Mother’s doing all right financially. God alone knows what she would pull if she ever found herself destitute.”
“Well, at least we’ve gotten to the interstate now.” Angus was already wiping sweat off his brow with his handkerchief. “We ought to get some use of our two windows/sixty-five miles an hour air conditioning.”
Dr. Carstairs went through the sketch book thoroughly, paying particular attention to the portrait of Farris. She stared over at her patient. “You say that the minute he reacted to this picture, you realized you’d drawn something he didn’t want to see.”
“He didn’t want anybody else to see it, that was for certain,” Clarice affirmed. “Actually, I wouldn’t have sketched him at all if it hadn’t been for the way he was handling Courier. That was a picture I just had to draw.”
“You’ve captured some emotions Farris doesn’t want to admit to,” Dr. Carstairs observed. “Were you surprised by his reaction?”
“Not really,” Clarice admitted. “That kind of thing had happened to me before when I was in college. One semester, all the art students had to do portraits of all their classmates. I sure made a lot of enemies quickly. Some of those kids never spoke to me again. – It was kind of sweet of Farris to tell my dad this crazy gift is my superpower.”
“It strikes me,” Dr. Carstairs responded, looking over her spectacles, “that Farris understands you a great deal better than most people do, and cares about you more. – Look, this tablet is no way near complete. I want you to take it home and use it to draw me your life in pictures. Include all the people and all the incidents that seem important to you. My test battery revealed you have a very strong visual memory. Use it.”
Angus had helped Clarice create a professional-looking website to advertise and sell her artwork, and these days, while she was feeling clumsy and uncomfortable, he served as her webmaster.
“Wow – Your announcement about the state of your pregnancy has really worked,” Angus remarked now. “All your clients are responding by giving you one to three extra months to complete their commissions. Some have even included advice, and all of them send their best wishes. A few are even including you in their prayers. I didn’t realize you had clients who were religious types.”
Clarice grinned. “You should visit some of the liturgical churches while you’re here. They’re all very much into ‘let him who is without sin cast the first stone’ and such. – But I’m glad of the extensions. I feel fat and miserable, and I’ve got therapy drawing to do.”
“Therapy drawing?” Angus, himself an art major, was always interested in some new angle about art.
“Yes,” she replied sweetly. “I’m going to be drawing my private life, so you better keep your nose out of my notebooks.”
Memories churned as Clarice’s pencil flew across the heavy paper. She kept her erasers handy, but, as she progressed, it was more like she was doing automatic writing. It was almost like her mind was throwing up, she thought, just the way she had during those early months of morning sickness. What came out astonished even Clarice.
Had she been this angry and this miserable ever since she could remember? Clarice couldn’t seem to draw a single happy memory until she’d begun working as an animal artist. Indeed, there were pictures of Marion pulling her away from kittens, puppies, and even baby chickens in neighboring farmyards. The only smiling adults Clarice had drawn were a couple of school teachers.
Then she began recording her Kentucky experiences in pictures. This tablet quickly filled with what Clarice could only consider pure porn – but at least it was porn with some soul in it. All her love and longing had flowed out. There were even pleasant vignettes of the McGees and other farm staff members. Clarice started to
Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain