A Stargazy Night Sky

by Laura Briggs

  "Sidney, you mean," countered Dean, coldly. His motorized wheelchair was facing the door, but I could see paint on his face and his shirt, and the arm harness that held Dean's paintbrush for his hand that still possessed some small degree of mobility.

  "I'm not naming any names," the PC answered, stoutly.

  I knocked on the door frame. "Am I interrupting?" I asked.

  "Invitedly so," Dean answered, sarcastically. And with incorrect grammar, which was a sign of his annoyance with the constable. The constable puffed his chest, trying to look stern.

  "Questions have to be asked, sir, nonetheless," he said.

  "I confess," said Dean. "I did it, constable. You have your man."

  Pringle's eyes widened. "Come now," he sputtered. "That's no proper way to act, making a joke of the law when we both know that statement's nonsense."

  "Are you saying that you don't believe me?" Dean challenged. "That you think I couldn't possibly be capable of committing a crime because of my disability? That's discrimination, constable. I am highly offended by your insinuation."

  I bit my lip to hold back a smile. Pringle looked worried.

  "It's just that — well — I can't see how you managed it," said the constable. "Exactly. I mean, you're — well, I simply don't see how you could've done it, sir." He managed this stoutly enough.

  "I didn't say it was easy," said Dean.

  "Yes, but —"

  "You'll have to arrest me to prove the law isn't biased."

  The constable's jaw dropped open a little, making him look all the more helpless over Dean's joke. I put my hand on Dean's shoulder before he said anything else. "Stop, Dean," I said. "Don't tease him anymore."

  "Only because you've asked nicely," he answered.

  Pringle turned crimson all the way to his ears as he tucked his hat under his arm. "I'll be off to attend to official business, then," he said. "Good day to you, sir."

  He glanced at me, and there was still a little suspicion from last time. "I still have an eye on you, miss," he informed me, before making his exit.

  I closed the door behind him. "I think he still suspects me of being involved in the criminal underworld," I said. A few months ago, the constable had suspected me of helping pilfer the diamonds that went missing from an auction exhibit at the hotel. Maybe he still wasn't entirely convinced the copycat jewel thief had worked alone.

  "He's an insufferable prig," said Dean. "The constabulary needs to raise their standards if he's their notion of an acceptable peace officer. I thought by now he would have let go of that nonsense about Sidney."

  With the touch of a finger, he wheeled himself back over the drop cloth covering the rug beneath his easel and canvas, which had been tilted at a special angle to help him wheel underneath it and guide the brush in the brace's arm with the help of its electronic box. Dean's paralysis left him with few options of movement, but he had recently renewed his efforts to make the best of what remained.

  "I brought you a gift from Sonia's garden," I said, holding up the bouquet. "It's late season, so they're a little wilted, but it's the thought that counts."

  "They're lovely," he answered, foregoing his usual sarcasm, although he still arched one brow slightly for the droopy heads of some of the flowers. "The vases are in the cupboard above the tea tins."

  The kitchen was tidy since Sidney hadn't been plying his cooking talents here any recent afternoons, only the tray of Dean's half-eaten lunch on the old cook's table. I opened the squeaky upper cupboard and selected a pinkish crystal vase and filled it at the tap. The flowers still drooped a little, but the water would perk them up, I hoped. I put the best ones in the middle.

  "Remove this contraption, if you will," he said, as I cleared a place for the vase on the sitting room's table. He meant the brush's mechanized arm and harness, which Sidney had rigged for him based on similar, more polished devices developed in the tech world. "I think my painting session is at an end for today, since Callum is due back from the shops shortly."

  I unfastened the straps and eased it off. There were some splatters of violet paint on one side of Dean's face from where the brush must have flicked some at one point. I brushed them away lightly with my thumb, but they became smears instead.

  He smiled. "There's a cloth on the table behind you," he said. "But you can leave them. It might be just as well, since it would match my clothes and arm."

  "Callum will have to tackle those with detergent, but these I can help with."

