Openers

Copyright © Shayna Krishnasamy 2010

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 9780981335223

Cover Photography: Jot

Contents

Excerpt from The Sickroom

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Epilogue

Excerpt from The Sickroom

One morning, about a week and a half into my lying-in (as Aunt Vera called it, though I didn’t understand why it made her hunch her shoulders and giggle), I woke up with a burning fever. Sweaty and furious, I kicked off the covers and wiped at my face and neck, my fingers coming away greasy and wet. At first I thought it was nighttime as the sun had still been up when I’d collapsed into sleep at eight the night before, exhausted from nothing more than an evening of sitting in bed playing Monopoly with the boys. (They couldn’t enter the attic, so they’d set the board up at the bottom of the stairs. There’d been a lot of calling out of which square I’d landed on, and throwing of dice up and down the stairs, and I was pretty sure Collin had been stealing from the bank.) Only as I gazed through the window at the sky growing increasingly blue did I realize, with pitiful dismay, that it was early morning and I’d slept nearly twelve hours without feeling the least bit rested.

I curled on my side, one arm stuck awkwardly beneath me, my legs flung one over the other, and stared miserably at the worn rug. The room would only get hotter as the sun rose and my fever would spike and Collin would annoy me and swallowing a gulp of water without crying out in pain would be the big achievement of the day. As much as I’d loved my sickness the week before, as much as I’d clung to it, I had to begrudgingly admit the truth: I was bored out of my mind and there was no end in sight.

Reluctantly I set my feet on the ground. I had to pee and I was hungry for the first time in days. I’d hardly eaten dinner the night before and Aunt Vera had wrapped it up for me (for later, dear, she’d said, patting me on the cheek sympathetically, as though to miss out on her pot roast was the worst thing that had ever happened to me). A fly buzzed around my head as I tried to gather my strength to make the ambitious trek downstairs. I swatted at it in annoyance, swinging my arm violently through the air, but it kept at it. It landed on my arm and I gave it a generous slap, but missed. Then it crawled up my back. It really had it out for me, this fly. It wouldn’t let me be, and I was in no mood!

Tripping to my feet in my pajama bottoms and undershirt, I fought at the air like a tiger, whipping at the fly with the first and last of my strength until I was left panting, and still it flew, still it buzzed. I jumped. I swung. I would squash that fly if it took everything I had!

Only when I finally nailed it right between my palms (an exalted yes! escaping my lips in a lunging rush), only then did I notice the furry blonde head bobbing in and out of view behind the table and hear the faint slap-stroke of paintbrush on canvas.

Macon.

Swallowing (and wincing), my palms still clasped together, I stood in the middle of my side of the room, wondering vaguely if I ought to smuggle back to my bed or keep on as though I hadn’t seen her, filling quickly with that gnawing, uncomfortable feeling of having thought you were alone when you weren’t. I looked down at my clothes. Was I decent? Had I said anything out loud that could be used against me? And what was she doing here anyway, while I was sleeping? Wasn’t that a little creepy?

I was sure she hadn’t noticed me—that would be just like Macon. I was positive I could just sneak down the stairs (though my ability to do this had long since depleted), until all of a sudden she stood up. She hadn’t looked my way this whole time. She’d been crouching in front of her canvas, painting away. Now she wiped her fingers on her shirt over and over (at least twenty times she wiped, as though she’d forgotten she was doing it), and said, Should I get my mother?

I looked down at the fly smeared on my palms. It had grossly expanded in death and one of its legs was twitching. It was pretty disgusting. If Handle had been here I would have showed it to him and he would have been thrilled to pieces. But Handle wasn’t here.

I took a defiant stance. What? I asked contemptuously. (I sounded a bit like Collin when he was speaking to Handle. Like, what right did Handle have speaking in his presence? Like he should know his place and stay in it.)

Macon looked at me and blinked. She didn’t seem to have heard the tone. She was still wiping her hands but more lightly now, winding to a stop.

Do you need help getting down the stairs? she asked.

Excuse me? I scoffed. What do you think I am? I don’t need help getting down the stairs! Geez! Then I laughed what was meant to be a haughty chuckle but came out more like a nervous twitter. I was already so tired, just from standing, that I thought my legs might give out again. (Maybe this time I would land on Macon.)

Oh, okay, Macon said and turned back to her painting.

(Oh, okay, would become the classic Macon response, one I would come to tease her about. She said it whenever she couldn’t figure out what the other person meant, or what to do, or what to say. One time in the middle of an argument, after I called her a particularly vicious name, her face flooded red and she screeched, Oh okay! at me, and we both burst out laughing. But that was all ahead of us.)

I swayed on my feet, trying to convince myself that I ought to go back to bed. Downstairs I could hear the house waking up—Handle rattling through the drawers looking for his cereal spoon, Uncle Charlie running his shower. Maybe I fell asleep a little.

Next thing I knew Macon was standing right in front of me, hand on my wrist. I stared down at the top of her head. She was a lot shorter than me, more so than I’d realized. She was small for her age and I’d just started the first of many growth spurts I would have to suffer through (earning me such nicknames as string bean and totem pole and CN Tower. Kids I knew were pretty unimaginative). There were red paint splatters in her hair, even all the way at the back, almost buried in her bun. I wondered how they’d gotten there. Was she throwing paint in the air? Doing handstands on the canvas? I felt my eyelids drooping closed again.

Then I felt Macon prying my hands open and wiping gently at my palms with a rag. She was getting the fly off. I’d forgotten it was there.

She led me to my bed and put the cover over me. I found that I was shivering. She stared at me for a few minutes with her intense blue eyes. Only in this strange state between waking and sleep would I have allowed such a thing.

Jacob, she said, you look so tired.

I nodded. I was so tired. So, so tired.

She shook her head sadly, as though it broke her heart. She said, Maybe I’ll paint you: Jacob So Tired.

I really liked that idea. It almost woke me back up.

She turned her attention to the rag and the fly, bringing the dirty fabric right up to her face. The fly was all smushed in with the dirt and the million colours of paint. Later, when I woke up again, I would find those same colours all over my palms.

A fly in the paint, I mumbled, as I turned over and drifted back to sleep.

About a week later, when once again I awoke feverish and hungry, I drifted over to the stairs. Leaning against a table leg by the door was a painting of a boy sleeping in a disheveled bed, his arm flung over his head. There were French doors hanging open to reveal a view of the sea, and in the corner, on the table, a can of paint had overturned, spilling its bright blue contents over the dull brown floor. If you looked closely you could see the fly.

In tiny letters at the bottom, Macon had written The Sickroom.

And the boy in the bed was me.

Part 1

During a baseball game on the first day of my visit I collapsed on my cousin Handle who was trying to steal second. I was a last-minute stand-in for the second baseman who’d woken up with the chicken pox and who, I was reassured, wasn’t much good anyway. I wondered if they knew I’d likely be even worse. Handle, who was only eight, couldn’t quite heave me off him and was left squirming for a quarter of an hour as the game went on without us (my enormous head, he later told me, was the problem. Jesus, Jacob, he said. Your brain weighs about a ton and a half! I’m not kidding. Handle was never kidding). Handle’s best friend Remmy, also the umpire, laughed so hard he cried and the tears made moist salty trails down either side of his dirty face. Handle described this to me—as well as the perilous adventure of carrying me back to the house without the use of the wagon he’d recommended—as I lay in bed hours later, swaddled in blankets, yearning desperately, equally, for three things: My father’s voice on the other end of the line; my mother’s purple lambswool sweater, which always made me feel better, even in the heat; and a room with a door that locked.

The three things I could not have.

I had mono and the majority of my time for the rest of the summer would be spent in bed, in the attic—the sickroom—of my aunt Vera’s house in Christie, Ontario, while my parents considered sending me to a less conservative school, a place where the bullying wouldn’t follow me. While my father tried to come to terms with everything that I might be under my mother’s reproachful gaze.

The visit to see my cousins had been planned for months and for the entirety of that time I’d been dreading it. Collin and Handle weren’t like any boys I was friends with, or any I wanted to be friends with. At lunch that first day (a mere thirty minutes before my humiliating collapse and exile) they were shoving and yelling, talking with their mouths full, scrambling in and out of their chairs, burping and fighting and back out the door before they’d finished chewing their last bite, their chairs rocking into place long after they’d disappeared. They were always talking, questioning, but never really listening, which was comforting and also irritating. They were the type of boys who assumed (no, knew) that all other boys were like them—interested in sports and winning and getting away with things—and that I must be too, however scrawny and serious I looked. I must be too because that’s what boys were like, period.

Before that summer we’d only ever seen each other at weddings and funerals, and very few people in our family had gotten married or died in my thirteen years. We hardly knew each other at all and yet they acted like they knew me completely, and since I hadn’t protested right off the bat I was forced to go along with it. Just that one day of pretending to be like them had left me so exhausted I wasn’t surprised I’d collapsed. It seemed inevitable.

Aunt Vera said I shouldn’t have been out on the field at all, weak as I was, and chastised the boys vehemently, swatting at their limbs and ignoring their protests that they hadn’t know I was sick ahead of time. How could they know ahead of time? Were they psychic? Did they read minds? Did they have eyes in the back of their heads (Handle’s contribution, which made no sense, though only I seemed to notice)?

She had Uncle Charlie carry me up the stairs, though I probably could have made it myself with a few breaks to catch my breath. She was awfully concerned that I’d be unhappy with the attic room, so far removed from everyone else, and the daybed so lumpy, and all of Macon’s clutter. But it had to be done. They couldn’t very well let me sleep on the cot in Collin’s room and risk my infecting him and the others (though that didn’t stop Handle from coming up to visit me several times that night, to check if my eyes had rolled back in my head, or if I’d barfed up blood, or if my tongue had turned black. Handle seemed to think having mono was like dying very slowly, which made me a great favourite. He’d waited his whole life to see death up close, he told me. He wasn’t about to miss it).

The attic was a long rectangular space, the same size as the entire first floor of the house, with large dormer windows on either end, one just above my bed. When I woke up from one of my extended blackouts (I was unconscious so constantly that it couldn’t really be called sleeping) I would hear my cousins calling and laughing outside and feel safe in the assurance that no amount of their insistence could drag me from this bed to play some game I barely understood and wouldn’t enjoy. Aunt Vera—her thick body blocking the doorway, hands on hips—would never allow it.

My sickness had saved me from a summer of torture and for that I coddled it, allowing it to grow. I loved my sickness like it was my only friend (which, for a short time, it truly was). The last thing I wanted was for my friend to leave me healthy and alone.

I couldn’t bear to be without it.

The daybed had been used as a sickbed before, as well as a guest bed and makeshift fort and place of banishment for the punished child. There was a side table on which I stacked my books (though there were more under the table and in my suitcase at the foot of the bed, and Uncle Charlie had said he would get me any book I wanted from the local library, a kind of dream offer for me), and a little dresser mostly full of old clothes and odds and ends. There was a rug on the floor and a mirror and a floor lamp. There were old toys and games lying around (I’d sat painfully on a metal racecar when Uncle Charlie had first put me down, though I’d masked my screech of pain in a cough). It was all set up like a little room, though there weren’t any walls to close it off. It was a sort of haven from the storm.

The other side of the room was the storm.

The other side of the room was Macon’s.

As little as I knew of Collin and Handle, I knew even less of Macon. I’d never really taken much notice of her. She was a girl, after all, and at twelve Collin was closer to my thirteen than she was at ten. She was nothing like her brothers; pale and blonde to their tan and dark, silent where they were loud, slow where they were fast.

And there was the matter of her name. My mother had always wondered (aloud, as she liked to do) why they hadn’t just replaced the K sound with a G and called her Meagan. The two were so close, as if Macon had been so close, at birth, to being normal. But instead Vera and Charlie had gone with Macon (not even a girl’s name, really, according to Mom), a name that rhymed with “bacon”, and ruined her.

Macon was a lost cause if ever I’d seen one. She wore mismatched shoes and her hair was constantly falling out of its tail. When she spoke her words came out so reluctantly it was like pulling teeth. She never looked anyone in the eye. She was a little pudgy around the middle, with solid, round limbs like a boy, and she was always hunching her shoulders, making it seem like she had no neck. Her gaze often wandered about, distracted by something in the air only she could see, and she had only one interest in the world.

Macon liked to paint.

I’d always known this about her. There was a family story that was brought out whenever we all got together about Macon picking up a brush for the first time when she was two and painting a horse. She was a prodigy—brilliant—and there’d been a great fuss about her one year when Aunt Vera entered a painting of hers in some contest without telling her age, and she won by a landslide only they wouldn’t give her the prize. The judges couldn’t believe a four-year-old could paint like that. Every year or so they did a feature about her in the paper (the paper we read at home, not just the Christie Gazette), and every year she was still a prodigy, still brilliant. I wondered when that would run out, when she’d be old enough that her talent would have to be measured against painters her own age and it would really be about the art, and not the novelty of it. I wondered then what the papers would say, and what would happen to Macon.

