movie—it was the beginning of summer vacation—and when we came home there was not a single writing instrument in the entire house. No crayons; no paint; no pens, pencils, or chalk. I was furious. They had to use tranquilizers to get me to sleep that night. The next morning I poured my porridge onto the table and drew in it, so my mother started to feed me by spoon. If I went outside I'd use a stick in the dirt, so I stayed in. I made patterns with soap on the bathroom tiles, so I wasn't allowed to bathe myself.
'I stood it for five days. I just couldn't understand why they were doing it to me. It was like being told not to breathe. I felt like I was going to explode, and finally on the sixth day I wouldn't get out of bed, wouldn't eat or drink, and wet myself. Mother bundled me off to the shrink, who tried to explain that it was for my own good. I just sat there, staring straight ahead, not really hearing his voice, and finally he gave up and led me out to the waiting room while he and my mother went into his office. I could hear their voices, hers very upset, and his receptionist in the next room typing and making telephone calls while I sat there in the stuffed chair and looked at the pattern of the frames on his wall, and the red sunbursts.
'As I sat there, alone in the world with those seals, they began to bother me. They were wrongly arranged, out of balance, and the more I studied them, my mother's voice rising and falling in the background, the more they bothered me. It needed another spot of red, just up there, on the upper right, above the sofa, and I reached in the pocket of my coat for my crayons, but of course they weren't there, and I thought of going in and finding something in the secretary's desk, but I knew she would stop me, and there was that unbalanced arrangement of red seals waiting for me to do something about it, and I had to do something—I couldn't stand it, sitting there with those lopsided marks dragging at the wall—so I did the only thing I could think of, which was to stand up on the sofa and bite my finger, and use that.'
She paused in the deathly silence and looked down at her hand, and rubbed her thumb across the pale scar that curved across the pad of her right index finger.
'That was the end of psychiatrists for a long time. My father came into my room that night, with a paper bag. He sat on the side of my bed and he opened the bag and took out one of those giant boxes of sixty-four crayons, with silver and gold and copper, and a real artist's pad, thick, textured paper. He put them on my bedside table and he crumpled the bag into a twist and he started talking to me. He told me that artists needed wide experience to do their art properly, that anyone who never looked up from the paper soon had nothing to draw. Therefore he would make a deal with me. I could draw and paint for one half hour before school in the morning, for two hours in the afternoon, and for one hour after dinner if I would agree to pay attention in class, play outside at recess time, read, and do my homework. If I agreed to this, and if I stuck to it, I could begin to have lessons on the weekends. He was a very wise man, but he was not very well and was totally intimidated by my mother most of the time. His compromise stuck, and that was how I lived for the next six years, until they were killed.'
Vaun looked at the flickering fire for a long moment and shook her head.
'My poor mother,' she said again. 'If she had lived… But I would be a different person, not Eva Vaughn at all. They died when I was thirteen, in a stupid boating accident—the man at the helm was just drunk enough to make a mistake. I went to live with Red and Becky, my mother's normal half-brother and his normal wife and two nice, normal kids, aged nine and eleven. They were totally unprepared for someone like me dropping into their life— smack into puberty, terrified at losing my security, and filled with anger at my parents and a guilt that I couldn't express, awkward and ugly physically, and saddled with this all-consuming obsession that nobody could understand and I couldn't even begin to talk about. I moved three hundred miles away to a small farming town, into a school with overworked teachers, kids who'd never even known an adult artist before, much less a weird kid their own age—and, of course, no more weekend lessons.
'They tried, my aunt and uncle, they really did, but they didn't even know where to begin. I bullied them into giving me a shed to paint in, and before long I just lived out there. I tried, too, when I thought about it. I took over a number of jobs around the place to make myself less of a burden. When I was sixteen I began to babysit around the community, to earn money for my supplies. I built a box to hold my paints and small canvases, and I was happy to cover a kitchen table with newspapers and work until the parents got home.
