A Palette of Grief

A Palette of Grief

Word count: 2684

*Warnings: Discusses death, child abuse, mental health. No graphic descriptions, just subject matter.

Dr. Sebastian Thompson flounced into the black Range Rover, slammed the door, loosened his tie, and started the engine. Reaching out, he cranked the AC to high and leaned back into the leather seat. Even for August, the weather was unusually hot. Not just hot, he thought, but humid as well. The air wafting in from the lake did nothing to cool Selwig down. Throwing the truck into reverse, the tired psychologist backed up and left the hospital’s parking lot. He was ready for a long, relaxing weekend. The heat was playing havoc on his patients. The lethargy caused by the withering heat drove his depressed patients deeper into their gloom and ratcheted up the tempers of the violent wards.

Thirty-five minutes later and cooled off, Sebastian pulled into the long, lined driveway of his house on the shore of Lake Selwig. He slid out of the truck and was disappointed to note that there was no breeze from the lake. Sighing, he trudged up to the front door and entered the huge Victorian home. He tossed his keys and wallet onto the foyer table, shuffled to the kitchen, and grabbed a beer from the fridge. After opening the cool drink, he looked out of the triple-pane garden window over the sink. Down the slate flagstone path, he could see the old greenhouse. Despite the heat, Roark was there. Good, Sebastian thought, you are painting. Smiling, he headed for the French doors and down the path.

Sebastian tapped lightly on the greenhouse door and then stepped in. What Roark was painting stunned him.

“Hey, buddy,” Sebastian said quietly, “Well, that is a bit of a palette shift. Looks good.”

“It’s how I like to remember him,” Roark said, stepping back from his easel. Reaching out, he picked up a beer bottle dappled with cool condensation, rubbed it across his sweaty forehead, and took a long drink. Then shrugging. “I think I was nine, just before he…well, you know, started hitting me. It was one of those package trips, I guess. You know, you pay a ton of money and pretend to be a cowboy for a couple of weeks out in Colorado.”

Sebastian stood awestruck by the work in front of him. The style and color palette were unlike anything his former patient turned friend and housemate had ever painted in the past. It was a leap into a realism that Sebastian would not have thought possible. For twelve and a half years, Roark’s art style was a dark and surrealist world of abstract symbolism and putrid colors. It was, the doctor thought, an attempt to convey, without speech, the pain and torment he was experiencing. Before finding his voice again, it was Roark’s only way to show the world the terror that bound his heart. Now he’d replaced his typical palette of ghastly greens and garish purples with blacks and grays on white. The subtle gradients found in his use of black were uncanny, a testament to his innate artistic ability. Stylistically, the painting was of photographic quality.

“You got to play cowboy for two weeks?” Sebastian asked, smiling, and moved to stand at Roark’s shoulder. “Never figured you for a cowboy. Have another?” the doctor asked, holding up his empty bottle.

Roark retrieved two more beers from the small fridge kept in the old greenhouse turned art studio and gave his friend a moment to study the canvas. The details were impeccable. Every wrinkle and crease were there, as if recorded by a camera. So deftly reproduced that Sebastian yearned to stick his finger into them to test their softness. The tree’s craggy grey and ebony bark reflected the time-worn exhaustion of the man in the portrait. Every leather fringe on the man’s chaps hung loose and flowing; the tiredness the pretend cowboy was feeling leapt out at the doctor from the work.

Tired, yes, Roark’s father must have been very tired. In the early weeks of that long- ago horrible, sweltering summer, he had lost his wife, killed in a tragic shooting accident by eight-year-old Roark. Then, as the pair grieved, his young son slowly turned into a stranger, violent and withdrawn in a desperate plea for help, suicidal at the age of nine, lost in a dark and impenetrable world of confusion and pain that the poor man had no real hope of reaching into without professional guidance, guidance he failed to procure. Yes, Sebastian could see the confusion and concern on the man’s face. There was something else there, though, a feeling of resignation. Sebastian sighed. He was certain that Roark’s father had already made his decision to abandon his young son in a last-ditch effort to save himself. He wondered if Roark had sensed his father’s despair during the trip. The man’s face spoke of self-reflection and inner scrutiny, and the eyes a certain desensitized and sanitized reflection on whatever scene he was looking at.

“Here.” Roark handed Sebastian the beer. “Took me long enough, no?” He asked proudly, pointing to the painting.

“Long enough?”

“Yes, to shed that God-awful green and purple palette that throttled me for so many years.” He replied, then reaching out, smudged at a spot on the painting with his pinky, spreading the black paint stroke a bit thinner, muting the harshness of its border. “Damn it, Sebastian, sometimes it seems like you just found me yesterday and not five and a half years ago.” He sighed, “So much, so much has come to pass.”

