Portrait of a Sister

by Laura Bradford

  Katie pressed her hands to her cheeks in an attempt to cool them. “I don’t know what to say. I-I do not try to do such things. I just draw my memories—things I don’t want to forget.”

  “And by doing so, you’ve given me pause and made me want to see my own life in a different way—to slow down and see the beauty that is a child’s laughter or a mother’s peace or two siblings setting off together.” With a reluctance she could physically feel, Mr. Rothman closed the sketch pad and handed it to her. “I would love to exhibit the rest of your pictures at the gallery. I think your work would really resonate with people.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, as you already know, I own a gallery here in the city. The front room is for the main exhibit. It’s that exhibit that brings the reviewers and the art critics and those wanting to enjoy art. Pencil sketches such as these, are not exhibited there. But a few years ago, I opened a smaller room where I like to exhibit little-known artists I think have something to show the world, regardless of the method used. It’s in that room where I’d like to add”—he tapped Katie’s sketch pad—“the rest of these.”

  “You-you like my drawings that much?”

  “I do. Though, if I may, can I ask if you’ve ever given thought to using charcoals or watercolors? Because those mediums could land you the top spot in a gallery showing one day.”

  She had thought about charcoals and paint. Many times. But neither would lend themselves to being stuffed under a mattress with no shred of evidence left behind . . .

  “No.”

  “It was just a question. Not a judgment. Anyway, may I add the rest of these to our exhibit?”

  “I-I don’t know what to say. I’m not supposed to draw such pictures at all.”

  Mr. Rothman nodded. “I know, Hannah has shared that with me. But you have both the eye and the talent to really go places, Katie. Your work is very reminiscent of an artist named Norman Rockwell. People were drawn to his work because of the memories and feelings it evoked. Your work does something similar while adding the kind of innocence so many of us crave in a world that’s forever changing.

  “It’s why I’m confident people will love your work. With just a few pictures you have managed to teach me not only about the Amish, but also life in general.”

  Hannah flapped her hands quickly before bringing them together, almost prayer-like, beneath her chin. “See? What did I tell you, Katie? Your drawings are amazing.”

  Inhaling slowly, Katie replayed Mr. Rothman’s words over in her head. Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined a moment like this. It was scary, and exciting, and it needed to end.

  She needed to end it.

  Now.

  “I thank you for your kind words, Mr. Rothman, I-I really do. I will remember them for many years to come, I am sure. But”—she pulled the sketch pad to her chest and released her breath—“I can’t share these with you or your gallery. I’m sorry.”

  Chapter 15

  Katie was grateful for the sun’s position in the sky as they made their way down the brownstone’s front steps to the sidewalk below. Without it, Eric wouldn’t be worrying about locating his sunglasses. And without that momentary preoccupation, he might have noticed the death glare she gave Hannah on the way out of the Rothmans’ front door.

  “I’m sorry my sister asked you to do this. I begged her not to, but she didn’t listen.” She tried to shove the piece of hair Hannah had tugged out of her kapp back into place, but it was no use. She was simply too angry. “Hannah forgets that we are the very same age. If she really had to take Jack to something with his parents tonight, all she needed to do was tell me how to get back to her apartment, and I would have been fine.”

  Eric slipped his glasses into place and stopped, mid-step. “Hey, I’m glad she called. Really. Gave me an excuse to get some air.”

  “You did not need to get stuck with me to get air.” She continued past him, her feet powered as much by anger as anything else. “But that is Hannah . . . always trying to run my life. When we were little, if I didn’t want to climb, she would refuse to come down from the tree until I came up. It didn’t matter if I wanted to play quietly on the grass, or if I was in the middle of a conversation with Mamm. If Hannah wanted me to climb, she made it so I had to climb. And later, when—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” He closed the growing gap between them with several long strides and guided her to a stop just shy of the corner. “First up, I don’t consider myself being stuck with you. I’m here because I want to be. Period. Second, I don’t think Hannah is trying to run your life by wanting someone to walk you back to her apartment. You’ve only been in the city for what? A little over forty-eight hours? This place can be daunting after five days, let alone two. And that’s not even factoring in the part about you being Amish and never having been here before.”

  “Amish does not mean dumb,” she protested.

  He drew back almost as if he’d been slapped. “I didn’t say it did. I just meant—”

  “Hannah forgets she was Amish, too. Sometimes, she even looks at me the way the English girls always do . . . like we are odd. But we’re—I mean, I’m not.”

  Now that she was going, she couldn’t stop, the words tumbling from her mouth with a vengeance. “I can walk down a street just like she can . . . I can choose not to use the electric lamp in her guest bedroom if the light from the window is enough to change my clothes by . . . I can tell Mr. Rothman no about”—she smacked the edge of the sketch pad protruding out from beneath her opposite arm—“my drawings if I want to.”

  “Wait. Your drawings are in there?”

  “Yah.”

  “Can I see them?”

  Something about the earnestness in his voice caught her by surprise, draining the anger from her body. “Why? They are just pictures.”

  “You drew them, yes?”

  She nodded.

  “And you said they make you happy, right?”

