Read Online In the Middle of All This by Fred G. Leebron - Free Book Online Page A

Richard’s and her life like that. She’d only move back if she was afraid. She refused to be that afraid. He’d murmured about it again on the phone last night. No, she’d said, I don’t think so.
    I have to run, she’d said. There’s someone at the door.
    She shut the journal and winced with pain as she pulled on an overcoat. For a while she stood under the dangling crystals and took deep breaths. All she felt was a new pain blooming in her shoulder.
    At the spa she walked the treadmill for twenty minutes, stretched for twenty minutes, swam for twenty minutes, and then sat in the juice bar watching the sun on the wooden tabletop, dozing and then waking to the low grind of the blender, drinking two glasses of apple-ginger juice. At noon the bar began to fill with corporate exercisers in their ironed white togs. She drove to a row of clothing shops and found a pale blue sweater to go with Richard’s eyes. She had to keep holding it up to the light to make sure, as if her eyes were thinking of failing. By two-thirty she had popped another fifty vits and made it in time to art therapy. Four men and five women, all sick in ways she didn’t want to hear about, sat in a straggly circle, huge easels in front, oversized sheets of paper shielding them from one another.
    â€œI want you to paint,” Marge said, looking at them and then looking out one of the many-paned windows that brought in the last of the day’s northern light, “something from your own history, something that was so deep inside you and so much where you’d been and who you were and even who you’d become, that sometimes—maybe even often—you’d forgotten it was there. Until just before now, when news of your own struggle hit you, and you began to work at unpacking yourself and putting you back together, to get it right, and there was this thing that you’d somehow forgotten about, and you understood it was a most essential piece. What is that thing?”
    Elizabeth started with pink, which became pale red, black for hair and eyebrows and even lips, blue for the dress, pale red for the legs, black for the shoes. What kind of shoes were they? She could only remember her mother in fat, white high heels, but it was too late for white. She didn’t want to make up anything. She wanted it to be true. She added blue to the black. Navy blue heels. Now another face, white outlined in black, tufts of hair at the ears, a line of mouth in pale red, black-outlined neck. She could not remember what her father wore. Yellow, she wanted it to be yellow, but it wouldn’t be. Sometimes he had worn suits. Dark suits. When was it worst? When he didn’t have to wear a suit? That didn’t seem right. Blue for the legs: jeans. Red and yellow and black for a plaid shirt, what he wore when he helped them up to the roof to claw leaves from the gutters. White for sneakers.
    â€œYour father and mother,” Marge said easily.
    Elizabeth nodded.
    She pointed at the woman. “Your mother’s that much larger?”
    Elizabeth shook her head, but she had drawn her mother at nearly twice the height of her father.
    â€œWell,” Marge said. “It’s a lot of red and black and blue.”
    â€œPretty obvious, huh?” She pathetically wiped a tear out of the corner of her right eye.
    â€œI don’t know. You have a brother and a sister, too, but they’re not in here.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou’re not going to put them in.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAre you finished?”
    Elizabeth shook her head.
    â€œI hope I haven’t said too much.” Marge eased on to the next student.
    Elizabeth dipped into the black paint and began in the background, almost blotted out by the oversized figures, the structure of a house, five windows wide, the furthest right over brick, the middle two above a porch, the two left above downstairs windows. The porch had a black roof. The