Waves of Light (7 page)

I
stayed in bed until late the next morning, avoiding the world.

Dad knocked and called through the bedroom door. “Going to rehearsal today, Sadie?”

“No,” I mumbled into the pillows.

“Call if you need anything, then. I need to go to the DNR, and tonight I’ll bring home chow mein. Sound good?”

“Okay.” I waved him off.

Finally, I dragged myself to the phone to call Penny. I think she read between the lines when I said I wanted to stay home to work on my sketches. I just wasn’t up for more Annabelle drama today. I tried to convince myself I was staying home for Frankie, which was partly true. No matter what was going on with Annabelle, with Vivian’s house, with Mom, I couldn’t ignore the scavenger hunt. Not when
Frankie was counting on me. I couldn’t call her yet, not feeling like this. But I could look for the next object: Find and draw an object that catches your eye because it’s an unusual color.

The only colorful things I could think of were fish. But Vivian’s fish weren’t unusually colored, and a picture of a broken fish would be the worst possible way to tell Frankie about the flash flood. I threw on jeans and a T-shirt, gathered my sketchbook and pencils, and as an afterthought slid Penny’s journal into my backpack too. Vivian and I had designed the scavenger hunt while thinking about New York. So I hadn’t planned what to draw here in Owl Creek. For one thing, I hadn’t wanted to give myself an unfair advantage. But now I couldn’t think of even one thing that was an unusual color. No lime green cars or pink hair in Owl Creek. Well, there was Penny’s hair, but she didn’t count. Everyone expected her hair to be some odd color or other.

“What do you say, Hig? Think we can find something unusually colored in the forest?”

Higgins’ ears perked up at the word
forest
. He loved to chase squirrels and sniff and mark everything. I’d stopped leashing him during our walks in the woods because he practically pulled my arm out of the socket when he charged off into the wild. And anyway, he always came back. Bears stayed far away from us since Higgins hadn’t learned the art of stealth, so I wasn’t worried about having a wild encounter today.

I grabbed my coat and a few treats, and slung my backpack over my shoulder.

The morning was cold and still, as though the sky, the trees, and even the birds were all holding their breath, waiting for something. Higgins broke through the quiet like a motorboat cuts through glassy water, ruffling the bushes and filling the air with joyful barks. He’d be a terrible hunter, and I liked him that way.

Now that it was spring, Dad had applied for a new hunting license, and he’d started asking around for hunting buddies. He wanted to fit in with the hunters, to bridge the gap so he wouldn’t seem so one-sided in his views about the bears. But everyone knew he wouldn’t shoot a bear, so I didn’t see what difference it made. Anyway, I was pretty sure we’d be moving soon. His job was just follow-up paperwork now. All of the community meetings were finished, and the decisions had been made. I hadn’t expected to love Owl Creek and its residents so much. When we moved back to California, I’d miss Andrew and Ruth. But who knew if they’d miss me? They’d be hanging out with Annabelle. Perfect Annabelle.

I kicked a rock and it bounced right past Higgins. He tilted his head at me with droopy ears and tail.

“Sorry, Hig.” I knelt down and scratched his ears.

Dampness from the mossy forest floor soaked into the knee of my jeans.

“I don’t see anything unusually colored. Just regular bushes and flowers and trees.”

Down here, the forest looked different. Flowers of every color bloomed: yellow, white, pink, even blue; but still, none qualified as unusually colored.

Off to my left, something crashed through the bushes, a large animal moving fast. I wasn’t afraid of the bears, but I didn’t want to be overrun by one — particularly not with Higgins here. I grabbed his collar and stayed as still as I could without letting go. I had seen mama bears with their cubs, and even though lots of people said they’d act protective, I’d learned that like all black bears, mama bears avoided confrontation. The most aggressive action I’d ever seen was when Patch had huffed at Andrew and stomped her front paws, blustering, so he would back away from her cub. But Higgins wasn’t a human, so I couldn’t explain bluster to him. Who knew what he would do if a bear huffed and stomped at him?

And then I saw them. July, followed by two cubs, one a deep black, and one pure white. My breath caught in my throat and I froze. A spirit bear. Helen said she’d never seen one in the wild. Last I’d heard, no one had seen July and her cubs yet this season, so they must have just come out of their den. We must have been upwind of the bears, because as they passed July and her cubs didn’t notice us.

Even Higgy seemed to realize this bear was special. He sat at attention, ears pricked up, but didn’t bark. Just as the bears were almost out of sight, the white one stopped and turned. For a long moment, I looked straight into its eyes, and it looked deep into mine. My heart raced and goose bumps shivered across my arms. This bear was more than just a bear. A sign … the impossible standing right in front of me. After the cub followed July into the trees, I waited
until I couldn’t hear a sound before dropping to my knees to cradle Higgins’ face in my hands.

“Did you see that, Hig?”

He stared back, his eyes deep and clear.

