No materials littered any surfaces: no tubes of paint, no brushes, no palette with freshly mixed colors. The smells of oil and turpentine hung faintly in the air like ghosts.
It was strange, being here. There was a long worktable set up along one wall, with tools hung on a pegboard. I had set up my own studio in much the same way, I realized with a start. Had I copied this from her? I must have without realizing it. She didn’t have the large antique printing press I did, and our tools were different, but so much was the same, including sketches tacked up on the walls, just as I did. I moved in for a closer look. They were anatomical drawings: close-ups of hands with the skin pulled back, tendons and bones carefully rendered and labeled. There were several sketches of birds. I looked more closely. Blue jays, all of them.
Eee-eee-eee, cried my mother’s voice in my mind, a near perfect rendition of the screech of the bird itself.
I turned away from the drawings.
A wooden easel was set up in the center of the room with a canvas on it. Someone—my mother? Paul maybe?—had covered it with a sheet. I stepped over to it, gently lifted the sheet to take a peek at whatever painting my mother had last been working on.
It was me.
A younger version of me. Me at eight years old, uncombed hair pinned back with plastic barrettes shaped like butterflies, my face utterly devoid of expression. And cupped gently in my hands was a blue jay with a broken wing that hung at an unnatural angle.
Eee-eee-eee.
TWENTY-NINE
IDROPPED THE SHEET BACKdown, covering my child-self like I was putting a ghost costume back on.
I backed out of the studio on shaky legs and shut the door a little too tightly. If only I could have locked it closed forever.
Where have you been, Ali Alligator? What took you so long to come home?
Eee-eee-eee.
I turned, sure that I wasn’t alone. That I was being watched.
But of course it was just me in the empty house.
Who’s there?
Just me, Mother, I answered wordlessly.Still just me.
Being in this house was messing with my head big-time. I needed to leave. Get the hell out before something in me cracked that I wouldn’t be able to fix.
Do a quick walk-through and get out, I told myself.Make sure there are no leaks, no open windows, no plants to water upstairs.
I headed up the wide oak steps that led to the bedrooms on the second floor. The house seemed to hold its breath, waiting to see what I was going to do next.
I opened the closed door to Ben’s old bedroom. The shades were drawn, the bed made with a neat blue bedspread. One of Ben’s model airplanes was on the desk, alongside a stack of his books. No plants. No leaks. Nothing that needed fixing or tending to. I closed the door and headed down the hall.
I paused at the entrance to my own childhood bedroom.
One look, I told myself.
Surely there was nothing there.
She’d probably gotten rid of everything (maybe even burned it in a fire in the yard), turned the room into a guest room, or storage.
But when I pushed open the door, my heart nearly stopped. I blinked. And just like that, I was twelve years old again, about to leave home for boarding school in Connecticut.
The room was just as I’d left it.
A strange museum to my past self.
The single bed was covered with the old red-and-white-checkered quilt I’d slept under throughout my childhood—something made by my grandmother, a woman I’d never met. On the simple pine desk was a jar of pencils I’d sharpened a lifetime ago, a desk lamp coated in a thin layer of dust, a dictionary lying open beside it. I walked over and looked down at the two open pages, scanning the words there, wondering what the young me might have been looking for:pennyweight, pensive, pentacle, penumbra.
On the shelves were the books on drawing and art that my mother bought me for each birthday and Christmas, a plastic Breyer horse and rider. Chestnut, I had named the horse.