I assumed she was full of herself. I assumed this because I knew I would be, if it was me.

The other side of the attic was full of Macon’s art. There were huge painted canvases covering the walls, right up to the ceiling and surrounding the window. A big space on the ground was covered in a spattered white sheet; Macon painted directly on the floor. There were also two long tables covered in brushes and paints and cups and sponges and all kinds of other tools I didn’t know the names of. And beyond that were all kinds of things, items of interest it seemed Macon had dragged up herself to provide inspiration for her creations.

There was the bottom half of a mannequin, and a mannequin head, but no body; a lamp shade with a picture of the world printed on it; a bowl full of shells; a box full of wool in various vibrant colours; an old trombone; a jagged piece of a blue wooden door; a dollhouse; a red tricycle; a ski boot; some broken frames, gold, silver and brown; and art books (which shocked me. Could you be called a prodigy if you studied at it? Was that allowed?) with paint smears down their fronts. It was clear that Macon turned their pages with paint-covered fingers (Macon was always, always, covered in paint). There were even drops of paint on the glossy pictures themselves, inside the beautiful expensive books. I was appalled.

When I’d been carried into the room, I’d caught a glimpse of a blank canvas sitting primly in the middle of the mess, and that was all. For days afterward I was so weak I couldn’t even sit up, let alone venture across the room to inspect Macon’s chaos. I wasn’t even all that interested. It was my weird little cousin’s space, and she was a genius. So what? I was more intrigued by my book about the Hundred Years’ War. I figured at some point she’d probably come up here. I didn’t think much about it.

One morning, about a week and a half into my lying-in (as Aunt Vera called it, though I didn’t understand why it made her hunch her shoulders and giggle), I woke up with a burning fever. Sweaty and furious, I kicked off the covers and wiped at my face and neck, my fingers coming away greasy and wet. At first I thought it was nighttime as the sun had still been up when I’d collapsed into sleep at eight the night before, exhausted from nothing more than an evening of sitting in bed playing Monopoly with the boys. (They couldn’t enter the attic, so they’d set the board up at the bottom of the stairs. There’d been a lot of calling out of which square I’d landed on, and throwing of dice up and down the stairs, and I was pretty sure Collin had been stealing from the bank.) Only as I gazed through the window at the sky growing increasingly blue did I realize, with pitiful dismay, that it was early morning and I’d slept nearly twelve hours without feeling the least bit rested.

I curled on my side, one arm stuck awkwardly beneath me, my legs flung one over the other, and stared miserably at the worn rug. The room would only get hotter as the sun rose and my fever would spike and Collin would annoy me and swallowing a gulp of water without crying out in pain would be the big achievement of the day. As much as I’d loved my sickness the week before, as much as I’d clung to it, I had to begrudgingly admit the truth: I was bored out of my mind and there was no end in sight.

Reluctantly I set my feet on the ground. I had to pee and I was hungry for the first time in days. I’d hardly eaten dinner the night before and Aunt Vera had wrapped it up for me (for later, dear, she’d said, patting me on the cheek sympathetically, as though to miss out on her pot roast was the worst thing that had ever happened to me). A fly buzzed around my head as I tried to gather my strength to make the ambitious trek downstairs. I swatted at it in annoyance, swinging my arm violently through the air, but it kept at it. It landed on my arm and I gave it a generous slap, but missed. Then it crawled up my back. It really had it out for me, this fly. It wouldn’t let me be, and I was in no mood!

Tripping to my feet in my pajama bottoms and undershirt, I fought at the air like a tiger, whipping at the fly with the first and last of my strength until I was left panting, and still it flew, still it buzzed. I jumped. I swung. I would squash that fly if it took everything I had!

Only when I finally nailed it right between my palms (an exalted yes! escaping my lips in a lunging rush), only then did I notice the furry blonde head bobbing in and out of view behind the table and hear the faint slap-stroke of paintbrush on canvas.

Macon.

Swallowing (and wincing), my palms still clasped together, I stood in the middle of my side of the room, wondering vaguely if I ought to smuggle back to my bed or keep on as though I hadn’t seen her, filling quickly with that gnawing, uncomfortable feeling of having thought you were alone when you weren’t. I looked down at my clothes. Was I decent? Had I said anything out loud that could be used against me? And what was she doing here anyway, while I was sleeping? Wasn’t that a little creepy?

I was sure she hadn’t noticed me—that would be just like Macon. I was positive I could just sneak down the stairs (though my ability to do this had long since depleted), until all of a sudden she stood up. She hadn’t looked my way this whole time. She’d been crouching in front of her canvas, painting away. Now she wiped her fingers on her shirt over and over (at least twenty times she wiped, as though she’d forgotten she was doing it), and said, Should I get my mother?

I looked down at the fly smeared on my palms. It had grossly expanded in death and one of its legs was twitching. It was pretty disgusting. If Handle had been here I would have showed it to him and he would have been thrilled to pieces. But Handle wasn’t here.

I took a defiant stance. What? I asked contemptuously. (I sounded a bit like Collin when he was speaking to Handle. Like, what right did Handle have speaking in his presence? Like he should know his place and stay in it.)

Macon looked at me and blinked. She didn’t seem to have heard the tone. She was still wiping her hands but more lightly now, winding to a stop.

Do you need help getting down the stairs? she asked.

Excuse me? I scoffed. What do you think I am? I don’t need help getting down the stairs! Geez! Then I laughed what was meant to be a haughty chuckle but came out more like a nervous twitter. I was already so tired, just from standing, that I thought my legs might give out again. (Maybe this time I would land on Macon.)

Oh, okay, Macon said and turned back to her painting.

(Oh, okay, would become the classic Macon response, one I would come to tease her about. She said it whenever she couldn’t figure out what the other person meant, or what to do, or what to say. One time in the middle of an argument, after I called her a particularly vicious name, her face flooded red and she screeched, Oh okay! at me, and we both burst out laughing. But that was all ahead of us.)

I swayed on my feet, trying to convince myself that I ought to go back to bed. Downstairs I could hear the house waking up—Handle rattling through the drawers looking for his cereal spoon, Uncle Charlie running his shower. Maybe I fell asleep a little.

Next thing I knew Macon was standing right in front of me, hand on my wrist. I stared down at the top of her head. She was a lot shorter than me, more so than I’d realized. She was small for her age and I’d just started the first of many growth spurts I would have to suffer through (earning me such nicknames as string bean and totem pole and CN Tower. Kids I knew were pretty unimaginative). There were red paint splatters in her hair, even all the way at the back, almost buried in her bun. I wondered how they’d gotten there. Was she throwing paint in the air? Doing handstands on the canvas? I felt my eyelids drooping closed again.

Then I felt Macon prying my hands open and wiping gently at my palms with a rag. She was getting the fly off. I’d forgotten it was there.

She led me to my bed and put the cover over me. I found that I was shivering. She stared at me for a few minutes with her intense blue eyes. Only in this strange state between waking and sleep would I have allowed such a thing.

Jacob, she said, you look so tired.

I nodded. I was so tired. So, so tired.

She shook her head sadly, as though it broke her heart. She said, Maybe I’ll paint you: Jacob So Tired.

I really liked that idea. It almost woke me back up.

She turned her attention to the rag and the fly, bringing the dirty fabric right up to her face. The fly was all smushed in with the dirt and the million colours of paint. Later, when I woke up again, I would find those same colours all over my palms.

A fly in the paint, I mumbled, as I turned over and drifted back to sleep.

About a week later, when once again I awoke feverish and hungry, I drifted over to the stairs. Leaning against a table leg by the door was a painting of a boy sleeping in a disheveled bed, his arm flung over his head. There were French doors hanging open to reveal a view of the sea, and in the corner, on the table, a can of paint had overturned, spilling its bright blue contents over the dull brown floor. If you looked closely you could see the fly.

In tiny letters at the bottom, Macon had written The Sickroom.

And the boy in the bed was me.

But that was still a week away. Hours later, when I woke up properly, Macon was gone. Aunt Vera had left a tray of food by my bed and I nibbled at it, playing with it more than eating really, stirring the mashed potatoes and gravy into a soup, then torpedo-bombing the pot roast with it. (This was just the sort of thing that would send my mother into a frothing fury and which Aunt Vera let me get away with easily, clucking her tongue when she took away my plate and bringing me a heaping serving of coconut-cream pie as a reward. Being ill and away from home certainly has its perks.) When I bored of my annihilation of the roast, I put on my slippers and brought my plate to the little table by the door (where, later, on a covert visit to the attic, Collin would accidentally slap his hand into the gooey mess and react with girlish horror, and Handle would turn to me with a smile of perfect delight). As I turned back to my bed I caught sight of Macon’s newest painting out of the corner of my eye and felt a faint stirring of interest.

After a moment’s hesitation, I stepped into the other side of the room for the first time.

I still had half a roll clutched in my hand and I found myself mashing it compulsively. I was nervous. Though I’d never been told I wasn’t allowed in Macon’s side of the room, it seemed like an unwritten rule. What if I disturbed something and it ruined one of her paintings? I crouched down in front of the sheet of canvas then raised my head to peek at my side of the room from Macon’s point of view. The bed seemed awfully close, much closer than I’d imagined, as though the dimensions of the attic had changed when I’d stepped onto this side. Or maybe I was just delirious.

I turned my attention back to the painting. It looked like an aerial photo of Aunt Vera’s house. There was the front lawn and the porch and the roof and the backyard. She’d done the neighbouring houses too. The colours were vibrant, much brighter than they were in real life, and she’d painted the streets purple. One backyard led into the other all the way to the library. I wondered how she’s figured it all out, if she’d actually walked all the streets and made sketches, or if she’s just made it up. It was detailed and absorbing, but I didn’t like it, just as I didn’t like most of the paintings on the walls.

I sighed, disappointed. I muttered, I guess this is what genius looks like.

I was about to heave myself back to my feet when I noticed a pile of canvases leaning against the wall just under the window. They were half-wedged behind an armoire and it took some effort to squeeze them out, but I did it. I pulled until they suddenly popped free and I fell backward on my butt, just like in the movies. I shot a furtive glance at the door, worried that someone might have heard, but nobody called, nobody came. It occurred to me to wonder what time of day it was and where Macon might be at that moment. With my erratic sleeping pattern and only intermittent interaction with the rest of the family, I’d sort of given up on time.

The canvases had fanned out like a pack of cards and I shoved them roughly into a pile, leaning heavily on my wrists. I was fading fast. I shuffled through the paintings quickly, already regretting the whole escapade. They were mostly half-finished attempts or early versions of the ones hanging on the wall. I felt I’d wasted my time and energy. The last thing I wanted was to be caught red-handed, lying asleep on this very spot. It seemed frustratingly possible.

Then I came to the last painting and knew it had been worth it.

It was an underwater painting of a lake. The water was beautifully done in greens and blues. I thought it must have taken Macon the longest time to get it right, and it was; it was perfect. It looked just like lake water looked when you opened your eyes after you dove, when you were swimming for the surface. Dotted through the water were six fish (well, eight if you counted the back fins of two on the left side). I didn’t know their names, but they looked real. I thought one might be a carp, and I made a mental note to look up the others. My favourite one had orange spots. I liked the clueless expression on his face. Then (and this was the part that made me catch my breath with wonder), at the sandy bottom of the lake, between the rocks and seaweed, Macon had painted a little war. A battalion of green men faced off against an army of grey, their size dwarfed by the gigantic fish swimming peacefully above. They looked amazingly real, not like real soldiers, but just like the plastic army toys. She’d arranged them just as Collin would have while playing: The captain at the rear, urging them on; the grunt on one knee, firing. One figure was peaking out of a sandy foxhole. Another was diving for cover behind a rock.

It was marvelous.

I sat their, giddy and grinning, for a good fifteen minutes. (It was the most heartrending experience I’d ever had with a piece of art, and to this day it remains my favourite painting, not just of Macon’s, but of all. I only wish I’d thought to take a picture of it right then. The painting wouldn’t survive the summer.)

I put the other canvases back where I’d found them, but I couldn’t bear to hide the lake painting away. Instead, I leaned it against the wall beside Macon’s painting area then flung myself into bed and fell right to sleep.

When I woke up the lake painting was hanging on the wall at the foot of my bed.

I became obsessed. Looking back on it now, I think my mind was ripe for an obsession just then, silent and unused as it had been for nearly two whole weeks, eager to be distracted from thoughts of home. It might have turned out differently if, say, Uncle Charlie had gotten me All About Birds from the library, as I’d asked him to. I might have spent the summer staring out the window with a pair of binoculars, stalking blue jays and cardinals. But he brought me the book two days too late, and it sat unopened on my bedside table for the next month, ignored.

Instead of stalking birds, I stalked Macon.

