No mention of any daughters, dead or alive. But it said Maisie moved to the lighthouse in 1974. And Claire said they had moved there right after her sister died, four years before.
I was dreaming about the past. When I saw Claire, it was 1978. I did a quick sum in my head: 2004 minus 1978 was twenty-six years ago.
I looked up. Magda was rummaging in a cupboard, pulling out flour and baking soda. She was probably going to make more muffins. Her motto seemed to be, “When in doubt, bake.” Fine with me, if only I had an appetite. Through the window, I could see the sun dappling through the leaves on the tree in the backyard. Everything was normal. Except for me.
What was wrong with me? Why had I fallen asleep in the library in the middle of the morning? And why was I dreaming of things that happened so long ago? How did Maisie King’s painting get into my attic? And the quilt?
I looked back at the book. The next picture was the one of the lighthouse in the storm. I flipped past it and opened my eyes just a little bit to squint at the new page. Then I forgot about trying to keep myself from falling into the pictures and just stared.
It was a painting of me in my blue cotton pajamas, my hair wild about my face.
My mouth felt dry and I felt that empty, dropping feeling you get when you think your heart has suddenly stopped—and then it started pounding like crazy, ringing in my ears. How did my picture get into this book? I looked at the caption—it was called Annie III, and the date was 1978. Then I looked more closely at the painting.
The pajamas weren’t my pajamas, but they were the same shade of blue, with little white flowers all over them. Mine had yellow flowers. Her hair was the same curly dark-brown as mine, but longer, and her features, as far as I could see, were almost identical to mine, except she was a few years younger than me. The only thing that wasn’t exactly what I saw in the mirror every morning was her expression. Her eyes were alight with mischief, and she had a big grin on her face. I was sure I never smiled liked that. She was bursting with life—as if she was going to jump out of the painting and go running around the room.
Just as I thought that, looking into her dancing eyes, the room started spinning and I felt like I was falling. I closed my eyes tight to try and stop it, but it didn’t work.
The first thing I noticed was the sweet, salty smell of the ocean air. Then I heard the waves rolling in on the rocks below the lighthouse. I opened my eyes.
I was standing in a room stacked with paintings, with a dresser crowded with paint tubes against one wall and a fireplace with a chimney against the other. A table with more tubes and paintbrushes stood beside an easel—and on the easel was the painting of the girl in the blue pajamas. The other Annie.
CLAIRE
THE MORNING AFTER the storm, Maisie went out to the store and I wandered into her studio. I don’t often venture over the threshold. It’s her private space, and she doesn’t like people looking at her work before it’s finished. But I glide through it every once in a while, just to see what she’s up to. I don’t touch anything, so she doesn’t know I’ve been in there.
I don’t really understand most of her paintings. She does landscapes and portraits. The landscapes are thick with color and it’s not the way I see things. It’s the same with the portraits—I can recognize the people she’s drawing, but she brings out unexpected expressions or their features are slightly skewed, and I don’t get it. Like one she did of her friend Tilly, who is a loud, laughing actor who always has a joke or something outrageous to tell you. In the portrait, Tilly’s eyes were on a slant and her mouth turned down. She looked sad. Not how she looks in real life.
That morning, after the storm, I was looking for one picture in particular. I went to her easel and caught my breath.
There it was. A picture of Annie in her blue pajamas. The same pajamas she was wearing the night she came to my bedroom.
ANNIE
THE PAINTING LOOKED just as it did in the book, only much more vibrant. I took a step closer. There was a black toy Scottie dog lying on a bed behind the girl.
A breath of wind ruffled my hair and I looked up. Light poured in the windows and I could see a blue sky with white clouds scudding across it in a stiff wind. The wide ocean spread out to a thin line on the horizon.
“Annie,” whispered a voice in my ear.
I spun around and there was Claire, right behind me. She spread her arms wide and enveloped me in a tight hug. She felt soft and smelled like the lavender sachet in my sock drawer.
“I knew you’d come back,” she said.
For a moment I wanted to stay in the circle of that hug. I felt something that was tight in my chest start to give a little.
“You don’t feel like a ghost,” she said, with a little laugh. “I can feel your heart beating.”
I pulled away.
“I’m dreaming again,” I said stiffly. I moved over to the easel. “I saw this painting in a book and I fell asleep and here I am.”
Claire frowned. “You couldn’t have seen it in a book. Maisie doesn’t show the Annie pictures to anyone. Not even me. I just sneak in here and look at them without her knowing.”
“There are more paintings of Annie?” I asked.
Claire nodded.
“Every year,” she said, her voice not quite steady. “Every year around the anniversary of the accident, she paints you. This is her latest. She just painted it this week.”
My stomach felt like it was dropping away.
“When…When is the anniversary of the accident?”
Claire stared at me. “June 10,” she whispered. “Two days ago.”
The day my mother crashed her car.
I swallowed. Claire’s eyes seemed to be boring into mine. They were dark blue, like blueberries. I knew those eyes. I looked away. I felt like I was falling again.
“Do you want to see them?” she said. “The paintings?”
“Uh…okay.”
She turned on her heel and led me out into the hall, then crossed to a door on the opposite wall that stood at the head of the stairs.
“Through here,” she said, opening it.
I followed her in and found myself in the biggest closet I had ever seen. It ran down the whole side of the house, with shelves and drawers along one side, and hooks and bars to hang clothes on down the other. It was full of clothes and blankets and sheets and pillowcases and towels.
Claire walked swiftly to a door at the other end of the closet. “This leads to the other side,” she said, and pushed it open.
“Other side? Of what?” I asked.
“Of the house,” she said, and stepped through the door.
It was a mirror house: everything was the same but reversed. The stairs ran down to the left, and three doors stood along the hallway.
“There used to be two families here,” said Claire. “Nan’s family on our side and the Pierceys on the other. Mr. Piercey was the assistant lighthouse keeper. Nan and her brothers and sisters used to play with Mr. Piercey’s kids when they were little. Nan told us lots of stories about it. We always called it the Mirror House.” She glanced over at me, as if she was testing me to see if I remembered.
I didn’t say anything, but I felt uneasy. Why did the words mirror house come to me before Claire even said it? I was thinking about how Alice went through the looking glass and everything was backward. Anyone would think that. It wasn’t because I remembered anything. I’d never been here before.
I followed Claire into the middle room.
“Maisie keeps paintings over here. We’re not really supposed to use it; we only pay rent for the other side, but no one has come here for years and years, so Maisie uses it for her stuff. And I come over sometimes.”
She watched me as I looked around the room.
“You really don’t remember, do you?” she said.
“I’ve never been here before.” It had been a bedroom, and an iron bedstead still stood in one corner, covered in a threadbare quilt, but the rest of the room was st
acked with canvases. The window looked south over a sparkling blue sea and dark-green headlands running into the distance.
“We used to come in here with Nan, years ago. You were just little. I guess that’s why you don’t remember,” said Claire, crossing to some canvases in the far corner. “Maisie puts her paintings over here when she’s done. If she doesn’t sell them, sometimes she paints over them. Or just leaves them.” She started moving the paintings at the front of the stack aside.
My fingers were twitching. I wanted to see all the paintings in that room, right away.
“She keeps all the Annie paintings hidden back here.” Claire started hauling canvases over to the window. “Come and look,” she said, setting three against the wall, where they were illuminated by the light from the window. She stood back to look at them, then stepped forward again and rearranged them. “Now they’re in order. Starting with the year you would have been five, up to this year, when you would have been eight. That’s the one in the studio. The new one.”
I caught my breath. The paintings showed the girl on a street, in front of the lighthouse, baking cookies—laughing, happy, full of life. She could have been my identical twin.
CLAIRE
THE FIRST TIME I saw one of the Annie paintings was on the first anniversary of her death, June 10, 1975. I wandered into Maisie’s studio while she was away at the store, and there was Annie grinning out at me from the easel, standing in front of our old house in St. John’s, holding a little black Scottie dog in her arms.
It knocked the breath out of me for a minute. Annie looked like she was going to leap out of the painting and come running toward me, calling out that she’d caught Sammy and the car had missed her. I felt like I’d been slammed by a car myself, with the shock of seeing her like that. When I caught my breath, I walked closer to the painting.
She was different. She was older. Her face was a little thinner, her hair was longer and she was bigger all over—as if she’d aged a year since I saw her last.
I heard the door slam downstairs as Maisie came into the house, and I skedaddled out of there on my tiptoes so she wouldn’t hear me.
I haunted the studio for the next few months, whenever Maisie was out, looking for more pictures of Annie. But there was nothing. The next June on the anniversary of Annie’s death, I crept into Maisie’s studio when she was out for a walk, and there was Annie, beaming out at me, standing in front of the lighthouse in a red knitted sweater with the image of a black Scottie worked into it. Annie had changed again and looked like a sturdy little girl of six.
After that I always went looking in June and I always found a new Annie picture. Sometimes on the easel, sometimes hidden away among other paintings. In each one she was older, and Sammy was always in the painting. Last year’s painting featured Annie mixing cookie dough at our kitchen table with a china Scottie dog standing on the window ledge behind her. This year’s had Annie standing in her old bedroom in St. John’s, with a stuffed toy Scottie dog on the bed behind her.
Maisie never sold those paintings or showed them anywhere. I don’t think anyone in the world knew about them except me. She was painting Annie as if she was still alive, growing up, but always with that little black dog there to remind us of the accident.
They gave me the creeps.
ANNIE
I SANK DOWN ON the bed and stared at the pictures. My five-, six- and seven-year-old selves smiled back. It was me: from the dark, slightly crooked eyebrows to the stubby fingers to the wayward curl escaping over my forehead. I had done enough self-portraits in my art class to know my features inside out, and they were all there. Only the eyes were different. Same color, same shape, but the light of mischief wasn’t mine. This Annie looked like she would be bouncing all the time, seldom sitting still, never measuring her words before they left her mouth.
