#7 The Portraits - Na Portraidi

The rain let up by the time I got off but there was still a slight drizzle and I power walked to my cabin. I never locked it so I let myself in easily switching on the lights to illuminate my quaint living quarters.

All the guests checked in with no surprise visitors, and still no Lyle.

I closed the door behind me and let the weight of my body rest against the solid wood for a moment. Being no stranger to exhaustion due to work I picked myself up and staggered to the kitchen. I never resented Grace or White Pine for taking so much of my time and energy. It was a living that I enjoyed and it damned near beat working as a full time waitress. I mean, I literally made pancakes and facilitated small talk for a living.

My cabin was less than three hundred square feet with a ladder that led to a loft in the back half. My living room was sparsely furnished. An old dark green sofa with a few mismatched pillows and a coffee table sat on the right side. On the left wall my desk and a few piled boxes of odd art supplies and empty bottles. All of my furniture were rejects from White Pine that Grace gifted to me. They added character to my home just as they did at the B&B, more importantly their second hand nature made them look actually lived in. A trait that was dismal as I was hardly at my actual home for more than sleeping purposes.

In the back left corner was my closet and to the right was a compact bathroom just big enough for a full size tub - which came in handy after eighteen hour days -. I walked through the clear pathway of my living room marked by a thick knitted rug that insulated the floor during Maine's harsh winters.

I set the Tupperware of pancake batter and pulled out my own portable griddle placing it on top of the stove due to the limited counter space. My kitchen was no more than seven feet wide, and the cabinets lining both walls took up a half of that space so that you couldn't have two opposite doors open at the same time or they would clash.

I turned on the matchbox radio that sat on my window sill and made my usual dinner of pancakes and jam sandwiches accompanied by whatever fruits hadn't been eaten by mold. The food pyramid would look more like an old wooden fence if it was based on my diet. Lots of gaps but somehow managing to stand upright.

I loved my home away from my Tudor home. There were windows in every room and the light bounced off the light wood walls and floors leaving me little need for bulbs during the day time. I always struggled to remember to close the windows in case of rainstorms as the breeze flowed evenly through them leaving me no reason for an AC. However, I'd gotten lucky this time and because the temperature dropped below sixty the night before I'd sealed all the windows and had no time to open them in my rush the next morning.

I took my plate into the living room and sat on the couch which conveniently doubled as my dinner table. The radio was still playing as I ate and decompressed allowing my back to mold into the plush cushions. As I ate I contemplated life as a couch potato, I was sure I had the credentials for it. I would probably have to buy a bigger T.V and three more pairs of sweatpants though.

It was almost ten by the time I'd cleaned up dinner and was ready for bed. I hauled myself up the ladder to my room. The ceiling tapered into a triangle ten feet above the floor creating a cozy environment that was just big enough to fit my queen sized bed and a small organizer on the right side.

A single naked light bulb hung a few inches above my head. I rarely used it because of the large rectangle window that took up most of the wall at the head of my bed. The window faced the Tudor home and I took comfort in the fact that it felt like White Pine was watching over me. The lights from the house brought a soft glow into my room and I did without the light bulb snuggling myself underneath the covers.

There was little decoration in my house as a whole but my room was a different story. Lining the angled ceiling were portraits - last time I counted there were upwards of sixty. They were all done in pencil or dark blue or black ink. Some simple sketches and others I'd put in more than a few hours of detail. Most were not done formally instead scrawled on a napkin or scrap paper I'd found at the B&B during slow days. The differing materials, shapes and sizes made fitting them together like assembling a puzzle. Only it was more of a freehand puzzle, one that I was making up on my own with only the beams of the ceiling acting as my border pieces.

They were all real people, I was inspired by our guests. Some young, some old, men, women, and even Grace was there. Her sleek profile stood in the center on the right of the narrowing ceiling. A broad smile illuminated her features and focused your attention on the pure joy she emitted. Her favorite flower, a swamp azalea peeked out from behind a section of braid that covered her right jawline as it nuzzled against her face.

This, however was not the first time I had drawn her. During the first year of White Pine she'd asked me to out of the blue one day and proceeded to pose giving me the silent treatment until I agreed. It wasn't awful and she liked it enough to framed it and hang in her kitchen above the stove.

