“That was very risky for you, going there.” Rebecca brought my mind back to her office.
My eyes suddenly burned, surprising me. I was so tired after last night, and so tried of feeling criticized. “Everyone from the gallery was going,” I said. “I knew I could go and not drink. I didn’t think it was a big deal. I still don’t.”
Rebecca looked down at my ankle in its walking boot. “What did they say at the ER?” she asked.
“A mild sprain, though it doesn’t feel very mild. They said to ice it. Elevate it. But I have to work.”
“Lisa is worried you might backslide.”
I was angry, but tried not to show it. “I’m not going to backslide,” I said.
“And she’s worried about how your ankle will affect your work,” Rebecca said. “She told me that if you can’t work, she’ll have to fire you and hire someone else, though she sounded so—”
“What?” Fear rose in my chest. “No! I have to do it. I will do it!” The thought of returning to prison was only part of my sudden panic. The mural was mine. The sudden sense of ownership I felt over it stunned me. It was my handsome lumberjack and my old Tea Party ladies and my little skull in the window and my bloody hammer and motorcycle fender. I wasn’t letting anyone else work on it.
“I was going to say she—Lisa Williams—sounded…” She seemed to hunt for a word. “She sounded frantic about you not being able to work on the mural. Something about going against her father’s will, and—”
“I love it, Rebecca,” I interrupted her. “I love what I’m doing with the mural. Restoring it. It’s challenging, and when you see what you’ve done, and you see a bit of the picture go back to the way Anna—the artist—intended … It’s so rewarding.”
“How will you be able to work with your ankle like this?” Rebecca pointed toward the walking boot.
“I don’t know, but I’ll find a way,” I said. “Seriously, I will. My ankle is going to heal one way or another. Maybe it’ll take a week longer if I don’t keep it elevated every minute, but I don’t care. It’ll heal eventually. I cannot lose this job!”
Rebecca hesitated, looking at the papers on her desk. “I believe you,” she said. “I guess you just need to convince Lisa you can keep at it.” She looked up at me. “And how about an AA meeting tonight?”
“Fine,” I said, shoulders slumping. I felt overwhelmed. I needed sleep tonight more than I needed a meeting, but I would agree to anything at that moment to be able to get back to work and keep Lisa happy. “Can I go now?” I asked, wincing as I got to my feet.
She nodded. Gave me a half smile. “No more bars, all right?”
“No more bars,” I agreed, and I half hopped, half walked out of the room.
I’d taken an Uber to Rebecca’s office and now I called another to drive me to the gallery. I wouldn’t be walking anywhere for a while. When I arrived at the gallery, Oliver, Adam, and Wyatt were in the foyer, crouched on the floor as they examined a cracked tile near the folding table, and it was clear to me that Adam and Wyatt knew what had happened. The smell of the white wall paint that was being used throughout the gallery seared my nostrils.
“Here she is!” Adam looked up from the floor. “How’re you doin’? Oliver said you spent the night in the ER.”
“I’m fine,” I said, as I hobbled over to the mural. Damn, my ankle hurt! I could barely read the labels on my paint bottles for the pain.
“Looks like you haven’t slept in a week,” Wyatt said.
Great, I thought.
“How’re you going to climb the ladder with that boot on?” Adam asked.
“Leave her alone, guys.” Oliver got to his feet with the broken tile in his hands. “Let’s focus on replacing this tile, all right?” He handed the pieces to Wyatt, then walked over to me and spoke to me in a whisper. “How’re you doing?”
I nodded. “All right,” I said, whispering back. “Lisa’s angry with me, though. She called my PO. Even talked about firing me.”
“That’s crazy,” he said. “None of it was your fault. And we’ll find a way for you to keep working. I’ll talk to her.”
“No, don’t,” I said, my hand on his arm. I loved having an excuse to touch him. “Might make things worse.”
He hesitated, then nodded. He gestured toward the mural. “Why don’t you focus on everything that’s at chair level for a while,” he said. “It might be awkward, but maybe you can keep your ankle elevated that way. There’s a stool in my other office … my real office down the hall … It should be the right height for you to rest your foot on. What do you think?”
I looked at the mural. The lumberjack’s perfect arm I’d created—or at least, the perfect arm Anna Dale had created and I’d re-created—gave me enormous pleasure, so much so that it nearly erased the misery of the night before. Lisa would consider replacing me? I couldn’t imagine losing this. This work. This joy. And if I lost my work on the mural, I’d also lose my freedom.
“Good idea,” I said to Oliver. “Thanks.”
Oliver disappeared into the interior of the building and returned a moment later with a short stool I recognized from his makeshift office. He set it down for me, then gave me a quick, gentle hug I wished would last longer.
“I would have missed you if Lisa let you go,” he said, and that tiny image of him grew a little bigger in the empty space of my heart.
Chapter 44
ANNA
March 14, 1940
Although there were still some very nippy days, spring definitely began early in Edenton. Quite suddenly, the little town felt like a different place. The waterfront was alive with fishing boats that glittered with herring, and the air near the wharf reeked quite nauseatingly of fish.
“You won’t even notice the smell in a couple of days,” Miss Myrtle assured Anna, who found that impossible to imagine.
Away from the water, gardens bloomed with color, and only then did Anna realize how badly she needed spring and growing things and all those vibrant colors surrounding her. The more color there was in her world, the happier she was, and she thought she now understood her mother’s passion for photographing flowers, preserving them in pictures she could enjoy when the cold weather set in.
Yet Anna wasn’t getting to see—or smell—too much of Edenton’s springtime: she was practically living in the warehouse these days.
Her borrowed cot seemed to worry everyone. Now that she had the cot, she painted well into the evening, refreshed from the nap she often took after Jesse went home to help on the farm. She’d hang a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, turn out the lights, and sleep deeply for twenty or thirty minutes in the shadowy light that slipped in through the big windows. She’d bring a sandwich with her for dinner, and Miss Myrtle complained that she was staying out after dark, which wasn’t “fitting for a single girl.”
The cot was just a simple old khaki-colored thing. It was low to the ground and more comfortable than it looked. Anna covered it with a thin quilt she’d borrowed from her bedroom closet at Miss Myrtle’s house, and she’d nap on a small pillow she’d picked up from Holmes Department Store. The funny thing was, a couple of months ago she never would have considered taking a nap in the warehouse. The creepiness of the place had been too much for her then, even when she was wide awake with her eyes open. She still didn’t like the long walk from her comfortable “studio” end where she had her work and lights and heaters, to the dark and dismal end when she needed to use the lavatory, but she no longer felt afraid. The warehouse was her home away from home now.