My first matter of business was to catch her in the act. I wanted to know her patterns, when she set brush to canvas, and why. That way I could be ready to spy when the moment came, instead of sleeping through it as I’d been doing so far. The problem was, Macon didn’t seem to follow any sort of schedule that I could see. The paintings kept appearing (I was keeping close watch at this point, and none of them took my breath away as the lake painting did), but Macon herself never seemed to be around. This paradox had me befuddled for a full day until the obvious answer hit me: She was doing the painting somewhere else.

It was a bit of a letdown. I was confined to the attic and my great hope had been to have the opportunity to watch her painting up close. In my fantasy of this (there was a lot of time for fantasizing in the sickroom, and as puberty hadn’t yet taken a firm hold on my mind, fantasies of watching my little cousin paint were plentiful and detailed), I could see every stroke, could watch the picture come to life as though it were projected on a screen in front of me, but Macon couldn’t see me. (The impossibility of this scenario hadn’t yet occurred to me.)

It was the paintings that fascinated me, not Macon. She was still nothing more than an afterthought.

Then one day, a gift.

I was approaching the stairs up to the attic after an illegal trip to the kitchen for a handful of Aunt Vera’s chocolate coconut balls (which we kids weren’t supposed to eat if we hadn’t finished our dinner, and I certainly had not) and a mug of tea with honey for my throat, when Macon appeared in the doorway from the hall, also aiming for the stairs. As soon as we noticed each other, we stopped in our tracks. I glanced down at the generous helping of desert in my napkin, shamefaced (I’d taken seven of the balls, more than half of the container). Macon, on the other hand, stared openly at me, as though it didn’t occur to her to look anywhere else. This was the first time we’d come face to face, alone, since she’d hung the lake painting by my bed.

I didn’t quite know how to talk to her. What did you say to a prodigy cousin you’d only just accepted as talented? What did you say to girls anyway?

In the end, the moment didn’t need any words at all. Macon’s gaze turned longingly to the stairs, and then back to me. I gave her a nod, an indication that she should go first, and the two of us trooped up to the attic, our footsteps in unison.

That’s when I took the risk.

Instead of turning to my side of the room as Macon crouched in front of her canvas and began to mix the paints, I set my food on a shelf by the door, grabbed my blanket from my bed, and plopped myself down at the head of the painting.

Macon stopped what she was doing and looked up at me, startled.

It was a dramatic moment, and I really didn’t know how she would react. I knew it was possible she’d ask me politely to go away. I also considered that she might get upset and cry, or throw a tantrum as Handle had done at breakfast (his father had eaten the last of the Mini Wheats). I thought she might give me a dirty look.

She did none of those things.

After a moment, she lowered her eyes to the canvas and paused, as though thinking it through, then carefully continued mixing. I was ecstatic. This was as close to my fantasy as I could get! A perfect view of the painting and Macon all but ignoring me.

When the colours were ready, she put the palette aside and picked up her brush. I was breathless with expectation, practically leaning over the canvas to see what her first stroke would be. But instead of beginning to paint, she said, Why’d you leave it out?

She raised her eyebrows and glanced at the lake painting. I stiffened. I felt as though I’d been caught in some dreadful forbidden act and I was angry with her for bringing it up. Hadn’t we agreed not to talk about it? Then I realized we’d never agreed to any such thing. Macon and I had never really had a conversation before, at least not while I was fully conscious.

I-I… I stuttered, flustered, but there was no accusation in Macon’s face. She just seemed curious. It looked like I might get away with it after all. I discarded the lies that sprang to my lips, the nonchalant dismissals, and opted to tell her the truth.

I said, It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

(I was thirteen and had spent my life with my nose in a book. I hadn’t been anywhere yet. I hadn’t seen much. At that time, and at that time only, it was the absolute truth.)

Macon’s expression brightened, though she didn’t quite smile. She seemed more interested than happy. I had caught her attention, just as she had caught mine.

She stood up and got my tea and dessert from the shelf, handed them to me. I cupped my hands around the mug and took a sip.

This is it, you know, she said as she kneeled down.

It? I asked.

Jacob So Tired, she said, busying herself with the paint again. Or maybe I’ll call it The Sickroom. I haven’t decided.

I glanced down at the painting, surprised. There was the outline of a bed, a table and a door, that was all.

Where am I? I asked.

She said, You’re a silly boy, like all boys.

What did that mean? My forehead creased with insult, and she smirked (the first time I’d ever seen her smile).

She went on, Even though you’re tired, you haven’t gone to bed yet.

I let out a little snort of appreciation.

She examined the canvas for a few quiet moments, then she said, Jacob?

I looked at her reluctantly. I figured this would be the moment she would ask me to leave. I was sure of it. But she surprised me.

She said, brush poised, What colour should I paint the sky?

Part 2

So it began. From that day on, Macon painted in the attic every day and I watched her do it. Sometimes I was asleep when she came up and she woke me with a shake, or a playful stripping of my covers. Sometimes I was so tired I lay down by the canvas and watched her work through drooping eyelids. For the first while she came in the mornings, dreadfully early, until I complained and she changed it to after lunch. On days when Aunt Vera had forced her to go shopping for new clothes or shoes (for the coming school year I refused to acknowledge), or if she’d had to do some chore in that outdoor world I never got to see, she would come at night.

I liked the nighttime vigils the best. I liked how she painted the same, at the same speed and without hesitation, no matter the time, no matter how dark it got.

She was amazing to watch.

After The Sickroom, we debated what she should paint next. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t paint in the style of the lake painting all the time. Her other paintings— the ones that got hung up in galleries and brought out for show when company came— were loud and bright and sometimes quite intricate, but they didn’t make you feel anything. They didn’t take your breath away. I didn’t understand what her hesitation was. Why couldn’t she just paint more of the paintings I liked most?

I brought the subject up again on a Wednesday afternoon, a few days after she finished The Sickroom. This newest painting was just like the lake one, it had the same softer quality, the more delicate lines. It was almost like a drawing set in paint. I felt again that rush of exhilaration of my first viewing of the lake painting and I was hungry for more.

The family had gone to see a baseball game, leaving Macon and I to our own devices. I was sitting on the porch swing, ensconced in blankets as usual, and Macon was sitting like a cowboy on the thickest branch of the maple that stood close to the house, her legs swinging. (It didn’t occur to me until later what a tomboy Macon was, how she liked climbing trees and getting dirty over playing with dolls or going to the mall. Macon could have fit in with her brothers in a way I never could, not if I’d been myself. Yet Macon was still ignored, because she was a little prodigy, because of her art. I wonder now if that bothered her, to be so close and yet so far.)

We were eating popsicles.

I don’t see the problem, I said, licking at a sticky purple drip on my arm. Your new style paintings are so much better. (We’d decided to call the style of the lake painting the “new style.” It seemed very Renaissance to us.)

Oh, okay, Macon said. Her popsicle hung from her fingers, the frozen pink treat sliding silently downward. With her free hand she ripped at the leaves close at hand, making green, fluttery rain.

That’s not an answer, I retorted.

She screwed up her face in distress. It’s what I paint, Jacob, she said. It’s what I’ve always done. I can’t just—

Can’t just what? I asked, impatient. I had very little sympathy for this line of argument, which she’d tried to use before. In my mind the art was what mattered most. In my mind there was no other audience but me.

Macon sighed. She pulled her legs up in front of her and pushed her toes into the bark. Under her breath she said, Just because you like it better doesn’t mean it is.

What was that? I said loudly, leaning forward, pretending I hadn’t heard.

Nothing, she said, staring at her feet.

You’re giving in too easily, I said. You’re stunting your own growth.

I still do them, I just don’t show them, she pointed out.

You’re hiding your brilliance! I cried, bursting out of my blankets, index finger raised. It’s unconscionable!

She gave me a tired look. I was pretty sure she didn’t know was “unconscionable” meant but that wasn’t what the look was about. It was a look that begged.

I sat back against the hard wood of the swing. The conversation was draining me of energy. I probably wouldn’t be able to get back up the stairs. And yet, Macon looked even more exhausted than I felt. As I watched her climbing higher into the tree, her tentative movements, I realized how much Macon strived to please. She wanted to do what her parents wanted, what the art world wanted, and here I was trying to force her to do what I wanted, which was something else altogether. I was forcing her into a dark corner.

If I kept pushing she would give in. I saw it clear as day. It was who she was. The art I wanted was just within my grasp but if I grabbed it I would lose Macon as a friend. And a friend was something I couldn’t afford to lose. (It’s ironic how clear that was to me at the beginning of the summer. How quickly we forget.)

I bit off the last of my popsicle and aimed the stick at a planter by the edge of the porch, missing drastically. Macon, her foot planted in a crook of tree branches, watched it fall. I said, Maybe you should do the playground next. You know, kids playing.

I could see her relief right away. She slung her arm around the trunk and leaned back, swinging free.

She said, See-saws, swing sets.

Slides, sand boxes, I continued.

Monkey bars, merry-go-rounds, she smiled.

Oh, I said, frowning, I guess you’d have to go and do some sketches.

My inability to leave the house was still an absolute. Going out to the porch was already quite a coop, and Macon would shove me up the stairs ahead of her in a quarter of an hour, long before the game would end, to be doubly sure of not being caught. I’d never make it to the playground. Disease or Aunt Vera would surely bar my path.

I’ll fix it, Macon said. I’ll make it so you can come.

How? I asked, puzzled. I’m bigger than Collin, you know. He can’t carry me.

Macon scoffed. Collin? Like he’d ever help us.

Well, how then?

Macon shrugged her shoulders coyly. Just leave it to me, she said.

I grinned. It was exciting; a mystery, an adventure. I felt a surge of affection for Macon. It was so nice to have a friend.

But it was a secret friendship. As far as the family was concerned, Macon and I still had absolutely nothing to do with each other. When we were caught together with the family around (in the upstairs hallway as I dragged myself along to take a bath, Macon’s arms full of towels, Handle running past with Collin close on his heels), we avoided each other’s eyes, edging past one another awkwardly, almost overemphasizing our disinterest. Then, when we were alone again (when the hallway cleared, if only for a brief instant as Handle locked himself in his brother’s room and Collin ran for his father in a rage), our eyes would meet and we’d share a wink, a nudge. It was our delightful secret, a bond for us alone.

It wasn’t always an easy secret to keep. One evening Handle came scampering up the stairs to pay me a visit and Macon, her eyes round with alarm (though what exactly we were afraid of I’m not quite sure), had to hide under a table, blocked from view by a cardboard box full of old shoes, as he asked pointless lazy questions (But what do you do up here all day, Jacob? I play solitaire, I write letters to my friends, I read. He glanced at the pile of books with disturbed puzzlement. I mean, like, what do you really do?).

Another time, when Macon was at a critical stage of a painting we would eventually name The Dying Man (in which a figure stood at the very edge of the roof of a tall building, his arms flung wide), I became so engrossed in watching her work that I completely forgot I’d agreed to keep score for a pin-pong tournament between Collin and some neighbourhood boys. Soon enough Macon and I found ourselves stashed in a narrow closet full of suitcases as Collin stomped around the attic, cursing and calling my name, and finally kicking over a folding table before slamming the door. (We spent the rest of the morning, still in the closet, doing our best angry Collin impressions and convulsing with swallowed giggles, our knuckles in our mouths, sure he would sense our mockery and return to find us, flinging the door open with a triumphant, Aha!)

Officially Macon and I spent no time together on our own, though I would often play games with the boys or get pulled down into their rooms, once I was feeling well enough. (I didn’t see Macon’s room even once that summer.) We were like two sides of the same person, never in the same room, but always together. Aunt Vera was the only one who ever saw the two of us in the same space, and even then it was only the one time, mid-morning one day, when she was bringing me the phone to make my weekly call to my parents.

(I’d been calling my mother, as promised, all that time, though at Aunt Vera’s insistence I didn’t tell her I was sick [she thought it would just cause undue stress since she couldn’t come to care for me herself. She has enough to fret over, Aunt Vera said, which sort of made me want to go out and get into some new trouble so everyone would be clear that I was the one who needed worrying about]. We spoke every couple of days, chatting about trivialities, both of us lying. I was playing outside everyday. She was sewing new curtains. I was learning to swim. She was enjoying the quiet in the house. We always stayed on the line a beat too long, letting the silence stretch, hoping something would come of it, knowing there was nothing real either of us could say, after all those lies.

I didn’t bother asking to talk to my father. We hadn’t spoken in over a month.)

It was clear from the moment Aunt Vera stepped into the attic that she didn’t know Macon was there, just as we hadn’t heard her coming. (I’d been singing along to a pop song called Baby I Might, which we both adored, and was concentrating on hitting the critical high note at the end of the second to last verse [oh girl, it just ain’t riiiiiight], my hands clasped around an invisible microphone.) She came through the door already talking to me, as was her habit. At the sound of her voice, Macon ducked to the ground in front of her canvas, as if she were evading an assassin. As luck would have it, I was actually in bed at that moment, having flopped back on the mattress after my soulful performance.

