by Brian Hodge
No, you don't. Your mother loves you.
Hah.
And you love her
Double hah.
Someday you're going to have to work this out—you two. Someday you're going to have to find a way to communicate. Your mother doesn't know how to tell you she loves you. She thinks so much of you that she wants you to be perfect. But you just want her to love you.
Triple hah. Like I could care.
You want that more than anything else in the world.
Her parents had fought a lot, and you could think they hated each other, but if anyone knew her mother and could make her change her mind about anything, it was her dad. That's what Amber wanted to believe. But now her mother had done all these cruel things, brought her dad back in a wheelchair even—why? And she was checking people in and out like they were clothes in her closet. Trying to get them to fit perfectly too. So maybe her father had been right, and maybe now her mother had gone over the edge.
He was wrong about her wanting her mother to love her, though. She didn't care anymore.
Not at all.
At last, reluctantly, she drifted off to sleep while Mr. Bryce stood watch outside the ashes of the barn, unaware and unable to save her from extinction. The last thing she thought before sleep claimed her was that she was going to wake up dead.
Which is why, as soon as she heard the barking, she thought she really was dead. Because no dog barked like Sir Aarfie, and no dog came skidding down the hall on the wood floor and then windmilled his nails on the seam of her door as fast as a gerbil's paws on an exercise wheel. So she must be where Aarfie had gone when he died. But then she heard Molly holler, "Where did that dog come from?" So then she knew she wasn't dead but that somehow, some way, Sir Aarfie had come back to life. And by the time she was sprawled on her bedroom floor, laughing and trying to keep him from licking her lips, she was already thinking that it had to be her mother. Her mother had painted Sir Aarfie back. She had found a photo somewhere and made the painting last night after their big confrontation in the sewing room.
And Amber didn't know why, but that made her start to cry again.
How could she have thought her mother would really hurt her? Hadn't she given her life twice? And even though she had caused her first death, it was because she wanted to bring her back, wanted her to be okay again and not in a wheelchair. Her mother had stayed up all night probably, looking for a photo of Aarfie and doing the painting, and now he was back! (Your mother doesn't know how to tell you she loves you.)
So what could she do to show her mother how thankful she was? Because neither one of them was any good at saying how they felt. (Someday you're going to have to find a way to communicate.) And she guessed she knew what she had to do, even though now that the first wave of relief had passed she felt just a tingle of doubt, as if maybe her mother had known all along how it was going to turn out.
But she got dressed anyway, putting on her Skechers and giving Aarfie one of her ragged felt-top boots from last winter. Then, while he was chewing industriously on the sole, she closed her bedroom door behind her, so that he couldn't follow and betray her intentions by barking. But the old floorboards snapped like a whole pack of barking dogs as she darted quickly through the house. Molly and Beverly were in the parlor, though they only nodded and smiled as she raced past, as if they were thinking she was going upstairs to thank her mother. Which she was, of course. But she was going to do it not with words but with the thing her mother wanted, even though it meant she would have to trust her now, because she would have no more leverage. The jar of red paint was up in the cupola, and she would get it and bring it to the studio, and her mother would understand and they wouldn't have to say a thing.
That was what she intended to do.
And she would have done it too, except that when she got to the sewing room and tried to raise the window sash, two slotted screws stared out of the wood at her like silver dragon's eyes.
Chapter 18
Get Amber!
When had she last said those words? 1968? 69? Before Woodstock but after Kennedy and King were assassinated, Ariel thought. The year of the three deaths. Like the rest of the nation, they had been traumatized by all the madness, and then—that summer—Sir Aarfie ran out in front of the pickup on the curve, and that third death was childhood's end as far as Amber was concerned. But until then Ariel could say Get Amber! with an intonation of excitement to the eager toy collie, and he would look up at her, half understanding, and she would slap her hands on her thighs, making him flinch and scamper off without so much as a sniff, as if he knew by telepathy where his young mistress was. He always found Amber, always barked when he did.