'For about six months I was happy, really happy. I had money for paint, my aunt and uncle had decided hands off until I was old enough to leave, school was easy enough to be undemanding, and the local librarian was very good at finding me books on art theory and reproductions to study. At seventeen I began to think about going to college. My grades were decent, there was a small settlement left from my parents' death to get me started, and I was putting together a portfolio that I thought was not too bad. With my uncle's approval I sent in applications to three universities.
'It was an exciting time. I was in my last year of what I thought of as exile, and I could see that my work was good, that I had a future waiting for me. These were the early seventies, and even in rural areas the times were exhilarating. Then in December of my senior year two things happened: I slept with a young man, a couple of years older than I was, and he introduced me to drugs. Andy Lewis. It was part of the whole package, you know. If you looked like 'one of those hippies,' it meant you did drugs, so I did. For six months I did, mostly grass, but twice LSD. The first time was in December.
'The acid was interesting. It changed the way I saw colors and intensified the vibrations of different colors, the glow everything gives off. Not only while I was under the influence but for a couple of weeks until it faded back to normality. And in the middle of March when Andy offered me another tab, I took it.
'It was bad. I don't know why it was so different from the first time, but I just went insane. A little while after I swallowed the stuff I was sitting and looking down at my hands. There was a faint smear of red paint on my finger, near the scar, and as I watched it suddenly started smoldering and bubbling and eating into my finger and exposing the bone, which turned into a white bristle brush—' She broke off and looked up sheepishly. 'There's no need to go over all the bizarre details, but in the end what happened was that my fingers turned into brushes and when I looked at one of the guys there—not Andy, I don't remember him being there, it was one of the kids who used to hang around—I saw paint pumping through his body, pulsing, every color, brilliant and iridescent. I was trying to get at the paint in his throat when the police arrived, and after I attempted to throttle several other people, they hauled me off to the hospital and filled me with some kind of heavy-duty tranquilizers. It was a lot of excitement for our little town, as you might imagine.
'By the next morning I was okay—sick and covered with bruises, but my fingers were flesh and blood again. They let me go home later, and the following day I was carrying a pan full of hot soup across the kitchen and felt my fingers turn to wood and dropped the pan. I had half a dozen relapses— sometimes I'd see paint pulsing in one of my cousins—but gradually it tapered off in frequency and intensity. I swore I'd never touch anything again, and bit by bit my family began to relax.
'In the first week of May I received a letter from one of the universities, the one I badly wanted to go to, saying that if I wished to send some samples from my portfolio I would be considered for a freshman scholarship in the fall. I went through the stuff I'd been doing, and somehow it didn't look as good as I'd thought it had. The next day I laid it all out, and I was appalled. I'd done nothing but crap since January. There was not one piece that wasn't sloppy and careless, and what was worse, it was all false, pretentious, shallow. Typical druggie stuff. I flushed the various leaves and tablets down the toilet and that afternoon told Andy to take a jump and got to work.
'As I said, that was early May. Just before my eighteenth birthday.' She paused and wiped the palms of her hands on her knees. 'Could I have a drink? Yes, that would be fine. Thank you.
'Early May. In mid-May Mrs. Brand called and asked me to babysit. She was a neighbor I'd worked for before. Some of my regulars didn't ask me much that spring—word gets around in a small town, and I wasn't exactly discreet. Well, this was their anniversary, and I think my aunt reassured her that I was okay. I needed the money, so I took my paint box and went along at about eight o'clock.
'They had two kids, a boy of fifteen, who had some kind of a play rehearsal at school that night, so he couldn't babysit, and yes, a little brown-haired girl, aged six. Jemima, but we all called her Jemma. She was in bed when I got there, but I went in to let her know I was there, and when I checked again at eight-thirty she was asleep.
'The son came in a bit before ten, had something to eat, and flirted a little, or tried to, but I was deeply into this piece that was going so well, the first solid, honest thing in a long time. I nodded my head a few times until he took the hint and went off to bed. The parents got home a few minutes before midnight, and I started packing away my box. When the mother went in to check on the kids, the girl was dead. Lying on the floor. Strangled. Naked.'
