Paint by Magic (3 page)

"Oh!" she cried, delight in her voice. "Crystal, darling!" She hugged my sister. "It's wonderful to see you! You look just lovely! Just the way I remember you!" She dashed away the blood from her forehead, looked startled at the bright red stain on her finger, then wiped it on her apron.

"Mom—how did you hurt yourself?" I demanded.

"I'm not hurt at all. I'm fine," Mom said in a cheerful voice. "I'm the bee's knees!"

Crystal looked worried. "Um—
bee's knees,
Mom? You were bleeding. And you look
different.
Your hair is totally retro—and what's with the dress? Looks like Goodwill."

"I guess I'm in my flapper phase," Mom said with a tender little smile. She smoothed her hair. "The haircut is called a bob, darling. And it would suit you, too."

"No thanks, Mom."

"Anyway, come and sit down and tell me about your day while you eat your snack. I've saved you some cake."

There on the table was a tall glass of milk and a generous slice of pound cake. Crystal shook her head.

"I'll get fat if I eat that! I'll just have a diet Coke."

Mom pulled Crystal to the table. "Now, one little piece of cake won't make you fat or spoil your supper, and milk is much better for a growing girl's bones than soda pop. So just sit down and enjoy."

Crystal gave me a look, but she sat and sipped the milk. She glanced at the counter where the kitchen TV used to be. "So, Mom," she began conversationally, "Con tells me you've junked our TVs."

Mom beamed at her. "Let's just say I've removed them."

"But they'll be back, right? Like, soon? Like, in time for me to watch 'Prince Charles, Man for All Seasons' tonight at eight?" She glanced at the wall clock. "I'm already missing the rerun of
Cheers
!".

"No, honey. It's time for us all to do other things. Get to know each other again. Read some books. Play—"

"Connor is right! You
have
gone crazy!"

Mom walked serenely over to the stove, where some onions in a frying pan accounted for the good smell in the kitchen. She stirred the onions, shook in some spices from a little jar, and added the freshly chopped tomatoes from the cutting board. It was as if she were in a world of her own. And Crystal and I couldn't ruffle her.

"Come with me," I whispered to Crystal. She abandoned her snack and followed me silently out of the room. First I took her upstairs to show her that my TV and phone were gone, and my computer disconnected. Then we checked in her room and found the same. She clutched herself around the middle and groaned as if she were dying.

"I can't believe her!" she kept saying over and over.

I showed her that the guest room TV and our parents' bedroom TV were also gone. Luckily, we discovered that the phone in our parents' room was still there on the table next to the bed. "Quick!" I said. "Let's call Dad. Maybe he'll know what to do about Mom."

But Crystal glanced at the bedside alarm clock and shook her head. "He'll be in a meeting now, or at the club for his workout. We'll have to wait and talk to him when he gets here."

"Ashleigh's TV is still in her apartment," I said. "Maybe she'll let you come over tonight and watch your show."

"Maybe." Crystal brightened for a second. But only for a second. "I just wish I knew what's made Mom do this." She sighed. "Mom seemed perfectly normal when we left for school this morning, didn't she? No, wait—we didn't see her this morning, did we?"

I shook my head. "No, Ashleigh made breakfast." Such as it was. Breakfast wasn't really a meal in our house. But Ashleigh had been here this morning, putting Blueberry Twirls into the toaster and handing them to us on our way out the door. We hadn't seen our parents. Mom and Dad had probably both left before we woke up.

"Well, Mom was fine last night, then," insisted Crystal. She fingered a tendril of her long pale hair. "Wasn't she?"

I tried to remember. Last night seemed so long ago—back when everything was normal. Ashleigh had given us macaroni and cheese for dinner while we watched the news and a talk show—I couldn't remember which one—and then I'd gone up to my room. I phoned Doug to ask about the math homework, and then I did my work sheets in front of the TV. The show was some kind of emergency-room drama, kind of gory with all sorts of severed body parts, but it went well with fractions. Later, after Ashleigh called upstairs to say good night, I put on my headphones and drifted off to sleep to a
Star Wars
story tape. Lots of times when I do that, I dream about
Star Wars.

