Isla's Inheritance Page 7

Over the next few weeks the weather gave us the first taste of summer. The entire exam period was marked by hot days and warm nights. Sarah and I often studied on the back porch in the evenings, enjoying the warm breeze and turning the back light on after sunset. The evening sounds were relaxing: the distant traffic; the tick-tick-tick of a moth throwing itself at the porch light; a magpie carolling its evening serenade; and even the thrashing metal of Ryan’s music, audible despite the closed window of the shed down the back of the yard. The air smelled of pine and eucalypts, grilled steak and the lit citronella candle perched on the porch’s railing in a ceramic dish.

  The night before our final exams, Sarah and I studied on the porch. Sarah’s battered copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream lay open in front of her on the glass tabletop, several pages folded to mark key passages—or maybe bits that tickled her fancy—and I was rereading Poe between casting sneaky glances at the beautiful orange and purple sunset. We’d finished dinner: lasagne and a garden salad­­. Ryan hadn’t emerged from the shed to join us despite being called, and Sarah and I had read at the table while we ate, so it wasn’t much of a family gathering.

  That’s probably what Aunt Elizabeth was thinking when she saw me fidgeting at the table. “Be a dear, Isla, and tell my oldest if he doesn’t come and get his dinner soon, I’ll be taking it to work tomorrow for lunch and he’ll be having toast. I’ll make us some tea.” We hadn’t seen paint-stained hide nor dyed hair of Ryan for days. Sarah and I were pretty busy, and he was a night owl at the best of times. Even his job usually had evening hours.

  I slipped on my shoes, walking down the wooden stairs and along the path to the shed. The music was loud enough the metal walls vibrated. How could Ryan concentrate? The sound coming off the small building reminded me of a shoe stuck in a dryer. Thump, thump, kerplunk, thump, thump, kerplunk. Maybe loud music was part of his “artistic process” or something.

  I banged on the door and waited, wondering if he could hear me over the growling singer.

  My knuckles stung as I rapped them against the metal walls a second time. A third.

  “Just go in,” Sarah called from the porch.

  I hesitated a moment longer. It went against the grain to go into anyone’s private space uninvited. Besides, what if he was doing something I didn’t want to see? Ew.

  When I squared my shoulders and opened the door I was hit by the strong smells of paint and turpentine, by the volume of the music, and by the stored heat in the shed. Feeling suddenly nauseous, I took a deep breath to settle my stomach. It didn’t help.

  Ryan was sleeping, slumped in a foldout camp chair. He looked paler than normal, sweaty from the heat, and his limp fingers were stained with black paint.

  “Ryan? Are you okay?” He didn’t respond. I looked around for the stereo and thumbed it off. My ears rang a little in the sudden almost-silence: the only sound was an old pedestal fan that rattled in the corner, trying unsuccessfully to take the edge off the heat.

  Ryan’s easel had a large canvas resting on it, the surface still glistening. At first I thought the painting was of me, a wilder, darker me with thorns in my hair, wearing a too-revealing dress of glittering, fragmented glass. Some of the glass was silvered, like a mirror. The colours were almost all washed out: black, sooty grey, powder blue, white, a pale cream for the flesh. The only spots of vivid colour were on the woman’s forehead, where blood beaded around the thorns that pricked her skin, and on her ruby lips. My jaw dropped. The painting unsettled me deeply.

  What bothered me the most was it didn’t look like the real me so much as it did the strange doppelganger I’d dreamt of at Halloween. Seeing her, the details of the dream came back to me, bobbing to the surface like twigs in a stream. The woman stared out of the canvas and straight at me in a way that made the hair on my bare arms stand on end.

  “Holy crap,” said Sarah from the doorway, her eyes wide, her demeanour radiating shock. “That’s messed up.” She looked ill, turning away from the painting and from me, taking Ryan’s shoulders and shaking them aggressively. His head lolled to the side and a paintbrush clattered to the concrete floor. But he didn’t wake.

  “Ryan?” Panic threaded through her voice.

  I reached past her and checked for a pulse in his throat. It was there, beating faster than it should, but strong. His skin was hot and slick with sweat. “He’s alive,” I tried to reassure Sarah.

  She brushed me off. “I know that.” She went to the door of the shed. “Mum!” When she turned back to me, her expression was dark. “Help me get him to the house.”

