Worth a Thousand Words

by Brigit Young

  “I can’t,” she repeated.

  Jake stopped. “Okay,” he answered, as if she had said something totally normal. “Flagpole tomorrow, then?”

  “I can’t claim ‘Art Club’ two days in a row. Plus, I have stuff.” A doctor’s appointment. A collage project to work on for Ms. Martinez. And then there was the fact that the guy in the cubicle scared her a little. “Gotta go,” she said.

  “Let me carry the camera and your bag to the bus for you,” Jake offered.

  Her leg, indeed, had just started to ache terribly. “Okay,” she relented, sighing.

  Not looking directly at him, she handed Jake her bag. They walked in silence to the town bus.

  * * *

  When they arrived at the empty bus stop, Tillie took a seat and Jake put her bag down by her feet.

  “Okay. We’ll talk soon, then.” He took a step away. “If anything happens, I’ll call you.”

  Tillie nodded, put a hand up to signal her goodbye, and looked down at her camera, clicking through the pictures.

  “’Kay, bye,” she heard him say.

  Mere seconds later, she felt a smack on her arm. “What the—”

  Jake stood next to her again, nearly jumping up and down. “Tillie! Tillie, that’s the car!” he shouted.

  She looked up and saw a blue car driving slowly toward them on the largely traffic-free road.

  “The blue Chevy! I swear to God, it’s following me!” Jake bolted out into the street.

  “Wait!” Tillie yelled. “Careful!”

  But there was no stopping him.

  “Get pictures!” he hollered back as he hurtled toward the vehicle.

  Tillie hopped up and stood at the curb, taking dozens of photos as the car neared Jake. It slowed down as it came closer and closer, though it was still too far to quite make out a face. A glare from the sun blocked any view through the windshield, though Tillie thought she may have seen the silhouette of a baseball cap.

  The car made a sudden U-turn and sped off.

  Why would it do that? Why wouldn’t the driver just honk and tell the dumb kid to get out of his way?

  Jake stood there, in the middle of the road, waving his hands. “Aw, come on!” he bellowed. “Come back, coward!”

  “Jake, get out of the street!” Tillie felt like her mom as she imagined him getting hurt, a driver coming too fast, not seeing him. “Get out!” Her voice cracked. She closed her eyes for a moment, opening them to see Jake trotting back toward her and the bus coming down the road.

  He arrived by her side, out of breath, just in time to say, “I told you. Something weird is going on. Do you believe me?”

  “I believe you,” Tillie answered as the bus doors opened. “You were right.” And she got on.

  * * *

  When Tillie arrived home, her mom put on a smile like everything was fine and asked, “So, how was it?”

  “Really good,” Tillie gushed as convincingly as she could, and to get out of any further interrogation she said, “Gotta study. So much history homework. Mind if I eat dinner in my room tonight?”

  Avoiding her mom’s face in case her eyes had questions in them, Tillie was already turning away as she heard her mom agree.

  But later that night, as Tillie headed down the hall to brush her teeth, she heard low voices through her parents’ door. She stopped in front of their room and listened.

  “Will you give it a rest?” her dad said, his volume peaking before her mother’s “Shhh!” silenced him.

  Tillie, a well-practiced expert in avoiding the squeaks of the hardwood hallway floor, tiptoed back to her room to grab her camera.

  Taking pictures through a keyhole was easier than one might think. Tillie had done some reading about old photography in art class, and knew that the first camera ever invented was a box with a tiny peephole in it, capturing images of light onto metal plates coated with a chemical called bitumen and then made visible by lavender oil. Considering all that, it was simple to look through the old-timey keyhole in her parents’ bedroom door and take photos. Returning to their door, Tillie crouched down in front of her personal spyhole.

  “She’s got a boyfriend, someone she’s spending time with,” her mom rasped. “And you don’t care.”

  Tillie snapped a blurred, half-dark picture of her mother pulling off her socks and throwing them into the hamper.

  “No, she doesn’t, Laura.” Her dad sat still on the bed, his head in his hands.

