The Painting

by Charis Cotter

  “I don’t care,” said Claire. “As long as she doesn’t show those paintings.”

  “And where are you going to put them? It can’t be damp. Or cold. It has to be safe.”

  “I’ve got the perfect hiding place,” said Claire, her eyes lighting up. “I found it a long time ago and Maisie would never guess. It’s completely dry and warm.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I’ll show you. But we have to be very, very quiet.”

  She took a flashlight from her dresser and led me out into the dark hall, taking one careful step at a time, listening for any signs of life in Maisie’s room. She opened the hall closet door and we slipped in, closing the door silently behind us. Claire turned on the flashlight and grinned at me.

  “You’re going to love this, Annie,” she whispered.

  We walked past the shelves of sheets and pillowcases and blankets, the hanging coats and the winter clothes, until we came to the far end and the door to the Mirror House. Claire slowly turned the handle and we were in.

  There was a faint pink light coming in the window that faced east, over the ocean. The sun was coming up. Claire took me along the hall, passing the dark open doorways of the bedrooms. I shivered. I imagined the spirits of all the people who had lived in this house over the years, the lighthouse keepers, their wives and children, lingering, drifting, echoes of a time long past. I hurried to catch up with Claire, who was halfway down the stairs.

  She waited for me at the bottom of the stairs, her face shining.

  “This is so cool, Annie. I found it one day when I dropped a pen down the stairs. It landed on this step.” She knelt down and pointed to the third step from the bottom. “I noticed this kind of crack at the back, see?”

  There was a dark line just where the step met the riser. “Yes.”

  “I ran my finger along and this whole piece of wood started to jiggle.” She pushed against the riser and it moved back. “You can see there’s a space back there, right? But it won’t move any more than that.

  “It just so happened that I was reading a Philomena Faraday book that had a secret passage in an old house, and you opened it by turning a piece of carving beside an old fireplace. So I looked around, and lo and behold!” She took my hand and led me down the stairs. “There are these carved fish on the side of the staircase.”

  The fish looked like they were swimming up the stairs, one fish for every step.

  “So I just started fooling around, trying to see if any of the fish would move, and—here, you try it.”

  I reached out to the third fish up and gave it a twist. Sure enough, it turned sideways with a satisfying click.

  “Hey presto!” said Claire, dragging me round the bannister to look at the stairs.

  The loose riser had flipped up, revealing a hidden shelf, built into the stairs, about seven inches tall and two and a half feet wide.

  “Wow!” I said. “That is so cool.” I bent over to peer in. “How far back does it go?”

  Claire shone the flashlight in. The shelf went way back.

  “Far enough to hide a painting in,” she said.

  CLAIRE

  “ISN’T IT THE PERFECT hiding spot?” I said to Annie. “And every one of these stairs has one.”

  “What were they for?” asked Annie.

  “There’s a little cove along the shore just big enough to land a boat if the tides are right. It’s called Smuggler’s Cove. Ed told me that back in the 1920s, during Prohibition, fishermen used to smuggle in liquor from Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. Ed said that there are stories about how they used to have all kinds of hiding places in old root cellars and even here in the lighthouse. They’d hide the bottles until it was safe to take them away and sell. I figure someone built these shelves into the stairs so they could hide bottles here.”

  “And every stair has one?”

  “Yup. I’ll show you.” I reached through the bannisters and twisted the fish on the fourth stair. The riser flipped up.

  Annie took the flashlight and walked down the stairs and shone it along the side of the staircase. “So there’s no other opening? They go right back to the wall?”

  “Yup. They get shorter as they get closer to the top. But there’s lots of room for the four Annie paintings.”

  “I guess,” Annie said.

  “They’ll be safe. It’s warm and dry. And Maisie will never find them.”

  Annie was silent.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just don’t feel right about it. Hiding her work.”

  “It won’t be forever. Once she agrees not to have the show, I’ll tell her where they are.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be that easy to get Maisie to do something she doesn’t want to.”