I looked around. We couldn’t be the only two in the world who saw the bear cub pass by. But the forest was empty. Thunder rumbled overhead, reminding me of Penny’s story in my backpack.

“Well, I found my unusually colored something,” I told Higgins. “Now we’d better run.”

I let go of his collar and we sprinted toward home. As I ran, I felt my story about the spirit cub mixing together with Penny’s story about the summer storm. Higgins and I were drenched when we splashed into the yard. He shook the water off as we reached the porch, soaking me yet again before we went inside. I took my backpack to the bathroom, toweled off my hair, and sat on the edge of the tub, not wanting to wait another second to read Penny’s journal. Somehow, I had to know what she’d written.

The story was strange and sad. The messenger Andrew had described was cruel. He forced the girl to dance and sing daily, telling her that one day she’d be good enough to perform for the king. Meanwhile, the girl tried and tried and tried, only to fall short every time. As hopelessness set in, the girl decided she’d never be good enough. She ran away from the messenger, away from her dream, and stumbled into a town where the local bakery shop owner took her in and gave her a job in his kitchen.

While she baked, she began to dance and sing once again — but for herself this time. She wasn’t even thinking about performing publicly anymore. The townspeople would stop in the bakery to watch her. Yet the girl went about her work, refusing to perform for the customers. She believed she wasn’t good enough to dance and sing for the king. And if she couldn’t have her dream, then she didn’t want to perform for anyone’s enjoyment.

When the king showed up at the end of the story, he explained to the girl that he’d watched her dance and sing since she was a tiny child, and no amount of skill or ability made the slightest difference to him.

He’d been watching her from afar, no matter how lonely she’d felt, no matter how often she’d failed. He cared about her so much, he’d wanted her to learn to do what she loved in her own way, not to please him or anyone else.

Tears splashed onto the page as I read the story again. The words were scrawled and sometimes misspelled, as though they had tumbled out of Penny faster than she could think. Her story wasn’t perfect or smooth, but I could feel her there in every sentence. The same way I could feel myself in one of my drawings. I could see why she’d wanted me to read the story from her journal, to feel the speed at which her hand had scrawled the words across the page. A rush of energy, like when you’re lost and panicking and you finally see the way out. Or you at least have hope that you’ll find a way out, like the way I’d felt just now when I saw the spirit cub.

I took Penny’s journal back to my room and sat in the
window seat. Higgins jumped onto my lap and curled up. As I watched the trees and scratched Higgins’s ears, I wondered what, exactly, I should do now. I felt … different. Ideas floated into my mind — slowly, disjointed, forming a vague plan. I’d draw the cub for Frankie and email it to her. I’d try to stop lashing out at everyone. Maybe tomorrow I’d go see Vivian.

“What do you say, Hig?” As I spoke, he looked up at me, ears cocked. “Time to draw?”

He jumped off the seat, tail wagging.

“Okay. Maybe a treat first.”

As I followed Higgins downstairs, I planned my drawing and tried to block out the lingering worry about Annabelle, Andrew, and Sunday’s dinner.

S
o what do you think of my drawing studio?” Vivian gestured at her cloth-draped living room.

She had promised not to paint the walls, but no one said anything about hanging fabric. Still, the bright yellow, red, and aquamarine didn’t cheer me up. They were sad echoes of what she used to have.

Vivian went to her canvas and picked up her still-wet paintbrush. “I’ve missed you, Sadie.”

I watched as she rounded out the corners of a large red circle in the middle of her canvas. “How can you stand it — being out here all alone, not having your house, not having anything?”

“Being alone helped, to tell you the truth. I felt like a turtle that needed to hide in my shell while I got used to the idea of not having the house anymore.” She rinsed her brush and dipped it into the black paint.

“But how can you get used to the idea of losing all of that art?”

She stopped and looked at me. “It wasn’t the art that hurt, Sadie. I can make new art. The memories are what I can’t bear to lose.”

It was a punch to my stomach. Yes. Vivian and her husband had lived in that house for a long time before he died. Every room would have held memories. The way you can find a forgotten ornament from last Christmas and how the smell of cinnamon makes you feel like you’re back in your pajamas opening presents around the tree.

“So you’re just accepting that the house is gone?”

“The house is gone, Sadie, whether I accept it or not. Right now, I feel particularly angry about losing something bigger than a house. My life, I guess.”

“You don’t seem angry.”

“Because I’m painting.” Vivian removed a drop cloth from a nearby easel, revealing a red canvas with jagged black slashes across it.

The next drop cloth covered a completely black canvas with deep blue slashes. On they went, canvas after canvas, each with angles and colors that screamed, “Why? Why? Why?”

“This helps you?” I asked.

“If I didn’t paint it out, I’d explode.”

Explode
was the perfect word. All the calm from yesterday — after seeing the cub and reading Penny’s story — had evaporated the minute I’d walked into Vivian’s apartment. Anger billowed
like storm clouds inside of me, making me wonder if I might just explode. Right here. In Vivian’s fabric-strewn living room. The locked box that I’d drawn at the bottom of the ocean floated into my mind as I looked at the blank canvas Vivian had set out for me. The mess inside the box rattled around, trying to get free, but I knew I couldn’t handle any more than I had to deal with already.