So now he was recalled for duty as a sleeper saboteur, a mole, a plant who would perform his Judas act at the proper time, because Ariel absolutely could not risk everything on a child's perspective! If her daughter managed to retrieve the paint from the roof, or if she had more hidden elsewhere, or if she was holding back some monster painting like this scarecrow of hers, then she must find it. She would watch for Amber's furtive exit, leaving Aarfie behind, and then when Amber had time to reach whatever hideaway she was visiting, Ariel would free the dog.
Get Amber!
The thirty-six-year-old painting of Aarfie she had used as a model stood side by side with the new one, virtually identical except for the brightness and the subtle densities in color that she achieved now with brush strokes rather than pigments. She had found the canvas flat in a drawer where she had left it after reclaiming the mount board for another project. It wasn't until she finished the new painting and noticed the shaky crayoned inscription MY DOG on the back of the old canvas that she remembered the circumstances of that year. Benchmark events came flooding back: explaining assassination and war to Amber; the accident with Aarfie in August; the Beatles "Hey Jude" for a dirge that fall because its lyrics and slow recession at the end seemed to sustain them; and then the movie "Oliver" at Christmastime for consolation and new beginnings.
They had taken their chances in a world that was falling apart back then and had somehow survived. Why was everything going wrong for her now that she had control? It was backward. Hope and trust had never been her allies. Should she risk everything, put Amber in school, send everyone back to the families who had buried or cremated them? The world would overrun her if it knew what she could do. She could paint back saints and prophets, presidents and Elvis Presley. It would be chaos if she did, of course. And yet, her little circle might be grateful to her then.
Another possibility was that she could simply destroy the paint and scatter her father’s ashes, freeing the occupants of her little Eden and trusting that she would not be forgotten again. But they would still be discovered for what they were and surrounded with sensationalism. She would be derided by the world for throwing it all away—the Elvises and Gandhis. Her "friends" would feel pressure to ridicule her too.
She stood at the window while the alla prima was drying sufficiently. She didn't watch—not watching had become a superstition with her—but just stared out as the night thinned away, shuddering a little at the sounds behind her. At one point she cried for the living Ambers she had lost, but the tears formed so slowly that there was no relief, and when at last dawn came and she heard the spasm of paws on the studio floor, her brittle mood annealed into something less vulnerable.
"And where have you been?" she asked Aarfie when he stretched his paws up to the windowsill.
She waited until the room filled halfway with light, like a bathtub full of sunrise, and then she led Sir Aarfie across the studio and opened the door.
"Get Amber," she said.
Later, she asked Dana to bring some coffee up to the sewing room for both of them. Of all the household, Dana was the least likely to lie or talk behind her back now, she thought, and if she did either of those things, they would show on her face like a slap. One on one, Dana read like a diary.
"You have a little sunburn," Ariel said when th
e coffee was poured. "Or is that from the barn fire yesterday?"
"Sunburn. And how are you today, Ariel?"
"Lovely, thank you. You should put some cream on your skin."
Dana nodded once. "I see you've gotten Amber a dog. You had one in the sixties, didn't you? Is that …"
"Sir Aarfie."
"Funny name."
"Amber says she saved you yesterday."
"Amber?"
"She started the fire."
"Amber did it?"
"She was watching you in the barn." The slapped look was evident, even with the sunburn, and the longer Ariel stared, the brighter it became. "Nasty habit of hers. Spying on people."
"I wasn't hiding anything, so she wasn't spying."
"No, of course not."
"If she didn't tell you, Denny Bryce and I were having a picnic, and I went to sit in the barn afterward."
"It's none of her business. No one's business but yours."
"I guess you're wondering about me taking his picture." Tremor in the voice. "It's really awkward. I don't know if I can do it."
"Yes, everything is awkward. This whole arrangement … being alive when you shouldn't be … awkward."
"Ariel—"
"Much easier to just follow conventions, niceties … natural laws."