  “Yes, she does! She quite clearly does!”

  Her dad sighed and looked up toward her mom, who was now throwing every item of clothing she saw into the hamper, dirty or no. “And how would that happen, Laura? She’s…” He paused and looked toward the door.

  Tillie held her breath and didn’t blink, didn’t snap a shot.

  He turned back and Tillie exhaled, capturing his profile. “She’s a twelve-year-old with disabilities,” he whispered. “Come on, she doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

  Tillie’s stomach flip-flopped and she felt a stab of pain in her hip as if her dad’s words had landed there.

  Tillie’s mother stopped in her tracks. “And so what, Andy? What does that have to do with anything?” her mom said. Whenever they argued they tended to call each other by their first names, instead of their usual “honey” or “love.”

  Thanks, Mom, Tillie thought.

  “Nothing! Nothing! I just—” her dad sputtered.

  “And she’s almost thirteen. Which you’d see if you ever really looked at her,” her mom spat out. “You never look at her.”

  The veins on her mom’s face and neck nearly tore out of her skin.

  “I do look at her, Laura!” her dad spat back. “I try! I—You know how I feel about her, okay? But,” he went on with a choked voice, “you know I hate to drive her places. You know I can’t…”

  “Stand it. I know. I’ve heard.”

  They were stock-still, looking at each other for a moment.

  “It’s been over four years,” her mom said. “Four years.” She paused. “Andy, I want you to take her to the doctor’s tomorrow,” she commanded. “You’ll pick her up from school. And you’ll talk to her about that boy.”

  Tillie slid back toward her room before she could hear her dad refuse. She was certain she would get a voicemail from him the next day saying he couldn’t make it, because she already knew that, to her dad, four years was like no time at all.

  7

  Blind Artist

  Tillie waited on the bench at the bus stop by school. Her knees started to shiver and bump each other a bit. She pulled her jacket tighter and crossed her arms to combat the chill of the March day. In Illinois, spring took its time. Sometimes it wasn’t warm until May.

  Charlie Jordan walked by her on his way home, his face buried in a book, as usual, but somehow he managed to navigate the sidewalk in a straight line. Cara Dale and Lily James followed a few minutes behind him, giggling together, Lily acting out some moment from the day.

  A small brown car with a multicolored beaded rosary hanging from the rearview mirror pulled up to the curb. When the window rolled down, Tillie saw it was Ms. Martinez, on her way home from school. Ms. Martinez gave her a big smile.

  “Hey there! How’s the collage going?” Ms. Martinez asked her with a friendly wink.

  “Well,” Tillie said, “I miscalculated the size of the corner images, so they ended up being too large. They overwhelm the whole thing. It’s my fault. I planned the sizes of the images wrong. I need to start over.” Tillie blushed. That was a lot of information for a simple question.

  “We all make mistakes,” Ms. Martinez said to Tillie from the driver’s seat through her open car window. “And not only do mistakes happen to everybody,” Ms. Martinez continued, “but mistakes can be a good thing.”

  Tillie looked at her like she was out of her mind, and Ms. Martinez laughed.

  “Really! A big part of being a good artist is making a mistake, and then figuring out how to use that to ma
ke the piece even better.” A couple of cars drove by, parents and kids leaving the school parking lot, but Ms. Martinez stayed right there, parked by the curbside, talking to her. “My watercolor teacher in college called it a ‘happy accident.’ So don’t worry about starting your collage all over again, just make the awkwardness of the corners do something different for the whole thing. Maybe make it a collage that celebrates awkwardness.”

  Tillie sighed. She pulled her coat around herself tighter. “But I miscalculated all the shapes of the pictures,” she said. “The whole thing looks too … blah. Nothing catches the eye, like you said it should.”

  Ms. Martinez smiled. One tooth in her smile jutted out slightly. “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  Ms. Martinez turned her head away from Tillie and looked up and down the road. She twisted her torso to glance toward the school parking lot and then back at Tillie.