Aunt Vera snapped off the radio as she came through the door. Would you rather call them later on? she asked, holding the cordless out to me, her back to Macon’s side of the room. Taking in the startled look on my face, which she mistook for anxiety, she abruptly softened and sank down beside me on the bed.

Are you doing alright, Jacob? she asked. She cupped my chin in her palm, examining my face. She put the back of her hand to my forehead to feel my temperature (which I imagined might be high, considering I’d been singing my heart out not ten seconds before. My throat was already throbbing in ripe protest). I forced a grin as out of the corner of my eye I saw Macon slowly inching her way behind an old grandfather clock.

Aunt Vera said, It’s hard isn’t it? She patted my knee. I know you must be angry with them. I’d be furious if I was you.

It took me a moment to understand who she was talking about, but when I did I immediately froze in place, as though keeping still might stop time and end the conversation. (It’s amazing the superpowers one assigns oneself in a panic.)

I know you probably feel like your world is falling apart, she went on, but one day I’m sure you’ll see this break was for the best.

My gaze slid over to the spot where Macon was hiding. I scanned the outer edge of the clock for a finger, a puff of hair. Was she really there, or had she snuck down the stairs when I wasn’t looking? Was she hearing this?

Aunt Vera sighed. They’re shocked. They need some time to adjust. But you know they love you, don’t you Jacob? You know we all love you, no matter what. We don’t have a problem with… (and here she paused, she wouldn’t use the word). We’re not like that.

I groaned inwardly and sank my nails into my thighs. I felt something building inside of me, though I didn’t know what it was. It coiled up through my bowels and my stomach, winding into my esophagus. It felt like injustice and fury and plain old hate all rolled into one. Or maybe it was just puke.

Technically, I didn’t know what she was talking about. My parents and I had never discussed it outright, we never really discussed anything. I was just a kid after all and not privy to important information about my own development. Those files were sealed somewhere inside my parents minds with the words “When Jacob is Older” stamped on them in red ink. No, I didn’t know. I didn’t.

I still had time.

This is just what growing up is like sometimes, honey, Aunt Vera said. Nobody said it would be easy. Being different never is.

I’d wanted to keep all that mess out of the attic, out of this summer. I’d wanted to leave my home life behind, to have one last summer for myself, was that so much to ask? Now Macon knew and nothing would ever be the same between us. Just the thought of her knowing about this thing that I didn’t even understand myself made my stomach tighten and my fingers curl.

I wanted to spit in Aunt Vera’s kindly face for what she’d done. I wanted to scratch out her eyes.

I understand, Auntie, was all I said, my jaw set. I’m fine.

Course you are, she said brightly, giving me a little squeeze. I’ll just leave the phone here. She got up, collected a couple of soup mugs from my bedside table, then walked toward the door, and we could have been home free (not that I much cared anymore) but at the last moment she turned to say something more and her eyes fell directly on her daughter, crouched beside an old side table, smiling meekly.

It was much later in the evening, after Macon had been bustled off, the scoldings gently administered (the attic was still, though we’d been ignoring it for so long it seemed laughable, off-limits to the other kids), the pajamas put on and the baths done—it was only once we all should have been asleep that Macon crept back up to the attic and we saw each other face to face with all that had been said in the air between us.

She came in on tiptoe in her blue polka dot nightshirt with the bell capri bottoms (an overtly girly ensemble my mother had sent her for her birthday the year before). She ran right up to me, breathless, and I almost backed up against the wall to escape it. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want her teary concern. I wanted the art and the long lazy days and sleep. I didn’t want her to know.

Oh, Jacob, she whispered excitedly.

I raised my eyes wearily.

She was practically bursting. I’ve got it! she said. I found a way.

She jiggled her shoulders in an excited Macon dance and I had to laugh. She wasn’t going to bring it up after all. Maybe she hadn’t heard, or hadn’t understood what she’d heard. Or maybe she just didn’t care. What did it matter? I was ecstatic that I’d escaped so easily. I could almost have kissed her.

Tomorrow, she said of our mysterious outing. Tomorrow night we go.

I was sure she wouldn’t show.

I sat on the porch stairs at the side of the house, grateful that my fever had gone down as night fell, though I knew that I would have come anyway, fever or not. I was exactly on time but I’d forgotten my shoes. When the time had come to put them on (at ten-past eleven, exactly five minutes before Macon had told me to meet her), I’d crept down the back stairs only to realize I’d left them in the attic. But by then I’d heard a noise coming from the front of the house and didn’t want to chance going back to fetch them. I didn’t think I’d have the energy to come down again. Besides, like I said, I didn’t really think I was going anywhere. I didn’t think Macon was coming.

We’d chosen the side porch specifically because it was out of earshot of all the upstairs windows (actually, it was Macon’s suggestion, and I was surprised by her crafty forethought. Only as she continued to lay out the plan so matter-of-factly did I realize she’d done this many times before. It was always like that with Macon. It seemed, no matter how well I got to know her, there was always a well of secrets she kept hidden. I could never get tired of her because at any moment I’d turn around and find her brand new).

The backyard was lit by the moon. It was full, almost bright enough to see by. I wondered if Macon had planned it that way or if it was just a lucky coincidence. I wasn’t sure which was the better option; luck had never been much of a friend to us. And if luck was finally coming to call we had so many other things that needed its attention. It seemed a waste to throw luck away on the moon.

It hadn’t been much of a lucky day for Macon, anyway.

Though I wasn’t wearing a watch, I figured I’d waited long enough. I was about to drag myself back upstairs when I heard a rustle in the bushes to my left, and there was Macon pulling up in front of me on her bike, dressed in a white t-shirt and shorts. In the bright light of the moon she positively glowed.

I sprang up and smiled. I wasn’t sure you’d come, I whispered, then immediately regretted it. What was the point of saying something like that? But Macon didn’t seem to mind. She was back to her old self, the Macon of few words, the Macon who held herself in and never laughed.

Get in, she said, pointing over her shoulder with her thumb.

Attached to the back of the bike was a wooden cart, clearly handmade. Macon told me later that the Latons, who lived two doors down, had built it to ferry their fat Labradors to and from the dog park. She’d swiped it from their shed that afternoon. It smelled a little like Purina.

Wow! I exclaimed. This is really great. It’s just the right size! Really, really good job, Macon. Really. I was babbling, overemphasizing my words, over-enthusing. My face already hurt from grinning.

You’ll have to hold my stuff, Macon said.

(I’d never been much good at cheering people up.)

Once I’d settled myself in the cart, Macon’s art supplies cluttered around me, Macon set to the job of pedalling and I kept my mouth shut. It was slow going. Macon weighed a lot less than I did, and there was nothing I could do to help. But once we hit the downhill slope on Glenhill road we started to coast, and I heard her heave a sigh. We were going to make it.

It was strange to be out in the neighbourhood at night. I still saw the world around me through a fog of sickness, which wasn’t entirely unpleasant. There weren’t any streetlamps on some of the streets and the houses sailed by, hulking black blotches, still and silent. The moonlight made the tree leaves twinkle. I closed my eyes as we swung around a corner and held out my hand to catch the bushes as we passed. I felt the air hitting my skin, hurtling into my eyes.

Almost there, Macon panted, and I wanted to beg her to keep going, to pedal us through the park and across town and on and on until there was no more night to hide us, just so I could go on feeling this way. The rush was addictive (and though I didn’t know it then, I would spend a great deal of my adulthood chasing after it—in drugs and lovers, art and travel, drugs and more drugs, different drugs, harder drugs—only to come out of it none the wiser and no closer to being thirteen years old with the wind in my face feeling, simply, completely, thrilled to be alive). When we stopped in the parking lot by the tennis courts I climbed out of the cart (oh how I would have jumped, had I been able) and flung my arms around Macon. I didn’t say anything and neither did she, but somehow it cut the string with which she’d been winding herself. When I let her go she was Macon again, my Macon, and the night was ours.

The playground was like a forgotten toy, too cheerful in the dark. Macon snatched up her sketchbook, settled herself in the grass, and before I even made it to her side she was sketching. The moonlight wasn’t bright enough to draw by, and I could have held the flashlight, but she didn’t need it. She hardly looked at the page. I’d never seen Macon draw before, and it was mesmerizing and a little scary. It was as though she’d fallen into a trance. Her hand crossed the paper, back and forth, in a lulling motion that might have been calming save for the violence of the scribbles. She finished one drawing and flipped to a fresh page with hardly a pause, her eyes darting to the next object, the next scene, ever hungry for more. She got so hot she pulled off her top and worked in her undershirt. She seemed almost to stop breathing.

I didn’t know if this was how it always was when she drew (and when I watched her draw again, a few weeks later, I would learn that yes, it was, but not nearly so bad, not nearly so much). I didn’t know what to think except that I was glad I’d come, that she’d let me come. I was glad I could see her like this and know that someone else felt things and didn’t know what to do.

I sat cross-legged in the grass and watched over her shoulder. Sometimes I dozed, and when I woke up she’d moved to another spot in the park and I had to find her, picking up her discarded sketches as I went. (She even sketched as she walked. Aunt Vera told me once that Macon would make art in her sleep if she could. It was in her veins, like mothering in some, malice in others; Macon was art. She couldn’t be any other way.) At some points we sat back to back, holding each other up like soldiers in the trenches. At some points I think she wanted to stop—she would pause and flex her aching hands—but she kept on. I wondered how she knew when to stop for good, how she knew the end when it came.

As the moon began to fall, we found ourselves by the pond. I splayed out on the rocks on my side, and Macon began to draw me. She was calmer now, better, like a toddler who’d cried out her tantrum. I was half-asleep (a state I was so used to by now that it actually felt like waking to me), my shirt under my head like a pillow, my lips loose and sleep-drunk.

Is this where you always go? I asked her.

Yeah, she said, for sketching. She didn’t stop drawing. (Nothing could make Macon stop when she got going. Nothing.)

Always in the night like this?

Yes.

And you paint here, too?

You think I could drag a canvas out here? No. But I painted in my room for a while, when you first came.

What for?

I felt shy.

I knew it was something like that. I thought so in the beginning.

You’re smart, Jacob. Mom always says so.

She does? I felt a flare of pride. But why? I asked. Why come here?

It’s easier sometimes, she answered.

But it’s so dark, I replied sleepily, though a part of my brain realized that wasn’t what she’d meant.

She said, I mean, it’s easier to be like this when no one else is around.

I’m here, I said, perking up, almost panicked, as though it was possible, somehow that I wasn’t actually there.

Macon took her eyes away from her sketch long enough to kick me, playfully. Yeah, she said, but you’re just Jacob.

Does it help you?

She thought about it a moment before replying, It’s like a cold shower. I come out clean and shivering and sometimes wishing I never did it in the first place. Yeah, it’s like that.

Do you—

She chuckled. You’re just like Handle, she said.

I gaped at her. (How could I possible be like Handle?)

Always so curious, she explained. Always what, how why.

I settled back down then, satisfied. Does he ask you about your art, too?

No.

You should do faces more, I said.

I’m doing you aren’t I?

You should draw more people though, you’re so good at them (I’d actually thought this for weeks, but had never said so. I’d come across a charcoal drawing she’d done of a little girl in a tattered dress that had filled me with an unspeakably sad feeling, a feeling so strong I’d had to turn the page quickly, to escape it—the only truly masculine reaction I’ve ever had).

Hmm, she answered. Maybe.

I sat up and leaned toward Macon, my movements so sudden that her pencil scratched across the page. She gave me a see-what-you-did? kind of look and started to erase, but I stilled her hand. I said, You should draw what you want to draw, but you shouldn’t turn away from what’s harder just because it’s hard. (I’d done it, I’d brought the subject back around again.)

I said, You owe it to yourself. Then I let her go.

I’ll try, okay? Macon said. She waited for my nod. She said, I’ll give it a try.

As we walked slowly back to the bike (I was basically sleeping on my feet), I said, You never paint Collin.

She hefted her supplies in her arms and answered, a little wearily, No, Jacob. I don’t paint Collin.

On the way back to the house I fell asleep and dreamed of our afternoon. Aunt Vera had decided I wasn’t getting better fast enough and she’d packed me in the car with the other kids to go to the doctor (who tutted and gave me stern looks and told me to rest, rest, rest. Then he gave me a lollipop and told me not to eat it all in one place. Aunt Vera forced a laugh. I didn’t). Afterwards she bundled me up in the sweltering car and told us all to sit tight while she picked up some things at the pharmacy.

You stay right here, she said. I’ll just be a minute.

Naturally, we were all up and out of the car as soon as she rounded the corner. No mother has ever gone shopping for just a minute.

The pharmacy backed onto a mall and the boys, Macon and I wandered aimlessly through the halls. My fever had spiked. I could tell by the way sweat kept beading at my hairline and running down into my collar, but yet I was still shivering, even with the blanket wrapped around my shoulders. At one point Handle yanked me down to show me an action figure in the toy store window and I swayed and almost toppled over.

Whoa, he said, pushing me back up. Not again, Jacob. He put his palm flat against his chest. I don’t think my body can take it. I’m not kidding.

