Flickering Hope (3 page)

“S
ades, phone for you.” Dad tossed me the cordless phone. “And hurry up. I’m meeting Helen and Meredith at nine o-clock at the research cabin to hike out to the shack. We’re late.”

I held the phone to my ear. “Hello?” Andrew sounded like he was shouting from the bottom of a cave.

“What?” Since I woke up, nervous thoughts about Andrew had built up like static electricity. Why was he calling now?

His voice came into focus. “Sorry, speaker phone. Look Sadie, I need the day off.”

The static sparked, sharp and quick, like a shock when you touch metal. I tried to keep my voice level. “Dad’s in a hurry. Can we talk when I get there?”

“No, I … I need to work on stuff.” He sounded rushed, not at all like himself.

“I know. That’s what we’re doing, cleaning the cabin.” I had dressed in my oldest jeans and a hoodie with holes in the sleeves.

Dad had already pulled on his coat. “Sades, come on.”

I pressed the phone between my shoulder and my ear and shoved my other arm into my coat. “Andrew, I need to go. I’ll see you in a minute.” I could deal with a little weirdness from him, especially since he would be at the cabin when Dad, Helen, and Meredith returned from their hike. After yesterday and what Helen said, listening in on conversations was probably the only way Andrew and I would get an update on the family in the wood.

“No, Sadie. Listen. You can’t come today.”

I stopped, letting my coat dangle off my shoulder. His words felt like a slap across the cheek. I
couldn’t
come?

“Sadie—” Andrew said.

Weirdness was one thing, but going to the cabin after Andrew told me I couldn’t was impossible. How could I face him now and act anything like normal?

I forced my voice to be light and said, “Sure. No problem. I need to …” I grasped for something, anything I needed to do. “… go to the library anyway.”

“Sadie—” Dad said.

I hung up before Andrew wasted breath on a fake apology.

“Sadie?” Dad tossed me my boots. “Time to go.”

I ran upstairs to grab my sketchbook. The library? Now I
had to go, because otherwise I’d sit around home, acting as though I had no life unless I was with Andrew.

The entire drive to town, Dad lectured me about planning ahead for trips to the library and grumbled about being late for the hike with Meredith. His words were background noise compared to the mental tirade I carried on with Andrew.
I couldn’t come out to the cabin?
After he had forced me to explain what happened in the woods, now he blamed me for Helen’s reaction? Okay, everything’s probably fine, but what’s he hiding in his room anyway?

Sunlight reflected off the snow and streamed through the library’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Light pooled on the burgundy carpet. Comfortable clumps of book-lined shelves created nooks and corners for armchairs with footstools, reading lamps, and end tables. Our high-tech library back in California was a library from a different universe. Here, on ordinary days, as soon as I walked in the door I wanted to bury my nose in a book. Today, though, I wondered if I’d be able to sit at all, with Helen, Meredith, and Dad on their way out to the shack, Patch totally unprotected in her den, and God knows what was up with Andrew.

I checked the clock. Nine fifteen, and Dad wasn’t picking me up until one thirty. I took out my sketchbook. What would I draw if I opened to a blank page? The girl again, glaring at me because I’d broken my promise? Andrew frowning over the dishes? Or even worse, the girl’s dad visiting Patch’s den? Pips was right. I needed art books. I slung my backpack onto the floor and climbed onto one of three
tall stools next to the catalog computers. The cursor flashed innocently, a silent question.
What would you like to find, Sadie?

I wanted what I couldn’t have. Vivian. My ex-art teacher, ever present, yet completely missing from my life. Every once in a while, I’d turn a corner and wham—her face appeared in my mind. The disappointed expression on her face at the trial where I’d testified against her son, Peter. Her intense gaze when she asked me to speak to Peter first, listen to his story, before I turned him in for shooting Big Murphy outside of hunting season. Sometimes I envisioned her happier, the way she smiled over my sketchbook after I completed a drawing, or when she lifted freshly baked cookies from the oven.

The cursor’s question became louder with each blink. What did I want? What book could possibly make up for not having a teacher?

Vivian had shown me the painting
Starry Night,
and I’d liked the colors and the shapes, but mostly the feeling. Van Gogh. I typed his name, and the screen filled with titles.

I scrolled back to the first title.
Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night. Starry Night
filled the cover. Sunflowers and landscapes in yellows and reds and greens on the other covers didn’t appeal to me. I wasn’t sure why,
but the swirling blues and purples with the bright yellow starlight whispered of mystery.

I jotted the book’s reference number on a slip of paper and wandered up and down rows of shelves. There were at least fifty art books. I pulled a few down,
The Art Book
and
50 Artists You Should Know,
and of course, the Van Gogh. I carried the pile to a nearby armchair.

Landscape after landscape filled
The Art Book,
including some of Van Gogh’s paintings of flowers. Most, including Van Gogh’s flowers, were too yellow, too finished. Creepy, lifeless eyes stared back at me from many of the portraits. I opened
50 Artists You Should Know.
More paintings I didn’t love. I swallowed back guilt. Obviously someone smart thought these images were masterpieces. What was my problem? I flipped through the book again, more slowly now, trying to really look at the pictures. Picture after picture after picture. Frustrated, I closed the book and returned to
Starry Night.
The difference startled me. My eyes slipped along the curve of the blue toward the crescent moon and then tumbled from star to star down into the quiet town. Questions popped up, unexpected. Who slept here? What went on in the houses with lit windows? An idea flickered at the edge of my mind, but I couldn’t put it into words. I opened
The Art Book
again to one of the first images,
The Nubian Giraffe.

