Beaming, Brock said, “Me too. I had thought I was crazy, falling for some girl I only knew a night—one who I had thought had betrayed me to boot.”
I shook my head and ran my fingers over his beard.
“You’re not crazy; we’re crazy.”
Brock slid his arm around me, and I snuggled into him.
“Now you have to tell me everything,” I said in a mock-serious tone. “How you escaped, how you found this place—everything.”
“I will,” he said. “But first I should share the good news.”
He reached into his pocket and took out a check for $1,000.
My eyes went wide.
“What’s that for?”
“My first art sale. I sold a painting, Alex. It’s starting. I’m going to be an artist.”
“I knew you could,” I murmured, giving him a kiss on the cheek.
He patted my head, and we sank into each other. Brock was better than his word. He told me all of it; he told me more than all of it—how, after the showdown with Russell’s men, he had run through the forest and called the only friend he had left, Garth. How Garth had picked him up at some Nederland convenience store and driven him as far as he could—all the way to Santa Fe.
He told me how he had turned down Garth’s latest Robin Hood scheme, how Garth had laughed at his story of the bakery-bag girl he’d fallen for. He told me how he’d had to work at a McDonald’s for three months to get some money, how afterward he’d moved out to the cabin and started painting and hadn’t stopped since. Lastly, he told me told me about the painting he had sold.
“Couldn’t part with it till I made a copy,” he said, gently untwining his arms from me to go over to his hulking bag.
He returned with a piece of the past, another mystery solved: what he had been doing when I’d caught him working that time so many months ago. He had been working on this.
The painting was of me. It was of that night, of the snow all thrown up around me and onto me; but mostly it was of me, of the laughing girl with sandy, fly-away hair and a smile face-wide. The snow was laughing with her, sprinkling giggles into her mouth, fanning around her head. It was beautiful. She was, too.
“Is that…how you saw me that night?” I asked softly, and Brock nodded.
“That’s how I see you now, an impossible light in this dark world.”
After a few minutes, he whispered, “Want to do it again?”
“Want to do what again?” I asked his eager face.
He responded by getting up, walking over to his backpack, and returning with two canvases.
“No,” I said softly, smiling nonetheless.
“Why not?” he asked. “Lying here, looking down on you, I could hardly resist starting as it was.”
Gazing into his excited eyes, I sighed.
“Oh, fine, though I’m assuming you have paint and brushes too?”
To which Brock raced to his knapsack and then back, some tubes of paint in one hand and a new paintbrush-filled tomato can in the other.
I laughed, and he shrugged.
“Old habits die hard.”
And so we turned to our respective canvases and got to work.
Once again, I found the bare canvas overwhelming. Really, where were you supposed to start? How were you supposed to know what to make, which ideas were worth transferring onto the canvas?
This time the answer came from my own hand: a dash of navy in the middle just like last time. And, even more incredibly, this gave me an idea of what I wanted to make, again just like last time. And so I got to work, first painting only wispy outlines of the figures. These I filled in with black and gray, with the nothingness that they were. The background I made a lighter gray. At the top of the canvas, I made my knight in shining blue. After I’d filled in the colors of each part, I went back and tried my hand at sketching out more definite features. Despite my use of a smaller brush, however, saying that this ended up being a disaster would have been an understatement.
At one point, Brock glanced over and, seeing the black blobs my careful attempts at faces had smeared into, started chuckling.
I glared at him.
“You wouldn’t be chuckling if you knew what the painting was of.”
“Oh really?”
I nodded and glanced away, suddenly feeling shy to say it outright. I had figured Brock would have guessed what it was, but now that I had messed the images up so much, there was little hope of that.
“It’s of searching for you,” I finally said quietly, “how I kept thinking I saw you, but the men never were you. How I still found you in the end.”