She sat at a table alone, to her left a window overlooking the street below. This particular café was her favorite, a diner in any other town, but here in Cripple Creek, a five-star restaurant. The food was exceptional—if a bit heavy with grease—the service one of smiles and winks and friendly banter, the view unlike anyplace else in the world. It was also, much like the Artist herself, private.
A few errant snowflakes fell from gray skies and past the window to melt on the sidewalk below. The temperature had not yet remained low enough to ensure a semi-permanent home for the snow, but she knew it was only a matter of days. Perhaps even tomorrow. There was something unsettling about autumn, like a harbinger of death or a messenger that quietly screamed the year was coming to a close. It was just a year, another score on the wall of her prison of life, but it always felt like the end.
It had felt that way since the day they died.
A man behind her scooted his chair back and bumped into hers. She turned her attention from the window for a moment, looked up at the man as he apologized, then let her eyes follow him as he meandered through the tables and chairs and patrons to the cashier's station. She knew him, at least by name and station, if not personally: Dan Chappose, a man with a problem, and it was the smell of that problem which lingered in the air a little too long around her. Whiskey, perhaps a little rum.
He was nothing like her father, but the smell congealed around her like melted wax, sticking to her pores. What was it about smells that triggered memory? Her father was so long removed from her life, dead and buried along with everyone else she'd ever had association.
Why did they want her to remember so much? Why couldn't she just wait?
The Artist sipped at her coffee and turned her attention back to the window and the street below. Nathan James stood as he had for two weeks, against a lamppost outside the Spanish Mustang. He fidgeted today. With her eyes still locked on the man in the Columbia jacket, she opened her sketchbook to a blank page. She'd known long ago who some of the people she would sketch but never knew when. Perhaps today. Perhaps tomorrow. Art was a window to the soul, but the curtains weren't open all the time.
With her pencil poised above the blank page, her mind quickly wandered back through time, a trick it often played but one she never enjoyed. There was enough pain to last two lifetimes, enough anger to stoke the furnaces of Hell, enough sleepless nights to turn eyes blood red. What did they think she would gain by remembering, by reliving the past in vivid detail?
Her father—aloof, strange, tall, perhaps once handsome and fierce—suddenly sat across from her at the table in the diner. She knew he wasn't there, and although it didn't always unsettle her when the visions from the past arrived on some mystic timetable, she was nevertheless bothered when he appeared.
The ethereal man fidgeted in his seat, a yellow-toothed rictus fixed forever. His eyes dashed from the window to some stain on the Formica table and back to the window. The Artist thought he looked like he wanted to say something, but she also knew words would never come. Perhaps, she reasoned, it was just an image she wanted to see: a man long gone who regretted the decisions he had made and had come to apologize for the past. Of course, he never apologized, and within minutes if not seconds, the vision disappeared.
She looked down at her sketchbook. Her father had never respected her artwork. He was never encouraging or supportive as she grew from a tow-haired little girl into a blossoming woman. He found more beauty in the label design of a bottle of Jack Daniels than he found in the artistic musings of his own daughter. He was, at times, cruel. She could not remember how many of her drawings she'd found crumpled by the trash can, but she did recall the number of times she'd cried herself to sleep because of words he had slurred in her direction.
"Thanks for the firewood," he might say. Or, even more cruelly, "Your mother would like this. Why don't you bury it in the backyard with her and the rest of the trash?"
Art was not always so emotionally draining. When her mother was alive, she would feel a rush of pride every time she finished a drawing and showed it off. The proud mother would beam, her smile a beacon of hope on the shores of some turbulent sea.
When the Artist was six, she drew a bunny on the back of a paper that had sat unmoved on their dining room table for a week. The words on the paper hadn't meant anything to her, but the blank slate on the other side was as inviting as any empty surface—a place to expunge the visions in her mind, to let loose the tremble in her hands. She worked tirelessly while her father was away, while her mother scrubbed dishes in the sink and tended to whatever needed to be cleaned. Her hands flew across the page, up and down, every line, smudge and smear a testament to genius. With tireless attention, she sketched every hair, shaded the fat of the animal's body, drew blades of grass that seemed to crawl up from the ground and wrap the rabbit in a meadow's hug.
