The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,97

reaction, while Rick brings up the rear of our little party, arms crossed, his mouth a nervous flat line.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Roy whispers.

I raise my eyebrows in reply: It wasn’t my idea, believe me.

The scaffolding is still up, the sheets of plastic, cloudily translucent, draping the mural off from view. Deedee pauses at the opening and turns.

“The work is finished, more or less, but I’m keeping it screened off until the official unveiling on All Saints’ Day. That’s the day after Halloween for heathens like you, Roy. Now . . .” She pauses to draw herself up to her full height. “Prepare yourselves.” She turns and parts the curtain, holding it open for the rest of us to pass. “Roy, you’ve seen it, so let Elizabeth go first. Rick, are you ready for this? I think you’ll be amazed.”

I duck through the plastic, mindful not to bang my head on the scaffold. The wall is profusely, minutely decorated. Deedee switches on the work lights, and suddenly the shapes come to life. I take a step back, banging into the scaffold I was so careful to avoid.

“Wow,” I say.

Rick edges up beside me. His jaw hangs open. He leans close to examine the figure at the very top of the mural. St. Rick perches high atop a stone pillar, a sort of fluted Greek column with just enough space on top for his toes to curl like a gargoyle’s over the edge. I have to go on tiptoes to see. This St. Rick doesn’t glare like the one at home. He gazes down from the heights with a faint, beatific smile.

Underneath him, in the same flatly photo-realistic style I recognize from Deedee’s other work, the streets of Lutherville extend like two sides of a triangle. At the far right, the Smythe house anchors the mural. On the far left, the redbrick face of Eli’s school. Not every landmark is there—none of the more, ahem, commercial properties have made the cut—but the resemblance remains striking. And the warren of streets crisscrossing the wall are far from empty. Crowds of people fill them, passing back and forth, going about their everyday lives under the gaze of St. Rick.

These people, the inhabitants of Lutherville, are not represented in Deedee’s usual way. This is what gives the painting its breathtaking strangeness. They dress in ancient styles, flowing robes with gilded trim. Their long, grave faces have a Byzantine quality, their skin like old frescos blackened over time by cooking fire, their features medieval and jagged. As if each person stepped out of an icon onto the streets of Lutherville.

And above every head, every one without exception, square halos float like crowns.

“Why are they square?” I ask.

“A square halo means the person depicted is still living,” Deedee says.

“Mine isn’t square,” Rick says. “Mine has arms coming out like a cross.”

“Yours?” Deedee chuckles, her low voice reverberating. She jabs her finger up at St. Rick. “You mean his?”

“Okay. His. St. Rick’s.”

“St. Rick?” She laughs louder, not having heard the nickname before. “My dear, that is Simeon Stylites, desert father extraordinaire. Though really it’s not Simeon Stylites at all—it’s Christ. To get a cruciform halo, you have to be part of the Holy Trinity.”

“Well, he looks like me.”

“He has to look like somebody. Everybody does—even Judas Iscariot. But don’t read too much into that.”

Something dawns on me. I have my inner double. Now Rick has a troubling alter ego too, not staring at him in the mirror, but from the wall. St. Rick is his Eliza. Or even stranger, maybe St. Rick is his Beth, the person he is becoming rather than the person he once was or could have been. Perhaps we have more in common now than I realized.

Roy comes alongside me. “What do you think, Beth?”

“It’s marvelous.”

He turns to Deedee, whose eyes narrow in pleasure.

She starts walking the length of the mural, talking about the old icon painters, the techniques of gilding, how challenging it was to translate the vision in her head onto the wall. I quickly lose the thread, absorbed in the scene. Crouching at the lower right corner, I examine the Smythe house. The level of detail is extraordinary. Even the minuscule details of the Victorian dental molding are suggested in the way the eaves are shadowed. Within the frame of an upstairs window, a halo glows, presumably Margaret. Our own house is there, and just behind it the shed, which seems to radiate ever so slightly,