“Don’t get me wrong. I’m passionate about my art, but welding for me means getting two huge pieces of metal to come together just right. That can try anyone’s patience.”
Maisie wrote and nodded.
“Welding’s all about heat and leverage. How you apply them and in what order. Sounds simple, right? But think about the size of the sculptures you saw outside the studio. There’s a lot of grunt work, dirt, and muscling it around to bring those babies to life. Plus it’s ninety-five degrees in here all summer. That can make me snap.”
“You never snap,” Katie said. “Cuss, yes. Snap, no.”
“Could it be he never snaps at you?” Jake said.
Katie ignored him.
“When she visited us at CAM, Ms. Katie talked a lot about her process. What’s your process?” Maisie asked Ben.
“I have a basic idea, and then I throw flames on it.”
Maisie gave a sharp intake of breath. “You don’t plan it out in your sketchbook?”
“Like Katie?” Ben laughed. “No, I’m the opposite. I follow instinct. Big sheets of steel don’t suggest anything. They’re blank canvases. I start with a pattern and run it through the rollers. And then I begin contouring and figuring out what the shape wants to be. At that point it’s talking to me, and hopefully I’m listening. At the end of the day, I want to be surprised by what I create. I want to watch it evolve.”
“I see,” Maisie said. “Ms. Katie also told us about casting. Do you cast?”
“No. Casting holds no appeal for me. You have to take all these steps to map out the process: make a model, then make a mold of that, then a wax of that, then a mold of the wax. Then you’re melting out the wax, then you’re pouring in the metal. And then you’re finishing the metal. At that point I’m bored.”
“That does sound quite tedious,” Maisie said.
“Yup, and expensive. Look up Rodin. R-o-d-i-n. When he died most of his pieces were sitting in his studio as plaster models. He never saw them cast in bronze. No, I know what I like, and when I find it, I don’t budge until the piece is finished. Working with steel is immediate and organic. I can cut up a piece, add another piece, and the creative conversation begins.”
Listening to Ben talk about steel was one of the great pleasures of life. It almost allowed her to forget Maisie was surrounded by power tools that could slice off limbs, take out eyes, and crush skulls. Katie shifted, and Ben glanced at her.
“How did you start?” Maisie said.
“I didn’t pick up welding until I was finishing my degree in studio art. And then I moved down here to Durham, got a little oxyacetylene set, and started messing around with sculpture. That’s how I found my passion.”
“Why did you move to Durham?” Maisie said.
“For a woman.” Ben blushed.
I could kiss him. Where did that thought come from?
“Oh.” Maisie blushed, too. “Would you please spell oxy-asset . . . ?”
“How about I write it down for you?”
Ben moved toward Maisie and stopped when she slapped her palm on her notebook. Jake’s face was blank, but he cocked his head. Good, he was paying attention.
“I bet Maisie needs to write out everything herself,” Katie said. “I know I would if I had a brand-new notebook.” And OCD. A memory played. She must have been around Maisie’s age, and she was standing in the kitchen in their old apartment in Boston, sobbing and screaming at her mother, who’d ripped half a page out of Katie’s new sketchpad to make a shopping list. Her mother was laughing, but then again, she’d been drunk.
“No problem,” Ben said and spelled oxyacetylene letter by letter. When Maisie spelled it back to him, he merely frowned as if listening extra hard.
“Do you have any more questions for Ben?” Jake asked Maisie. “We don’t want to take too much of Ms. Katie’s time, and I was hoping, Ben, that you might give me a studio tour.”
Was it her imagination, or did Jake sound like a normal human being when he addressed anyone but her?
“Of course.” Ben didn’t move. “Maisie? Do you need to ask me anything else?”
“No! All done!” Maisie hopped off the stool, and Katie swallowed the scream of Careful! Maisie landed inches from the drop cord, one of many unseen hazards in the studio.
“If you think of anything else,” Ben said, “you can always shoot Katie a text.”
Jake narrowed his eyes.