“Is that his, your father’s actual likeness?” Sebastian asked, trying to deflect Roark’s moodiness while pointing to the weathered man sitting in a cowboy getup with his back to an equally gnarled tree.

“Yeah, after the accident, after I killed her, he wrinkled all up like that.” He tipped his head to the right and pointed at the forlorn, canvas cowboy. “Just… got old overnight. I guess we both got old really, really fast after it. Lost too. I killed her, and it sucked the life from his soul like the sun sucks the life from a grape.”

“Grapes become raisins, Roark. Not necessarily a terrible change.” Sebastian said watching as the younger man picked up his brush and added a bit of gray to a shadow near the horse.

He stopped in mid-stroke and turned to Sebastian, his face a mask of sorrow and confusion. “That is true, Sebastian, true. But Sebastian,” he began, then paused, and shaking his head, he looked into Sebastian’s topaz blue eyes.

The doctor could see the start of tears pooling in Roark’s deep chestnut brown eyes. When Roark cried, his tears were the huge bulbous tears of a small child before tipping over and slipping down his cheeks. Seeing them still broke Sebastian’s heart. When Roark spoke again, his voice was hoarse.

“Raisins are good, but you cannot raise a broken little boy on a diet of raisins. I was starving to death, Sebastian. I needed the grapes. I needed…” He sniffled, blinked, and Sebastian stifled a quiet laugh when Roark’s tongue flicked out and licked away the tear drops slipping past his lips. “I needed him.”

With a long sigh, Roark set his beer down and squeezed a bit of black paint out on his palette. He had made little effort to conceal the bitterness in his voice. The statement was true enough. Admitting that he was angry and hurt by his father’s selfish and tragic decision to remand him to a state-run orphanage was one of the most difficult hurdles in his recovery. Just allowing himself to feel and accept that anger had sorely torn at the thin fabric of his burgeoning well-being.

Sebastian watched Roark paint with confident strokes. A wisp of gray here, a flick of black there. Then back to his palette, mixing the next hue. Roark wielded his brushes with a strange and absolute certainty. He did not seem to second-guess his choices. Sunlight now shone dappled flecks on the cowboy's face, filtered by the branches of the overbearing shade tree. The horse, still saddled, leaned a bit heavier on its left hind foot after Roark made subtle changes to the curve of the animal’s left hind leg. The forest in the background grew darker, starved of the sun’s rays, and the coffee pot, sitting atop a small campfire, gleamed with a well-worn, black metallic sheen.

Frowning, Sebastian took a swig of his beer. While the man and the horse were photorealistic representations, the tree worried him. Trees symbolized some of Roark’s old fears and insecurities. Overwhelming emotions that had held his heart captive for so long. Despite the paintings realism the tree leaned in as if tearing free of the earth and grasping stealthily toward Roark’s father. The therapist knew that monsters of all shapes and forms plagued Roark’s nightmares. This tree could easily be the embodiment of one of them. Even with his sudden change in color palette, Roark was still loading his art with subtle hints about his emotions and thoughts. His gruff voice yanked Sebastian back from his musings.

“I’ve had enough. It’s done.” He declared, tossing the brush down and stepping back to study his work. “What time is it?”

“Fourish. Why?”

“Tired, exhausted, I didn’t sleep at all last night. I can’t sleep. I was hot and fidgety. I just can’t sleep all sticky like that. This heat is oppressive, and it’s suffocating me. I just got up and painted.”

“Yeah, there was no breeze, even with the windows open. Summer is really hanging on this year.”

“Takes so much out of me, painting.” He muttered, sighing. He sipped from his bottle and turned to his friend, “Can we sit, for a bit, on the swing on the dock? The sun’s going down, and I like the smell of the trees by the lake. They smell green and damp, and the mud smells warm and fresh. I like the sound of the weeping willows swishing in the breeze too.”

“Yes, of course, buddy. The trees are indeed nice this time of year.” Sebastian replied, watching as Roark wandered out of the studio door and down the slate flagstone path toward the lakeside swing.

Sebastian put the soiled brushes in the wash water, grabbed four beers, and after a last glimpse of the acrylic painting, made his way to the dock.

Roark was swinging gently, lost in his thoughts, when Sebastian caught up to him. He sat close to him, shoulder to shoulder. They popped open their beers and sat in companionable silence for a time. Bats flitted in and out of the failing light, chasing what bugs they could. Far off, a dog was barking. The water carried sound a long way on hot sultry nights like this, and when the first dog stopped, a second and then a third from across the small inlet picked up the baleful song.

