AS SOON AS SHE got home, Stella sat at her table and began to draw Libby. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d had the whole time she was with her. Something was off. Libby was really troubled and she was hiding something. Stella drew and drew, fueled by a kind of light switch that she couldn’t turn on. The drawing of Libby was perfectly acceptable. There was Libby’s hair, her big eyes, but it was like a shadow of Libby instead of a picture of Libby herself.
Maybe she was just too close to Libby, Stella decided. Stella was used to drawing strangers, approaching them like they were a door that she could simply open. She and Libby were just too intertwined. There were parts of Libby that would be tender, and Stella wanted to protect them rather than reveal them.
Stella studied the drawing, squinting until she could see a little bit more. In it, Libby looked torn and unhappy. Actually, she looked haunted. She looked in love and Stella bet it was that asshole Ben, still on Libby’s mind. Stella wouldn’t show this to Libby. It wasn’t anything that Libby didn’t know, anyway, and what good would it do either one of them. She ripped up the drawing and stuffed it in the trash.
She dug her hands in her pocket and drew out the stone. She felt calmer, like she had made the right decision. She’d keep this stone with her from now on. Thank you, Libby, she thought. Thank you.
TO HER SURPRISE, Stella found she loved the stone. She loved being able to feel its weight in her pocket. At night, she put it on her bed table, so when she couldn’t sleep, she could look at it. Oh, how she loved looking at it. The stone was supposed to be clear, but she always saw something new in it, a little vein of pink racing through it, a part that was bluer than another. It was a beautiful object. It seemed to pulse like a heart, and sometimes, she felt as though it connected her to Libby. I am here. I’m right here, it said. Like a true friend.
The stone, Stella was convinced, made her think more and more about art, because it somehow opened her up. When she felt it resting in her hand, colors around her seemed brighter.
One morning, she got up and carefully researched all the art stores in Manhattan. She read the Yelp reviews (“Staff are morons! They didn’t know the difference between acrylics and oils!”) and then decided on the League because everyone seemed to love it (“Artists’ paradise! They know what you want before you even do!”) and because it appeared that all the art students went there.
She went to the store, her heart thumping, feeling like a usurper who didn’t belong there because she wasn’t really an artist, not yet anyway. Her only artist tool was a pen or pencil. She’d never tried watercolor, oil, pastels, or those gorgeous shiny acrylics. Could she learn to work with them? Would she be any good with them? Or was her gift—or whatever it was—only with drawing?
The store was packed with people. She should have known that. It was September now, and all the art students were here, crowding around all the counters, but she didn’t want to go home. A man stood in the back holding up three sable brushes and studying them. In the corner, a woman was trying out pens, scribbling something over and over. They all were hipper than she was. She wandered the aisles, unsure of what she wanted or needed but certain she’d know when she saw it.
“Can I help you?”
Stella turned around. A girl with a blue streak in her hair was standing there, and Stella saw her name tag: Sheila.
“I probably don’t belong here—” Stella said, and to her surprise Sheila took her arm. “You do,” she said. “Everybody’s an artist in one way or another. We’re all creative, don’t you think?”
“I guess so,” Stella said.
“What do you think you want to do?” Sheila said.
Stella looked around. There were rows of tubes of paint along one wall, the caps different brilliant colors. Each one called out to her, as insistent as a push. “Those,” Stella decided. “I’m brave enough to try those.”
She wanted to buy everything. She wanted to run the sable brushes along her skin. She wanted to eat the colors. For a moment, she remembered how it had been in the coma, when colors had a feel to them, a sound, a smell. How much she had loved that sensation and here it was again.
In the end, Stella was loaded down with acrylics, watercolors in tubes, and five different kinds of brushes. She had watercolor paper, a palette to mix paints, an easel, and four already-blocked canvases because she didn’t know how to do that yet, and she was in a hurry to start.
“You can always come back, you know,” Sheila said. “I’d like to see your first acrylic.” She gave Stella a hug. “You’re my kind of people,” Sheila told her. “Come back. Be sure to come back.”
When she left the store, Stella was so happy she felt she was floating. There it was. Artist. Something to be.
She got home and pushed the dining room table to the side. She spread newspaper on the floor and set up her easel and daubed color on a palette with a knife and then reached for a sable brush. Before she put it in the paint, she stroked it along her face. It was as soft as a makeup brush. Cobalt blue, she thought, and then she carefully, gently, painted a line onto the canvas, so deep and dark she could have tumbled down into it.
There it was, the jump of excitement. This was who she was. She dipped her brush again.