  Helping Dean was a new experience — once upon a time, he would have eschewed my offer like it was a burning coal from the fireplace, when his bitterness was still at its zenith and didn't allow anyone except Sidney close. Back then, I would have never visited him on my own, but with his gradual change, a friendship had tentatively formed between us that broke down some of the old walls.

  Of course, I had never thought a time would come in which Dean would agree to wear this sort of rig, either, which he had initially likened to a horse harness, and surely drew stares from PC Pringle — much less attempt a canvas again. But the proof it happened was — literally — in the picture, this one streaks of shadowy purple against a pale, grayish-pink background.

  I studied it as I laid aside the harness. I could almost see the morning haze in its simple shades, and perceive depth to the forest as the colors changed.

  "Utter nonsense, isn't it?" Now that sounded more like the Dean I had known longest.

  "No, trees," I said. "Those are the limbs. A wood in the light of daybreak?"

  "A remarkable guess. It's my highly-impressionistic version of the wood behind the cottage after dawn," he answered.

  "I didn't guess," I said. "It's obvious." I daubed the paint from the bridge of his nose, still a little amazed by the remarkable change that made him permit this. No bristling for kind gestures or human contact.

  "Kind of you to say," he answered, gently. "It's vile in places. But it occupies my time, so I continue with it, no matter the mistakes." The wheelchair's motor hummed as he wheeled it closer, giving a critical eye to his work, which I knew fell short of Dean's old standards. At least judging by the picture of the cow shed on summer's eve hanging by the door, and the impressive garden scene that Sidney helped finish last year.

  "I like it," I said. Despite his harsh criticism, I could see the pale shading that highlighted the trees and gave them definition, and the velvety daubs that created underbrush and shadow where light hadn't penetrated the canopy. Dean painted as much from memory and imagination as he did from real life 'impressionist style.'

  "I would give it to you as a housewarming gift, but I planned to give you something better from my past efforts," said Dean. "I thought I would let you choose what you'd like, if you wish, from some of the canvases."

  "You're giving me a painting?" I said. I was surprised, and I knew that it colored my voice. Dean's canvases were still precious to him, finished or unfinished, even though few of them were on display.

  "I thought it would brighten the room you rent, which is undoubtedly filled with dusty castoffs that Sidney's friend can neither bear to part with, nor stand to be surrounded by," he answered. "It seemed a more fitting present to give you a castoff of mine, therefore, than some pointless rubbish I ordered from a catalog. And I hardly have the wall space for as many as I have, so I really have no idea why I keep them."

  I knew better than to take the acid in this reply seriously. "I would be flattered," I answered, solemnly. "You know that an original by you would have a place of honor, wherever I lived."

  Was I mistaken, or did Dean blush momentarily? If so, he recovered himself quickly. He maneuvered his chair aside, opening the path to the cottage's passageway. "If you'll open the closet, you'll find my past efforts in a stack," he said. "Callum may have piled a few boxes, but they can be moved."

  The art was stacked behind a box of recyclables, five or six canvases of varying sizes. These were finished, unlike much of his artwork. I sat on the floor and tilted ea
ch one forward, discovering a lonely moor, a watercolor scene of sheep racing up a green hill from a field with stone walls, a sky that could easily be the sea. A rippling desert of pale sand with three lonely blurs that conjured the survivors of a desert caravan or the journey of the Magi.

  "Where did you paint this one?" I turned it to face Dean in the hall. "It doesn't look like any place in England."

  "It wouldn't," he answered. "It was painted from a desert postcard years ago. Or as a variation on some detail from one of the paintings in the portfolio in the living room. I bought Roberts's Luxor and Cairo portraits when I was younger. Back then, I liked to imagine the freedom of wandering those sites of ancient wonder so freely, in the manner of all the boorish and insensitive explorers of those days, who had no regard for cultural sensitivity."

  "Is that why you painted a piece of it for yourself?" I asked.

