PIECE: Watercolor painting of Sagrada Família church, Barcelona.
Paige was freaking out. She was the only one of the residents who had never laid eyes on Caroline, but the sirens and the cops and the fact that someone had died had her so shaken up, she couldn’t stand the thought of sleeping at the Colony. A part of her wanted to call Trent. She knew she would find comfort if she could curl up against him and rest her head on his chest—even if it meant she had to share space with him on his friends’ couch. But pride and fear kept her from contacting him. To go to Trent in such a vulnerable state would only launch them back in the direction they’d been going, which, in Paige’s opinion, had been too serious, too fast. Paige found another escape, though, in the form of a musician named Jay whom she’d met while playing the online version of Magic: The Gathering.
Back in high school, she’d been deep into role-playing games. She got into them after her parents figured out that the cuts on her wrists were not, as Paige claimed, “burns from taking a pizza out of the oven.”
She hadn’t been trying to kill herself. Just trying to feel something. Because pain, even the type of physical pain that came from taking a hunting knife to her wrists, was better than the big hole of nothingness that seemed to live in her chest.
Her parents came from the sort of stock that said things like “chin up” and “you’ll feel better in the morning.” Paige never felt better in the fucking morning. Not in those days, at least. The thought that depression could be a disease and not just an attitude problem never crossed her parents’ minds, until her high school guidance counselor told them that Paige should probably “see someone.” Paige hated that phrase. It could just as easily mean “I’m dating someone” instead of “I’m meeting with a mental health professional.” Was it, like, supposed to be polite? Because, to Paige, it just seemed shaming and secretive.
A few things saved her from herself, and none of them was the drowsy, cliché-spouting psychologist her mother used to drive her an hour each way to see. The first was gaming. Battling fictional monsters on the board was a hell of a lot easier than battling the ones in her head. When Paige sat down for a campaign, she could block out, for a few hours anyway, how out of place she felt in every other aspect of her life. School was okay—well, the class part anyway. At least there was an art room, even if it was forever running out of supplies because of budget cuts.
Between classes, though, Paige knew girls whispered behind her back. Called her things like “freak” and “slut.” Because apparently having no-strings-attached sex in high school made you a whore. At least if you were a girl it did. But sex, like gaming, got her out of her head. Art did, too, sometimes. But art also could backfire, and push her deeper in. And deep in her head was a very unpleasant place to be.
Since she’d been at college, though, art had expanded to take up the time and headspace that gaming used to. With deadlines and final projects, Paige didn’t have ten hours to spend sitting at a table in some strip-mall game shop, rolling twelve- and twenty-sided dice and drinking Red Bull.
When she and Trent split, though, a couple of weeks earlier, she’d been shaken up in a way she’d never been before. And she didn’t like it. Even though she was the one who had cut things off, the breakup made her feel out of control, emotionally. And she’d worked very, very hard so far, in these few, nascent years of adulthood, to keep her thoughts and emotions under control. So she tiptoed back into gaming because it was an excellent escape. So was sex with someone new. All the better that with Jay, she got the prospect of both in one.
As a lover, Jay was just okay. Paige was pretty sure he hadn’t been with many girls. But he and his friends were a lot of fun to game with. That Saturday night, she stayed up with them until dawn to finish an epic D&D campaign—something Paige hadn’t done since high school.
But after a few days, Paige grew tired of being stuck without a car on the outskirts of Madison. Jay lived on several acres of land, which made sense as soon as Paige met his bandmates. His gaming friends were harmless enough, drinking microbrews while immersing themselves in fictional battles and expeditions. His bandmates were another story. They were like nerds on steroids. Or—more accurately—nerds on some sort of strong mind-altering drugs. When they came over to practice one night, the whole house shook. And their music was awful. So loud and awful that Paige was only able to fall asleep after she put earplugs in. She’d gotten in the habit of carrying them in her backpack for when she needed to tune people out in the studio at school.
She went into the spare bedroom so as not to be woken up when Jay eventually came to bed, and she fell asleep to the whooshing sound of the blood in her own eardrums. She woke up when she felt hands against the skin of her back, underneath the T-shirt she’d worn to bed. She swatted the hands away, still half-asleep. “Knock it off, Jay, I’m tired.”
But he didn’t back off. Instead, he reached around to her waist and pulled her into him. Paige felt the rough texture of denim against her legs, and his hard-on jabbing into her back. Now she was pissed. She pulled out the earplugs, shoved him off, and turned around, now sitting up. “What the fuck? I said back off.”
But the glassy-eyed, laughing face she saw wasn’t Jay’s. It was one of his stupid bandmates, reeking of booze and who knew what else. Paige got out of bed, shaking with anger, and pointed to the door. When he didn’t move, she yelled, “Go!”
As soon as he left, Paige locked the bedroom door, grabbed her phone, and called Odin. When he picked up and said hello, it sounded as if he, too, had been asleep.
“Hey, it’s Paige,” she said, still shaking. “Sorry to be calling so late, but could you come pick me up? I think you have the address.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll leave right now.”
Paige didn’t say good-bye to Jay or his friends before she left. She waited inside the locked room, looking out the window until she saw Odin’s truck pull into the driveway. Then she slipped out the front door, unheard over the sound of screamed lyrics about wizards and rogue warriors.
“Thanks for picking me up,” she said as she got into the passenger seat of the truck.
“Don’t worry about it,” Odin said. “Everything okay?”
Paige nodded. “You were right, though. It wasn’t a good idea for me to go.” As they pulled out of the driveway, she sent Jay a text: Your drummer’s an asshole. Ask him why.
“Annie’s home,” Odin said. “They let her out on bond a couple of days ago.”
