The Painting Read online

  Text copyright © 2017 by Charis Cotter

  Tundra Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers, a Penguin Random House Company

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Cotter, Charis, author

  The painting / Charis Cotter.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9781101918876 (hardback).—ISBN 9781101918883 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8605.O8846P35 2017 jC813′6 C2016-906913-3

  C2016-906914-1

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by Tundra Books of Northern New York, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers, a Penguin Random House Company

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956781

  Edited by Samantha Swenson

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Terri Nimmo and Jennifer Griffiths

  Cover illustration © 2017 by Jensine Eckwall

  Art direction by Terri Nimmo

  Painting on this page reproduced with permission from the Squires family.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v4.1

  a

  For my mother, Evelyn Cotter, 1923–2013

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: The Call

  Part Two: The Old Hollies

  Part Three: The Dreamer

  Part Four: The Secret

  Part Five: The Ghosts

  Part Six: The Haunting

  Part Seven: The Theft

  Part Eight: The Accident

  Part Nine: The Call

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Charis Cotter

  “Take care of yourself!” screamed the White Queen, seizing Alice’s hair with both her hands. “Something’s going to happen!”

  THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE

  CLAIRE

  I WAS COLD. I struggled up through a dream of long white corridors and breaking glass into my freezing bedroom, which was filled with the white light of the full moon. An icy Atlantic breeze inched its way through the gaps in the window frame and slithered around my bed.

  I jumped up, ran to the trunk in the corner and hauled out a red woolen blanket. As I turned to get back in bed, the moon pulled at me, and I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and sat down in the big stuffed armchair. The glowing disc of the moon spilled light in a wide path across the water.

  The beacon from the lighthouse flashed over the silver sea, a steady rhythm, every five seconds. Like a heartbeat. Like a drum.

  “Annie,” I whispered. “Where are you?”

  ANNIE

  THE FIRST TIME I had the dream was the night of Mom’s accident. The house was quiet. A stillness spread out from my parents’ room.

  I lay there for a long time, listening. The curtains were open and a full, silvery moon shone in the window, as bright as a streetlight. Its beam fell on the painting of a Newfoundland lighthouse opposite my bed. It looked different than it did in daylight, transformed by the moonlight into black and white, with sharper outlines and deeper shadows.

  A white seabird with black-tipped wings swooped across the dark clouds—I blinked. For just a second I thought I had actually seen the bird moving across the painted surface. I sat up. As I watched, another bird leaped forward and dived into the silver ocean with a splash.

  “Annie!” called a faraway voice. I scrambled out of bed.

  “Annie!” called the voice again. There was something familiar about it, but it wasn’t coming from downstairs, nor from my parents’ bedroom down the hall. I turned and stared at the painting. I took a step toward it. Now I could see more details: patches of wildflowers by the side of the road leading to the lighthouse, a few sheep grazing on the hill, lights glowing behind the windows of the keeper’s house.

  Suddenly the blades of grass in the foreground trembled. A wave passed through the meadow grasses. Then another. I felt a gust of wind on my face, and a wild, unfamiliar smell filled the room. I could taste salt on my lips and I could hear the seabirds crying as they swooped across the sky.

  “Annie!” cried the voice again. “Come!”

  I took a step forward.

  Then I was inside the painting, standing on the road to the lighthouse, with a surprised sheep raising its head to stare at me and the dark ocean stretching away as far as I could see.

  I rubbed my eyes. It didn’t help. The moonlit landscape was still there all around me, with the sharp Atlantic wind blowing my hair across my face. A sweet scent rose from the long grass as it rippled in the wind.

  “Annie!” called the voice.

  I took a step forward. Then another. The road was mostly sheep-cropped grass, cool under my bare feet, but every now and then I stepped on a sharp stone. The chill wind cut through my blue cotton pajamas.

  Every so often I’d stumble into a puddle of water on the road, and the cold made me gasp. A few steps through squelchy mud and then I was on the grassy path again.

  “Annie!” called the voice again, coming right from the lighthouse above me. I hurried up the road, the rocks digging into my feet, rounded the last corner and I was there.

  The house loomed up, two stories high, with the dark-red lighthouse towering over it. It had two front doors. I knocked on the first one. The knock echoed through the house, but no one came. I knocked again. All I could hear was the ocean waves steadily beating at the rocks below. I knocked one more time. No answer. I pushed open the door and went in.

  I was in a dark hallway. A staircase opposite the door led upstairs.

  “Annie!” The voice was a whisper now, coming from the second floor.

  Slowly I mounted the steps. My bare feet made no sound. A shaft of moonlight shone in through a small window at the top of the stairs, and I could just make out three closed doors to my left.

  “Annie,” came the whisper again, very faint now. It came from behind the first door. I turned the handle and opened it slowly.

  A figure sat by the window, gazing out at the moon hanging over the ocean. It was a girl about my age, with light-brown hair falling over her shoulders. She was wrapped in a red woolen blanket.

  “Hello?” I said.

  The girl screamed and jumped straight up in the air. She came down scrambling and huddled against the window frame, still clutching her red blanket and staring at me with eyes as round as the moon behind her.

  “Sorry,” I said, catching my breath. Her scream had jolted me. “But I thought I heard you calling me.”

  “Annie?” the girl croaked. “Annie, is that you?”

  “I’m Annie, but who are you?”

  She took a faltering step toward me. “You’ve changed. You’re older.”

  “I…uh…older than what?” I said. My head was starting to spin.

  “Older than when I last saw you. You were only four. But don’t you recognize me? I’m Claire, your big sister Claire.”

  I shook my head. “There must be some mistake. I don’t have a sister.”

  She edged a little closer, studying my face and frowning. “You’re definitely Annie, but I don’t know why you look so much older now.”

  Before I could answer, a door slammed and I heard quick footsteps in the hall. The girl lea
ped toward me and started pushing me toward the bed.

  “It’s Mom! Hide!”

  Without thinking, I scrambled under the bed and lay holding my breath as Claire bounced into the bed and the bedroom door slammed open.

  “Claire, what’s wrong? I heard you scream.” The woman had a husky voice and she sounded sleepy.

  “I don’t know,” mumbled Claire. “I guess I had a bad dream.”

  The woman sat down on the bed with a thump and I got a good whack on the head. I just managed not to yell out.

  “What am I going to do with you, Claire?” said the woman, heaving a big sigh. “I thought you were getting past this.”

  “Mmmmphhh.”

  Silence.

  “Are you okay?” said the woman finally.

  “Just let me go back to sleep,” said Claire. Silence.

  A corner of the bedspread was hanging down in front of me. The moon lit up the edge of it. The blue-and-white pattern looked very familiar. I reached out and felt the thick circles of quilted material. I had felt those interlocking circles before. Many times. It was the quilt from my bed, the one I had been sleeping under that very night when I heard the voice calling me. My quilt.

  It happened in the blink of an eye—one minute I was lying under Claire’s dusty bed, my fingers tracing the outlines of circles on the quilt, and the next I was sitting on my bed, the quilt soft under my hand, staring at the painting of the lighthouse. It looked like it had always looked—a quiet seascape with the red tower of a lighthouse stark against the sky. No birds swooping, no sheep raising their heads to look at me. I lay back and pulled the quilt up to my chin and closed my eyes. A dream. It was all a dream.

  CLAIRE

  IT MUST HAVE been a dream. That’s what I told myself the next morning as I sat at the breakfast table stirring brown sugar into my corn flakes. I must have fallen asleep in the chair and dreamed that Annie came back.

  Annie. I’d sat at that window and called her so many times. Hoping she would come back to me. I didn’t care if she was a ghost. I just wanted to see her again.

  After she died I saw her all the time. I didn’t have to call. Every time I opened my closet she’d be there. I’d look up from my desk at school to see her standing beside me. Or she’d be sitting in her usual place at the breakfast table. Or on the sidewalk looking up at the house. Always silent. Always staring at me with unblinking eyes. I was scared to go to the bathroom at night, afraid she would be behind the shower curtain.

  Finally one day while I was watching TV with Nan, Annie appeared beside me on the couch and I lost it. I jumped up and started screaming at her to go away.

  My mom took me to a psychiatrist. He said I was still grieving for my dead sister and then asked me to sit outside while he talked to my mom. The door wasn’t quite shut and I could hear them.

  “Does she blame herself for her sister’s death?” asked the doctor.

  “I don’t know,” said my mother. “It was an accident.”

  “You must do everything you can to reassure her,” said the doctor.

  “I’ve been planning to move out of town,” said my mother. “For a while now. Maybe a new environment will help.”

  “Maybe,” said the doctor.

  The next week we moved away from St. John’s to Crooked Head Lighthouse, in the middle of nowhere, and Annie never came back. No matter how many times I called.

  Sometimes I think I can’t go on living with my heart broken in two like this. It’s supposed to get better in time, that’s what people say. That you stop missing the dead person every minute of every day. But after four years, I still keep hoping she’ll come back to me.

  She was too little to die, too little to go wherever the spirits of the dead go. She still needs me. I still need her. I’m lonely.

  Last night it felt so real. Not like a dream at all.

  I glanced at the old clock on the mantel. Oops. Ten past eight. There were only two weeks left before the holidays, but the nuns teachers were strict. If I was late, I had to stay in for recess.

  I slapped a peanut butter and jelly sandwich together, wrapped it up in wax paper, grabbed an apple and stuffed it all into my schoolbag. Took my raincoat off the peg in the hall and ran out the front door.

  Mom never got up before ten. Or later. She’s a night owl. She trained me when I was seven to get up and make my own breakfast and lunch for school, and I’d been doing it ever since. Annie used to wake me up early and we’d lie in bed talking for a while, then I’d get up and make her breakfast.

