Free The Blue Bath by Mary Waters-Sayer

young to understand everything about the paintings, she still felt them. She thought that the great ones were like that in any art form—music, painting, dance. While the technical genius might not be easily visible to the naked eye, that which was beautiful and true needed no explanation. Later, she had also come to know them by the artists who had painted them. But despite this later knowledge, they had always remained for her as she had first known them to be. She thought that it was best this way. To first experience something in its pure state—to feel something before fully understanding it.
    Over time, their number continued to diminish. After the initial departure, she took more notice of them. Cataloguing them with her callow child’s eye. Each its own world. Of color and line and style. Of age and time and reason. Each with its own rules, its own borders, its own palette. She had made a story from the pictures. Her story drew them together. United them and changed the rules of each of their worlds, blurring the boundaries that separated them.
    The Matisse had been the last to go. For a while it hung oddly off-center on the wall. And then for a while it was only the ghosts, but then they went as well, there being no one there to remember them.
    The empty spaces where the paintings had hung were never filled. Instead, the walls held only their shadows. Their varying degrees of darkness on the moss-colored wall, a testament to how long each painting had been there. The last ones to be removed were memorialized by squares of deepest green—deeper even than the surrounding wallpaper.
    Sometimes long periods passed between departures, as had been the case following the exodus of the girl before the window and the seascape. When she grew up, she understood that they were more than pretty pictures. That they were important. That they had value. And that her mother had sold them off one by one, as needed. The paintings had sustained them. Perhaps not in the way that her father had intended, but in the way that had been necessary. She saw all that they had given her and she felt that maybe she owed them something in return.
    She had seen the Matisse once, years after its departure. Through the window of a small gallery in SoHo. It had seemed to her that they had recognized each other at the same time. Old friends passing on a crowded street. After her initial excitement, an odd sense of shyness and propriety had caused her to keep walking, preventing her from stopping and running her eyes over its familiar curves, allowing her gaze to linger in its expanse of blue, as if she did not have the right. Not anymore. When she had found herself on the same street several weeks later, it was gone from the window.
    She wondered about the order in which they had been sold and those that had been the last to go. What did they represent? Were they her mother’s favorites? Each possessing its own special significance? Or were they simply the most likely to sell? Would they have fetched the best prices at auction? She thought about her mother and how she would never know the whole of her story. She thought about the possibility that what had shaped her, what had defined her most markedly, was not what was in her life, but what was not. And how she had built her life around those empty spaces.
    When her mother had informed her father’s family of her pregnancy and of her intention to raise the child in her Catholic faith, her father’s family had responded that they had no interest in the child. And so she did not know them.
    There had been one time. She could not have been more than five years old. It had been a weekday, but her mother had instructed her to put on one of her Sunday dresses. As she pulled the smocked garment over her head, Kat had wondered expectantly at the occasion. Coaxing the strap of her shoe into its buckle, she had heard the doorman ring up and, minutes after that, the doorbell. When her mother had called her