"You know what?" I said. "I don't think we saw Mom and Dad last night, either. It couldn't have been too long ago, though, because otherwise we'd have missed them."

"Well, yeah," she agreed slowly. "It's not like they've been out of town or anything."

"But Mom was here when I got home, just sitting in the living room, looking at that book—" I stopped, remembering how Mom had snapped the book shut.

"What book?" demanded Crystal.

I jumped up off our parents' king-sized bed. "Come with me!"

We ran downstairs, peering around corners like spies to make sure Mom didn't see us. I'm not sure why I didn't want her to know we were going to look at the old book. But I was glad to see she was still cooking stuff in the kitchen. It sure smelled good—even better than macaroni and cheese from a box.

The book lay on the coffee table in the living room, just where Mom had left it. It was closed, but I saw that the jacket flap was marking a page—probably the one she had been studying so intently.

"
Cotton in the Twentieth Century,
" read Crystal. "Cotton? What's she reading about cotton for?" She picked up the heavy book and sat down with it on her knees. "I never even knew we had this book."

"The decorator brought it," I said dismissively. "Like all the other ones." The decorator had told my mother it was part of the house's "total look."

Crystal flipped open the Cotton book and glanced at the jacket flap. "It's an
art
book," she said. "Cotton is a painter. An artist."

I sat down next to her and looked. It said that Fitzgerald Cotton had been born right here in Shady Grove in 1883. It said he had captured the early decades of the twentieth century in his exquisite and luminous paintings of family and home. It said he was distantly related to an Italian artist from the fifteenth century.

I didn't know Mom was interested in paintings. The ones she and Dad bought at the decorator's suggestion were kind of wild-looking abstract prints, all bright colors and odd shapes. But the paintings in this book weren't abstract at all. They looked almost like photographs. Crystal and I stared at the page marked by the jacket flap. We both frowned down at it, puzzled.

I don't know what I'd expected. Something that might inspire Mom's weirdness? Pictures of a dragon destroying television sets with huge bursts of flame? Or something really psychedelic, like those pictures made of colored dots that you stare at until something shifts in your brain and suddenly you see it's really a kangaroo or a flying saucer or something.

But this was a perfectly ordinary painting of a family sitting at a dinner table. There were a grandfather and a grandmother standing up, and the grandmother was just putting down a big silver tray with a cake in the middle of it. The cake was a birthday cake—with nine candles lit—probably for the little girl sitting with a stack of presents in front of her, the one with her hair cut like a helmet, topped with a humongous pink bow. There were a bunch of kids and grown-ups sitting around the table together waiting for that birthday cake. You could just see their heads along the sides of the painting. The caption under the picture said
ELSIE'S PARTY,
1926.

It was kind of cool how the painter—that Fitzgerald Cotton guy—had made it look like the woman was just about to set the cake down but hadn't
quite
done it. Maybe that's what made it seem almost like a photo. Caught in the act.

The stuff on the table looked pretty ordinary. Empty dishes and silverware and glasses of water showed that supper had already been eaten and the cake was the dessert. There was a glass dish with little candies in it, and a bowl of whipped cream. A bowl of grapes or something, too. All very real looking and painted well, if you like that sort of thing. But nothing special, at least nothing I could see—

Until then I
did
see.

And so did Crystal.

There was a woman sitting on the right side of the table. A woman with golden hair curled in careful waves along her cheeks, and a big, excited smile as she leaned across the table to talk to somebody sitting on the other side. She wore a yellow dress—in a style that we recognized, just as we recognized that face, that smile. The woman in this picture painted years before she was born looked exactly like our mom.

I flipped through the pages, disbelief like a strong current pulsing through me—disbelief mixed with excitement, and something else, too.

Fear.

Because there were more pictures of Mom—pictures I recognized. Mom on an unfamiliar couch, with a book on her lap, holding a rose. Mom in somebody else's kitchen, chopping tomatoes.

"Crys—" I whispered, my heart hammering.

"I see them," she whispered back.

And then there was Mom in person, walking into the living room with a vase of freshly arranged flowers. She set the vase on the coffee table and turned to us—and her smile went cold when she saw what we were doing.