“Oh, that is a verrry good idea.” Maisie rummaged through her backpack. “I now have my own iPhone, thanks to Uncle J.” She pulled out a phone that had been seriously bejeweled with plastic glitz, several rainbows, and a sticker of what appeared to be a lemur.
Ben recited Katie’s number, and Maisie typed it in.
“All done?” Jake said. “Good. I’ll be right back, darlin’.” He blew Maisie a kiss.
She and Maisie were going to be alone again. In the closest thing she had to a home. The apartment didn’t count, had never counted.
What if she trips? What if she falls? What if I push her? What if she doesn’t have OCD, and I say the wrong thing and trigger it?
“Mr. Ben’s very tall, isn’t he? He’s quite a lot taller than Uncle J.” Maisie cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Ms. Katie, very sorry, for what Uncle J said about the studio when we arrived. That was not acceptable, and I’ll tell him when we drive home.”
“He’s simply being protective”—as Ben is with me—“and he wasn’t rude.” Actually, he was. “He loves you a great deal, doesn’t he?”
Katie chewed on the spot inside her mouth.
“Oh, yes. Uncle J helped raise me.” Maisie sighed dramatically. “But it’s hard having a dad and a spare, which is how my dad puts it.”
“That’s going to get fun when you’re old enough to date.”
“Uncle J’s already threatened to hog-tie the first boy I kiss. Yuck. Who wants to kiss a boy?”
“In a few years you won’t think about much else. A first kiss is a rite of passage.” Remorse—heavy and unyielding—sank to the bottom of Katie’s stomach. She had missed so many firsts; she would miss so many more.
“Ohhh, what’s that?” Maisie pointed with the neon-haired troll.
“It’s called That Perfect Moment, and it’s made of copper and brass.”
“I like it very much.”
“Me too. Remember what Ben said about flaws? You see the outline of the moon? That was a mistake. I had this aluminum circle I was going to put under the copper.” Katie dove down to the shelf under her worktop, found the circle, and straightened up. She slotted it under the piece of copper she still hadn’t decided how to attach. “But I accidentally held it in place too long and created so much heat that I ended up with this lovely shadow moon, which worked better than my original idea.”
“Oh, yes,” Maisie said. “The aluminum is too bright.”
“Exactly! Which is the same problem I’m having with the rivets.”
“What’s a rivet?”
“It’s a pin with a head on one side. The head is larger than the hole so that you can hammer it into place and it can’t slip back through. And then you grind it down to be level with the frame.” Katie picked up a copper rivet. “Right now, I’m trying to decide whether to use copper rivets like this or”—she reached across the worktop for an iron rivet—“tone it down a bit with iron. What do you think? I’d love your opinion.”
“The second one, the iron,” Maisie said. “I mean, I guess. What do you think?”
“That you’re right. The copper’s too flashy.”
Maisie grinned as if she’d won a medal, and a grinder fired up on the old loading dock. “It’s quite noisy in here, isn’t it?”
Katie pulled her protective earmuffs off the metal shelf behind Maisie. A rusty freestanding shelf that could easily tip over and rain sharp tools on her daughter’s head. “Would you like to put these on?”
“No, thank you.”
“I don’t notice the noise anymore.” Katie repla
ced the earmuffs and, with her right arm, coaxed Maisie toward the table. “When I’m working, it’s almost as if I’m in a trance.”
“I feel the same way when I’m writing a story, Ms. Katie.”
“My mind can race in circles, except in here. My creative process is slow and demands absolute focus. That focus kicks out all the other thoughts. Before you came in, I was trying to decide how many holes to drill in That Perfect Moment, and where I should drill them. You see, I don’t want them too close to the edge. Ultimately this will lie on top of the frame over there, the one I treated with a black patina.”
“What’s a patina?”
“A layer that forms on metal and changes or deepens its original color. That can happen over time or we can make it happen faster by creating our own patinas.” Katie pointed at the piece of copper roofing that was lying on the table. “You see that lovely battered and weather-beaten piece behind you? The patinas were already there. All I did was rub them back in and polish them up. But I could have created the same effect with an acid that reacts with the metal as if it’s been buried in the ground for a long time.”