  "It was my experimental period, when I painted whatever suited me at the moment. Ironically, I think I was in Italy at the time."

  "It's very romantic," I said, gazing at it. "Did you travel a lot in the past?" He hadn't traveled since the accident, I knew, except to come here from London.

  He laughed. "I intended to," he answered. "Before Oxford, I saw Italy and parts of France, a little of Morocco, which is as far east as I journeyed. I intended to go further in the future, but there was a slight problem with that plan." He grimaced. "But I had hoped to paint deserts in person at one time."

  "Egypt," I said. The childhood dream of Dean and Sidney had involved fantasies about climbing pyramids and exploring ancient ruins, I remembered.

  "That was the plan," he answered. "Of course, Sidney was gone to who knows where by the time I finished my Oxford studies, so I was facing an adventure for one. I thought about backpacking, with only my paints and easel, and a change of clothes. Mostly to sketch, or paint small canvases. Much of the heart had gone out of the plan by then." He smiled, sadly. I knew the smile for faded dreams well, having seen it in my own mirror a few times before.

  The next canvas was an Oxford one, of a chapel I recognized from Dean's photo album. The last one was a different study of the garden from Dean's big canvas, this one without people, although I recognized the garden statue and the ornamental stone urn of flowers.

  "Can I have this one?" I asked.

  "Did I not say you could take whichever one you liked?" he answered, amused. "Would I say it, then deny precisely the one you chose?"

  "This one might have sentimental value," I pointed out. I knew how much the bigger version, depicting some of his family, meant to him.

  "They all have sentimental value," he answered. "That's the point of giving you one."

  I didn't question that statement again, but lifted the canvas from the back and gently leaned the others in place again. I propped the desert canvas in front, wondering if Dean might like to find a place for it, and remember the dream now that his bitterness was losing ground.

  "Did you ever travel?" Dean asked.

  I laughed. "Not really. I went from one side of the U.S. coast to the other, with some time spent in between," I said. "I visited the desert a couple of times, and I saw part of Mexico once ... and until my time with the author, that was as grand as it got."

  "Where would you like to go, given the world to choose from?" he asked.

  This was a hard question to answer, I discovered. "I've never dreamed of any particular place," I admitted. "I dream of different places at different times, but I never really expected to see them. I guess I was always happy with the fantasy. Happy with whatever came my way in reality."

  "I suppose you travel in your stories the way I did in my canvases — before I entered my realist period," he corrected, with a mocking smile that took away any seriousness for the artist's statement. "There are some people for whom traveling in the mind is more satisfying than the real version."

  "Are you one of those people?"

  "No," he answered, bluntly. "But that's undoubtedly because I loved it when I had the ability, and I missed it after I stopped."

  "Can't miss what you don't know, right?" My turn to joke, and with a touch of Dean's usual wry humor. My ex Ronnie had spent his Easter weekend at a Norwegian castle — I had spent it at the diner where I worked, filling plastic eggs with jellybeans as free gifts for our customers. My exotic visits to National Parks in his company tended to be punctuated by a lot of birdwatching and facts about nesting habits and migration patterns.

  "Still. It's nothing to dismiss," said Dean. "You've seen things that others never will."

  "True," I said. "So maybe that's why I enjoy the reality as it comes. I could say it about this moment right now, seeing paintings that no one else here knows about, except for Sidney and your nurses."

  He scoffed. "The world didn't lose an artistic genius when I was forced to withdraw from it," he answered.

  "I beg to differ. And so does Sidney, or he wouldn't have spent so much time convincing you your art wasn't dead."

  "I think he was trying to convince me that I wasn't," Dean corrected me. "I'm not an idiot, Maisie. I was aware that the desperation to get me to sketch a crocus with my still working finger was never about capturing its inner beauty as only I could."

  I picked at a jagged corner where the canvas was nailed over its board. "Nobody wants to lose a dream, though," I pointed out. "Maybe Sidney thought he could save yours, even if he couldn't save whatever he wanted in the past."