In the picture, a giraffe stood near two Arab keepers and a gentleman in a suit. The giraffe’s head hovered above the three men who were deep in conversation. If I thought about
it, I could list all sorts of questions about this painting. And yet, questions didn’t spring to mind naturally.

Was this the difference?
Starry Night
invited me to wonder, but many of the other pictures did not. Paintings—captured still moments — couldn’t help but feel finished. And yet, the way my eyes moved around
Starry Night
made me feel as though time could pass, as though my own ideas and thoughts about the scene mattered, making the picture more than just a picture.

Looking at books was nothing like going to Vivian’s house. Vivian would ask me questions, give me an assignment. What was my assignment now? Vivian would tell me to look carefully. To draw what I saw. Would drawing
Starry Night
teach me something?

I slid my colored pencils out of my bag, set the Van Gogh book on the end table, and tried to draw there in my sketchbook. My pencils rolled off the little table, and my elbows bumped into the armrests. After struggling for a few minutes, I packed everything up and headed for the larger table at the back of the library.

I rounded the last shelf and stopped. The last person I expected sat at the end of the long table. Frankie.

N
ot the Frankie who had left two weeks ago, though. At first, I couldn’t pinpoint the exact difference. Her white blond hair was pulled back in her usual ponytail, but she clearly had a new, layered haircut. Strands fell around her chin, framing her face, which was different, too. Her eyebrows were thinner, more arched. Her eyelashes were darker, and small crystals sparkled like stars in her newly pierced ears. Her fingernails weren’t cherry red with chipped edges. Instead of being painted, now they shone. Frankie had always been pretty, but now she looked … … what was the word? Finished? Like a sketch that had been detailed into a final drawing.

Strangest of all, her expression was wrong. When she looked up at me, the edge of her mouth tilted up slightly before she returned to her drawing. No sharp insult. No
fierce glare. What did that odd expression — could you call it a smile—mean? And why, after being gone for so long, was she sitting in the library with her math book?

I had two options: sit down and draw or leave. For reasons I couldn’t understand, leaving seemed wrong. Mean, somehow. Not that Frankie had wanted me anywhere near before. But something about her drooping shoulders made me feel that walking away would be cruel.

So I sat down, took out my pencils, and tried to draw.

But I couldn’t. Not with Frankie at the end of the table — probably watching and dreaming up more insults about me existing on the planet. After three false starts, I finally sketched the shape of the swirls in the sky, the curve of the moon. Every once in a while, I looked up at Frankie. She kept her eyes down, black ink covering her page. Her image wasn’t really a drawing, more a random collection of lines. I’d never seen Frankie draw. I’d never seen Frankie without a group of friends nearby.

I shouldn’t stare.

I forced my attention back to my drawing, to the big, blue-black shape in
Starry Night
— the mountain or bush or what was it? I sketched the outline and started shading it in.

“Do you understand this order of operations thing?”

Frankie had turned to a fresh page in her notebook and written an equation at the top. I blinked at her, hearing her words repeat two or three times in my mind before I comprehended what she had asked. She had not insulted me. She had asked me a question. About math.

“I’m interrupting you.” She waved her hand in the air, as though she was batting her question away, out of the space between us.

I turned back to my drawing. What should I do? I was no math whiz myself. But I had finally, after hours of struggling, figured out the order of operations. Frankie made an x through her first attempt and wrote the equation again. I slid down the bench until I sat across from her.

After watching Frankie write and erase numbers for a while, I finally gathered the courage to say, “The part that confused me was doing the multiplication and division first, and then the addition and subtraction.”

“You don’t have to help me, Sadie.”

There. The sharp tone I expected from Frankie. But still, no sarcasm, no evil glare. And really, did I wish the torture of learning the order of operations on anyone—even Frankie?

“I don’t mind.”

She looked up and smiled that tiny almost smile again.

“Truly?”

She tore a page out of her notebook and passed it over. I wrote the equation.

“First do everything in the parenthesis. You already had that. And then any multiplication or division, left to right. Last, do the addition or subtraction.” I handed the page back.

Instead of looking at the numbers, she studied me. “What are you drawing?”

I shrugged.
“Starry Night.
Van Gogh.”

“Do you still take art lessons?”

At first I wondered how she knew these things, but then I remembered my presentation at school, in October, with all my drawings. I must have said something then. I wouldn’t have thought Frankie would remember anything about me, unless it was fuel for a new insult.

“No.”

“I think Vivian Harris should come back to our classroom. To do more art with us, I mean. All we ever do is math and science and English and social studies. And PE. Running. My favorite.” Her sarcasm was back.

“Mine too.”

I was smiling at Frankie. Frankie, who had hated me before she even met me because of my dad’s job. Frankie, whose dad, at this very moment, was plotting to shoot Patch as she slept in her den, and in a flash all my worries flooded back. I checked the clock. Noon. Dad, Helen, and Meredith were probably with the family in the woods right now, unless they had already left.

I slid back to my seat and quickly packed up my pencils and notebook. “I’ll see you around.”

“See ya.” Frankie went back to her math.

At the main desk, I checked out the Van Gogh, and the librarian convinced me to borrow a book she’d just bought,
Masters of Deception.
Its pages revealed illusion after optical illusion, arches that turned out to be boats on a sea, a photograph of a heap of bottles and shakers that cast the shadow of a woman with an umbrella.

I stood and flipped through the astonishing images, but even they couldn’t hold my attention. Dad wouldn’t be here
for another hour and a half, but my legs were jumpy and I had to get some fresh air. After I packed up my bag and bundled up, I went outside. Even in my coat, hat, and boots, the fifteen-degree air wouldn’t allow me to take the walk I needed so badly. But after my awkward conversation with Frankie, I couldn’t go back into the library. Time for hot chocolate at Black Bear Java.