Paint by Magic (7 page)

"Mom!" screamed Crystal. "Mom, what's happening to you?" She grabbed my arm. "Quick, Con, call nine-one-one!" But as I whirled over to the phone, grateful that Mom had at least left us a couple modern conveniences, her voice stopped me.

"Wait!" she gasped. She closed her mouth and her eyes blinked a few times, rapidly, as if she had some specks of dirt in them. "Oh my!"

"Pam, are you all right? What happened, darling?" Dad bent over her, worried, still with his arms around her.

She reached up and patted his hand. "I just—just felt dizzy for a second. That's all."

Crystal and I stared at each other. Dad stroked Mom's hair. "You're scaring us, Pam. I really think you had a seizure. We'd better call the doctor."

"Now, don't be silly!" Mom laughed and unwrapped Dad's arms. "I'm perfectly fine." Then she caught sight of the newspaper on the counter and snatched it up, all the stiffness suddenly gone. She tapped a picture on the front page. "Is that one still president?" she asked with a laugh. "Seems like somebody else would have been elected by now." She flipped through the pages. "Whoa—look at the real estate prices..." She stood there reading the paper like current events were so fascinating. Like she'd been gone on a long trip to some remote spot and now had a lot of catching up to do.

"Pam, let me call Dr. Rhodes." Dad stroked her hand, then lifted her wrist, tracking the pulse.

"Why bother her? I'm
fine,
" Mom said, pulling her hand away: She rustled the paper. "Look here, Grant. Can you believe these prices?"

Dad cleared his throat. "It's
you
I can't believe, Pam."

But it looked like Mom was all right again. Not
normal,
but not frozen, either. I waited around for a few seconds, trying to figure out if she really didn't remember what had just happened to her—or if she was just trying to keep us from worrying. Then I decided this was as good a chance as any to escape, so I sidled quietly out of the kitchen. I did not miss the look Crystal gave me as I passed her, and so I was not surprised when I heard her right behind me on the stairs.

"I think it
is
a brain tumor," she said. "It's got to be. I've heard they can cause seizures and things." She sounded like she was about to cry.

"Somehow I don't think it is," I said slowly. "No, I think it's something else."

"Like what?" she demanded.

"I don't know. But I'm going to find out." I was at the top of the stairs. "I'm
trying
to find out."

"Is that what you and Doug were doing in Mom's closet?" she hissed.

"Come to my room," I whispered. "I'll show you."

I closed my bedroom door behind us and clicked the lock. Then I went over to the dresser. I pulled out the big art book and carried it to the bed. Crystal and I sat cross-legged on the bed and paged through the book. "I was going to show Doug," I told her. "But Mom had hidden it..." And I related how we'd searched for the book and found it, and how Mom had come upstairs just at that moment and we'd had to run for cover.

"Stupid Doug and his stupid key chain!" Crystal said.

"Yeah, well, it doesn't really matter." I tapped the page with my finger. "This is what matters." But what I just couldn't figure out was
why
it mattered. Or how Mom could be so different just since yesterday.

We stared down at
Elsie's Party, 1926.

"That isn't Mom," Crystal said slowly. "It just can't be. It's impossible."

I rubbed my finger on the picture of the woman at the table who' looked like Mom—or her clone. "Same hair," I said.

"Mom
obviously
just copied the hairstyle in this book," said Crystal witheringly.

"But look at the earrings," I whispered, and I felt my heart thumping hard in my chest. You could see it perfectly clearly when you looked closely: There were tiny dangly pendants painted on the woman's ears, peeking out from beneath her curls. Little gold elephants. "They look like the ones Dad had specially made for her birthday last year."

Crystal wrapped her long ponytail around and around her hand, something she always does when she is nervous or upset, "It's just a coincidence!" she hissed at me. "It has to be. What possible connection could Mom have to some woman who looked just like her and had the same earrings around eighty years ago?" She shook her head and answered her own question before I could say anything. "No connection at all, that's what! In fact, this might not even have been a real person! The artist could have just made up somebody out of his head. Artists do that all the time."