Paige felt bad that she hadn’t checked in at all while she’d been gone. She realized how much she’d been holding herself at a distance from the Colony, not just by being at Jay’s, but before that, too.
When they got home, Paige was happy to be back in her room, with the sound of the wind whistling over the lake and the old house creaking, instead of the aggressive wail of a guitar in its death throes. Before she went to bed, though, she opened up the closet to look for the old maps she’d stashed in there after Trent stopped coming around. She pulled what she thought were the rolled-up maps from a cardboard box. When she unfurled them, though, Paige saw that they were watercolor paintings of famous sites in Europe that Paige had never been to, but still recognized—the Colosseum in Rome, London’s Tower Bridge, the Sagrada Família church in Barcelona. The paintings were yellowed at the edges, all done by different artists, and probably weren’t worth much. It made Paige smile, though, to think of Betsy buying them. Apparently the old lady’s love of art and the people who created it encompassed a range wide enough for both Georgia O’Keeffe and a sidewalk artist selling paintings on a tourist drag—and, somewhere in that range, people like Annie, Odin, and Paige, too.
Paige finally found the maps, tucked into the bottom of the box. In putting them away, she’d done a good job of making sure she wouldn’t stumble across them and, in turn, have to think about Trent and all the time they’d spent together up here, in her room. Her tactic hadn’t worked, though. Neither had hiding at Jay’s house for a few days. Since she hadn’t succeeded in getting over Trent, either with physical distance or sex with someone else, Paige figured she’d have to try to get over him the only other way she knew how: with her art. And his fascination with old maps gave her an idea.
The next morning, she went to one of the rare book rooms on campus, where she donned white gloves to pore over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century atlases. In the margins of the yellowed maps, giant serpents coiled around ships, and lions with scaly tails salivated over stranded sailors.
The reference librarian, a middle-aged woman with a round, pleasant face, looked over Paige’s shoulder and said, “Intriguing, aren’t they? ‘Here be dragons.’”
“What?” Paige turned around.
“Cartographers used to draw monsters and mythical creatures on areas of the map that were beyond charted territories,” the librarian said. “‘As if to say, ‘Who knows what’s out there? Venture at your own risk.’”
It was how Paige felt about so many things in her life—about getting too close to someone, about sticking with a single art medium for too long, about graduating in a few weeks. She had no clue what she was going to do for work after the residency ended in June, let alone what she’d do about studio space and equipment.
All the old maps at the library, and in her room back at the Colony, gave Paige the idea for a new series she titled Maps and Monsters, for which she tried out a new technique, woodblock printing. Usually, Paige moved from one medium to something completely different. Now, though, she’d still be doing printmaking, but just adding a different skill to her arsenal. If she got good enough at different types of printing, maybe she could combine several of them into one project.
From the library, Paige went to a used bookstore on State Street, where she purchased some old atlases for next to nothing. Then she went to an art supply store on Gorham Street and bought blocks of tight-grained maple and a graver, or chisel. She planned to carve images into the wood of mythical sea creatures like the ones she’d seen in the rare book room, then stamp those images onto torn-out pages of the atlases.
When Paige got back to the Colony with her new supplies, Nell was in the kitchen, pouring herself a coffee.
“Hey, welcome back,” she said, sliding the carafe back into the coffee maker with a clatter. “Odin said you were staying with a friend?”
“For a few days, yeah,” Paige said. “Where’s Annie? Odin said she was let out.”
“She was, but she had to go back to court today for a status conference. She’s there with Josh right now.” Nell held both hands around her mug and leaned her back against the counter. “It’s been so quiet around here.”
Quiet sounded just fine to Paige, after geek metal. But she had really been hoping that Annie’s case would have been dismissed by now. “I can’t believe they’re actually following through on the charges,” she said. “Have you, like, called the papers or anything to see if they’d want to do a story about Annie’s case?”
Nell shook her head. “Usually Annie is all about drawing attention to her causes, but Josh told me she asked that we not talk to the papers. Something about Caroline’s family not necessarily wanting word to get out about how she died.”
Paige sat down on a counter stool. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
Nell put her mug down on the counter. “Do you remember me mentioning a group show? It’s one of the few requirements for the Colony that Betsy actually wrote out in the trust.”
Paige nodded. “I didn’t think much about it at the time because I didn’t have enough pieces to show. But I do now, with all my screen prints. And I’m starting up a new series, too, of woodblock prints.”
“Madison does a citywide Gallery Night on the first Friday of every month. What if we opened our doors to show some work and raise money for Annie’s case? Josh is handling it right now pro bono, but she might end up needing more help than he can give her. And I guess she’s already racked up court costs, and had to post money for bond. I called the organization that does the planning for Gallery Night. They print up a map ahead of time with a listing of all the places that are participating. The April one already happened, but it’s not too late to get added for May, if you and Odin are willing to do it. And Annie, of course.”
“I love the idea,” Paige said. “But aren’t you worried about, I don’t know, the Colony’s reputation or whatever?”
“I want the Colony’s reputation to be that it stands behind its residents. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I think Betsy would have agreed. She went to Annie’s most recent show in New York. I checked the date of the show and the date on Annie’s application. Annie applied for this residency after her show. I just have this feeling they met. And that Betsy knew at least something about what Annie was doing.”
“But what if she ends up actually getting convicted of something?” Paige asked.
“I thought about that, too,” Nell said. “Because I think we have to be prepared for that possibility. But everyone is entitled to a legal defense. And Annie doesn’t have any family or know many people in town who could help her out.”
“We’re the closest thing she has to family,” Paige said, nodding. “Count me in. What does Odin say about it?”
“I haven’t talked to him yet. But he probably has a few pieces he could show, don’t you think?”
“He’d better,” Paige said. “He’s out in the garage all the time.”