The Painting

by Charis Cotter

  CLAIRE

  THE FRONT DOOR slammed. I turned my head away from the window.

  “Claire, I’m home,” called my mother.

  I looked back at the headland. Annie was gone.

  “That’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly: “it always makes one a little giddy at first—”

  The White Queen, THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE

  ANNIE

  “ANNIE!”

  Somebody was shaking me.

  I opened my eyes and looked up into my father’s worried face.

  “Annie, what’s wrong? Why do you keep falling asleep?”

  “Whaaa?” I said groggily, sitting up and looking around. I was at the kitchen table, the book about Newfoundland artists in front of me, opened to the page with the girl in the blue pajamas. I shut the book quickly. Magda stood behind my father, wringing her hands again.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” she kept saying, over and over again.

  “Magda, please,” said my father. “Try to calm down. She’s okay.”

  She gave one little squeak and then bit down on her lips. He turned back to me, took my hand in his and laid his fingers on my pulse, glancing at his watch.

  We sat there for a moment or two, my heart pounding in my ears. Then he let go and leaned down to look into my face.

  “How do you feel?” he said in his doctor’s voice. It was noticeably different than his regular voice—much less impatient, concerned but cool—like I was some patient he didn’t know who had just walked into his office with a problem he could solve.

  I hated his doctor voice.

  “Ummm, I’m a bit dizzy,” I said. “And I’m tired.”

  “Your pulse is fast,” he said. “I think there might be something going on with you that we should look into. This isn’t normal, falling asleep like this, first in the library, now here. I’m thinking acute narcolepsy, although it’s come on very suddenly.” He was muttering away, almost as if he was talking to himself, not me. “Are you having any hallucinations?”

  “Hallucinations?”

  “Dreams, visions. Are you seeing things while you’re sleeping?”

  I stared at him. I didn’t want to tell him about the paintings, the lighthouse, Claire—he’d have me in the hospital before I could blink.

  “Not really,” I said. “I’m just tired, Dad. I’m worried about Mom.”

  My upper lip trembled and I felt that breathless feeling I always get when I’m trying not to start crying. Dad frowned and Magda hovered behind him, clucking to herself like a hen.

  Dad cleared his throat. “Of course you are. Shock. It could be just shock.” It was still his doctor’s voice, but a muscle under his skin on his jawline was jumping up and down. “I think perhaps she should go to bed for a while, Magda. We’ll just keep an eye on this, Annie, but if it doesn’t stop we’ll have to get you in for some tests.” He stood up. “I’m heading back to the hospital. I’ll keep in touch.”

  He left the room swiftly. Magda put her arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze.

  “She’ll be fine, sweetie, you’ll see,” she said. “She’ll wake up soon and be her old self. Don’t you worry.”

  I looked up at her.

  “I don’t want tests,” I said. “I hate tests.”

  Just because my father was a doctor, he seemed to think he could send me for tests whenever he felt like it. Whenever he couldn’t figure me out. Which was often.

  Why wasn’t I talking more, why wasn’t I doing better at school, why did I have no friends, why did I just want to draw all the time? He was always sending me off for tests, and I was always slipping away from being pinned down with any of the conditions he thought I might have.

  Learning disabilities—no. Autism—no, Asperger’s—no, social malfunction—no. I learned a lot about all kinds of things that can go wrong with kids, just by listening to what the psychologists and doctors and specialists said while they were testing me, and eavesdropping on my parents when they were talking about me. I would creep into my clothes closet after they thought I was asleep and listen to them talking in their bedroom next door. My closet was separated from their closet by a thin wood partition, so I could hear them quite clearly.

  Apparently I was a very unsatisfactory child. I didn’t care about schoolwork and my marks weren’t good. The tests showed I was intelligent, so they couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t doing better. All I wanted to do was draw. One of the psychologists suggested they should encourage me, so they reluctantly started sending me to art classes downtown every Saturday morning. That was the only good result that ever came out of a test.

  I had a picture book when I was little, one of the ones my mom had banished to the attic, about a changeling child that was substituted for a real baby. He was ugly and odd-looking and sat staring at the world with a blank expression. Sometimes I thought maybe I was a changeling, a strange, unnatural baby someone substituted for my parents’ real child. That would explain why I felt so out of step with them, like I was living in my own world and I needed a translator to communicate with them.

  And now Dad thought I might have a brand-new disease, narco-something. After Magda left me tucked up in bed, I waited till I heard her go downstairs, then I crept down the hall to Dad’s study. He had a medical dictionary in there and whenever they were testing me for a new condition I would secretly go and look it up.

  Narcolepsy: a condition characterized by brief attacks of deep sleep often occurring with cataplexy and hypnagogic hallucinations.

  I didn’t know what cataplexy or hypnagogic meant, but the rest of it sounded like what was happening to me. Sudden deep sleeps and hallucinations that I could walk inside paintings and end up in Newfoundland.

  I tiptoed out into the hall and listened. Magda was humming to herself in the kitchen. I edged along the hall and into my parents’ room. The bed was unmade. That never happened. Dad must have left his sheets and blankets in a tangle when Magda called him to help try and wake me up.

