Mister Impossible - Maggie Stiefvater (ereader manga TXT) 📗

Once the elevator door had hissed closed behind them, Jay took just one moment to look out one of the studio’s windows for something and then, when she didn’t find it, she returned to make a great fuss over Hennessy. She had her try on several of the dresses she had thrown on the sofa. She posed her in multiple ways in a simple wooden chair. She messed with her hair and played at braids and put lipstick on her and wiped it off. All the while she told Hennessy how pretty she had grown up to be, how wonderful a painting they were going to make together. No! Not a painting. A series of paintings. An exhibition. It had felt like a day that happened to someone else. Hennessy sat very still in the chair, like an animal by a highway, afraid to move lest she dart from safety to something worse. She was cold in the white shift but she didn’t want to even shiver in case her mother remembered Hennessy was not usually treated like this.

But the spell hadn’t broken. They’d worked all day, all evening. The next morning, Jay was still enthused. She ordered in a very grand breakfast of pastries from one of the bakeries and then they went back up for more work, this time up the rickety back staircase that ended in the door with no knob. They spent two weeks like that, with Hennessy sitting still in the chair and not shivering and her mother painting her and takeaway and delivery bags piling up in the stairwell.

At one point, Jay put her brush down and said, shocked, “I made you. One day you’ll grow up and be a woman, and I made you.”

Jay looked at Hennessy, and Hennessy suddenly had the impression that Jay was really seeing her, really thinking about what it meant to be Hennessy, to be Hennessy’s mother.

Jay looked from Hennessy to her painting and back again, and then she said, “How wonderful you’re going to be.”

It was the best moment of Hennessy’s life.

Then there was an audible slam. The front door. Bill Dower, returning from wherever he had gone. Jay leapt up so quickly that her stool clattered on the floor. Her still-wet palette was abandoned on the piano. The elevator door was whirring closed.

Hennessy was alone before she even quite understood what had happened.

She sat in the chilly chair for quite a while, not wanting to move in case her mother returned. After an hour, she pulled up the drop cloth to wrap around herself and wait some more (little ghost!). Finally she let herself shiver and admit Jay wasn’t coming back.

With a little sigh, she padded barefoot across the cold floor to the elevator, but discovered it wouldn’t move without the code, which she didn’t have. She went to the door without a knob instead, but it wouldn’t open. It was locked; the keyhole was empty.

Hennessy was trapped in the studio.

At first she called down very nicely, though she didn’t think either of her parents would hear her over their own raised voices. Then she shouted. She banged.

Finally, she gave up. She waited.

It became night.

Hennessy wiped away her tears and turned on the floor lights, which threw hard, lacy patterns across the floor and walls. She went to see the canvas her mother had worked on all these weeks.

It was awful.

It was the worst painting Hennessy had ever seen her mother do. It was twee and cutesy, a straightforward and boring portrait of a daft, plucky little girl sitting awkwardly on a chair. The eyes weren’t alive. The hands weren’t alive. Hennessy, who’d been working and learning with her own art all this time, was embarrassed for her mother. It was terrible that she wasn’t coming up here for Hennessy and her growling stomach, but it felt even more terrible that anyone would ever see this piece.

Hennessy looked at the canvas for a long time, and then she counted, telling herself that if one of her parents came for her by the count of six hundred, she wouldn’t do it.

Six hundred seconds went by. Eight hundred. One thousand. Hennessy stopped counting.

She searched the drawers by the wall and collected all the paints she wanted. Then she moistened her mother’s oils again on the palette, picked up the brush and began to paint. After a few minutes, she dragged over the full-length mirror from beside the sofa, and she redid the portrait’s gormless face with her actual wary expression. She overpainted the boring shadows in the white shift with subtle colors instead. She shrugged the shoulders of that chilly girl just a little, not quite shivering, but wanting to. At each step, she got up to compare her brushstrokes to the other paintings in the studio. She made the eyes alive. She made the hands alive.

She painted the portrait that Jay should have painted. It took all night.

It was a J. H. Hennessy by way of Jordan Hennessy. It was another day after that before her mother came to get her, and by then Hennessy was fitful and burning up with a fever that had come on during the second night. Bill Dower had gone again.

“This turned out better than I thought,” Jay said, looking at the canvas, hovering her fingers over her signature in the corner, painted by Hennessy hours before. “Oh, Jordan. Stop complaining. I’ve got some paracetamol downstairs. Come on, what a trial. Next time don’t hide so long and you won’t feel as awful.”

Hennessy’s first forgery was of herself.

Sitting in the basement of Aldana-Leon’s house, crisscross applesauce on the roll-up mattress, Hennessy took out her dreamt phone and held it in her lap. She looked around the dim basement. It was stacked densely with cardboard boxes, a family that had either not yet unpacked from a move or was packing for one. One corner had been reserved for a