What Hides Within

Shades

"Was she happy?", Eric asked his father-in-law.

Joe rubbed his eyes tiredly. "She did her own thing, you know... She would come back from work, chat with me a bit and then go into her room. Weekends she would go out with her friends... or with you."

"So you never knew if she was happy or sad?" The question came out a bit harshly.

Joe looked up at his son-in-law sharply. "Did you?" He asked sarcastically.

Eric averted his gaze. "Mind if I spend some time in her room?"

Joe shrugged and got up.

Eric lay down on her narrow bed, and looked around her room.

He had barely ever spent a few minutes here before.

Come to think of it, didn't it always feel like Carrie didn't want him here?

The walls were a dark red colour. They were peppered with random stuff.

A big framed jigsaw puzzle. A wall hanging she had made of old DVDs. Figurines of animals. Stuffed toys. Books. Candles.

A regular room, except that it had a strange vibe to it.

Almost like it was hiding something.

He got up and opened her closet.

He was a little surprised to see it was almost full.

Feeling a little guilty at invading her space, he rummaged around.

Clothes. Junk jewellery. Shoes. Cosmetics.

Just a regular woman's closet.

He couldn't see any of the old journals Joe had mentioned.

Feeling frustrated, he slammed the doors shut. And heard something fall with a thump inside.

He opened the doors and like with the red book, he felt a strong sense of unease when he saw the leather folder that had fallen down.

Crouching on the floor, he opened it, his heart racing.

It was full of paintings.

All of them showed women. Crying, bleeding, dying, dead.

One hanging from a tree... one strangled by her own hair... one weeping by a gravestone... one laying on a couch with blood dripping from her mouth.

The bright red stood out in every painting. Glaring against the other dark colours.

Eric felt nauseous.

He remembered Carrie telling him she used to enjoy painting but never had the time anymore.

He forced himself to flip through the paintings and look for the dates. Carrie always dated everything. Even to do lists.

The latest one was more than a year ago, just before they were married.

He noticed the colours were brighter here. The woman had her back to the viewer, watching the sun rise. But she wasn't suffering. Or dead. Her body language seemed pensive, but the brightly coloured dawn sky hinted at hope.

He flipped to the next one. It was a year before that. The time when they were in a complicated relationship.

The girl was in a wedding dress. Sitting alone in a dark forest. Her face was downcast. Tears streamed down her face. The familiar red colour was her bouquet. Tattered to shreds.

Eric remembered how uncertain he had been about her back then. How afraid he had been of the strong feelings that this petite girl managed to raise in him.

It squeezed his heart now to look at this painting and see how shattered she must have felt.

The previous paintings were before they had met.

Some were six months apart, some a year apart, some more than that.

But they all had the recurrent theme of pain and death.

Feeling unsettled, Eric kept the folder on her top shelf, assuming that's where it fell from.

He was almost out of her room when another thought nagged him.

He went back to the closet and opened the folder.

Flipping through the paintings slowly, he looked at the women more closely.

In some their hair was dark, in some light. In some wavy, in some straight. Their features were not always distinguishable.

But in every painting the woman had a tiny mole on her left jaw.

Just like Carrie.

Carrie wasn't painting random women. Carrie was painting herself.