  “She’s not taking me seriously. She’s got to see how important this is for me.”

  “But I don’t think you see how important it is for Maisie to show the paintings. She’s not going to just give in to you.”

  “Whose side are you on, Annie?” I felt a sharp, throbbing pain above my right eye. “Do you want to help me or not?”

  “Of course I want to help you. But I’m trying to show you what you’re up against. I’m not sure that getting Maisie mad is the best way to go about getting what you want.”

  The pain was getting worse. I clutched my head and closed my eyes. I felt Annie’s hands on my shoulders.

  “Claire, what’s wrong?”

  “My head,” I gasped. “I’ve got this bad headache; it keeps coming back.”

  She steered me over to the stairs and sat me down. Gently, she pulled my hands away from my head and placed her warm hands over my eyes.

  “Take a deep breath,” she said. “Keep breathing. In and out.”

  At first my breath was shaky, and I couldn’t get a lungful of air. But after a couple of breaths, I started to relax a bit.

  “In and out,” said Annie softly. I could feel the warmth from her hands spreading into my head, surrounding the pain, loosening the knot. As we sat there, I began to feel the warmth going through my whole body, and then there was a pinky-red light all around me. I opened my eyes and Annie’s hands fell away. The rising sun had bathed the hall in a warm glow.

  Annie smiled at me. “Better?”

  I rubbed my forehead. “Yes. Almost completely gone. How did you do that?”

  “That’s what I always do when you have a headache,” said Annie. “Works every time.”

  “But—but you’ve never done that before,” I said. “What do you mean?”

  Annie’s smile dropped and she stood up suddenly. “I meant, that’s what I do when my mom in Toronto has a headache. It works for her, so I thought it would work for you.” She walked down the hall toward the window where the sun was streaming in.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “It’s making a path over the water. A shining path.”

  I stood up and started walking toward her. She was a dark shape, outlined by light. And then she disappeared.

  ANNIE

  IT WAS AS if the sky had unlocked and opened up to allow the sun to roll in, a red ball of fire that was laying down a golden path along the water. I had never seen anything so beautiful, and I felt like I was being welcomed home by a big warm mother who would stretch out her arms and enclose me in a gigantic hug. And then it all spun together in a fiery whirlwind that caught me up and twirled me around till I was dizzy and sick and everything went black.

  “Annie?” said a gentle voice that I thought I recognized but couldn’t quite place. A papery- soft hand touched my arm. I opened my eyes.

  Mrs. Silver was sitting in the chair beside me, her hand on my arm, looking very concerned.

  “Are you all right, dear?” she asked.

  I looked around. We were all alone in the quiet corner of the library, with the leaves nodding slowly in the park outside and a few birds skittering past the window.

  I felt awful. My head was still spinning and my stomach was lurching.

>   “You’ve been asleep for a long time,” said Mrs. Silver.

  I looked at my watch. It was five o’clock. I jumped up.

  “I’ve got to get back. If I’m not home by four, Magda starts worrying.” I swayed, and sat down again. “Whoa,” I said, closing my eyes tight.

  “What about a nice cup of tea?” said Mrs. Silver.

  I opened my eyes again. Mrs. Silver was reaching into a green, quilted bag and pulling out a thermos.

  “I find it usually does the trick,” she said, unscrewing the top and pouring steaming brown tea into it. “Milk and sugar, isn’t that how you like it?”

  I nodded, taking the cup and sipping it slowly, my eyes never leaving her face. How did Mrs. Silver know how I took my tea? And why did she keep showing up wherever I went? She dived into her bag again and brought out a plastic ziplock bag full of cookies.

  “Oatmeal and raisin,” she said, offering me one. “Good for restoring your energy.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked after a while, as the tea started to warm me up and the cookie made me feel a bit less like a wraith. “I was looking for you at the other library this morning. I didn’t know you came here too.”

