Page 36 of The Beast
The faith question was one I turned over while I made coffee on the hot plate, watching the street below come awake through the window.
It was Sunday. Across the city, Saint Sebastian's was filling up for the nine o'clock Mass. My mother would be in her usual pew with her back straight and her hands folded and a space beside her where I was supposed to be.
I was not going to be there.
I thought about that. About what I believed and what I had been told to believe and where those two things overlapped and where they didn't. It was a question I had been avoiding with some dedication for years, because it was the kind of question that, once you started pulling the thread, had implications for a great many other threads.
I believed in God. That was the bedrock, and it was real. I had felt it in this city, in Saint Sebastian's light falling red and gold through the stained glass, in the hush of the church before Mass began when the building seemed to hold its breath.
That wasn't nothing. That had never been nothing.
But I had also spent twenty-nine years allowing someone else's interpretation of that belief to govern every significant choice of my life.
Last night, I had felt something I could only call grace. Not the official kind. The real kind. The kind that arrived without permission and didn't ask you to be worthy of it first.
I didn't think God was upset with me.
I thought, if anything, God had been waiting rather patiently for me to make a decision that was actually mine.
My mother would disagree with that theology. We would have that conversation, eventually, probably over her kitchen table with the handkerchief in her hands, and I would listen and love her and hold my own ground. That was a bridge I would cross when I came to it.
For now, I drank my coffee and watched the light and felt—for the second day in a row, which was beginning to seem like a pattern—like myself.
By eight, I had showered and dressed and stood in front of the canvases for a while, just looking. I did this sometimes—stood in front of the work and let it tell me things. This morning, it told me I had been painting loneliness for years without calling it that. The colors, the negative space, the figures that appeared in my larger pieces always slightly outside the frame, always at the edge of something they hadn't entered yet.
I had been painting toward a door I hadn't walked through.
I picked up my sketchbook and my good charcoal pencils and my keys and I went to my car.
Folly Beach in the morning was a different creature from Folly Beach in the afternoon.
The Saturday crowds were gone and the Sunday ones hadn't arrived yet. The island in the early hour had a stripped-down quality, a realness—the surf shops still shuttered, the taco place chairs up on tables, a pelican standing on a piling with the conviction of a thing that owned the place. The air was cool off the water and smelled like salt and wet sand and something green and alive. I stood in the parking lot for a moment and just breathed it in.
The pier was open.
I walked out onto it barefoot again—shoes left in the car—and found the bench built into the railing near the midpoint, the wide one that faced south along the shore. I sat down and opened the sketchbook across my knees.
I didn't plan what I was going to draw. That was the rule I'd made for myself years ago, in the early days of the studio, when I was still fighting the part of my brain that wanted to organize everything in advance. No planning. Just let the hand go and see what arrived.
My hand went.
For a while, I didn't look at what it was doing. I watched the water instead—the way the morning light came at it sideways, making the waves look like hammered metal—and let the charcoal move across the paper, and let myself think about nothing in particular, which was a skill I was still learning and was getting better at.
I thought about Dublin. About the trip I was not going on. About the Ring of Kerry and the countryside I had circled in a travel guide with a pen and would not see, at least not this spring, and whether that loss felt like what I thought it would feel like.
It felt smaller than I expected. It felt like a rain check rather than a door closed.
Somewhere in my recent history, the thing I had been moving toward had stopped being Dublin and started being something else, and it had happened so gradually that I was only now catching up to it.
I thought about the gallery owner. Her voice on the phone, warm and certain:I think you're the real thing, Mary Catherine, and I think you know it, and I think it's time.
I had said no so fast.
I thought about what it would mean to call her back. To say:I've reconsidered. The timing is different now. I'd like to talk.
I thought about what it would mean to actually do this—to show work publicly, to stand in a room and let strangers look at the things I had made in the private dark of a studio over a frame shop and decide what they thought about them. The exposure of it. The vulnerability of handing your truest thing to the world and waiting.
The thought made my stomach tighten.
