Flickering Hope (8 page)

P
ieces of the map now piled up on my desk. Each origami figure had pulled open to reveal yet another three inch square section. In the early morning light, I moved the pieces around, matching one end to another. Three pieces of a path or a road matched from one piece to another, but I wasn’t sure about the rest.

A white star had been painted onto drawer ten. I pulled it open and took out the origami bird inside. None of the other origami shapes had been as intricate as this, and as with the first star, I really didn’t want to pull it open. I took the bird to the bathroom and let her watch me brush my teeth and wash my face.

“You ready to do this thing?” I asked her after I’d done every last get-ready task.

I pulled her tail up and away, and smoothed the paper
open. This time, there was no map. Instead, the paper held scrawled instructions.
Go to your favorite place, high above the snow. Look with far-reaching eyes, and you’ll find what you need.

A treasure hunt. I really wanted to go right now, but since I had to face Vivian today, I decided to save the clue for afterward. A needed reward.

After school, Dad drove me to Vivian’s house. “I can’t wait for more than half an hour, Sades. I need to get back to work.”

“Okay. I don’t think this will take long.”

“You’re sure she’s here?”

No. But I hadn’t been able to bring myself to call ahead. “I’ll hurry.”

Snow fell in huge flakes today, frosting my eyebrows and running tear-like down my cheeks. No one had bothered to clear the snow from Vivian’s front steps, which made sense, since Peter had left town after the trial. I hesitated in front of the door, the echoes of Peter and Vivian and my laughter over drawings and hot cocoa and stories loud in my ears. I didn’t want to go inside, didn’t want to see how different everything was now.

Still, I forced myself to ring the doorbell. Almost immediately, her footsteps sounded down the front hall, the quick, purposeful rhythm I had learned to listen for unconsciously as I sat at the drawing table. Vivian always knew exactly how long to let me draw. Just when I began to doubt the shapes on my page, I heard those footsteps. Vivian would bustle in with a steaming cup of tea or a plate of fresh strawberries and ask a question that first made me want to throw my pencils against the wall. But then, as I struggled to find an answer, the fog would lift, and I would see the next few steps of my way clearly. Everything had been fog since I’d last been to Vivian’s house. At least as far as drawing was concerned. Maybe as far as everything was concerned. But you couldn’t spend your life counting on someone else to lift your fog, particularly when that person might let you down in the end.

Even though I wasn’t ready, would never be ready, the door opened.

Vivian wore her red apron, splattered with dried paint and dusted with flour, over her usual uniform, jeans and a long sleeve shirt, with her green and yellow polka-dotted socks. The sweet smell of peanut butter cookies baking spilled out onto the snow. Words caught in my throat. Vivian still baked. She still wore polka-dotted socks. She was still Vivian, even though so much had changed.

“Sadie,” she said, not quite covering the surprise in her voice. “Is your dad waiting in the Jeep? He can come in.” She grabbed her coat. “Here, you come inside and I’ll go …”

“No.” The word burst out of me, too loud.

She stopped, as though my shout had paralyzed her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just have something quick to ask you. He doesn’t mind waiting.”

She frowned out toward the Jeep. Then, she nodded and hung the coat back on the hook. “Come in out of the cold, then, Sadie. No need for us to freeze while we talk.”

Either Vivian didn’t believe in decorating for Christmas, or she hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Everything was as I remembered. The floor-to-ceiling fish tank divided the hall from the living room, the orange and blue fish polka dots against the red wall on the other side of the tank.

“You have perfect timing. The cookies are almost done.” Vivian led me down the hall into the kitchen.

I sat at the tall counter as she took the baking trays out of the oven.

“I’ve thought about you often, Sadie,” Vivian continued, when I didn’t speak. “How is the drawing?”

If only I could swallow the lump in my throat, I could ask about the kiln and leave.

Vivian worked a spatula under each cookie and set them on a baking rack to cool. She put the last two on plates. “One for you and one for me.”

I took the plate she held out and stared at the cookie, which swum under my suddenly watery eyes. No. I would not cry.

“There’s a lot to say.” Vivian said. “You sure we shouldn’t invite your dad inside?”

A tear rolled down my cheek before I could stop it. “No. I need to go. I just …”

“Wait here.” Vivian left the plate and walked down the hall to her art studio.

I swiped angrily at my eyes. Here, with Vivian handing me cookies, looking so ordinary in her red apron, I could almost forget how strange
everything had become between us. I wanted to go back, back before I’d found out about Peter. Back to when Vivian’s house had been my one escape from the mess of the rest of my life.

Vivian returned with a black spiral bound notebook and sat on the stool next to me.

“After the trial, my sketchbook started to change,” she said. “At first I didn’t want to draw at all. I kept seeing the eyes you drew in your sketchbook, your dad’s eyes, over and over. I didn’t want to draw for practice, and I didn’t want to plan new pieces. I wanted to draw Peter. I wanted to draw him until I didn’t only see what I wanted to see, but until I really saw him.”

