Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Ronan’s heart was beating hard again. It was like the rush he got when the masks came out, when he knew they were going to dream, only it was so much bigger than that. They were going to change the world. They were going to change their worlds. There was no going back. Was he doing this? He must be. What had he been made for, if not for this?

  Bryde said, “Then we begin where I left off.”

  Jordan couldn’t really fathom what it was to be great at art.

  Other people told her she was great at art all the time. They gasped over how quickly she could pencil a likeness. The ease with which she mixed pigments. The confidence of her brushstrokes. And it wasn’t that she didn’t understand why they said it. The canvases she turned out were impressive. Her grasp of technique was notable at her age. Her ability to paint what she saw before her at speed was unusual.

  But she was simply aping other people’s greatness.

  It wasn’t that she was incapable of greatness. It was possible (probable?) she had the aptitude for it. She had a very good grasp of art theory. She knew how to lead the viewer’s eye around a canvas in just the order she intended. She knew how to subtract and add elements to make the eye linger or flit. She knew which colors warmed a subject closer and which cooled objects into the background. She knew how light glowed on glass, on metal, on grass, on cloth. She knew which of her paints were lean and which were fat, she knew how much turpentine to add to get the stroke she wanted, she knew what value problems varnish would and wouldn’t fix. She knew all the fiddly math and science that made art and emotion work on a good canvas. Jordan had the prerequisites to be a great artist.

  But she was not a great artist. She was a great technician.

  Being in the presence of paintings like El Jaleo and Jordan in White only drove this home. They weren’t great because they were technically perfect. There was something else. Something more. Whether that something could be named—sweetmetal?—she wasn’t sure. What she was sure of was that pieces like that all had a way of seeing the world that no one else had noticed before.

  That was greatness.

  Jordan knew this with every fiber of her being. Every time she forged an Edward Lear, a Henry Ossawa Tanner, a Frederic Remington, a Georgia O’Keeffe, a Homer, she knew. She wore their great hats for a little bit each time she forged them, but that didn’t make her great. The gap between what she did and what those artists did was vast. Before Ronan, she had thought that was how it would remain. She’d figured that she would run out of time long before she’d ever have a chance to see what she was capable of. But now she was in Boston and her heart was still beating and her eyes were still open. With a sweetmetal in hand, she might have more time than she ever hoped for.

  Jordan wasn’t great at art, but for the first time, she thought she might get the chance to find out if she could be.

  “Thanks for the help,” Jordan said.

  “Sure thing,” Matthew Lynch replied. “Thanks for buying my corn dog.”

  “Is that what you were eating? I thought it was a sock.”

  Matthew rubbed his stomach enthusiastically with one hand and shifted the enormous garment bag on his shoulder with the other. “Everyone needs more socks—that’s what Deklo says.”

  The advantages of bringing the youngest Lynch as her assistant were threefold. First of all, she could use an extra set of hands. Not only was it nice to have someone else to move lighting or adjust hair, but clients also paid more for artists who brought assistants. It seemed like it should be more expensive and so it was, one of those psychological self-fulfilling prophecies. Secondly, Declan Lynch had asked if she could keep an eye on Matthew while he ran some errands, presumably of dubious legality or safety, and it was nice to be able to do him a favor to show she appreciated him coming up to Boston. And finally, it hadn’t taken long for Jordan to figure out that Matthew Lynch was a little bit like a sweetmetal, but for humans. People loved him. They didn’t know why they loved him, but they did. Thoroughly, simply, unabashedly. That seemed like a lucky thing to have on a job.

  “You’re gonna tell me what I need to do, right?” Matthew asked. “When we’re in there?”

  “That’s the plan,” Jordan said. “Should be nice and relaxed. We want them to feel they’ve had a good time. You make ’em happy, they tell their friends about you. And people in places like this have friends …”

  “With dollar bill signs for eyes?” Matthew asked. “Wait, no, you’d be the one with the dollar bill signs, ’cause you’re the one getting paid. Or pound notes? Pound note signs?”

