"It was bad. I don't know why it was so different from the first time, but I just went insane. A little while after I swallowed the stuff I was sitting and looking down at my hands. There was a faint smear of red paint on my finger, near the scar, and as I watched it suddenly started smoldering and bubbling and eating into my finger and exposing the bone, which turned into a white bristle brush—" She broke off and looked up sheepishly. "There's no need to go over all the bizarre details, but in the end what happened was that my fingers turned into brushes and when I looked at one of the guys there—not Andy, I don't remember him being there, it was one of the kids who used to hang around—I saw paint pumping through his body, pulsing, every color, brilliant and iridescent. I was trying to get at the paint in his throat when the police arrived, and after I attempted to throttle several other people, they hauled me off to the hospital and filled me with some kind of heavy-duty tranquilizers. It was a lot of excitement for our little town, as you might imagine.
"By the next morning I was okay—sick and covered with bruises, but my fingers were flesh and blood again. They let me go home later, and the following day I was carrying a pan full of hot soup across the kitchen and felt my fingers turn to wood and dropped the pan. I had half a dozen relapses— sometimes I'd see paint pulsing in one of my cousins—but gradually it tapered off in frequency and intensity. I swore I'd never touch anything again, and bit by bit my family began to relax.
"In the first week of May I received a letter from one of the universities, the one I badly wanted to go to, saying that if I wished to send some samples from my portfolio I would be considered for a freshman scholarship in the fall. I went through the stuff I'd been doing, and somehow it didn't look as good as I'd thought it had. The next day I laid it all out, and I was appalled. I'd done nothing but crap since January. There was not one piece that wasn't sloppy and careless, and what was worse, it was all false, pretentious, shallow. Typical druggie stuff. I flushed the various leaves and tablets down the toilet and that afternoon told Andy to take a jump and got to work.
"As I said, that was early May. Just before my eighteenth birthday." She paused and wiped the palms of her hands on her knees. "Could I have a drink? Yes, that would be fine. Thank you.
"Early May. In mid-May Mrs. Brand called and asked me to babysit. She was a neighbor I'd worked for before. Some of my regulars didn't ask me much that spring—word gets around in a small town, and I wasn't exactly discreet. Well, this was their anniversary, and I think my aunt reassured her that I was okay. I needed the money, so I took my paint box and went along at about eight o'clock.
"They had two kids, a boy of fifteen, who had some kind of a play rehearsal at school that night, so he couldn't babysit, and yes, a little brown-haired girl, aged six. Jemima, but we all called her Jemma. She was in bed when I got there, but I went in to let her know I was there, and when I checked again at eight-thirty she was asleep.
"The son came in a bit before ten, had something to eat, and flirted a little, or tried to, but I was deeply into this piece that was going so well, the first solid, honest thing in a long time. I nodded my head a few times until he took the hint and went off to bed. The parents got home a few minutes before midnight, and I started packing away my box. When the mother went in to check on the kids, the girl was dead. Lying on the floor. Strangled. Naked."
Vaun looked curiously at her hands, which were trembling. "I haven't told anyone this story in fifteen years.
"I just stood there in the corner of the kitchen for the next hour, totally stunned. The doctor and police came, then more police, detectives, and then somebody thought to look at my painting.
"Have you ever had a leech on you? No? It's the most desperately revolting feeling, to find this horrible, slimy, slow-moving thing attached to your skin, sucking away at you. That's exactly how the policemen looked at me after seeing the canvas. I saw that look a lot in the next few months.
"That painting convicted me. Oh, there were a lot of other things, of course, from my history of psychiatric treatment to my use of LSD and what I'd done in March, which came out early on. But the painting clinched it. If I'd had a decent lawyer I might have tried to plead insanity, but as it was, the painting stood there for all to see, evidence that I was a coldhearted and ruthless murderer, a mad, artistic, murdering cuckoo in their nest.
"You see, what I'd been working on was a picture of Jemma as I'd actually seen her the week before. I had been out walking, thinking about what I wanted to do for the scholarship portfolio, when Jemma appeared. She didn't see me. She'd obviously been down in the pond catching pollywogs, which she wasn't supposed to do, and had her dress and underpants off so she wouldn't get mud on them, and she looked so amazing, like some pale wood sprite, totally at ease with her nakedness. She spotted a butterfly and dropped her clothes to go racing up the hill after it, and at the top of the hill the new green grass was so soft looking, you could just see her decide to roll in it. I knew I'd have to tell her that she mustn't do that any more, for her own protection, but for a few minutes I just enjoyed the sight of this nature child. At the end of it she just lay there, all alone in the universe, head back in the grass, looking at the clouds, and I knew I had my main piece for the portfolio. The colors were perfect, the position technically challenging, and there was this subtle innocent exuberance that I knew I could capture. And I did. It was a good, solid painting, one of the best I'd ever done, and it sent me to prison for ten years because she was found in exactly that position, arms sprawled, head back, and naked.
"I know now that the whole trial was a farce. There wasn't enough money for a proper lawyer, so I had a public defender, who was a total incompetent, but what did I know? I couldn't imagine those twelve people would actually believe the prosecuter's accusations, they seemed so utterly absurd. Once when he was going on and on about Timothy Leary and the hippie movement being anti-Church and the painting being a crucifixion scene because Jemma's father was a deacon in the local church, I actually laughed, it was so ridiculous. That was a big mistake, I realized later, but by then the verdict was in.
"The first few months in prison were pretty hellish, but after that things calmed down. They let me paint for a few hours every day, and my aunt sent endless supplies of pastels and Conte crayons and paper. I learned to walk very quietly around certain inmates, and I made a lot of flattering drawings. That was my first taste of prostitution." Her smile was gentle, and ugly.
"I had been in for just short of three years when there was a riot at some low-security prison in the Midwest, and all of a sudden the press was full of stories about how prisoners were being coddled instead of punished, and the law-and-order people grabbed onto us. Our prison had a reputation of being more humane than some, which I suppose was why I was sent there, because of my age. Some newspaper decided to run an expose of the place, as an example, and the powers-that-be were forced to crack down on us. I learned all that afterwards. The first thing I knew about it was when my painting privileges were taken away. Two days later there was a sweep through the cells and all my supplies disappeared. It was like when I was seven, only now I had no parents who I knew, underneath the confusion, loved me. Now I had nothing.
"And you know the funny thing? The relief was tremendous. I had carried the burden of this gift since I was two years old, and it had ruined my whole world. Now it was all over, it had been taken away from me, and I had no control any more, none whatsoever. I felt as if I were floating, and I could let go. So I did. At first they thought I was, as they called it, 'being difficult,' instigating a hunger strike I suppose, and they slapped me into solitary confinement. When they came to get me out, I was catatonic.