WHEN SIMON GOT home, the apartment had the distinct smell of paint. Stella had pushed the table to the window and she was sitting in the light, painting something on an easel, not turning when he came in. Her happiness radiated, and to Simon’s astonishment, the painting was even more extraordinary than her drawings. It was a portrait of a woman he didn’t know, older, with glossy white hair and blue eyes, rendered in colors so rich and vivid he swore he could taste them. There was a kind of light in her painting that jumped out at him. Stella could see things in people, and she painted those things into her works, but trying to see what she had felt in this painting only made him anxious and confused. “Stella,” he said. “This is beautiful.”
“Not finished yet,” she said, daubing red into the white hair of the woman in the painting, something he never would have thought would work, but here it made her hair somehow whiter. Stella’s hands were moving, conducting a kind of symphony. How did she know to mix colors like that?
“Stella,” he said again. “You hungry? Want to order Chinese or something?” But she didn’t answer, just kept painting, entranced. He could wave a hand in front of her and she wouldn’t notice him.
He sat down beside her and Stella didn’t even look up. Her brush flew over the canvas.
“Sorry. I can’t stop,” she said, but Simon didn’t care. He liked being here, sitting quietly with Stella. Watching the glide of the brush was comforting until a wave of loneliness washed over him. He put his head in his hands.
“Hey,” Stella said. She put her brush down and studied him.
“I’m okay . . .”
“Was it the picture?” she said. “Sometimes people get weird when they see what I do. It’s like a puzzle they can’t solve.”
“Can you solve it?” he asked her.
“Soon,” she said. “Soon I will be able to.”
“What are you seeing?” he said. “What does this painting mean?” He looked at the painting again, and for a moment he felt it was whispering secrets to him. Louder, he thought. Louder so I can understand.
She went back to the painting. “I’ll tell you when I’m finished,” she said. “Then I’ll know.”
But then she finished, and when he asked her, she shook her head. “I don’t know. I thought I would know, but I don’t.” Then she turned to him. “See what you see in it,” she said.
And he tried, studying. “I don’t know either,” he said.
“Maybe later we’ll know,” she told him.
ALL THROUGH SEPTEMBER, Stella went to a new place, Washington Square Park, this time with a portable easel and paints. She sat away from the hub where people were playing music or doing magic or demonstrating for or against one thing or another. From her bench on the periphery, it felt greener and leafier, and less crazy. Soon enough, though, people started noticing her and her work, and they clustered around her easel.
A few commissions followed. People began inviting her to paint them in their homes. She obliged, in part because she loved seeing how they lived. Sometimes the places were immaculate, and she knew they had cleaned for her. There was the scent of pine cleaner. Other times, she saw dishes piled in the sink, scrambles of cat hair in the corners by the heaters. It didn’t matter. She knew that homes weren’t necessarily extensions of people, that a neat home could be a reaction to a tortured mind, that a messy place could belong to someone creative.
The people she met in the park told other people about her. The phone kept ringing. It unnerved her a little the way her new clients looked at her, as if she had magic inside of her. “How did you hear about me?” she always asked. “How did you know?” They all had stories. One client told her that her best friend had commissioned a portrait of her child, and the more she looked at it, the more she understood why her child was so shy. “She doesn’t realize how beautiful she is,” the mother said. “And that’s something I can do something about. Especially with the help of this painting.”
Stella came home excited, wanting to talk to Simon about her experiences, but she sometimes felt that he wasn’t really listening. “Play music for me while I paint,” she’d asked, but he always said no. He was happier when she was doing something else, watching a movie, baking cookies, but she felt herself becoming resentful. She had done so much for him. She remembered how much she had supported him and his music, never asking him to give it up, even when things weren’t going well. And now she couldn’t give this up, not even for him.
Besides, he hadn’t asked her to.
ONE DAY, STELLA was in the park with her face tilted to the sun, doing nothing more exciting than enjoying the day and listening to a man who was playing a piano that he’d hauled outside, when someone tapped her. She looked up. A man in a dark raincoat, his haircut crisp against his head, smiled at her. “You’re Stella Davison, right?” he said.
“Last time I looked,” she said. She shaded her eyes against the sun.
“The artist,” he said. The word still sounded funny to her.
“I’m not painting right now,” she said. She nodded at the bench. All she had with her was her handbag.
“Oh, I don’t want you to paint me,” he said, and then he dug in his pocket and handed her a card. Jack Mantor, it said. Time Out New York. “I want to interview you,” he said.
“Why?” The card fluttered in her hand.
“You’re famous. And you got there in a weird way,” he said. “And that’s always interesting.”
She wasn’t sure. Did she want people to know more about her? Time Out was a magazine weekly. She didn’t need any more clients. She sometimes felt harassed by them. Sometimes they seemed to be looking for something in her when they should have been looking at the artwork. Fame was something Simon had always chased. He had told her it was like being dipped in gold, it was like getting dark chocolate sprinkles on delicious ice cream, and she hadn’t been able to imagine it.
“Okay,” she said.