At the intersection of two hallways Collin ran into some kids he knew. That’s when it all went wrong.

They were sitting at a table by the fountain, just sitting there, staring into space. They must have been brother and sister—they had the same stringy dirty-blonde hair and lips, curled at the edges in a sneer—and it was clear Collin knew them, though they weren’t friends. When he saw them he went right for them, like Handle going for a cupcake, but they didn’t seem quite so eager. The boy whispered something into the girl’s ear as we approached and she rolled her eyes.

Collin stood by their table, tapping his fingers on the tabletop, and I plunked down in a seat without being asked (which might seem rude, but I was feeling so ill at that point I just didn’t care). Collin explained that I had mono and right away the girl made a sound and switched seats so she was sitting diagonally from me. She looked at me like I was an open sore. I coughed in her direction once by accident and then again on purpose.

As the girl was rolling her eyes a second time, I looked around for Macon and noticed that she’d held back. She was sitting on the edge of the fountain with Handle (who was leaning far in, trying to reach the quarters that had drifted to the centre). She was staring hard at the back of the chair closest to her, and there was something strange about the way she was holding her body; stiff, almost like she wanted to become stone, like the fountain. When I called her name she looked over at me ever so slowly and then, like a pendulum, her head turned away again. It was almost as if she hadn’t seen me at all.

I didn’t know what all this was about. I was too sick to put the pieces together with any kind of swiftness.

Hey, don’t I know you? the boy said. For a moment I thought he was talking to me, mostly because Collins froze all of a sudden and Macon sucked in her cheeks and gazed up at the ceiling.

Is there something I’m supposed to be doing? I wondered feverishly. Do I have a part in this play?

It’s that art kid, the boy said to his sister. (They really were ignoring Collin altogether.) You know, she did that painting of the garden mum put up beside your bedroom.

The sister was unconvinced. That kid? she said, thrusting a purple fingernail in Macon’s direction. What is she, like, eight?

She’s ten, Collin said tersely. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw Macon flinch.

What, is she your sister or something? the boy asked.

Sure is, Collin answered with a broad fake smile. Want to see her make something?

The boy turned to his sister who shrugged and dug into her eye with her index finger, rubbing and rubbing until it was red and raw and her makeup had smudged all to hell. Whatever, she said.

The next thing Collin did confused me so much that I lose track of what was going on. Reaching across the table, he grabbed the plastic salt and pepper shakers, opened up the metal flaps on the top and emptied them both onto the table. The boy and his sister watched avidly, but I kept glancing up at Collin in puzzlement and eventually I was distracted by Handle’s wiggling legs as he tried to reach even farther, his feet kicking as though he was swimming the front crawl.

Then I closed my eyes for a minute (or ten, it’s difficult to say) and when I opened them again Macon was sitting beside me, hunched over the salt and pepper. I smiled when I saw her and tried to put my arm around her shoulder in a hug (it was the fever talking), but found that I couldn’t because Collin was standing behind her, pushing his thumb into her back to make her sit up.

Here, draw something, he said. He pulled the pencil out of her hair so it flopped loose and loopy around her ears and thrust it into her hand.

She can make art out of anything, he said to the boy and girl.

Then he gave Macon a particularly filthy look. He said, She’d make art in her sleep if she could.

I frowned. I’d only just caught a wiff of the tension hanging in the air, thick as molasses.

Gripping the pencil so hard her fingertips began to turn white, Macon moved her hand forward and made a single circle in the pile of salt and pepper. And there she stopped and would not start again, no matter how Collin prodded her.

The girl whistled. Well, woopdeedoo, she said. My little cousin can do better than that, and he’s two.

Collin’s cheeks turned red with embarrassment as the two kids began to gather their things to leave. Macon’s face was impassive. Suddenly seized with disgust at the whole situation, I leaned across the table and pointed at the girl’s pointed little face. You look like a drowned rat! I said throatily. (It seemed as good an insult as any.)

Handle (who always had the best timing) came over to the table just then, his pocket jiggling with change. Spying the spilled salt and pepper he said, Wow, what a mess! Then he smacked his wet hand down in the salt and flicked some at Collin and in the ensuing battle the brother and sister made their getaway, waving their middle fingers wildly. I scowled after them.

When they were good and gone, I looked over at Macon.

Her eyes were squeezed shut and her hands, one still gripping the pencil, were clenched tight. Actually her entire body was clenched, every muscle held tight, as though she was tensing for a blow. I wondered if I should tell her that Collin was gone, off chasing Handle, but thought better of it. I felt I’d be intruding just by speaking to her. She’d closed in on herself; her shoulders curled forward, her chin buried in her chest. Her whole body seemed to be screaming Leave Me Alone.

It was then that I finally realized—though to be honest it had been pretty obvious all along—that Macon didn’t like the attention that came with being the little prodigy painter. In fact, it horrified her to be recognized on the street, singled out in front of everyone. (She said to me, years later, There’s such a fine line between genius and freak. And the thing is, when you’re just a kid, it’s hard to tell which side of the line you’re on). Making art in front of a crowd was, to her, almost a violation.

Now that I understood this, I could sympathize. I knew a little something about wanting to hide a part of yourself.

When she was sure her brother wasn’t looking, Macon straightened up, dropped the pencil and walked straight for the exit, with me trailing behind. She didn’t look back. We walked quickly, but all the same it wasn’t long before Collin caught up with us. His voice chased us toward the door, loud and brash. It seemed to fill up my head and amplify when it got inside. Insistent. Merciless.

Here comes the famous Macon Wheeler, he cried. The prodigy painter and artist extraordinaire! Here she comes, folks! Here she is!

People stopped to stare. It was only a few meters to the door, just a matter of moments. But a lot of damage can be done in a moment.

Collin kept it up until we came to the doors, yelling even louder as he ran out of space, as though to make up for it. And when we burst out into the cloudy day, Collin ran ahead and whirled around on Macon, glaring at her with such fury, as though it was she who had injured him. As though, just by being herself and good at art, she was to blame.

Macon stood far back, against the glass doors, holding her middle.

What the heck, Collin? Handle cried. What the heck was that about, huh? I mean, I’m serious, that was crazy. You’re crazy!

She didn’t cry, though.

(I’d never seen Collin like that before. I’d never known. And I never looked at him the same again, not even later, when I befriended him and, I think, became a little like him for a short time. In that one brief hour I learned to hate, really hate, a weapon I would one day turn on myself. I have my cousin Collin to thank for that.)

By the time Aunt Vera returned to the car we were all sitting quietly, Collin in the front now. He was back to his normal impatient self, horsing around with Handle, changing the radio stations. Macon sat beside me, deflated, defeated (because what could she do? He was her brother, and this was how it had always been and always would be. That fact sat like a boulder on her chest, sinking her into the seat. I wondered if she’d ever be able to push it off. I wondered if she’d ever pick it up and hurl it at Collin, right at his stupid jealous head. I thought I would have; he deserved it! But that wasn’t Macon. No, that wasn’t Macon at all).

We parted ways at the stairs. It was almost light.

Goodnight, cousin, Macon said. (She was weirdly formal, sometimes.)

As she turned, I called out in a whisper, Is it better?

She turned back, frowning. What?

Do you feel better now?

She paused and scratched at her head with the end of her pencil, but she didn’t answer (though I imagined I saw her shake her head, quickly, just once). Then she disappeared into the hallway, her short blonde ponytail bobbing away in the dark.

It’s funny how the mind rearranges things. Though I know the night in the park was only the start of my friendship with Macon, and that the real meat of our relationship —the most urgent confidences, the greatest laughs—were all ahead of us, in memory I always see that night as the beginning of the end. I fast-forward through our happy month right to the end of the summer, skipping the best parts as though they matter little (when they meant everything to me at the time). What’s coming overshadows, and all our innocent play, our silly jokes and games, just can’t measure up.

You always remember the worst parts the best.

I was sorely punished for our adventure in the park. A full day of activity including a trip out of the house, plus an all-night vigil by Macon’s side—with or without naps, I was bound to feel the effects.

I slept nearly uninterrupted for a full week.

Aunt Vera was thrilled. She felt I’d truly taken Dr. Farber’s words to heart. I, when I was conscious, was bitterly disappointed. Here was my first chance to see one of Macon’s creations through from start to finish—I’d actually seen the subjects, watched her make those pencil marks on paper, sat with her while she’d turned them from thing to picture—and now I was missing the crucial part, the change from drawing to paint!

I caught only dim glances as I trudged to and from the bathroom, fuzzy images I couldn’t quite connect with the finished product. Had the green swath become this pair of bushes? Had she changed the colour of the sandbox? And where had the red hill gone? Where? (Macon was never able to figure out what this “red hill” was all about. There wasn’t a hint of red in the four paintings she completed that week. Maybe I’d seen an older painting? Or the cabinet by the wall? Or her orange t-shirt with the birds on it? No, I’d seen her painting a red hill. A RED hill! The image would remain lodged in my head for weeks afterward—the illusive red hill of my sleep-addled brain.)

She must have worked feverishly. Normally it took Macon a full week to finish just one painting. Four paintings in seven days was incredible. I didn’t quite believe it when she told me, the morning I finally awoke for real, my eyes opening as though from a winter’s hibernation. I could swear I heard them creek.

I just finished them, Jacob, she said. Four new ones.

Four?

I rocketed out of bed and sprinted to the space between the tables. It was empty.

Macon tried to look innocent, the beginnings of a grin at the corners of her mouth, and I thought for a short moment that she was pulling my leg. A red hot anger sprang up in me, searing with all the frustration of my disorienting week, until she pointed to the wall by the door (the only wall as yet untouched). She had hung them up for me.

I looked at them one at a time, lingeringly, forcing myself (and it wasn’t easy) not to rush it. They were all in the new style. Seeing this, my heart began to pound. She’d taken my idea and put it into action! Macon twisted the hem of her shirt around her fingers as she watched me taking it in. What I thought mattered to her, and I knew it.

The first was the most obvious and yet the most surprising—Night Playground. There it was, just as it had been the night in the park: the abandoned swing set, the sad empty sandbox, the teeter-totter, the blue metal merry-go-round. This was the one painting actually set at night, all grays and dark blues, haunting. Only as I stared at it did I notice that it wasn’t a straight reproduction of the scene. She’d added certain aspects; creeping rust at the foot of the slide, broken rungs on the monkey bars, an abandoned shoe. For some reason it reminded me strongly of the lake painting, as though this playground were sunk to the bottom of the sea. It was the colours that did it. It was as though she had painted loneliness into the strokes.

(A critic would describe this painting as the moment of Macon’s emergence into adolescence. “She shows herself as a young woman, no longer a child,” he would write. “The emotion of the piece denotes disillusionment, alienation. Her angst shows through.” All poppycock, of course. He had no idea that she’d painted the park when she was only ten, as it didn’t make it to gallery until she was nearly fourteen. After that summer Macon took a break from galleries and painting altogether.)

The second and third paintings may have been Macon’s best work to date. One was dominated at the left side by an enormous tree, its bark so lifelike you felt you could reach out and touch it. The other featured Handle hanging upside down from the branch of a weeping willow, and though his t-shirt partially obscured his face I recognized him instantly. She’d captured the mischievous crinkle of his eyes to a tee, and the colour of his hair illuminated in the sun. She’d even captured the movement of his hand as he reached for a branch.

They were brilliant paintings, breathtaking really—but that’s all I remember of them. I rushed through them, just as I’d sworn I wouldn’t, because out of the corner of my eye I’d caught a glimpse of the last painting, a boy sprawled out on a rock, and my ego pressed to examine it. (Oh, how vain I was then! How self-centered! And what a disappointment to Macon it must have been to realize—and she must have realized it then, she must have seen—that all I really wanted was to see myself in paint, that all that really mattered to me was me, and how good I thought the painting was related almost directly to how much of myself, and my advice to her, I could find in it. My love affair with Macon’s art was, in short, a love affair with myself. It had little to do with her at all.

And I wonder if, in a very small part, her realization of this contributed to the fact that the painting of the boy sprawled on a rock—which she called, diplomatically, Boy— was the last of her paintings for four long years. Though once again I suppose that’s my ego talking, to think I played such a big part when there were other, far bigger forces at play. In pitting cousin against brother in the battle for Macon’s broken heart, I know which boy wins.)

After seeing the last painting I couldn’t speak. The boy sprawled across the rock overlooking the water was unmistakable. As with the other two, she’d set the scene in the daytime while we’d been there at night, but otherwise it was just as I remembered it. He lay on his side, his legs bent at the knee, leaning on his elbow, palm at his ear. There was a shadow across his upper chest, from the branches hanging over, and he seemed to be looking back over his shoulder, the sun coming around his ear like a spark. Beyond, the water rippled. The trees in the background trashed in the wind.

I couldn’t see the expression on the boy’s face for one simple reason. Macon had left the face, startlingly, blank.

She’d said she’d been drawing my face. She had lied.

