Blank Canvas

by Mere Joyce

  Chapter Thirteen

  I walk out into the street expecting cold wind to blow against me, and instead I’m momentarily perplexed by the warm evening air. When I remember it’s May and not late October, my confusion clears away enough for me to recall why I’m outside in the first place.

  I walk aimlessly down the street, Autumn following a few steps behind.

  “The bus station is back that way,” she says when I come to rest at an intersection, trying to decide which way to go. I turn back to see her facing the direction we’ve just come. At first I think she’s looking at the distant bus depot, but then I notice the figure hurrying up the street towards us.

  “Maddie, wait!” Wesley calls my name, and I tense. Autumn glances at me, and then looks back at Wesley. When he reaches us, she takes a few awkward steps to the side and leans against the brick wall of the First National Bank.

  “Sorry I didn’t tell you I was coming,” I say. It’s the only thing I can think of, and I regret saying it as soon as it’s left my mouth. Why should I be sorry for coming? And what does my presence at Jolly Joe’s have to do with anything? But I can’t manage anything else, so I say the words, and then stare down at my feet.

  My stupid, tingling feet.

  “No, I’m happy you came,” Wesley says, sounding confused himself. He pauses, and I listen to his breathing, slightly ragged after his run up the street. “I just, um, I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he continues at last.

  I shrug. I’m not okay. Obviously. But I don’t want to seem like the perpetually pathetic girl, either.

  “I’m fine,” I say, the vague lie becoming a common utterance for me these days. It’s second nature, like saying ‘hello’, ‘please’, and ‘thanks’.

  “Are you sure?” Wesley asks. I press my lips into a tight line, unable to give him the answer I’d like. This is an opening, my chance to figure out exactly where we stand. I want to ask him why he wrote the song. Was it simply inspiration garnered from my painting? Or is it a ploy to give his band some free publicity?

  I remember the nights we sat in his living room, making up duets of our own. He’d play, and I’d paint. The two mediums would come together in something original, something beautiful––something private. No one ever experienced our creations, at least not completely. Wesley’s dad may have heard him play a new tune, and Autumn would see most of my paintings when she barged into my room before bed to tell me goodnight. But seeing them, hearing them, encountering them together was a secret between the two of us.

  Was the song meant as a dedication to those times? Or does it mock how much I cherished them?

  I’m burning to ask him these questions, but I’m also afraid of the response. I fear my memory has become warped, and the past I believed to be true is nothing more than a clung-to fancy of my childish mind. I’m terrified of what the fantasies may have done to my memories of Wesley. I’m sure we were close, best friends who understood each other better than anyone could comprehend. But what if I was wrong? What if the abyss of time has shaken reality, distorted it for my own benefit? To me, the past is something magical. I’m afraid if I try to recreate it, the truth of the illusion will be revealed.

  “Yeah, Wesley, I-I’m fine,” I say. I steel myself against his beauty and look up at him. He’s standing closer than I realized, and I resist the compulsion to take a step back, or a step forward.

  “Well, okay,” he replies, and I can tell he’s waiting for more. He wants me to react, to tell him how well he played, or to accuse him of being a horrible friend. But I’m not sure what my reaction should be, so I say nothing. Our silence pulls against us, suffocating despite the busy sounds of the street.

  A minute, maybe two, passes before Wesley nods his head and shoves his hands into the pockets of his slacks. He begins to turn back, ready to retreat into Jolly Joe’s, to pack up his cello, or perhaps to finish the set. He looks bothered, almost restless, like he wants to cross the gaping hole separating us, but isn’t sure he can make the jump.

  “Wes,” I say quickly, choosing the name carefully. I can’t let him slip away. Even with my uncertainty, my anger, my disappointment this is all so hard, I can’t lose him.

  “Yeah?” he asks, and I’m relieved to hear the note of relief tickling the word.

  “See you Monday, right? You’ll be my m-much appreciated chauffeur?”

  Wesley looks slightly crestfallen, and my stomach clenches uneasily. But then he nods again, and gives me a small smile.

