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“You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
Alison looked up, startled. How long had Margaret been there? Were they in the middle of a conversation?
“It’s the title of my English assignment,” Margaret continued, unaware Alison was trying to pull herself back to reality. “I have to critique a cover of one of the three assigned novels and design a new one. I was thinking maybe you could help me. You used to do art, didn’t you?”
Alison had started drawing Lucy without realising, lines on a page had became a jawline, a cheek bone, she had excellent bone structure. A pen wasn’t satisfactory so she’d found a pencil in the stationery cupboard. It felt better in her hand, more solid—she could shade and smudge. The pencil had migrated home with her.
“I haven’t,” Alison replied, pushing her sketch away, “—not since I left high school. But sure, I’ll help you.”
“I was thinking maybe I could design it and you could draw it for me? It’ll be so much better than everyone else’s - they’ll be making them on the computer. But this will be something real.” Margaret examined the picture of Lucy. “This looks real. Who is she?”
“No one.” Alison flipped the sketch face down, it was a good likeness. “I might be a little rusty. I’m not sure if it’ll be much good.”
“I think that was good.” When Alison didn’t say anything she added, “You used to draw for me. I remember.”
“You remember that?” Alison was touched.
Margaret nodded. “Before I started school. I’d paint at kindy then I’d come home and tell you about what I’d painted and you’d draw it for me. Sometimes right on top of my painting. I thought it was magic.”
Alison didn’t know how to respond. Margaret was looking at her, expecting an answer. She remembered a small child’s smile, the feeling of creating something together.
“I want a woman for my cover,” Margaret said finally. “That’s as far as I’ve got.”
“I’ll go look for my sketch books,” Alison said, running away from her sister’s open admiration.
It was lucky that when Alison had returned home, several months earlier, her room was just as she left it. She had moved her things back—the bookshelf and the books it contained, her clothes; the bed had remained. No posters had ever graced the walls, the closest had been a study schedule, first for high school then university. The walls were neutral as they were throughout the house to make a cohesive space, the curtains were blue on the solitary window.
On the top shelf at the back of her wardrobe she found them. The books were filled with sketches of her father. Alison selected the portfolio containing her various attempts at portraits; miniatures, half-lengths, whole-lengths, pencil, crayon, and watercolours had all been tried in turn. She had always wanted to do everything, the creativity pulling her along several paths at once. No great variety of faces as she had only her own family to study. There was her father—another of her father—again, and again, and again. He would sit whenever she asked.
She moved the pictures of her father to one side and sorted through the rest. She would look again, later, when Margaret wasn’t waiting for her.
As the week progressed, and Alison spent more time with Lucy, drawing her became an obsession. She would hardly listen to the things coming out of Lucy’s mouth, sketching the movements in her mind, reducing her to pencil drawings. Unintentionally she realised that Lucy was the woman on the cover of Margaret’s book. You couldn’t see her face but the body shape, the way she stood, was all Lucy.
Margaret was exacting. “Not so skinny. I want her to look like a real person who could just walk off the page, none of this idealised stuff everyone else will be doing.”
Alison smirked and decided there was no point enlightening her sister that the subject was a real woman.
“It’s a shame that Edward doesn’t like art.”
Alison paused. Margaret couldn’t know who she was drawing, there was no way she could know. “Doesn’t like art. What makes you say that? He doesn’t draw or paint, but he likes seeing others work. I think he would’ve drawn well, given the chance. He distrusts his judgment so much, that he’s unwilling to give his opinion on any picture.”
Margaret hovered but said nothing else.
“I hope, Marg,” continued Alison, “you don’t think he’s completely devoid of taste?”
“I don’t know him as well as you do obviously. I know he’s a good,” she struggled for an adjective, “... kind person.”
Alison snorted. “That’s high praise, especially from you.” She bent back over her sketch, a new shape forming. “He’s just shy and Mary-Anne talks so much she monopolises the conversation around here. We’ve spent a lot of time together over the years; he’s intelligent and funny, he reads a lot.” She was rattled, trying to absorb herself in her drawing to avoid the conversation, she didn’t think how these words could be taken.
“He’s even kind of cute, don’t you think?” Margaret asked.
“I’ve never really thought about it,” she said dismissively, trying to focus, hoping to end the topic.
“I think you think he is.”
Alison started at this declaration. She looked up but Margaret had her eyes fixed on the picture Alison was drawing. She looked down. It was Edward.
“I like him.” She wished she could turn the sketch over. At least this wasn’t the final. “I love him, as—as a brother.”
“As a brother.”
“What was it you said the other day about incest?” Alison rallied. “Believe what you like Marg. He’s been part of our family for eight years, it’d be awkward and don’t you think that if something were going to happen between us it would have already?”
“Anyone can see that he likes you.” Margaret was eager. “Mary-Anne has a theory that the two of you have been continuing on behind our backs.”
Alison was tempted to ask when Mary-Anne had said this as she'd locked herself in her room all week. Instead she laughed along but she was far from convinced of Edward's liking her, though her sisters considered it certain. The more time they'd spent together, the more she doubted his feelings; and sometimes, for a few painful minutes, she believed it to be no more than friendship. Now she didn't know what to believe.
Alone in her room she laid the pictures of her father across the bed. The images tracked the course of his illness; he became thinner, cheeks hollowed, shoulders curved. She sorted them chronologically. There he was well, and well again, then he looked somehow less himself, they continued on. His watch, the one she now wore, became looser on his wrist. She had kept every picture of her father, he looked alive even when he was dying.
The burden of knowing about her father's illness, of being the only one who knew, of sharing the secret with him, had eaten away at her as surely as the cancer had eaten him. There were days when she wished she didn’t know, when she knew that ignorance was bliss. She had silently grieved for him as she supported him through the process and when he finally succumbed to the cancer ravaging his body her grief remained silent. Her mother and sister fell apart—she had to be the strong one. Once, Mary-Anne had accused her of being heartless. Mary-Anne who right now was shut up in her room, refusing to talk to anyone or tell them why.