Three Blue Paintings

Patrick was only ten the day they’d finally found his mother. She’d been missing for two months, and everyone in town had long ago decided she’d run away from home. After all, the signs had been there for years.

Alice was distant and melancholy, a strange woman who rarely to never told people what was going on in her head.

In fact, no one could remember the last time they saw her smile or laugh, but they were reasonably sure it had been before she had gotten married and had children. That’s when all the light had begun to go out of Alice’s brilliant blue eyes for reasons no one understood, least of all Alice herself. They’d faded a little bit each year since, like well-worn denim that had grown thin and threadbare.

So when she’d gone out for milk a couple of days before Thanksgiving and never come home, people were worried, but not exactly surprised. Especially since Tom Mullins, her old high school sweetheart, had also left town for the big city a couple of weeks before. Alice and Tom had still been close and spoke often, so the buzz was that they had been having an affair, and she had eventually gone to meet him in the city.

The whole town had simply put two and two together, and that was that.

But then, early one afternoon the following January, Ray Thomas stumbled across a horrible discovery while he was ice fishing. His hook had caught upon a familiar blue woolen shawl, the very same one Alice’s husband had bought her years ago because it matched her eyes so exactly. And from there, it didn’t take long to find the rest of Alice underneath the ice.

Patrick happened to be there at the time, as he’d been ice skating further down the frozen river with some friends. And he’d seen the body before anyone had the presence of mind to notice him and usher him away.

He was shocked speechless, but also oddly struck by just how blue his mother seemed to him. Her skin was bloodless and pale, a frosty backdrop for the delicate network of spidery cornflower veins that sprawled across her chest and peeked shyly out from underneath her frozen white-blonde hair at the temples.

Her eyes were half open and quite frozen, but you could still see that they’d been the most saturated shade of blue. Frozen blue clothes, blue nails, and his mother’s pouting blue lips completed the grim picture Patrick would carry with him in his mind for the rest of his days. Blue – the color of stillness, death, and a strange kind of peace Alice had never been able to achieve when she’d been living.

No one was quite sure what had happened to Alice to bring her to such an untimely end. Some were sure she’d jumped from the bridge downriver and that had been the tragic end of her. But the less dramatic people in town, including Patrick’s father, thought Alice had simply slipped, hit her head, and fallen in during her walk to the market that day. An unfortunate accident, but an accident all the same.

Patrick supposed it really didn’t matter anyway. Either way, he was left without a mother underneath a faded blue sky that made the world feel much too big all of a sudden.

*

Anna didn’t know where people went when they died, but it had always been something she enjoyed thinking about. Heaven. A place full of unfiltered joy and undiluted elation. A place where she’d finally get the answers to all the questions that had filled her head ever since she was a little girl.

It helped her to imagine the people she’d loved and lost were now passing the time in such a place, talking and laughing together until the day their loved ones came to join them. Her grandparents. The little girl at the end of the lane who had been her best friend when she was six years old. Each well-loved and hard-lost pet that had passed on over the years.

Her grandmother had given her a book about the saints when she was a little girl, and she’d spent hours and hours flipping through it, marveling at the many colorful paintings it contained. And there was so much blue – blue robes draped across the stately shoulders of one saint, blue wall hangings in the temple behind another, blue vortexes in the sky filled with countless souls spinning together in some eternal dance in a third.

“It’s because it’s the most human color,” said Anna’s grandmother when she asked her about it – why there was so much blue. “It’s the color of the sky overhead and the waters of the ocean. It’s the color of our deepest emotions – our royal sadness, our cerulean wonder. The robin’s egg happiness we feel on a perfect spring day.”

Anna didn’t know about all that at such a young age. But she knew the sight of all that blue in those wonderful paintings made her feel calm. Serene.

And although she supposed it could be her imagination (or the opaque words of her grandmother permanently taking up space in her imagination), blue also had a way of appearing at the most poignant moments in Anna’s life.

It sparkled at the center of the engagement ring her husband had given her and was expertly woven into the enamel of the willow pattern tea set her grandmother had gifted her just before she’d passed away, the same one they used to drink tea together from when Anna was little.

A million shades of cobalt winked out at her from the stained glass windows in the church where she spent her Sundays.

Blue birds. Blue dishware. Blue skies. Blue saints with the mysteries of the infinite sparkling in their painted, upcast eyes.

A peacock blue A-line coat Anna found on sale at a thrift store when she was still young – a coat that made her feel just like Grace Kelly, even if all she was doing that day was the grocery shopping. An impossibly blue coffee cup that somehow made everything she drank out of it taste better and more flavorful. Powder blue flowers in a bouquet her husband had sent her once when she was having a bad day, just to cheer her up.

And at night, when Anna would dream, she’d see it – the blue backdrop of the universe sprawling out limitlessly overhead. Ghostly souls of those who’d come before and those who’d yet to come at all swirling in the foreground.

And below were all the gods of all the nations that had ever been and never been, mingling and hurrying together in a fantastic crowd. Each was clad in a spectacular shade of blue that could not be seen by human eyes, each on a mission to a very serious destination.

Anna stood among them, drinking in the sight of their finery and basking in the spicy scent of cinnamon and ginger that hung in the air overhead. Very still always, because to step forward would break the spell. So instead, she’d just sit and breathe, breathe, breathe, thinking, “Is this all there is?”

Perhaps. But would that really be so bad?

*

Terry had wanted to be an astronaut ever since he could remember. Even his father had told him he’d been born looking up, loving the stars, and dreaming of the day he’d walk among them one day. And now his childhood dreams had come true.

His job here in space was to grow things – good, nourishing things to feed himself and the team while they conducted their experiments as the space station flew around and around the earth below. And in time, the techniques Terry was perfecting would make it possible for people to take longer and longer journeys into space.

The other day, he’d made a salad out of the plants he’d been growing, and he was fairly certain it was the most delicious salad he’d ever eaten. Perhaps that was just how things were in space – novel, like the adventures he’d have in his imagination when he was a little boy playing with his toy space shuttle and dreaming big dreams.

Or maybe things just tasted better when you could truly say you’d been responsible for their creation from start to finish. He hoped he could bring a little bit of what he now knew back down to earth so he could share this experience with his family.

He wanted to tell them what it was like to see the earth from way up here, to be this far away from the only home any human had ever known, and to see all of it and none of it all at once. To breathe irony air that smelled a little bit like hot steak while working in an environment that sometimes seemed impossibly topsy-turvy. To contemplate life for what it was while floating a seemingly infinite distance away from where he belonged.

Here in space, the earth was the most colorful thing in the sky – very far away, but brilliant blue against the inky black velvet of outer space. In fact, it was at times the only true color. The color of home. The color of human life, joy, and tragedy. The color of the place where people dreamed of things like spaceships and then built those dreams into reality using metal, and fire, and fuel.

It was enough to make Terry’s heart feel like it might burst. This was another thing he wanted to bring back to the people he loved most when the time came – the essence of what it meant to be a blue man from a place that was blue, too.

The most human color. The color that was the closest and the furthest. The most impossible and the most real all at the same time.