  We each took one of Ryan’s arms and draped it across our shoulders, lifting him from the chair. His fingers and hands were still tacky, but now wasn’t the time to worry about getting stains on my T-shirt.

  Aunt Elizabeth rushed down from the house as we emerged from the shed, Ryan hanging between us. He was taller than either of us, and his feet dragged along the ground. “Ryan! What’s wrong with him?”

  “Unconscious,” Sarah panted. “Hot in there. Maybe he passed out?”

  Was it the combination of heat and fumes that had caused his collapse? My own queasiness began to fade once I emerged from the shed, taking a deep breath of fresh air.

  Aunt Elizabeth helped us manhandle Ryan up the stairs, holding the door open so we could get him inside. We laid him on his bed. She ran a face washer under some cool water and placed it on his brow. I remembered what she’d said on my birthday, about how Ryan would always be her little boy, and could see it in the fear in her eyes.

  “I’ll get a bottle of water.” I fled the room before I cried.

  Sarah followed. She grabbed my arm as we entered the kitchen, pulling me around to face her.

  “What’s going on?”

  “With what?” The fury on her face made the urge to cry even stronger.

  “With you and Ryan? Are you seeing each other behind our backs? Behind Dominic’s back?”

  “No. Gross!” Ryan was more like a brother to me than a cousin, and I would never cheat on Dominic. Or anyone.

  “How do you explain that painting?”

  “I don’t. I … can’t.”

  Some of my own unease must have shown through­­, because the sharp edge of her rage blunted a little. She dropped my arm. “It’s just weird. Shit.”

  “I know.” I got a bottle of water from the fridge. “Should we call an ambulance?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe?” Sarah took the bottle from me and hurried back to Ryan’s room. I grabbed the phone from the charger and followed.

  But when we went in there, Ryan was stirring, blinking up at the overhead light. He looked confused, and protested when his mother and sister blanketed him in a hug. “Where…? What happened?”

  “We found you unconscious in the shed,” Sarah scolded him. “Dumbarse.”

  “Sarah,” Aunt Elizabeth remonstrated gently, taking the bottle from her and handing it to Ryan. He guzzled it down.

  “Thanks,” he said when he’d finished, handing it back. He tried to sit up, swaying.

  “When was the last time you ate?” Aunt Elizabeth asked with narrowed eyes.

  “I … don’t remember?”

  “Dumbarse,” Sarah said again. “No wonder you fainted.”

  “I didn’t faint.”

  “You did. Like a silly girl in an old movie.”

  “Sarah,” Aunt Elizabeth warned again, this time more forcefully. “Please go and dish up dinner for your brother. Ryan, you need to wash up. You’re covered in paint.”

  I stayed out of the way as best I could while my aunt herded Ryan to the bathroom and supervised as he scrubbed his arms. He mentioned wanting a shower, but she said she wasn’t letting him out of her sight until she was sure he was recovered, so he opted for a quick wash at the sink instead. Sarah clattered around in the kitchen, frowning, but as well as serving Ryan dinner she also poured him some orange juice and added ice.

  With Ryan eating under Aunt Elizabeth’s watchful eye, I went back o
ut to the porch, ignoring my textbooks. I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling the intense stare of the woman in Ryan’s painting had given me. It had looked like she’d wanted to step out of the painting and … I wasn’t sure what, but it wasn’t anything good. When Sarah joined me, I was leaning against the balcony, staring at the shed like it contained something dangerous that needed to be watched. A snake, maybe. The sun had set and the stars were sparking to life above us. In the poor light the shed loomed.

  “That painting is even weirder than you know,” I murmured without looking at her. Then I told her about my nightmare.

  When I was done, she asked, “How could he be painting someone you dreamed of?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s freaking me out.” I squirmed at even entertaining the notion Ryan had somehow seen the woman from my dream. “Maybe it’s a coincidence? I mean, the black hair, pale skin, red lips thing­—it’s Snow White, right? He painted Snow White, and I’m imagining it looked like a woman in a dream I’m probably recalling incorrectly anyway.” The more I talked, the more my confidence in my explanation grew, steadying my nerves.

  “Snow White wearing a dress made of a broken mirror, like from your dream?”

  “In the dream she was wearing black. The mirror broke at the end, when I woke up.”

  Sarah rolled her eyes but persisted. “Snow White looking a lot like you?”

