The Altington Painter
Helen slaps four slices of Wonder Bread down on the two paper plates sitting on the counter. She’s vaguely aware of weekday morning NPR driveling about the weather being ‘colder than usual’ from the radio behind her by the kitchen sink. She listens to the broadcast every morning but public radio’s role in her life is less riveting information and more background noise. It keeps her awake while she smears globs of gummy peanut butter and grape jelly across spongy slices of too-white bread. It also keeps her distracted from the fact that she’s doing it alone.
She pulls open the cookie-cutter drawer and shifts through the dozens of metal shapes she’s collected over her last seventeen years of being a mom. Stars, hearts, and spaceships clink against each other until she finds a dinosaur. She presses the triceratops into one of the clouds of bread and watches the dough bubble through the metal, deflating as she pulls it away.
She’s snacking on dinosaur remnants when the tell-tale thuds of feet against hardwood tell her the kids are up. She shoves crusts into her mouth and tosses the triceratops mold into the sink— a problem for later— before turning to meet her oldest, Logan, at the door of the kitchen.
“Mom, can you drive Sammy to school today? I told Eliza I’d stop by her house before school.”
“Good morning to you too,” Helen responds. She’s heard this plea a thousand times before and her answer never changes. She does not spend her few days off from work acting as a chauffeur when she has a perfectly good seventeen-year-old daughter with a license. She’s about to say as much when Sam walks by his sister and into the kitchen.
“Mommy,” he whines. “I don’t want Logan to drive me to school. Harriet said she’s going to sit with me on the bus today.”
“Come on Sam, that doesn’t matter; you’ll see Harriet when you get to school. When mom drives you,” Logan snaps in return, watching as Sam crosses the kitchen, towards the head of the table.
Helen’s watching their interaction go back and forth, jumping from Logan still standing in the kitchen doorway and Sam standing by the window behind the end of the table. She only steps in when she notices Sam’s eyes turn glossy and a pool of tears sets itself in his lower eyelid.
“Logan,” Helen breaks in, “you’re driving your brother to school. End of discussion. Sam, can you go grab your and your sisters’ lunches for me, please. You’re going to be late for school.”
“But mom! I told Eliza—”
“I don’t care what you told Eliza, you are driving him to school.” She gestures over to Sam who is now crouching towards the window, bent so his head is behind the curtain, leaving just a rump with legs visible.
“Sammy honey, what on earth are you doing?”
Without bringing his head back outside the curtain he chirps, “Mommy, why is it still dark out?”
Logan looks over at her mom, sharing a concerned look. Helen crosses the kitchen to the window and peers through the curtain. Her stomach drops and her mind jumps straight to Charles, then Sam. Sure enough, it's seven-thirty and dark. This wouldn’t be cause for concern if it was still winter, but in early June, the sunshine is a part of their daily morning routine. Helen decides then and there that she is driving both of her kids to school. It’s pitch black out, not safe conditions for a seasoned driver, much one as new as Logan. Frankly, she doesn’t want to let her kids out of her sight for longer than she needs to right now.
-
The drive to Altington Public School is dark, cold, and quiet. Altington’s streets are poorly lit. Streetlights buzz and flicker. In between flickers, the road is only visible through the dim-lit headlights of a gently used car. The family ‘Tideland Pearl’ Prius chugs along, Helen keeps her foot on the accelerator, ready to jerk to the brake at any sign of trouble.
It’s June, but the heat is blasting. The icy chill outside meets the sauna inside the car and fogs the windows. No one is talking. The sun should be out. Helen knows it. Logan knows it. And Sammy, being ever the intuitive eight-year-old, can tell there is something wrong.
Helen pulls into the student drop-off lane right as the first bell rings and Logan shoots out of the car. Bending down to meet her mom through the car window eyeing Sammy, who is still sitting in the backseat watching a video on the iPad, she asks,
“Have you heard from dad today?”
