My Sweet Annie

28

I was hyper aware of the silence and stillness of the house as I stood at Gran's studio door. I drew a breath and pushed the door open, the slow whine of the hinges raising goosebumps along my arms. I regretted leaving Porkie to her snooze downstairs: I felt very alone.

The room was peopled with shadows. I stood rooted to the spot for a moment, wanting to go back downstairs, but more than that, I wanted to find the painting my gran had mentioned in her diary.

When I flicked on the yellowish overhead lights, the shadows retreated.

I stepped into the studio, hugging my sweater tightly around myself. I still didn't feel comfortable in this room. It was a sacred space where I, a woman without sufficient artistic spirit to wrap a gift, did not belong. It was a room where Gran's presence was abundant and, simultaneously, her absence was overwhelming. Recalling the brush of cold fingers on my hand in Tim's room, I turned to peer into the hallway.

I was alone, or seemed to be, and I shook myself. Get a grip, Tab.

When I had come up to the studio with Anabel, I hadn't noticed any snowy landscapes, but I had been most focused on Ana at the time, so there was a lot about the room I hadn't taken in properly. When we had lived here, this had been my mom's bedroom. It had been only on our rare visits back to Gran's that I had seen the space as a studio, so it was still new to me and wildly interesting, the most chaotic place in the cluttered, tidy house.

Apart from the few easels that stood in the open space at the center of the room, crowded by stools jumbled with stuff, there were other furnishings: a pair of mismatched dressers, one tall and one low; a table on which stood a wire drying rack with a few pages tucked in; a large bookshelf stacked with art books, photos, and knick knacks; and a lumpy old love seat which, of course, had an afghan draped over the back. Near the closet was a deep sink Gran had installed to allow her to wash brushes and palettes. On every wall hung canvases, framed paintings, textiles, and cork boards pinned with photos and newspaper clippings. Between the furnishings, canvases were stacked against the walls, too. Every horizontal space in the room was overwhelmed with sketches, magazines, boxes, rolls of canvas, and bizarre trinkets, like a doll house Christmas tree, a plush Kermit the Frog, and a cookie jar shaped like a cat wearing a floral hat.

The strangest objects must've been for Gran's still lifes. For most of her artistic career, she had focused on portraits and landscapes, but I could see from a couple of the canvases hung on the walls that she had started to explore the genre.

I began to look through the canvases, carefully flipping them forward like I used to flip through CDs at the store, trying not to touch them too much. Would fingerprints damage the paint? I had no idea.

"There's Kermit," I murmured, laughing at the bemusing scene of the plush toy flopped on a checkered tablecloth, a stack of books and the cookie jar behind him and a very real-looking ladybug on his hand. Paw. Foot? Whatever you would call it for a frog.

I pulled myself away from my scrutiny of the still life, continuing my perusal of the canvases. I found a couple other snowy scenes, but they weren't the ones I was looking for. I wanted to see Gran's painting of her own house. Where had she put it?

The dresser drawers were mostly full of art materials, like paints, brushes, pastels, charcoals, and such a variety of sketchbooks and drawing pads that Gran could have stocked her own art supply store. I smiled as I poked through the stuff, finding crumpled paper towels and mangled, mostly-empty tubes of paint among unopened stock. She never would have put an empty box back into the pantry, but in her studio, chaos reigned.

A couple of the drawers were filled with used sketchbooks and stacks of drawings. I thumbed through some of these, completely absorbed. The dates jotted at the bottoms indicated that none of the work was too recent. There were pastoral scenes, sketches of Myrtle's Main Street shop fronts. There were sketches of Mom, of Tim and me, of Grandpa. I found a portrait of a young Royal that captured him so perfectly that I could almost see the lines that would seam his face decades later. And just in the five minutes or so I spent lightly searching Gran's sketches, I found three more pictures of Anna Elvers, her best friend.

I would have to take a lot more time to go through Gran's artworks. It might be the most difficult part of the entire process of cleaning out the house.

"Where did you put that painting, Gran?" I asked, turning around again, triple checking that it had not been hung on any of the walls. What if she'd sold it? I didn't know why that struck me as so sad a possibility. It might very well have been her last painting. Had she even managed to finish it?

I walked the perimeter of the room, checking and re-checking everywhere, but it wasn't until I peeked behind the low dresser, just on a whim, that I saw the edge of a canvas that had slipped behind.

That was weird. I knelt and slid my fingers back behind the dresser, hooking the canvas and pulling it gently out, hoping I wouldn't smear the paint. Thankfully, whatever kind of paint Gran had used didn't seem like a smearable kind.

There it was: Gran's last snowy landscape, a painting of our house. The house she'd grown up in, and Mom had grown up in, and I had grown up in. It stood proudly in the center-left of the painting, the old ash tree rising behind it and the tree line of the grove shadowing the horizon.

It was beautiful. As I knelt on the studio floor, I drank it in, my heart swelling with pride and love and awe. My grandmother had painted this with her own hands. She had made it from nothing, and somehow, looking at the wintery scene with lights from a Christmas tree glowing in the living room window, I felt that she had managed to capture a lifetime of memories in layers of paint.

The longer I looked at the painting, the more tiny details I made out, from broken branches in the tree next to the house to a bird sitting on the roof to faint rabbit tracks through the snow. There were even shadows in the tree line framing the house, suggestions of trunks beyond the ones that edged the forest, and there...

...There, not far from the tall, winter-brown grasses framing the frozen pond, was a paler shape. A silhouette.

A person had been painted into the scene, standing just inside the woods, looking out at me. I could see the faintest indication of facial features and the clear shape of shoulders, a torso...

Ice skated down my spine. I looked up, my gaze darting around the cluttered studio. It was too quiet. I felt too alone. The colors around me were unsaturated, thin.

Why was this person standing in the woods, not up on the porch or in the yard building a snowman, or even gazing out one of the gold-lit windows?

And why had the painting been slipped behind a dresser? It was perfect.

She didn't want to look at it.

She didn't want to look at this.

I traced the shape of the silhouette with a fingertip. I couldn't tell who it was meant to be. I couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman.

I set the painting on the low dresser, standing it up behind Kermit and the cookie jar. I was eager to return to Porkie's company downstairs; I flicked off the lights and closed the door on my way.

Gran had painted a ghostly silhouette. Maybe she'd seen something in the woods or in the house.

But if Gran had seen something...if Gran had seen a ghost...then whatever was in this house...

...It couldn't be her.