The only undamaged art in the room, Dürer's Self-Portrait regarded him without expression. In a loose pattern around it, three bullet holes still smoldered.
Tremaine held Dürer's gaze a moment longer, waiting. The air seemed electric, though he supposed it could have been his starved lungs. He watched for movement, and noticed the light from the vault had caused a dim shadow of himself to fall on the painting.
When nothing happened for several minutes, Tremaine decided it was time to go. He did not know why the Master's curse had spared him, although he recalled something Ziminski had said to the Mad Russian: The man values his art more than his life. If that's not a quality worth admiring, I don't know what is. Tremaine thought perhaps that might be the reason but he supposed he'd never know for sure.
He pushed himself to his feet, stumbled, righted himself, and staggered toward the door.
The Master's eyes remained fixed on the empty vault, and what his pupil had painted there. They did not follow Tremaine as he left the gallery.
MY PROTECTOR
"THE STATE OF those young boys..." the Principal lamented. "You understand, I'm sure, why it behooves me to have your daughter expelled."
Jenny's mother understood. The two boys outside Principal Villeneuve's office had been viciously attacked, barely able to sit in the hard plastic chairs without squirming for the pain. She turned to her little girl, whose eighth birthday they had recently celebrated with a tea party and pony rides. Jenny's green eyes, wet with shame, refused to leave her patent leather shoes, hovering inches above the gray carpet. Her freckled face twisted in a pout, her little red pigtails rested on the shoulders of a pale blue smock dress, Jenny might have looked the part of innocence were it not for the obvious spatters of blood. Whatever had happened, Mrs. Cooper couldn't imagine her little girl possessing the strength to do such horrid things to a single ten-year-old boy, let alone two of them--especially considering how much bigger they were. But shame had sealed the boys' split lips. And all Jenny seemed able to say was, "It wasn't me."
The shock of it, for Jenny's father, was dulled by a glimmer of pride. He fought to hold back a smile when he looked at his daughter, thinking she just might manage middle school all right on her own. The thought reminded him of the empty seat at the dinner table, of the room that would no longer carry loud music or laughter, only gather dust. He no longer felt the urge to smile.
"Mr. and Mrs. Cooper, I truly am sorry. But you see, I'm sure, how her actions left us with no choice. The parents have threatened to sue, and they have yet to see the damage she's done to their children!"
Jenny could no longer hold her peace. Her voice was so small, so meek, her father had to ask her to repeat it. "It wasn't me," she whimpered again, with a beseeching look toward her parents. "It was Aaron."
Jenny's mother and father shared an anxious look, and Principal Villeneuve's face lost all color. When Mr. Cooper looked at his daughter again, his heart nearly burst with compassion.
Only then did he notice she bore no wounds on her hands. They were, in fact, entirely free of blood: the boys' or her own.
❚❚
WITH HEAVY HEARTS, Jenny's mother and father dropped her off at Camp Broken Wings. Bereavement camp was Principal Villeneuve's idea, and Jenny's parents had agreed spending time off school with other children of her age, who had suffered similar trauma, would be beneficial.
For her part, Jenny had been silent during the trip, and had yet to apologize for what she'd done. Her mother was still trying to wrap her mind around what Jenny had told them, that it hadn't been her who'd hurt the boys but her older brother. She tried to put herself in her daughter's shoes, to fathom why she would have made up such an obvious lie after doing something so despicable, when she could have simply blamed it on another student. She must have known no one would believe her. But the fact that she'd lied to them without a trace of guilt made Mrs. Cooper angry, particularly since it had been her brother she'd pointed to as a culprit, knowing full well it was impossible for Aaron to have hurt those boys. He'd protected her from bullies before the accident, but now...
Mrs. Cooper shied away from the thought. In the same moment, she looked up to catch her daughter's eye, and was surprised to find a glimmer of hatred behind the sullen pout. Hatred burning toward her.
