Stella rubbed her neck and her temples. She recalled passing this house, when it was an abandoned house, standing shakily where it was built, a shack surrounded by weeds, not this perfect restoration without a hint of the decay or sadness that it encapsulated all those years ago on the drive to Mercy Lake.
Stella needed to sit down. She was trembling, shaking, her mouth filled with drool. This house had come to life. It had been saved. Restored. Vibrant once more. People had remembered Maud — not just her art, but where she lived and worked.
Charlotte came into the room and sat beside her. She took Stella’s small cold hand. Charlotte’s sapphire ring sparkled in the precise gallery lighting. “There, there, Stella,” she said. “Oh, my dear girl, we all get older, and the days come back to us as they were. All we can do now is try to make sense of them, of what was. I know it’s so hard for you with your memory, a whole life closed away. Why don’t you show me your sketchbook? I used to draw myself. Did Fred tell you that?”
Stella took her sketchbook from her backpack. Only Grace and Dianne had ever looked at it before. She held it out and Charlotte carefully took it in her hands. “Oh, Stella, what an honour. I know what it’s like to show sketches and doodles to someone. Dear, I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”
Charlotte’s voice was low and quiet. She spoke slowly as she turned the pages. Stella hadn’t realized how many pages were blank, how often she sketched only with her fingertip, drawing flowers and birds, rivers and skies only she could see. But Charlotte lingered over even the blank pages. “Yes, Stella, sometimes it’s the spaces in between, isn’t it? That’s where we say the most.”
Stella smiled and rested her head on Charlotte’s shoulder. Charlotte briefly stroked Stella’s hair and turned the page. “Now, look at these roses. They are absolutely baroque. You do have an eye, my dear. Look at these waves. Something just below the surface? What is it, we ask? Does the artist know? Has she left us guessing, or was she herself not sure what resided beneath the gleaming surface?”
Stella sat up and leaned her head back against the wall. She was calmer now, her breathing slow, the drool swallowed down, her mouth dry. Charlotte was absorbed in Stella’s ferns and petals, the night sky, the sea in starlight, people around a beach fire. Stella didn’t remember drawing this, these people on the shore.
The gallery was quiet. The air reminded Stella of libraries, the scent of wood and oil. She could hear an etching, the soft sound of lead on paper. Charlotte was drawing. It was Stella on the page, her head against the wall, her eyes closed, hands folded in her lap.
“I haven’t drawn a single line, Stella, not since I became Charlotte. It’s as though the cartoonist I was, when I was living as a man, hasn’t joined me. Or if she has, that she hasn’t made herself known.” Charlotte kept drawing, shading, capturing Stella’s face in repose. “Just a few simple lines show it all, dear. Especially eyebrows. See how beautifully arched yours are? Always looking a bit surprised, a bit wonderstruck, those marvellous eyes of yours. One dark. One light.” There were lines by Stella’s eyes, by her mouth. “It’s much better to have an expressive face, dear. We carry life with us. Beauty lines, they really are.”
Stella was much older on paper than she was in her mind. It was startling. Occasionally Charlotte would reach out and pat Stella’s hand, humming as she sketched in Maud’s tiny home in the background, the flowers on the walls of the house. And in front of the house was a bench, with an old lady and a middle-aged lady, the old one drawing and the younger one staring straight ahead.
Aviator Glasses and the
Salt Water Cure.
Then
Stella soars over the road beside the marsh on her way to Cedar Grove. She’s wearing her father’s aviator sunglasses to shield her eyes and brain from the sun. And for extra protection, an old sunhat. The lenses colour the world a pale violet. On the inside rim of the sunhat was an embroidered name tag, carefully sewn to the straw, the coral satin yellowed now from oil and sweat. Stella. Her aunt’s. It fit her perfectly. She’d tied it under her chin so it wouldn’t blow off. It occurs to Stella that while the straw hat keeps the sun off, it would do nothing if she fell. She feels a gush of anger that her father would point out her lack of athleticism but not even consider the risk she was taking. She wishes she could be more like Cynthia.
She’s wearing Cynthia’s shorts and T-shirt, and her old training bra. It’s easier to ride a bike in modern clothes, easier with her sprouting breasts confined. Stella can’t believe she thinks of the clothes as modern, that her parents have shaped her in this way. She giggles. The Stella she is now, the post–Horrible Accident Stella, has a private sense of humour. She doesn’t even need Cynthia in front of her leading the way.
And she doesn’t need her father, smoking and preparing for his job, the only thing that seems to interest him. This morning when she’d asked him again about the moving truck he admitted he’d forgotten his promise to call
