Portrait of a Sister

by Laura Bradford

  “But I—”

  “Close them, Katie.”

  She closed them.

  She took the five steps he requested.

  And she tried not to dwell on the feel of his fingers suddenly entwined with hers.

  “Okay, you can open them now.”

  Parting her lashes, she peeked out to find a pond with an assortment of toy sailboats floating around in the center. People walked around the pond, talking, while others sat along its edge, basking in the late-morning sun or laughing with nearby companions. A handful of ducks swam beside the boats, voicing their displeasure at any and all sudden changes in direction.

  “Oh, Eric, Sadie would love this.” She clapped her hands together beneath her chin and stared at the scene in front of them, trying her best to memorize it all. “She’s always trying to make boats out of leaves and twigs! At first, she tried to use rocks, but that didn’t work very well. She’d get them all ready for their voyage, push them away from the shore, and watch them sink to the bottom. That’s when she moved on to leaves and twigs. And once? Last summer? One of them actually made it all the way across to the other side! She squealed so loud and so long I’m quite sure the Hochstetlers and the Millers heard her clear out in the middle of their fields. And truth be told, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the Fishers heard her, too.”

  “Who’s Sadie?”

  “My little sister. She’s four.”

  “Sounds like she keeps you busy.”

  “Yah. But happy, too.” Katie bobbed her chin toward the lake, and at his nod, made her way down the hill for a closer look. “Do you come here often?”

  “To the park?” At her nod, he shrugged. “I walk through it mostly. Less people to maneuver around when I’m trying to get across town to my favorite writing spot.”

  “Writing spot?” she echoed.

  “I write songs. Or, at least, I try to. And there’s this cool little coffee shop on the other side of the park that I like to go to when I need a change of scenery.” He stopped at the water’s edge, looked around the lake, and, at the answering shrug from an elderly man on the opposite side, liberated a toy sailboat from a snarl of leaves and set it back on course. “That’s my dream—to hear a song that I’ve written being played on the radio.”

  “Perhaps it will happen one day.”

  “Maybe. But even if it doesn’t, it’s still something I do that makes me happy . . . like talking about your little sister did for you a few minutes ago.”

  “If you knew Sadie, you would understand.”

  “Funny kid?” he asked as they continued around the lake, stopping from time to time so Katie could point out a particular duck or sailboat.

  “Mamm used to say Sadie is like me because she misses nothing. But she’s also adventurous in a way I never really—look!” Katie pointed toward a man and a young girl seated on stools beneath a tree, facing one another. The man looked between the girl and a big white board while the girl stood perfectly still. “What are they doing?”

  “Who?” Eric followed the path forged by Katie’s answering finger. “Oh, okay, so that’s a sidewalk artist, for lack of a better word. There’s dozens of them scattered around the park on any given day.”

  “What do they draw?”

  “People—mostly tourists, and mostly caricatures. Something people roll up and put in their suitcase to remember their trip to the city, I guess.”

  She knew he was still talking, even registered a little of what he was saying, but her focus was on the man looking between the girl on the stool and a large sketch pad. The concentration on his face called her to come closer and she obliged. Eric, too, changed course, moving in beside her as she stopped in view of the man’s easel.

  “Why is he making her face look like that?” she whispered. “Her lips are not that big.”

  “That’s what he does. He finds a feature or two and overemphasizes it.”

  Fascinated, Katie moved a little closer. “I wish he would just draw her as she is.”

  “I’m guessing that would take longer.”

  “Yah. But it would be better.” She leaned closer to Eric to ensure the man could not hear. “See her cheekbones? If he turned his pencil to the side a bit more like this”—she held a pretend pencil between her fingers and moved it back and forth quickly—“he would get more depth.”

  “You say that like you know. Are you an artist?”

  “No, I am Amish.”

  He looked at her from beneath raised eyebrows. “And those are mutually exclusive because . . . wait, I know this! It’s because he’s drawing her face, isn’t it?”

  “Yah.”

  She watched as the man finished the picture, showed it to the girl, and, at her squeal of appreciation, handed it to her in exchange for a ten-dollar bill. There was no denying the girl’s happiness or the way it stirred something deep inside Katie.

  “I draw at night,” she whispered. “When Dat and the children are sleeping. I-I know it is wrong, that I could be shunned if they found out, but still, I draw.”

  “Why?”

  Katie looked down at her feet, the answer she knew she shouldn’t utter the same one she could no longer hold back. “Because I think it is my dream.”

  Chapter 13

  She’d tried the couch in the living room, the table near the kitchen, and the armchair closest to the big window, but in the end, just like at home, Katie opted to prop herself against the headboard of the bed with the sketch pad balanced across her crisscrossed legs. The lighting was different on account of the late-afternoon hour, but the most liberating change was knowing she could draw without listening for evidence of Dat’s footfalls in the hall or an early rising Sadie trying to get a peek underneath the door.

  Here, she could bask in a freedom she didn’t really know yet found infinitely appealing. Here, she could wander around the room, trying to recall details of her day without worrying whether others knew she was awake or not. And here, she didn’t have to draw by moonlight only to cringe at the results come morning.