The camp looked decent enough. Freshly-painted log cabins bordered the parking lot, surrounded on all sides by fragrant pines, spruce and cedars. Beyond them children laughed and squealed, and the faint smell of fresh water reminded her of the small lake, where boys and girls ages 8 – 16 could swim, paddle and play. Other activities included rope-climbing, scavenger hunts, soccer, and many more--at least according to the brochure Principal Villeneuve had given them.
Two counsellors dressed in red t-shirts and shorts approached from down a wooded trail, a teenaged boy and girl. Once they were nearer, Mrs. Cooper realized the white emblem on their shirts wasn't an ink blot--her first thought, and a peculiar one at that--but a bird with one wing twisted at an angle, the name of the camp spelled out in letters made to look like carved wood. She eyed the tanned, muscular thighs of the brunette, late teens, as the girl bent to address Jenny, pleased to note that her husband's eyes remained scanning the trees.
"Hi there. You must be Jennifer. I'm Brooke."
"Say 'hi,' honey," Mr. Cooper urged.
Jenny looked back at her father, then turned to face the counsellor with a sullen, "Hi."
"You're gonna have a lot of fun with us, Jennifer. Isn't she, Jonas?"
Jonas, the young man regarding Mrs. Cooper with his hands behind his back, snapped to and nodded. "Huh? Oh, you bet."
Jenny shifted her knapsack onto her shoulders. Above them, the red maple leaf strung from the end of the flagpole fluttered limply in a light breeze.
"You be good, okay?" Mr. Cooper told her with a hand placed gently on her head. His little girl nodded. "Your mother and I will be back to pick you up on Monday."
Jenny looked sullenly at her mother, who tried her damnedest to smile with tears welling in her eyes. This would be Jenny's first time away from home, and despite what had happened to bring them here, Mrs. Cooper couldn't help but feel a little saddened.
The tanned girl, Brooke, stood and held out a slender hand for Jenny. Reluctantly, Jenny took it. As the two counsellors led her away, she turned back in the direction of the car. Mrs. Cooper hitched a breath, waiting to meet her daughter's eyes, to leave her with one last hopeful smile. But Jenny seemed to find something interesting in the empty space between them and the car, and smiled anyhow.
❚❚
JONAS AND BROOKE showed Jenny to her cabin, where she'd be spending the night with nine other girls of similar age, then introduced her to a group of young boys and girls on the soccer field. They played Red Rover. They paddled canoes. They made wallets out of duct tape, and friendship bracelets. They changed into swim trunks to play Marco Polo in the shallows of Lake Caribou. The counsellors tired the children out, and try as she might, Jenny couldn't manage to hold onto her sadness for long. She started to enjoy herself. She opened up to other kids. They found a baby turtle, and showed it to their counsellors. Brooke told them to wash their hands so they wouldn't get salmonella, and a little boy with a bowl-cut asked, "Don't you mean turtle-monella?" The children all laughed. The day wound down, the evening filling with cries of joy and laughter as they played tag and caught fireflies. For lunch, they'd had tacos. For dinner, it was chicken fingers and French fries. No bone-dry chicken and couscous like her mother made her eat at home. No cauliflower "steak" and Brussels sprouts.
After dinner when darkness fell, the children and counsellors all gathered on wooden pews circled around the big fire pit, reminding Jenny of paintings she'd seen about the mysterious Druids. Soon a tall fire crackled, and mosquitoes buzzed around their ears. Trees whose color had faded now glowed orange, their pointed tops stark black against a sky filled with more stars than Jenny, a city girl, had ever seen in her life. The counsellors
roasted marshmallows for s'mores, and passed the finished treats around. Soon everyone's fingers were sticky, their mouths tingly from sugar, and their bellies full.
"Who has a story they'd like to share?"
Several children put up their hands. Jenny sat beside a chubby girl with short dark hair named Colleen. The girl, whose older sister had passed a few weeks before Jenny's brother had his accident, had given her a friendship bracelet. The two of them had stuck together during free time at the lake and had sat side by side at dinner. Neither girl put her hand up.
Darius, a bearded counsellor older than both Jonas and Brooke (and much too handsome to have a beard, in Jenny's opinion), pointed to a tween boy.
