The Painted Room

by Tina Mikals

Chapter 36

  Morning

  A loud rhythmic beat shook the air around the gray colonial as May coasted up the drive and parked her bike. Before going inside the house, she picked up the folded newspaper off the lawn and tucked it under her arm. As she opened the front door, the rhythmic beat became an assault on the atmosphere.

  Charley pressed the mute button on the remote when he saw his sister enter the living room. He was stretched out on the Taylor's brown couch with his head on one armrest and his white stockinged feet on the other. He had his physics textbook propped open on his chest.

  "Your music sucks," she said, happy and relieved to see him.

  "Too bad for you. What's that in your hand?"

  "The newspaper."

  He sighed. "The other, stupid. The jar?"

  She grinned. "Paint. It's a gift from a friend. Thought I would try it."

  "You have friends?"

  "Occasionally," she said, heading for the stairs.

  "You didn't—did you go to the game today? I didn't see you there."

  "No, I was at Sheila's. I'm sorry. I wanted to go, but we missed it."

  "Oh." Charley fingered a few pages of his textbook. He gave a small nod. "Well, you didn't miss much."

  "Weren't Mom and Dad there?" she asked.

  "You know Dad wouldn't miss it," he said in a sarcastic tone. "But Mom had an appointment."

  "Imagine that," she said.

  "You're too hard on her."

  "Not nearly." May started to head for the stairs, but he stopped her again.

  "You two just stay over your friend, Sheila's, for the afternoon?"

  She turned around. "Yeah. Hung out. Painted our toenails. Girl stuff. I'm sorry we missed the game. I hope you're not disappointed."

  "Don't worry about it. Why would I be?" he said quickly, diving back into his physics textbook.

  She watched him a moment. "I must be an idiot."

  He turned a page. "You are an idiot. What is it?"

  "Why don't you just ask her out already?"

  He didn't look up from his book.

  "Oh, my mistake." She turned to go.

  "She probably has tons of guys ask her out all the time," he said.

  "Yes, well, what would you expect? She's gorgeous." Which I will never be, she thought. "Tons and tons."

  "What I figured," he muttered.

  "I happen to know, though, she goes for a certain tall, blond, dorky guy. No accounting for taste, I guess. You don't happen to know any do you? They seem to be in short supply."

  Charley frowned in concentration at his book, not reading a word of it.

  Watching him, she took a few more tentative steps toward the stairs.

  "Really?"

  "Yeah. I guess it's a shame she's not your type and all. I should probably call her and tell her you aren't interested so she can move on." She gazed up at the ceiling and tapped her index finger lightly on her chin. "What was her new cell phone number again? I remember I wrote it down on the fridge calendar last week."

  "You aren't really going to call her, are you?" He was looking at her now in a kind of terror.

  "No. But, if you don't, I will."

  "You wouldn't dare." He swung his legs off the sofa and sat up, causing the physics book to fall off his lap. It landed open on the carpet with the pages bunched and folded, trapped between the heavy cover and the floor.

  "Charley, if it was up to you, she'd be a grandmother before you called. How much easier can I make it? Suck it up and call her already, preferably in her lifetime." She tapped an imaginary watch on her wrist and the newspaper slipped out from under her arm. "Clock's ticking, buddy. Twenty-four hours. You call or I will."

  Forgetting all about his physics homework, Charley settled himself back on the couch and contemplated the ceiling.

  "Oh, and if she breaks your little stone of a heart—and she probably will—keep in mind, I'm not responsible."

  May bent down, picked the paper off the floor and swore when she saw the headline.

  "You better not let Mom hear you say that," said Charley. "She grounded me for a week."

  "Say what?" she said, walking up the stairs with her eyes glued on the paper.

  "Did you want me to turn down the music?" he called after her.

  "Music?"

  "Yeah, the music. You want me to turn it down?"

  "Turn it what? No, no, turn it up. It's starting to grow on me."