  In fact, if she was honest with herself, the picture taking shape beneath her pencil was some of the best work she’d ever done. Somehow, someway, she’d managed to re-create the lake and the ducks and the sailboats so clearly it was as if she were standing in the park, looking at it in real time, rather than calling on her mind’s eye to fill in the blanks. Even Eric’s hands as he repositioned the boat in the water looked good, though she’d had to redo the pile of leaves he’d pulled from the vessel a half dozen times to make them look natural.

  The only aspect still weighing on her was whether she’d made the right decision to start the picture at his hands so that, when she was done, the only part of Eric seen beyond them was the side of his face . . .

  His strong jawline . . .

  The way his dark brown hair stopped just shy of his ear . . .

  The edge of his dimpled smile . . .

  A distant click from the direction of the living room broke through her thoughts, bolting her upright in time to identify the next sound as footsteps. The answering thump of her heart had her launching forward, gathering her pencils and sketch pad in a mad grab, and then freezing in place as the reality of her current surroundings reared its head in tandem with the familiar voice now moving toward her room.

  “Katie? Are you here?”

  “Yah. I’m in my room.”

  She willed her heart rate to slow, opened her fist to let the pencils drop back onto the bed, and then looked up as her sister appeared in the doorway, curiosity lighting the eyes that were a mirror image of her own. “I am drawing,” she whispered.

  “I can see that.” Laughing, Hannah closed the gap between the door and the bed, sinking down onto the edge of the mattress closest to the hastily closed sketch pad. “But just so you know, you don’t have to whisper that here. You also can skip the whole scurrying to hide everything part, too. Your secret is safe with me.”

  “I did not scurry.”

  Han
nah dipped her chin almost to the base of her neck and studied Katie the way Miss Lottie studied them on occasion. “Please, Katie . . . I heard enough to know you were scared.” Then, before Katie could say anything else, Hannah gestured toward the sketch pad. “So? Can I see what you added today? I promise I won’t say another word about my scar.”

  “I started a new picture. One from this morning.”

  “This morning?” Hannah echoed as she looked around the guest room Katie had made sure to neaten before settling down to draw. “You mean you drew this room?”

  “No. I drew the lake at the park. The one with the boats on it.”

  Hannah drew back so fast she almost toppled off the bed. “You went to the park? Alone?” And then, as she recovered enough to really take in Katie’s words, a smile replaced the surprise. “See? I knew you’d come out of your shell here.”

  “I wasn’t alone.”

  A second round of surprise pushed Hannah’s overly tweezed and darker than normal eyebrows halfway to her hairline. “I don’t understand.”

  “I went with Eric. He sent you a text, remember?”

  The surprise remained for about as long as it took for regret to register in Katie’s brain.

  Uh-oh.

  “Ooooh, that’s right . . . Do tell.” Hannah clapped her hands in glee. “And leave nothing out.”

  “It was not like that, Hannah! He called to talk to you and I told him you were working until four o’clock. He asked what I was going to do and when I said nothing, he suggested we go for a walk in the park. That’s all.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Did you have fun?”

  She tried to answer via a noncommittal shrug, but her own smile, born on the memory of her time with Eric, refused to be denied. “I did. Eric is very nice.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We walked. And we talked. He talked about his childhood and the songs he writes. I told him about Blue Ball and Sadie and”—Katie looked down at the sketch pad—“my drawings.”

  Hannah opened her mouth as if she was going to ask more, but in the end, she simply pointed at the pad. “So? Do I get to see what you’re working on?”

  “I suppose.” She flipped back the cover and then stopped, her gaze seeking and finding Hannah’s. “I’m sorry I got so angry last night. It was not right to yell at you the way that I did.”

  “You were angry. You’re allowed.”

  “I shouldn’t say such things to you.”

  Leaning forward, Hannah brought her lips close to Katie’s ear. “Psst . . . you’re human, Katie. That means you’re allowed to get angry. You’re also allowed to cry and stamp your feet and ask for help when you need it.”

  “But—”

  “It’s okay, Katie. I get it.” Then, pulling back, Hannah pointed at the sketch pad again. “Now, show me. Please.”

  Katie gave up and paged through her drawings until she came to the one of the park. “It’s not done yet. I still have to add the side of Eric’s face. But this is it so far.” Nibbling her lower lip inward, she spun the pad so it was right side up for Hannah and then waited.

  “Oh, Katie . . .” Hannah lifted the pad off the bed, her eyes moving from the ducks and boats in the background to the boat in Eric’s hands. After a few moments of silence, she looked back up at Katie. “This is amazing—you are amazing! I-I don’t understand how you learned to draw like this when no one was looking. I mean this is talent, Katie, real talent.”

  A sudden infusion of heat in her cheeks propelled Katie off the bed and over to the room’s back window. Down below, on the ground level, was a small garden area bordered by the buildings on either side of Hannah’s, as well as the backside of another. Scattered around the garden were benches. An hour earlier, the benches had been inhabited by school children doing homework or chatting on phones. Now, save for one lone elderly man reading a paper, there was no other sign of life. “It was back before Rumspringa when I started to think about it. I was painting a scene on a milk can for Dat’s stand. It was of that fence along the north side of Hochstetler’s farm. For some reason, instead of seeing the fence I was trying to paint, I kept thinking about Luke and the frog. No matter how hard I tried, I could not put that memory aside. It was as if my mind could see nothing else that day. So, when we were on Rumspringa, I bought a sketch pad and practiced until I could draw that memory.”

