See What I See (15 page)

Finally he gets around to saying how sorry he is about Dad. He asks what I'm going to do now, but from his slightly abstracted look I suspect that all the while we talk, the bigger part of his brain is working on the math competition. When I mention the amount of money I'll have, he tells me how much I would earn each year if I invest it in bonds or the stock market or something called certificates of deposit. Once he hears about the money, he seems more interested in me. Not because I have it, but because even a small sum has so many mathematical possibilities.

Justin is Justin, a good friend, but nothing more. I think about Adam. There has to be someone out there for me, and I tell myself I have lots of time.

Dad's car was on its last legs, so I splurge for a decent used car that I can drive back and forth from school. Mom doesn't object; she's thinking I'll be able to come home more often. I find having your own car is like a passport to the world. Even if you never go farther than the end of the block, you know you
can
go all the way across the country if you want to.

On a mild February day, when the snow has melted into puddles, I head for Detroit. I've sent the school a CD with my most recent work and I've been accepted for the spring term. It's Valentine's Day and the students have created these amazing valentines. They're stuck up all over the school, so the first things I see when I walk into the building are hundreds of hearts. It's like they're saying,
Welcome back
. In the admitting office the counselor is friendly. “We'll be able to give you the same scholarship you had. Luckily we've had an endowment from a very famous artist, Dalton Quinn.” She looks down at my application and smiles. “You share his last name. How appropriate.”

I smile and say I won't need a scholarship, that like the school I was lucky enough to come into some money.

“Why how nice for you. A grandparent?”

“No, my father.”

“Oh, I'm so sorry. He must have been very young to die.”

“Yes,” I say, and hurry out of her office before she puts it all together. I will have to learn to deal with people who do make the connection. It will be an advantage and a curse. People will be interested in my work because I am Dalton Quinn's daughter, but people will compare my work with my father's, and my work will suffer in comparison. At least our painting styles are very different. No one will be able to say I copied my father's style.

I have a room in the student dormitory now. The dorm was once an elegant apartment building, and along with the regulation utilitarian furniture there are graceful archways and high ceilings. From my window I see the Art Institute, where I can go to see Dad's painting anytime. After his show's success they moved it to a more prominent place.

I haven't seen Thomas, but there are stories in the newspaper every day of the trouble in Lebanon, and I imagine Thomas's and Mary's aunts and uncles and their children getting into airplanes and heading here, leaving the violence behind.

Sometimes I help out at Lila's. I did a mural of Belle Isle for one wall of the shop, and her designs look perfect hanging against the background of trees and water.

In the city, spring catches me unawares. One day there's gray, slushy snow on the streets and sidewalks, and the next day I see the blooms of forsythia and crocuses poking up. The banks along the expressways are greening up. At school some of our classes are held outdoors in the sculpture garden. At night when we head out of the dorm to get pizza, we make a point of leaving our jackets off, pretending it's summer.

I know spring in the city is hardly anything compared to what's happening up north. The alder bushes along the stream are in blossom, and in the woods the spring beauties and trout lilies and Dutchman's-breeches are spread out like a tapestry on the forest floor. On the lakes the migrating ducks have settled in, the buffleheads and mergansers and wood ducks with their clown faces. You have to be out nearly every second not to miss what's coming next. It kills me not to be there, not to paint it, because next spring everything will be a little different. I think of one of my favorite paintings. It's by Winslow Homer. It's summer. There's an open field of grass, probably a pasture, with a scattering of wildflowers. In the distance are trees and green hills. Some little boys, barefoot and wearing caps, are playing crack the whip. Homer makes you feel what it's like to be happy and free on a warm summer day. That's what I want to do. I want to make people feel what it's like to be in the woods, in the places where there are wildflowers but also in the dark places where hawks and foxes hunt.

One evening I drive by Dad's house. It's been sold, and I see a young couple sitting on the porch enjoying the warm evening. My memories of Dad come flooding back. I pull up a few blocks away and stop the car until I can pull myself together.

At school we've just hung the annual student exhibition. I can guess by looking at the paintings that a lot of my classmates paint what the fashionable artists are painting in New York. What's hot. There are students who try to shock the viewer like five-year-olds who get into mischief just for the attention. I see paintings that imitate my dad's work too. When I look at my own painting in the exhibition, I have to be honest and admit that there are paintings by other students that are a lot better than mine. I know how much I have to learn.

Of course I dream about being a famous artist like Dad, with my paintings in a New York gallery and hanging in a museum. I don't think that's going to happen. But here's what
is
going to happen: When I finish school, I'll go back home and I won't stop painting until everyone sees what I see, until they can look at my paintings and know the woods in the way I know them, with the different times of day and the different seasons. That's what paintings do—they add something to other people's lives. So I'll go on sharing my world, surprising myself. “Keep painting,” Dad said. I will—and not just for me but for him too. I'll paint all the pictures he never got to paint, but they'll be mine.