The Gallery (8 page)

Johnny spoke as soon as he saw LaDonna, as if he was really saying, go away, don't bug me about this. “I can't go back up there, LaDonna. I keep thinking about that room, about Katherine.” Johnny sat staring out the family room picture window at the rain that had started gently falling, the rain that was predicted to turn to snow by night. A flock of small birds, knowing the weather was changing, fed frantically at the bird feeder. Flames danced as fire crackled in the fireplace.

“You have to, Johnny. You need that piano. This one just isn't the same.” La Donna indicated the old-fashioned upright that Johnny had started playing on when he was five. She fingered a few keys. The instrument had a lovely tone, but nothing like the baby grand in the practice room.

She sat on the bench for a few minutes, keeping Johnny company in his misery. Maybe she had the solution.

“I'll go with you. I'll stay in the room and listen to you practice.”

“You don't want to do that. You'll get bored. I'd worry about you being there, getting bored.” Johnny splayed the fingers of both hands, long slender fingers, and looked at them as if they held the answer to his dilemma.

LaDonna knew that after about five minutes Johnny wouldn't worry about her. He wouldn't know she was there. “I never get bored with your music, Johnny. But if I do, I'll tell you. We can go get that pizza I promised.”

Johnny thought about that for a time. Finally he stood up. “Okay. I'm going nuts sitting around here.”

Now Mrs. Blair worried about them getting wet. She insisted they take two umbrellas and that LaDonna borrow her raincoat.

Outside, lowering her umbrella and sharing Johnny's, LaDonna laughed. “I don't know if I could take that much mothering. I'm so used to being independent.”

“She means well.” Johnny put his arm around LaDonna's waist to keep them together under the ribbed taffeta. LaDonna felt warm inside and out and as cozy as she had in the family room.

“She wants her baby to stay well for his recitals,” she teased. “Are you playing in May?” Her plan was to distract him from everything except his music.

“Yes, and I'm nowhere near ready.”

“You will be. You always are.” They splashed in puddles until they climbed Seventeenth Street hill where water ran towards them in small rivers. “I'm painting again, Johnny. Good stuff. But Eric Hunter thinks it's not my work.”

“That phony. He's probably envious. You realize we haven't seen any of his paintings. Or one sculpture. Whatever he does. You know how you feel about what you're doing. Ignore anything he says.”

“I will. But I didn't like his saying this isn't my work or that I've copied something.” LaDonna knew that one reason she hated what Eric said so much was that she had her own doubts. She just couldn't shake them, believe entirely in herself.

Their silence as she and Johnny walked was comfortable. But when they reached Old Main, LaDonna felt Johnny tense. He lowered the umbrella and stepped away from her, entering the building. He stared at the staircase as if reluctant to start climbing.

“Race you.” LaDonna leaped up the first steps, pounding ahead of Johnny. She heard him behind her. She kept running as far as she could. Then she gasped and slowed to a walk. “I never claimed to be athletic. You can win.”

Johnny was panting, too. “You already beat me. I usually take the elevator.”

“You don't!” LaDonna laughed, or tried to. Laughter seemed wrong up here.

On the third floor, Johnny hurried to his room, unlocked the door, and slid in, as if once inside he'd be safe from his awful memories. LaDonna knew he'd never be free of them, but she stayed right beside him and kept him talking.

“I'm not going to sit beside you. I'd be in the way. I'll just sit right here on the floor in the corner, Johnny, behind you. Is that okay? What are you working on?”

Johnny opened the bench. “Rachmaninoff. His Concerto in F Sharp Minor, Opus One. Everyone plays his second. He wrote this when he was about seventeen. I'm way behind.” He set his music on the piano, plopped down on the bench, adjusted the bench, adjusted his shirt sleeves, wiggled to get comfortable. La Donna figured his motions were ritual. He did this every time he sat down in order to get his mind and body ready.

She leaned against the corner wall, slid until she was on the wood floor. Stretching her legs in front of her, she wriggled until she was comfortable. Then she waited.