  “Is someone picking you up, Tillie?” Her smile faded. Her voice softened. “It’s pretty chilly out here.”

  Tillie mimicked Ms. Martinez’s looks up and down the road, as if she were expecting someone. She felt her face flush pink. Her dad’s voicemail replayed in her head: Hey, Til. I’m so sorry, but I’m overloaded at work. I know it’s not ideal, but you’re going to have to take the town bus today, okay? I’m … I’m sorry. See you in a bit. Nachos later? Or something? Okay. Bye. “I’m just waiting for the bus,” she said, moving her eyes toward her feet. Typically, she’d call her mom in this kind of situation, but she just didn’t want to hear a bunch of excuses about her dad.

  “Oh, okay,” Ms. Martinez said, nodding. “But what about the school bus?”

  Another car drove by, this one with some of Tillie’s classmates in it, and they waved at Ms. Martinez. She waved back, with a momentary flash of a smile, and then focused her gaze on Tillie again.

  Tillie paused and then told her, “Well, my dad got held up at work and I have a doctor’s appointment. The school bus doesn’t go as near to there as the town bus. I’m not sick or anything,” she added, feeling stupid.

  Ms. Martinez just nodded again. A slow, thoughtful nod. “Well, why don’t you come hitch a ride with me?”

  Tillie’s head automatically shook in a “No.” “I can’t do that, Ms. Martinez,” Tillie said. “I’m fine. I’m totally okay. I do this all the time.”

  As she said the words, she saw Ms. Martinez unlock her side of the door.

  “Hop in.” She smiled. “Come on.”

  Tillie put her hands on her shaking knees and pushed herself up. Holding her head high and her abdomen tight in an effort to make her limp appear as minimal as possible, she walked the few steps to Ms. Martinez’s car. Right as they pulled away, the bus came.

  “It’s much better in here, don’t you think?” Ms. Martinez said as they headed off.

  Tillie relaxed into the seat and watched the streets around them wind along. She lifted her camera to take a couple of shots of town through the window.

  She felt her phone buzz in her coat pocket. Tillie eyed the text from Jake. He’d told her at lunch that he hadn’t seen the car this morning, but there’d been a couple of calls and hang-ups from the blocked number the night before.

  no sign of the blue chevy after school either … we scared it off i guess

  K. Talk soon, Tillie wrote back.

  “Where to?” Ms. Martinez asked.

  What if Tillie told her it was a hundred miles away? Could she stay in Ms. Martinez’s car the rest of the day?

  “It’s downtown. Off Main Street, near the high school.”

  “Oh, perfect. That’s right near my house! Mind if I turn on some music?”

  Ms. Martinez began to hum along to her radio. The lyrics said something about cities and pretty girls and guitars. The singer managed to sound whiny and romantic at the same time. “Do you know this song?” Ms. Martinez asked her.

  “No,” Tillie answered.

  “Makes me think of New York,” Ms. Martinez said as they took a left.

  “I’ve never been.”

  “No? I think you’d like it. There are a million things you could photograph. On every street.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Ms. Martinez grinned.

  “So you’ve been there on trips?”

  “I lived there, actually,” she said.

  “Really?” Tillie asked. “Aren’t you from here, though? Someone can go from this place to New York City?”

  “I went to high school here, yeah. But then I went to art school in New York.”

  Tillie knew many things about Ms. Martinez because she worked on projects in Ms. Martinez’s classroom at lunchtime once a week. Sometimes Ms. Martinez would talk about herself. Tillie had learned that she wasn’t married, she loved to draw with coal pencils, she thought George Clooney was the handsomest movie star of all time, and she wrote letters to Illinois politicians requesting more funding for art programs in public schools and thought that all the students should, too. Tillie had learned, in other words, that Ms. Martinez was amazing. But Tillie hadn’t heard about New York.

  “I went there to paint,” Ms. Martinez told her, keeping an eye on the road, but every now and then tilting her chin toward Tillie. “I wanted to paint, rather, but actually—somewhat randomly—one of my teachers suggested a sculpture piece I did to this art curator he knew, and they put it in an art show. So people started to think of me as a sculptor.”

