Toby had seemed thrilled to see me, in person and unkidnapped, and once she verified that I was fine, started complaining about how bored she was. Apparently, it had been a slow day, and since she was still memorizing her docent script, she wasn’t able to give any tours, so she had walked around, familiarizing herself with the paintings and sculptures.
“So,” Toby said, tilting her head as she looked at me, “is this a formal dog-walking service?”
“Ha ha,” I said, glancing down at myself. I’d changed into flip-flops but was still wearing the dress—it seemed easier than going home and changing, and it was going to need to be dry-cleaned anyway.
“I like it,” Toby said, gesturing to me with a flourish. “Andie Walker, dog walker.”
I hadn’t even put that together until now, and I groaned. “Oh no,” I said, shaking my head. “That sounds like something from one of your romantic comedies.”
“Don’t knock the romantic comedies.”
I looked around the courtyard of the small museum, more than ready to change the subject before Toby could start lecturing me about the merits of Sleepless in Seattle again. “Want to give me a tour?”
Toby grinned and straightened her blue blazer. I noticed there was a crest with a P on it sewn over one of the lapels. “Certainly,” she said, in her most grave and serious voice—it had dropped about an octave—and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. “If you’ll follow me, miss . . .”
I followed her past the courtyard and into the museum itself, bracing myself as a wave of memories hit me hard. I actually didn’t need a tour at all, since I knew the Pearce really well. My mother had been an artist by training and had volunteered there for years, organizing the kids’ art program. I’d spent hours there when I was younger, listening to my mom talk through her art-appreciation class, her holiday ornament-making class, her intro-to-sculpture class.
It had never seemed fair to me that I had no artistic talent whatsoever, whereas my mom could conjure whole worlds with just a paper and pencil, or a tiny bit of clay. I’d seen her turn squares of paper into cranes that could fly and packing peanuts into hippos. It was like she was the one person who knew there was a unicorn waiting to be set free from the paper clip. In addition to her framed pieces, which had been all over our old farmhouse, she’d done drawings everywhere—directly onto the walls. She would sketch absentmindedly while she was on hold on the phone—rabbits and huge fire-breathing dragons sharing a beer while a grizzly bear tended bar. Tiny pink mice chasing one another around the walls of my room, keeping up a running commentary about my snoring. An abstract series of lines that turned into waves, that turned into a town, then a city, before the waves came back and everything went back to lines again and then disappeared. That one had been by my mother’s bedside, and I’d wondered ever since if she’d drawn it years ago and I’d only noticed it after she got sick, or if she’d done it after her diagnosis. Although her bigger and more polished pieces had been the ones she was proudest of, it was the farmhouse drawings I thought about first when it came to her art. But the fact that my dad hadn’t told me we were moving, just had me dropped off from camp at our new house in Stanwich Woods, had meant that I hadn’t been able to see them one last time. I hadn’t gotten once last glance at the bashful bear peeking around the corner of the study. He’d always been there, so it was like it had never occurred to me to really look at him, not realizing that one day he might be gone.
I hadn’t been to the Pearce in years, but most of the pieces were still the same. It was a small museum, only five galleries splitting off from a central courtyard. It housed the collection of Mary Anne Pearce, who had been acquiring for decades and had donated her whole collection—to the apparent dismay of her heirs—to the town of Stanwich, along with a grant to build the museum. She and my mother had been close, and Mrs. Pearce had died the year after my mother did. I remembered seeing her at the funeral and thinking how wrong it was, since it was my mom who was supposed to be at Mrs. Pearce’s funeral and not the other way around.
One thing I’d always liked about the Pearce was how eclectic it was. Mrs. Pearce had collected based only on what she liked, which meant it was a little all over the place. There were lots of impressionists, some medieval tapestries, modern sculpture, and Roman statuary. But somehow, it all worked.
“And through here,” Toby was saying, motioning me ahead, and I realized I hadn’t been listening to her, “we have our contemporary gallery. . . .”
“Do lead on,” I said, imitating her serious tone as we walked into the last gallery. A guy wearing an identical blue blazer had been leaning against the wall, blocking a description of the work of Mark Rothko, and he jumped when we walked into the room, standing up straight and pulling a white earbud out of his ear.
“Hey,” he said, as we passed, his eyes landing on me briefly before returning to Toby. “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” Toby said with a shrug as she kept walking, not even looking back at him. “Quiet, you know?”
“Totally,” he said, raising his voice, clearly trying to continue the conversation, even as Toby kept walking away.
“He was cute,” I said to her in a low voice, glancing behind me once to verify this. He was, too—light-brown hair, blue eyes, tall enough for Toby, even with her heels on.
“Gregory?” Toby asked, sounding surprised. “He’s okay, I guess.”
I took a breath to say something about this—when I saw the wall in front of me and stopped short.
Toby walked a few more steps before she realized I wasn’t with her and came to stand next to me. We both looked at the painting in silence for a minute, while I fought down the lump in my throat.
It was a big canvas, taking up most of the wall. I stared at it, drinking it in like I’d never seen it before, when it was probably the painting I was most familiar with—not just in the Pearce, but anywhere. It was of a field at night—overgrown grass and wildflowers and an explosion of stars above. Twelve-year-old me was in the bottom left corner, lying on my back and looking up, one hand reaching toward the sky. It was incredibly detailed, in a way that still took my breath away. I could see the broken and double-knotted lace on my dirty yellow Converse, which had been my favorite that year. I could see the slight tear in the sundress pocket, the dress that was still in my closet somewhere, even though I hadn’t been able to fit into it in years. I could see my crooked bangs, the ones I’d cut that summer myself when I’d gotten annoyed they were in my eyes. The only thing I didn’t recognize was my expression, peaceful and smiling at something just beyond the frame.
Because most of the canvas was so detailed, it always felt a bit like a punch in the gut when your eyes reached the right side and realized that the detail faded away until you were looking at pencil sketches on bare white canvas.
My eyes traveled over the picture to the identifying information at the wall, and I swallowed hard as I read it.
Stars Fell on Alexandra (unfinished). By Molly Walker.
Toby put her arm around my shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “It’s such a good painting, Andie,” she said, her voice quiet. “You know she’d love that it’s here.”