Jake looked at Mrs. Mitchell. She shrugged.
Emily dropped the puzzle piece. Reached out. Put her finger down on the trackpad, and swung it across the black frame. The video began sliding by at high speed.
“No, Emily, that’s—” and Mrs. Mitchell grabbed his arm as he reached for the child. Jake froze.
The girl was watching the screen with rapt attention as the video sped by at sixty times its recorded speed.
Emily’s eyelids fluttered as the sped-up version of Jake went through the process of holding one painting up after another—in an endless loop. Her eyes didn’t seem to be looking at the screen, but beyond it, and Jake wondered if she was seeing anything in the random shapes that were snapping by too fast for him to catch. Every now and then he would get a glimpse of a canvas, an image that flashed by slowly enough for his brain to register its shape, but by the time he saw it, it was gone.
Emily sat photo-still as she watched the video, her only movement being that slight twitch in her eyelids. The wind and rain bombarded the house and the images of the canvases flicked by in jagged splashes of color against Jake’s almost unmoving form in the frame.
As he watched the girl, Jake forgot the mug of coffee cradled in his hands. Frank drank his absentmindedly and his attention was divided between the girl and the storm tearing through the neighborhood outside. The sea was funneling down the street in a two-foot-thick surge. A big wheeled garbage can somersaulted down the middle of the saltwater river, lid flapping like the jaw of a basking shark straining for plankton.
Emily watched the blue-glow screen, enrapt. By the second minute, she was whistling through her nose, a rhythmic hiss that was almost musical.
The video came to an end and Emily gasped. Without pausing, she drew her finger back across the touchpad, and the video began to crawl backward. The jerky, puppetlike movements that Jake’s alternate self had just danced through began to run in reverse, and it had the same unreal quality to it as Emily’s upside-down puzzle making.
The girl was humming now, a thick, deep-throated buzz like a power transformer heating up. Jake understood how ignorant thirteenth-century peasants could see autistics as being possessed; their world was so distant, so impenetrable, that there was no way to equate it with the nuts and bolts of the average mind. He watched her stare at the video—even if you ignored that almost complete upside down puzzle on the floor—and realized there was no way to label this girl as average. Not even in the abstract. Which said something.
The video ended.
Emily’s eyes stayed locked beyond the screen, her eyes focused on the pixilated universe inside the laptop.
“Did you see anything, Emily?” Jake asked, trying to keep the edge of hope—or was that hysteria?—out of his voice. Without her, they were at a dead end.
Dead.
End.
Skinned.
The little girl stared ahead, unmoving.
“Sweetie?” Mrs. Mitchell asked. “Did you see anything? Was there anything there?”
No movement.
Jake felt the adrenaline of expectation fizzle into the dull ache of despair. He began to stand.
Emily clicked to life.
She stood up and her expression changed from blank disregard to intense concentration. She stomped out of the room and Jake continued to rise but Mrs. Mitchell put her hand on his shoulder and shook her head. “She’s on a mission now. Maybe it has something to do with you, maybe she’s just off to stack the soaps in the bathroom, but she’s going to do something.”
Frank had stopped sipping his coffee and waited for the girl to return, absorbed by the whole weird process. Jake sat stone-still on the sofa beside Mrs. Mitchell, waiting for—what?
Off in another room there was the sound of a drawer being emptied, of utensils being gone through, then it stopped. More heavy footsteps as the girl moved to another part of the house. A door opened. Closed.
Emily came back into the living room carrying a beach ball under one arm and a pair of scissors and a few felt markers in her hand. She walked over to the stereo, snapped the power on, and pressed play on the CD player. The high-octane music of Johnny Puleo and the Harmonica Rascals came on in full volume.
Mrs. Mitchell leaned over and spoke into Jake’s ear. “She loves that CD. It’s all I’m allowed to play.” Something in her tone suggested that she wasn’t all that fond of the music.
Jake watched the girl, mesmerized.
Emily sat down on the floor and locked the beach ball between her legs. She turned it over like a gemologist looking for a flaw, and when she found whatever she was looking for, stabbed the scissors into the thick rubber surface. The ball sighed, then let its life out in a long protracted fart.
Then the little girl with the expressionless face went to work with her scissors and magic markers.
61
It took Emily Mitchell eleven minutes to finish her scissor surgery on the beach ball as Johnny Puleo and his Harmonica Gang belted out musical mayhem as accompaniment. She worked quickly, without time for reflection, her fingers deftly manipulating the skin of the ball like an Old World tailor going at a pattern. To most people it would have looked like there was no thought or deliberation behind her actions—just raw industry. Jake recognized the innate ability of someone born with a gift and for one of the few times in his life he understood why the people he worked with couldn’t understand how he did something—it was a simple lack of language.
Emily slashed at the rubber with her scissors, turning the wrinkled skin this way and that as she made precise cuts in the material. When she was done, her thick black bangs were plastered to her forehead with sweat and the bright yellow barrette that secured them hung lopsided by her temple.
She laid the ball out on the floor, colored side down, and the hundreds of cuts had reduced it to a flat plane, myriad small irregularly shaped shards barely connected by thin strands of rubber. Jake recognized these shards as a miniature model of the weird little canvases piled up at the beach house. The pieces were not independent of one another, and the gestalt was roughly the shape of a lopsided lobster with odd, clubbed feet and a deformed body, formed by thousands of small interconnecting scales—each denoting one of Jacob Coleridge’s blobs of madness.
She made her last snip in the ball and lay the scissors gently down on the floor. Then she picked up the markers and began coloring in her handiwork. At one point she stopped and stood up and Jake wondered what was wrong. But she just walked over to the CD player and hit Repeat.
“She only likes the first four songs,” Mrs. Mitchell offered as explanation.
Emily returned to the carpet by the sofa and went back to work like a high-speed robot programmed to color.
It took her another nine minutes of coloring in the loosely connected bits of rubber ball until she was finished. She stopped, placed the markers on the floor beside the scissors, and went back to work on her upside down puzzle.
Mrs. Mitchell looked over at Jake and shrugged. “I guess that’s it.”
Jake looked at the ball, laid out like a dissection in a biology class.
Mrs. Mitchell shrugged. “Looks kind of like some of the pieces on your video.”
Jake stared into the swirling rubber puzzle, trying to pick out details that made some sort of sense.
It was Frank who said, “It’s upside down.”
Jake stood up and walked around to the other side of Emily’s artwork. In the middle of the spider’s body, sprawled out like a gerrymander map, four irregularly shaped pieces of rubber came together and formed the image of a human eye.
“You sonofabitch,” Jake said through his teeth.
“What?” Frank came over and stood beside him.