The Unexpected Everything

When a group came in for the tour that Toby had forgotten she was scheduled to give, she hustled out to the front entrance, leaving me and Clark alone to wander around the museum. Which, I realized, wasn’t actually the worst way to spend a rainy day. We walked around, making up backstories and names for the people in the paintings as we walked.

When we reached the gallery where my mother’s picture was, I knew I could have steered him away, or told him I was museumed out, or something. But I didn’t; I took his hand and led him to where my mom’s painting was. I’d told him about it, here and there, but he’d never seen it before. And even though anyone who paid the Pearce’s entrance fee could see this picture, standing next to Clark as he looked at it, I was feeling somehow exposed—like he was seeing something I usually kept to myself.

“So?” I asked, keeping my voice light, like I really didn’t care about the answer, even though my heart was pounding hard in my chest.

“It’s great,” Clark said, looking at the painting for a moment longer before looking at me, and squeezing my hand. “It’s really wonderful, Andie. Your mom was so talented.”

“She was,” I said, looking at the way the stars seemed to glow against the canvas, the way you could somehow feel the wind that was blowing through the trees.

“So what are you looking at?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think there was meant to be something else there,” I said, gesturing to the bare section of the canvas, the faint etchings of pencil lines that I’d spent way too long trying to make sense of. “But I don’t know what it was.”

Clark nodded, eyes still on the painting. “So did you pose for this, or . . . ?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t ever known where the inspiration for the painting had come from, only that my mother had started working on it late one night when she was sick, before my dad had quit the campaign and moved home again. “I don’t know where it came from,” I said, and as I did, I felt the hollow realization in my stomach that because I had never asked her about it when I had the chance, now I would never know.

“Because you’re definitely looking at something,” Clark said, almost more to himself, as he leaned closer to the picture again. “Right? I mean, look at your sight line.”

“I know,” I said, shaking my head. “But I don’t think we’re ever going to know what it is.”

“Well, maybe not,” Clark said after a moment, his words coming slowly, like he was still putting something together. “Was this supposed to be somewhere? That you know of?”

“It’s the field behind our old house,” I said. I had recognized it as soon as I’d seen my mother start sketching it out. You could see the top of our roof in the distance and the remnants of the tree house my dad had tried to build for me before he’d admitted it was outside of his capabilities and I’d admitted that I actually hadn’t wanted a tree house. “Why?”

“Because I have an idea,” Clark said, raising his eyebrows at me.

Twenty minutes later I sat in Clark’s passenger seat, feeling my heart beat harder the closer we got to East View. When Clark had suggested going to my old house to see if we could find out anything, I’d been ready to tell him that I didn’t want to go back there, that I’d avoided it for five years. But I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I’d found myself agreeing and giving him directions. I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t want to have to hide from it any longer. And Clark seemed so convinced that we’d find our answer to what was happening in the painting that I found myself wondering if maybe this could be true. The closer we got, I found myself anticipating every turn, every landmark, even though I hadn’t been down these streets in five years.

“You’ll be coming up to it on the left,” I said as he signaled and turned onto our street.

“Gotcha.” The rain started to come down harder, and he increased his wiper speed.

I turned to face the window, feeling like maybe I was ready to do this after all. That it probably had been ridiculous to avoid it for all these years.

“Where is it?” Clark asked, looking out to the side of the road, then at me.

I started to answer, but it got caught somewhere in my throat as I stared out through the rain-streaked window. I somehow couldn’t get my brain to understand, to process what was right in front of me. I looked around, wondering if there was any way I’d taken us down the wrong street, if we’d turned too early . . .

But even as I thought it, I knew that wasn’t the case. Clark pulled to the side of the road, and I got out of the car as soon as he put it in park, not even caring about the rain, and walked across the street, to the spot where the farmhouse had been.

But it wasn’t there.

There wasn’t anything there. Just the plot of land, slightly overgrown, though I was pretty sure I could still see where the foundation had once been.

I was getting soaked; the rain was running down my face and I wasn’t even moving to wipe it away. So the house had been torn down. My dad had sold it; I knew that much, so maybe it had been here for a while before it was knocked down? I looked around, as though I was going to get some information from the deserted street, but there wasn’t anything. Just an empty space where our house, my whole world when I was a kid, had been. And now, unless you’d known, you wouldn’t even stop to slow down and look at it. You would never have known anything was there at all.