, “so if you multiply everything by ten, you get fifty and eighty, which makes—”

“Thirteenty.”

“No, one hundred thirty. Don’t look dopey like that!”

“What do you expect?” said Josephine. “He doesn’t know ‘multiply,’ Richard. You can’t explain something by referring to something unknown.”

“Right, and you are the math genius of this house.”

“You need to look at things from the other person’s point of view,” she said.

Richard sniffed. “Flemish painters...”

Dinner was an anxious coiling of spaghetti in tomato sauce while Joseph’s parents interrogated him about his day at school. He had been on “time out” for kicking someone just before science class so he did not know what module the class was on, so he guessed the science module might be “Frankenstein.”

They laughed and he laughed. For a moment the world seemed right.

“I downloaded a new video last night,” his father said. “Would you like to watch it after dinner?”

It was a school night, when after-dinner videos were forbidden, according to the old rules. But recently many of the old rules, not just the one prohibiting daytime quarrelling, were being ignored. Moreover, Joey’s internal rule (“never say no to a cartoon”) was intact, so he stretched out full-length in front of the big screen. Just as the superheroes were getting hot on the trail of the bad guys, though, Joey had to turn up the volume.

It was them. Again. He tried to concentrate on the video, but his stomach began to churn. He pressed the Off button and climbed steps two at a time.

His parents stood in front of the linen closet—blocking the door to the laundry room. His mother held a large clear plastic bag, and she was scooping towels and sheets into it. “Tablecloths!” she spluttered as Joey tried to squeeze past. “I’m the only one who appreciates fine linens—they’re coming with me!” A stack of snow white cloth cascaded into the bag.

A bulky bundle on the bottom shelf, lime green and electric blue, caught Joey’s eye.

“As I recall,” said Richard, “we decided never to use tablecloths because they would have to be washed and ironed. As you may recall, I don’t iron to your high standards. That would have meant extra work for you, Josephine. So don’t blame me for not appreciating tablecloths.”

Josephine pressed her lips firmly together. Richard had an explanation for everything, and the explanation always boiled down to the fact that he was nice and reasonable. Whereas she was not.

Joey wiggled out a soft, tightly wedged bag.

“Okay, let’s shell out for a maid! Will that make everything right, Madame Solicitor?” asked Richard.

Joey did not have to look at his mother to know that comment made her angrier. He poked and tore at the soft plastic of the bag until finally he yanked the afghan free. Undulating stripes of green and blue waterfalled over his knees and the floor. “Cool! I was wondering where my Gran blanket was!” he cried. The adults turned momentarily toward him.

“Oh, great...” Josephine rolled her eyes.

Richard shrugged. “It’s his, you know. The last thing Mom made for him. I couldn’t just—you know—”

“Spineless.” Josephine’s voice was pure contempt. Joseph’s babyhood, and now his childhood, had been one long series of capitulations. Gone were the well-matched outfits from Baby Lacoste. Gone were the dulcet-toned chimes, the hand-carved wooden train set, the velveteen puppets. “Guess he’s inherited the gene for bad taste,” Richard used to joke. But not anymore.

The adults paused to watch their son, wound up in the afghan, boisterously rocking himself. Joey observed a lull created by the force field radiating out from the afghan. The stripes hummed with some primal, brutish power.

“If there’s a colour not to be found in nature,” said Josephine, “he loves it.”

“Oh yeah? Have you never seen a parrot? Electric blues and lime greens like that all over!” said Richard.

“Oh, you know what I mean,” said Josephine.

“Or some flashy aquarium species? Tetrads? They’re flashy.” Richard enjoyed this; it was easier to refute her statements with his facts than make a case for why she should stay.

Joey pulled the afghan so it covered his head. He loved making a tent from his afghan. He felt faintly sick with joy. He knew Gran had made him an afghan! He had seen her working on it. She had promised it. But when he asked after her funeral, no-one could say what had happened to it.

Silly adults. He loved the pattern of dappled light when he held the afghan over his head. It was heavy and warm. He pushed away the side he was holding over his head and let it drop soundlessly.

“It hurts my eyes. It’s psychedelic,” Josephine said. “You didn’t tell me your mother was an acid freak.”

Joey knew acid was sizzling bad stuff. Bad for a soft, fuzzy afghan.

“Mom made one for each of her grandkids. Except Colton, I guess; she’d only bought the yarn before—.” Richard found himself curiously unable to complete the sentence. He squinted, and as he did so a memory of squeezing his eyes against smoke—when was that? Last year’s barbecue, Mother’s Day, wasn’t it?—when he’d wanted to talk to Mom, to carve out a smidgen of her time, and all he’d come up with was some crap talk on what? home equity loans? He’d wanted to tell her to take some money and travel a little, like she’d always wanted to do. But before he could finish the suggestion, Lisa the dingbat had barged in on the conversation.

“Can you imagine that?” Richard said, “Crocheting that enormous thing with a crochet hook the size of a pencil?” His throat constricted again.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all, Richard. Her arthritis. Her failing eyesight. Your mom was a saint, but why she inflicted this hideous thing on us—”

“‘Hideous’? You know what your problem is?”

Joey pulled the afghan further up. It had to be something more than a tent, he thought. The sail on the mast of a ship, maybe. Joey called, “Watch out men, there’s a massive storm on the horizon.” Massive: he liked the sound of it. A massive storm. Choppy waters. Joey rocked from side to side. The fury of the wind, the torrential rains. He trembled. His breath whistled. He could hear the lightning crack, feel the pitch of the water under the boat. Cold, clammy despair. The typhoon hits full force, the rigging snaps. The brave sailors are engulfed by a wave that arches right over them. Eeeee-ai, crash!

*         *         *

Joseph, the sailor, cannot withstand the storm. He ties himself to the mast and the wind whips the sail tightly around him. The storm is so ferocious it sucks the breath from him, sucks away the words of his shipmates—who are loud and mutinous and arguing on deck as usual—and he cannot even tell if they are still there or have been pushed overboard by the mountainous swells of icy grey water. What is it they are saying? “Save our souls!” He tries to call this out—

It is just so hard to breathe in this storm—this torrential downpour—he can only breathe by whistling.

There is this heaviness in his chest—

Liquid filling his lungs—

Something pressing him down—

Down down down.

THE END