"Crystal! Connor! Give me that book this instant."

"
Whoa
, Mom!" I said, standing up quickly. "We were just looking at it—and anyway, how come—" I'd been about to ask her about the woman in the paintings, but something made me stop.

"It's mine," Mom said, her voice as cold as her smile.

"Like, haven't you ever heard of
sharing
?" asked Crystal haughtily, slamming the book shut. "What are you screaming at us for? What did we do?" But her voice trembled.

Mom snatched up the heavy book and held it to her chest as if it were a protective shield. Two bright patches of red stood out on her cheeks like splotches of paint. "Mind your manners," she told us in an icy tone of voice I'd never heard from her before. "And do not lay a finger on this book again. Do you hear me?"

Silence stretched out around us as Mom and Crystal held a staring contest. It got so quiet and so tense I thought I could hear Doug in his room next door, zapping creatures at his PlayStation.

But the noise was at our own front door. We all jumped when we heard a heavy footstep in the hallway.

"It's okay!" hissed Crystal. "Dad's home early!"

"
Thank you, thank you, thank you,
" I whispered to whatever cancelled meeting had sent him home to save us.

I was so relieved to see my dad home early that I tore into the front hall, barrelled right into him, and wrapped my arms around his chest. He's big and solid and still looks like the football star he was in college, thanks to his daily workouts at his office fitness center. Laughing in a kind of baffled way, he hugged me back. We don't hug very much in my family, but with Mom being so weird, I needed a hug.

"Well, hi, Con," Dad said to me. "How's it going?"

"Dad!" I cried. "You're home! You're home!" I was hanging on Dad like he could save me from drowning or something.

"Oh, Dad!" Crystal ran to clutch his arm. Between the two of us, he was having trouble taking off his coat. "I'm so glad you're here. You'll never believe—"

"Hey, you two!" laughed Dad, juggling us. "Where's the fire?"

"Grant, darling," Mom said, coming into the hall. Crystal and I let go of Dad and backed off. "I've missed you so much." She stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. Dad looked stunned. He and Mom never acted mushy together. In fact, they used to bicker and argue a lot, but lately they'd hardly been home at the same time. And when they were, they sort of ignored each other. I didn't think I'd really heard them talking together for weeks.

"Hey, Pam," Dad said, still looking sort of bewildered but pleased at her kiss. "I got your message to come home early, so here I am. But what's going on?" He scanned our faces. "Kids? What's wrong?"

"I just couldn't wait to see you again," Mom said in a soft voice. "After all this time."

We were standing there like robots, sort of stiff. How could I tell Dad about all the weirdness with Mom right there in the hall with us? But then again, he could see for himself she wasn't acting normal.

"'All this time'?" he asked, puzzled. "All this whole, long day, Pam?"

"Oh, it's been a very, very long day, Grant," said Mom with a little hiccoughy laugh. "You have no idea."

"Listen, Dad!" Crystal butted in, "It's a good thing you're home early. Connor and I were going to call you—you've always said we could if there's an emergency. And there
is
an emergency, Dad!"

I glanced nervously over at Mom, and she was frowning at us. That made me even more nervous.

"You have to talk to Mom!" Crystal's voice rose. "Talk some sense into her so I get my TV back—or any one of the TVs she's thrown away—in time to watch my show about Prince Charles." When no one said anything, she added: "It's on at eight."

"Thrown away the TVs?" Dad asked. Now he was looking annoyed.

"Yes!" Crystal wailed. "Every one of them!"

"Even the big-screen TV in the family room," I added softly.

Mom continued to frown at us all, a frown that seemed to hold a secret.

At that moment the front door opened again and Ashleigh stepped in. She's a round sort of person, with short, dark, feathery hair, and she's always wearing loose Indian-print dresses and interesting hats. Today she was wearing a red velvet hat with a silk flower on it. "Whoa!" she cried when she saw us in the hallway. "What's going on? Is it a council of war? I don't think I've seen you guys all in one place since Thanksgiving."

"We can talk later," Mom interrupted in a soft voice. But her tone was very firm. "I'm glad you're home early, Grant—and Ashleigh, too—our meal is ready."