  “That’s my point. When and where did you practice when I was still living at home? And why did you keep it from me of all people?”

  The first part of Hannah’s question was easy to answer and so she started there, the man on the bench down in the courtyard quickly bowing to another, equally vivid image. “Remember those days when I would walk Mary and Jakob home from school?”

  “Okay . . .”

  “That is when I would draw.”

  “But you weren’t gone long enough to walk them all the way home and draw.”

  “That’s because I didn’t walk them all the way home.”

  “I don’t understand. You just said—”

  “I met them on that path between the road and the pond . . . the one that we always took home from school when we were their age, too.”

  “But that isn’t even halfway!”

  “They were old enough to walk the whole way by themselves, but they were always happy when they came around the trees and saw me waiting for them.”

  “And you would draw there while you were waiting?”

  “Yah.” Katie watched the elderly man fold his paper atop his lap, struggle to his feet with the help of a walker, and then head toward the building’s back door, disappearing from her sight completely. “You know that old shed on the Hochstetler’s land that is not far from the pond? The one with the door that does not close as it should? That is where I kept my sketch pad—underneath an old horse blanket on the top shelf.”

  “You didn’t have that much time.”

  “Most days, I had twenty minutes before I had to hide it under the blanket again.” She felt her mouth stretching wide with the memory. “The picture you took from the pad? The one of Luke and the frog? That took me from the start of the school year until nearly December to finish. It got so cold those last few weeks that I had to erase many times because of shaking fingers.”

  “But there are a lot of pictures in here,” Hannah protested. “If it took you more than three months to draw one, how did you draw so many?”

  “Once you left, I could draw inside . . . at night . . . after Dat and Mamm went to sleep. Sometimes, I would draw for hours.”

  “Okay, but why didn’t you draw in our room from the start? Did you really think I would tell?”

  “No. I knew you wouldn’t tell.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me? Why did I have to find it under your bed when I visited in the fall?”

  Eight hours earlier, she couldn’t have answered that question. But now, thanks to her time with Eric, she knew the why. Slowly, she made herself turn away from the window and venture back toward the bed and Hannah; her need to answer rivaled only by the fear of sharing what had been a surprising admission even to herself. “I didn’t want to tell you. I wanted my drawings to be mine. I wanted to learn something you couldn’t do and I wanted to be good at it. I-I wanted to be . . . Katie.”

  Hannah scrunched her face. “Who else did you think you were?”

  “What I’ve always been, Hannah—your twin.”

  “My twin? Hey, that’s not true! Mamm loved you, Katie, you know that!”

  Sinking onto the bed, Katie reached for her sketch pad with one hand and waved away Hannah’s protests with the other. “I know that. She showed me that every day.”

  “Okay good. And this other stuff? About wanting to be good at something? What about the children? You’ve always been better with them than I was. And that was even before Mamm passed. Now, you do everything for them.”

  “I am simply doing things as Mamm did them.”

&nbs
p; “So. And what about Dat? He trusts you in a way I’m not sure he ever trusted me.”

  “But whenever we would meet people for the first time, Mamm and Dat would always say ‘this is Hannah’s sister, Katie.’ And at school, I was always Hannah’s sister, too. I was never just Katie.”

  “Okay, but that held true whenever something went wrong, too. If a barn door was left open or Fancy Feet was found in the house, they came looking for me.”

  “Because it always was you.” Katie ran her hand across the picture of the lake, lingering her fingers in the place where the side of Eric’s face would soon be. “But the drawings in this book? They are something I’ve done all on my own—not because I’m Hannah’s twin or Hannah showed me how, but because I put my mind to it and I found a way. Just me. By myself—me, Katie. I need that, Hannah. I need that for me.”

  Chapter 14

  She waited for Hannah to finish petting the third dog of the morning and then fast-walked to catch up with her as she resumed the kind of pace Katie had always equated with a brewing storm. This time, though, they weren’t rushing to close windows or secure the horses in the barn before the black clouds unleashed their wrath, they were swerving around people and running across city streets for a start time that was still twenty minutes away.

  “You said the Rothmans are close—just ten blocks. We have gone seven. Why are we running?” Katie asked between increasingly labored breaths.

  Hannah reached into the small bag tethered to her neck and shoulder and pulled out her phone. A quick glance at the screen yielded a shrug. “I’m sorry, Katie. It is the way real New Yorkers walk.”

  “We’ve passed many people.”

  “If they weren’t tourists, then they aren’t trying to get somewhere like we are.” Still, Hannah slowed enough that Katie’s boots no longer smacked against the concrete. “I wish you would’ve worn the jeans and top I handed you when you came out of the bathroom. They’d have been a lot more comfortable than”—Hannah flicked her hand at Katie’s aproned dress and stockings—“that.”