The Painting

by Charis Cotter

  I went up to the bed and touched Mom’s hair. Then I bent over to kiss her forehead. Her skin was soft.

  “Hang on, Claire,” I whispered. “I’m coming.”

  CLAIRE

  GHOSTS. I DREAMED about ghosts. First there was Annie, smiling at me. Then she disappeared and ghostly shapes drifted past me, gray, filmy, floating ghosts. Flying through the sky around Crooked Head. Like seagulls, or gannets. A flock of ghosts. They didn’t mean me any harm. The murmur of their voices and the rustling of their filmy garments were like soft wings fluttering on the breeze from the open window. Ghosts. I drifted away out over the ocean with them, and sleep enfolded me.

  Over the years at Crooked Head I thought a lot about ghosts. It started with Ed and the Old Hollies, and then Mary Tizzard and Joan Crocker told me all those stories till I was convinced that the whole headland and the house were maggoty with ghosts. At first every creak in that old house made me jump, and I was always looking over my shoulder, sure there was a ghost nearby. Anytime anyone mentioned a ghost story I would go on alert and listen to every word they said. Kids at school, old-timers I met on the road, people chatting at the general store, friends of Maisie who came to visit. I was drawn to ghost stories like the arrow on a compass is drawn to the north.

  I was terrified. Jumpy. Plagued by nightmares. But I still wanted to hear more.

  On all those long, long walks home from school that first dreary autumn at the lighthouse, I was sure I would see them. I walked in a bubble of fear, glancing behind me every few feet, scanning the road ahead, always on the lookout. It was scary. But exciting too. I soon discovered that the line between horrifying and delicious is very fine. And slowly my feelings about ghosts began to turn into something else.

  I began to look forward to the walks to and from school. I began to anticipate that thrill that would tickle the back of my neck when the road dipped into the woods and the shadows would thicken around me. I welcomed the fog that rolled in across the water, straining my eyes to see a ghost ship gliding toward me. I listened for the whispering of the wind over the grass on the downs, imagining it to be the dead, whispering all around me.

  The ghosts became my friends. If this vast emptiness of sky and ocean was populated by the spirits of the dead, then I wasn’t alone. And I was closer to Annie.

  The third day of not speaking to Maisie, I set off after school through the cottony fog. I knew every step of that walk to the lighthouse so well that I could walk it in the dark, and the fog wasn’t as bad as the dark. At least I could see where to put my feet. All I had to do was follow the winding road: up around the hill, down along the causeway, through the trees to the lighthouse. The cool air felt clammy against my face, but I was wearing a thick wool sweater Maisie had knit for me, so I wasn’t cold.

  I walked slowly. There was nothing to hurry home for. Just Maisie glaring at me and trying to get me to talk.

  Foggy days were perfect for ghosts. Everything changed its shape in the fog and took on an air of mystery. A man loomed up at the bend in the road, and then shrunk into a fir tree as I got closer. A dog slunk through the bushes and then solidified into a broken piece of fence. Houses looked like rocks. Rocks looked like houses. And ghosts floated by in streamers of fog.

  The causeway was always the scariest place, even when there was no fog, because of the sharp drop on both sides to the beaches below. And because there were just so many ghost stories about those two beaches: a pirate in chains, digging for treasure; a drowned fisherman hauling his boat up on shore; a Newfoundland pony trotting up and down the beach.

  I shivered as I began to cross the causeway, imagining the ghosts crawling up the steep sides to grasp at my ankles. The wind picked up and the fog began to swirl around me: one moment it was thick against my face and the next I could see a few feet ahead.

  This was where I used to play a game with myself that Annie’s ghost would come to me, and she’d be walking beside me as I picked my way along the road, sticking to the middle away from the slippery rocks at the edge. Slipping her warm little hand into mine, the way she used to. And sometimes, sometimes I could almost convince myself that she was there.

  “Annie,” I whispered. “Come.”

