PAINTED GHOSTS by Jennifer Leeper
Every other porch on our street was a shelf that hadn’t been dusted in years. Rawlins, Colorado sat on the high plains, lifted up like an offering to the heavens, though the heavens seemed to have forgotten about Rawlins by the time my family moved there.
The kids I went to high school with in another town in Silver County referred to Rawlins and other dying towns on the high plains as “suicide watches.” They were all killing themselves as the eastern Colorado population shifted to Denver.
I decided to wander Rawlins one Saturday morning a few days after we had relocated from Chicago. My parents left behind lucrative careers as creative directors for the same advertising agency to paint the stark poses of windmills and barns against the desolation of endless cropland.
As my parents sat in a field of soybeans outside town waiting to be inspired, I stood in the middle of Rawlins, if you could call it the middle of anything. Nothing alive moved.
What remained was a puppet show of wind animating trash and an abandoned set of wind chimes three houses down from ours, once a prominent home in Rawlins. Now, it was an artistic outpost, rented for its proximity to earth and sky dressed in scarcely more than the seasons.
I turned onto Pine, then Maple, Oak, Elm, Durango, Silverton Street and so on. Every house and business was a vacant face staring back at me. Though no one was supposed to live in downtown Rawlins according to our real estate agent, I searched for a pair of eyes on my back, but I shook off the sensation as a reflex of human nature in a once inhabited place.
My mother, returning later from the field of soybeans, declared, “It’s cats. Feral cats. I’ve heard they take over towns like these.” She spoke with authority as she always did, her foam of wild, red curls emboldening her words. “They’re predators. They know how to watch without being seen.”
“Could be squatters.” My father submitted his own theory, dipping a paintbrush in a cup of water to remove the excess color.
Tall and lean, my parents reminded me of the brushes they used to paint. They both wore their hair long, my father’s near-black hair pulled back neatly at the nape of his neck and my mother’s always unbound.
“I didn’t see anyone or any animals.”
My father continued cleaning his brushes and my mother minced garlic for the steaks we had brought in coolers with us from Chicago, fearing there would be no decent steaks in no-man’s land.
“Who knows what or who lives here now.” My mother spoke without looking at me, but by now I was used to it. I was their most personal collaboration, but not an intentional creation, so I had remained somewhat of an outsider in their world. They loved me from afar as a mysterious, inscrutable painting they couldn’t touch with the intimacy of their own paintbrushes.
The next morning, after my parents departed for their field, I returned to the ruins of Rawlins. Again I had the sense of being watched, only this time, the watcher appeared before me.
A child, younger than my 16 years, stood alone in the middle of Durango Street. It was as if we were the last two people on earth, the way we stood alone together in such a blank part of civilization.
She wore her white blonde hair long and braided, down her back, and I imagined it was long enough to sit on. She was thin and wore faded jeans, brown leather sandals, and a white polo shirt that winked at femininity in its slightly bunched sleeves. There was something in the child’s light blue eyes that challenged me, but she seemed unaware of it because she smiled warmly, revealing a baby tooth missing from her lower front teeth.
“Marin.” The child offered a strong handshake. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
“I didn’t know anyone else lived here. I mean downtown.”
“Oh, yeah, we do. My dad is Martin Curtis. We live on Dodge. And the Wheelers live at Pine and 3rd. The Kowalskis live out on Prairie Street.” Marin spoke assuredly, like someone much older. “And you live on Main.”
I nodded. “But, I thought this was like a ghost town.”
“People say that, but we’re still here.”
“So are there other kids?”
“Yep. There’s Stella and Benji, but they’re little.”
Someone shouted something I couldn’t understand.
“Coming!” Marin funneled her voice through cupped hands. “Gotta go – nice to meet you.” Marin took off down the street, darting up a hill at one point, disappearing.
“She said she lives on Dodge with her dad,” I told my mother after returning home from an otherwise uneventful stroll through town. “And there are two other families living here too.”
My mother had returned from the field sooner than my father.
“Where’s Dad?”
