She stands on the porch, watching her shed through narrowed eyes. Water drips into the awning, dancing with the rusted steel in a slow, melodic beat. Night has fallen; the shed is a gray silhouette in the porch light. Her mind twists with haphazard thoughts strung together, swirling incomprehensibly. Tapping her foot is involuntary. It is after one AM. Herb says she needs to sleep, but she can’t sleep until she checks her shed. This place was her comfort. It has gone cold; Peter Briggs stole her daughter, her ocean, her art.
Even in death, Peter Briggs has sent someone to hunt them.
Myra can hardly breathe as she descends down the step. Her mind travels in figure eights and circles, in straight lines and angles. She darts behind the house and hides in its shadow. The shed is pitch-black. She blows a thin stream of air from her lungs.
Stay calm.
She runs across the crunchy gravel, and she concentrates on her breath, on her feet as they hit the ground. Muddy water splashes onto her ankles. Still breathing hard, she lifts the heavy latch up. The windows are sealed shut. She hovers outside and listens to the rain plunk down, the wind bristle around her. Bats squeak in the distance; the whistle sends a bone-deep panic through her. Waking a bat in winter is bad luck.
A hibernating animal has warned her. She opens the door anyway.
Myra rushes inside, mouth dry and chest pounding. She pulls the cord to the hanging lightbulb. It illuminates the small space. She laughs at herself. The painting slasher isn’t stupid enough to return here. Besides, she can’t go back to the house till she’s painted her angst out. Still, insomnia can drive even a sane person mad. She rubs her weary eyes. No one is here. I’m losing my mind, she thinks, and cracks the window.
All of her paintings of Charlotte come from scenarios she has dreamed of over the years. She hasn’t had a subject on the little stool in her studio in forever. Not since Herb began pestering her to paint something or someone else besides Charlotte. He said it wasn’t healthy to be stuck in the past. She said it kept her breathing, kept her in motion. Myra checks under the table, behind the paintings. She will not let this man control their lives.
She has memorized her adult daughter’s face, excited to transfer it to the canvas. Her mind empties as she prepares the piece, swishing the stiff brush over the canvas in rich, thick strokes: sienna, white, red. She blends the colors with ease, ignoring the splatters of paint that flick against her cheeks and smear onto her apron. As she swipes the paint, her arm tires, but she loves the fatigue; the cramp in her hand is one unique to creation. She uses the thick brush to draw a basic outline. The details will come later. This is a process. It is methodical, soothing.
Myra prefers portraiture over other types of art. She enjoys watching the subjects, really watching them, through a series of photographs or in person. She knows how to capture a certain vulnerability in a hand, or a sparkle in the eye. There are dozens of pictures of her babies and Herb, of the family.
Painting was a way to bring subjects to life, and she was up for the challenge.
And after, Myra hoped to bring her daughter to life, when everyone thought she was dead.
She sweeps a wild blue color across the canvas, heavy-handed. She scrapes white over the blue. It sounds like a builder evening out mortar, rough and careless. Sweat pools on her forehead and she blinks away tears.
Myra drops the supplies with a bang. She slides to the cold floor and rests her head on bent knees. Loose hair cascades around her face. The scent of wet paint is pungent in the air despite the cracked window.
After Charlotte’s disappearance, Myra considered all of the places her daughter might be.
In the first painting, Charlotte remains eight years old. Suspended in the air on a wooden swing, she wears a broad smile. A tangerine sea of California poppies surrounds her. The sun brightens her face. She pumps her strong legs, catapulting into the sapphire-colored sky. Charlotte has wandered to Southern California. The weather is warm. She is found by a kind farmer. He brings her home, where she joins his wife and other children. Charlotte cries, but the old man gives her a popsicle and calls the police. She is like a lost child at Disneyland, playing with Mickey and Donald and a slew of princesses while she waits for her parents.