“No,” Helen’s lips are pursed and she keeps her gaze straight ahead, firm and unmoving. “I’m going to call Don when I get home. Please make sure your brother gets to class Lo.”
“You’re making us go to school when dad could be dead for all we know?” she whisper-yells.
Shushing her daughter, glancing to make sure Sammy was still preoccupied, “It’s better if you’re here Logan. We don’t even know anything’s wrong yet. Just, please take him inside and keep an eye on him. Today will be easier for all of us if we just keep going. There’s not much we can do right now anyway.”
Hands gripping the steering wheel, she watches Logan send a stony look back as she escorts Sam out of the car and into the school. Altington is a quaint town, with only one school that every grade shares. There are no lights outside the school and her children only walk ten feet ahead before their shadowy figures are indistinguishable from the rest of the blots of darkness around them. As a kid, she went to Altington Public so she knows the scene that should be playing out before her. Today, instead of the hustle and bustle of screaming children and playground games, there are shadows.
She reaches into the center console and pulls out her phone.
“Hi, this is Helen. Is the Deputy in? Can I speak with him?
The receptionist tells her to hold on a moment and Helen’s ear is met with sounds of shuffling papers and a chair squeaking out from behind a desk. Less than a moment later, the call redirects.
“Don, it’s Helen. Can I see you? Please.”
-
On the way to the police station, Helen drives past the supermarket. Lio’s Groceries. It’s a little out of the way but she finds herself drawn to the familiarity and stops inside. Roaming the aisles, she remembers when the kids were younger, Sammy a newborn, and Logan eleven. They shopped here a lot in the first few weeks after Sam was born. The store is right by the county hospital. He was a preemie and in the NICU for three months before they could bring him home. During that time, she and her husband, Charles, became more familiar with Lio’s than they ever thought they would. They spent most afternoons roaming the aisles while Logan was at school. Because the hospital was close, it was easier to do their grocery shopping up there before heading back to Altington. Plus, Sammy was always close by.
She hasn’t seen Charles in just over seven years. His duties as the Altington Painter started when his father died unexpectedly just after Sammy turned a year old. They tried to put it off for as long as they could. Logan needed her father. They’d just had a baby. Helen needed Charles. But Altington needed someone to paint the sun and it needed to be Charles. There was nothing they could do. They had fourteen days before Charles was swept away to the skies. Off to solitude and loneliness and paint.
She takes her time now, walking through Lio’s. She takes in the smell of fresh produce and the unending aisles of vibrant reds, greens, and yellows. She stops at every crate.
When she leaves the market, Helen takes in the darkness around the parking lot. Shadowy trees branch spindly fingers towards the sky begging the sky for nourishment and warmth. Helen pulls her rose-colored shawl tighter around her shoulders, shivering from the cold. She can see her breath in the cold air. She turns her focus to the neighborhoods outside the parking lot. Rows of houses are illuminated by televisions behind windows and lackluster street lights. She can’t get over the eeriness of the screens, of everyday lives continuing on in light of the unorthodox. Unease clutches at her heart, squeezing it over and over. Pumping blood through a race in her veins. She always thought she’d be able to tell if something happened to Charles, that there would be a scratch in the back of her mind trying to tell her something is wrong. But it wasn’t like that at all. It took a whole world of darkness to understand.
-
The state of the police station is about what Helen expected at noon on a Tuesday morning in June with no sun: chaos. Every phone in the station is ringing and concerned citizens rush in and out through the front doors. Some demand answers and others simply wander around with nowhere else to go. There’s a woman shouting at the poor young man at the front desk. She’s going on about the last time the Altington Painter disappeared. The blackout lasted fourteen days and it was so cold that nearly a quarter of the town ended up in the hospital. The total number of casualties was close to one hundred.
The woman is getting more hysterical by the second, and her voice carries through the busy room. She catches a glimpse of Helen and points her out right away.
“You,” she yells. “You’re the wife! What the hell is going on here? What are you doing to fix this mess? My rutabagas are dying in this weather.”
