Land of Dreams: A Novel Read Free Page A

loudly, waving an oil-stained rag feebly by my side. The stag stopped scratching and looked up. His head was not much bigger than the female’s, but his antlers spanned the width of the huge open doorway. He looked at me and, sensing this could go badly wrong, I kept the next “Shoo” to myself. After just a few seconds he turned and walked away, the deer and fawn following him. I was, he had decided, of no interest to him whatsoever. Strangely, I felt more rejected than relieved.
    When they were gone, I walked up the wooden steps and opened the door to the kitchen. A breeze followed me in and sent three hastily pinned watercolors fluttering to the floor. After four summers here I was still so infatuated with the beauty of Fire Island, in love with its muted sea-soaked palate, so grateful for the peace and solitude it had offered me, that I found myself sketching all the time in a sort of homage to the landscape. My passion for creating art—despite my commercial success—was still very new to me, as was the skill of drawing; the novelty of being able to capture life as it was, with merely a soft pencil and a piece of paper, had not worn off. While my sprawling artist’s studio behind our house was packed with canvases of my stylized Impressionistic landscapes, the walls of the narrow two-story cabin where I lived with my two sons were pinned with small, simple watercolors of the natural landscape and abundant wildlife that surrounded us: sketches of the silvery grasses that looked so delicate and yet anchored our precarious sand dunes with their network of slim, greenish threads; the ballooning clouds of a summer morning that floated overhead on breezy days like “angel’s ships,” as my sons called them.
    There were sketches of the boys on every surface of the house. Both my boys were adopted, so they looked very different from each other. Tom was stocky and black-haired. Leo, now sixteen, was blond and lean. There was nothing more beautiful to me than my sons’ faces; there was no greater feeling than their soft lips on my cheek. As they grew older they paid less and less attention to me. Their arms were directed now out into the world, and not back toward the comfort of their mother’s bosom; yet, as with a bad lover, their sometimes feckless disregard only made me love them more. I craved their affection, but perhaps the fact that I wasn’t their natural parent made me more reserved in demanding it. I did not feel that I had the right to cloy, so when they came crying to me with a scuffed knee or a cruel slight, my concern for their troubles was overridden by the joy of being allowed to give them comfort; a pleasure so addictively sweet that every mother hopes her child will need her forever.
    Although I was certain I loved them with the same passion that a mother loves her natural child, the act of re-creating them over and over again on paper had become a compulsion for me, as if every sketch was in itself a microcosm of giving birth. Each picture was a homage to their detailed, intricate anatomy: the complex formation of their ears, the perfect rounds of their shoulders, the soft confusion of their eyes, the plump innocence of their lips—hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hastily drawn sketches, not just on the walls, but in the pockets of aprons and handbags and jackets. While the few visitors who called at the house would comment on the abundance of pictures, Tom, Leo and I did not see them anymore. My drawings were merely an extension of our lives with one another, another eccentricity of their artist-mother’s abounding love.
    I opened the odds-and-ends drawer in the kitchen, but there was no string there, or in any other drawer or cupboard. I now clearly remembered putting a large roll of string in that drawer.
    “Did you move the string, Tom?” I called over to my son, who was sitting on the sofa with a blanket over his lap, under which was a bag of expensive crackers that I had specifically told