  “Yeah, of course. Always, Maddie,” he says. He turns completely then, giving Autumn a quick wave before ambling back towards the coffee shop. I watch his departure, and then my eyes wander to my sister.

  “You dolt,” she tells me, her face full of annoyed amusement. She steps over and gives me a kiss on the cheek, and it’s the first time I really notice we’re now the same height.

  “You’ve grown,” I say blankly, and Autumn lets out a laugh.

  “Youdolt,” she repeats, and she takes my arm as we head back to catch the bus home.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It’s a relief to be home again. I’m not agoraphobic, I don’t fear a million lurking disasters waiting outside the invisible gates of my personal palace, but I don’t enjoy being away from the comforts of home like I used to, either. Once, the world beyond our driveway was exciting, full of adventure and the thrilling unknown. Now I like my days to remain calm, even dull. Going downtown, seeing Wesley play, hearing his––my––song, all took its toll on my energy and my nerves.

  When Autumn and I step into the muted yellow of our entryway, it’s like returning to a peaceful haven where I can finally rest.

  “Want to do each other’s nails?” Autumn asks as she follows me up the first flight of stairs en route to my bedroom. I glance back at her, one eyebrow quirked at her bubbly tone. I can’t fathom what it’s like in her mind. Either everything really does slide off her like she’s got a waterproof coating over her pores, or else she’s become remarkably good at ignoring tense moments and acting as the peacemaker in all situations.

  The first option is, to me, unbearable. But the second is frightening. Because the second option is probably closer to the truth of my sister’s existence, and I wish she didn’t feel the need to throw herself into such a demanding role.

  “No,” I say as lightly as possible. “I just want to go to sleep.”

  “No you don’t,” Autumn replies automatically. And she’s right, I don’t. I want to lie awake in bed, tormenting myself trying to figure out Wesley’s intentions, Wesley’s feelings, my intentions––my feelings.

  I stand in the second floor hallway, staring up the steps leading to my room.

  “I’m tired,” I tell her, reiterating my point without directly contradicting her assumption. Autumn stares at me for a moment, her lips pursed and her soft round cheeks sucked in. It’s her thinking pose, the one she started doing sometime around the age of four. And even though she’s now nearly a decade older, whenever she makes this face I see her as a girl not much bigger than a toddler, with messy hair and a wide-eyed determination so fierce, she’ll undoubtedly carry it her entire life.

  I can’t help the smile cracking through my lips, and it proves a dire error for me to make. Autumn may have been close to letting me slip away to the loneliness of my room, but now she grins, her eyes triumphant.

  “Come on,” she says, already backing towards her own room. “I really want to give them some color, and I hate doing them myself. Please? I got a whole kit’s worth of polish for my birthday last year.”

  It’s the perfect thing to say to clench our deal, although I don’t think Autumn meant anything by the mention of her birthday. All the birthdays I missed are painful to think about, but Autumn’s birthdays are particularly special to me. My sister was born on September 22nd, the first day of fall on that particular year. Apparently, my parents were trying to come up with a name for their new daughter, and I suggested she be named Fall, since she was b
orn on the first day of the season. My parents liked the idea, even if they did tweak the name a bit. Mom said she’d never even considered the name Autumn before, but after my suggestion, she knew it was the right choice.

  I was at the hospital when my baby sister was born, sitting in the waiting room with my grandmother. And I played a part in naming the chubby, sleepy little bundle swaddled in a blanket of hospital white, pink, and blue. I don’t remember the conversation between myself and my parents regarding Autumn’s name. But I do remember when Dad laid her gently onto my lap, and I was overcome with the simple knowledge: she was not justababy, she wasourbaby. She was not justanyone’ssister. She wasmine.

  I turn to face the stairs, and slowly head up.

  “I-I’ll be upstairs,” I say dolefully, and I can hear Autumn rushing into her room to get the polish.