Helen stutters in response. She knows just as much about what is happening with Charles as this woman. They’re both here for the same reason: answers. All eyes are on Helen as the woman continues her tirade, moving closer and closer to Helen. She’s nearly on top of Helen when Deputy Don emerges from his office.
“Excuse me, ma'am, this is a professional environment, not, a wrestling match. So I would appreciate it if you stepped away from this fine young woman, and used an inside voice.”
The rutabaga woman sputters something more about Helen and the town and how careless everyone’s being, but after a promise from the deputy that he was doing “everything he can to get things in Altington running as smoothly as ever,” she leaves. Not without promising she’d be back tomorrow if the sun wasn’t shining.
Attention is still on Helen as Deputy Don places his hand on the small of her back and leads her into his office. Stacks of files are strewn across the desk sitting in the center of the room. The walls are lined with file cabinets, nearly all of which are open and there are holes where files are missing. The deputy gestures to a small swivel chair in front of his desk and Helen takes a seat. Her knees start bouncing almost immediately. Don opts for the desk’s surface rather than the velvety red chair behind the desk. Wrapping one leg under himself, he faces Helen.
“Hey Helen,” he all but croaks, “it’s nice to see you, even given the circumstances.”
Helen likes the deputy. She really does. She wishes the circumstances were different, but they’re not, and it’s no time for pleasantries.
“Has he contacted you?”
Don shakes his head like he knew she was going to ask but wished he didn’t have to answer.
“I want to go up.”
“I knew you were going to say something like that Helen.” He smiles sadly. “You know I can’t let you do that.”
She does know that. She knows that her husband is the Altington Painter. When she married into the family twenty years ago, she knew what she was giving up. She knew that if she ever had a son, he would be next in line. She married him anyway. They weren’t going to have children. Charles wouldn’t be summoned for ages anyway. There was nothing to worry about.
How was she supposed to know Charles’ dad would die at sixty, when Charles was only thirty-five, and Sammy had just been born. That Charles would be summoned two weeks after. That seven years into his role as a Painter, the sun wouldn’t rise. That Sammy would be expected to take over the role of Painter at only eight years old. It’s not the painting Helen is worried about. He’s always been a painter. Artistic prowess runs in the family of course. It’s the solitude. She is not sending her child into the sky alone for the rest of his life. She’s going to take his place.
She tells him as much.
“Helen, I’m not letting you go up there. We don’t even know if he’s gone for sure—”
“We know,” Helen interrupts. “He’d only stop painting if he’s dead.”
Don just stares at her.
“Helen, I can’t just send you or Sammy or anyone up there until we know for sure. I’ve been looking into this all day and protocol is protocol. I looked for a loophole, I really did. But because this is technically a missing person case, we have to wait twenty-four hours since last contact to send anyone, and technically, his last contact was last night’s sunset. So I’m sorry but we have to wait until tomorrow morning. But then I’ll send up a search party and I’ll go with them and—”
“No, just send me.”
“Helen, you know I can’t do that. It’s against the Painters’ Code. We need to send Sammy up next. Once we know it's safe of course.”
“You have to let me try. Sam is my son. Who gives a fuck about a code when my husband is probably dead and my son is right behind him,” her voice cracks on the last word. “Sammy doesn’t even know he’s next in line. He doesn’t know what this means for us.”
Deputy Dan stares at her for a moment.
“I’ll ready a balloon at ‘sunrise’. Be there.”
-
She’s late picking up the kids from school. She never thought she’d ever wish that they could stay at school just a little longer. A few more hours. A couple of days. But here she is dreading the moment they enter the car and she’s faced with the responsibility of letting them know she’s leaving forever. If she could, she would put this conversation off forever.
But time keeps moving and they enter the car stony-eyed and quiet.
“Hey guys,” she greets them, trying to keep her voice cheery.
“Hey” they respond in tandem.
They go through the everyday ‘how was your day at school’ questions, but spend the rest of the ride in silence with Logan sending her mom weird glances the whole dark ride home.