  Again, she nodded.

  “Have you eaten yet? Because I know a great place between here and Hannah’s where we can stop for dinner.” The same smile that had been on his face when he first arrived at the Rothmans’ returned, bringing with it the same answering flutter inside her chest. “And maybe while we’re waiting for our food I can see your work . . .”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  His smile slipped a little but not for long. “Then I’ll just walk you back to Hannah’s, and on the way there, you can tell me what’s got you so worked up.”

  “I’m not worked up.”

  “Yes, you are. So how about you just get it out so you can be done with—”

  “Mr. Rothman looked at my pictures.” She hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that, but it just kind of happened.

  “And?”

  “He-he said they are good. That I have”—she glanced up at the sky as they walked—“talent.”

  A single clap brought her attention back down to street level and the man walking beside her. “Katie! That’s incredible!”

  “It was very nice of him to say such things.”

  Eric’s steps slowed, necessitating the same from Katie. “Nice of him? Are you kidding me? Rothman saying you have artistic talent would be like the president of a major recording label telling me my songs are good. I mean, that’s huge—super huge, actually.”

  When she said nothing, he bobbed his head until her gaze mingled with his. “This guy owns a big-time art gallery not too far from here, Katie. Do you know what it could mean if he decided to show your stuff there?”

  “I said no.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said he could not show them.”

  He stumbled backward a step. “Wait. You’re telling me he offered to show your stuff? Now? Already?”

  “Yah. But I said no.”

  “But that’s your dream!”

  “But drawing what I draw is wrong.”

  “Wrong? How can it be wrong?”

&nb
sp; “It is as I told you yesterday. The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thyself a graven image.’ ”

  “But I thought that was just about photographs.”

  “My drawings are like photographs. They are graven images.”

  Fisting his hand in front of his mouth, he exhaled, hard. “But it’s your dream, Katie.”

  “It’s a dream I can’t have.”

  “So leave. Like Hannah did.”

  “It’s not that simple,” she whispered.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve been baptized and Hannah wasn’t.”

  “And there’s a difference?”

  She didn’t mean to laugh, but it was either that or bow to the tears she’d been fighting off and on since declining Mr. Rothman’s offer. “Hannah can still talk with Dat and the children. She can visit when she wants. She can come for holidays if she wants. She can come when there are weddings and when there are funerals, too. In between, she can keep in touch with letters and send the little ones stickers if she wants.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “But if I left, I would lose them all—Dat, Samuel, Jakob, Mary, baby Annie, and”—her voice broke—“Sadie. I couldn’t write to them, I couldn’t visit them, I couldn’t speak to them. I couldn’t be part of their lives in any way.”

  “Ever?”

  She swallowed against the lump climbing up her throat. “Ever.”

  “And if you stay but let him show your work? Then what?”

  “I would be shunned. My family and my community could not speak to me until I repented.”

  “Okay, so what you’re saying is that if you ask for forgiveness things would go back to normal?”

  “Yah.”

  “So why don’t you do that?”

  “Because I just can’t. I can’t allow Mr. Rothman to show my pictures in his gallery. To do so would be wrong, and to make it right I would have to walk away from the only life I know.”

  She made herself look away, to focus on something, anything that would buy her time while she steadied her breath and blinked away the tears. For a moment, that something was a woman getting into the back of a yellow car. Then, when the car was gone, it was an elderly man crossing at the next light with a walker.

  Every time she thought she was ready to resume their conversation though, the telltale prick of tears resurrected itself in her eyes. Finally, after taking in so many different things she couldn’t remember them all, she glanced back at Eric to find him leaning against the front of a building, studying her in return.

  “Is something wrong?” she whispered.

  He started to speak, stopped, and then, after a few seconds, continued, the alluring rasp of his voice paling against the punch of his words. “A different life doesn’t mean the wrong life, Katie. Remember that.”

  “I-I don’t understand.”

  “I think you need to figure out what makes you happy. Because in the end, when all is said and done, it’s really your life to live.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Eric’s words were still echoing in her head as she fought with the lock on Hannah’s door. At home, in Blue Ball, no one questioned her life. It was as it was supposed to be. But here, in New York—

  The answering click to what had to be her fifth attempt at opening the door stole her thoughts long enough to get inside and shut herself away from a day she wished had never happened. Tossing her sketch pad onto the couch, Katie marched into the kitchen, yanked open a cabinet, helped herself to a box of crackers she’d spied while pulling together breakfast earlier that morning, and tried to ignore the mental images of the dinner she could have had with Eric if she hadn’t been so angry at Hannah.

  Yet even as she sunk down next to her sketch pad with the cracker box in tow, she knew the anger she’d carried for the first part of their walk home went beyond Hannah to something deeper, something more befitting the general malaise now weighing her down.

  She tried to push it off on her grumbling stomach, but six crackers in, she knew that wasn’t the case. It wasn’t the busy morning with Jack, either. She’d loved every moment she’d spent with the little boy. It wasn’t the fact that Eric had been summoned to walk her home, either, although that had certainly given her something to blame . . .

