Idalia
(Formerly "Where Holland Began")
There is a portrait that hangs in the hallway. It is the only emotionally-authentic thing in that house. It is usually a picture of a woman standing under a great tree holding it's thousand year-old arms out in the wind. The woman is usually wrapped in the arms of a man, her husband. He is the shy type who is uneasy about permanence, and it shows in his crooked, but sincere smile. The leaves are about to fall, but hold on with their last breath for the picture that would hang in the hallway. Do the souls of inanimate things remember? Portraits sometimes forget. Now, only the husband remains, grasping emptiness.
While this type of thing causes uncomfortable feelings among guests, to the more permanent occupant of the house, it is no more odd than someone leaving the kitchen table to get the morning mail.
John is the occupant, recent widower, orphaned at the age of seven by a car crash and a suicide. Ever since his father's death, a stain on every memory and sight, he fears the trees. Trees that revealed. Images pulsate like veins - the strange beat of death. The angry father, after returning home from his wife's funeral, told his only son that he loved him, and walked out into the yard.
Where does she go? one guest asks.
There was a trip to Paris some years back, and one morning, while she was still asleep, he took his camera and left the hotel. She slept long while they were in France. Holland was hers with it's sweeping windmills, riverways running under delicate bridges, rows of bright lines passing by, engulfing all the senses. All this, then, she dreamed of while John closed the door behind him. He took several pictures while out - one photograph in particular was of a street. Years later, after gazing upon the empty portrait in the hallway for four hours, he had gotten the strangest nerve to look at the Paris photograph. He pulled it out of the box, and there she was, staring back, emotionless, on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais.
He seemed anxious to them. The way his eyes lit up while speaking then. His hands and body were animated. They feared that he was on the verge of a breakdown because John had never been this outgoing before. He would sit in a corner, outside circles of laughter, giving a modest smile at every decent joke, a nod when addressed, a shrug of the shoulder when expected to agree. She would always try to get him involved in the conversations. She, who made the sounds audible once again. She, who made the trees bearable once again. The neck through which life passes was unfolded and mended, and air came into his body once again by her.
The guests turn to each other, concerned, some whispering to one another upon hearing the story of the Paris photograph.
John, I must say, I am concerned about this, one says.
Oh, I am too! I am too! Like, why is this happening? I mean, is God, or whoever, trying to tell me something? Is it Idalia that's trying to tell me something?
When did you first notice the thing with the picture in the hallway? another guest asks.
About a year ago.
Idalia only passed away two months ago, John.
I know. She was greatly concerned about it too. She saw it as a sort of sign of the direction her life has taken. I think she might have been unhappy in our relationship, or maybe I was and was making her unhappy also. I don't know. You all know I loved her to pieces. This reminds me, I have to be on a plane in an hour. I'm going on a trip.
What for? Why is this the first time I'm hearing about this? a guest asked.
But he said no more, and instead, stood up and walked out the door with nothing but the clothes he was wearing. He didn't tell them about the last picture she appeared in. She was standing in the middle of a tulip field. It was the most beautiful picture. He thinks he would like to see those fields once again. They were quite an amazing sight.
On the walk to the airport, an old thought takes hold of him once more. It would not be the same ever again. He sits on the ground next to the road, hands around his bent legs, crying. His face is hard from the strained muscles under the skin. The tears reflect the colors of the setting sun. Where has that warmth gone, that once encircled smooth, soft waists adorned in white cloth? Floral embroidery, pink and yellow. The fingers are blind. The trees were there. They hovered over moments caught with nets like longing eyes, the leaves that breathed then have long since fallen, but the memory remains in the bark.