  My mother’s purse sat on her dressing table. I walked over and undid the zip. It was a black leather purse with different compartments. Ever since I was a very little girl, I loved going into my mother’s purse. I could only look in with her permission, and every so often she said yes. There were usually wrapped butterscotch candies at the bottom, in a tangle with handkerchiefs that smelled like her perfume, her good silver pen, a lipstick. Her red leather wallet.

  I pulled it out. Her driver’s license was visible in the plastic window on one side. Under her driver’s license were all my school pictures. I liked digging them out and sorting through them, going back to kindergarten, remembering this dress or that blouse, looking at my different haircuts. I wanted to pull out the pictures and compare them to the paintings I had seen of Little Annie, but I needed to see the license first. There was her name in capital letters, printed across the top: Cathleen Morrow Jarvis.

  No Claire. She must have dropped that at some point. And King. My mother always told me her maiden name was Morrow.

  I stared at her picture. It was new, taken earlier that year, near her birthday. Straight, light-brown hair cut in a pixie cut, close to her head and neat as a pin. Dark blueberry-blue eyes that looked out sadly on the world. The little frown lines on her forehead, that made her look as if she was always worried.

  My mom. Claire. Claire grown up.

  CLAIRE

  I WATCHED THE HEADLAND for a while, and the woods, but there was no flash of Annie’s red shorts. She was gone. But she’d be back. I knew that. I knew deep inside that no matter what she said about her other life, she was my Annie and she was here to help me. Help me get out of Crooked Head and the half-life I’d been living ever since she died.

  I could hear Maisie banging around downstairs, putting groceries away. I sat down in the big chair by the window and gazed out at the ocean sparkling in the sunshine.

  I closed my eyes. My head ached. It had been achin
g for days. It was almost time for me to put my plan into action, and I was scared. Scared it wouldn’t work.

  I had had my plan for a long time. It started way back when we first moved here.

  I was always good at schoolwork. I like the neatness of it. You have a list of questions and you answer them. It’s all laid down in black and white. And I always liked doing my homework.

  It was something that was mine, and something that made sense when everything around me was in chaos. Maisie was never much of a housekeeper, and there was always a jumble of clothes and books and newspapers all over the place. But my room is tidy, and everything has its place. I do my homework at my desk, where I can look out over the ocean when I’m thinking about an answer.

  I do my homework twice: once in rough and then once in good. Sometimes twice in good if I’m not happy with the first version. I spend hours on it. When I was in grade four, the first year we moved here, my mother went to talk to my teacher on Parent-Teacher Night, and she told her she thought I got too much homework, and that a child my age shouldn’t be spending two hours a night at it.

  My teacher that year was Mrs. Bartlett, who was cheery and quick, and never spent much time looking at you when she talked.

  “Two hours?” she asked, with a laugh. “Mrs. King, two hours?” (They all called Maisie “Mrs.” and she finally stopped correcting them. Seems that if you had a child, you automatically became a “Mrs.,” no matter what.) “She gets half an hour’s homework at the most. She does a lovely job on it, but it’s not my responsibility if she spends two hours doing it.”

  “I just don’t think she should have to work that hard,” said my mother. “She should have time to play.”

  Mrs. Bartlett laughed again, a short, sharp laugh like it was shot from a gun. “Claire is the most serious child I’ve ever known. Does she even know how to play? I think you should just leave her be and let her find her own way.”

  I sat silently beside my mother.

  “You enjoy your schoolwork, don’t you, Claire?” said Mrs. Bartlett to me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “There now, nothing to worry about,” she said.

  I kept at it over the years. I wouldn’t go to sleep until my homework was perfect. I got great marks. Not that it did me any good, except with Nan, who was always proud of me. But Maisie would skim her eyes over my report card and say, “All As again. When are you going to start having fun, Claire?” then put it aside and go back to whatever she was doing. The kids at school weren’t impressed either. They called me Teacher’s Pet and added my high marks to the list of things that made me a weirdo: my townie accent, my secondhand clothes, my fatherless state.

  I didn’t care. I read books at recess and ignored them. I kept up with my perfect homework. And I started to plan my escape.

  ANNIE

  I THINK I KNEW the whole time. Right from the moment I heard that voice calling, “Annie,” the night of the accident. And when I saw her in her room in the moonlight, staring at me after she screamed. I knew, but I didn’t know. Something deep inside me recognized something in her, but I couldn’t quite grasp it, not until she said that thing about wanting to get away from Newfoundland where it rains all the time and everyone knows your business. That was my mother’s voice, telling me what she’d told me so many times before.

  Taking her wallet and her purse with me, I stumbled back into my room and got into bed. I sat with the purse in my lap and looked at the painting of Newfoundland hanging on my wall. It was ordinary now—no moonlight, no birds winging their way across the sky, no waving grasses. Everything was still.

  My mother. Claire Cathleen Morrow King. Thirty-eight years old, lying in the hospital, hooked up to machines. And somehow at the same time, twelve years old and pacing back and forth in her room in the Crooked Head Lighthouse, plotting to get away. Was she dreaming all of it? Trying to work something out that happened long ago? But where did I come into it? How did I get into her dreams?

