The Last Safe Place
Page 33
The room went airless. Gabriella looked at the piece of art paper and the world slowed down and stopped. Didn’t move on its axis. For a breathless, eternal moment nothing in the universe stirred.
Below the little-kid-drawn watercolor of the valley was an oil painting of a single, perfect bristlecone pine tree—a tree that glowed. Somehow, Ty had captured the incandescence, the light from within. Each needle on every branch was a golden firefly. Around the tree were hundreds of points of light, sparkling, each a star, a universe of its own. The glow spread out into the shadows; the rock walls curved protectively around it.
It was stunning, a work of art!
Gabriella dragged her eyes from it to the picture above it—a child’s scrawl on a refrigerator door with the Mona Lisa. She looked at Pedro, saw his eyes go from one picture to the other, watched him make the same comparison, reach the same conclusion. He turned his eyes toward her, opened his mouth, but no words came out.
Ty was completely oblivious to their response. He stepped back, adjusted his baby-owl glasses on his nose and looked it over himself.
“I wish Grandpa Slappy could have seen it,” he said, his voice thick with unshed tears.
“Me, too,” Gabriella managed to gasp.
Then Ty turned around and saw that his mother and Pedro were gaping at him.
“What?” he asked, looking from one to the other. “What’s everybody standing around for? I thought we had a plane to catch.”
THE END