Johnny limbered his fingers with some scales and bits and pieces of runs and trills up and down the keyboard. Suddenly, his hands both came down hard, making her jump, then his fingers cascaded across chord after chord. Once he started to play the concerto, she was surrounded and caught up in the melody. He didn't need the music. He had the piece memorized. And in no time she knew he was unaware of her presence.

She was not unaware of Johnny Blair, however. He expressed the music with his whole body, leaning forward, straightening, leaning back, his face tilting up as if, like fine wine, he was savoring the notes he struck.

When the melody softened with a hint of nostalgia, Johnny's fingers caressed the keys. His hands arched, he raised them on and off the ivory with such grace, like gentle ocean waves slipping in and out on a quiet beach. Without meaning to, she imagined those same fingers caressing her face, her body. She shuddered with emotion.

Now with crashing waves, Johnny poured his heart into the piece. The music intensified as did her emotion. The low notes stirred her deep inside, pounding, churning, sending her into passion she had never even imagined.

A sudden realization flooded her. She was in love with Johnny Blair. She had been in love with him for all of time, their time, as short as it was, as few years as they had lived. She wanted to love him forever.

Pulling her legs up, she wrapped her arms around her knees, hugged herself into a small ball to contain her feelings. She realized she was imitating Johnny's position in her painting of him, but where in the picture Johnny was filled with pain, she was filled with love, with passion, with such a deep emotion that it both thrilled and frightened her.

She had to leave. Johnny couldn't know this—how she was feeling about him. She had no idea if he would return the emotion. She had no idea how he felt about her. They were friends, buddies. They had been friends forever, bonding together in mutual misery, driven by art and music, the need to express themselves with paint and melodies, and in no other way.

Crawling quietly, she moved toward the doorway. Could she leave without Johnny knowing? She didn't want him to stop playing. She didn't want to interrupt, intrude on this space he had entered. She had shared it. That was enough. And he had forgotten—for a short time. He was free of fear, of memory. He lived for this moment, and this moment only.

Placing her hand on the doorknob, she twisted it slowly, pulled, stepped into the hall, pulled it closed behind her. Then for a few seconds she leaned against the wall, breathing deeply.

Paint with your passion, your emotion
. She heard Mr. Sable speak to her. Yes, she must go immediately to the basement art room. She must capture this emotion that filled her, threatened to spill over, to melt her whole body like candle wax. She must paint.

She turned and fled down the hall to the stairs. Halfway there she froze, staring, at seeing a familiar figure.

Her father leaned forward, his head pressing on the wall. He was crying.

ten

“D
AD, IS THAT
you?” She knew it was. She just didn't know what to say to him.

Her dad looked at her through teary eyes. “Donnie?”

He hadn't called her that since she was little—four or five. It touched her deeply, mixing with the well of emotion already filling her from Johnny's music, filling her, spilling out. She felt her own eyes water. She blinked to clear them.

“Dad, what's wrong?” She touched his shoulder. She couldn't remember the last time she had touched him.

“She was so beautiful—so beautiful. I was standing here remembering. She always spoke to me.”

LaDonna stepped back. “Katherine?” For some reason, finding her father in the hall, this near the practice room where Katherine Taylor was murdered, didn't feel good to her once he had spoken her name.

“Yes, she was so beautiful.”

A ring of keys hung at her father's belt. He would have access to any room in this building. Even a practice room that was locked. Locked without anyone in it. Locked from the inside by a student who was practicing. A student who didn't feel secure up here alone at night in an unlocked room.

“I was up here with Johnny.” LaDonna felt compelled to tell her father what she was doing in The Tower, but not to stay here talking to him for long. “He's practicing the piano. And I'm going over to where I'm working to paint.”

“Where is that?”

Had he forgotten? For some reason, LaDonna didn't want her father to know exactly where she was. “In the art building.”

For some reason? She knew why. Her father was scaring her. The suspicion that had flitted through her mind, unbidden, was there now. She felt guilty about it, but it had surfaced, mainly because she realized she didn't know him really well. The idea of her father killing someone was absurd, but the idea had come to her. It would take some work on her part to make it go away.