  He continued prattling on to himself as Jordan texted the client to let her know she was on the doorstep. It was an impressive doorstep, a stone-clad threshold double their height. The grand old stone Boston church had been converted to four massive luxury condos, each as large as most suburban mansions. Tastefully expensive cars sat on the curb. A nanny shot them wary looks as she pushed a stroller down the sidewalk. Matthew waved at the little girl following the nanny; the little girl waved back.

  There was a little hum of an electric door lock, and then the door came open.

  The woman in the doorway matched the cars on the sidewalk. Tastefully expensive. Her smile was free for all, though. “Hi, I’m Sherry. Jordan Hennessy?”

  Jordan grinned back. “And my assistant, Matthew. This is a great location.”

  “We love it,” said Sherry. “Still smells like contrition. Come on in.”

  They came on in. Jordan was combining business and pleasure, or at least business and personal. As far as Sherry knew, Jordan was just there to get reference photos for a gimmick commission. But Jordan had also discovered that Sherry and her husband, Donald, had probably purchased a sweetmetal through one of Boudicca’s auctions years before. Probably because Jordan wasn’t one hundred percent sure the collection it came from was made up of sweetmetals. All she knew was that it had been a similarly eclectic assemblage of works that went for unexpected prices. And that it was very, very secret. More secret than one would expect a collection that included bed frames, lamps, and fine art photography to be. It had taken a lot of legwork and social pull to get even that much information. It felt like a lot of hours invested for the possibility of looking at maybe another sweetmetal to see what it had in common with El Jaleo and the other sweetmetals she’d seen. This one was a photograph, so that was unique, at least. And what other leads did she have, anyway?

  Inside, the condo was modern and spare, taking advantage of the church’s soaring ceilings to incorporate sleek, tall sculpture and dripping, laser-clean lighting. Not Jordan’s style, but she could appreciate it. Declan would probably have been wild for it. It was a grown-up, very expensive, very specific version of his blank townhome, combined with the abstract art he’d hidden away in his attic.

  “I know this is kind of corny,” Sherry said. “This whole thing. But I’ve just loved the idea of it ever since I was a kid, and I got too old to be in it myself, and now that Harlow’s just big enough to be painted, I thought, I’m going to do it, I’m going to pull the trigger before I change my mind or Donald talks me out of it.”

  “There’s a long tradition of it,” Jordan said. “So you’re in good company. John White Alexander isn’t what I would have imagined you’d want, though. Not with your style.”

  Sherry looked around the room. “Oh, this is Donald’s style. I got to do the library and bedroom, he got the living room and the dining area. We divided the territories in the peace accord.”

  “Oh, I see,” Jordan said as Sherry led the kids into a library. It was far more what she would have expected for a client requesting John White Alexander, a traditional and mannered contemporary of John Singer Sargent. There were dark floor-to-ceiling bookcases and an ornate, hulking desk holding up a Tiffany lamp. Fiddly bronzes were tucked into alcoves; the rug was a hand-knotted number so shabby that it must have cost a fortune. There was a gap in the shelves just the right size for a Jordan Hennessy take on John Alexander White.
r />   “This is very handsome,” Jordan said.

  “Thank you,” Sherry replied, but she was examining her phone with annoyance. “I’m sorry to spend your time like this, but it looks like the nanny’s not checking her phone. She wasn’t even supposed to be here today, but there was a mix-up, so I told her to stay on, and of course she took the kids out on a walk. I’m going to have to go catch up with her before she takes them to the aquarium or something. Do you have a minute? Help yourself to coffee—I just put a pot on. Follow your nose … the kitchen’s just over there.”

  Once they were alone, they immediately went to get coffee. The kitchen was beautiful and unused except for the gadgets on the counter: coffee machine. Blender. Bread maker.

  “This coffee is hairy,” Matthew complained.

  “It’s fancy,” Jordan said.

  “Everything’s fancy here. What’s that lady mean about her painting? Why does she think the painting’s bad before it already started?”