"But, Crys," I said in a low voice, trying to puzzle it but in my own mind, "how can you explain all these pictures?" I flipped through the book. "Look, this one on the couch, holding a rose—I found Mom just like
that
when I came home. And this one, chopping onions? She was doing the exact same thing—and sort of standing there, frozen, as if she were—"

Crystal jumped off my bed. "I agree that Mom is being totally weird," she said briskly, "but it can't be anything to do with this book, and I think you'd better just put it back where you found it." She slammed the door and stomped down the stairs.

I sat there on my bed and kept turning the pages in the big book. Fitzgerald Cotton's paintings were divided into three categories. The first section was titled "Early Work," the second was called "The Muse Period," and the third was called "The Dark Years." I turned to "Early Work" first, mostly boring landscapes with old falling-down barns and fences, painted in sort of dull grays and browns and dark reds, with no people in the pictures at all.

The muse-period paintings were bright and vibrant. These were the ones that all, incredibly, featured my mom. There was Mom knitting, weeding a garden, wearing a white dress and hat, leaning over a bed of daffodils. Mom laughing under a canopy of giant sunflowers. Mom playing checkers with a little boy in an old-fashioned kitchen. Mom curled up on a couch, with a fire in the fireplace, reading a book to four kids—two boys and two girls—who sat at her feet, toasting marshmallows on long sticks. Mom and the grandmotherly woman from
Elsie's Party,
sitting on a front porch, drinking lemonade.

I turned the pages silently, chewing the inside of my cheek. Chewing hard. The paintings of the muse period were so clear and detailed, they looked almost like photos. Until you saw the brush strokes, I mean.

"It has to be Mom; it
has
to be," I whispered, and I traced my finger over a portrait of
Muse in Straw Hat, 1926,
the gold elephant earrings just visible. I read swiftly from the book:

Fitzgerald Cotton's health, always fragile, took a turn for the worse after the death of his beloved younger brother, Homer, in the final days of World War I. He and Homer had been very close as boys,
with the more robust Homer looking after his frail, artistic brother, Fitzgerald. After Homer Cotton's death, Fitzgerald Cotton's creative genius was stilled. For years he could not paint, and he became more and more depressed. His behavior grew erratic and increasingly strange, and his parents feared for his sanity. They urged him to move back to his childhood home in Shady Grove, California, to let them care for him. They arranged for him to travel in Europe in 1924, after he told them that his lifelong dream was to study Renaissance painting in Italy, the land of his ancestors.

While studying in Padua, Cotton traced his own roots through a direct bloodline back to Lorenzo da Padova, a fifteenth-century painter of the Magi School. Cotton returned to California in 1925, his artistic drive restored. His work took on new intensity, with hints of da Padova's brilliant style.

The appearance some months later, in the spring of 1925, of the mysterious woman Cotton referred to as his muse is credited by many art critics and scholars as instrumental in breaking through Cotton's depression, though other scholars maintain that it was Cotton's use of rare, ancient paints obtained during his Italian sojourn—paints reputedly once belonging to Lorenzo da Padova himself—that gave his art new life. Nonetheless, Cotton's painter's block was ended. The body of work painted between 1925 and 1926 features his anonymous muse and is imbued with a fresh style and vibrancy.

I stopped reading. "I don't believe it," I said flatly, right out loud as if Doug or Crystal or somebody were there to argue with me. "Mom wasn't even
born
in 1926. Even her
parents
weren't born yet! It just doesn't make sense."

I wished Doug or Crystal were there. I didn't like being alone with this. Whatever
this
was. My eyes scanned the next page.

After a year, Cotton's muse disappeared as suddenly as she'd appeared. Cotton's painting style changed again. His work became dark and sinister. The cheerful vibrancy of the muse period was gone forever, replaced by the undertone of menace that haunted Cotton's work until his death by suicide, in 1928.

I turned the pages, staring down at grim, grainy-looking paintings, all grays and blacks and blues, with strange swirling shapes that reminded me of ships lost at sea. In some of the paintings there was a little face of a man down in the right-hand corner, with a creepy, unpleasant smile. I wondered if that was what Fitzgerald Cotton had looked like. I wasn't sure what "undertone of menace" meant, but I sure didn't like Cotton's later work.