“I'll see you later, unless you think you need to go home. Want me to drive you home, Dad?”

“Oh, no. I'll be all right in a minute.” He dug in his pocket for a handkerchief. “I—I just thought of her again.”

LaDonna was glad to leave, to escape. She pounded down the stairwell and out the front door of Old Main. Then she closed her eyes and took deep damp breaths of the rain-soaked air. She still had Mrs. Blair's cheery red umbrella. She raised it and walked quickly towards her basement room.

He was there. A new painting hung on the wall. This one was more cheerful. Red was the dominant color. A road disappeared on the horizon, a road bordered by fields of red flowers—poppies? But was it cheerful after all? The sky reflected the red flowers as it would an inferno, as if the fields blossomed with flames instead of flowers.

“At first I thought it was cheerful, but I changed my mind,” LaDonna said out loud. “Is it anger or frustration?”

He laughed. “You're getting the idea. Each painting carries an emotion, touches an emotional chord in the viewer. You're ready to paint, aren't you?”

The emotion she'd felt because of Johnny's music, and maybe because she'd discovered that she loved him, had dissipated somewhat by meeting her father.

Sitting, she closed her eyes and willed herself back into that practice room, back into that Rachmaninoff concerto. As she heard the notes again, her heart, chest, throat swelled with renewed passion.

She took her paint brush, squeezed a few colors on her palette, started to place the color on a canvas. Totally lost in the moment, she worked until she felt exhaustion set in. Then she stepped back to see what had come from her subconscious. That was where the good work was hidden, she realized. If she tried to force a picture, tried to reason it out, it was flat and amateurish. When she gave over, dug deep, let go, she got a picture that was worthwhile. That pleased her to learn that. Learning about the place from which a painting came was a giant step forward for her work.

She was flying. In the picture she was flying. She laughed out loud. Long plumes of scarlet and purple and blue covered her body, but elongated arms pointed across the sky. Long legs with bare feet trailed. Flames from the ground licked towards her. Thunderous gray clouds threatened on her left. She flew towards a bright light coming from the right side of the picture. The source of the light was hidden. That didn't matter. There's where the viewer would use his or her imagination. What was the source of the light she flew towards so eagerly?

“It's uplifting without being frivolous. Good work, LaDonna.” His praise made her feel like flying. “Is flying always so hazardous for you?” His voice was deep, his laughter rumbling deeper.

She sighed and started cleaning up her brushes. “Sometimes just living seems awfully hazardous, Mr. Sable.”

“You're thinking of the girl who was murdered, aren't you?”

“You know about that?”

“I heard.”

“Do—do you know who did it? I mean, if you can—” How to put this. Did this—this—ghost wander all over the campus, coming here when she did, but otherwise have the ability to be anyplace he liked. “Do you go to other buildings whenever you feel like it?”

“Would you like to see my studio?”

“You work—you paint down here? Or near here?” This situation moved beyond her imagination, so all she could do was say yes and see what happened next. Before he could answer, she continued. “I'd love to see your studio.”

“Come.”

She still could not see this man who kept her company in the basement room, but when the door opposite the door to the upper floors opened, she stepped that way.

Again, she was assailed by musty air, air which had probably been trapped here for a long time.

“I can't see.” The light from the basement reached only a few feet into the darkness.

“Follow my footsteps.”

She swallowed, straightened her shoulders, and took several steps forward. Then she continued, guided only by the rustle and soft thud of his feet ahead of her.

Her father had told her once of the tunnels that ran underneath all the campus buildings. The metal tubes held pipes, underground power lines, air ducts. In some places this tunnel was large enough to stand upright, in others she had to bend over slightly to continue behind him. Mr. Sable warned her when this was the case, and she let her hand reach up and guide her.

Cobwebs brushed against her fingers, causing her to jerk back. Dust floated in the air, probably raised by their—her—feet. How long since anyone had walked here?