Behind the Canvas Read online

  Claudia picked up Aunt Maggie’s birthday card. Hey, chica. What artist doesn’t need a bazillion colors to express herself with, right? Happy birthday. I’m back in town—come visit me. She smiled. Her aunt was the kind of person who would probably wear all twenty-four colors at the same time.

  Placing the card back on her desk, she turned and climbed into bed. On the wall beside her hung the other present from her parents. A painting—real oil colors on real canvas in a real frame. It was a painting of a meadow full of brilliant wildflowers and a blue sky. A creek cut through one corner and a willow tree stood off to the left. Her parents had brought it back for her from a trip to Canada, which made it an international work of art. It was tiny, about the length of a pencil, but it was all hers. Her painting on her wall. It meant that she wasn’t just a kid who thought art was interesting. It meant that she was an art collector.

  Claudia closed her eyes and pictured herself sitting in the meadow, the breeze blowing her hair, the whisper of the creek tumbling by. She breathed in and almost caught the scent of wildflowers.

  Who cared about what happened at the museum? It would all be behind her tomorrow.

  She lay down on her pillow and snapped off the light.

  * * *

  Claudia awoke with a start. Her breathing was heavy and her heart thumped against her ribs. She glanced at her clock. It was the middle of the night. Her sheets and comforter were wrapped tightly around her. But something had woken her up. She listened in the darkness. Nothing.

  She slipped from bed and peered out the window. The neighborhood below was silent. Silent and dark, except for the occasional pocket of light on a front porch that somehow only accentuated the darkness. Like a scene in a Caravaggio.

  She stared at the porch lights a while longer until her heart slowed to a more familiar rhythm. Maybe it was a nightmare that had woken her up. She was glad she didn’t remember it.

  The dark room begged her to sleep, and she was happy to oblige. She stumbled into bed and pulled up the covers, her weary eyes aimlessly searching for the outline of her painting on the wall. She found it just as her eyelids started to droop. In the back of her mind, she heard a car driving down the street. It passed, filling her room with light like a slow-motion flash from a camera.

  And in an instant she was sitting up, entirely awake.

  There was someone in her painting.

  In the blaze of headlights she had seen someone there. She was sure of it. Someone in a meadow that was supposed to be empty.

  She jumped out of bed and snatched a flashlight from her desk drawer. She spun around and clicked it on, her arm pointing straight out toward the painting.

  The circle of light landed on the canvas. There, next to the tree, a tiny figure threw up its hands to shield its eyes from the blinding beam.

  Claudia shrieked and dropped the flashlight. There wasn’t just a picture of someone in her painting—there was a real someone in her painting. Someone who moved.

  On an impulse, Claudia launched herself onto her bed. She grabbed the painting by the wooden frame and spun it around on its wire, slamming it face-first against the wall.

  She stood there for a few moments, pushing against the back of the painting as though it might recoil off the wall on its own. Then she tentatively let go. The painting remained still.

  Claudia snatched up the flashlight and ripped the comforter from her bed. She huddled on the far side of the room, the flashlight shining on the back of the canvas. It looked innocent and ridiculous hanging crookedly on the wall.

  Her breath was ragged. What was going on? Two paintings. She had seen people now in two paintings who didn’t belong there. Could she really be going crazy? But crazy is what happens to old rich people, not kids in the prime of middle school.

  It was ghosts, then. She was being haunted by artistic ghosts. But who would want to haunt her? Nobody paid attention to her.

  She pulled the comforter around herself in the darkness, listening to her heart pound in her ears. I could go sleep in my parents’ room, she thought, but immediately scolded herself. I’m not five.

  This was absurd. What was she going to do—sleep on the floor all night? Because of … what? Headlights flashed through her window? She imagined something in the shadows of the night?

  She slowly stood up, the comforter falling to the floor. No. She had seen something. Someone. She raised the flashlight and took a step toward the painting.

  Was it the boy? Had it been the same boy just now whom she had seen in the museum?

  Another step.

  She couldn’t just leave the painting there with its face to the wall. The curiosity would drive her … well, she already might be crazy.

  Another step.

  What if the painting was empty? Would she need to see a shrink? Wouldn’t a shrink just try to convince her that this was merely a thought followed by a daydream followed by a nightmare?

  Another step. She was close enough to reach out and touch the painting.

  And what if it was the boy and he was waiting for her right now in that painting? What would a ghost want with her? Maybe she should wait until her grandpa came by the next day. If he was there when she turned the painting around and they both saw the boy …

  “No,” whispered Claudia. “This is my painting.”

