Maya has never liked the deep gold walls of her house’s entryway. It gives the house a murky, shadowy feel. But back when she and Tom moved in, she’d been seven and a half months pregnant. There’d been no time to think about it. Then there was her next pregnancy a year later, and their busy jobs and lives, and she stopped noticing it.
After Maya’s mother got sick, Maya started seeing the gold again. Its nagging presence annoyed her, it made her tense. It was almost a physical sensation, like hands pressing down on her shoulders.
On a rainy December afternoon, Maya drives past the Benjamin Moore store. And she pictures that dark gold. Eight years of putting up with it is enough. She makes a U-turn, pulls into the parking lot, and walks inside.
Oh, the colors! The sight of hundreds if not thousands of colors makes something happen to Maya. As she takes in each one, there is an almost imperceptibly tiny shift. She flips through the display boards. She gathers paint chips of the most promising ones. The thick stack of colored strips feels solid in her hand.
When Tom gets home he takes off his jacket, flicking water droplets all around. “It’s crazy out there! And the traffic—” he says and breaks off, his eyes falling on the strips of color that Maya has fanned out on the wood floor. “So what’s this? A little project?”
Maya is sitting cross legged in the entryway, head tilted, admiring the brilliant array of hues. Citrus Mist. Spring Meadow. Deep Silver. “I think it’s time,” she says.
Ellie and Fiona, eight and seven, take turns holding the color strips up on the wall. Everyone stands back to assess. They separate them into two groups.
The No pile: Fresh Grapefruit, Meadow, Wisteria, Midnight Blue, White Chocolate, Papaya.
The Maybe pile: Sand Dune, Aura, Winter Solstice, Nantucket Gray, Cashmere, Mt. Rainier.
***
Every year or so, Maya’s boss sends her to leadership training. Even though Maya has been managing her small team just fine with or without these classes, usually held in windowless meeting rooms at company headquarters or hotel conference centers. But this one is different. This one is in a quiet place under tall redwoods.
There is a morning meditation session. Maya has tried to meditate before, but her mind wanders. As the minutes tick on, her head will begin to spin. Doctor appointments to be made, data to be analyzed, school meetings to attend.
But here, now, she breathes. Like she’s been holding her breath for too long. She pays attention. An hour passes in a blink. At the break Maya slowly gets to her feet and moves out of the room.
Dreamily, she flips through books and admires beaded necklaces in the center’s store. She moves to a shelf full of scarves. She pulls a pretty lilac one from the bottom of the stack. Unfolded it shimmers, deepening to a darker shade of fringe. As she runs her fingers over the silk threads, she pictures her mother wearing it. Her mother will love it.
Then, a rush of reality. Oh. Her mother is dead. Her mother has been gone almost a year.
Maya presses her hands to her chest. She squeezes her eyes closed. As people cross back and forth behind her in the shop, she stands there in her socks and cries.
***
Maya and the girls stop in at Benjamin Moore for sample pints of the most promising Maybes. “Choosing colors is an art,” the sales clerk tells them. “So much depends on the size of the room. The light. The feeling.”
At home, the girls drop their backpacks and go fetch brushes. Happily, they paint poster-sized patches over the gold walls. Then the family stands amidst the colorful rectangles to assess.
The Nos: Nantucket Gray, Cashmere, Mt. Rainier.
The (unanimous) Yes: Winter Solstice.
Decision made. The girls jump up and down and hug. Just as Maya’s mother was, they’re huggers. Maya remembers them. Quick hugs from her mother before heading off to school, longer hugs at the airport or train station.
Winter Solstice sounds as if it’s a cold color, but it is not. It’s a medium-pale shade, grayish with tones of mauve. Elegant but with warmth. Winter Solstice feels solid, timeless.
***
The night after the mindful leadership course, Maya’s voice shakes and tears stream down her face when she tells Tom about the scarf. It feels like she’s reliving her mother’s final days. When her mother was unable to eat or to speak. When she became unrecognizable as the one person who’d been there all of Maya’s life.
After her mother died, Maya slept in fits. Tom told her that she moaned through the night. With a pillow pressed over her head, Maya went through thousands of what ifs. What if she’d insisted on scans after those first coughing attacks? What if she’d sought a third opinion, or a fourth? Maya found herself counting backwards obsessively. A year before. Three months before. Eight weeks ago—the day before she was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer—she’d been alive and Maya still had her mother.
When Maya blinked awake and resituated herself, she was aware of Tom and the girls up and moving about the house. But she could not get up.
***
This winter, there are thunderstorms on the day Maya’s family preps and primes. The temperature is near freezing on the day they paint. But on a crisp Sunday afternoon, the sun is peeking out from behind clouds when they clear away drop cloths and ladders. They all step back to admire the newly finished walls.
The color is not the Winter Solstice Maya envisioned. Not the earthy gray they’d picked. Before her eyes is a brighter, cheerier shade than gray or mauve. Their walls are now blue.
A silvery, glowing blue. An early dawn blue. Their entry is lighter. The ceilings are taller. The girls tilt their heads back, their lips parted. Tom’s eyes are wide, as if a Picasso were hanging before him.
“What the—?” Maya creases her brows and moves slowly around, touching the walls with her fingers. Is this real? Can she trust it?
“It’s lighter,” Ellie says. “And so glowy.” Fiona plays with the light dimmer and Ellie moves the window shade up and down. But none of that changes the color much. By dusk, everyone acknowledges that the entryway is definitely blue.
Clearly something’s happened that wasn’t there before. Is it an improvement in the weather? The shifting of the sun with the seasons? Or is it something in Maya’s eyes or expectations or heart that has changed?
***
Maya is running late for work today. She pulls her car out of her driveway and speeds down the street. At a stop sign several blocks from her house, Maya sees a grandmotherly woman at the bus stop. The woman wears a soft wool scarf and a puffy jacket. There is something in the way she turns towards Maya, in the way she notices her idling there and smiles. It filters into Maya. It slips its way towards somewhere down deep.
The feeling of her mother comes to Maya. Her mother’s voice. Her mother, holding her baby daughters. Her mother, laughing at the movies. Instead of clamping down, Maya lets herself begin to loosen.
The next time Maya drives in that direction, she slows before she gets to the bus stop. And on that day no one is waiting there. But still, she pauses. And this time she pays attention. At the long limbs of a big leaf maple tree. At the smooth clear sky. At her own memories, so vividly swirling around her. Her mother comes back to her like this. With more lightness now, but still beautiful and still real. Just as she always was.
Greta Wu is a writer and non-profit consultant. Her work has appeared in The Hunger, The East Bay Monthly, and Mothers Always Write. She currently lives with her family in northern California, where she is at work on more short fiction and a novel for children titled Growing Pains.
