Thirty, maybe forty drawings and paintings were tacked up one after the other—and sometimes one on top of the other—from the ceiling to the paint-spattered floor. They were good, too. Many were of the same woman with long brown hair—a drawing of her face and hands, one of her glancing over her bare shoulder, one of her in profile, looking thoughtful—all sketched with just a few lines. There were other pictures without her: painted blocks of colors that seemed to float off the wall into the air and pictures of overlapping circles, triangles, and squares done in bright, thick paint. And sometimes the pencil, crayon, or brushstrokes went off the paper right onto the wall.
On the second-floor landing outside my room a shiny silver mobile floated above me like indoor clouds. Up the stairs to the third floor dozens more pictures cluttered the walls on both sides. I touched the actual marks and felt the rough surface of the paint. If my blood relative had drawn and painted these, I might have ability myself. Henry’s pictures were full of color and life. Maybe some of that life might rub off on me.
On the third floor I opened the door to Henry’s room and stood amazed at what I saw. It was one humongous space. Each long wall had a bank of four arched floor-to-ceiling windows, pointed at the top like the windows in a church. Near me stood a huge drawing table, its slanted top cluttered with taped-down notes and sketches. Beside it was a rolling chair, an empty easel, a table with sets of oil paints and pastels in wooden boxes, and jars of brushes, their handles covered with dried colors but their upended bristles clean. Above the drawing board were dozens more pictures, sketches of sculptures I’d seen in the yard, and more pictures of the woman—though in these she looked thinner, and her hair was cropped short or covered with a scarf.
Overhead, a dozen mobiles dangled and swirled from hooks in the high ceiling. A mobile of butterflies and silver birds spun over the drawing table. Another one of red, blue, and yellow circles and triangles whirled above my head.
At the far end of the room was an enormous bed that looked like something from a fairy tale. Its four posters reached nearly to the ceiling, each one made from metal into the trunk of a slender tree from one of the four seasons. Autumn’s and summer’s branches intertwined to form a headboard with Henry loves Mandy written along it in silver script. Mandy must be the woman in the pictures. I wondered where she was now.
The bed was unmade and the room messy in a comfortable, lived-in way, though clean and cared for underneath. Books were everywhere. They littered the bed and floor, teetered ten and twelve high on the two bedside tables, leaned against one another on the windowsills and the dresser, even spilled out of the open dresser drawers. Wobbly stacks sagged an old sofa that couldn’t have been sat on unless you were a mouse. For sitting, there was a single armchair and a footstool, but even there, books lay open over the chair’s armrests and back.
Even more wonderful, there weren’t any library markings on the spines, no red-inked Property Of stamps on the closed pages, no Due Back in 14 Days stickers inside the back covers. Henry owned each and every book. Most were about artists. I admired their covers, whispered the titles, and tried to work out the artists’ strange names: Picasso, Gonzales, Man Ray, Rothko, Archipenko, Serra, Klee, Kapoor, Arp, Giacometti, di Suvero, Bontecou, and Miró.
I stood in the middle of this magic for a long while, taking it all in. Maybe this room was why the people in town looked at Henry like he’d gone round the bend. Folks were probably thinking: Who’d be crazy enough to give up being a rich and famous doctor to live like this? But I knew about crazy. I’d lived with true craziness all my life, and nothing this beautiful or joyful had ever come from it. This was the total opposite of crazy.
A drawing pad rested beside a box of pencils, erasers, and charcoal on the bed. I fingered the pencils, suddenly itching to draw pictures of my own. I lifted the cover of the pad and saw a drawing of an upside-down face. I turned it right side up, thinking to see another picture of the woman Henry was forever drawing. When I saw who it was, an ant could’ve knocked me over, easy. There, drawn in pencil, in eight or ten perfect lines, was a picture of me.
I closed the cover on the pad and went down to the second floor. My own room seemed disappointing now, though it was the best of the three rooms on the floor. There was a small wooden sleigh bed that had belonged to Henry when he was a boy, a mirrored dresser, an empty old steamer trunk that smelled like mothballs, and a walk-in closet. Four high windows overlooked the backyard and had a roomy, cushioned window seat underneath. I’d opened all the windows to let in air, but I’d left my suitcase—a Piggly Wiggly paper bag—packed, just in case. Not that I had much: an extra pair of jeans, three T-shirts, a jacket, four pairs of socks, some raggedy underclothes, and a skirt with the last of my emergency fund—a