  Sidney had never given any clues as to what that was, precisely, and maybe I was hoping Dean would spill some vital clue to it in his reply. He had grown reflective, and I wasn't sure what he was thinking at this moment.

  "Maybe it's true that we do for one another what we can't do for ourselves," he answered, after drawing a deep breath. "But with Sidney, ulterior motives sometimes exist to surprise us, so never be too sure that you know what his intentions are. He often begins one thing in order to finish another — in my case, that would hardly be for canvases I probably never would've finished if I still had working arms and hands."

  "He wanted you to finish life, so maybe that's enough," I said, since Dean had declared it so just moments ago.

  "Is that all?" Dean's smile had the inscrutability of Sidney's own at this moment. "Can you be sure?"

  I thought he was mocking me a little, in a more bitter fashion than Sidney's humor. Buried in those words, was a fragment of something I didn't quite understand from their past or the present, and Dean knew I would have no means of figuring it out.

  Maybe he sensed that it made me uncomfortable, because he cleared his throat suddenly and changed the subject. "If we are talking of dreams, we might as well talk about your own, since they've clearly gained more ground than anyone else's," he said. "Sidney tells me you've submitted your manuscript at last."

  "I don't expect anything big to come of it," I answered. "Realistically, I'll receive a pile of rejections, a few helpful comments, and figure out what to do afterwards." Helen's email, with its vague wording, was something I kept to myself for now.

  "The first bold step," said Dean. "I might give you permission to use my art for the cover, if you beg me with a sufficiently groveling attitude." A hint of a smile twitched the corners of his lips.

  "Somehow I think landscapes might be a bit too tame for a young adult fantasy adventure," I said. "Do you have a ruined castle I could borrow? Or a bloody battlefield?"

  "I'm afraid I never advanced my career to those heights," he answered. "A pity I didn't think of a career in cover art before my accident, or I might have a nice stash of blood-stained knights or moldy old ancestral homes."

  "You could have painted the art for Alistair Davies' books, and it would have been your work that seized me with its cover," I answered, getting to my feet.

  "That would never have done," he answered. The inscrutable tone was back, a bit darker this time, catching my notice again. I wanted to ask why, but considered whether this had more to do with Dean's losses than he wanted to spe
ak of, and held my tongue.

  "If Alistair isn't your jam, maybe a nice retelling of Tam Lin would be," I answered, trying to keep things light.

  "Is that your next story, I presume?"

  "If I can stay committed to it and put my time to use creatively," I answered. I no longer had the 'shut myself up in my room and write' mentality from my California days, when free time was devoted to my manuscript and not to fun or friends. For all Sidney's help when it came to my book, he also provided a very tempting distraction that was hard for me to ignore.

  "You will," Dean answered, as confidently as Sidney would.

  His finger, the one with the most mobility, lightly touched the corner of the canvas I held. "Do you need a frame?" he asked. "There are several in the box behind those coats.

  "I'll hang it without one," I answered. "I like the bare edge look as well as a frame, because it reminds me that it's a real canvas, not just a pretty print."

  "The next one I give you will suit your artistic style better," he answered, as he moved aside from the closet doorway. "The wood in twilit shadows, possibly."

  "And a nice big raven in one of the trees?" I joked.

  "We'll see if my still working muscles can learn to paint feather strokes first before I make any promises."

  ____________________

  Helen's email was staring me in the face on my tablet computer's screen before I took a deep breath and hit the 'reply' button. I can meet you on Friday afternoon, if that's a convenient time, I typed. Maybe around two? I'll take the early train and try not to be late. Looking forward to hearing your advice and impression on my story. — Maisie.

  I sent it before I could change my mind and become a coward. It only took a second for the period of adjustment to pass. This was the right decision, and I was glad for the chance to face it, no matter what it brought me. While Helen's criticism could cut me more deeply than my old instructor Wallace Scott, I was stronger and more mature than the first time I had faced hard truths and negative opinions about my work. I would definitely survive it, no matter the outcome.