knew.
Thomas nodded, his expression thoughtful. ‘Your arrival provides me with an opportunity. I wonder, would you let me sketch you? All of you together, I mean.’
‘Well, I’m not really sure—’
Thomas cut her father off. ‘You’d be doing me a favor, sir, I assure you. I can only paint this idyllic scenery so many times. Birches, hemlocks, the gulls and woodcocks, boats tacking back and forth across the lake. Frankly, I’m losing my mind.’
Her mother laughed, interrupting before Alice’s father could demur. ‘We’d be delighted. It’s very kind of you to ask. How exciting!’
‘You could keep the sketch. Who knows? Someday it might be worth something. Of course, it’s equally possible that someday it will be worth absolutely nothing.’
Alice could see her father weighing his options, one of which was likely four weeks of her mother’s wrath if he declined Bayber’s invitation. She wondered why he hesitated.
‘I suppose if it’s all of us together, it would be all right,’ he finally offered. ‘You’ve already met Alice, our amateur ornithologist. She’s fourteen, and starting ninth grade in the fall. And this is Natalie, our oldest. She’ll be a junior at Walker Academy next month.’
Alice realized then that her sister hadn’t looked up from the dock once, seemingly enthralled with a book she was reading. Odd, considering Natalie was long accustomed to being the center of attention. She had the shiny, polished look of a new toy. Her appearance drew gawky young men to their front porch in droves, each of them hoping to be favored with a task: fetching lemonade if Natalie was warm, retrieving a sweater if she felt a chill, swatting at bugs drawn too close to her dizzying gravity. Alice had less immunity to Natalie than any of them, practicing her sister’s mannerisms in the mirror when she was alone; accepting her hand-me-downs with secret delight; wishing for even a small measure of Natalie’s unapologetic impulsiveness. There was power associated with her sister’s prettiness. Even now, listless and drawn from some bug she’d caught after weeks spent away looking at colleges, Natalie was still the bright sun, the star around which the rest of them orbited. Her failure to attempt to charm, or even acknowledge Thomas Bayber was surprising. Even more surprising was the fact that neither of her parents admonished Natalie for her rude behavior or insisted she say hello. And Thomas Bayber, for his part, seemed equally unaware of Natalie.
‘Hello. Thomas, are you there? It’s Alice.’ She knocked louder; the slick doorknob turned in her hand and the door creaked open.
‘Thomas?’
Her father was on the skiff, halfway across the lake; Natalie had shunned her invitation to skip rocks, and instead put on her swimsuit, packed a lunch, and said she was going to the beach near town and didn’t want company. Her mother was meeting summer friends for a game of bridge.
‘Thomas?’
There was a scrambling sort of noise, and there he was, looming in front of her, blocking out the light. He looked as though he’d been sleeping—sloe-eyed, one side of his cheek creased with little half-moon impressions, his dark hair knotted—though she’d watched him carry the paper bags into the house not quite half an hour ago.
‘You look a fright,’ she said.
He smiled at her and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Alice. What an unexpected surprise.’
‘Is it all right?’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘Where’s Neela?’ She’d grown attached to the little dog, carrying table scraps with her in case of a chance encounter. Natalie, on the other hand, referred to Neela as the vicious little cur.
‘She’ll bite you if you’re not careful,’ she’d told Alice.
‘She will not. You’re jealous because she likes me.’
‘That didn’t stop her from taking a bite out of Thomas, and he’s her owner.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘You should.’ Natalie had smirked. ‘I’ve seen the scar.’
Thomas turned and walked into the main room of the cabin. ‘Neela’s out visiting friends, I imagine.’ His bare feet left marks in a fine dust on the floor, and Alice trailed in after him.
‘Damn chalk dust,’ he said. ‘It gets over everything.’
‘What are you working on? Can I see?’
‘I’m not sure it’s ready for public consumption, but if you insist, I suppose you can have a preview. Stay there.’ He sorted through canvases stacked on an easel facing the bank of windows overlooking the lake. Settling on one, he picked it up by the edges and walked back across the room, sitting on an old velvet sofa, patting the cushion next to him.
The sofa was the color of dark chocolate, the fabric stained and threadbare in places, with big tapestry pillows stuffed into the corners. In spite of its condition, a shadow of elegance clung to it. That same shadow cloaked everything in the room. Beautiful books with tattered covers and pages plumped by mildew, a grandfather clock with a cracked cabinet door and a sonorous chime that sounded on the quarter hour, expensive-looking Oriental carpets with patchy fringe—all of it near to ruin, yet perfect in the way that something is exactly as you imagine it should be. The Restons’ cabin, by comparison, was a third the size and designed to look as though its owners were sportsmen, though nothing could be further from the truth. This place was like Thomas, Alice decided: flawed and sad, yet perfectly true.
She settled on the sofa next to him, folding her legs underneath her. He turned the canvas so she could see. It was a chalk sketch of the beach near town, sadly without birds. She recognized the silhouette of hemlock trees against the sky and the lip of shoreline that curled back toward itself after the point. But even though she knew the location, the way Thomas had depicted it made it unfamiliar. The pier was drawn in dark, violent slashes; the trees were leafless, charred spires; and the water looked angry, foaming against rocks and railing against the beach.
‘Why did you draw it that way? It scares me to look at it.’
‘I should thank you for preparing me for the critics. It’s supposed to do that, Alice.’
‘That stretch of beach is beautiful. It doesn’t look anything like this.’
‘But you recognized it.’
‘Yes.’
‘You recognized it even though it frightens you, even though you find it dark and ugly. So maybe those qualities are inherent, but you choose to overlook them. You don’t see the ugliness because you don’t want to. That’s the job of an artist: to make people look at things—not just at things, but at people and at places—in a way other than they normally would. To expose what’s hidden below the surface.’
Alice followed the line of a tree trunk, the tip of her finger hovering just above the paper. When she realized he was looking at her hands, she tucked them under her legs.
‘Why are you hiding them?’ His voice was patient, but firm. ‘Let me see.’
She
