The Breaking Point. Mariella Starr

to the garage. She thought she would be staying in your studio because that’s where she has stayed before. She didn’t mean to damage your work. Where are you going?”

      Faith said nothing. She couldn’t think, speak, or breathe. She wheeled her suitcase to her vehicle, opened the back hatch, and shoved it inside.

      “Where are you going?” Ales demanded again. “You can’t just walk out!”

      Faith raised her eyes to the pile of what was her work, and felt a physical stab of pain. Her efforts, her creativity had been reduced to rubbish. “I’m done,” she whispered in a broken voice. She slammed into her car, floored the gas, and barely missed another vehicle when she pulled into the street.

      The tears didn’t start for several miles, but when they came, Faith couldn’t stop them. She swiped at the tears on her face. She dug into the console compartment for tissues, but there weren’t any. Ales used them to clean his sunglasses, but he never thought to replenish them.

      Her cell phone began to ring, but she didn’t reach for it. The calls went to voicemail, but it wouldn’t stop. She braked at a stop sign, grabbed her cell, and tried to silence it, but it kept ringing in her hand. Someone honked behind her, and she looked both ways, turning onto the road that would take her to the interstate. The car behind her, the honker in such a big hurry, turned at the next intersection.

      The damn phone wouldn’t stop ringing! Faith was sobbing now, and she rolled down the window and threw her phone out with a furious motion. She watched through the rearview mirror as it shattered into pieces. It was somehow symbolic.

      Faith kept driving, although she didn’t know where she was going. She didn’t care where she went, but she had to go somewhere. The road would lead her somewhere. They lived six miles from the downtown area of Cumberland, a small city in western Maryland. She had never minded the drive to town. Living there gave them the benefits of small-town living, yet they were centrally located only hours to the surrounding states of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. She drove a short distance to Frostburg University every day as an art teacher.

      Gradually, Faith began to calm down, but she felt strangely hollow inside. She kept seeing her work, tossed aside like trash. Destroyed! She’d have to call the James Gallery and tell them she wouldn’t be able to fulfill her commitment. She would never get a better opportunity; never be offered a chance to show her talents again. Her work was gone. Her mind kept screaming. Destroyed! Destroyed!

      She turned onto Frederick Street to connect with interstate 68 west. She was the second in line approaching the stoplight, and it turned green. The car in front of her cleared the intersection. She didn’t see the white convertible that ran the red light to the left of her. Faith felt the sudden impact, screamed as the metal of her vehicle twisted around her. Her head hit the window, and everything went black.

      Alessandro Benedetti, Ales to everyone, had never seen such a disheartened look of shock on his wife’s face. His Faith was animated, so happy all the time. She was the glass half-full, as opposed to half-empty kind of a person. She’d left, and she hadn’t looked back. The only time he’d seen that look of sadness and despair on her face before was when her parents had died.

      He turned and looked at the mess in the garage. His wife’s easels were tossed helter-skelter in that pile. The leg of one of them had skewed a portrait through the face. He pressed the garage door remote, wincing as the door caught on the leg of an easel, and the pile shifted again. The safety mechanism caused the door to rise. It was probably closing the door that had caused the contents of Faith’s studio to tumble together in the first place.

      Whatever had caused the damage, she wasn’t going to forgive it. She’d said, ‘I’m done,’ and although Ales wasn’t exactly sure of the meaning of those two words, he wasn’t stupid. It definitely referred to his mother. He was afraid it was also aimed at him, and their marriage.

      He went inside the house, already dialing his wife’s phone, but she wasn’t answering, and his calls went straight to voicemail.

      “Where is Faith?” Cybil Benedetti demanded as she pushed the wheelchair through the doorway from what had been a family room and had been converted into an art studio. “It’s just like her to take off when someone needs her!”

      “That’s not true, and I don’t know where she went,” Ales said. “Why are you here? I told you to wait for me at the hospital.”

      “I couldn’t wait around for you all day!” Cybil screeched. “You should have come when I called! I had to take a taxi, and when I got here, my room hadn’t been set-up!”

      “We weren’t going to house you in the studio,” Ales said, his voice even with no hint of the anger he wanted to release. “We were going to let you stay in my office. We had a Murphy bed built into the new cabinetry in there.”

      “I stay in the studio,” Cybil exclaimed. “That’s where I have always stayed! Where is Faith?”

      “I don’t know,” Ales said. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done, Mother?”

      “I asked those nice boys to clear Faith’s junk from the room, and I paid them. What’s wrong with that?” Cybil demanded.

      “They destroyed Faith’s work, and I think you have destroyed my marriage,” Ales said.

      “Don’t be silly,” Cybil said, dismissively. “Faith paints. She wastes all her time painting or doing that artsy-fartsy stuff when she should be taking care of her family. This is your fault, Alessandro. You should never have let her go to work at that college. Now she thinks she’s better than everyone.”

      Ales walked past her, repeatedly hitting redial on his phone, and still not getting an answer. He went into his office, closed the door, and called his sister Jillian.

      “Hello,” was Jill’s bright answer.

      “I need you,” Ales said.

      “What’s wrong?” she asked, recognizing her brother’s voice.

      “Mom called this morning and told me she was in the emergency room, and about to be released.”

      “What’s wrong with her this time?” Jill asked.

      “She broke a toe,” Ales said. “I talked to the doctor, and she said it was a minor injury.”

      “Nothing with Mom is minor,” Jill said.

      “Tell me about it,” Ales said. “The doctor said it wasn’t a bad break, and all she needed was an air-cast—that she would be fine in a couple of weeks. Mom insisted on renting a wheelchair from the pharmacy in the hospital. She was released, and she called me to pick her up. I was in the middle of a meeting with a client, and when I got there, she had already left. She took a cab to the house, let herself in and...”

      “And what?”

      “She paid a couple of teenage boys that were walking by the house to move all of Faith’s artwork from her studio to the garage.”

      “No!”

      “Yes, and worse than that, it was stacked or piled, or maybe it was thrown in there, I don’t know. Nearly everything Faith has been working on in preparation for her show has been damaged or destroyed.”

      “Has she seen it?”

      “Yeah,” Ales said.

      “Give me ten minutes to find my boys, and I’ll be over,” Jillian promised.

      Ales kept dialing Faith’s phone.

      “Alessandro!” Cybil’s voice was screechy and demanding.

      “What?” he demanded angrily.

      “I need help!” she squawked.

      “In what?”

      “I