I wasn't a fan of posed works. They seemed fake. Naturally they worked for inanimate objects of landscapes who they didn't know they were posing -either that or they didn't care. But people, people are different, they put up a front when they pose. They primp their hair, pop their pimples, and paint on a smile. Even someone as intrinsically happy as Grace fake a smile. It's instinctive to put up face, so then why not your best one.

A week later I remade Grace's portrait from memory. Now it hung taped to my ceiling. Hers was the first of many in what turned out to become my hobby. I'd tried for so long to follow my mother's footsteps and be a great painter capturing nature, but now I'd found my niche. In a strange way, although it wasn't anything remotely relatable to her style I felt close to her when I drew. There was a certain rush I got from capturing guests I found of interest. Capturing not only their outward appearance on paper, but what I believed to be their essence - or whatever small piece of it that I could grasp.

It was in the way they angled their chin naturally or the way the corners of their mouth curled up when a family member told a joke. Mostly I found it in the eyes. They always gave bits of information away that we didn't readily relinquish.

I became an expert in noticing details about the face and committing them to memory. It was like a game for me. Finding out what drove people and in what ways I could capture it with nothing but a piece of paper and a pen.

I took a moment to scan over each portrait. As I did so my wandering mind went back to Lyle.

Perhaps Lyle was napping I mused, and that's why she didn't hear me knock. Or maybe she had her headphones in. I tried to picture what type of podcasts Lyle would listen to, or was she a podcast gal at all?

Good lord. I mentally pumped the breaks.

"Get a grip." I mumbled to myself.

It felt foreign to be obsessing so intently over someone. In my life I'd made very few strong connections. In school I hadn't been a total pariah, but I was surely an introvert with a couple friends who I kept at a distance. Even Martha who undoubtedly knew the most about me was still at arm's length. In a sense we were 'professional friends' who meet under specific pretenses. After I turned eighteen we tried to bend the rules we constructed to make our relationship more casual. It never worked. I loved Martha dearly and she was a wonderful woman, but to me it was almost as if she knew too much. At least about my mother, she - or I suppose the idea of my mother - was the backbone of our relationship. I'd met Martha because of her absence and every meeting especially those to Unit #16 were as a consequence of that. Now when we talked we were at a loss. Conversations were like trying to make the perfect cake without the recipe. Did we talk about my mother too much where it solidified the fact she was our only connection? Or were we mentioning her too little as we intentionally avoided the subject?

I concluded everyone always knew too much or too little about me to make a true connection. And I was not without blame in this equation.

Grace was the exception. I felt close to her, familial in bond almost. She didn't know about my mother but I think in some way she had an inkling. Her intuition told her something was off and that I wasn't comfortable in sharing it. That is what made our relationship stable. We knew what we didn't know.

I considered my rather swift setting fascination with Lyle in the same way. I knew what I didn't know about her - to be fair was just about everything - and I knew that I wanted to change that.

I rolled over onto my side and reached into my organizer pulling out a sheet of scrap paper and a pen. I bunched my pillows up behind me and sat up in bed leaning against the window pane. I reached for the album I kept wedged under my mattress, my hand fumbled in the limited light and finally I threw off my blankets and knelt on the floor. Lifting up my whole mattress I used my phone flashlight to locate the solid book I used as a flat surface when I wanted to draw in bed. The book was something Grace had gifted me a day before the re opening. It was more a photo album than a book, and had pictures of White Pine's progress. They were mostly candid she'd taken of me doing semi dangerous tasks that normal folks leave to the professionals. Half of the book was blank, Grace explained we'd have many more achievements to fill it with.

I treasured the heartfelt present which is why I always kept it close to my bed or wedged under it slightly. I did the same with my mother's photo albums, I felt the need to keep them close and secure. The three sat neatly in a stack next to my pillow but all had somehow managed to travel clear to the other side of the bed.

Odd, I never slept on that side.

I set the mattress down and rolled across the top to the other side lifting it slightly to retrieve the album. Then snuggling back under my covers I began Lyle's portrait.

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