Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

Well, when I got her there, I looked out. There he was, Mr. Dietrich, just leaving the building, like this—” She put a hand over her eyes, as if she were saluting. “Perhaps he heard it, the bicycle, and turned around.”
    “He was headed south, Molly. To Venus’s apartment.“
    “Oh,” she said.
    “After they married, Harry stayed there.”
    Her lips were drawn up in a tight little pucker.
    “They were husband and wife.”
    “And here I was thinking he’d heard the bike coming, and when he turned, he had to put up his hand to shade his eyes, so he could see better.
    “It would have been better if he had been going the other way. At least then, he wouldn’t have seen it coming. When my time comes,” she said, crossing herself as she spoke, “I don’t want to see a thing.”

Chapter 30
    Is That Lady? I Asked Her

    On my way out, I peeked into the garden. Jackson and Charlotte were there, sitting at the same table, both working intensely. I held the door open for Dashiell and let him lead the way.
    It’s awkward figuring out what to say when you don’t expect a response. Working with Emily once, I thought I could sing a song, tell her my troubles, or read from the telephone book for all the good any of it would do me.
    But every once in a while, she seemed to understand what I was saying. She’d follow some simple instructions or respond appropriately to what I had asked, her actions, not her words, serving as her answer. When I’d asked if she’d hug me good-bye, and to my astonishment, she did, it filled me with the belief that just because I couldn’t understand someone, that didn’t mean that nothing was going on there.
    Just as the nurse had told me about Venus.
    And just as I’d always felt about dogs, that there is far more consciousness, interpretation, and decision making going on there than most humans assume.
    Jackson was doing what Jackson did, dipping his fingers in the green paint, then moving his hands in slow, graceful, swirly patterns over the paper. As I watched from the doorway, I saw that when he finished with the green, he waited for it to dry. While it did, he dipped his fingers into a cup of water and wiped them carefully on a paper towel, as if he w>ere cleaning his brush between colors.
    Charlotte wasn’t sharing materials with Jackson. She was using colored pencils, which she kept close to her and absolutely square with the tabletop. Still, I’d never seen either of them sit near each other, or anyone else for that matter. Had experiencing the trauma of seeing Venus get hit made them bond in their own inscrutable way?
    I walked closer and took the seat next to Jackson. Neither of them looked up. Jackson’s paper had swirls of green on it, the color of the leaves in the garden right after it rained. Now he dipped his fingers in a second color, a bright red, the color of a kid’s wagon, or oxygenated blood. The green had dripped freely, running off his fingers in thin streams. He must have watered it down to speed it up. But the red paint was as thick as pudding, dropping rather than dripping off his fingers, forming clumps and thick lines across the page, pooling in one place where he held his hand still instead of moving it.
    I looked across at Charlotte’s pad, her head bent so low it was inches from the paper, making it difficult for me to see what she was drawing.
    I reached my hand across the table, but not so far that I’d be touching hers.
    “That looks pretty,” I said. “May I see it?”
    Charlotte’s pencil kept moving in a way that made me think she was coloring something in, leaving dense color in one small space. And she was. A moment later, she lifted her head, giving all her concentration to resharpening her pencil. It, too, was red. For a few seconds, like Charlotte, I gave all my attention to the curls of wood coming out of the side of the sharpener, light brown with a red rim, one long piece, reminding me of the way my mother peeled an apple. I used to think it was magic, the way the curling skin got longer and longer as the flesh of the apple was revealed, naked and pale, in the palm of her hand. Then she’d quarter it and hand me a piece, but it was that curl I always wanted, the part I didn’t understand.
    I pulled Charlotte’s pad closer and turned it around. When I saw what she had drawn, I felt my breath catch up in my throat. This time it was a picture of a puli standing over an uneven circle of red, colored so densely and for so