Maisie moved toward the drill press and pointed with the troll pencil topper again. “I really like all those metal curlicues. You could make jewelry with those.”
“Del—my sister tells me the same thing.”
“You have a sister? My stepmom’s pregnant, and I’m hoping for one, too!”
“Is it hard”—a memory of the red metal crib flashed—“preparing for a new baby?”
Maisie shrugged and examined the sphere that was meant to be the earth, until it came out all wrong. Katie called it her WhatNot.
“I was experimenting with casting when I made that and messed up big time.” Katie put her finger in the gaping mouth between the two halves she’d welded together. “I was trying to create two halves of a perfect sphere, but the wall was too thin and the metal cooled too quickly. This was the result—an imperfect cast. And then I went back in and made another one with the same mistake.”
“Deliberately?” Maisie glanced up, her eyes huge.
“Art for me is about working through my need for perfection. I want it to be imperfect.”
“But why?”
“Perfection stops you from enjoying the wonder of what is. It snares you with unrealistic expectations. Tells you constantly things can only be a certain way, and that’s how you fall into the trap.”
“What trap?” Maisie said.
“Of always wanting everything to feel just so.”
Maisie combed her hair with her fingers, twice on one side, twice on the other. “Can I watch you work?”
“I’m a little uncomfortable with that idea.” Katie put down the WhatNot. “A lot of my equipment is dangerous, and most of what I do involves sparks.”
I could pick up the grinder and use it to bash in her head.
“See this little handheld grinder?” Katie picked it up, and her hand started to shake. She put the grinder down and scratched her thighs: back and forth, back and forth. “That could easily flip out of my hand and hurt you. Once, the circular blade shot off and narrowly missed my face.”
“Oh.” Maisie clasped her notebook to her chest. “Have you ever been badly hurt?”
“Nothing more than minor burns, but Ben had a sculpture fall on him.” Katie tapped the top of her head. “It cut his head open, and he had to have fifty stitches.”
Maisie gasped.
Maisie’s going to trip over something and have an accident, and it’ll be my fault because I scared her, made her careless.
Her stomach cramped. Was she going to retch?
A thought is just a thought; it has no power.
“Sometimes welding seems an impossible task, but then you change one thing, and everything clicks. Shall I tell you what the first step is in creating a Katie Mack piece?”
“Yes, please.” Maisie opened up her notebook and smoothed out the page.
“I think about things that cause me worry.”
With her pencil hovering above the paper, Maisie looked up. In the front of the studio, Ben laughed.
“My art,” Katie continued, “is about more than salvaging junk or casting imperfect circles. It’s also about crafting my worries into something I can touch, something tangible that makes them less scary.”
Maisie began to write. Her script was strangely messy, her letters jerky as if written through jolts of pain.
Pain I caused? Katie swallowed.
“This is the first Katie Mack piece.” Katie pulled the tarp off her knife sculpture. “Knives used to make me intensely uncomfortable. I mentioned it to Ben one day, and he suggested I explore that fear in a piece of art. This is how it all began.”
“I don’t like it.” Maisie’s hand shot to her mouth. “Gosh, I’m so sorry. Really, really sorry. What a horrid thing to say.”
“No, I agree. I hate it. I wanted it jagged and ugly. This piece represents the thing I told you about at the Chocolate Factory. The echo in my head.” Katie paused. “I call it The Voice.”
Maisie glanced over her shoulder, then turned back. “Do you tell people, Ms. Katie, about your voice?”
“I didn’t, but I’m trying to change. There’s no shame in admitting your brain’s a bit funky. It’s like learning to read if you have dyslexia.”
“Uncle Jake has that.”
I know he does. “Well, in the same way that some people need to learn a different way of reading, people like me need to learn a different way of thinking. And it can be hard, but we have to teach ourselves how to manage our thoughts. Not let them manage us. Everyone has scary thoughts, but most people instinctively treat them as junk mail. We don’t have that filter”—you, me, and possibly your grandmother—“so we listen to them, which makes them get louder until they slam us with an avalanche of fear. But the danger’s not real. It just comes from a broken early warning system.”
