The Unexpected Everything - Morgan Matson Page 0,35

more steps before she realized I wasn’t with her and came to stand next to me. We both looked at the painting in silence for a minute, while I fought down the lump in my throat.

It was a big canvas, taking up most of the wall. I stared at it, drinking it in like I’d never seen it before, when it was probably the painting I was most familiar with—not just in the Pearce, but anywhere. It was of a field at night—overgrown grass and wildflowers and an explosion of stars above. Twelve-year-old me was in the bottom left corner, lying on my back and looking up, one hand reaching toward the sky. It was incredibly detailed, in a way that still took my breath away. I could see the broken and double-knotted lace on my dirty yellow Converse, which had been my favorite that year. I could see the slight tear in the sundress pocket, the dress that was still in my closet somewhere, even though I hadn’t been able to fit into it in years. I could see my crooked bangs, the ones I’d cut that summer myself when I’d gotten annoyed they were in my eyes. The only thing I didn’t recognize was my expression, peaceful and smiling at something just beyond the frame.

Because most of the canvas was so detailed, it always felt a bit like a punch in the gut when your eyes reached the right side and realized that the detail faded away until you were looking at pencil sketches on bare white canvas.

My eyes traveled over the picture to the identifying information at the wall, and I swallowed hard as I read it.

Stars Fell on Alexandra (unfinished). By Molly Walker.

Toby put her arm around my shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “It’s such a good painting, Andie,” she said, her voice quiet. “You know she’d love that it’s here.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything else right then. She would have too. Her work, hanging in a room with Rothko and Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’Keeffe. Mrs. Pearce had bought the painting from my dad two days after the funeral. At the time I’d wondered if she’d done it sooner if it might have made any difference. If maybe my mom could have held on somehow, stayed to finish it, kept going if she’d known it would end up here . . .

I made myself look away, trying to stop this train of thought. There was absolutely no point to it. This had been five years ago, and I’d long since gotten over it. There was no need to drag this stuff up again. But even so, I let myself lean slightly into Toby. She gave my shoulders another squeeze, and I was beyond grateful for a friend who knew exactly what I meant even when I wasn’t saying anything.

• • •

After I left the museum I headed to the library. I sat on the floor with dog books stacked all around me—I figured since my learning curve was pretty high, I needed to find out what I could. Just because this hadn’t been the summer job I’d expected, I rationalized, didn’t mean that I couldn’t do it well. And as I left the stacks, I found myself heading away from the checkout and over to the biography section. I walked down the row until I got to the Ws and stopped in front of my dad’s autobiography. I hadn’t done this in a while, and I had a feeling I was only here because I’d seen my mother’s painting. That it had led me to the only place I could go for answers to impossible questions.

There was a copy of the autobiography on the bookshelf in my dad’s study, of course, and there was a copy in his apartment in D.C. But somehow, reading it at home, actually sitting down with his hardback, would have been admitting what I was doing, and so I’d read the whole thing here, in short bursts, standing in the stacks or sitting on the ground, leaning back against the rows of books. It had been written when my mom was still healthy and things were still good—the intent was for it to coincide with the national election that fall, but by the time it came out, everything had changed.

I flipped through it, stopping briefly at the pictures in the middle—my dad in elementary school, his hair combed flat, his front teeth missing; at high school