  “Oh, ’cause it’s not an original,” Jordan explained, opening and closing every drawer and cabinet in the room. “Because she doesn’t want me, you see? She wants John White Alexander, but he’s very dead, which isn’t good for business. So she’s got me, and she wants me to put her li’l daughter in one of his paintings.”

  Sherry had hired Jordan through fairly ordinary word of mouth to do one of her least sexy but most common forgeries: historical pieces redone with the faces replaced with clients’. Sherry’s was at least a tasteful request, her young daughter done in the same style as Alexander’s elegant Repose or Alethea, two pieces subtle enough to look like homages rather than out-and-out gimmicks. Jordan tried to avoid painting clients into the Birth of Venus these days.

  “Like Photoshop,” Matthew said. “Oh, gosh, oh, no, that sounded mean, I didn’t—”

  She laughed. Matthew couldn’t sound mean if he tried. “You’re not far off. It’s not a direct copy, that’s why I’m more swish than the other people doing it. I’m supposed to do the painting Alexander would’ve done if he’d been around, not just a photocopy. His palette, brushstrokes, composition. My brain. Her daughter. New painting.”

  “Sounds hard.”

  “It’s not. Well, not anymore. It’s just my job.” Swallowing the rest of the fancy coffee, she pushed off the pure-white counter to gaze at the living room walls. No photographs. She wondered if the sweetmetal was even in the house. She couldn’t feel anything; it wasn’t like El Jaleo, where part of her could always tell it was around the corner even before she saw it. Barbara or Fisher had said something about sweetmetals wearing off. Maybe it had worn out.

  “It’s a cool job.” He was glancing at her when he thought she wasn’t looking. Probably he thought he was being discreet, but he wasn’t. His face was curious. “Cooler than Declan’s other friends.”

  “He has friends?” Jordan asked, mouth amused. She doubted this highly. Friends required honesty, which wasn’t a thing Declan had a lot of. “What do they do?”

  “Number jobs? Politics. They wear ties. They have these things.” He made a gesture to his face that managed to convey facial hair. “Declan stuff.” Jordan was surprised to see that Matthew seemed to believe in the neutral, boring person Declan presented to the rest of the world. That meant Declan had played that role even at home.

  “Do you go to school, Matthew?”

  His golden, carefree expression went troubled, and then it went blank. This was a very different expression than the one he’d had before. Something had happened at school, she thought, or something—

  Oh no. Something was wrong.

  Her mind was slipping out one of the high church windows, up into the sky. She could see clouds, wings, birds, branches—

  Jordan dragged herself back to the present. It had been a little bit since she’d had one of her dreamy episodes. Never mind, she thought. It was minor. She could push through it. She had done it before; she could do it again. It was only when they got really bad that other people began to notice she was struggling.

  Oof. There it came in a wave again.

  Flashes of images moved before her eyes. Images from another time, another place. Real? Unreal? Past? Future? She didn’t know. It was hard to make sense of them and harder still to remind herself to make sense of them.

  It only took a glance to see that Matthew was experiencing it, too. He’d put down his coffee and was walking very, very slowly toward the door, shaking his head a little.

  What a pair! Both of them were failing badly. Sherry was going to return with her daughter and find them drunkenly draped across her furniture, completely out of their heads. It would be a bad situation with any client. But it seemed worse if it was a client that had even a passing knowledge of sweetmetals and the people who needed them.

  Wait a tick, Jordan thought. The sweetmetal. Of course.

  She pushed out of a chair (when had she gotten into a chair?) and tried to have a listen. A feel. A sense. If there was a sweetmetal in this house, it would give them back their thoughts until the ley line got itself back together, hopefully. She caught a whiff, she thought.

  “Come on,” she told Matthew, grabbing his arm to tug him deeper into the condo. “Focus, if you can. Come on!”

  Together, they investigated the condo as quickly and quietly as they could. Here was the library again; they’d gotten turned around. Here a nursery. A bathroom, a closet, a study. Mirrors, art, books. It was hard to remember what they’d already seen. Hard to remember what they were looking at, even as they were looking at it.