When her mother looked up from her chores, the Artist had finished nothing less than a masterpiece of pencilwork, a photorealistic rendition of a place that existed only in imagination. Her mother smiled, walked around the corner of the table and kissed the child on the cheek.
"Very nice," her mother said with her acrid but soothing breath.
"Can you put it on the wall?"
"You need to sign it first." Her mother pointed to the corner of the page. "Right there, so the world knows what a wonderful artist you are."
Dutifully, the Artist scribbled her name as legibly as she could. She slid the paper across to her mother who had taken up a seat next to her. "Done. Do you think Daddy will like it?"
The slightest waver of her mother's smile wouldn't have been obvious even to a child of six, and if there was one, the Artist didn't notice. Rather, the girl beamed with pride, swelled with hope, exploded with the excitement only she could know—that of her Daddy's approval.
"Your father will," her mother had said.
She had lied, of course.
Her Daddy didn't even notice the drawing until he stood beside the table, looking for the paper he thought was still where it had been. He swore at its disappearance, cursed her mother for misplacing it and stormed through the house with mud-caked boots looking for it. When he finally saw the bunny pinned to the wall, he raged.
The Artist could never say for sure if that was the first time she'd been slapped across the face and her pencil broken in two in front of her, but it was the most memorable of the times. When it happened again at eight, it didn't seem as bad. At twelve, a few weeks before her mother passed away, the Artist had been hit so many times she thought it was a normal part of growing up, punishment for misbehaving, for drawing bunnies on foreclosure notices.
Still, the Artist drew, even as sores lit up her mother's skin like flames and the prospect of being alone with her Daddy became a twisted reality. As her mother cursed God and Satan and everyone in between under a fever that eventually took her life, the Artist sat by her bed and drew more.
She shook the memories away, looked up from her sketchbook and out the window. Nathan was still there, like a weathered fixture. What was it about a man who had lost everything? Was losing everything—or at least everything that mattered—a catalyst for bringing on more pain, like a pebble that starts the avalanche? Before they came—before they told her to wait—she'd never noticed people. She'd always seen them, even interacted with them on a regular basis. But to be a watcher of people—a woman who wondered why and how and who and what and all the things that combine to make a person real—that didn't happen until it was too late.
She turned back from the window as her hand trembled. The feeling was coming again, like pinpricks on the skin, ants that crawled over the body. It was not unpleasant, but it was still unnerving. The first time she felt the sensation was when she was fifteen and she sketched a picture of her Daddy passed out on the couch in their rundown house. A bottle of whiskey lay across his chest, the last of the golden mash poured out down his checkered flannel shirt and jeans. As quietly as she could, she guided her graphite pencil across paper, up and down, unveiling the lines on his face and the wrinkles in the skin draped over his thick arms. She smudged some, erased some, shaded areas where the light from the kitchen had created shadows. She didn't pause, her movements smooth and graceful, her brown eyes never once leaving her subject to glance at the sketch.
Finally, she had stopped and focused on her work. Her hands trembled, not from the past hour of frantic sketching and smudging, but from what appeared on the page: her father's body writhed, contorted in unnatural ways. Atop his sickly neck, a face she would never forget stared back. Daddy was dead to her, and the sketch revealed nothing less.
That night, she left her house with a backpack of tattered clothes and her sketchbook. She'd left the portrait of her father on the wall where her mother had once pinned the bunny. Her father would surely find the sketch, and maybe then he would see himself for what he really was.
She was a god, albeit a limited one. She could not know her father's heart nor understand the reasons for the way he had treated her. She could, however, draw out his inner self and perhaps his future.
Her father died within a week, but the Artist didn't know until she came home three years later.
She sighed as her pencil touched the blank page. If she had to wait, she could pass the time by drawing out the inner lives of people around her, of people who didn't even know what their own future held. She had filled up most of the sketchbook, asking questions along the way. Was it redemption or retribution? Was it rebirth or independence? Did they all fight wars in their mind like she did? What makes a man . . . a man?
The Artist turned her eyes back to Nathan as her hand began moving across the blank page.