  A brisk wind blew off the ocean, ruffling my hair. It was clear, and I could see the headlands climbing into the distance away north and the indigo sea stretching on forever to the east. I set my face to the west and hurried down the path that led to the village. It was a two-mile walk, and I’d have to run part of the way or be late.

  ANNIE

  THE NEWFOUNDLAND PAINTING had been hanging on the wall opposite my bed for about eight months. Before that it had stood behind an old wooden trunk in the attic, wrapped in the blue-and-white quilt, for who knows how long.

  I found it one rainy day when I was looking for my picture books. Once I finally learned how to read at the end of grade two, my mother took all my picture books away and stashed them in the attic. “You’re too old for these now, Annie,” she’d said. I missed them. To me, the pictures of a story were what held my attention. They said so much more than the words. Every once in a while I go up in the attic and look at my books by the dim light from the bare bulb overhead, turning the pages slowly.

  I hadn’t been to the attic for a while, and my mother must have rearranged things, because the cardboard box with my books in it wasn’t where it used to be. As I poked around among the piles of old furniture and boxes, I came across a big wooden trunk that I’d never noticed before. Behind it I could see a lumpy shape, wrapped in a blue-and-white quilt.

  I liked what I could see of the circles sewn into the quilt. I reached out to touch it and felt a hard frame beneath it. I hauled the whole thing, quilt and all, out into the middle of the attic, where the overhead bulb cast its yellow ring of light.

  The quilt was a lovely thing: large interlocking circles made of various shades of small blue squares, from light turquoise to deep indigo, set against a white background. It was a bit faded, but the shades of blue still held some vibrancy, slipping from light to dark and then back to light again, the colors leading my eyes from one circle to another until I got lost in it. I gave my head a shake and then let the quilt fall away to see what lay beneath.

  It was a painting, set in a heavy wooden frame carved into thick swirls. A grassy foreground, a road leading through rocky hills to a lighthouse, and a vast ocean beyond. Something about it seemed familiar. I’d never been to the ocean. Maybe a photograph I’d seen somewhere? Or even a picture in one of my old picture books? I brought the quilt down to my bed and leaned the painting against my wall.

  I sat on the bed, feeling the thick circles of cloth under my fingers, and looked at the painting.

  In the better light I could see some sheep grazing at the base of one of the hills and white seabirds with black wingtips flying against the gray sky. A falling-down rail fence climbed halfway up a hill.

  When my mother got home from work that night and stuck her head in my room, I was lying on the quilt with my sketchbook and colored pencils, drawing the lighthouse. She stood there for a minute with her mouth hanging open.

  I smiled at her.

  She closed her mouth and came into the room, reaching out her hand to touch the quilt.

  “What are you doing with this, Annie?” she asked. Then she saw what I was sketching and turned and saw the painting.

  “Oh,” she said and sat down suddenly on the bed.

  “I found it in the attic,” I said. I held out my sketch to her. She glanced at it. It wasn’t bad: the white-and-blue house with the tall red lighthouse rising above the roof. I liked the four-square shape of the house, with its two front
doors and the windows lined up in rows.

  She took my sketchbook and flipped back the pages. I’d been drawing studies from the painting for a couple of hours: the curve of the road, a couple of sheep, the lighthouse against the stormy sky, the grasses in the foreground. She stopped at a study of the grasses and reached out her finger to touch one of the golden, nodding stalks. She seemed to have forgotten me. She looked like she was thinking of something far away in time and space.

  “Where is this?” I asked. She closed the sketchbook.

  “It’s Newfoundland, Annie. I’ve told you about Newfoundland.”

  “You said it was cold and gray and raining all the time.”

  “Most of the time,” she said, and stood up, smoothing her skirt and turning her back to the painting. “I should have got rid of that picture years ago. I don’t see why you like it so much. It’s just an old, rocky field.”

  It was so much more than just a rocky field, but I knew from experience that Mom and I seldom saw things the same way.

  CLAIRE

  MY MOM AND I never see things the same way. She’s an artist. I’m not. Whenever we walk the path to Crooked Head together, she talks about this view and that view, and how she wants to paint those trees and that broken-down fence. But all I see is the lonely road winding through scrubby trees and climbing along the long ridge of land that joins up with the mainland over a skinny little causeway that floods whenever the seas are high. I see the ocean spreading out on both sides forever and the little houses along the shore that are too far away to be neighbors. I’d trade it all in a minute for Gower Street in St. John’s, with its tall houses tucked together in rows and firm pavement underfoot.

  My mother had wanted to move out of St. John’s for a long time. She was always piling Annie and me into the car and driving out to Crooked Head to paint. I would keep Annie busy playing while Mom worked at her easel, humming and frowning. She didn’t like to be interrupted. Then on the way back to town, with Annie falling asleep against my shoulder in the back seat, Mom would talk on and on, almost to herself, about how she needed to be closer to nature for her art. And how she wanted to live at Crooked Head Lighthouse.