"Ariel, I'm not complaining."
"Yes, you are. Why is everybody making this so awkward for me? Can you tell me that, Dana? Why don't I have"—she gestured—"cooperation or … gratitude or … sympathy?"
"You've got all of those things, Ariel."
"Really? You've been dead, Dana. What was it like? Tell me that and I'll believe in your cooperation." She waited a full ten seconds, even though Dana instantly adopted a pose of settled long suffering. "Well, so much for enlightenment. I feel better now that you've … cooperated. Take Mr. Bryce's photograph, Dana. You can do that, and I expect you to."
Neither of them touched their coffee.
The brittleness Ariel had felt last night was diamond hard now. Like it or not, she was at her best as judge and executioner. She saw this as a role that had been forced upon her by a lifetime of alienation, but her great fear was that it was her native element. Perhaps these second comings were about punishment and revenge after all. She didn't know how to be loved. Would she even recognize it if it came? Or would it be lost in her own resistance and suspicion?
Even Amber's gushing gratitude for Aarfie's return seemed pasted on. Thanks, Mommy, thank you SO much! rendered in a remembered voice from a still younger child. Not her. Not really Amber. But what was Amber? A hybrid of two little girls thirty-five years apart. "Beluga butt" and "freaky scene" with Dylanesque overtones all in the same sentence. "Groovy" and "cool" were her bridge over decades.
And then at lunch Dana, sitting across from Denny Bryce, who had come for his afternoon visit to his father, lifted the Polaroid camera from below the line of the table. And when Denny pulled back from looking over his father's shoulder, she said:
"Oh, come on now. Your dad's all spruced up. Pose with him."
Ariel's appraising scrutiny sharpened. Martin Bryce, shaved and freshly barbered, was wearing a new long-sleeve shirt his son had brought him, but that wasn't the incentive for Denny's cooperation. It was the relationship that was unmistakably deepening between him and Dana, Ariel decided. She could see it in his eyes, wide and boring into hers. The premise there was a mix of doubt and tentative trust, and she could tell which one was winning by the fact that he leaned forward with a reluctant smile. The electronic flash left his expression floating in the air, and Ariel memorized it, certain that the image would be all she needed to combine with her artistic eye on canvas.
Denny Bryce was the one exposed element in New Eden. He had insinuated himself through implied threats and an open wallet in order to get what he wanted. And now Ariel could recognize the daily surge of his little foreign car up the driveway. It seemed likely that sooner or later he would know too much. So she needed some insurance, a little implied threat of her own.
She could paint him to life in the house right now, handicapped in some way, and that would end the natural-born Denny Bryce in the natural world, just as it had the natural-born Amber. But that wouldn't end the danger he posed. He was active in society, and there would be an investigation if he broke off his connections. So, unfortunately, she would have to deal with him terminally. She could do that by creating him here at New Eden, which would cause his death naturally wherever he happened to be elsewhere. A perfect murder (she thought it once, then banished the term). And when he was created here at New Eden, she would immediately paint him out again. Presto. No corpus delicti. Ariel the judge and executioner would have to protect New Eden. The world had no jurisdiction here.
With a nascent whir, the Polaroid snapshot slid out of the camera and everyone craned to see. An image emerged from the chemical wash. One more toss in the wishing well of immortality for those who stood in line.
Ariel loomed in like a towering adult casting a shadow over her children's discovery. "Let me see," she said, reaching across Dana for the prize.
And Dana, smelling lavender water and talc and something horribly eager, was suddenly repelled. Just before the bony wrist passed her cheek, she dropped the photo—some at the table thought she flicked it—into her soup. It was tomato soup. Dana's white cotton blouse looked like it was spattered with gore.
Ariel's gasp was palpable. "Well, I'll just take another," the goddess of creation at New Eden said, reaching for the camera, which Dana—now standing as she dabbed at her blouse with a napkin—held in one hand.
