Unfinished Beauty, Unanswered Questions
The house at the end of Alder Street had a habit of holding its breath. Even in summer, when cicadas stitched their electric songs into the dusk and the air lay thick as honey, the house felt paused—mid-thought, mid-sigh. It was the kind of place where paint peeled in thin, patient curls, where the porch sagged just enough to remember the weight of years, and where the windows reflected the sky as if trying to decide whether to let it in.
Mara returned to the house after ten years away, carrying a single suitcase and the quiet of someone who had learned to pack light because nothing ever stayed. Her mother had died in the spring, the letter said simply. No details. No apologies. Just a date and a key taped to the corner, the metal dulled by time and touch. Mara slid it into her pocket and felt the weight of it all the way home.
Inside, the air smelled of dust and old paper, of lemon oil and regret. The furniture remained exactly as she remembered: the couch with the sagging cushion where her mother used to sit, the side table with the chipped edge that always caught her knee, the bookshelf leaning imperceptibly to the left, stubborn as a bad habit. On the mantel stood the unfinished painting—a woman’s face emerging from soft blues and grays, eyes left blank, mouth hinted at but never decided. It had been unfinished for as long as Mara could remember.
Her mother had painted it during a winter when the house felt colder than usual, when the phone rang and rang and then stopped. Mara had been seventeen then, hovering between childhood and escape, between the urge to stay and the need to run. She remembered watching her mother paint late into the night, the lamp casting a halo on the canvas, brushstrokes careful and unsure. Whenever Mara asked why the eyes were empty, her mother would smile without smiling and say, “Some things aren’t ready to look back at you.”
Mara set her suitcase down and traced the edge of the canvas with her finger. The paint was cracked in places, a spiderweb of age, but the colors still breathed. Unfinished beauty had a way of doing that—of lingering, of insisting. She wondered what her mother had intended, and whether intention mattered as much as the act of beginning.
In the kitchen, she found the old teapot, its spout chipped, its lid mismatched. She filled it with water and waited for the kettle to sing. While it heated, she opened drawers and cabinets, discovering the archaeology of a life lived quietly: folded receipts, rubber bands brittle with time, a postcard from a place her mother had never visited but once dreamed of seeing. On the fridge, held by a fading magnet, was a list written in her mother’s looping script:
—Finish the painting
—Fix the porch step
—Call Mara
The last item was crossed out so lightly it barely counted.
Mara sat at the small table and let the tea cool. The list was not a confession, not an explanation, but it felt like a map of unanswered questions. Why had her mother stayed when everything else fell away? Why had she never left Alder Street, never followed the postcards’ promises of salt air and foreign light? Why had she let the painting remain unfinished, year after year, as if waiting for something—or someone—to arrive?
That night, Mara slept in her childhood room. The walls were still the pale green her mother had chosen because it was “calming,” though it had always felt like a held breath. Moonlight slipped through the curtains, drawing silver lines across the floor. Mara dreamed of the painting, of eyes finally opening, of a face stepping out of the canvas and asking questions Mara did not know how to answer.
In the morning, she found her mother’s journals in a box beneath the stairs. There were dozens, each labeled with a year, each filled with neat, careful entries that spoke of weather and errands, of small joys and smaller sorrows. Mara read slowly, respectfully, as if the words might bruise if handled too roughly. There were entries about her father, who had left when Mara was eight, written without bitterness but heavy with absence. There were pages about painting, about the way color could say what words refused. And then there were gaps—weeks, sometimes months, where nothing had been written at all.
Mara realized then that her mother’s life had been shaped as much by what was left unsaid as by what was recorded. The unanswered questions were not failures of memory; they were choices. Some truths had been set down gently, others kept back like seeds waiting for a season that never came.
On the third day, Mara set up the easel in the living room and brought the painting down from the mantel. She studied it for hours, the curve of the cheek, the suggestion of a smile, the way the light seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. She mixed paints, testing colors, trying to imagine what her mother had seen when she stood here, brush in hand. But each time she lifted the brush toward the empty eyes, her hand stilled.
To finish the painting would be to decide. To choose an expression, a gaze, a truth. And Mara was not sure that was hers to choose.
Instead, she did something else. She repaired the porch step, steadying the place where the house faltered. She sorted the papers, keeping some, letting others go. She called people her mother had known, listening to stories that overlapped and contradicted, each adding a new layer to a woman Mara had thought she understood.
On her last evening, Mara carried the painting back to the mantel. She cleaned the frame, touched up the cracked varnish, and left the eyes just as they were—open spaces, invitations. Unfinished beauty did not demand completion, she realized. It asked for care. For presence. For the courage to live alongside unanswered questions without forcing them into shapes they did not want to take.
Before leaving, Mara added a new list to the fridge, written in her own hand:
—Take the painting with me
—Remember the quiet
—Begin again
As she locked the door and walked down Alder Street, the house seemed to exhale, finally. The beauty of it all was not in the answers she carried away, but in the way she had learned to hold the questions—gently, honestly, and with room enough for light to get in