  Oh, thank God, there it was.

  She felt the sweetmetal as soon as she passed the doorway. Stepping inside the room was like stepping into reality itself.

  It was an enormous master suite, and the sweetmetal, wherever it was in the room, worked well enough to provide dramatic clarity. It made every detail sharp: every stitch on the duvet, every curl in the carved posters of the bed, every velvet ripple of the curtain.

  Both Jordan and Matthew heaved huge sighs of relief as they collapsed on either end of a fainting couch in the master sitting area. Slowly, the two of them rebooted.

  She could see this slow-motion return to herself reflected on Declan’s little brother’s face. That confusion turning to relief turning to frustration and then finally turning to normality. It reminded her, sadly, of the girls. They had all done this together, too, when Hennessy waited too long to dream, or when the ley line sagged. Which was happening now? It was hard to say. Hennessy hadn’t managed to get in touch with Jordan yet.

  “I didn’t know that’s what was happening to me,” Matthew said. “Before I found out. I didn’t know it was because I was a dream. I’ve never seen anything else do it before. Anything human, I mean. Oh, I didn’t mean to be mean, I didn’t—”

  “I know what you meant. Not one of Ronan’s things. A person. I never saw an animal do it before his bird, either, so we’re the same, you and I.”

  Matthew just kept frowning at the floor, chewing on his lip pensively, so she stood up and snooped around the room until she found the sweetmetal. It had been pushed under the bed, probably because it didn’t match anything else in this room. It was a black-and-white photograph of a diner with a skinny man in spats standing in front of it, looking at something outside the frame. She could feel that it was a sweetmetal, but she couldn’t tell why. It was like the landscape at the Boudicca party. She hadn’t been able to tell why she liked that one, and she couldn’t tell why she liked this one, either. She pushed it back under the bed where she’d found it.

  “I think Ronan dreamed me to be stupid,” Matthew said. “I think I’m stupider than most people. I don’t think very hard; I don’t think.”

  “You seem normal to me.”

  “You knew to look for that thing under the bed. I was just walking around in circles.”

  “Maybe I’m just very clever.”

  “Dreamed to be clever?”

  “Clever because Hennessy’s clever and because I
take a daily vitamin.”

  “Whatever.” Matthew sounded disappointed.

  “I don’t think your brother dreamt himself an idiot brother,” she said. But somehow this made her think about how she was missing the memories of Jay. She’d always thought of herself as identical to Hennessy, apart from the dreaming, but it was obvious that she wasn’t. She didn’t think Ronan had dreamt his brother to be an idiot, but perhaps he had dreamt him to be lovable. Perhaps Hennessy had dreamt Jordan without those memories on purpose.

  “Oh, there you are!” Sherry said. She held the hand of the little girl Matthew had waved at earlier. The suspicious nanny stood in the hallway behind her, holding the baby from the stroller.

  “Sorry to wander,” Jordan said.

  “I had to pee,” Matthew said with a little laugh, and because he was Matthew, Sherry laughed with him. Jordan didn’t think he was as guileless as he feared; it was a solid deception.

  “And while looking for the bathroom I saw this couch,” Jordan said, gesturing to the chaise Matthew was on. “And I just think it’s even more what we’re looking for. The lighting through this window will do so much work for us. You have a great eye.”

  Sherry lit up. “I bought that couch last year! I thought it was special. I’m so glad.”

  They’d gotten away with it.

  Jordan and Matthew busied themselves. Matthew retrieved the garment bag from the other room and made such a noise of surprise at the massive period dresses inside when he opened it that Sherry and her daughter both laughed at him. Jordan posed the daughter and began to take reference shots, and as she did, Matthew told Sherry jokes. Eventually Matthew got Sherry so cheery that Jordan persuaded her to try on the other period dress and posed her together with her daughter on the chaise. The single portrait became a double, which increased the price by a third and also made it more interesting by far.

  She and Matthew were actually a pretty good team, she thought, as they accepted the deposit from Sherry and retreated from the church.