  ANNIE

  I LAY IN THE dark, waiting. Dad sometimes checked on me before he went to bed. I twitched with impatience. I wanted to get to Crooked Head as fast as I could to help Claire.

  My bedside clock showed 11:15 in glowing red numbers before I finally heard his footsteps coming heavily up the stairs. Sure enough, he opened my door and walked over to my bed. I lay motionless, pretending to be asleep. He stood there for a moment.

  “Good night, Annie,” he whispered, and then left. I heard him go into his own room and shut the door.

  Poor Dad.

  I pulled my flashlight out from under my pillow and took the Newfoundland book from my bedside table. I had to find another picture to fall into.

  I flipped through to the Maisie King section. She smiled out at me, her hair white and wild, her eyes alive with humor. I quickly turned the pages, past the painting of the lighthouse in the storm, and stopped at the painting of Annie in the blue pajamas. I stared at it for a minute but nothing happened. There was something weird about the dog on the bed. He didn’t look like a friendly stuffed animal. He was kind of scary looking. Something about his eyes. I peered closer. Maisie had painted them as spinning vortexes. I suppressed a shiver and read the caption.

  Annie III 1978. Acrylic on canvas. This is the last of the Annie paintings, portraits of a young girl from age 5 to age 8.

  The last of the Annie paintings. Did that mean that Maisie stopped painting Annie after that?

  These paintings were originally shown in King’s breakout show at the Remington Gallery in New York City in 1978. Her first international show, it marked the beginning of her worldwide reputation as one of the twentieth century’s finest portraitists. The subject of the paintings was King’s daughter, Annie, who was tragically killed when she was four. The portraits reflect how King envisioned her daughter growing older if she had lived. The eerie juxtaposition of the cheerful young girl with the threat of violence gives these portraits the haunting, unsettling tone that is the trademark of King’s later work.

  Threat of violence? They must be talking about the dog. I glanced at him again. He looked like he was staring at me, ready to pounce. I quickly turned the page.

  This painting was very different than anything else I’d seen of Maisie’s. At first glance it seemed to be an abstract, with swirling shades of gray. I looked at the caption.

  Fog I 1978. Acrylic on canvas. This is the first of King’s Fog paintings, a series of four landscapes shown at her second show at the Remington Gallery in New York City in 1979. The paintings became more and more abstract, the first being mostly representational and the last almost completely abstract. The reviews of that show likened her technique to J.M.W. Turner’s in his studies of the Thames.

  Hmmm. Turner. I looked back at the painting.

  It was a subtle mix of gray and white, with some darker shadows. But as I looked closer, the shadows began to take on a recognizable form. A stony road ran along a narrow piece of land, with a steep drop-off on each side to rocky beaches. Halfway across were two small figures, one bigger than the other, walking hand in hand away from the artist. They were walking into a huge gray wall of fog, where indistinct shapes loomed over them. Right at the top of the painting I could make out the outline of a tower with a faint light at the top. The lighthouse?

  I peered at the figures. They were children, swathed in bulky sweaters and rubber boots. The fog was swirling round their feet. Gray fingers were pulling at their hair, drawing them into the wall of fog. I could feel the clammy touch of those wisps of fog and I shivered. Then my head began to spin, the room rocked, and I was on my hands and knees on the stony road.

  CLAIRE

  SUDDENLY I HEARD something scrabbling on the road behind me. I looked up.

  I
was nearly at the end of the causeway, and the fog ahead of me was a thick gray wall. I spun around. I could just make out a small figure at the far end of the causeway. The fog was closing in fast, licking at the rocks at the edge of the road.

  “Hello?” I called out, my mind full of ghosts. Was it really a person? Or just a trick of the fog?

  “Hello?” I called out again, my voice cracking. A trickle of moisture ran down the back of my neck. It was starting to rain. The figure seemed to grow bigger and float toward me.

  I felt a tremor in my legs and a scream bubbling up. I was within an inch of turning tail and running home as quick as I could when the figure stopped moving.

