Marabelle

Daedalia: Chapter 16

Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

Kelly wrote in her journal about kissing Lefty and feeling unsettled by desire, her own dissociation, and the pressure of what their relationship had become. Over the next weeks they fumbled toward sex, boundaries, and cohabitation while Kelly feared Ona might be gone and worried that her ability to do the work would suffer.

In the fall of 1995, Lefty and Kelly bought a house in Santa Fe, New Mexico. While they would own several homes in different parts of the world in the years that followed, this four-bedroom adobe-style home on three acres in the foothills, with a separate shed for Kelly to work in, would always be the place they called home.

They named the ranch Marabelle, after me, their only daughter.

Knowing what you know of my parents so far, it won’t come as any surprise to you that I wasn’t exactly part of their plan. If my math is right, I was likely conceived around the time my mother wrote those journal entries in the spring of 1995 about the decided shift in their relationship. I’ve waited until this part of their story to reveal myself to you because it only seems fair. As much as I’d prefer to remain outside the story, it’s important you know who your unreliable narrator is going forward.

I’m not sure if I factored into their decision to settle in Santa Fe or if they had already decided before they knew I was coming and made the choice to keep me. There’s a strong case to be made that the allure of the landscape and the community of artists who live in the area influenced their decision because Kelly’s work through this period drastically changed.

I was born in Kelly’s shed on a frigid afternoon in December of 1996. I came a week early and so fast that Kelly barely had time to put her brushes down. I imagine her standing in front of the large canvas she was working on, her belly brushing the muslin as she leaned forward to work on the detail she’s famous for. I’m not sure what they would have done if the new housekeeper, Maria, hadn’t been there. She wasn’t a proper midwife, but she had helped bring many babies into the world and apparently knew exactly what to do. After her heroic assistance that day, she got promoted to full-time nanny, and in the daily, practical ways, she would be my mother for the first ten years of my life.

The house, when they bought it, had been a wreck. It had belonged to a well-known local artist who had done very well in the seventies but eventually lost everything and had to abandon the place. Lefty says when they first visited the house it was well on its way to being reclaimed by the landscape, with all the windows broken out, coyote scat in many of the rooms, bird nests in the eaves, and spider webs spanning the doorframes. They both fell in love with the three-sixty view of the desert and the mountains, and the artist’s shed was perfect, already fitted with big windows and skylights.

It took nearly two years to completely renovate the main house, so I slept in a bassinet at the foot of my parents’ temporary bed near the woodstove in the large one-room shed. I try to imagine the three of us in that space sleeping together, but I can’t picture it, the intimacy of it. We weren’t that kind of family.

Daedalia’s next big series was well underway the minute they moved in, and my mother’s growing belly didn’t seem to slow her down. Lefty said it had the opposite effect. She was working like someone with a deadline. She forgot to eat and barely slept, despite Lefty’s hovering and hand-wringing. He had two babies to fuss over now, the work and me.

The ten pieces she created for that series all sold within a week of the show’s debut in Paris the following summer. I have yet to see them in person. I’ve studied photographs, of course, but by now I’m sure you understand how that wouldn’t be the same.

It’s strange to think of those paintings my mother worked on at all hours in that drafty shed for months with me inside her, sharing her breath, her blood. Without a doubt, those pieces are hanging in the marble halls of some billionaire’s estate now where a select few dinner guests will stand before them a couple of times a year and contemplate the genius of their mysterious creator.

The artist was definitely mysterious, but not in the ways they imagined. There were stories of her being some blind savant or an austere witch-like figure who worked in the crumbling tower of an old New England estate. My mother looked very normal, maybe even a little plain. There’s a photograph of her and Lefty taken just a few weeks before I was born and she’s wearing this awful floral dress and leggings. They’re sitting at a restaurant in Santa Fe. Kelly’s nose is sunburned and her hair is a mousy brown. She could be anybody’s mom. But she wasn’t. She was barely my mom.

Kelly was mysterious in that, even though she was my mother, I never really knew her and I’m not sure Lefty did either. There was a large part of her that was unknowable.

My earliest memories are of playing on the floor of that shed with sunlight filtering through from above and my mother working on a stepladder. The cavernous room was silent except for the scratching of her pencil, the graphite sharpened to the length of a hummingbird’s beak on the board in front of her. There was a steady, unrelenting, almost mechanical rhythm to the sound. It would continue for what seemed like hours without a single pause.