The grandstand understood all of it, of course: Ariel's motive, Dana's taking of the photograph, the change of heart. They cheered inwardly when the photo went in the soup. But it was too much to expect Dana to refuse to give up the camera. So when that object seemed suddenly to slip from her grasp, fracturing its plastic shell and cracking the lens on the hardwood floor, mitral valves hung up and lungs quit respiring. For a long moment no one dared a living breath.
But Ariel was only half surprised this time. "Poor Dana," she said very evenly, "your arthritis must be killing you."
And then she looked at the rest of them in a slow pan, smiling benignly.
Hearts jump-started, lungs filled to capacity, and in the wake of Ariel's gray retreat victorious smiles broke forth. But Dana was not smiling. She sat back down in a cold sweat, eyes averted, oblivious to the goodwill burbling around her. She didn't have arthritis.
Yet.
Chapter 19
Ariel slept three times that day—two and a half hours, forty minutes, twenty-five—but despite being up the night before, she wasn't tired. Old people who slept were either ill or bored, she told herself. In reality her body was shedding its long-term needs like a dead skin. Beneath the surface she was beginning to consume her final resources, like a fiery star-bound meteor.
So the naps were only to preserve her strength, because there was no doubt at all now what she must do tonight. Tonight she would be altering six portraits—Helen's, Beverly's, Paavo's, Ruta's, Molly's and Dana's—the able-bodied of her disobedient second comings.
She didn't dare think about it during the day. If she thought about it while she was still smarting from the nearly open rebellion, she would very likely succumb to her baser instincts. A lifetime of eating crow, playing second fiddle, bringing up the rear, and now that she had a taste of control, a rebuff. That made it doubly tart. But even with the delay and the naps, dark images were simmering inside her. Artistic blasphemies she couldn't suppress. Ruta with no mouth. None at all. And Molly with a thunderous butt—a beluga butt!—so big that she couldn't climb the stairs. Dana turned into a cinder of Cinderella, left scarred, as if her sunburn were indeed the searing, weeping wounds left by the barn fire. Paavo with his sleeves pinned up because he no longer had arms. Or maybe she should take his legs, leaving him in Amber's old American Flyer coaster wagon to get around. Horrors all, tinged with gallows irony.<
br />
But she put off the conscious decisions of what to paint, because in the end it had to be more measured than that. Otherwise how would it be explained to Denny Bryce? Yet she wanted them to know without ambiguity. She couldn't take Ruta's mouth away, but she could make it smaller. Just enough to make her want to scream through it (ha-ha). Paavo's strong hands could become gnarled and stiffened, like Dana's were going to be, and "Helen the Hunchback" was an appellation waiting to happen. Beverly would be runtier still, thinned and weakened. Accelerated aging, that was all. Weaker, stiffer—Molly staring at her enlarged and infantilized thighs in the mirror, noting the flaccid flesh of her arms. Enough change so that Ariel's Edenites would see it in each other's eyes—the common tenor, the realization of what they were and that Ariel could run the clock in either direction.
Denny Bryce might notice, but he wouldn't recognize the suddenness of the process. All in one night. Passover.
Her first-born to a soul. The tenth plague. Unannounced. No Paschal Lamb's blood on their lintels to save them.
Chapter 20
Maybe it was the silver dragon's eyes staring out at her from the sewing room window sash, or maybe it was the fear she sensed everyone had for her mother, or maybe it was just her own streak of wildness, but Amber knew that she wasn't going to give back the paint now. She would have after Aarfie came back—she had tried to—but now it was too late. She didn't care if that meant she was ungrateful and disobedient. She already believed she was a bad person, because she had no friends, no real father anymore, and because her mother didn't love her even though she had tried. You couldn't fake that.
The magic paint almost made up for it. The paint was power and control over her own life, if she could just get good at using it. Sure, she had made a few mistakes, but she wouldn't make any more. She would just hang on to the paint until she figured out how to use it to make things better, and also because as long as she was the only one who knew where it was, she was protected.