  “Claire?” came a disembodied voice through the fog. “Is that—is that you?”

  It was Annie.

  I ran to her. Not thinking of the fog, or the uneven road beneath my feet, or the steep drop-offs on both side of the causeway. Not thinking, just running. I swooped her into my arms and gave her a tight hug.

  “I knew you’d come back!” I said, laughing. Then I pulled away to look at her.

  She was smiling, but there was something odd about her expression. Her eyes were bright, almost as if she was about to start crying. She was dressed in those same blue pajamas with the little flowers on them that she was wearing in Maisie’s painting.

  “I’m cold,” she said, shivering.

  I took off my sweater and helped her put it on. It felt just like when she was little and I used to take care of her.

  “Come, on, let’s get you home out of this fog,” I said, taking her hand, and we hurried along the causeway and down the road through the woods.

  When we got to the lighthouse, Maisie’s truck wasn’t there. I got Annie into the kitchen, made two mugs of hot chocolate and gave her the cookie tin to carry.

  “Let’s go up to my room, so we can hear if Maisie comes home,” I said.

  “And then I’ll hide?” asked Annie, still shivering a bit.

  I smiled. “Yes. Under the bed again maybe.”

  As we settled ourselves on my bed, pulling the quilt over us and opening the tin of cookies, it felt like old times.

  “Oatmeal!” said Annie. “My favorite.”

  “Remember how we used to make them together?” I asked. She nodded and took a big bite.

  “Yup.”

  I smiled at her again. “So you do remember!”

  Annie’s grin faltered. “I guess I remember some things. I know I always liked making oatmeal cookies with you.”

  “And drinking cocoa.”

  “Yes.”

  “All wrapped up warm in bed.”

  “Yes.” She put the cookie down and her eyes filled with tears.

  “Annie,” I said, “what’s wrong?”

  She shook her head, trying to stop the tears that were splashing down her cheeks.

  “I just…I just miss you.”

  I put my arm around her shoulders. “You’re here now,” I said.

  ANNIE

  I HAD TO GET ahold of myself. I wasn’t going to be any use to Mom if I kept dissolving in tears.

  She handed me a Kleenex, smiling. Now that I knew Claire was Mom, it was so easy to see it and I wondered why I didn’t realize it the first time I saw her. Her face was so much younger, and her skin had no lines, and her features were less sharp, like she was jelly that hadn’t quite set yet. But her eyes were exactly the same.

  I smiled back and took a sip of the hot chocolate.

  “I was hoping you’d come today,” she said. “It’s been so awful here. Maisie and I are fighting, and this fog won’t go away, and everything just keeps getting heavier and heavier, and my head hurts and—”

  “Claire,” I said, reaching out my hand to her. “It’s okay. I’m here. Tell me.”

  She looked up, her face full of worry. She had that pinched, hungry look I noticed when I first saw her, a look that I recognized now as one I’d seen on my mother’s face once in a while. Like she was starving for something she couldn’t get and the hunger was tying her up in knots.

  “I have to get out of here, Annie. I can’t stand living here with Maisie. She never talks to me, and whenever she looks at me, I know she’s thinking of the accident and that it was my fault. I want to get away from here, somewhere where no one knows about it, where people won’t think of me as the girl who killed her sister—” She began to cry.

  I couldn’t bear it. I could never stand it when my mother cried. It felt like there were shards of glass inside my chest. “Claire, Claire,” I said, putting my arms around her. “You didn’t kill her.”

  “Tell that to Maisie!” she said, her face a mess with tears. “Tell that to all the people who are going to see her paintings of you and Sammy. She’s having a show, Annie, in New York, a really big deal, and she’s going to be famous as the painter whose daughter died, and everyone will know.”

  Right. The show.

  “I was just about to tell her that I want to go to high school in St. John’s in September and she sprang this on me. And now I’m not speaking to her and I don’t know what to do.”

  “High school? In September? But I thought you were the same age as me?”

