Page 84 of Black
CHAPTER 14
The man in the Painting
Gabriel
After our last dinner at the camp, Cia was busy talking to the weird guy who had been a baby for a week. He was a child now and she was the only one he would talk to. His mom had told me a few days ago that they had already tried traditional treatments to help him with his anxiety, but after his fifth suicide attempt it had been recommended to them to call Dr. Bruce.
I had to admit the guy looked much better than when he arrived, and Cia even managed to make him smile at times.
“G, do you have a minute?” Bruce called out to me from the doorway.
“Sure.” I got up and followed him down the hallway to the dining room, where Cia’s paintings were placed on the dining room table.
“I thought we should wrap these for your drive tomorrow,” he said.
“All right.” I picked up the role of bubble wrap and carried it to the table, when he spoke again.
“You still believe he’s helping her float?” I followed his gaze to the blue painting where Cia was floating on water with my hands covering her private parts.
I nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“You know,” he said thoughtfully. “The more I look at that picture, the more I worry for that man.”
“Why?”
He looked closer. “Do you see his face? How is he breathing?”
I looked at the painting. “I don’t know, it’s just a symbolic painting of me bathing her.”
“Well, maybe you should think about it, because if he truly is helping her float, then what’s going to happen to her when he drowns?”
“What are you saying?”
He frowned and looked at me with one of his freaky X-ray glances.
“Tell me about your feelings for Cia.”
“Ehh…” It wasn’t the first time he had put me on the spot. Bruce and I had shared walks in the forest and talks around the bonfire about Cia, but also about my time in Afghanistan and my nightmares. I had come to the conclusion that helping others wasn’t just a job to him, it was embedded in his persona. He couldn’t switch it off.
“I care about her,” I said.
“Do you lust for her?” he asked and I jerked back.
“No.”
He held up both palms. “No judgment.”
I swallowed a few times. “I don’t lust for her,” I lied. “But sometimes I get a little confused about my feelings for her.”
“Confused how?”
I exhaled deeply. “It’s all so entangled that I’m afraid I might confuse one feeling for another.”
“Like what?”
“Argh, it’s hard to put in words, but it’s like when a bartender hands you a drink with a bit of everything and asks you: can you taste what’s in it?”
“Fair enough, but try to tell me some of the emotions you can identify.”