Soon the news will make it to Rocky Shores, and she’ll be sent home. For now, she swings with the couple’s children. They dry her tears and keep her fed.
She is okay, Myra told herself. The couple will send her home soon.
In the next painting, Charlotte is eighteen years old. Her hair is clipped to her chin and dyed purple. A cigarette hangs from her lips, ribbons of smoke flirting with a cold November evening. Her legs and arms are thin and drawn to her chest. Her lips are painted, with a sharp brush, into a pensive expression.
She is okay, Myra told herself. Charlotte would have come home, if she could have, by now. She isn’t safe or unsafe, but eventually she will be back. Charlotte remembers who she is, where they live. She couldn’t have forgotten, right? Maybe that’s what it is. She was far too young to remember the inn’s location. Probably she is living somewhere with a couple who couldn’t have children. They love her deeply, cherish her. Someday they will realize what they have done is wrong. You can’t just take someone’s daughter and claim her as your own.
My daughter has to be out there, she’d think. She could not believe what they had told her, that Charlotte had probably drowned.
A rap on the door breaks her thoughts. She peers through the small window. The pale moonlight is muted by old dust smeared on the glass.
“Who’s there?” Myra clenches the palette knife in her fist.
“It’s me. Elizabeth.”
Her heart skips in her chest. She gets up and opens the door, breathless. “It’s okay. I just thought … I don’t know what,” she says, and drops the knife from her sweaty palm.
“Sorry I scared you.” Elizabeth shifts on her feet.
She freezes. “It’s very late.”
“I haven’t been sleeping well,” Elizabeth says.
A hint of unease courses through her. “Does Herb know I’m out here?”
“He doesn’t know you’re awake, if that’s what you’re asking.” Elizabeth raises her eyebrows.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Myra asks cautiously.
Elizabeth shoves her hands in her pockets. She looks around the corner. Her lower lip trembles.
“Come in,” Myra says, dropping a handful of brushes into a coffee mug filled with cold water. “It’s all fine. See? It’s just me and my art.”
Elizabeth points to the painting of the little girl on the swing. “Is this me?”
Myra nods.
“And this is Gwen?” she asks, pointing at the portrait of the angsty teen.
Myra doesn’t want to sound crazy. “Yes, it is. Not a very good rendition, I suppose.”
Elizabeth slides down beside Myra on the floor and crosses her legs. She doesn’t seem to suspect the lie. “Can I see the others? You’re really talented, Myra.”
“Okay. Let me show you this one I did when your grandmother was still alive.” She flips through the canvases and pulls out one from the very back. Setting it beside the light, she glances at Elizabeth. “This is it.”
Bernadette was seventy years old when Myra painted her, capturing the gleam in her eye and the beauty in her thick-knuckled hand. It was the first and only time Myra understood her mother as a human, and not the mother who found baking and sewing joyless. Bernadette taught her daughter to be fearless and tough, and Myra didn’t quite appreciate this until she listened, really listened, during those last days of her mother’s life.
You have to listen while you paint a person, Myra discovered. You have to listen to capture a whole life in your teeth and usher it softly to a piece of canvas. And then, with empathy in your heart, you cajole the blob of color into the layers that make a person’s life.
“She looks so soulful,” says Elizabeth. “You must have had a very unique childhood.”
“Unique is one word to describe it,” says Myra, laughing. “I didn’t appreciate her enough. Kids grow up with the belief that their parents are above regular humans—or that they should be. I wanted her to be one of those 1960s moms, when she was a free-spirited woman who spoke her mind. I was proud of her and embarrassed all at the same time.”
Elizabeth smiles pensively. “I think that’s normal.”
“Someday, Theo will find out his mama is just another person, trying to make her way through a difficult world. I long for the day when Gwen understands. Her two perfect girls might grow up and pull something unexpected on her.” She wipes a tear from the corner of her eye and says, “All that therapy she gets and the books she reads won’t prevent her children from coming into their own.”