  “Oh yes, once in a while, when I have a particular interest,” she said, her eyes twinkling at me. “It’s one of my favorite places to go in the city. So convenient, right on the subway. And so many books!” She waved at the shelves of books all around us.

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. She was so enthusiastic.

  “So, down to business,” she said. “How is your dear mother?”

  “Not good. She wants to steal Maisie’s paintings and hide them. I think she’s heading for trouble because Maisie is unpredictable; she’s a bit wild and—” I stopped, realizing what I was doing. “Oh. Did you mean my mother in hospital? Or my mother in—”

  Mrs. Silver gave her head a little shake. “It’s the same thing, Annie. She needs you. You need to keep going down there with her and help her find her way out.”

  “Down where?” I asked. “Down into Crooked Head?”

  “Down into her dreams,” replied Mrs. Silver.

  I looked at the book, which had fallen to the floor. “I need the paintings in that book to get there,” I said. “The ones in my other book don’t work anymore.”

  “Then take it with you,” said Mrs. Silver.

  My mouth fell open. “You mean steal it?”

  “Borrow it, shall we say?” said Mrs. Silver with a small smile. “This is a library, after all.”

  “But it’s a reference book. You’re not allowed to take them out. And there are security guards at the exits who check everyone’s bags.”

  “Not mine,” said Mrs. Silver, picking up the book. “I’m practically a fixture I’m here so often. And I volunteer for the reading program. They never check my bag.”

  The big book disappeared into her quilted bag. She took the thermos cup from me and screwed it back onto the thermos.

  “Meet me across the street in five minutes,” she said with a wink, and walked sedately down the aisle of books toward the elevators.

  CLAIRE

  IT WAS STILL too early to get up for school so I went back to bed. I lay there with the rosy light from the sun filling my room, thinking about when I could steal the paintings. It would have to be when Maisie was out. I’d have to make my preparations and then just be ready to grab my chance. She often was out when I got back from school, picking up things at the store or visiting some of her friends who lived along the shore. Or off sketching something. The problem was, I never knew how long she would be. She’d usually come back in time to make supper, so I might have a couple of hours. But she was unpredictable.

  I’d stolen things from Maisie before. And she’d never found out. Every year when she painted the Annie picture, she made all kinds of sketches before she started painting. They were piled in drifts on her worktable. I went through and took two or three…not too many because I didn’t want her to realize they were gone. Then I brought them back to my room to put in Annie’s sketchbook.

  The sketchbook was the one thing of Annie’s that I kept. Maisie never knew I had it to begin with, and I’ve kept it hidden from her all these years. It’s a hardcover book, as big as one of my school notebooks, but way thicker, filled with heavy white paper. Maisie gave it to Annie a week before she died. She made a big fuss about it being a “grown-up” sketchbook, and Annie was very excited about it.

  Maisie was working a lot that summer, up in her studio, and Annie and I were left to our own devices. Sometimes we went to Nan’s, but often we just hung out in our living room or the backyard. We would make cookies, play with dolls and do normal little kid things, but Annie also liked to spend time drawing. I liked reading, so we were often quiet together for an hour or so: Annie absorbed in her pictures and me in my books.

  She didn’t draw anything in her new sketchbook until the day before the accident. She told me she was waiting till she found something really special for the first picture. That day she opened it up and laid it on the coffee table and began to draw, with that weird focus she had that shut everything else out, her tongue sticking out slightly between her lips. I was reading The Secret Garden and I was lost on the Yorkshire moors and the creepy old house with sour-faced Mary. I liked Mary. She reminded me of—well, me.

  I didn’t pay much attention to Annie. She was quiet, so I could relax until she got it into her head to jump up and do something else.

  After a while she called my name. I looked up, dragging myself away from the echoing halls of Misselthwaite Manor. Annie had a big smile on her face.

  “Claire, want to see?” She held out the sketchbook to me.

  I put my book down, stretched and went over to look.

