Free What's Left of Her by Mary Campisi Page A

ready to pounce, ready, ready, ready, to fill his mind with horror.
    He hates this, hates it, hates it . He wants normal back. Quinn lets the curtain fall into place and turns away. This is where he comes to feel close to her. His father avoids it as though he thinks this part of her life inconsequential. But Quinn knows better; he’s seen her face as she strokes the canvas, colors and shapes taking life beneath her brush, exploding in bursts of energy and relief. He knows that feeling.
    She’s a brilliant artist and he wonders why she’s never done more with it. Why has she settled for afternoon watercolor lessons to bratty kids and a two-for-one raffle spot at St. Michael’s alongside his father’s snow removal service? Her gift is with oils; anybody with half a brain can see that, though most don’t, maybe because she keeps the oils hidden in the attic.
    Quinn works with oils, has from the time he was five. Watercolors are like being underwater with your eyes open, his mother tells him. You miss the sharpness, the life, the contrast. It’s all muted, toned down, dull. But she’s done watercolor, painted it, taught it, sold it, and yet she thinks it useless.
    He walks to the chest where she keeps her oil paintings and opens it. Oil is what she does for herself, he guesses, in the night or during the day when no one is home. Quinn lifts the first painting, a field of sunflowers, their yellow faces drooping forward under the weight of their heads. This is old man Cunningham’s property. He started planting sunflowers for the birds ten years ago after his wife died, and now he has a field of flowers and birds coming from three counties. The next picture is a winter scene: trees, houses, mail boxes clumped with snow. That could be any winter in Pennsylvania. There are three more winter landscapes and then one done in spring with tulips and daffodils. Quinn pulls them out and lays them on the hardwood floor.
    He stops when he comes to a painting that is a collection of colored bottles, iridescent pinks, purples, yellows, and blues in round, oblong, and pyramid shapes. The hues are brilliant. Where did she get the bottles? They are rimmed with an exquisite line of gold. He sets that painting aside and reaches for the next one. Again, this is something he’s never seen before: an oriental vase done in black, mauve, and red, with a dragon stretching across the front, mouth blowing gigantic flames. The next two are unfamiliar as well: a nightscape of high-rise buildings with a single yellow glow emanating from one of the windows. He stares at the blotch of yellow, tries to make sense of it, but it is too foreign.
    Has she been creating from memory, from when she lived in Philadelphia? He wants to know, wants to ask her why she’s kept the pictures hidden, what it all means. Quinn removes every canvas from the huge chest, twenty or more, until he reaches the bottom. Tucked under a black felt swatch are eight composition notebooks, numbered and dated. He opens the first and sees his own scribble in the upper corner: Chemistry—Quinn Burnes . The first half of the notebook contains the periodic table and equations. He flips through the pages until he finds his mother’s handwriting. There, alongside an equation for table salt is the sentence, I am suffocating in my own life and all that was once familiar to me is foreign, and it is the familiar that is killing me.
    He stares at this sentence until the words are a blur in his brain and the truth pierces his soul. She is gone, not kidnapped, or victim to nature, man, or circumstance, but removed of her own volition. How long has she planned the event—days, weeks, years? She’s left them, even ten-year-old Annalise.
    They are the victims, not his mother. It is them, Rupe, Quinn, Annalise. He forces himself to read every word of each notebook, every damn, painful word, as numbness seeps through his body and he discovers the truth about Evie Burnes, or is it Evelyn now as she