“Gwen loves you,” Elizabeth says.
“I don’t know, honey. The mother–daughter relationship comes effortlessly for some people. That’s not been my experience,” she says.
Elizabeth shifts on her feet. “The painting that was slashed. It’s very different from the rest. The style is different. Did you make it for someone else?”
Myra pauses for a moment. “I guess I just like babies. New beginnings. So, I thought I’d try something new.”
“It seems incomplete, yet not. Somehow. It’s indescribable.”
Myra thinks about this. “You’re right.” She laughs. “Clearly, I’m not Van Gogh.”
“I think it’s lovely,” she says. “Maybe you could show me sometime.”
“I’d like that,” says Myra. Hope swells in her chest.
Elizabeth laughs nervously. “Okay. Though I doubt I’m any good.”
“Eh? Good, great—whatever. It’s fun. Want to try?”
There is a want in the breathless beat, a need curled inside of her question. Elizabeth had said sometime, not at one AM. Myra can’t ever remember having anxiety like this. She wants to scream at someone, anyone who might listen. She is a bomb hidden in the shrubbery on a safe and tended road. With all the curves that have been thrown at her lately, her sanity feels precarious. How can she take this rejection from her own daughter? When Charlotte was a little girl, she wanted to use her mother’s paints. Desperately. And Myra made her use the cheap, washable watercolors. She should have let her daughter use the paints when she cared to. Because now, she has to beg this stranger to spend time with her, and it shreds her insides.
Just say no. Say you hate me. Say you wish you’d never come home.
“I guess so. For a little while.”
“Are you sure?” Maybe Elizabeth senses her desperation. Heat prickles her cheeks.
Elizabeth laughs—she really does—and says, “I’d love to paint with you.”
Myra swallows this heavy, heavy lump, and it lands in the pit of her stomach, nauseating as cold meat. “Here, try these.” She picks out several colors and squirts them on a palette. She can’t let Elizabeth see that she is nervous.
“I’m not good at this at all,” Elizabeth says, painting a giant orange stroke across the canvas. “But this is amazingly fun. This is better than any therapy.”
“Someone finally sees! Your father is certain all the medications and the therapy are what cured me. But I needed a thing. Do you know what I mean?” She’s rambling now. “I guess maybe you don’t. But someday, after you feel more secure in this world, I guarantee, you will want a thing of your own.”
“I get it. No one can take this from you.” Elizabeth stares at Myra. “That is brilliant.” She pauses. Myra resists the urge to fill the blank spot. “When he took me to the woods, I had this spot under a tree. Even in the cold, dead winter, it was covered in this thick, frozen moss. In the spring, wildflowers bloomed. So many—dozens and dozens—in pink and purple, blue and yellow. They were my thing.” Tears drip down her cheeks.
With a paint-stained thumb, Myra wipes them away.
Elizabeth stiffens, but not too much. “It’s time to go in, Myra. Herb is going to be worried if you stay awake all night. Lack of sleep is very bad for you, right?”
“Can you not mention it to him? That we were out here so late?”
Elizabeth pauses. “I guess so. But you have to sleep now, okay?”
“Promise.” Myra swishes the brushes in water and wipes them on a paper towel. Elizabeth gathers the tubes of paint. “Just leave the paintings to dry,” Myra says. “We’ll get to them tomorrow.”
They finish wiping the counters and step toward the door. Elizabeth swings it open, and a cold gust of wind rushes inside. Myra turns to take a final look at her shed, to make sure everything is in order.
“Wait.” Something peeks out from underneath her stool.
“What?” Elizabeth freezes. “What is it?”
Myra marches toward the stool and pushes it hard. The wheels screech as it rolls backward.
“Nothing.” Myra sucks a breath. “I just have the strangest feeling when I come out here. It’s like I’m being watched.”
Myra meets Elizabeth’s eyes.
She shudders. “Yes. I feel that too.”