Don’t you like them?

It was Macon. I’d forgotten she was there, though she stood right at my elbow, waiting with barely contained excitement. Her eyes gazed up at me, hopeful.

I was furious. I folded my arms and wouldn’t look at her. I stared at the blank place where my face should have been. Why had she left it blank? Wasn’t my face good enough? She’s painted Handle in! Why not me? And in The Sickroom she’d left my face in shadow. What was she trying to say?

I turned to her, ready to let loose. How could she do this to me? After I’d stayed up all night with her! After I’d encouraged her in the new style, stood by her all these weeks. How could she ruin this, my moment, my unveiling?

(I cringe now. I weep. Oh, Macon, you deserved so much better.)

Macon blinked at me, her fingers beginning to twine again. She moved back a step. She lowered her chin.

I let out a breath, relenting, though only slightly. I pointed to Boy without looking at it. I said, my tone chilly, This one isn’t finished.

I caught myself narrowing my eyes at her and tried to widen them instead. I think it made me look a little half-cocked because she laughed, her face brightening.

She said, I wanted to ask you about it.

She stepped forward tentatively, as though I owned her paintings and she needed my permission to come close. She waved her fingers around the face. She said, I was thinking of taking your advice here.

This was satisfying. I waited for her to go on.

I was thinking of painting… Collin’s face.

I wandered back to my bed, wrapped myself in the blankets sour with sleep. Macon looked bewildered. She followed me slowly, keeping her distance. She was about five feet away when I started to cry.

I felt her put her arm around my shoulder. She murmured little words of comfort as her mother would have done. But there was no regret in it. She seemed almost glad. She thought I was sobbing over her brilliance. She thought I was overcome.

I didn’t correct her. I didn’t say a word.

It was the greatest kindness I did Macon that entire summer.

And so began the quest for Collin’s face. It was more of a challenge than it might seem. Macon refused to paint from photos, she felt they made her paintings come out flat and sad, but we couldn’t very well ask him to sit for her (though I did suggest it at first. He won’t, Macon answered flatly, cutting me short when I tried to argue that we should give it a try. The way she said it hinted at some past pain, some evil trick he’d played on her [I could imagine it. I didn’t need to ask]. I let it go). We tried sneak-attacks at the breakfast table or while he and Handle were playing checkers, but as soon as he saw the sketchbook he would throw a tantrum and pull the neck of his shirt up to his forehead. Macon even tried drawing him when he’d fallen asleep on the couch one afternoon, but just as she was getting settled one of his eyes flew open and his hand shot out, grabbing her arm.

Sometimes Collin was a lot like the Vietcong.

The plan we came up with in the end was simple in its brilliance, playing into all the traits Macon disliked most in Collin, and it worked so well, so quickly, that it was almost a letdown. The plan was small and perfect, a little gem we marveled over, a tainted treasure. The plan, the stupid stupid plan, would tear the family apart (tear Macon and I apart) and end her childhood of artistic genius.

The plan was entirely of my devising. And it hinged on me.

That first evening as I shrugged on my robe with Macon at my side; as I rehearsed with her exactly what I should say to him (Macon, though she had two brothers and I none, had some very exaggerated ideas about how boys spoke to one another. She infused me with the fear that I would do one thing wrong—use a strange hand gesture or the wrong turn of phrase—and the jig would be up in an instant, Collin pointing me out from across the room, his hand curled like a gun, the truth out, my cover blown. She had it all wrong, but I couldn’t see it then. I knew just about as much as she did about how to be a regular boy); as she listened to my last-minute concerns, nodding, Oh okaying, nudging my reluctant body toward the stairs; as she put up her hand, fingers spread, Five minutes; as I turned my back on her and faced the dark stairwell—I knew something Macon did not.

I knew what I was doing would kill all that we’d nurtured and accomplished throughout the summer, all that we’d tried to make with each other, with the art. I knew the plan was the worst plan in the world for us. I knew it! But I went on, I didn’t tell her and I didn’t turn back. I went down to Collin’s room and I slipped in and closed the door and something ended then, something that could have been everything.

I was still angry with her and like a stupid, narcissistic boy I thought that mattered more.

And Macon, sweet, loyal Macon, trusting me completely, let me go ahead and tear her life apart.

Collin’s room was every young boy’s fantasy. I’d been inside it only a few times before, most memorably on the very first day of my stay, when they’d laid me on his bed to recover after my fainting spell. I remembered the model airplanes swaying in the breeze, and how they’d made me feel nauseous just looking at them. I remembered the striped wallpaper and how everything matched—all dark colours and manly woods—how everything screamed boy, even the musky smell of earth and varnish. Only as I stepped into the room for the second time was I able to pin down that it was that very thing, the boyishness of it, that made me so uncomfortable.

They all looked over as I walked in: Collin, Handle and Remmy. (As we’d learned at the mall that fateful day, Collin didn’t have any friends his own age. He only ever played with boys who were younger than he was, little soldiers he could order around and dominate. It wasn’t so obvious then, as Handle was his brother, and there weren’t a lot of kids to choose from. But when he hit his teens and still hung around the elementary school, then it became very clear, but by then it was already far too late.) They were on their knees in the corner, hunched over something. I clicked the door shut behind me, retying the belt of my robe, and Collin raised his chin at me in greeting. Then they all turned away. Macon never had any idea how easy it was. Collin expected this, expected that I would want to be near him, that I would come eventually. My presence hardly made a ripple in his clean male world.

I was in.

I never got around to finding out what they were doing. It was something about a cave in the woods behind the dog park, something about digging a tunnel. They had a diagram out on the floor and they were pointing and circling things and arguing. Handle kept saying, About five feet deep, I’d say, and brandishing the tape measure.

I sat gingerly on the edge of the bed and tried not to look too out of place. I didn’t really care what they were talking about, and yet I was so glad to be there, much more glad than the situation warranted, then the plan warranted. It wasn’t as though I’d had to jump any hurdles to make it there. It hadn’t been much of a challenge. Yet, even in my extremely uncomfortable state, I was just so glad that I could still make it in, I could still be accepted. They were younger than I was, Collin just on the cusp of puberty. They didn’t see that thing in me that others did (older kids at school, teachers, girls), that thing that even I couldn’t quite get a hold of. I was still just a kid to them, just a regular old boy, and as much as this assumption had seemed a burden at the beginning of the summer, now it brought me nothing but comfort.

I could hide here in a way I couldn’t with Macon (who knew what she knew, who knew me inside out).

Until that moment I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted to.

Collin was ever the willing enabler. Just as soon as he realized I was really staying in the room, that I hadn’t just come in to borrow a pencil (as I’d done the night before, to scout out the territory), he turned his shoulder to include me in the group and the other boys shifted over.

See, Jacob? he said. It’s great, isn’t it? See here?

Right away Handle and Remmy were scrambling to bring me in too. There was a tangle of arms and calls of, Let me show him! and Collin had to work to get them in order. He reprimanded them for overwhelming me, slinging a protective arm around my shoulder. He shooed them back. I was fragile. I’d been sick. They shouldn’t crowd me. What were they thinking?

Handle snickered and got a smack upside the head. Remmy laughed. Collin wanted me all to himself, a new little soldier (though I was technically older), a new body to boss.

Jacob knows all about this stuff anyway, Collin said. He reads all those books and things. He’s already got it figured, don’t you?

I nodded a little cockily. I would have agreed to anything.

Remmy regarded me with wide eyes. He said, You think you could help us finish it?

I let them hang for a second. Handle leaned far forward, his mouth hanging open in anticipation. Come on, Jake, he whined.

Sure I will, I answered, and they all grinned. Collin slapped me on the back.

We hunched over the drawing, the four of us.

It was grand.

Though I didn’t even notice, at some point Macon crept in and sketched Collin’s face. She got him from five different angles. The plan was a success. Together, later, we celebrated with a stack of toffee crunches Aunt Vera had baked the day before, five each. She told me she would start painting the next morning, and the way she said it, so eager, made my insides ache.

She didn’t know that I hardly cared, that I’d found a faster, better game to play. She didn’t know yet—as she filled her bulging cheeks with sweets, high with sugar and triumph—that I’d already left her behind.

Part 3

In the brilliant late summer days that followed I lead a double life. Aunt Vera had accepted that my full week of sleep had essentially cured me (which, surprisingly, it had, though with all the plotting I’d hardly noticed) and so long as I “took it easy” and napped in the afternoons, allowed me to venture outside.

With my house arrest lifted, Macon and I abandoned any pretense that we weren’t friends. Freedom of movement became, to us, freedom in everything, and we wouldn’t be constrained by sneaking, by whispers. From that day on we were inseparable. It was Macon and I at our prime. Any rules Aunt Vera tried to impose, bellowed after us as we zipped through the yard (no father than the corner store, no swimming, no running), were thwarted the moment we were out of sight of the house with little or no remorse. It was summer, after all, and we were kids and delirious from months of being cooped up. We took off on our bicycles after breakfast and did as we pleased until dinner. We gorged ourselves on wild strawberries in the fields behind the house; we played games, built forts, played shark in the community pool; we linked arms and ran about the house shrieking, louder sometimes than the boys. We ran wild.

There wasn’t much painting going on. Macon finished Boy (which she’d done, strangely, in her own room, away from me—maybe she’d finally sensed the tension surrounding the piece, or maybe she’d feared Collin coming across it by accident. I didn’t know. She showed it to me only once. It was perfect. She stowed it under my bed and we didn’t speak of it again) and from then on she seemed more interested in sketching, looking for new inspiration.

On “artistic days”, and to be honest there weren’t many, we took to doing out of the ordinary things like climbing to the roof of an abandoned building at the edge of town and having a picnic of bananas and barbecue chips, or searching for the blackened firepits left behind by the teenagers who got high in the woods. Macon would settle down to draw and I would sit placidly beside her, but her art wasn’t the focus anymore, and as the days wore on I paid less and less attention to what she was drawing, falling instead into heavy daydreams and awakening startled, disoriented. Once, still fuzzy from a undisguised snooze, I couldn’t focus my eyes to see what she’d sketched and asked her repeatedly what it was (a rabbit, she insisted, though no matter how long I stared at the pad I could only make out a dragon, its jaw drawn open, readying to take its first awful bite).

I don’t know how Macon felt or what she thought during this end of summer time. To me, Macon seemed entirely happy. Sure, she wasn’t making as much art, but she had a great alternative—a real live friend—and she seemed glad to trade up for a while, to be out in the world instead of holed up in the attic with a paintbrush in her hand. She became, all of a sudden, quite the talker, and we would discuss everything that popped into our heads (what would Handle be like when he got older? [She said more serious, I said obscene.] Did we like the city or the country better? [The city, both of us, though Macon had never even been.] Had Aunt Vera and Uncle Charlie ever been drunk? [We agreed, never.] Who was the best painter in the world? [She said Remrbandt, I said Macon Wheeler. She beamed, but I think she could tell I’d felt obligated to say so.] How did the internet really work? [We had absolutely no idea.]).

Once or twice she tried to broach more personal subjects. She wanted to know about my friends at home and what my school was like. She asked if I had any crushes. I didn’t tell her that liking someone in that way made me feel like my ribs were caving in. I didn’t tell her that love was something I didn’t think I was capable of feeling, not completely, not as it was described in books. I told her I’d never had a crush (a lie) and she said, blushing, that she liked a boy in her class named Timothy, but had never told him (and for a long afternoon I was silently furious with her, for having such a simple, solvable problem. For being, in at least this one way, so predictably normal).

She never went any further than that. She never tried to go there. Once she said I was the best friend she’d ever had, better than any girl, and I reacted so violently that she backed off. The closest she came to broaching the subject was her never-ending cheerfulness, as though she was trying to keep my mind off it. The end of the summer was coming fast and I would have to go back to all that mess. That was something we both knew for sure.

That was something I spent my nights trying to forget.

It happened quite simply. After that first evening in Collin’s room, talking maps and diagrams, I just went back again the next night, and the one after that, until it became routine. I never spoke to the boys about my friendship with Macon and never told Macon about what I did at night. The two parts of my day were separated by a steel wall and nothing could traverse from one side to the next—nothing but me.

Handle was thrilled, even more so than Collin. He went out of his way to make me feel included: letting me pick first or take the biggest bite, laughing at my jokes, even if they weren’t funny, especially then (and it was this trait, this genuine friendliness and concern for others, along with his happy-go-lucky personality, that would bring him riches and fame that far eclipsed his sister’s. Handle was always meant to be the star in the family. We just couldn’t see it then).

We didn’t do much. Sometimes we just hung around reading comic books and smuggling extra desserts from the kitchen. Sometimes we watched the game on Collin’s little TV set (me, pretending that I understood the rules, though I absolutely did not, while Handle and Collin argued over who was the best first baseman in the league). One time Remmy and his brother Jason got a hold of a Penthouse and we spent an hour poring over it, all of us nervous and giddy, watching the door with one eye as we ogled with the other. (Interestingly, this episode didn’t make me feel the least bit uncomfortable. We were all inexperienced, all fascinated by what we didn’t know. The pictures themselves might not have sparked anything much in me, but they didn’t seem to in the other boys either, especially the younger ones. It was the illicitness of the act that excited us more than what we were seeing. There wasn’t anything very sexual about it.)

