“Good luck,” I said.
He looked into my face for a weird length of time. It was starting to feel spooky.
“Please don’t make me go out anymore,” he said. It was as sincere a plea as I had heard in my young life to that date. “Please?”
“I won’t. I promise.”
He walked into his house to face the music, and I walked home to mine. To face the fighting.
My parents were indeed fighting when I got home, so I locked myself in my room. And I wrote a letter to Roy. Even though I hadn’t heard back from him since my last letter.
Dear Roy,
I think this is kind of a weird thing to say to your big brother. And I think, if we were both home and I said this to you, you’d probably laugh at me or hang me up on the coatrack by my shirt or something. But you’re not home. That’s the problem.
I love you.
I’m sorry. I just had to say that, because I’ve been thinking about it but I can’t remember if I ever did. Tell you, I mean.
Be careful, and please come home.
Your brother,
Lucas
Chapter Seven
I’m Alive
When I got out there the following morning, Mrs. Dinsmore was nowhere to be found. And the dogs were gone. It was a jolt I felt right down through my gut and below.
I thought maybe she had put the dogs somewhere and . . . I don’t know. Taken them to the pound, maybe. Or done something to herself and then one of her daughters had . . . Well, it’s hard to recount what I was thinking. It was just a lot of thoughts flying in a lot of directions. All terrible.
I panicked.
I started running through the woods, yelling for the dogs. Yelling both of their names. But I had no idea of a direction, so I was more or less running in circles, flipping the hell out. If there was ever a better example of a human imitating a beheaded chicken, I haven’t seen it to this day.
After a minute or two of that insanity Vermeer appeared out of nowhere and gave me a strange look, with her head tilted. As if to say, “What on earth are you so upset about?”
Then she turned back into the woods, stopping once to look over her shoulder at me. To see if I was going to follow. I followed, my heart still banging around in my chest.
She led me back to Rembrandt and Mrs. Dinsmore. The lady was sitting on a little folding chair, on a high hillock of ground that looked down through hundreds of trees at a snippet of the river. She had an artist’s easel in front of her, and she was painting the forest.
She was a good painter.
I sat down on the ground next to her, still trying to settle my heart and breathing. She knew I was there. I could tell. But she didn’t look directly at me or say anything. She just painted.
I liked the way she handled the light.
The sun was just barely showing behind a sea of leaves. And she had painted that, though the sun was higher in real life than on her canvas. She must’ve been out there working for a long time. The rays extended in a circle, clearer in a few places where gaps in the leaves let them through. It wasn’t perfectly realistic, the way she had painted it. Not exactly like a photograph. It was . . . more somehow. A little more than the real sun. A little bit stylized. But she had certainly captured it.
“I like the way you do light,” I said.
At first she only grunted.
Then she said, “Thanks. What were you yelling about back there?”
“Oh. I didn’t know where you were. Or where the dogs had gone.”
“What did you think?”
“I don’t want to talk about what I thought.”
I watched her work in silence for a minute, Rembrandt’s big head in my lap.
“I wrote to my brother,” I said. A minute or two later. “Said what I needed to say.”
“Good.”
“I mean, he hasn’t seen it yet. I only just dropped it in the mailbox this morning. It takes forever for mail to get back and forth.”
“Government work,” she said.
“I’m not sure what that means.”
“It means government never works very well.”
“Oh.”
Another long silence. I watched her work for more than a minute on one leaf. Just the way the light touched that one leaf out of hundreds. The part of the painting that should have been river was still blank white canvas. I wondered if she didn’t want to paint that part. I wondered if she’d be happier if I went away and left her to work in peace.
“And I tried to be a good friend to my friend,” I said. “But I didn’t do a very good job of it.”
“But you tried,” she said.
I wasn’t sure if I had her full attention or not. It was hard to tell.
“But the problem was, I tried to get him to do things that would be the right things for me to do. But I don’t think they were the right things for him. I was trying to help him the way I thought he should be helped, but he’s not me.”
She let her brush hand fall to her side and looked over at me. For the first time that morning. Really studied my face.
“What?” I said. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No. Not at all. You just said something very intelligent. Something that puts you ahead of most of the adults I know.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t expected anything like a compliment from her, and it caught me off guard. “Why do I do that?”
“Do what?”
“Try to take responsibility for everything and fix everybody.”
“What makes you
