the silhouette of pine trees was just barely distinguishable against the sky.
After switching on the light, she stretched up her arms and looked around her room. Was it a “pigsty”? It was messy but in a good way, in her opinion, because the mess was what she herself had created. Everything else in the room—desk and bookshelves, bed and bureau, pale pink walls and most of her clothing—had been passed down to her. She’d divided the room into zones: one for sleeping, one for homework, one near the window for thinking and reading, one for dressing, one for art making. She’d nearly covered the pink walls with her artwork; everywhere, there were so many animals and books and knick-knacks to look at, that the looking nearly silenced the world outside the room. Perhaps, she thought for the first time, she should sleep with her light on.
She began picking up the clothing layered on her desk chair, separating dirty from clean. The dirty things went into a pile near the door; the clean things she hung up in her closet or folded neatly in drawers.
She went to her easel and flipped through sheets of newsprint. None of the paintings she’d made of flowers and bowls of fruit looked real. When she took her sketchpad outside, on the boat or in the yard, lines and brushstrokes seemed to have wings. But here in her room, she couldn’t get the shapes right. She thought of the ruins at the museum that seemed more like creations of nature than of human hands. She thought of the mysterious Sid and wondered when they’d meet again.
After sorting through every one of her drawings, she selected a few to clip back onto the easel. The rest she stacked on the floor next to her dirty clothes.
Now, she carefully placed the tubes of paint in their box in order by color. Pinched the dry, hard spots off her modeling clay, then rewrapped each color. Switched her Cray-pas around in their box, matching each one with its named slot. She eyed her art supplies; organized in little rainbows, they were as tantalizing as the cookies in a bakery case. She liked arranging and deranging them almost more than drawing with them.
Through the door, she heard her father snore, like a warm-up for the blub-blub-blub of a lobster boat starting up now, on the other side of the cove. She hastily assessed her cleaning effort. With everything in its proper place, the room looked bigger, sleeker, its horizontals and verticals clearer. Surely, she thought, this would make her mother happy. If she was still alive, that is. On mornings after a night like last night, she could never feel sure she would see her mother again.
It was seven o’clock, time to get back in bed. She turned off the light and went to the window. The sun was up, and it set the edge of the red sumacs ablaze. The rocks of Miller’s and Poison Ivy Island were black against the midnight blue sea; the trees were losing their leaves, and she could see all the way to New Hampshire. When she turned ten next year, she’d be allowed to sail their boat across the harbor and river mouth, to New Hampshire. To another state, by herself!
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