When I looked up from my little play kitchen to the vast white monolith of the canvas she was working on, I remember being frightened. My mother was standing at the center of this void and summoning from it a world so flawless and intricate that it made the room and everything in it, including me, seem like a primitive sketch, unfinished and inconsequential. I remember crying really hard for what seemed like hours and she never turned around. I’m sure it was probably no more than a few minutes before Maria came in and scooped me up into the warm softness of her bosom and the smell of cornmeal.

I believe Maria was the only other person besides Lefty and me who knew the true identity of Daedalia. I don’t recall us ever having regular guests at Marabelle. It wasn’t until I was almost twelve that they told me the first version I understood of their secret. It was around that time that they started putting a padlock on the shed door so if I happened to have a curious friend come over, we wouldn’t go exploring out there.

I remember sitting at the breakfast table in the kitchen on a summer morning after my mother had gone out to start working and Lefty was preparing to go away on another business trip. I was eating a bowl of cereal and he was making coffee. Maria was busy in some other part of the house.

I asked Lefty why it was such a big secret who Mommy was.

His back was to me and he was stirring cream into his coffee. He paused mid-stir and the kitchen was so quiet I could hear the faintest sound of music coming from the shed, which was probably thirty yards away from the house.

“That’s a good question, pumpkin.” He finished preparing his coffee and then came over to sit at the table. “Your mom’s a private person and she has an amazing magical gift. We keep the secret to protect her.”

“Protect her from what?” I asked.

“You know, from people who would be too curious and would want something more from her, more than she can give.”

That spawned about a hundred more questions, and I could tell from the look on his face that he had no good answers to any of them. Why? What would happen if people knew? Didn’t Mom want to be famous? Wasn’t it kind of like cheating?

Finally, he had had enough and pulled the trump card every parent deploys at some point.

“Marabelle, don’t ever tell anyone, even your closest friends, that your mother is Daedalia. If you do, it will ruin the life we’ve built here. Is that what you want?”

For the record, I never did tell anyone, even in high school when I was completely miserable and hated both of them and their secret world.

I remember in English class in ninth grade, there was a girl, Heather Mendoza, who made Daedalia the subject of her research paper so every week for two months I had to hear her talk obsessively about this mysterious artist, her brilliance, and all the crackpot theories of who she really was.

I learned a lot of things I never knew, like the fact that one of her recent paintings sold for ten million dollars at auction. I knew we had money, but even with the constant building projects happening at Marabelle, I didn’t understand how much until Heather read her paper to the class.

Over the course of my childhood, our property would grow into a sprawling compound with tennis courts, gardens, a pool, a guest house, and a private movie theater, all protected by the boundary of a ten-foot privacy fence and a wrought-iron gate.

I had a compulsive urge to shout to the class that this brilliant artist watched about a million hours of television, never went anywhere, and preferred a bag of Doritos to about any other food.

I wanted to say that she would go days without saying a word to me and then, out of the blue, barge into my room and want to talk to me for hours, leaving me feeling completely hollowed out and exhausted after she finally left, always disappointed that I didn’t live up to whatever it was she expected from those sessions.

I’ve spent my life studying my mother, the way many people have studied her art. The interviews I recorded with her in the months before she died weren’t much different from the conversations we had when I was little. When you have an artist for a parent, you’re always competing for their attention. I thought if I could understand where she went when she made art then I could go there with her. But of course, that wasn’t possible.

I never had any desire to be an artist. I didn’t enjoy coloring or drawing and I don’t remember Kelly ever trying to teach me or encourage me to be creative. Of course Lefty did for a time and then he just stopped.

Maybe he was conflicted about pushing me the way he had been pushed by his father or maybe he decided he couldn’t manage two artists. It’s possible he didn’t see the same return on investment that he had in Kelly. That sounds horrible. I’m not being fair to him. I can hear Kelly saying this in my head. Lefty has always been there. Steady.

I didn’t intend to reveal myself so early in the story. This book isn’t about me. This book is their story in which I play a supporting role. In the coming chapters, I’ll do my best to disappear back into the telling.

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