Sebastian looked over at Roark. He was captive to his lonesome musings, and the doctor knew well enough just to let him alone. Two years ago, he would have panicked, afraid that Roark would slip away and not return to him. Sebastian studied his handsome face in the dimming light. His typical medium stubble covered his cheeks and the underside of his jaw, and his near shoulder-length, mahogany-brown hair wafted slightly in the lake-borne breeze. It amazed Sebastian that he could be so handsome outwardly, after all the tragedy that had marred his life had scarred him. The scars, he thought, were all in his heart and soul.

No one deserved the horrible life Roark’s father had unwittingly cast his son into, not even the intrusive dogs across the silky water barking at the inky blue evening sky. In short, the orphanage pawned him off on a psychopath, who brutalized and dehumanized him. Finally, by sheer luck, after two years of unimaginable abuse by the man he still referred to as the Otter King, a party of hunters found the boy at an extremely remote trapping camp high in the mountains. During the hunters’ efforts to rescue the battered boy, they had killed the Otter king. The State, having no guilty party, filed no charges, and Roark, his voice silenced by atrocities so appalling that Sebastian’s mind still reeled when he thought about them, could not tell his story until after years of painstaking therapy.

At a loss, the authorities warehoused the mute, feral eleven-year-old in the adult population of a poorly run mental health facility. Roark languished there for eight years until Sebastian found him five and a half years ago and brought him to St. Francis Hospital in Selwig, mute and lost except for eleven years of paintings.

“He, my father, had already decided to throw me away, hadn’t he?” He asked in a whisper, staring straight ahead at the silvery lake.

Sebastian wrapped his arm around Roark’s broad shoulders and pulled him closer. “ “Yes, Roark. If your painting accurately describes him, yes, I think he had.”

“He was watching me. I’d caught a trout, and the wrangler wouldn’t take it off the hook for me. It kept slipping away from me. I was laughing. The scales tickled. I hadn’t laughed in so long. The wrangler tackled me. The fish slipped away back into the water. Then he wrestled with me, tickling my ribs. When I looked up again…my father was gone. He’d just wandered away.” He took a long pull from his beer. “I don’t think I’ll ever laugh again. Never.” He stood abruptly and started back toward the house. Sebastian finished his other beers and prepared for the coming storm.

On his way back to the house, Sebastian stopped to lock up the studio. The image that he saw shocked him, and his knees nearly buckled. Roark had revisited his painting and reworked it deftly in a wash of purple, green, and red, an aura of his hate and pain. The tree now had a face with gruesome yellow and green teeth. A root, torn free of the soil, strangled the man, and the sky, swirled with the loathsome hues that Roark used to symbolize chaos, loomed ponderously overhead. The coffee cup, at first a symbol of comfort, spewed an equally villainous purple and green substance straight at Roark’s father’s face, and it ran in rivulets through the deep wrinkles. Roark had warped the snapshot of serenity, comfort, and love into an apocalyptic scene of despair.

Once back in the still uncomfortably warm, stifling house, Sebastian changed into lightweight running pants and a battered T-shirt. After starting supper, he went upstairs to check on Roark. The beleaguered artist had already curled up in his bed, dressed in shorts and no shirt, atop the sheets. He rolled over onto his back and, as was his way, sighed deeply and threw an arm over his eyes.

“You’re angry.” He said, his voice tremulous with fear.

“No,” Sebastian replied evenly, “Just worried, you know me. I worry.”

“Don’t, I’m alright.” Then whispering, “I had to do it.” He said resolutely while rolling away from the doctor and reaching into the night table drawer.

“I know,” Sebastian said.

“For me, please, tomorrow, call it.” He said firmly and handed the curious man a scrap of paper. “My Papa.”

Sebastian studied it, stunned. “A phone number? Roark, are you certain? Truly certain?”

He curled up again and nodded into his pillows.

“Sure, if you are ready, I will.”

Roark had not seen his father in thirteen years. Sebastian supposed if he was ready, it was time.

“Okay,” Roark muttered, his voice muffled by the bedding. Then a bit more relaxed, “Is it true, Sebastian, that old saying, ‘that a picture is worth a thousand words’?”

“Yes, Roark. More often than not, it is true.”

“Well, then, I’ll take him on a tour of my little studio and today’s piece. I have to. I need to let him feel my anger, to know my anger, my pain, and my disappointment. Yeah, and a thousand words is still an awful lot for me.”