  “I’ll be thirteen in October. I should be going into grade eight, but this year I’ve been doing two years in one.”

  “They let you do that?”

  “Yup. I’ve got this great teacher, Mrs. Matchim, and she talked Maisie into it. Only Maisie thinks I’ll be taking the bus to the high school in Lattice Harbour next year. But I want to go to St. John’s and live with Nan and go to school there.”

  “Will she let you?”

  “I don’t know! That’s what’s driving me crazy.”

  She took a big drink of cocoa and reached for a cookie.

  “High school. Wow. You must be…pretty smart.”

  Claire grinned. She looked so much like Mom at that moment that I almost stopped breathing. “I am pretty smart. I can’t draw like you and Maisie but I am a brain. I like schoolwork. I love it, actually.”

  Mom could never understand why I didn’t love school the way she did. She loved it so much that she never stopped going. She’s a university professor of English and she’s never happier than when she’s got some old books open on the dining room table and is scribbling away, writing books about books.

  “I don’t like school,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “My mind just wanders off and I start doodling, and then I miss whatever they’re talking about. I’m just not that interested. I’d rather draw.”

  “Just like Maisie,” said Claire. “She never did any good at school either. Till she got to art college.”

  “I might go to an art school,” I said. “Next year.”

  “For grade eight?”

  “Yes. My art teacher, Iszák, teaches at this special art school in Toronto. We’ve been working on getting my parents to let me go. I wanted to go last year but they wouldn’t let me. They don’t think I should specialize so young. But all I ever want to do is draw. Draw and paint. I know it. And this school is really cool. You take all the regular subjects but you get art every day, and you find the connections all the other subjects have to art. Like, you study art history along with history, and the lives of artists along with English, and you do math along with perspective and all kinds of stuff…” I stopped.

  It was weird. Here I was chatting away to Claire as if she was my best friend, and she was listening as if she had forgotten for the moment that she thought I was the ghost of her little sister.

  “Sounds pretty neat to me,” said Claire, and she took one final swig of her cocoa. Then she put her finger in her mug and wiped it to scoop up the dregs of the cocoa that hadn’t quite dissolved. Then she stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked it.

  Claire. My mother. Doing what she told me a hundred times not to do: sticking her finger in the cocoa mug. I started to laugh.

  CLAIRE

  FOR SOME REASON Annie was laughing her head off.

  “Wha
t’s so funny?” I said.

  “You. Sticking your finger in your cocoa mug,” she said. “My mom always tells me not to do that.”

  “Really? It’s the only way to get the chocolatey bits.”

  “I know!” she said, laughing again and dipping her finger into her own mug.

  “So you really live in Toronto?” I asked. “With your mother and father?”

  “Yup.”

  “And it’s real? It’s not a dream?”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s real. As real as this.”

  “That’s so weird, Annie. I don’t understand how you can be my Annie and have this whole other life.”

  Her face kind of squidged up as if she was going to start crying again.

  “I don’t understand either. But I am your Annie. And I want to help you. Only I don’t know how.”

  “Just having you here helps. But I wish you could persuade Maisie not to show the paintings. And to let me go and live with Nan.”

  Annie frowned. “I don’t know if I could persuade her,” she said. “I don’t even know if Maisie can see me or not. And if she could, I don’t know how she would react. Wouldn’t she freak out? She’d think I was a ghost.”

  “She doesn’t believe in ghosts. She’s always telling me there’s no such thing and it’s all my imagination.”

  “Hmmm…” said Annie.

  “I wonder,” I said. We locked eyes. She began to grin.

  “Snap!” We both said it at the same time.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I said.

  “Yup,” said Annie. “We should haunt her.”

  “It would be perfect!” I said, scrambling out from under the quilt and grabbing Annie’s hands. “You can visit her from beyond the grave and tell her you don’t want her to show those paintings to anyone.”

  “If she can see me that is,” said Annie.

  “We can work that out. We’ll have to experiment.”