  She’s not kidding about having a whole kit’s worth of choices. When she enters my room a few minutes later, Autumn hauls a black plastic case onto my bed, and opens it to reveal trays and trays of small polish containers. There are classic shades of pearly pink and deep red, along with shimmering whites and greys, glittering purples and blues, neon greens and yellows, and a few dozen other hues in between.

  “Okay, so, I was thinking of doing alternating fingers. Black and white? No. That’s kind of boring. I could go with something bright. Orange, maybe. I like this clementine color. With some silver?” Autumn pulls out ten different bottles of polish, placing them in groups of two, and then switching them around to find the best match.

  “You know you’d be better asking Mom to do this, right?” I say, looking at the lovely array of colors shining under the room’s overhead light. “Or D-Dad, or pretty much anyone else. I suck at stuff like this. I’ll g-get it all over your fingers.”

  “I know.” Autumn beams at me, and then she lifts two bottles and holds them before my face. One’s aquamarine, and the other navy blue––both with a soft, metallic gleam. It’s a good combination, and I grab the pillows from my bed for us to sit on as we move to the floor so I can start decorating her nails.

  “So what’s the special occasion?” I ask, as I unscrew the first cap and take Autumn’s thumb in my left hand.

  “What?” Autumn’s confused by my question, so I nod towards the case on the bed.

  “The p-polish,” I say, making my first streak down the center of her thumbnail. The little brush fans out against the nail, gliding across the short distance between tip and cuticle. “Why’d you want to color them?”

  “Oh,” Autumn says, the word a laugh. “No reason. I just like to––to color them, sometimes. That’s all.” I notice her pause, the brief hesitation as she’s about to say she likes topaint her nails. She’s been careful not to say the word at all, actually. Which is unusual for her. But then again, I’ve been avoiding it, too, doing my best to ignore the ridiculous comparison of coating my sister’s nails and coating a canvas with color of a thicker, more permanent nature. Autumn must feel sorry for me following tonight’s episode at the coffee shop, after all. I’m grateful she’s not trying to push my limits any more than she already has.

  I finish the first hand with only minor amounts of polish reaching past the nail and sticking to Autumn’s skin. The second hand is worse, but by the time I complete the second coat, I’m familiar enough with the feel of the tool to control the brush with relative ease. Autumn is pleased with the way it turns out, and she holds her hands up, fingers outstretched as she admires my less-than-perfect work.

  “Oh, shoot,” she exclaims, her voice so sudden it makes me jump, “I forgot, the top-coat stuff’s still in my room.”

  “I’ll get it,” I offer, picking myself off the floor and stretching my back.

  “Thanks. It’s in my desk, the middle drawer, I think.”

  Autumn’s room is the opposite of mine. As I reach the second floor and push back her half-closed door, I’m struck by the way my minimalist design, with its bare floor and empty walls, seems positively empty compared to Autumn’s chaotic clutter. Three walls of my sister’s room are painted a candy-floss pink shade, but the fourth is wallpapered with black and white stripes, giving the entire space a funky, Parisian flare. Autumn’s bed is a mess, the covers strewn about, several books and an array of fitness magazines heaped onto the sheets. Her dresser, a big, antique-looking thing made of oak, is shoved beside the closet, and her matching oak desk is piled high with movie cases, a laptop, clothes, and assorted pencils and pens.

  The mess makes me dizzy, and I shake my head in amusement as I step over a discarded sweater on the floor to reach the desk. The middle drawer gets stuck, and I have to tug it hard until it flies open. A stack of old essays are crumpled and crammed into the small space, filling it to its brim. I sigh, digging through the papers and other items in the drawer, but I don’t find the polish. I glance at the desktop, and decide not to risk toppling something over by rummaging around.

  I open one of the side drawers instead, and quickly forget about finding the polish. The drawer is surprisingly empty, a strange contradiction to the rest of the desk, and the rest of the room. When I stare down at it, I see only one object residing in its snug casing. It’s a book, or rather, a scrapbook, neatly positioned in the center of the drawer. I pull it out, my heart sinking as I read its one-word title:

  Maddie.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Maddie.”

