The Day that Wasn't There
By Anthony St. George
The colors were lined up in dabs on the palette in front of Zack: ultramarine blue and titanium white for the sky; ochre and gray for the cathedral edifice; scarlet and viridian for the rest of the May Day scene.
But there was a gap: one figure remained blank. The central figure, the one Zack couldn’t remember.
There were plenty of other days that Zack could recall in vibrant tones. Like one of his earliest memories, bolstered by a photo. Zack had been four. His father had seemed to have been forever away on business trips, always returning with a gift. In Zack’s memory, every time his father walked through their black, iron-grated door, the first thing Zack would call out running down the stairs was, “Wha’d you bring me, wha’d you bring me?” His father never failed to produce some treat.
Zack remembers sitting with his father in the sun on a sandy bluff above Nantucket Sound. His father was visiting a house they had rented for the summer. There must have been a chill sea breeze, because the photo reveals Zack in a Fair Isle sweater, squinting in the sun. His father had been drawing with him on the weather-beaten grass, magic markers strewn around the pad. Zack’s mother had learned to provide him with paper after encountering too many pencil-drawn birds on their white walls at home (the pink magic marker tic-tac-toe board, played to a draw, indelibly scored into their camel-colored carpet was the last straw).
The photo had revealed not a drawing that Zack had done; it was far too accurate for a kid who hadn’t yet learned to keep within the lines of a coloring book. It was a smiling Santa on a beach with grass and blue sky. Above the black-belted, red-and-white suited man was the sentence “Christmas is coming...” Clearly, Zack had been pestering his father for a gift (his father had walked through a door, right?), and his father was telling him to wait. What a brat, Zack thought when he’d pieced it together.
The other memories are less easy to reconstruct, though. The colors are less clear. There was the day, not long after that drawing, where Zack was clambering around the white box radiator with its dry metal scent, while his mother and father sat facing each other, talking in low voices in the chairs nearby.
Suddenly, the unknown word “divorce,” and his mother in tears. Instantly, tears and the sore throat of crying strangled Zack, who rushed to his mother’s knee.
The memories after that included visits with his siblings on tentative toes to see his father with his father’s new wife. There were careful steps, the cloud of his grandmother not liking the new wife or the new situation, some veiled, tortured disapproval around these visits. His parents were the only divorced people amongst the families of his first-grade class. That hadn’t felt good. The drawing he’d done in that class was for a “What does your father do?” assignment. Zack barely knew. He drew some semblance of his balding father behind a desk in a Kelly green suit. As best as he knew, his father was a lawyer who traveled to Ireland. The teacher had had to help him figure out what to write for the caption.
Then there was the penultimate memory. The day of the ripping.
One by one, his siblings were called into his grandmother’s living room. He knew what he would be asked, he knew what he was to say. “Your father’s going to ask you if you want to go to Ireland with him. You are to say ‘No’,” his somber mother had said. Zack was six at the time; of course, he would do as he was told. Except that instead, when asked, he had replied plaintively, “I want to, but I can’t. I was told not to.”
At which point his teen brother clanged through the French doors barking, “C’mon, we’re leaving!” There was a flurry, and a taxi, and his grandmother lamenting, “I knew you never should have come!” Out the door in his brother’s arms, their father’s fingers gripping the cuff of Zack’s pea coat. Amidst yelling, the rip of the shoulder seam, worse for the sound, a tear through the fabric of time, of their family: the before and after moment for Zack. This followed by the view out the back of the taxi, his father shaking a cane at them, his siblings susurrating: “We can’t go to the airport or the train station. They’ll have called the cops there to stop us!”
The rest of the day was spent at a family friend’s who drove them the five hours home to their mother. Zack remembers it mostly being a beige day with a lot of graphite tears. All the figures are in charcoal.
Yet still the May Day painting won’t come to his brush. It was his birthday, he remembers laughter with his best friend from next door, he remembers rides on a whirligig, he remembers sticky, bright pink cotton candy his sister shared with him.
That was also the last day, he was later told, that he had seen his father. It was a few months before his grandmother came in her black dress with a kangaroo stuffed animal to tell Zack and his siblings that their father had died.
Twenty years later, from that date, his sister told Zack that his father had been at the festival. That he was gaunt and jaundiced and scary looking and that she had refused to go see him. Death by cirrhosis.
Zack returns to the gap in the painting. All the bright colors and yet still the empty space in the center. It occurs to him for a moment: perhaps he should paint the figure a sickly yellow-gray.
He pulls back his hand from the canvas.
Or, perhaps, Zack realizes: this is the painting that will never get finished.
THE END
Author Bio: Anthony St. George lives with his husband somewhere on the west coast, in transit to British Columbia. His fiction has appeared in such publications as the Ocotillo Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, and New Maps. Links to his publications appear at https://anthonystgeorge.com/.