You don’t have to open it, not now. It’s enough to know it’s there
.

The thought slipped into my mind like smoke seeping under a door, surprising me with its clarity. I hadn’t been willing to draw or even talk to God these last few days. I hadn’t considered that he might still be close by, watching, caring about what was going on. I’d convinced myself he didn’t care, actually. Now, after seeing the spirit bear yesterday and having this thought arrive, uninvited, I wasn’t so sure.

I realized I was staring, unseeing, at Vivian’s canvas. “You always tell me to draw what I see. These are just lines and colors.”

“These are the images I see in my head,” Vivian said. “So instead of letting them jab me, I’m throwing them out onto the page.”

“And then they’re gone?”

“No. But when you can see something, it’s much less intimidating than when you feel something you can’t define.” She handed me brushes and pointed to a canvas. “That one’s yours. Make anything you like.”

I hadn’t worked with brushes and paint since second grade. Was I supposed to copy Vivian, just lay down a bright color and then start flinging paint around?

“This kind of painting isn’t about planning or thinking, Sadie.” Sometimes it was like Vivian could read my mind. “Just let yourself go.”

I took a can of aqua paint over to the canvas. The deep-sea color stood out against my paintbrush’s black bristles. Thinking of my locked box rattling around, I suddenly wanted to paint waves — crashing and foaming and tearing. My hand moved on its own, splashing paint in waves and swirls across the canvas. Over and over I dipped my brush, letting the strokes fill the canvas with color. They didn’t look exactly like waves, but they moved around the page, up and over one another.

At the bottom of the canvas, I’d left a calm spot in the middle. I found a smaller brush and some black paint. Instead of drawing the box and key again, I formed the silhouette of a person kneeling with her hands over her head, trying to protect herself from the stormy sea. I stepped back. Foam. The waves needed white water. A brush wouldn’t do it, so I used one of Vivian’s paint sponges. I sponged white paint in foamy masses at the edges of the waves, working the paint until the white and blue smeared together in some places. When I finally stepped back to look, Vivian joined me.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the kind of painting I’m talking about.” She pointed to the stack of canvases. “Want to try another?”

Anyone else would have asked about the figure, about the waves, about what was going on with me. Vivian knew the last thing I needed to do right now was to talk. Instead, I needed to paint all of the things I couldn’t see — all of the mess that foamed up inside of me — and figure out if I could find a way through it all.

I rinsed out my brush and set a new canvas on the easel. This time, I started with black and roughly outlined a girl on a swing, her legs extended. That day on the swings with Frankie, I’d wanted to draw the air around me, the way I’d felt in that moment — totally lost in happiness. With a set of brushes and multiple colors of bright paint, I shaped thick streaks of color in swirling strokes around the girl, trying to make the colors twist into one another the way wind moves in unpredictable fits and starts. I didn’t want the colors to mix and become muddy, so I kept rinsing my brushes, using thick streaks of color instead of small amounts of paint. The texture of the paint, glossy on the canvas, gave the air that tangible feeling I’d wanted to show but hadn’t been able to picture in my mind. Painting this way, not thinking first, gave me the same feeling as drawing in my journal. I missed that open, free feeling. I was listening instead of working hard.

Maybe I’d been too quick to stop drawing at night. To block out what had been so important to me. And blocking out God didn’t seem to work anyway, since he slipped words into my mind when I least expected them.

I stepped back from my canvas, almost breathless from the speed at which I’d been painting.

Vivian stopped painting too and looked at me.

“I saw a spirit bear,” I said.

Her eyes went wide. “In the forest?”

“One of July’s cubs,” I said. “It stopped and looked at me, as though it wanted to tell me something.”

“The legend says they were meant to bring hope, new possibilities.”

“I used it for my object of an unusual color. For Frankie.”

Vivian smiled. “Perfect. She needs hopeful reminders.”

She studied my latest painting. “You’ve got it. That’s the swing from our drive to New York, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Vivian was smiling, the first real smile I’d seen from her since we found her house under a thick layer of mud. “I should have given you paint sooner. Looks like you’ve found your medium.”

Yes. The image was more vivid than what I’d seen in my mind, unlike any of my drawings to this point. I’d only come close to drawing what I wanted, never gone past my hopes.

I grinned at Vivian. “Yeah. I could get used to paint.”

“And cookies?” she asked.

“Definitely cookies.” I followed her into the kitchen. As I went, the thought crystallized. Anger wasn’t getting me anywhere. Vivian was better because she was doing something. I could do that too. I’d work on set pieces and help wherever I was needed. If I just kept pretending I was all right, then eventually I’d convince myself I actually was all right. The
plan would work. It had to because I didn’t think I could sit in the middle of this stormy sea for even a second longer without drowning.