She opened her sketchbook and turned page after page. “I used photos from when he was a little boy, wrote about what I remembered.”

Sketchy drawings intermixed with pages of writing, some pages watercolored in intense Vivian colors — mandarin orange, aquamarine, with Peter, mud-streaked and grinning, Peter pouting into an almost empty Halloween bucket, Peter, eyes wide, opening a Christmas present.

“When I built up my courage, I started drawing him as he is now.” She turned the page, showing adult Peter at the breakfast table, head in hands. Adult Peter, ax over his shoulder, heading out to cut firewood. Adult Peter looking out the window, a desperate look on his face.

I knew Vivian was trying to tell me something, saying something without saying it. I couldn’t say what I needed to say either. How could
I put into words how disappointed I had been, all the reasons things would never be the same as they had been?

I swallowed hard. “I haven’t been drawing much. I’ve been trying …”

Without understanding why, I took out my own sketchbook. Talking to Vivian in pictures was simpler than finding the right words. I flipped through my
Starry Night
pictures, through my magical realism pictures, all the false starts for Pips’s present.

“Who is this artist you’re copying?” Vivian turned page after page. “Such intriguing perspective. I can see why you like her work.”

“His name is Ron Gonsalves. You’d think, with his pictures to copy, my pictures wouldn’t come out so all wrong.”

“How are they wrong?” Vivian asked.

“The perspective. The colors. The light. Sometimes even the shapes are wrong.”

“First of all, you’re asking something very complex of yourself, Sadie. Perspective is distorted in these images. Perspective, even when it is true to life, is difficult. But also, you’re trying so hard to get it right. Your lines are very tight and controlled here. Copying other artists is a fantastic way to learn, to push your skills, but don’t forget, skill with a pencil isn’t the only important thing. In our last session, you had started to think about the artist’s first essential question. Did you ever figure out what it was?”

I thought back to the day I’d run out of Vivian’s art studio, too upset to finish my lesson after discovering the truth about Peter. That day, we’d looked at Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
and a few other paintings. Up to that point, Vivian had encouraged me to draw only what I saw, and the unrealistic paintings contradicted everything I had learned. I stared down at Vivian’s sketchbook. Each image, though different, had a Vivian quality. Her thick strokes faded at the edges, loosely drawn, not painstaking like some
of my drawings. All her shapes had a similar rounded-edge feel, and shading played a big part in every scene.

I ran my finger along my sketchbook’s spiral spine. “Something about style? The way an artist draws that makes them different, I guess?”

Vivian smiled, and I figured I had at least come close. I also knew she wouldn’t ever tell me straight out. She preferred I discover answers myself, and to be honest, I preferred that, too.

I retraced the line of fall trees in my drawing, both treetops for a lower street and leaves scattered on a higher street. Two things at once. The way I was two things now, a girl who wanted nothing but to leave and who also wanted to hear every last thing Vivian would tell me. A girl who believed that maybe Vivian could lift my fog once more and help me move forward.

“We’re making ornaments, for youth group. We want to make them out of glass, but we need to fire them in a kiln.”

Vivian smiled. “My kiln is at your service.”

“There are a lot of us. Ruth, Andrew, and these other two kids, Georgia and Nick. We’d have to come here to lay out the ornaments.”

“Yes, the ornaments wouldn’t travel well before they are fired. A little party gives me a chance to try a new cookie recipe. Peanut butter has become boring.”

My cookie still cooled on my plate. I took a bite, letting the warm, slightly doughy middle melt on my tongue. Leave it to Vivian to make peanut butter cookies in the middle of December, when everyone else busily made Christmas cookies.

“Peanut butter is okay with me.”

“I’m here every afternoon next week. Figure out what day works for everyone and let me know. I’ll have to fire the kiln once before you come, so give me at least a day’s notice. We have to watch the glass carefully when we fire it, so plan to stay for at least four hours after we put the pieces in. Maybe we can order takeout. Sound okay?”

With everyone else here, Vivian and I couldn’t get into any deep conversations, so I should be all right.

“Thank you.” I finished my cookie and put my sketchbook away.

“Take your dad a cookie.” Vivian handed me two cookies on a napkin. “And another for you. For the road.”

W
hen Dad dropped me off at home, my head was full of Vivian’s notebook, which brimmed with messy sketches, scrawled notes, a record of her life from the trial until now, not only daily events, but her thoughts and memories too, all mixed up together, like real life.

After looking at Vivian’s notebook my fingers itched to draw, really draw, not just copy art from books. But curiosity could only be held off for so long. I was so impatient to know where the Advent calendar clues led, I didn’t bother taking off my coat or boots.