"W-what kind of story?" the boy asked, unfortunate enough to have both a lisp and braces which flashed with firelight when he spoke. "Like... a ghost story?"
A ripple of excitement followed this. Darius motioned for the children to quiet down. "We don't tell ghost stories at Camp Broken Wings," he said. "You know that."
"Yeah, but why not?" a girl called out.
"Well, it's just our policy. Now does anyone have a story that's a little more pleasant? Maybe a story about something funny. Or heroic."
The children looked at each other. Nobody wanted to say anything, or had anything to say. Jenny felt frustrated. The suggestion of ghost story had stirred something in her and the others, but the camp's stupid "policy" wouldn't allow them to be told. But he had asked for a story of heroism, and the only hero she'd ever known was her big brother.
Jenny put up her hand.
"Yes." Darius pointed out a young boy in the front row he then called Timmy.
"My big brother tried to fart on my head once, but he pooped himself instead."
The kids all laughed, even the older ones. Everyone except Jenny, who wanted to tell her story and felt only anger toward the dull boy.
"I'm sure that wasn't funny for your brother, or your mom," the counsellor said, and scuffed his sandals in the dirt. "Anybody else have a story that doesn't involve poo?"
Jenny's hand fired up again. She twiddled her fingers so he'd see her first.
"Yes, uh..." Brooke leaned and whispered something to Darius. "Jennifer," he said.
"My brother is a hero," Jenny told him.
"Okay. That sounds like a nice story. Why don't you tell us a little bit about him?"
Jenny struggled to describe him, though his face was as clear as day, even at night. They both had the same freckles and red hair, the same green eyes. They both had dimples when they laughed, though presently he wore a scowl, shaking his head 'no.'
"Well... he's got one wonky ear and one normal one. My mom calls it his elf ear, but Aaron told me a while ago it was a defect he got in the womb. He's really really tall, but not as tall as my dad. Dad always said he'd grow up taller than him, but that was before. We don't talk about Aaron since the accident, an' if I forget and say something about him, Mom cries and Dad looks all worried."
"Oh." The bearded counsellor turned to his fellow counsellors, who seemed at a loss. "Jennifer, I'm sorry, but we're not supposed to talk about... those who've passed."
Her nose wrinkled. "What's 'passed'?"
"He means died," Colleen explained in a whisper.
"Aaron's not dead." She turned to the empty seat between her and the small boy to her right, a cold place where the boy had first sat and then immediately shifted away from. "He's sitting right beside me."
Colleen reached out and clutched Jenny's arm.
The small boy looked at Jenny, fear registering on his face in the flicker of firelight. He hesitated a moment, scowling at Jenny, before pushing his friend over and scooching further away. Someone made a ghostly "Woo-oo-ooh!"
"Jennifer, that's not funny," Darius said.
Children craned their necks and stood up in their seats to get a look at her brother. An older boy sang the Twilight Zone theme tunelessly, and some of the children laughed.
Darius waited for the children to settle with a look of concern. "Your brother's not here, Jennifer. There's no one sitting beside you."
Jenny felt small and weak, her cheeks growing hot from all the attention suddenly focused on her, from the handsome counsellor with the stupid beard not believing her. She looked to the place where her brother had just been. "He was," she said, "until all your stupid jokes scared him away."
The children all tittered nervously, and the counsellors, apparently eager to change the subject, launched into a silly song about a camel named Alice and her many humps. Everyone seemed to know the words but Jenny, and her embarrassment deepened. She pretended to sing along to On Top of Spaghetti and The Log Driver's Waltz, but the counsellor had made her angry, and she was no longer enjoying herself.
Colleen turned to her as they all sang Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore, and whispered, "You can tell me about him, if you want. When we get back to the cabin."
Jenny turned to her, genuinely pleased. The two girls smiled conspiratorially, and began to sing along.
❚❚
AFTER LIGHTS-OUT, the girls gathered at the foot of their bunks where they could see each other in the dim cone of light from a flashlight cupped in an older girl's hand. The oldest girl, Shondra, had directed them to tie their blankets around the beds to block the light from reaching the windows, "so the counsellors won't see we're awake." In the dark outside the cabin, frogs and night bugs chirped, but inside all was quiet.