  REMAINS OF MISSING PAINTER FOUND IN UNDERWATER CAVE

  The remains of painter and railroad tycoon, Francis Carlisle, were found today in an underwater cave at the base of the castle that bears his name. Carlisle's body, missing for almost 120 years, was found by an excavation team of Eurocorp Development Company during an effort to shore up the foundation of the castle. The company has been unsuccessful thus far in its efforts to renovate the antique structure into an elegant hotel and spa.

  His body lost for over a century, Carlisle was thought to have drowned himself in the bay shortly after the death of his wife in 1887. Bone fragments, including a badly fractured skull indicate that the painter most likely plunged or fell to his death from one of the castle windows onto the jagged rocks which line the sheer cliffs of the estate. Carried by the surf into an underwater cave, his body waited for over a century, his death shrouded in mystery.

  Once the body's identity is confirmed, Carlisle will be laid to rest next to his wife, Cora, in Masobesic Cemetery after a formal ceremony. Preliminary identification is based on items found with him, most notably a marriage ring bearing an inscription, and a man's black onyx ring known to have belonged to him. Also found within the cave were some small non-native shells and a silver key. Both items may be incidental to the find but will warrant further examination as to their origins.

  May had arrived at her room. She entered and locked the door behind her.

  She placed the jar of paint on her shelf, walked to her desk and put the paper down on it. The news article didn't make any sense to her, and she shook her head, unable to accept the words on the page and unable to accept how she felt about them.

  He was dead.

  No matter how much she reasoned it out to herself; it seemed to make no difference to how she felt. It was no good telling herself he had already been dead for over a century the whole time she had known him or that this newspaper report didn't matter one bit. It changed absolutely nothing about what they had been through.

  But all her good reasoning wasn't working in making her feel any better. There seemed no way for her to avoid the complete irrationality of it. And with her door locked and herself finally and completely alone for the first time in what seemed like forever, there just didn't seem to be any point in avoiding how she felt about it, either.

  With Charley downstairs in a stupefied dither getting up the nerve to call Sheila, and the pounding rap music blaring through the house, she gave herself up completely.

  She cried because she had lost something she hadn't even known was important to her. Then she cried, scared and mad about everything else: the pirates, the goddess, the earthquake, the ogre, the freezing cold and the gnawing fear in the pit of her stomach to see Carlisle close to death.

  And the thought of that made her cry all over again about him.

  She lost all sense of time. She cried as long as she wanted and as miserably as she wanted.

  She cried until she began to think what a silly, stupid fool she was for crying so much. The news article really didn't matter. What she had been through was truer than anything written in black and white on a page.

  Finally, she raised her head off her desk, sniffed and wiped her eyes.

  The paper was soaked good. It was wrinkled and smudged, and the ink had left reversed black letters all up the length of her arms. She went to the bathroom and in the mirror, she saw that her nose was shiny, and her eyes were puffy.

  She looked gloriously awful.

  May splashed her blotchy face and the printed ink all up her arm
s reflected back at her from the mirror no longer in reverse. It was a jumble of smeared words, but she saw clearly in bold letters, 'Eurocorp'. She smoothed soap over her forearms, washing the words away. Then she brushed her hair and went back to her room.

  An hour later, she emerged with a box of items she had no use for anymore: old stuffed animals, empty journals never written in, music hardly listened to, worn out books and pieces of herself that no longer seemed relevant or pertinent or part of her any more.

  She brought the box down to the garage along with a trash bag of unsalvageable oil paints in hardened tubes, stiff unusable paintbrushes she had never bothered to wash, school papers from elementary school, and old bits of broken, out-of-date bric-a-brac. She lifted up the top of the large metal garbage pail in the garage and threw the full trash bag in.

  The box of items, she put near a pile of other yard sale merchandise accumulating for several years now, no one in the family having the inclination to give up a Saturday to actually have a sale.

  A shaft of bright light, falling through a high window on an unused nook of the garage, caught her attention. It was just beyond a tall plastic shelf full of old rusty tools and car wash paraphernalia. She went back to her room to get some more items.

  When she returned to the garage, May propped a blank canvas up on a makeshift easel made from an old kitchen barstool and began to paint.