My mother slumped in the only comfortable chair we had bothered to unpack. She closed her eyes, her thick spray of hair tamed to flatness by gravity. I wished for hair like hers – for anything like hers. My hair was straight, brown, and hung limply against my head. Her skin was always radiant, like she had just returned from a brisk trail run, whereas my complexion was dull. No wonder she never saw me. I wasn’t anything worthy of a canvas.
“He’s doing a charcoal of some abandoned oil pump.” My mother covered her eyes with a hand as if closing them wasn’t enough of a departure from reality.
I’d never seen my mother frustrated over my father finding inspiration. They had always been conjoined in their creative process.
“Did you paint today?” I asked from a high stool at the kitchen counter.
I could feel the sigh pushed through my mother’s nose.
“Not yet. Maybe tomorrow.”
From the kitchen I could see a slice of my mother’s face. Her hand still lay across her eyes.
* * *
The next day after school I walked the three blocks west to Dodge, searching driveways and yards for signs of human activity, but there was no evidence of what I had seen the previous day. Had I hallucinated a little girl?
After I scoured the streets on either side of the street, and peeped in more than a dozen windows, Marin was even less real.
I returned home to find my mother in the same pose as the day before, only her eyes were wide open to the ceiling.
“What about painting the downtown?” I suggested. “There’s no one to bother you. Isn’t that what you said you wanted – a person-less landscape?”
From my stool perch I watched my mother blink several times before her lips parted in response. “I don’t know.” She closed them again. “I wanted to capture the natural world. Claude found his rhythm. I just need to find mine.” My mother always referred to my father by his name in front of me as if to further distance their existence from parenthood.
“Have you been sitting here all afternoon?”
Again, my mother blinked several times before responding. “Just an hour or so.”
“You wanna grab a pizza? One of the kids at school says Deerborn has the best pies west of Chicago.”
I hoped the unlikely superlative would grab my mother’s attention.
“I’m too tired to go back out. I’ll start dinner here in a minute. There’s leftover steak.”
“Whatever,” I whispered, slipping out the sliding door to the back patio. It took me less than ten minutes to reach the edge of what used to be Rawlins.
Born and raised in Chicago, I wasn’t used to such stillness. Life was motion and sound.
I hoped I would spot my father like a skyscraper on the high, empty plain. There were a couple of oil pumps, but no painter and canvas paired with them.
The sunset was all but faded, and a strand of smoke fed eveningtide. I followed the strand and its scent to a cluster of trees and to my surprise, my father spotlighting an easel with a hiker’s headlamp. I couldn’t see what colored his imagination, but as I crept closer, I noticed several tents and a fire where a clearing separated tree from crop. Several figures of varying sizes huddled around the blaze, their backs to the artist.
“Dad?”
“Allegra?”
For a moment I was blinded by the headlamp.
“Mom said you were sketching oil pumps.”
My father’s glistening face came into view. I had seen it that way often whenever my parents stayed up all night to finish artwork for campaigns.
“I was.” My father’s eyes were tired. “Your mother.” My father shook his head, leaving me an unfinished thought.
“Hey new kid.”
It was Marin.
“We’ve got dogs on the fire. You hungry?” Marin asked, sounding more like a chuck wagon cook than a little girl. “What about you, Mr. Pearl?
My dad still looked at me, smiling as if it were just the two of us in the shadow and firelight. “No, thank you, Marin.”
“We’ve got plenty if you change your mind.” The spritely child flickered away like a spark back to its flame.
“I was starting to wonder if I imagined that kid.”
My dad smiled again. It was my own smile and I hadn’t seen it in a long time. Like me, Dad didn’t show his teeth and his lips were self-consciously thick. “I met Marin when I was tired of sketching those damn pumps and cattle pens. She just materialized.”
I nodded, smiling my own thick-lipped grin. “Yeah, she showed up that way for me. Do they all really live downtown?”
My dad sighed, shaking his head. “Seems like they live between two worlds.” His lips thinned out again in a smile. “Martin – Marin’s father – was pretty vague, but I get the idea they sleep out here when it’s nice.”
“You think they’re squatters?”