I scratched Higgins’s ears and called hello to Mom, who sat with her laptop in her favorite armchair in the living room, and then I hurried up to my room and grabbed the clue, taking my sketchbook too.
My favorite place high above the snow
could only describe one spot. At the end of our second floor hallway, a spiral staircase rose up to a trap door on the ceiling, which opened
onto a round porch at the top of our house. I hadn’t been up there since the first snowfall.

Pips kept insisting she hadn’t made the calendar, and I was starting to wonder. Of course, if it wasn’t Pips, it must be Mom and Dad. They loved to do stuff like this. When I’d been younger, my parents used to make an adventure out of my “big” present. They’d wrap a clue in a box under the tree leading to a trail of other clues and ending with the present, something I’d hardly dared to wish for, like my first bicycle.

When I was seven, I secretly wished for my very own theatre, knowing I couldn’t have one. Somehow, they’d transformed the downstairs playroom into a stage, complete with a trunk full of costumes and a pipe to hang backgrounds from. Their artist friend painted sheets to look like a castle, a forest, and a candy factory.

A pile of snow fell onto my head when I pushed the trap door open. I shook the snow off my hair and climbed the rest of the way up. Snow had transformed the forest, frosting branches and blanketing the ground.

Look with far-reaching eyes, and you’ll find what you need.

I scanned the treetops. Was the clue sending me into the forest? Other than the round railing and the cushioned seat, the porch only held an old telescope, left behind by a former owner of the house. Andrew and I had rolled the telescope over to the railing so we could stargaze, but covered it with canvas when the snow began. I pulled the cover off and squinted through the hole.
Nothing. I twisted the dial and looked again. Still nothing. Squinting never worked well for me. I covered my left eye with my hand and yet again, I didn’t see anything.

Maybe the snow had broken the telescope. I turned the barrel toward me and brushed snow away. And then I saw it. A folded paper, wedged into the seal that held the lens in place. I pulled it out and unfolded it. Another piece of map, this one with two words:
Turn left.

Where could my parents be sending me? The map, with trees and paths marked, was obviously not leading to anyplace inside our house.

I rotated the telescope so that it pointed back out to the woods and peered through. With my left eye covered, I saw snow-kissed trees in detail through the scope. I uncovered my left eye, focusing hard, trying to see both the detail with my right eye and the distance with my left. Two things at the same time. A tree, individual and particular, and an entire snow-covered forest.

I opened my sketchbook and drew the telescope’s outline, making the view finder large enough to show the detailed tree, leaving enough room on the page to sketch in the rest of the forest. As I sketched the tree in the lens-shaped circle, I was tempted to hurry through the branches. But I forced myself to draw these specific branches, this specific tree, the way Vivian had taught me. As I did, I realized the tree tilted at an odd angle, and the snow only tipped branches on one side. Had the wind blown off the rest? Had someone brushed past the tree?

Questions flowed in with each pencil stroke. I hadn’t forgotten how to draw, how to look at things. Almost blue with cold, still my fingers flew across my page. I felt like me.

I started scribbling notes beside my drawing, as Vivian had done in her sketchbook. Maybe this wasn’t technically the best drawing in the world, but after almost a month of nothing, my fingers finally felt free. I wasn’t tensing them, afraid of what might show up on the paper, or trying to perfectly copy from a book. I hadn’t realized how much I missed this feeling.

The phone rang and I hurried downstairs to pick it up.

“I’m going to talk to Doug tomorrow,” Ruth said. “About the family. Dad is going caroling with a bunch of people, and Doug will be there. I thought I should tell you.”

“Ruth—”

“Patch’s den is pretty far away from the shack.” Ruth pushed on, as though she was reading a rehearsed speech. “And Sadie, those people can’t keep living out there in the cold. We have to do something for them.”

Finally she gave me room to talk. “I just don’t want to do the wrong thing,” I said. “I don’t want to mess up and hurt Patch. Not after we all fought so hard to keep her safe.”

“We can tell Doug about Patch if you want. We can ask him to help us keep her safe, and maybe help the family find a better home.”

“I don’t think they want to move, Ruth. And Andrew would hate us talking about Patch.”

“Andrew thinks everyone is a hunter deep down. He wants to protect his mom,
and they’ve both seen a lot of bears killed. But Sadie, you know this is the right thing to do.”

I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do. But I knew Ruth would tell Doug whether I agreed with her or not. “I’ll come with you.”

Ruth paused and then asked, “You’re sure?”

“Yes, Ruth.”

Another long pause where I could hear a muffled conversation with her mom. “Okay. We’ll pick you up around six o’clock.”

“I’ll be ready.”

When I hung up, Mom called up. “Sadie, is that trap door open? It’s freezing.”

“I’ll close it!”

I climbed back to the porch to finish my drawing. After looking through the scope once more, I added a few final strokes and then leaned away to examine the page. Done. I closed the book, covered the scope, and closed the trap door on my way inside.

I had finally slipped back inside my own skin.