All This Life

Our mistakes barking into the air.

She sets up her chair, another for her clients. Gets out her pens, pencils, and erasers. Sometimes, she’ll simply sketch a bit, whatever’s on her mind, let tourists walk close and inspect her talent before committing to a purchase. More often than not, in these instances, she’ll draw her own caricature. Let the general public see that she can laugh at herself. She’ll show Kathleen in the foreground, her son in the back. She’ll show her walking away from him. Her face will be a trash can of self-sympathy, true torment in the eyes, mouth agape, mounds of brunette teased out and up, looking like an appalling hat, one of those Russian jobs, an ushanka. Sometimes she’s armed with a suitcase, motion lines showing she’s running away from the boy in the background. Or she’ll sketch a large hot air balloon with teeth near the basket or snakes dropping to the ground in place of ropes. She knows the tourists can’t tell the drawing’s significance.

She’s also been known to draw pictures of her boy. When she does this, these portraits are flawless, so lifelike. She exaggerates nothing. And he looks perfect and some day she hopes to have him model for her in person.

Kathleen does one of those now. Re-creating an old picture of the two of them, though Kat deletes herself in this rendition, lets the boy be the star. It’s a photo she’s drawn many times since leaving — it’s the one she left by his bed before bolting: a shot of mother and son on a horse together, and the boy has dazzle and awe plastered on his face. It was his first time riding a horse.

“What will it cost us?” a couple asks, sneaking up behind her.

Kathleen crumples up the portrait of her son. “What did you say?”

They walk around her and sit on the chair. They are both young, in their mid-twenties. Younger even? Kathleen hopes not.

Because the girl has a black eye.

The guy does not.

And the girl is pregnant.

“What will it cost us?” the girl with the black eye says again.

Kathleen stares at the young man with her. Looks about the age when her husband turned violent — he was a good husband up until her son’s accident, and after that every one of them had closed head injuries, not only the boy. Their beautiful boy who for whatever reason climbed on that weather balloon, floated thirty feet up in the air, and was dumped onto the concrete. He survived, which was a miracle, but his brain was never the same. It wasn’t only him, though. Every one of them was rewired.

“Only five dollars,” Kathleen says.

“Can we do it, Tyler?” the girl with the black eye says.

“Fine.”

“Don’t make me look fat,” the girl says to Kathleen.

“You’re not at all fat, sweetie.”

“Dude, you should see her naked,” the guy says, nudging the girl and laughing. She hits him playfully on the arm and says, “Shut up, Tyler.”

He apologizes, though it’s obviously insincere. Kathleen gets the sense that if these two were home alone, barricaded in some trashed apartment, Tyler wouldn’t be saying sorry for anything, but slugging beer from a can, a dune of tobacco bulging from his bottom lip and making the girl with the black eye wait on him like an indentured servant.

“Better suck in your gut,” Tyler says and pats the girl on the stomach.

“That isn’t a gut, asshole. That’s your baby.”

“What kind of background do you want for the picture?” says Kathleen.

“It can be anything?” the girl with the black eye asks.

Kathleen nods.

“Where should we go?” the girl says to Tyler.

“I don’t care,” he says, and Kathleen watches him check out another girl’s butt as she passes by. Then he looks at Kathleen, shrugs.

“Paris,” the girl says to Kathleen. “Can you draw us in front of the Eiffel Tower?”

“Sure.”

“Pack your bags,” the girl says to Tyler. “We’re on our way to Paris.”

Kathleen prepares to draw the girl with the black eye first. Normally, she captures her subjects mostly from the neck up or with tiny bodies, but she doesn’t want to this time. No, she wants to make sure and capture this pregnant young woman whole.

There’s life in her.

There’s hope.

There’s hope until there’s not.

Kathleen can see their future so clearly because it’s identical to her past.

And since today is her son’s eighteenth birthday, she’s feeling both nostalgic and cruel. These emotions knotting around her neck. These emotions leaving her no choice but to lash out at this innocent couple because she’s tired of lashing out at herself.

She draws the girl’s black eye first. Swollen hues puffing under it. The black eye is huge. It’s going to be a monument for every woman’s eye that has ever felt a man’s knuckle. Tyler has to be able to decipher his own violence.

“Are we in Paris yet?” the girl with the black eye says. “I’m in the mood for a chocolate croissant.”

“We’ve started our final descent,” Kathleen says.

“Good. I’m starved.”

“There’s a shocker,” Tyler says.

“Should I deprive your baby of sustenance?”

“Our baby is going to be fine.”