She reached under the pile of clothes, toppling sweaters and scarves and art supplies to the floor, searching with her fingers. Once she found her bent-corner sketchbook and grabbed a pencil from her desk, she flipped open to an empty page and began to transcribe.
Within a few minutes, the gentle swish of charcoal had rendered a black-and-white version of her dream. Evie propped the pencil against her lip, not quite satisfied. There was too much missing, too much still hiding in her brain.
It needed color.
She glanced at the acrylics, now lying on the floor with the clothes. Who was she really punishing if she didn’t paint? Evie didn’t like the answer.
Anyway, it was past noon and based on the lack of response to her yell at the sheep, Papá wasn’t home early like he promised. There was nothing comforting about knowing nobody could hear her scream in this tiny, moss-covered hobbit hole. Refusing to paint wouldn’t change any of that.
She forced herself off the bed, pulled the red crocheted beret Abuela had made over her bedhead hair, and slid her feet into flip-flops. Icelandic weather be damned. Her jaw tightened as she shoved all of her supplies into her leather cross-body satchel and tucked a canvas under her arm. Screw it. She’d barely left this room since they arrived. If an orchard really grew in Iceland, she wanted to see it for herself.
SHE WAS THROUGH the cottage and out the door in moments, gaining elevation through wet grass with every slippery step. The chilly wind breathed down her neck as she dodged sheep pellets littering her way. Maybe her shoe choice was ill conceived after all.
When she crested the hill, the most sensational feeling of déjà vu silenced the swishing of her silk pajama pants and she froze mid-stride. The horizon opened onto a show-stopping panorama.
Holy shit.
There really was an orchard in Iceland—an exact replica of the one from her sketchbook and her dream. Little details swam to the surface in her mind, bit by bit, as she made her feet move again, toes pointing and planting down in the spongy earth.
Dozens of cherry trees danced in the lukewarm breeze. Their sloping rows couldn’t have been more symmetrical if they were drawn on lined paper. They clung to the hillside as though determined, at some perfect moment, to slide into the glassy water below.
Rays of sunlight glittered a magnificent sheen on waxy leaves and decadent red globes. Something enchanting shimmered in the leftover raindrops clinging to them. And just beyond the orchard on the edge of the water, a barn-like building loomed, painted cherry red to match. A few cars sat in the parking area out front. Across the distance of the water, a white lighthouse trimmed in deepest crimson jutted from the horizon, standing bastion at the edge of the sea.
Evie had intended to set up and paint on the hill, but sweet-smelling breezes beckoned her forward and the landscape drew her into its essence. One moment she stood on the hill, taking in the scenery—the next, she stood at the fence in the back of the orchard, staring at the largest tree among them, so dazed she didn’t remember the walk itself.
There was something different about this tree, and not just because it was the first one she came to after climbing through the bars of the white fence . It tugged at her heartstrings, a vague sense that it anchored everything below it. She set her supplies against a paint-chipped post. The soil under her feet gripped her flip-flop treads as she walked, making a sucking slurp when she stepped in the wettest spots. When she reached the shelter of the shade, she stilled, feeling oddly at ease. Welcomed, even.
A cluster of cherries hung from a branch at eye-level, as if the tree reached out to hand them to her. The delicate ruby bulbs glistened as they touched her fingertips. She plucked a few and took them back to her spot by the fencepost, rolling one between her thumb and forefinger. The fragrance squeezed moisture into her mouth.
She plopped one past her lips as she sank to the earth and set her tabletop easel on the ground. Silky flesh separated under her teeth, and the pulpy middle melted on her tongue, perfectly ripe and alive with possibility. She discarded the pit on the ground next to her. As she chewed the next two and propped her sketchbook against the fencepost, her dream’s details materialized in fragments.
But was it a dream? It felt familiar, somehow—like a song she’d once heard but had forgotten the words to. She hurriedly set up her paints, determined not to lose her grip on it. The wet ground seeped through the thin silky pajamas and brought her back to reality, if only briefly, making her wish she’d brought a blanket to sit on. But a wet butt was a minor inconvenience in the urgency of the moment. She had to paint the scene tickling her cerebellum while it was fresh, emerging in bright flashes of light. It was just like all the times a song made her grab a canvas and rush to relay the scene, sometimes without a sketch.
This time, there was no song to reference, no pause button to press, only a glimpse pinging around in her brain. She trembled as she mixed colors with sticky fingertips, hurrying to smear the paint and then wipe the excess on her knees.
The first layer transpired into a barely coherent clump of color. Blues and grays and whites washed the sky; swaths of green bathed the ground. A second layer added depth and distance. Tree trunks of umber reached toward the sky with bony fingers. Rings of sunlight rimmed feathery white clouds.
By the time she’d painted the third layer, her hand moved of its own volition. Like the minute hand of a clock, it knew exactly where to go without having to be told, and for just the right amount of time.
Cherries thudded to the ground intermittently around her like an irregular heartbeat. The breeze exhaled a gasp that stole her crocheted hat and tossed it on the ground. She barely noticed as her hair whipped around her face and brushed her collarbone.
Once she’d swept verdant leaves onto climbing branches and speckled them with cherries, she focused on the alabaster blob in the foreground. It was the only thing in her painting she didn’t have the advantage of glancing up to reference, because it huddled only within the confines of her subconscious—an abstract place she could only reach with a paintbrush.
Slow and patient, stroke by stroke, it became a boy.
The sinewy lines threading his torso and arms came to life beneath her smudged hands. She stared at the rendering, biting her quivering bottom lip. He had a farm boy’s body, scratched and dotted with dirt. A tattoo engraved his right bicep, a black symbol she’d never seen before. Three lowercase i’s leaned into one another—they looked like lit candles converging—and were surrounded by a circle. She painted the symbol without even glancing at her sketchbook for comparison, as though she’d invented the intricacies herself.
As she added final touches—golden highlights in his messy blond hair, dimples twinkling against a stern jaw (left one deeper than the right), distressed denim clinging to his long legs, and a silver bucket overflowing cherries at his feet—her heart sped to a satisfied staccato.
Decidedly not Ben Benson. If this boy were real, he’d know the difference between Iceland and Greenland. She’d bet on that.
A dreamy haze swam laps around her as she studied her work. It was easily the most beautiful thing she’d ever painted. Completely ridiculous, but she was crushing on a boy she made up, falling in love with a song she’d never even heard.
CHAPTER FOUR