I could have gone on like that right up to the end of my stay. I believed at the time that I was balancing it perfectly, that the one part of my day would never interfere with the other. I believed it because it worked best for me that way. But obviously, eventually I had to pick a side, choose an allegiance. Eventually I had to decide: would I betray the boys or the girl?

It didn’t take me long to choose.

I knew which side I wanted to be on.

The idea came to Collin via Remmy. I’d never really liked Remmy. He was always stirring things up just for the hell of it, making trouble out of nothing. He was chubby with big round cheeks and he loved to laugh (like Handle), but what he liked the most was to laugh at you and to egg the others on to do the same. (I’d once seen him tease Handle to tears over a bad fall he’d had off his bike. An older boy had had to piggyback him home and his knees had been cut so badly he’d needed stitches, which Remmy seemed to think was more deserving of ridicule than the fall itself, as though being hurt badly enough to need medical attention was ludicrous. Remmy didn’t seem to have a real understanding of other people’s pain. I wish I’d noticed that sooner.)

Though overall he was a good kid and often seemed to follow Handle’s lead rather than Collin’s, it was specifically his interest in Macon and all her eccentricities that turned me off. From the very first time I heard him call her Monetcon (a painful combination of Monet and Macon that made even Handle grimace) and laugh embarrassingly long at his own joke, when I saw Collin’s eyes light up at this unexpected support and how he always managed to make some nasty remark about Macon whenever Remmy was in earshot (so they could guffaw together, pointing at her paint-spattered sneakers as she retreated up the stairs), when I saw how they fed off each other, a part of me set off the alarm. A part of me sensed it.

Remmy would be the one to light the match, but it would be Collin who would set us all ablaze. It was always Collin who fanned the flames.

We were sitting on Collin’s bed playing cards, Remmy, Handle and me. Remmy was sleeping over again (which he did at least four times a week. Remmy’s father had a leather belt and wasn’t afraid to use it, Handle told me. I wondered if Handle really knew what that meant. I wondered if I did). Collin was on the floor doing pushups, though he couldn’t really manage a full one, only a half. I could do up to thirty in a row in gym class, and my muscles were bigger than Collin’s. (It was these private triumphs that kept me perpetually cheerful throughout my nighttime forays).

Collin collapsed on the floor after approximately ten minutes of “working out” and lay shirtless on the rug, panting as though he’d run a mile.

I told you, said Handle without looking up from his hand. It’s too hot.

That’s no excuse, Collins replied. Kobe Bryant works out for four hours a day, six days a week. More during the off-season.

But I noticed that he didn’t resume his pushups.

Handle snorted. Like you’ll ever be Kobe Bryant.

Collin swatted at Handle’s leg but he moved it out of the way in time. More might have come of it if Collin had been in the mood. It might have gotten ugly. Earlier he’d held Handle in a headlock for nearly ten minutes until his face had turned purple and he’d cried uncle uncle. This was over the last chip in the bag, which Handle had swiped with a flourish. (I was fascinated by these little bursts of violence, sometimes brutal, which came and went among boys, like furious gusts of wind, leaving them breathless, their clothes askew. I never participated, but it was great fun to watch.)

Then, without preamble, Remmy said, Where does she keep all those masterpieces anyway?

I kept playing. It was my turn and we were playing Hearts. I put down a jack of spades and won the round. Handle groaned and flopped on to his side, re-arranging his cards.

Collin sighed. Who? he asked, rolling onto his back, hands behind his head.

Who do you think? Remmy said. He hunched his shoulders and his neck disappeared entirely into his thick torso. He said, Your freaky sister.

Collin still didn’t take the bait. For a moment I was proud of him. He said, Upstairs somewhere, gesturing lazily with his hand.

Handle played a five of hearts, Remmy played a ten of spades, I played a five of spades and Remmy collected the cards.

Remmy leaned on his elbow. He was looking only at Collin now. Do you ever wonder about it? he said. I mean, wonder what she’s got up there.

Paintings, of course, Handle retorted, then smacked down a card. Masterpieces. You said so yourself.

I worked at keeping my face expressionless. I didn’t like where this was going. I didn’t like the tone of mischief in Remmy’s voice.

So many paintings just waiting up there, without an audience, Remmy said. It’s a shame, really, don’t you think? All of them hidden away…

(He might as well have drawn red arrows leading out of the room and right up the attic stairs.)

There was a dreadful pause as Handle waved at the air around his face trying to make a breeze and I held my breath. Then Remmy seemed about to say something more and Collin and I both interrupted him at the same moment.

Nobody heard me. (Maybe if I’d spoken up sooner, talked louder. Maybe if I’d established myself as the oldest one, the dominant one, earlier in the summer, right at the beginning. Maybe then things would have turned out differently.)

Handle and Remmy turned to Collin as he spoke. Remmy was grinning in a self-satisfied way.

Collin repeated himself. I felt strongly, though he wasn’t looking my way, that he was speaking to me only. Daring me.

He said, Want to go check it out?

So we tramped up there, the four of us. We weren’t even quiet about it. The attic wasn’t off-limits anymore, now that I was better. The only thing that had been keeping the boys away, it seemed, was disinterest. But Remmy had taken care of that.

It was dark and the only lamp in the room was the one by my bed. Macon used candles when she worked at night, but they’d been collected and taken away by Uncle Charlie a few weeks back (upon threat of a whole autumn of raking duty if he ever caught her using matches again). I was hoping they would never find the light at all and get frustrated with the game before it even began. I wasn’t prepared for this sudden clash of worlds. Looking around in the gloom, I became hyper-aware of all the evidence in the room that linked me with Macon’s art, revealing my interest.

(You see? It wasn’t the betrayal of Macon that had me worried, that was merely a stirring in the pit of my stomach. It was my precious boy status that mattered to me most. It was the charade.)

Handle flicked on the overhead light, shocking me. Had there been a light there all along? The room looked alien under the glare, my bed illuminated, my things laid bare: my books, my teddy bear, my wrinkled sheets and scattered socks. I scooted over to my side of the room and kicked my dirty clothes under the bed.

I didn’t realize until I turned around that Handle had followed me over. He stood in front of me, a serious look on his face (which was a shocking sight to see on Handle). I sat down on the mattress. It was a high one and even though I was sitting and he standing I was still taller than him.

He said, Jacob, I don’t like this. He looked over his shoulder at the others as they stepped between the tables, making jokes and pointing. I’d never seen Handle react this way to Collin’s antics before, standing back instead of joining in. (He certainly hadn’t stood back when we’d raided his parents liquor cabinet two nights before, each of us taking a sip from a dusty bottle of something called Grand Marnier before rushing to the bathroom to wash out our mouths. Handle said the great mariners were crazy. He’d never bring that stuff on his boat, that’s for sure.) But this time even Handle could see we’d crossed a line and somebody had to turn us back. He looked at me expectantly.

He knew it wasn’t up to him.

I ground my teeth and stared down at my hands. Didn’t he see? If I objected, if I made a fuss, it would all come out. I would be labeled. I wouldn’t ever be allowed back.

I sat under his gaze for a full five minutes, until he sighed and walked away. And though he was younger than me I felt the bitter sting of his disappointment, just as I had at the beginning of the summer when my father had sat across from me in the principal’s office and refused to meet my eye. It was familiar, that burn of shame.

Yet, still, I did nothing.

It happened fast. (That’s what I told myself after. It all happened so fast.)

They saw the lake painting. It was hanging by the window (and I should have realized, but didn’t. I didn’t turn my head. There were a few moments there, I could have done something. But I was too slow, too ashamed. I didn’t see it). Remmy said the fish looked stupid. Collin gave the painting a dirty look, as he had been to all the paintings—it was what he always did when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. I’d seen him give the computer the same look the day before when his mother had put the child restrictions on after finding “girls girls girls” in the search history.

Handle looked at the painting for a long time with his hands behind his back and didn’t say anything.

It surprised me that they didn’t see the brilliance of the new style paintings compared with the old. Handle might have had an inkling, but the others saw those paintings as just the same as the rest—stupid colours on a canvas. They barely stopped in front of them. They barely looked. I wandered over, searching their faces for some realization, but there was none. Thy sneered and rolled their eyes. They jerked the canvases around like they were toys, or trash. They had no respect. They didn’t care.

It was incomprehensible.

It was then, as Handle noticed his own image in the painting of the boy hanging upside down and he covered his eyes, embarrassed; as we stood side by side examining it, our backs to the others; as my eyes slipped back to the lake painting just next to it—it was then that I knew there really was going to be trouble.

I spun around too late. Remmy was already standing at the foot of my bed, looking up at the painting Macon had hung there for me, moving the lake painting to the other wall. Remmy was already calling us over, calling Collin over. It was too late, so quickly too late.

There was nothing I could do now.

Collin’s body went still. He stood staring up at his own face, his cheeks twitching. Handle said something like, Wow, it really does look like you. Remmy chuckled and poked Collin in the side and Collin flinched violently. I caught my breath. It would happen now.

In an instant the painting was off the wall and in his hands. His face was a mask of pure disgust. Macon had painted Collin with such realism. The look on his face in the painting was one of tenderness, openness. I imagined she’d painted her brother as she wished he could be—a soft brother, a loving brother. But that look on his face in combination with the abandoned pose… I saw it right away, through his eyes. The boy in the painting looked almost feminine.

Collin was humiliated.

How dare she? he cried. He was so angry he was vibrating. He gripped the canvas in his hands as though he would tear it to pieces.

Handle quietly stepped behind me. Remmy stopped laughing.

I took a chance, my one chance. I said, It’s a good painting, Collin.

He turned his furious gaze on me and I tried not to shrink. He was breathing like a bull. He said, Oh really, Jacob?

It was the way he said my name, so full of scorn.

I didn’t say another word.

Remmy found the butter knife on the plate by my bed. He handed it to Collin, telling him to “cut it out” if he didn’t like it, telling him she had no right. His words spun around me, sliced through me. For a moment I simply couldn’t grasp their meaning. When I saw Collin raise his arm, I turned away. I couldn’t bear to watch.

He grunted as he jabbed the knife into the painting. At the sound of metal tearing through canvas I had to catch the edge of the table to hold myself up. I looked down at Handle (who would never break my fall again). He stared at me, stricken, his face white as paper, then he fled for the stairs.

Collin stalked around the room stabbing every painting he saw: the portrait of his father, the neighbourhood from above, Handle upside-down, The Sickroom (striking the knife almost directly through my face, making me gag), older paintings of dogs and cats and chairs, a painting of a boat in a storm, of a group of kids running. He missed Night Playground, maybe because the colours were too dark and he couldn’t really see it. He skipped an old painting of a woman sitting on a bench, I never knew why.

Remmy skipped ahead, pointing out paintings that he thought truly merited the knife, delighting in the anarchy. I crouched to the ground and picked up the remains of Boy, the face expertly carved out, the canvas edges flapping around the hole. They had reached the lake painting.

Collin raised the knife and I screamed out in horror. I stumbled across the room, trying to fling myself between him and the painting, but I was too late. He’d already cut a long gash right down the middle.

How can you do this? I screeched. I shoved Collin back. I snatched the knife out of his hand. Both he and Remmy were staring at me. I didn’t realize that I’d been crying, that my face was splotchy and swollen. I didn’t realize how loudly I’d screamed. We could hear footsteps approaching.

Remmy backed into the darkness and disappeared, but Collin reared up.

He said, It’s just a stupid painting, Jacob.

Why can’t you just leave her alone? I countered.

You didn’t have to be her brother your whole life, he answered, he face flushed with emotion. You don’t know!

I tried to pull the pieces of the painting together, to make it whole again, but it was no use.

You’re just jealous! I cried. Because you don’t have an ounce of talent. You can’t even touch her!

Oh, really, cousin? Collin said with a sneer. I’m jealous? Are you sure you have that right? Because it seems to me that of all the people in this house the only one who’s jealous is you.

I took a step toward him and stooped so we were face to face. I said, Believe what you want, but you’re the one who’ll have to live with this, not me.

You think so? Collins replied. You think I’m the one she’s going to blame?

(I didn’t consider this, I couldn’t just then. It’s difficult even now to admit how right he was. You have to care about a person to feel the weight of their accusation. And if you love them, as I loved Macon, the wrongs you’ve done them can follow you for the rest of your life. Even if, or so you tell yourself, you didn’t really mean them.)

We were nose to nose and I still had the knife in my hand when Macon came running into the room, followed closely by her parents.

Aunt Vera let out a string of expletives, many of which I’d never heard before. Uncle Charlie grabbed the knife from my hand and threw it to the floor so violently its blade cut an inch-deep gouge into the wood floor. Then he took us by the shoulders and shoved us down the stairs, as behind us Aunt Vera cried, over and over, What did you do? What did you do?

