Witches in Flight

The art world really had no idea what to do when the artist they
were trying to honor was still alive.
 
Jennie sat in a quiet corner of the Guggenheim hall exhibiting her work
and decided it was really weird to wander through a crowd of people who mostly
thought you were dead.

She grinned as a lumpen man sat down beside her and
grunted.
 
From Charlie Tosh, that
was an effusive welcome.
 

He glanced her way.
 
“I see you’re still kicking.”
 

She looked around the room, lips twitching.
 
Charlie had been through his own
Guggenheim “retrospective” the previous year—he’d be one of the few who
would truly understand how strange this was.

He shifted his bulk around on the bench.
 
“I hear something in Berkeley’s caught
my great-nephew’s eye.
 
You happen
to know anything about that?”

Charlie wanted to have a conversation?
 
Maybe she
was
dead.
 
Unfortunately, Josh Hennessey wasn’t a topic she really
wanted to discuss.
 
“Well, he’s
just bought a house.”
 

Her companion snorted.
 
“Knowing my nephew, I suspect the ‘something’ in question is young and
pretty.
 
Why is it that men are so
distracted by young and pretty, anyhow?”

“Not you, Charlie.”
 
She patted his knee and gave in to her urge to tweak his eternal
grumpiness.
 
“You’ve always been
good at finding ‘pretty’ in those of us who are old and wrinkly.”

Others might have mistaken his noises for choking—she knew
it as his rare laughter.
 
“That
mean you’re finally going to let me take your portrait?”

She’d been telling him no for twenty-five years.
 
Charlie didn’t take portraits—he
stripped his subjects bare.
 
She’d
been accused of the same, but she worked with an empathetic deftness that usually
had people thanking her in the end.
 
Very few people thanked Charlie.
 
He had little empathy and even less need to be liked.
 
What he had was an unstinting eye for
truth.

He was a genius at finding what people didn’t want seen.

Jennie leaned back against the wall, contemplating the past few
days.
 
Lizard, the rebel poet,
putting “stupid” in its place.
 
Elsie on a trapeze, reaching for freedom—and purpose.
 
Two moments of stupendous bravery and
vulnerability.
 
She knew to
treasure those moments—they came all too infrequently in any life.

Perhaps she was ready for another one of her own.
 
If her students could put their
innermost dreams out into the world, then maybe she could sit for Charlie
Tosh.
 
“When should I come?”

Not by the flicker of an eye did he indicate she’d surprised
him.
 
Fortunately, mind witches had
better tools.
 
He was as
shocked—and as intrigued—as she’d ever felt him.
 
He stared casually down the hall.
 
“Why now?”

He’d find the answer with his lens anyhow—he always
did.
 
But she wasn’t going to make
it easy for him until then.
 
“I
need a new picture for my wall.
 
I
hear you take pretty good ones.”

His choking sounds were back.
 
She’d made Charlie laugh twice in one sitting—that was
the stuff of which miracles were made.
 

He snorted one last time.
 
“I was thinking I might come visit that nephew of mine, anyhow.
 
See that new house of his and whatever
other pretty baubles are lying around.”

It was probably a good thing Lizard wasn’t present to hear
herself called a “bauble.”

Charlie shifted beside her, never quite comfortable in his own
skin, at least while it was perched on a skinny bench.
 
“I’ll bring my camera and we can go for
a little walk.”
 
He scowled.
 
“But if you put any picture of mine in
one of those cute silver frames, I’ll shoot you dead.”

If Charlie Tosh took her picture, it would go up on her wall in
a place of high honor—but she didn’t need to let him know that.
 
She glanced over, eyebrow raised.
 
“What, my family snapshots aren’t good
enough company for you?”
 
They were
pretty illustrious snapshots—she’d taken most of them herself.

He growled.
 
“If
that’s the kind of picture you want, find somebody young and pretty with one of
those newfangled digital monstrosities.”

She grinned, appreciating his curmudgeonly soul as she always
had.
 
“Want to take a tour of the
crowd and introduce me?”
 
She’d lay
a thousand dollars on no, but it was fun to ask.

“What the hell for?”
 
He pulled to his feet, far more graceful than he looked.
 
“Half the place thinks you’re dead, and
the other half thinks you’re a man.
 
Let’s go find some decent whiskey instead.”

She laughed and hooked her arm through his.
 
Retrospectives were highly
overrated.
 
It was the life ahead
of you that mattered.

Lizard stared at Bean, scared down to her bones.
 
His face was doing that scowly, unhappy
thing again, which meant he was going to wail.
 
It was an immutable, unstoppable law.
 
“Cut me some slack, little dude.”
 

His face screwed up into something that might possibly be
interest, so she kept talking.
 
“I’m new at this whole babysitter gig, and your mama just wants to have
a nice, long bath, which she won’t be able to do if you get all loud and
cranky.
 
So work with me, okay?”

Sigh.
 
She was
negotiating with a week-old baby.
 
Yeah, that was going to work.
 
Quickly, she ran through the baby checklist in her head.
 
Fed?
 
Check.
 
Thea had
done the whole nursing thing just before she’d fled for the bathroom with a
look of profound joy on her face.
 
Dry?
 
Check.
 
Which was good, because the whole
diaper-changing-while-avoiding-random-boy-parts-leakage thing was way, way
above her pay grade.

Since that was the end of her very short checklist, she was
hooped.
 
And then Lizard remembered
she now lived in a universe where other people liked to be helpful.

Pulling out her phone, she texted Nell.
 
Aervyn’s mom had five kids—her
baby checklist was probably a mile long.
 
The kid’s not hungry or wet, and Thea needs time to have a bath.
 
What else can I try?

The reply came quickly.
 
Take him for a walk.
 
If
that fails, I’ll send you an experienced nine-year-old :-).

It was totally embarrassing to think that she might need
rescuing by the preteen squad.
 
Tempting, though.
 
Lizard
looked around for anything resembling a stroller.
 
Thea used a sling to carry Bean, but that contraption made
changing a diaper look like child’s play.
 
And Bean might be less than impressed when he discovered that her chest
didn’t conveniently leak food.

Finally she spied something that looked like an English pram,
piled under four hundred pounds of other baby stuff.
 
The neighborhood had been emptying their garages into Thea’s
house, as best as she could tell.
 
There was a freaking two-wheeler in the corner.
 

Gingerly, Lizard extracted the pram and laid Bean down, waiting
for the wail that never came.
 
She
got halfway out the front door before realizing her mortal error.
 
Quickly she backed the pram into the
house and closed the door.
 
“Back
in a minute, little dude—don’t go anywhere.”

Yeesh.
 
That was the
eleventh stupid thing she’d said in the last three minutes.
 
Talking to babies was hard.
 
Lizard flew up the stairs and knocked
on the bathroom door.
 
“Hey, Thea—I’m
taking Bean for a walk, okay?
 
We
won’t go very far.”

“You’re my favorite friend,” came the sleepy, happy response.

Taking that as permission, Lizard raced back to Bean, opening
the front door just as his first protests hit the airwaves.
 
“Hey, don’t do that.
 
We’ll go visit the neighbors and they
can all tell you how cute you are, okay?”
 
And maybe they could even find someone who actually knew something about
babies.