-
Helen can’t do it. When they get home, she sits them down at their small, four-chaired dining table and tells them she’s going up to the Blue House to check on their father. She doesn’t tell them she’s not coming back. She can’t. So she tells them she’ll be back in the morning.
Sam takes the news as well as she could have expected. He’s more worried about not having someone to tuck him in and read him a bedtime story tonight than he is about his dad. Charles has always been more of a mystical figure to Sam than a dad. He’s a fun fact he can share about himself on the first day of school, a quick, “Hey my dad is the Altington Painter,” but nothing more. When Helen tells him Logan will be taking over story duty for the night, he’s sad but moves on quickly. A story is a story and Helen will be back tomorrow with a new story: the story of Blue House.
Logan is crushed. Helen knows how hard everything has been on her. She’s known from the time she was eleven years old that her dad was gone. And that one day, she’d lose her brother to the sky too. As a mother, she could see the small part of Logan that always believed her dad could come back. But any flickering of hope burned out when the sun didn’t rise this morning. Something happened to prevent him from being able to paint the sun and it must be something bad to put Altington in so much danger. Helen watches as the last embers of hope extinguish in Logan as she excuses herself from the table and retreats to her room.
Helen tries to keep the rest of the night as normal as possible. She helps Sam with his homework and sets the table for dinner. She makes their favorite, spaghetti and meatballs. She reads Sammy a bedtime story— the one with the dragons— and gives Logan a kiss on the forehead before sending her off to bed early because it's a school night. Helen knows she won’t be able to sleep so she doesn’t even try. She spends the night out on the front porch, staring at the stars. If she squints, she thinks she can see the faint outline of Blue House.
She leaves for Altington Central Park before Logan and Sam wake up. Don said the balloon was scheduled to take off at five-thirty, just as the sun should have been rising, but she shows up an hour early to watch the balloon preparation.
She’s standing off to the side of the balloon shivering and staring blankly as it begins to rise and inflate. The hot air pouring into the balloon brings warmth to her cheeks in the now-frigid June night. She closes her eyes and pretends she’s at a bonfire. She’s with her kids and Charles and Don and everything is bright and sunny and fine.
Her eyes are closed and she just feels the warmth of the balloon engulf her senses. She stands still, breathing in the warm air until her until Don taps on her shoulder.
“It’s time.”
The door to the balloon’s basket is open and Don leads her inside. They stand there together in the basket for a moment and Don rests his hands in hers.
“Look after them for me,” she whispers.
Tears are dripping down Don’s face and down his shirt now, but he keeps his hands in Helen’s. “You know I will.” Helen smiles and Don chuckles before adding, “I wouldn’t be letting you go otherwise.”
The balloon is rising now. And Don is reaching up to Helen as she rises.
Helen reaches into her back pocket and pulls two letters, one for each child. “Give them these for me. Please. And tell them I’m so sorry. Tell Sammy I love him so so much and that he deserves so much life down here. And tell Logan”— she chokes— “tell Logan I am so sorry for putting her through this again. Tell her I’ll find a way to see her. To talk to her.”
“Helen I don’t—”
“Just tell them.”
He takes the letters as she lifts higher and higher into the air.
-
The smaller Don gets, the closer Helen knows she is to Charles, and she finally lets herself wonder how it happened. Did he fall off of the ladder and break his neck? Was it a heart attack? Stroke? What if he did this to himself? It’s not uncommon for Topper Painters to kill themselves. To be a Painter was to commit to a life of complete solitude and routine. It would be torture for anyone. It’s going to be torture for her.
The millions of ways Charles could have died swarm through her mind as the balloon continues to rise. Her mind is a beehive of terrible thoughts and she can’t stop thinking about Logan and Sam.
As the balloon rises through the first layer of clouds, Blue House emerges. It’s a slender thing, more prominent in height than anything else. There are two floors, and the walls are mostly taken up by windows of all different shapes and sizes. There is nothing to tether the house down, but it stays in the same place, always ready to house a Painter. There’s a long chimney emerging, not from a roof but from a marble dome. And the house is blue. Not just any shade of blue, it changes to match the sky around it, hiding the house from wandering eyes. Now it’s a dark navy hiding her from her children below.