But it was the look on Macon’s face in that first instant as she saw what we’d done that haunted me that night (that haunts me still). Like Macon herself, it was a complicated look, a mixture of horror and dismay, incomprehension and accusation and hurt. There was anger there too, of course, there was. And tucked in a little corner of her face, hesitant but gaining strength, there was also something I couldn’t quit put my finger on.

It was almost like… relief.

I was sent home the next day, no discussion. Aunt Vera packed up my things while I was sleeping and my mother was there waiting for me when I woke up.

Collin wasn’t allowed to leave his room. I didn’t even say goodbye to him (which was probably for the best. I had the feeling I wouldn’t have the courage to punch him in the face with the whole family watching, and saying a cordial goodbye, as if he’d done nothing more than tie Macon’s shoelaces together, frankly would have made me wretch). Handle gave me a half-hearted wave from the porch as Uncle Charlie loaded my suitcase into my mother’s car. Then he turned and went into the house. I got the message: I was no longer his idol.

My mother was mad at Aunt Vera for not telling her about my illness and just wanted to get out of there, but I had to say goodbye to Macon. I made an excuse about forgetting a pair of shoes and ran through the house to find her. I knew where she would be.

She’d taken down all the damaged paintings (leaving rectangular spots of lighter paint all over the walls, the contrast like a cherckerboard) and piled them in a heap beside my bed. When I walked in she was sitting in the middle of the mess, just staring.

What do you want? she asked. She said it quickly, defensively (one hand dropping to grip the frame of a broken canvas, as if she thought I might brandish a new knife and pick up where we’d left off). I knew better than to try to take another step toward her.

My mother’s here, I said.

Yeah, she said.

My father didn’t come, though. (A sympathy bid, and a pathetic one. But I had nothing to lose and I so desperately wanted her to look at me.)

She said nothing.

I’m leaving, I said.

Good, she said.

It was the voice she was using that hurt the most, that dead voice. It was the voice she used when we ran into that girl she hated who lived at the end of the street. It was the voice she used with Collin. But it wasn’t as though I hadn’t expected it. I’d spent the whole night expecting it.

I gestured at Night Playground, still hanging on the wall. I said, That one’s okay.

Yahoo, she said. She turned her shoulder a little, away from me.

Silence expanded in the room. I could hear the adults talking down on the driveway, my mother’s angry voice rising and falling. I didn’t have much time.

I looked down at the painting closest to my feet. It wasn’t really that bad at all. He’d only cut one corner. I said, You know, this one could probably—

Shut up, Jacob! Macon cried. She sprang to her feet.

I blinked at her. This was the first time, the very first time she’d ever stood up to me, or maybe to anyone. I was a little taken aback.

It happened so fast, I protested. I couldn’t stop him.

Oh, ok, she said snottily, her platitude now a sarcastic jab. She was finally looking me full in the face and right away I wished she wasn’t. She said, You think that makes it better? You shouldn’t have let them up here in the first place.

She shook her head, her blue eyes searching mine, and for the first time that day I felt the full force of my betrayal like a kick in the teeth. I swallowed and I almost tasted blood. A part of me wished I could.

I searched desperately for some excuse, some reason that would convince her—I hadn’t turned on her really. I was just a bystander. I was still hers. We were still us.

I-I just, I spluttered, I think— I don’t care what you think, she cried out, her voice shrill. She sank back down into her pile of ruined paintings. She shook her head at the floor. I could see the rage seeping out of her, like air out of a tire. Macon wasn’t the type to hold on to anger. She didn’t have that kind of hate in her.

When she spoke again it was so quietly that I almost missed it.

I never thought you’d take it this far, you know, she said sadly. I figured you’d eventually see that you and me was better than them. Better than… him.

My mouth opened as though to speak and stayed that way, widening and narrowing, like a dying fish.

She looked at me over her shoulder. She said, I though you’d choose me.

Hot tears slid down my cheeks.

I wanted to, I moaned.

I think we both know that’s not true, she replied. And it’s too bad.

The words she said next were delivered in a strange lilt. Her voice actually shook, and I would have taken it for disgust if her eyes had not been brimming with tears.

She said, It’s too bad, because being who they want you to be will never make you happy, Jacob.

(Years later Caroline Kalinsky, my prom date, would accuse me of breaking her heart when she caught me making out with Brandon Riley under the punch bowl table. But I knew then that I had only ever once broken a girl’s heart, and it was my cousin Macon’s when she was ten years old and I was thirteen and she spat my own words back at me. I know, because at that moment, my heart broke as well.)

If I hadn’t already been sobbing I would have started then. What amazed me the most (even through my weeping) was how thoroughly I’d underestimated her. Macon knew me far better than I knew myself, and I was suddenly struck by the fact that I really didn’t know her at all. Had I ever really tried to?

All along she’d been watching me, and waiting for me to set myself right. All along she’d let me think I was winning as I lost her.

I wanted to go to her, to weep on her, to prostrate myself at her feet.

I took a step forward, but she held up her hand. No, she said. She looked down and my gaze followed hers over all the mangled paintings littering the floor, like mountains and oceans of art, destroyed. Mountains and oceans that I could not cross.

She looked at me and her eyes were cold again. Just get out of here, she said.

And I left.

Epilogue

I didn’t speak to Macon again for six years. It was at the wedding reception of our cousin Kerry (which my mother had guilted me into attending by pointing out that I’d missed every family event since I’d started university) that I found myself once again thinking about that fateful summer. Macon was sixteen by then, and I was just about to turn twenty.

I spotted her from across the room, skulking by the bar, wearing an ill-fitting blue dress I suspected she’d borrowed from a friend who was much bigger than her, especially in the chest. Still, she looked beautiful, her blonde hair long and straight. She looked almost nothing like the child she’d been. She’d grown out of her baby fat. I, on the other hand, looked a complete mess, my shirt wrinkled and fraying at the collar, my suit jacket stained. I’d been stoned for most of the afternoon and my buzz was just now wearing off. I needed a drink.

I stepped up next to her without saying a word. It was a few moments before she noticed me. I smiled at her pleasantly, unsure if she would recognize me. I’d recently grown a beard and the last time she’d seen me, at someone else’s wedding three years before, my parents had been going through a very messy divorce and I’d hardly spoken to anyone. My father lived in Halifax now and coached high school football. My mother was engaged to a chiropractor named Gill.

But she did recognize me.

Oh, Jacob, she said flatly. (She was in her sullen teenager phase. Nothing that happened could get much of a reaction from her. Not even coming face to face with the cousin who’d ruined her life.)

Hi there, I said. How are you this fine evening? This is an exquisite reception, wouldn’t you agree? (I was actually still a little stoned. I always spoke in an affected way when I was high, like a bizarre imitation of a 1950s sitcom father. I also had the tendency to be overly honest. It occurred to me, a moment too late, that it might be better if I didn’t strike up a conversation with Macon right then.)

She gazed out at the dance floor, fidgeting with the silver bracelet on her wrist. This sucks, she said. I couldn’t figure out if she was talking about the bracelet, the reception, or being stuck talking to me. (I figured, all of the above.)

I said, I saw the article about you last month. I think it was just terrific, I mean really top-notch. The photos were especially impressive. The one of you, that close-up was pretty great. It really captured your essence, I’d say. Can I say essence? Do you know what I’m getting at?

I knew I was prattling, and that I sounded like an idiot, but I couldn’t stop myself if my life depended on it.

She gave me a look. I was sweating and I mopped at my forehead with my sleeve.

What’s the matter with you? she asked.

I need a drink, I replied.

Here, take mine, she said, and handed me a glass of white wine from the bar.

I just stared at her, I couldn’t help it. She was only sixteen! Where were her parents? How had she gotten the wine in the first place?

Macon laughed at me.

Oh, okay, she said simply (and I couldn’t help but grin). You don’t want it? Get your own, then.

How’s Handle? I asked, just to change the subject. (Handle was the easier brother to enquire about. Collin, I already knew, had been caught dealing drugs to middle school kids the year before and there had been court dates set. Had he gone to jail? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t really care. He’d sent me a nasty letter after I came out which had been so thoroughly riddled with spelling mistakes as to make me almost pity him. In it he’d revealed that he’d always known I was gay, even when we were little kids, didn’t I know that? And of course, by that time, I did, though it certainly would have shocked the hell out of me at thirteen. They’d all know the whole time, even Handle. I’d finally realized this, months after I returned home, because in all the time I spent in their house that summer, sick with mono—the kissing disease—not once had anybody asked me who I’d been kissing.)

He’s over there, Macon said, referring to Handle. He was sitting at a table, his arm around a pretty girl with curly red hair. He was whispering in her ear and she was laughing and trying to push him away. Macon said, He has a different girlfriend every week.

Good for him, I said.

What about you? she said, turning to me. Got a boyfriend?

No, I replied with forced composure, though talking openly about my sexuality still mortified me. (I still had a lot of growing up to do.) You?

She smiled slightly, but didn’t deign to reply.

We stood around for a few minutes, saying nothing. I was starting to get that feeling I used to get around the girls I’d dated in high school, that desperate apologetic feeling. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t stand here next to her without bringing it up.

She was staring out at the dance floor again. Her parents were dancing in that way parents dance to fast songs—a little jerky, sort of trying to waltz and do the twist at the same time. They looked like they were having a good time.

Listen, I said, suddenly serious. She leaned in to hear me. I said, I know you must have hated me all these years, and I’m sorry. It was horrible, what I did. I was such an idiot. I know that. I want you to know that I know that and I’m so sorry.

She straightened up without any change of expression. I wondered if she hadn’t heard me. I took a breath to start the whole schpeal over again, but she interrupted me.

It was years ago, she said. I don’t hate you. I hardly even remember it.

I felt a flood of relief, six years of anguish leaking away. But then, just as quickly, I became suspicious. It had been too easy. She couldn’t really mean it. I remembered the look on her face when she’d come running into the attic. I remembered our last conversation.

But you stopped painting, I said. We broke you.

No, you didn’t, Macon said, shaking her head. You did me a favour.

A favour! This was too much. A pile of broken paintings on the floor could never be a favour.

She said, That break from painting helped me figure out who I was without the art. It helped me grow up.

But I hurt you! I cried. I took her by the shoulders, turned her to face me. She still had those big blue eyes. I said, That’s the worst of it. You shared your secrets with me, you shared your art and I took it and killed it. I hurt you worse than I’ve ever hurt anyone. And yes, I was just a kid and I had my own problems. But I used you. I took what you had and twisted it around until it was all about me. And Colli— Don’t talk to me about Collin, she said, averting her eyes. I wondered what it had been like, continuing to live in that house with Collin. What had he been like as a teenager? What else of hers had he destroyed?

I waited until she looked up again. I said, I’m sorry I hurt you, Macon.

Oh, ok, she said. And I’m sorry I let you.

I let her go and we stood in front of each other, a little awkward.

All that wasted potential, I said. All those wasted years. With your talent, who knows what you could have done during those years. Who knows how many paintings were never painted.

Macon frowned. Is that all that matters to you? she asked. The paintings?

Of course not! I was aghast. You were my best friend.

I was ten, sweetie, she said, patting me on the arm. We were kids.

You were a fabulous friend, I insisted. And you were a genius.

She gave me a look that was almost pitying. I was never a genius, Jacob, she said. I was just a little girl who liked to paint.

A drunken uncle came ambling over and elbowed himself between us at the bar, striking up a conversation with me about Virignia Woolfe. (What the hell is all that about, I ask you? I mean, why doesn’t the woman just say what she really means?). He seemed to think I was an English major when in fact I was studying Anthropology. In truth I was flunking out and within the year would drop out entirely and spend five months backpacking around South America. Around that same time Macon would start taking classes at the Art Institute in New York, having graduated from high school a full two years early.

Whether she would admit it or not, she really was a genius.

By the time I extracted myself from the uncle she’d wandered off and I didn’t see her again until the very end of the night. The party was winding down. People were lining up to say goodbye to the bride and groom. I was sitting at an empty table with my feet up, half-dozing. Then I saw Macon out on the dance floor.

She was swaying to the music, dancing by herself. Squinting, I realized she was wearing converse sneakers, just like those ones we’d worn years before. She was hunching and her elbows stuck out like wings, masking her newfound beauty, and all at once I was struck by a wave of nostalgia. I saw the Macon she was then: running beside me through the house, giggling like a fiend; kneeling over a canvas with paint in her hair, her brush poised for the next stroke; talking with me for endless hours about art, as if it was the only thing in the world worth talking about.

It only lasted a moment. Then somebody came up to her, taking her arm. She nodded as she was pulled into the conversation, leaving her dancing behind, and all at once she was herself again.

The Macon I knew was gone.

Table of Contents

COVER PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

CONTENTS

EXCERPT FROM THE SICKROOM

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

EPILOGUE