"Nice one at the campfire, kid," Shondra said as she tucked the corner of a blanket into her bunk to act as the roof of the tent. "You broke the cardinal rule on your first day. Thou shalt not talk about the dead."
Jenny stirred on the bottom bunk closest the door, the word upsetting her. "I told you, Aaron's not dead. He got in a bike accident with a car on my street. When we got to the hop-spital, I heard the doctor say he died on the operating table but then they brought him back, an' after that, they let me in to see him. He had all these tubes and junk coming out of him, but I could tell he was still alive because sometimes he blinked. My mom said he's in a cona."
The older girls giggled. Jenny felt her cheeks grow red again. She didn't like to be laughed at.
"It's coma," Shondra told her, with the patience of a friendly older sibling. "So he's in a coma. You said he was sitting beside you at the fire."
"He... comes and visits me. Sometimes."
The other girls shared a look. Doubtful, worried--Jenny couldn't tell.
"V-visits?" Colleen asked.
"Uh-huh. Like the day before yesterday, these two boys were pickin' on me, pulling my hair and stuff when I was just trying to walk down the stairs, calling me 'ginger' and 'freckle-face,' so I told 'em to stop, but they didn't care." She shook her head, as if the boys should have known better. "They just kept on doing it. But I told them, 'I wouldn't do that if I were you,' because I knew what my brother would do to them if he found out."
Jenny took a deep breath. She saw the eager looks on their faces, wide eyes in deep shadow thrown by their cheeks from the flashlight. She hadn't been able to tell anyone what had happened that day. Nobody had wanted to hear the truth--not the principal, not her parents. But these girls were eager to listen. And technically, she wouldn't be doing wrong, since what she was telling them wasn't a ghost story.
"But they still didn't listen," she continued. "They kept teasing me even worse. They pinched my bum and stepped on the back of my shoes." The girls shook their heads in disgust. "And then after that they chased me under the stairs, but I bet they didn't expect my brother was gonna be waiting there. Right away, he hit 'em with a hammer from the art room. Bop bop bop." She made a striking gesture, the girls flinching as if she'd hit them. The flashlight beam flickered, causing their shadows to flutter on the blankets. "They ran crying to the Principal's office and lied and said I was the one that hit 'em."
Jenny looked at the others, saw the fear in their eyes mingled with delight, because the bad boys had been punished.
"But it was A
aron that did it," she finished. "Aaron's my protector."
In the shocked silence that followed the blanket closest to Jenny came down violently, and all the girls screamed, even Jenny herself. The girl called Delia who had a lazy eye dropped the flashlight, and when it settled on the dusty floorboards, the intruder's giant shadow fell on the wall by the open door, the blanket rumpled at his feet. They crawled to the ends of their beds, hugging their knees, eyes widened in fear of the man whose face still lay in darkness. But Jenny held her ground because she knew he wasn't her brother. This man was slimmer and wore sandals.
"I told you, no ghost stories," Darius said, bending into the light to grab her roughly by the wrist and yank her out of bed. "You're coming to the office."
Jenny allowed herself to be pulled along quietly, sullenly. Colleen reached out to her, and the other girls protested. Shondra merely shook her head.
"Wonder if her brother will protect her now," she muttered sarcastically.
❚❚
DARIUS SAT ACROSS the desk from Jenny, who swung her feet from the tall chair. On the wall were photos of children at play, along with several framed newspaper articles touting the healing power of Broken Wings. A clock made from a flat piece of driftwood ticked away the seconds above two canoe paddles in the shape of an X.
The counsellor put his feet up on the desk, rattling a big metal flashlight with the words HEAVY METAL stenciled on its side, which rested beside a desk tray labelled IN and OUT, filled with various files. This was not Darius's office. The camp director, he'd informed Jenny, was away at a conference, and had put him in charge for the weekend.
"Whatever I say goes," he said with what looked like glee, "and I say we have to call your parents."
Jenny muttered something under her breath, her feet still swinging.
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