  Releasing the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, Katie set down the cracker box and pulled her sketch pad onto her lap. Slowly, page by page, she went through her drawings, stopping on occasion to study a shading choice, or a detail she’d felt the need to include—the tilt of a head, the lift of a chin, the glint of mischievousness, the joy of an innocent. . .

  “You have both the eye and the talent to really go places, Katie. ”

  She ran her hand across Mary’s young face, the youngster’s joy over Samuel’s inability to catch a chicken bringing an unexpected misting to Katie’s eyes. So much of her pictures were about reliving special moments and documenting them in a way they could never be forgotten even if she was the only one who could ever see them . . .

  “You’ve given me pause and made me want to see my own life in a different way—to slow down and see the beauty that is a child’s laughter or a mother’s peace or two siblings setting off together.”

  Every time she started a new picture, she told herself it would be the last, that it was wrong. That she was wrong. But by the time she made the final mark on each new picture, she knew she couldn’t stop. It was as if the uncertainty she felt in her day-to-day life slipped away the moment she picked up her pencils and began to draw, leaving behind a different Katie than everyone else saw. Including herself.

  “A different life doesn’t mean the wrong life, Katie. Remember that.”

  Was Eric right? Could she really be that Katie all the time?

  Turning to the last picture in her pad, she took in the lake, the toy boats, the mother duck and her two ducklings, and the spot where she, herself, had stood while quietly contemplating the life Hannah had now. Regular Katie didn’t belong in a world made up of dreamers like Eric. It wasn’t the Amish way. But what if she wasn’t regular Katie? What if she was the Katie she was when she was drawing?

  She liked that Katie . . .

  She wanted to be that Katie . . .

  She—

  “Do not worry, Mamm. Please. I will take care of them all—Samuel, Jakob, Mary, Sadie, Annie, and Dat. I promise.”

  Bowing her head nearly to her chest, Katie gave in to the tears she could no longer hold back.

  Chapter 16

  Katie was sitting on the windowsill the next evening, looking out at the buildings and the people, when Hannah breezed in the front door and tossed her purse across the room and onto the couch.

  “You’ve got a total of ten minutes to freshen up before we need to head out of here, so let’s get a move on.” Hannah clapped her hands. “Quick. Quick. Quick.”

  Slowly, Katie dropped her feet to the floor and stood. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s a surprise—something I think will wipe that sourpuss off your face once and for all.”

  “There is no sourpuss.”

  “No?” Hannah closed the gap between them with three quick strides and then led Katie over to the mirror next to the door. “You still say there’s no sourpuss?”

  Katie wiggled out from under Hannah’s hands but remained in front of the mirror, the sad eyes looking back at her making it difficult to argue. “It has been a long day of doing nothing,” she protested.

  “I told you that you could come with me to work this morning, remember? But you insisted you wanted time alone. So if you’ve been bored that’s on you, Katie.”

  She knew Hannah was talking, but really, all she could truly concentrate on at that moment was the face peering at her from just beyond her own shoulder—a face that was both the same and completely different than her own. Yes, the basics were still the same—the brown eyes they shared with Dat, the soft brown hair they got from Mamm, and the high cheekbones that were someh
ow a combination of the two. But even those givens were suddenly not so given anymore, thanks to Hannah’s makeup, kapp-free head, and the way the amber flecks in her eyes seemed to dance with her smile.

  “You look so . . . so happy, Hannah.”

  “That’s because I am.”

  “Does makeup and fancy hair really do that?” Katie asked.

  Hannah’s laugh filled the space between them a split second before she closed it with an arm around Katie’s shoulder and neck. “It certainly doesn’t hurt.” Then, resting her chin on Katie’s shoulder, their gazes met in the mirror. “But really, Katie, the thing that makes me look like this is about being where I’m supposed to be. Here. In New York City.”

  “With Travis?”

  “That certainly helps, but it’s more than that, Katie. It’s getting to be me. It’s taking a dance class one evening a week. It’s getting to go to shows with Travis and Eric. It’s getting to be neat if I want to be neat, or sloppy if I want to be sloppy. It’s getting to sleep in on my day off if I want to, or stay out late with friends if I have nowhere to be the next morning. It’s getting to decorate this place in a way that makes me happy. It’s getting to listen to a radio and sing the same kind of songs that other people my age are singing. It’s wearing dresses and shoes that make me feel pretty. It’s walking down the road holding hands with Travis because I like the way his hand feels around mine. It’s stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and kissing him. It’s meeting people who are different than me and getting to hang out with them. It’s getting a paycheck from Mr. Rothman and getting to deposit it in an account with my name on it, knowing that one day, when I’ve saved enough, I can go to school to learn about things I want to learn about.”

  “You mean like you said the other day? About learning to do English hair?” Katie asked.

  “That’s right.” Hannah released her hold on Katie and stepped back. “If you could see the salon Mrs. Rothman goes to, you’d understand. It’s . . . it’s wonderful. Women come in looking tired or feeling low. They want the stylist to make them feel better. And when their hair is done and they look in the mirror, they are no longer tired or low. They feel pretty.