  “I … I guess so. Maybe she didn’t look that much like me, and we imagined it.” The other logical option was that, when Ryan was painting his sexy Snow White, he’d modelled her loosely around my appearance. The notion unsettled me, although not as much as the idea he’d somehow seen into my dream.

  What other dreams might he have seen into? My eyes widened. That didn’t even bear thinking about. I’d had some … interesting dreams since I’d started dating Dominic.

  “Well, there’s one easy way to find out,” Sarah said, determined. She pushed away from the railing. I blinked, wondering what she meant. She was already marching down the stairs to the footpath, and I hurried after her.

  But I hesitated before entering the shed. Sarah barrelled in, flicking the light on. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. I took a deep breath, told myself not to be stupid, and followed her.

  The shed was starting to cool, the metal roof ticking as it contracted, but it was still warm and reeked of turpentine. The nauseated feeling returned in full force.

  “It does look a lot like you,” Sarah said. She stood in front of the canvas, seemingly unaffected by the oppressive atmosphere. “I suppose at least the reflective bits of glass are covering your privates.” Talk about looking on the bright side.

  “They aren’t my privates,” I insisted, but it was hard to argue that the woman did look like a more refined, attractive version of me.

  “So he must have seen into your dream.”

  I disagreed, but bit my tongue rather than saying the words aloud. Sarah needed to believe her brother wasn’t attracted to their cousin. I could understand that.

  A sobering thought shook me. Was I so determined to believe it was modelled off me because I found the idea of someone seeing my dreams so unpalatable? No, that was silly; it was because it was impossible. Unpalatable had nothing to do with it.

  Gritting my teeth and breathing slowly, I studied the painting. The glass fragments of the dress seemed to jump out, moving beneath the light as I inched closer to the image. The picture’s background was indistinct, drawing my gaze back to the woman. Her dark eyes burned as they glared out of the canvas, substantial, almost three-dimensional.

  The crown of thorns was made from vines woven together in an intricate braid. The thorns were identical to those on the rose Ryan had painted on my MP3 player case; the curved shape and the wicked point were the same. I wondered if that was significant. Presumably there were only so many ways to paint a thorn.

  “Sarah,” Aunt Elizabeth called, coming down from the house. Her shoes slapped on the path. “I’m going to take Ryan to the after-hours doc—”

  She entered the shed. Her gaze settled on the painting and she stopped short, her skin blanching almost as pale as that of the woman on the canvas. Sarah and I stared at her as she turned and hurried—almost ran—back to the house without saying another word.

  “What the…?” Sarah trailed off, following her mother. I hurried after, head spinning, but also relieved when the nausea again dropped away like an unwanted, bilious cloak falling to the floor.

  When we entered the house, she was interrogating Ryan. He was still sitting at the kitchen table, empty plate in front of him. He looked confused. “The woman in the painting. Where did you see her?”

  “Painting?” He struggled to remember. Maybe he’d hit his head when he passed out. The painting must have taken days. How could he have forgotten? He blinked slowly. “I, uh, it was a dream I had.” He didn’t even glance at me.

  Sarah, on the other hand, shot me a triumphant, relieved look.

  And Aunt Elizabeth looked horrified. She rushed out of the kitchen, again without saying anything, and disappeared into her bedroom. The door slammed.

  There was a moment of silence. Sarah pointed at the phone, back in its cradle. The light had gone on to indicate that the line was in use. There was another handset in Aunt Elizabeth’s room. Sarah picked up the phone, holding a finger to her lips as she held it to her ear. I stood beside her, and she tilted the receiver so both our ears were pressed against it.

  I was the serious, studious and—yes, I admit it—square one among my friends. But I wanted to know what prompted this uncharacteristic reaction from my aunt. The woman in the painting looked like me. Didn’t I have the right to know?

  Sarah pressed the talk button on the phone and we both held our breath.

  “You’re sure?” It was my father.

  “Yes.” Aunt Elizabeth sounded angry. “He says he saw her in a dream, but that’s impossible. He must have seen an old photo or something. She hasn’t aged a day.”

  “It’s not that impossible.” Dad sounded scared.

  “Of course it is,” Aunt Elizabeth retorted. “It was eighteen years ago. He hasn’t seen her on the street.”

  A cold feeling crystallised in my stomach. Eighteen years?

  “I hope,” Dad said. “Look, you’re sure it’s her?”

  “I’m positive. The painting is of Isla’s mother.”

  Chapter Five