Page 27 of The Starfish Sisters

“He did,” I say, “but not until he was a very, very, very old man.”

“How old?”

“Twenty, which is something like a hundred and two in human years.” I point to her drawing. “You did a great job. Is the girl from a game?”

“Kinda. I mean, she was, and then I drew her my way.” She pats the empty stool next to her. “Do you want to draw, too?”

I glance at Phoebe for permission and she gestures like a game show host—it’s all yours.

First I wander to her side of the enormous table to see what she’s working on. It’s an elaborate, detailed design, yellow and white vinesagainst a forest-green background. I can see where she’s used her fingers to make round spots of yellow along the edge of each big leaf. “Very William Morris,” I say. “Fabric?”

“Wallpaper, actually. It’s become very popular the past couple of years.”

“I love it.”

“Thanks.” She dips a thin brush into a pool of paint and draws a tiny line along a petal. “You sleep well?” Her tone is impersonal, as if she’s talking to a shop clerk. Beneath it, I feel the swirling of all that’s unresolved between us.

I answer in the same tone. “Understatement.”

“Good.” She examines my face. “You look a lot better.”

“I guess Yul Brynner and I will have to move in with you.”

She snorts, and although I was kidding, it stings. I sip my tea.

“Jasmine wants to go to the Pig ’N Pancake for lunch in an hour or so,” Phoebe says. “Want to come?”

I can’t read in her eyes whether she really wants me to, but I’m desperate not to be alone. “That soundssogood.”

“Come draw with me,” Jasmine says. “There’s paper over there, and”—she gestures her hand in a swirl, just like her nana—“all those things. Crayons, pencils, whatever.” She pulls a black metal tin, long and narrow, from the jumble. “Watercolor if you want.”

I settle my tea on the lower table so that it won’t spill on the art, as Beryl taught us, and peel off my sweater and sit down with a fresh piece of paper, feeling the old lure of calm. In those days, I never lacked for ideas and would be drawing before I fully sat, but now I look at the paper and feel frozen by all the years I haven’t done this, by all the bad drawings I will do again until I get the hang of it.

“Just paint color,” Phoebe says, picking up on my discomfort.

I glance at her. As if she feels it, she looks up. “Purple,” she says, her mouth lifting on one side.

“Purple,” I echo, smiling. It was Beryl’s favorite. “The color of morning glories.”

“And pansies!” Phoebe cries.

I raise my hands, spreading them across the horizon. “Sunrises and clouds!”

Phoebe lifts her hands, palms to the sky, and imitates Beryl’s voice exactly: “Sea stars, the beauties of the tide pool.”

I crack up, and so does she, and for a long moment Beryl is in the room with us, and nothing has ever gone wrong.

“Purple,” Phoebe says, and bends over her vines to trace a dark line with a brush no wider than a single hair.

I nod, and begin. But it’s not purple that calls me. Instead, I choose billows of phthalo blue, so bright and water-struck, then some orange, some Mars black. Dots of magenta, too light, so I let the water saturate the cake of watercolor more completely and try again. Better.

Time moves around me in eddies and waves. It’s both now and many other times. Beryl and Phoebe and I painting woodland creatures, learning to draw feathers, playing with patterns. She directed us loosely, gave us little lessons in all kinds of things, offered encouragement and praise. When Joel joined our little crew, his work was head and shoulders above ours. Phoebe was always the better of the two of us, but Joel was in a class apart and Beryl treated him accordingly. A memory of the pair of them bent over one of his nature scenes comes back to me. His black hair loose on his shoulders, Beryl standing next to him, one hand on her hip as she points to something. I wonder if he became a fine artist. His mother left town shortly after—

Well, after everything. After I was sent away. After he burned the church down.

In the today studio, music is playing, something with flutes, and Jasmine swings her foot, tilting her head this way and that. I dip my brush and let go of the outside world. I splash color on the paper and splash some more. I think of Peter, who traveled with me all over theworld, and how he comforted me, sleeping on my pillow with me when I wanted to die of sorrow, right upstairs in the room where I slept last night. Beryl gave me refuge in a world that had been extremely harsh.

What a blessing she was in my life. I suddenly wonder if I could write about her. Lately I’ve been feeling the call to write, more than the journals I still keep.