Page 6 of In Every Lifetime
Sarah
Isquinted my eyes, tilting my head to the side as I looked at my freshly painted wall, which was done with less than stellar precision. I was a psychologist, not a painter, and it was strikingly obvious from the current state of my living room.
I had wanted to paint to start a new beginning, refresh the house, make it mine, andonlymine. It took me nearly six months to decide on the color, and once I had picked the deep blue, I wanted to jump into painting, too impatient to do the real prep work.
Maybe I should have taken the time to at least tape.
“I don’t think it looks that bad,” Nate mused as he looked at the swipe of paint on the ceiling, the dark blue paint—which matched his eyes—on my white ceiling, which was supposed to stay white. “It’s like the night sky.”
“We could just color-drench the room,” Jackie suggested from the other side of Nate, her chin raised as she looked at the same spot. “You know… paint the ceilings and trim?”
I groaned and dropped my forehead into my hands. Maybe my mistake had been choosing two of the most uncoordinatedpeople I knew to help me paint. Even if they hadn't looked so eerily similar, you would know they were siblings from their commentary alone, let alone their painting skills. Both were covered in paint, splattered across their clothes and skin, and I had a feeling it had already stained their matching blonde hair as well.
“It looks horrible,” I mumbled with a sigh.
“Nah,” Nate protested, throwing his arm over my shoulders. “It’s artistic, unique even. Just like us.”
I playfully whacked him in the stomach. “Nathaniel James, you don’t have to live here.Ihave to live with the slightly painted ceiling.”
He rolled his eyes but smiled wide. “It’ll grow on you.”
Jackie rested her chin on my shoulder from behind. “Just like we did.”
“I should have called your siblings to help me paint.” I mumbled, wandering into the kitchen to get a glass of water, or maybe a bottle of wine, given how the first hour of painting had gone. "Those two are much more put together."
While I complained, I was so grateful both Jackie and Nate had offered to help. Painting the whole house was a daunting task, and I knew I couldn't do it alone. I would normally have called my best friend, Jackie's husband Will. He couldn't make it until noon, which left me with Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who were—
I glanced over my shoulder at the sound of shouting to find Nate trying to paint Jackie's hair. You would never know the two were in their thirties from the way they had been carrying on all morning. Unproductive as it had been, it had been a joyous few hours.
Life over the last six months had been hard. Full of joyous moments like this one, yes, but there had always been anunderlying tension, a quiet worry and sadness that tainted every moment, every breath.
It had been six months since the divorce, since the last time I had seen my ex-husband, Fai. He had been in bad shape—his dark brown hair in its usual mess, his scruff he always forgot to shave ever present—but it was his eyes that gave away the truth. They were bloodshot as hell, and the light in them was gone, completely snuffed out.
Our divorce had been necessary. Fai was more committed to his drinking than he was to me. In truth, our marriage had died years earlier. We had been holding onto hope that it would somehow get better, but the only way it could get better was if one of us had fundamentally changed, and neither one of us was willing.
Learning to live without Fai had been strange. He had been such an intrinsic part of my entire adulthood that I felt like I was finding myself for the first time. I was exploring new hobbies, new interests, and apparently new painting techniques. Jackie, for one, had taken color-drenching into her own hands, having moved on to the rest of the ceiling without any input from me. It seemed the decision had been made. We were painting the entire room, not just the walls as intended.
I wiped my hands down the front of my overalls and went digging through the kitchen cabinets for a glass. I had rearranged the kitchen thirteen times in the last six months and had yet to settle on a system that made sense. After two wrong guesses, I found a glass on the third try, tucked beside a mixing bowl, a plate, and, oddly enough, my blender.
The cabinets were a perfect representation of my life: overly organized chaos.
"Do either of you need anything to drink?" I called to the siblings. They both shouted no and carried on with their painting escapades.
I filled my glass slowly at the kitchen sink, laughing to myself as I listened to the two argue in the background. While I had many siblings, I didn’t have a close relationship with any of them the way Nate and Jackie did.
I was the result of a one-night stand. Both my parents loved me, but they didn’t love each other. They went on to marry other people, have kids, and build their families, all while I was packing my bags and switching houses each week.
My parents loved me just as much as their other children, but I spent half as much time with them as my half-siblings. Between the constant moving and the age gap—my closest sibling being eight years younger than me—I never really connected with any of them. Starting college at fourteen and moving from New York to Oregon at eighteen for graduate school only deepened the divide. While they were growing up together, I was across the country, building a career and chasing a passion that left little room for my family. By the time I might have returned home, the closeness I could have had with them was already out of reach. Not that I minded. My life's work was here, a country away.
I couldn't pinpoint when I had decided I wanted to be a psychologist. It had simply been my goal for as long as I could remember. I wanted to help people, specifically those society had counted out. So here I was, focusing on the rehabilitation of the criminally insane. The term discounted a lot of these people, many assuming they were automatically a danger to society. While that was true of some, many simply hadn't had the resources to get the help they needed. There was a need for systemic change, and the idea that people were left to rot in prisons and underfunded mental hospitals had never sat right with me. I couldn't change the entirety of the system, but I could offer what support I was able to, the help that so many people desperately needed.
It wasn't easy work, but it brought me a level of fulfillment I hadn't known was possible. The majority of my patients were serving life sentences, but that didn't mean their lives had to end. Seeing them thrive, even within the walls of hospitals and prisons, was a beautiful thing.
Not all of my patients were criminally insane or locked away for life. Some, like the one currently painting my living room ceiling with questionable precision, were very much out in the world. Jackie and Will had asked me to work with her brother Nate a few years back. His life hadn't been easy, and calling him a mess when we began our sessions would have been an understatement. Seeing him now, though, thriving as a college professor and settled in his marriage, made me wonder whether I should devote more of my time to those on the other side of the crimes I had spent over a decade navigating.
It was my work that brought me fulfillment, but it hadn't brought me joy. It couldn't. I was discussing some of the worst crimes a person could commit on a daily basis, flown across the country to meet with individuals considered the most dangerous alive. That kind of work could never bring joy.
My joy had come from my home, from Fai, but he was gone, and I needed to find that joy again. So here I was, painting my living room and accepting that I would probably need to hire someone to fix it.