Then the door to my bedroom crashed open, hitting the wall, and Mom stood there, cheeks red and eyes blazing. I edged toward the wall, suddenly understanding "undertone of menace" perfectly. If Mom hadn't already taken my phone away, I might have grabbed it and dialled 9-1-1.

Mom approached the bed. She slapped her hand down hard on the book like she wished it were
me
she was hitting. Her voice came out tight and controlled and icy. I'd never seen her so mad in my whole life—not even when I spilled my Coke all over my computer once and wrecked the whole thing. But there was something else, too, besides mad.

"I told you this is
my
book. I told you not to touch it." Her voice squeaked a little at the end, and I saw that behind her icy anger, she was so scared she was shaking. Her fear made me remember this was my
mom,
not some crazy witch, no matter how weird she was acting.

So I took a deep breath, like Ashleigh always tells me to when Crystal's bugging me. "Mom," I said quietly. "Tell me about the pictures."

"You saw them?" asked Mom, her voice squeaking again in what sounded to me like panic. "
All of them?
" She bent over the book and flicked frantically through the pages. Then she picked up the heavy book and shook it. A piece of folded paper fluttered out of the back and she caught it in a quick swoop. "Not all of them!" she cried. "Not
this
one!"

"Let me see it," I said.

"You can't," said Mom, folding the paper and putting it behind her back. "You mustn't see this. You'd never understand." But something in her eyes looked to me like she might be wavering, like maybe she really
did
want to show somebody.

"How could Fitzgerald Cotton paint you before you were even born, Mom?" I whispered. "How could he paint these"—I reached out a trembly finger and touched the gold elephants that dangled from her ears—"before Dad ever gave them to you?"

Mom was watching me closely. There were tears in her eyes.

I felt I was just on the brink of understanding something, something so weird that it couldn't be grasped. It was too impossible.

"Tell me what happened to you, Mom," I said urgently. "Tell me what's
still
happening—"

But it was too late. Even as I spoke to her, it was happening again. Happening worse than before. Her eyes narrowed, seemed to glaze over in that awful stare ... but this time, instead of the usual panic, there was a new and fearful cruelty in them. Her mouth, teeth bared, curled up into that awful grimace. "
Ahhggghhh!
" she cried through the terrible grin. "
Ahhaaa!
"

I jumped back from her—I had seen that smile somewhere before!

Her hands held the art book open as if she'd just looked up from reading it. The grin was frozen on her face. Her eyes didn't blink. Behind her on my bedside table I could see my alarm clock: 7:27. I grabbed at the art book, but her fingers held it like a vise. I forced it away and flipped through the pages, backing across the room because she looked so ... so much like the little evil face in the corner of Fitzgerald Cotton's later paintings! I dropped the book.

"No!" I cried, and I grabbed Mom's arm. She didn't blink, and she didn't unfreeze. "Mom,
no
!" It was like talking to a statue. The numbers on the clock changed, but nothing about Mom moved at all: 7:28.

The door to my room burst open and Crystal and Dad ran in. "We heard you yell," Crystal said. "Is it Mom—"

"Pam!" cried Dad, and he ran to her, gasping when he saw her ferocious face. "Oh, dear God!" he whispered, shuddering, and it really did sound like a prayer. "What is happening here?"

He bent over her as he had down in the kitchen and listened to her heartbeat. "It's very slow, kids; this is really bad. How can this be happening? I think we could lose her ... Oh—we need help!"

"I'll call!" Crystal shrieked. "I'll call nine-one-one!" She turned to leave the room, looking back over her shoulder at Mom's evil grin and cold, glittering eyes. As Crystal ran out, the folded paper fluttered to the floor in her wake.

My dad was working on Mom, trying so desperately to help her, panic in his eyes. After a few seconds he jumped up again. "Watch her, Con," he cried. "We need an ambulance!" He raced out of the room after Crystal, and I was alone with Mom.

"
Aggghhh,
" Mom groaned in the voice of the damned. "
Aghhhaaa!
" Blood was seeping out of her hairline again—really starting to drip. Flinching, I reached out and touched her cheek—no, wait a minute—not blood. Something else. Something else red. Wet and sticky...