  Could I possibly be her little sister who died? A ghost, like Claire said? But that was silly. I wasn’t a ghost. I pinched my leg, hard. It hurt. I was too solid to be a ghost. But could I have possibly been Little Annie in another life? Reincarnation: the belief that people are born again and again into different lives. We studied it at school in World Religions. Hindus believed in reincarnation. And a few other religions did too. I liked the idea because it meant that your spirit never really died, but kept on living. You might know your loved ones in another life, but you don’t remember them. You don’t remember anything about your former life. Maybe that’s what happened to me. I died in the accident, but then I was born again as Claire’s daughter, so I came back into her life.

  I shook my head. No. I didn’t want to be Little Annie, hit by a car. I was me. Claire was my mother. I shook my head again. I felt as if my life was starting to slip away and I wasn’t certain about anything. I had to figure it out. Somehow.

  I fumbled in the wallet under the license, drew out the collection of my school pictures and spread them on the quilt. I put them in order, the way Claire had done with the paintings. There were seven: kindergarten to grade six.

  In the first one I was five. My dark-brown hair fluffed out around my face. I was serious, and looked a little scared. I remembered how worried I was that day they took the pictures. I didn’t like being with strangers who talked in such big jolly voices to me. But despite my wary expression, I looked just like Little Annie in her five-year-old picture. The same fat cheeks, the same mouth and eyes.

  I shivered, then picked up the next one, when I was six, in grade one, and the one from grade two. My face was identical to Little Annie’s in the paintings. I could have been her.

  I gathered the pictures up and fit them in behind the license again. Then I lay down and held the purse tight to my chest, under the blue-and-white quilt.

  What was happening to me?

  I could hear Magda downstairs in the kitchen, rattling the dishes, opening and closing cupboard doors, humming to herself the way she always did when she was working, snatches of Irish folk songs or pop songs from the radio. My window was open, and every so often I heard a car going by, or a dog barking, or kids’ voices rising and falling as they walked by the house. It was a normal June afternoon in Toronto, and I was lying in bed with my mother’s purse as the world spun out of control.

  CLAIRE

  IN GRADE FOUR my plan was to work really hard at my schoolwork so I could get a scholarship and go far, far away to university. On the mainland. And never come back. It seemed such a long way off, but I kept at it. By the time I got to grade six, I started wondering if I could go to high school in St. John’s and get away even sooner. Nan was always telling Maisie that the schools out here aren’t as good as the ones in St. John’s. She’s never given up trying to get Maisie to move back to town. She misses us.

  The only part of my plan I hadn’t quite figured out was how to persuade Maisie to let me go and live with Nan. Unlike Nan, I knew I’d never get Maisie to leave Crooked Head. She loved it too much and her work had been exploding ever since we moved here. She’d had shows in St. John’s and Montreal and Toronto and was starting to make a name for herself. And according to Maisie it was all because she was living and painting in Crooked Head. It “fed her art,” that’s what she told me and Nan, again and again. Maybe that was true. But it didn’t feed me. I was starving.

  I figured I had lots of time to come up with something so Maisie would let me go. But then last November, everything changed.

  I was in grade seven, but our class was mixed—half grade seven and half grade eight—taught by Mrs. Matchim. She is very stern and hardly ever cracks a smile. But she took notice back in the fall that I was getting high 90s on all my tests, and in November on Parent-Teacher Night she spoke to my mom about it.

  “Mrs. King, Claire needs more of a challenge. She’s ahead of the other students and the work is too easy for her.”

  “Yes,” said my mother,
glancing sideways at me. “I know.”

  “I propose that I start giving her the grade eight work. She should be able to catch up with it and then she could graduate into high school next fall.”

  “I don’t know…” said my mother. “That would mean changing schools next year, and she’d be with kids who are a year older than she is.”

  “Yes, but she’d have work that was more suited to her capabilities. You don’t want to hold her back, do you?”

  “No, of course not.” Maisie looked at me again. “Well, Claire?”

  I swallowed. A wave of excitement was rising up inside me. Grade eight work! Skip grade seven! I’d be in high school next year! And maybe…maybe…maybe in St John’s!

  “I would like that,” I said carefully.

  “It will be double the homework,” said Mrs. Matchim.

  Maisie rolled her eyes. “She’ll love that, won’t you, Claire?”

  I allowed myself to smile. “Yes,” I said. I pictured myself sitting at my desk, books piled up around me, filling in pages and pages in my notebooks, with my neat writing all in tidy rows, with little red A+s scattered here and there.

  That’s when I really started to work hard. Mrs. Matchim gave me extra assignments every night, so I could catch up with all the work the grade eight students had done since September.

  For the first time since I came to Crooked Head, I was almost happy. I was staying up till eleven or twelve o’clock every night and putting in long hours on the weekends. And daydreaming about how I would go to high school in St. John’s next September.

  Only I still didn’t know how I was going to get Maisie to say yes.