Something caught in my throat. This was the way I might have been, if I hadn’t grown up in such a cool, ordered house, with parents who frowned when they looked at me, where I was always careful not to show too much. If I had grown up here, with that vast sky and ocean all around me, a big sister to play with and a mother who knew about painting…
And she did know. Despite the shock of seeing these paintings of a dead girl who looked just like me, part of my brain was busily assessing the technique. I had been drawn to Maisie King’s landscapes, but her portraits were something else again—brilliant, but unsettling. Like she saw something her subjects might not want shown. Here it was a slight self-satisfaction. This little girl was loved, and happy, and she felt she could do whatever she wanted without consequence.
There was a simmering anger behind these paintings. At the girl, at the dog. I shook my head, as if coming up for air.
CLAIRE
ANNIE SAT ON the bed, staring at the paintings for a long time. She seemed to be lost in them. She looked at them just the way Maisie did when she was particularly interested in a painting. Like she was a million miles away. Somewhere I could never follow. Suddenly she shook her head and took a deep breath.
“Annie,” I said. No reaction. “ANNIE!” I said, again, louder.
She turned toward me and slowly her eyes came into focus. “Your mother is one good painter,” she said. “Amazing.”
I felt something hot inside my chest, rising up into my face.
“OUR mother,” I snapped. “Our mother is a good painter, yes. But that’s beside the point. She could be the greatest painter in the world and I couldn’t care less. She’s a lousy mother.”
I stomped over and started grabbing the paintings and putting them back where they came from.
“For the last four years, our mother has spent hours painting these weird, sicko pictures of you while she ignores me for days on end.” I shoved the paintings behind the others. “I hate it here. I have no friends. I’m lonely. But she doesn’t care. She tells me to try harder and then disappears into her studio for hours. Painting. You’re more important to her than I am. You always were. And now painting you is more important to her than talking to me. About anything.”
Annie sat very still, watching me.
“All I want is out of here. As soon as I can, I’m moving in with Nan and if I never see Maisie again, I don’t care. She won’t even notice I’m gone.” A sob bubbled up and I took a deep breath. “And when I grow up, I’m going to get as far away as I can from this godforsaken place and never come back.”
Annie started. “What? What did you say?”
“I said I’m going to get as far away from this godforsaken place as I can, where it rains all the time and everyone knows your business, and I’m never coming back.”
Annie just kept staring at me, like I was the ghost.
“Claire,” she said in a shaky voice. “What’s your name? Your full name?”
“You know my name.”
“No. I don’t. Please tell me.”
“Claire King,” I said. “Claire Cathleen Morrow King.”
Annie stood up. She was trembling.
“I have to get out,” she said, pushing past me to the door. “I can’t breathe.”
She stumbled out the door and racketed down the stairs.
She ran the way Annie always ran—without warning and quick as a flash of light. One minute she was there beside me and the next she was gone, the front door banging shut behind her.
I let her go. I took one last look around the room to make sure it looked the same as it did when we came in, then I slipped back through the closet into our side of the house. I went to my room and stood looking out the window over the downs. I thought I caught a glimpse of Annie’s red shorts flickering as she ran through the woods.
I stood watching, and sure enough, she emerged at the far end and stood at the edge of the cliff, looking out to the ocean. I sighed. I thought Annie coming back would fix everything. But it wasn’t going to be that simple.
ANNIE
I FORGOT WE WERE in the Mirror House and halfway down the stairs I had this weird feeli
ng that not only was everything inside me off-kilter, but that the house was turning itself inside out. I pulled up and nearly fell, but grabbing the bannister saved me. I could see an empty kitchen through one door and an empty living room through the other. I got to the front door, yanked it open, ran down the steps and took off around the house. The road to the shore curved off to the left and ahead of me a rough path led up over the hill.
I slipped on a rock, but managed to right myself, and ran up the path. I couldn’t hear Claire behind me but I didn’t want to stop and check. I just kept running, jumping over rocks and trying not to fall on the uneven ground. That tilting feeling was worse than ever and my head was spinning. I felt like I was falling as I ran, slipping down a slope, running into a place I didn’t want to go, into something I couldn’t understand.
The path took me through a woods—not what we’d call a woods in Ontario, just clumps of trees not much bigger than I was—up and down little rises, twisting around corners, then out into the open again.
I stopped, panting. I was at the far edge of the point, with rocks below and the blue ocean stretching on before me. There was nowhere to go from here. Except back. The world stopped tilting. I took a deep breath and looked around me.
It seemed like I could see forever. I turned in a slow circle. The lighthouse stood over to my right, high above the sea. A long strip of land curved back toward the mainland, where rocky headlands inched out to the horizon in both directions. The ocean surrounded me on three sides, with the sunshine spreading a wide arc of diamond sparkles across the surface.
It was the most beautiful place I’d ever been. The vast sky cupped over the world and I spread out my arms to it. The place was welcoming me, holding me up, giving me strength. I didn’t understand anything about what was happening. Nothing made sense except this huge, breathtaking world I was standing in. In the midst of all my confusion I was only certain of one thing. I had come home.
The Painting Page 5