  “That’s awesome!”

  “It was okay.” Ms. Martinez shrugged, and her eyes looked like they were far away somewhere. “I actually used to have an art stand on a small street in the city. I sold miniature sculptures there. Of women dancing. I called them my ‘little women.’”

  Tillie wanted to take a picture of Ms. Martinez right then so badly. But instead she listened.

  “But I wasn’t really a sculptor. Or a New Yorker, I suppose. So I came back. I really wanted to be a teacher.” She paused, and her eyes returned from far away. Her voice brightened. “And now I have my wonderful students, like you!” She moved in toward Tillie with her shoulder as if to nudge her, though they didn’t touch.

  “Wow,” Tillie marveled. “If I had an art stand in New York, I would never leave.”

  They whirled past Lake Avenue, and the thought of Jake and the lost father and the man in the cubicle hit Tillie.

  “I think you can definitely make it to New York, if you want to,” Ms. Martinez said. “Your photographs are beautiful.”

  With those words, Jake’s dad evaporated from her thoughts. Tillie must have looked shocked, because Ms. Martinez laughed and said, “Really, Tillie! Art should capture something true, you know? And your photos do that.”

  It was the first time anyone had called her photography “art.”

  They were on Main Street now, moments away from Dr. Kregger’s.

  Ms. Martinez paused, squinting and leaning her head toward the windshield. “So what street are we looking for?” she asked. Even in such an awkward position, Tillie saw, Ms. Martinez was graceful. She had the neck of a ballerina, but a full and dimpled face. Her hair, consistently smoothed back into a sleek ponytail, was a pure black.

  “It’s on Thompson Street. The corner,” Tillie told her regretfully. She didn’t want to leave the car.

  “Ah, okay. Sorry, I can’t find my glasses—I lost them last week—so the letters are a little blurry. I’m wearing an old pair with my old prescription. They’re so funny-looking, right? Huge. I call them my ‘grandma glasses.’”

  Maybe teachers could use the Lost and Found, too. And, like Jake had said, she really could find anything. So with a little bravery, Tillie said, “I could help you find them, maybe. If you want. Did you lose them at school?”

  “I think so,” Ms. Martinez said. “I feel like I last had them there. But don’t worry about it, Tillie. Just make me a great, mistake-filled photo collage.”

  She kept looking for street signs, squinting her eyes more and more, until she looked like a beautiful m
ole.

  Tillie felt herself giggling. “Your eyesight is pretty bad, Ms. Martinez, huh?”

  “Yup,” she said. “I’m a blind artist.”

  “I’m sure the glasses are in pictures I took in your class. I can totally figure out where you left them. Maybe you put them down somewhere and I got a shot of it.”

  Ms. Martinez made a face of disapproval but couldn’t hide a smile. “Oh, so you’re taking pictures in my class, are you? I didn’t know I was blind enough to miss that. I thought pictures were for out-of-class time.”

  “Yeah.” Tillie smiled back. “Sorry…”

  “Oh, hey, that’s where I live, over there.” Ms. Martinez nodded toward a little brick house with a small porch on a residential street right on the corner of Main Street and Clareview. They flew right by it, but not before Tillie lifted up her camera and in a flash took a picture of it through the car window.

  “Not far from your doctor’s, I guess.” Then, laughing at herself, Ms. Martinez said, “I really need your help reading these street signs, Til.”

  “We’re almost there, Ms. Martinez,” Tillie said, feeling the happiest she’d felt in a while.

  Tillie looked down at the shot she’d taken of Ms. Martinez’s house. She tried to imagine Ms. Martinez sitting on the porch, maybe with a sketchbook in her hand, her hair out of the ponytail after her workday, the thick strands tucked behind her ears, waving at the kids who walked by. Maybe she had a shelf full of all her old “little women” sculptures. Tillie pictured the house at nighttime, a light on in the window, Ms. Martinez sitting on her couch watching George Clooney movies.