The balloon floats up and above the house before it starts to descend like it knows what it’s there to do and lands in the center of the domed roof. All around her is blue. Helen’s head is in the clouds and she waves her hands through the webby condensation. On the roof below her, there is an open window, waiting for her to climb in. She drops herself into the house and suddenly she’s falling falling falling. The mismatched windows rush past as she drops further into the house. She’s sure this is where her life ends. But gently, as if by magic, she lands on her feet. In the center of the main floor of the house.
There are paintings of her and her family covering the walls head to toe and a small bed lying in the center of the room. Other than the bed, there is no furniture in sight. A white marble floor sits below her feet. She assumes it would ordinarily reflect the light from the sun painted above Charles’ head. Above her is the interior of the dome, where her hot air balloon sits. It’s where Charles painted Altington’s sun every day for seven years. Only now, instead of the intricately patterned brushstrokes holding every shade of orange, yellow, and white, there is nothing. The sun has been blotted out with black paint. Not in the neat and orderly way Charles used to paint at home, but with quick, frantic, and uneven strokes.
Eight-foot-tall cans of every color imaginable line the walls like an interior fence. Every can is dripping paint down the sides, pooling into a brown muddled mess beneath her feet. Suddenly, Helen can’t stand the silence anymore.
“Charles! Charles are you here?”
Her voice echoes through the empty room and reverberates through her own head. When silence finally breaks through the echoes, the desire she had to scream out her husband’s name is gone. She knows he’s not here anymore.
Instead, she walks toward one of the paint cans against the wall closest to the front door. She drags her fingers through the paint dripping down the paint. She imagines Charles waking up every morning and staring into the cans. She wonders if he could see his reflection in them, if he ever thought about his family while he was painting their sun. She reaches for the top of the can, smearing the slick orange paint along with her. She can’t reach the edge of the can. But she suddenly gets the urge that she needs to. Pushing herself up on her tiptoes, she tries to peer over the rim. She needs to look into the paint can. Then everything will be alright. She and Sam and Logan and Charles will be together again.
Hopping up on her toes, she feels her fingers finally graze the top of the bucket. She lets out a breath as she feels the paint beneath her fingertips when out, a gaunt and spindly hand shoots out of the paint can and grabs her wrist.
She tries to rip her hand away, but its grasp is too strong. It yanks at her and she is dragged up the side of the paint can. The moment she finds herself face-to-face with the burnt orange paint, she sees Charles. He’s fully submerged in orange paint and his pale face bobs like an apple half-submerged in water as he smiles wide, staring straight at her. After almost eight years, he’s here. They are finally face-to-face.
“Charles, it’s you.”
His grin turns sour when he hears her voice. “You’re not my son.” His grip becomes tighter around her wrist.
“What, no. You see, I saved him, Charles, I saved our son; he’s safe now.”
“Not Sam. Not Sam. Not Sam. Not Sam.” Charles chants spitting out orange paint through his teeth. “You are not supposed to be here, Helen,” he interrupts the chant, gurgling orange paint as it slides down his throat and over his blinking eyes.
Helen knows she should be scared. But here is Charles and paint and orange orange orange. She reaches toward him and he drags her further and further into the paint can, chanting, “not supposed to be, not supposed to be, not supposed to be.” The chant becomes more and more indiscernible and gurgled the further they submerge. Helen is dragged down deep into the paint can, clutching at Charles’ hand as she sinks. He drags her down further with him and as the two lovers drowned in the sun, their last glimpse of life was the lid of the paint can, sealing them in.
***
Aubrey Madison is a rising sophomore at Emerson College majoring in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. She is a competitive figure skater and has six dogs! ‘The Altington Painter’ is her debut publication. You can find her on social media on Instagram and Twitter (@aubreymadisonnn).