My dad watched the figures moving around the fire. “I think they never left when the economy went bust. They’re the remnants of Rawlins.”
“Did Mom see these?” I picked up one of the charcoal drawings on a table next to the easel. A child swung from a branch reaching over a huddle of tents.
My dad shook his head. “She probably thinks I’m still sketching oil pumps.”
I studied the contours of my dad’s face. They shifted with the firelight, but on their own too, shaping what I guessed was sadness.
“You hungry?” I nodded toward the fire.
“I am.”
I couldn’t remember the last time my father and I did something that didn’t include my mother. We joined the others and I met Marin’s dad and the Wheelers and the Kowalskis.
Neither my father nor I thought to text or call my mother about being home late, though neither one of our phones rang or buzzed.
When we finally arrived home, my mother was passed out in the chair where I had left her. She slipped out the following morning before either of us woke.
* * *
I discovered my mother behind her easel the next afternoon. She sat in the middle of Elm Street, her eyes on the forgotten post office.
“Mom.” She didn’t turn right away.
“Mom,” I said a little louder and closer.
“You were right. These buildings make great subject matter.” She glanced at me, then returned to the shadow she cast from the back of the post office.
“Sorry about last night.”
“Last night?” she echoed. “Oh, it worked out. I fell asleep anyway. Woke up early and started painting.”
Her eyes never left the canvas. I watched her hand moving the brush as if it was separate from the rest of her body; compelled by some powerful, external stimulus, like a maestro in front of an orchestra.
“That’s great, Mom,” I said, though there were tears warming up behind my words. I turned to go, hoping to hear my mother’s voice behind me, but I made it all the way home without turning around.
Later that night, from my bed, I could hear my mother say, “I want to go back to Chicago. I want to paint more buildings. There’s so many abandoned areas on the South Side.”
“Well, I don’t,” I heard my father say. “Besides, you’re the one who wanted to come here in the first place.”
“You know those people are living here illegally.”
My father said something I couldn’t hear about my mother distracting him from the real issue at hand.
“They’re the happiest people I’ve ever seen, Camille.”
“We used to be happy,” my mother challenged. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“What about Allegra?”
“She’s old enough to choose.”
“That’s not the point.” My father raised his voice, but my mother had already left the room and closed the door to another room. She didn’t want to fight, at least not for me.
The next morning, my mother’s paintings and brushes were gone. She left nothing behind, not even a “goodbye.”
* * *
“How long do you want to stay?” I asked my dad one night about a month after my mother had returned to Chicago, when there was a cocoon of heat around only the two of us – when Marin and Martin and the others were catching fireflies in jars. “I know you and Mom aren’t staying together.”
“I’m sorry we let it fall apart, Allegra.”
“Mom never wanted this life.”
“I’m sorry you saw it before I did.”
“This is a pretty good life here,” I admitted.
“As long as you want.”
“Really?” I leaned my head against my father’s shoulder for the first time since I was a very small child.
* * *
About a year later, I was touring Northwestern for its photojournalism program when I noticed my mother’s name on a community events board at the university.
The gallery was in a Gold Coast neighborhood and my mother wasn’t there that day.
“Yes, it was all painted in Rawlins, Colorado,” the curator assured me.
Expecting to see the post office and the other shuttered businesses of Rawlins, I was shocked to see myself reading a book on the back patio of our home in Rawlins. In the next painting, my father was made of watercolors, cleaning his own brushes at the kitchen sink.
When I reached the last piece, a charcoal drawing of me watching a sunset burn out over Rawlins from the middle of Main Street, I thought of the morning my mother left us for Chicago. The dawn was dry and gray-black and while my father slept, I watched my mother from the bedroom window. She sat in her car staring back at me, her eyes moving over my face. I shivered at the unexpected intimacy.
On the wall after the last drawing, there was a bronze plaque that read:
These are my painted ghosts. They are with me always.
Jennifer Leeper’s stories have appeared in Independent Ink Magazine, Notes Magazine, The Stone Hobo, Every Day Fiction, and Cowboy Jamboree.