Bettina shrugged. “I wondered…”
Lisette reached forward and brushed a lock of hair away from Bettina’s brow. Bettina tensed, but the gesture was friendly, not flirtatious.
“I can see you in all the others,” Lisette said. “But in this piece—” She indicated the painting on her easel. “I want others to see you, too.” She smiled again. “It’s early yet, but the likeness will come.”
Some of the paintings from earlier sessions hung on the wall of the studio and Bettina turned to look at them. They were unframed, the paint on many of them still not quite dry. Their colors seemed to leap out from the canvas toward the viewer, barely tamed to Lisette’s will, pigments laid on with thick brush strokes, complementaries pulsing against each other. Try though she might, Bettina could see nothing of herself in even one of them.
“What is it I’m missing when I look at them?” she asked.
“You’re searching for form,” Lisette said, “where I’ve painted only the impression of what the form clothes.”
Bettina shook her head, still not getting it, but before she could speak, Lisette went on, saying, “How can I explain this better? You carry yourself with a languid grace, as though nothing matters, but one has only to look in your eyes to see that for you, everything matters. Under the skin, intense fires burn. Standing near you, I can almost feel the heat.” She made a motion with her hand, encompassing the abstracts that hung on the wall. “These are about the fire. Now I want to clothe the fire with your skin.”
Bettina glanced at Lisette, then turned back to regard the paintings in a new light. Bueno, she thought. This would teach her to make assumptions. Because now she understood. Lisette hadn’t been simply playing with color. Instead, she saw la brujería and that was what she had been painting. Her abstracts were like small windows looking into la epoca del mito. They captured images of myth time, how the trace of it himg from Bettina’s shoulders like a cloak, vibrant, but puzzling in all its mystery and confusion.
“I see it now,” she said. She turned away from the paintings and smiled. “But we all carry that light inside ourselves. I’m not special.”
“Perhaps,” Lisette said. “Perhaps not. But in you it seems more intense. More tightly focused.”
Bettina almost laughed, thinking what her abuela would have thought to hear this. The most-used phrase in her grandmother’s vocabulary had been, “¡Presta attention!” It was always, “pay attention.”
“¡Presta atencion, chica!” Because Bettina’s mind had always been wandering, her attention captured by everything and anything and not always the task at hand. There was no place in the mysteries for a sonadora, a daydreamer. Only for true dreamers. “Remember this one small piece of advice,” Abuela would say. “You must always be focused. You must see everything at once, as it is, or you will lose yourself in all the possibilities of what might be, and for you and I, who can so easily slip into la epoca del mito, that could take us a very great distance indeed. It could take us so far we might never return.”
“You’re amused,” Lisette said, bringing Bettina back to the studio from that place where her memories had taken her.
Bettina nodded. “I was thinking of my grandmother. When I was young, her one complaint to me was always that I wasn’t focused enough.”
“Something you’ve outgrown, I assume.”
“So it would seem,” Bettina agreed, though she wasn’t entirely sure. Sometimes she felt she was still too much the sonadora, not the true dreamer. Not serious enough. Though, she remembered, Abuela could be anything but serious, too. If the fancy happened to take her, she could readily play la tonta loca, the crazy fool.
Lisette walked back behind her easel and picked up a brush.
“Do you have time for one more twenty-minute session?” she asked.
“Sí,” Bettina said.
But she paused as she passed the window, her gaze caught by a stranger she saw standing on the lawn by the tree line. Something in his stance reminded Bettina of that part of la epoca del mito where el lobo had taken her last weekend, of the priest she’d seen by the salmon pool whose existence el lobo had denied. The figure wore a dark overcoat with an old-fashioned cut and stood with his back to them, facing the forest.
Even from this distance Bettina could see how la brujena clung to him, like shadows to the branches of the trees beyond him. It was not a healer’s magic, not quite witchcraft either, but something new to her. Potent and strange.
“Ah,” Lisette said, joining her by the window. “The Recluse is back,”
“The who?”
Lisette shrugged. “I don’t know her name, but she winters every year in the old cottage—you know, the original one that Hanson’s supposed to have built and lived in. She usually moves in again around the end of November, the beginning of December,”
Bettina remembered seeing smoke rising from its chimney the other night, but that hadn’t struck her as odd. She’d thought that one of the writers was living in it.
“This is the first time I’ve seen her this year,” Lisette went on. “I wonder where she spends her summers?”
Bettina turned to look at her. “You keep saying ‘her’ and ‘she,’ but…?”
Lisette smiled. “Oh, I know she looks butch, but she’s a woman, the same as you or me.” Her smile broadened a little. “Well, probably more like me than you, if you know what I mean.”
Bettina returned her gaze to the stranger who was walking along the tree line now, her face in profile. She still didn’t look like a woman to Bettina. Not with her short-cropped hair and strong jaw, the man’s gait and the masculine set to her features. Bettina thought of Kellygnow’s housekeeper Nuala. She might dress as a man, but for her it seemed more a choice of style and a man’s clothing could do nothing to disguise Nuala’s womanly shape. This woman Lisette had referred to as the Recluse appeared to be deliberately confusing the issue.
And she still reminded Bettina of the priest by the salmon pool, though she wore no priest’s collar today. La brujena had been strong then, too, but she had put that down as their being in myth time.
“Is she a writer or an artist?” Bettina asked.
Lisette shrugged. “I don’t really know. She doesn’t mix with the rest of us. Someone told me a couple of years ago that she’s an old friend of the family—the Hansons, that is.”
“I thought they were all dead and gone—that some foundation looked after all the business now.”
“It does,” Lisette said. “But that doesn’t preclude special dispensation for certain individuals. Consider yourself. I don’t think there’s ever been a model in residence for as long as you’ve been—not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
“And speaking of modeling,” Bettina said.
Lisette nodded. “Yes. We should get back to it. I’m sure someone else has you booked for the afternoon.”
Bettina shook her head. “Not today. I’m going to work with Salvador after lunch.”
Lisette had been squeezing some paint onto her palette, but paused now.
“Really?” she said.
“Mmhmm.”
“Lord, you even have the look of one who relishes the idea.”
“Oh, I do. I love physical labor. It helps center me.”
Lisette smiled. “I’ll take paint on my hands over dirt under my nails any day.”