Maisie scowled and looked way too serious. Katie wanted to hug her. Hug her so tight that Cal and Jake could never pry them apart. An unbreakable mother-daughter weld.
“Lots of people have what I call the voice, but it’s not the same for everyone, because we’re all individual. For example, my voice shows me nasty images of doing violent things that I would never do, but other people are frightened of germs and diseases, or they have to pray a lot . . .” Like my mother. Were her ritualized prayers scrupulosity at work?
“Are you okay, Ms. Katie?”
“Yes, sorry. Sorry.” She shook her head, but the memory stayed. “And some people do these rituals called compulsions. The voice tells them they have to do things in a certain way, otherwise there’ll be bad consequences, maybe even for people they love. And while you know that doesn’t make sense, it’s not a risk you want to take. Right?”
Maisie touched her arm. “Ms. Katie? I have a voice, too,” Maisie whispered.
“I know you do, sweetheart,” Katie whispered back. “And I bet it’s gotten a whole lot louder since you found out you were going to be a big sister.” She squatted down in front of Maisie.
Maisie nodded and kept nodding. “I worry all the time that Lilah will die in childbirth. And the voice tells me it’ll be my fault, but it also says that if I do certain things in a certain way, I can keep her safe.”
“Honey, do you have a class bully?”
“Yessss. Parker, and he’s a booger.”
“And how do you deal with him?”
“I stand up to him.” Maisie sounded indignant. “Especially when he’s mean to Ava Grace and Ellie.”
“That’s exactly what you have to do with the voice. Treat it the way you’d treat a bully.”
“I’m super glad I can talk to you about this. I can’t tell my dad. He’ll get upset and worry about me because he’s super sensitive and can’t cope with anything scary and I”—Maisie paused for a quick breath—“don’t want to scare him.”
“But he needs to know, honey. What if Uncle Jake could help with that?”<
br />
“You mean I wouldn’t have to tell my dad?”
“I think you should let Uncle Jake handle that. And now that you have my number, you can call or text me whenever the voice gets loud.”
“What’s the worst thing the voice ever told you?”
“That I was capable of hurting the most important person in my life.” Katie stared at the concrete floor. “But I didn’t realize it was just a bully inside my brain, and I didn’t get help. If you talk to Uncle Jake, you’ll be streaks ahead of where I started.”
“I think Uncle J will get it, but I’m not sure about Daddy,” Maisie said.
“Then it’s up to Uncle Jake to fix that.”
“It’s up to Uncle Jake to fix what?” Jake said.
FOURTEEN
CALLUM
The GPS told Callum his final destination was on the right. He’d programmed it to bring him here, to the last place he would ever choose to visit: the past. Lilah thought he was meeting with grad students. Had even asked which ones. Every day he laid out more lies, clung tighter to the fading illusion that he deserved a second chance. Across the double yellow lines, in a second-floor apartment, was proof that he didn’t.
When Katelyn resurfaced after seventeen long months, Callum had taken advice from others. Today, he would handle things alone. Listen to the medical information that was, apparently, vital for Maisie—dear God, let it not be a predisposition for cancer—apologize, and get a credible explanation as to why Katelyn had upended his life. Jake’s news that she was battling an anxiety disorder back then made sense; that she should reinvent herself as an artist did not. During four years of marriage, he never saw her so much as doodle. Maybe she was the master of disguise; maybe he had been in love with a mirage.
Would she threaten them again, as she had on the night she ran? He began to sweat. Hand shaking, he picked up his phone.
I love you so much, he texted.
Lilah replied immediately with a row of heart emojis. If he turned around now, he could catch her before she left to pick up Maisie. He could hold her and whisper, Don’t ever leave me. Maybe add, We need to talk, and tell her everything. All the details even Jake didn’t know. The details.
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