  I breathe my own name out into the room, and open the book to its first page. The paper is robin’s egg blue, and pasted onto it is a newspaper article from a few days after my disappearance. It’s just a small article––a little blurb entitled, ‘Local Girl Missing’. The edges of the newsprint have been traced with red pen, the ink forming a thick border around the article. Some doodles, squiggly lines, broken hearts, birds, and the face of a crying girl decorate the rest of the otherwise blank space.

  I turn to the next page. Two more articles about my disappearance are pasted here, along with more simple drawings. Another turn of the blue paper shows a printout from a news site, a short opinion piece about the need for better surveillance measures to stop things like my kidnapping from occurring again. There are false promises of clues, and a comment section from an online forum where people who assumed I was dead told me to rest in peace, while others declared I had run away from home and was probably holed up somewhere, strung out and oblivious to the panic I’d created.

  Each page of the scrapbook is adorned with sketches, some illustrated by a single scene, still others full of nothing more than mindless scribbling. It’s like a diary, like something I’d keep for my art therapy sessions.

  I never bothered to ask what people did while I was away. It never seemed important, but now I see I was stupid not to realize––it is. Wesley wrote a song, and Autumn kept a scrapbook. Sometimes I forget my abduction influencedother people’s lives as much as it influenced mine.

  There’s a feature from my school’s paper highlighting a memorial they held for me, with some photos of a hand-painted poster saying,We Miss You, Maddie, surrounded by flowers and small teddy bears. I wonder what happened to all the paraphernalia. Do my parents have it stored somewhere? Was it donated to a charity for sick children? It would be nice if it were the latter, but if nothing else¸ I’d be satisfied just to know the flowers and toys weren’t heaped into the trash the day after the assembly.

  Further into the book, the dates of the articles become more spread out, as the time between my disappearance and my lack of return broadened. At last, there’s a break of about a year, a time in which most of the world had forgotten about my story, or had stopped hoping for a happy ending. But it’s not the end of the scrapbook, which I’m thankful for, both for my own peace of mind and for the simple sake of giving my sister’s strange collection a joyful finish.

  The first article announcing my return has been framed with a glittering green marker, and the whole page around it is full of exclamation marks. I bite my lip, my sister’s artistic merits te
chnically awful, but emotionally astounding. The next clippings are decorated with flowers in bloom, hearts once broken now stitched back together, and stick figures running on grassy meadows.

  There are still blank pages at the end of the book, but the final page with anything on it is recent, a printed blog article dated only a few weeks ago. Autumn’s still keeping track of the events, still cutting and pasting the stories about my return, police findings, and the upcoming court dates.

  “I forgot, the top-coat stuff’s not in my desk. It’s in my bag...” Autumn trails off as she comes into her room and sees me staring at the book. “Maddie?”

  I look up, not sure if I should feel guilty or not. “H-How come you’ve never shown me this before?” I say, deciding it would be foolish to try and apologize for looking at something so obviously about me.

  “Figured you wouldn’t want to see it,” Autumn shrugs. She looks put-out, almost annoyed, but after a few silent seconds she crosses the room and takes the book from my hands, her still-unfinished nails carefully flipping pages until she’s reached a specific one. “This is my favorite.”

  She points to a photo. I skimmed the book quickly, and didn’t stop to read the details on every page. I missed this one altogether. It’s a picture of Wesley, with his band. The other guys stand with their hands in their pockets, but Wesley’s leaning over his upright cello, the only member featured with his instrument. The photo’s been printed in grainy sepia, and I wish I could see it in sharp, vivid color.

  “L-Local Band Raises Money for Missing Teen,” I read aloud, glancing at Autumn and then back down at the text. The journalist has tried too hard to make the facts creative, to add ‘mood’ into the report with mentions of cheering crowds, warm temperatures, and an air of community spirit. Luckily, the flowery language doesn’t detract from the power of the story.