  I caught my breath. She had drawn a picture of me curled up in the overstuffed arm chair, bent over my book, completely absorbed, the curtain blowing in the window behind me.

  Annie’s drawing was always vivid and confident. Her technique was streets ahead of any other child her age—Maisie said she was a prodigy and I think she was right. Annie loved to show me her drawings and I was always taken aback at how sophisticated they were. Even with my lack of interest in art I knew she was something special.

  But in this picture Annie had jumped ahead again. You could almost see the curtain moving with the wind, and she’d caught my likeness completely, down to the shape of my nose and the flowers on my T-shirt. And although I was very still in the drawing, you could tell I was lost in the book. The drawing had a feeling about it, a feeling of that warm summer day, a sense of peace.

  Annie grinned at me and I gave her a big hug and told her she was a genius, and we both laughed, then we went to make lemonade.

  The next day, after the accident, Mrs. Dearing, our neighbor, brought me into the living room while the ambulance screamed outside and the sunshine broke into sharp fragments of glass all around me. The first thing I saw was Annie’s sketchbook, lying on the coffee table. I picked it up and hugged it to my chest. Later, when Nan came, I wouldn’t let go of it and I took it to her house. I hid it under the bed.

  Maisie never found out that Annie had drawn in her new sketchbook. I kept it secret. If she had seen it, she would have taken the sketch and put it in the big leather portfolio where she kept all Annie’s work. I didn’t want her to have it. Annie had done it for me.

  When we went to Crooked Head, once I moved into my own room, I slept with the sketchbook clutched in my arms for months. I felt that a little part of Annie was preserved in that book. The book held the memory of the way Annie was that afternoon, completely caught up in her drawing, and then laughing with delight at her creation and my reaction as she bounced into the kitchen after me. I hugged that memory close and sometimes, just before I fell asleep, it was not the hard-edged book but Annie, soft and warm cuddling up to me. The next morning, I would hide the book away in an old suitcase under my bed with a bunch of dress-up clothes.

  Over the y
ears I pasted things into the book that reminded me of Annie. First there was her obituary from the newspaper and a short article about the accident that they printed with Annie’s photograph. Then I slipped a few photographs of her out of our family albums and glued them in. Every year at Christmas I went through the Eaton’s catalogue, the way Annie and I used to do, choosing what we would ask Santa for that year. I’d choose some toys and clothes I thought Annie would like, cut them out and paste them in the sketchbook. And every year I’d steal some of Maisie’s working sketches of Annie. I always chose drawings of Annie’s face.

  I liked to sit with the book, turning from page to page. Feeling that Annie was with me.

  That she wasn’t gone forever.

  ANNIE

  MRS. SILVER WAS right where she said she would be, across the street in front of the office supply store.

  “Let’s walk a bit, so it doesn’t look too obvious,” she said.

  We walked down Yonge Street toward the subway. There were lots of people rushing by, and I had to keep alert not to bump into any of them. Mrs. Silver seemed to be a bit teeter-tottery, like she was going to lose her balance, so I got her to tuck her arm into mine and we walked along together. She looked happily around at everything, smiling, like it was all a wonderful show put on just for her. We stopped in front of the subway entrance.

  “I won’t come with you, dear. I want to go and look for some pretty handkerchiefs in The Bay. Do you know, handkerchiefs are so hard to find these days? And they’re so much softer than Kleenex, and more ladylike, I think.” She reached into her bag and pulled out the art book.

  “There, now I just look like your grandmother giving you a book, and not a desperate criminal passing on the goods,” she said, with a tinkly little laugh.

  “Thank you,” I said. Then she turned and tottered away. She was soon swallowed up by the crowd.

  When I got home, Magda was beside herself.

  “Annie, oh, Annie, where have you been? Your father’s been calling and I’ve been so worried about you.” She gathered me in one of her vanilla-scented hugs. “With your poor mother taking a turn for the worse and—oops!” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “There I go with me big mouth flapping in the wind.”