a soul of tremendous vitality and a heart so vulnerable that the beat of
his own was quickened even in sleep.
They found Lindsey upstairs, in the extra bedroom that served as her
at-home studio. The easel was angled away from the door, so Hatch
couldn’t see the painting. Lindsey’s blouse was half in and half out of
her jeans, her hair was in disarray, a smear of rust-red paint marked
her left cheek, and she had a look that Hatch knew from experience meant
she was in the final fever of work on a piece that was turning out to be
everything she had hoped.
“Hi, honey,” Lindsey said to Regina. “How was school?”
Regina was flustered, as she always seemed to be, by any term of
endearment. “Well, school is school, you know.”
“Well, you must like it. I know you get good grades.”
Regina shrugged off the compliment and looked embarrassed.
Repressing the urge to hug the kid, Hatch said to Lindsey, “She’s going
to be a writer when she grows up.”
“Really?” Lindsey said. “That’s exciting. I knew you loved books, but
I didn’t realize you wanted to write “Neither did I,” the girl said, and
suddenly she was in gear and off, her initial awkwardness with Lindsey
past, words pouring out of her as she crossed the room and went behind
the easel to have a look at the work in progress, “until just last
Christmas, when my gift under the tree at the home was six paperbacks.
Not books for a ten-year-old, either, but the real stuff, because I read
at a tenth-grade level, which is fifteen years old.
I’m what they call precocious. Anyway, those books made the best gift
ever, and I thought it’d be neat if someday a girl like me at the home
got my books under the tree and felt the way I felt, not that I’ll ever
be as good a writer as Mr. Daniel Pinkwater or Mr. Christopher Pike.
Jeeze, I mean, they’re right up there with Shakespeare and Judy Blume.
But I’ve got good stories to tell, and they’re not all that
intelligent-pig-from-space crap.
Sorry. I mean poop. I mean junk. Intelligent-pig-from-space junk.
They’re not all like that.”
Lindsey never showed Hatch-or anyone else-a canvas in progress,
withholding even a glimpse of it until the final brush stroke had been
applied. Though she was evidently near completion of the current
painting, she was still working on it, and Hatch was surprised that she
didn’t even twitch when Regina went around to the front of the easel to
have a look. He decided that no kid, just because she had a cute nose
and some freckles, was going to be accorded a privilege he was denied,
so he also walked boldly around the easel to take a peek.
It was a stunning piece of work. The background was a field of stars,
and superimposed over it was the transparent face of an ethereally
beautiful young boy. Not just any boy. Their Jimmy. When he was alive
she had painted him a few times, but never since his death-until now. It
was an idealized Jimmy of such perfection that his face might have been
that of an angel. His loving eyes were turned upward, toward a warm
light that rained down upon him from beyond the top of the canvas, and
his expression was more profound than joy. Rapture.
In the foreground, as the focus of the work, floated a black rose, not
transparent like the face, rendered in such sensuous detail that Hatch
could almost feel the velvety texture of each plush petal. The green
skin of the stem was moist with a cool dew, and the thorns were
portrayed with such piercingly sharp points that he half believed they
would prick like real thorns if touched. A single drop of blood
glistened on one of the black petals. Somehow Lindsey had imbued the
floating rose with an aura of preternatural power, so it drew the eye,
demanded attention, almost mesmeric in its effect. Yet the boy did not
look down at the rose; he gazed up at the radiant object only he could
see, the implication being that, as powerful as the rose might be, it