  Her chest tightened as she knelt on her bed and reached a trembling hand toward the painting. Panic inched its way to the surface. She swallowed, trying to force it down. But a strange giddiness accompanied it, too, like stepping into a haunted house on Halloween.

  Her fingers tingled as she lightly touched the wooden frame. Then in a slow, methodical motion, she turned the painting on its wire.

  There in the glow of her flashlight stood the willow tree, and the meadow, and the stream … and that was all. There was no boy. No one at all.

  She closed her eyes and placed a hand on her forehead. She let out a long breath. Relief and disappointment shared a place in her otherwise empty stomach. She grabbed her comforter from off the floor and forced a laugh, a quick one, with a shake of her head. She would sleep. She would sleep and forget the whole silly thing.

  She snapped off her flashlight.

  “Wait!”

  It was a voice, from there in her room.

  Claudia’s heart was in her throat as she flicked the flashlight back on.

  Cheeks flushed and eyes shining, a boy stood in the painting as though he had been there all along. His tousled brown hair was in dire need of a comb, and he wore some sort of old-fashioned buttoned shirt and vest. And if he hadn’t been shifting slightly from one foot to the other, she would have sworn that he had been created with the same brushstrokes as the rest of the painting.

  And his eyes were crystal blue and unmistakable.

  Her knees gave way and Claudia dropped to the bed.

  The boy ran a hand through his hair without much result. He looked behind himself and then back at her, squinting in the beam of the flashlight. “I’m sorry. I stepped away just now because I didn’t think you’d turn the painting around again so soon. But you did! They don’t usually come back, not after … well. I didn’t mean to scare you earlier. I guess I’m sorry for that, too.”

  Claudia inched closer to the painting, staring at the boy’s tiny mouth. It actually moved as he spoke, as if repeated brushstrokes were rapidly applied and erased by some invisible artist’s hand.

  The boy seemed encouraged by her approach. “I don’t suppose you would mind…” He motioned at her. “The light?”

  She looked down at the flashlight. “Oh, sorry.” She turned it toward the ceiling so that it cast a soft glow over the bed.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I saw you here in this room,” the boy continued. “I mean, after seeing you in the museum. It’s almost like we were meant to meet each other.”

  Claudia couldn’t help herself. An excitement bubbled up in her like fizz in a soda can. He seemed harmless enough. She reached out a finger and touched the canvas where the boy stood. Dried paint, nothing more.

  The boy glanced at the place on the painting she had touched. “Your name is Claudia. You told me that in the museum. You asked me my name, too. It’s Pim.” His voice held the smallest trace of a foreign accent. Not Spanish like her grandpa. Something different.

  Claudia looked at the painting as if for the first time. “Pim.”

  “Great work on your sketch, by the way. You have a real talent. You’re still budding, of course, but you have talent.”

  “That’s what my grandpa says, too,” she mumbled.

  “I wouldn’t mind meeting your grandpa. He sounds like a smart fellow. I don’t get to meet many people, as you can imagine.”

  She had no idea what to imagine.

  “Hey, do you want to hear an art joke?”

  “A what?”

  “An art joke. Try this one: Why was the art collector in debt?”

  Claudia shrugged. Was he really telling a joke?

  “Because he didn’t have any Monet. Get it? Monet sounds like money?”

  “What are you? Are you a ghost?”

  Pim laughed, a hollow sound. “No. Not a ghost. In fact I’m very much alive. Flesh and blood, just like you, but … well.” He became silent and thoughtful for a moment before continuing. “Not a ghost. Although, I get that a lot. Once when I was at the Louvre,3 I scared an old woman so badly that she … well, anyway. Not a ghost.”

  “You’ve been to the Louvre? But that’s in France, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed. Paris. And what a museum. There aren’t words to describe it. Enormous. Gigantic. Immense. A masterpiece in every corner. Thousands upon thousands of paintings. Just when I think I’ve been in them all, I come across a new one I haven’t seen before—at least not that I can remember.”

  She shook her head, trying to picture what he had just said. “So you, what? Hop around from one painting to another?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not quite as simple as that. I do like paintings, though. I can tell you do, too. The Louvre has some of the most famous paintings in the world. Vermeer, Delacroix, Leonardo. You know about the Mona Lisa, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do, but—”

  “I’ve seen her many times.” The boy’s gaze suddenly seemed to reach past Claudia. “Taken counsel in her court. Listened to her stories…”

  “I don’t get it. You say you’re not a ghost, that you’re flesh and blood. But how’s that possible? Where are you?”

  “Ah, now that’s the question, isn’t it? Where am I?” Pim studied her, stroking his chin. Claudia had the feeling she was being evaluated, like those flexibility tests in gym.

  “You can tell me,” she encouraged. “I want to know.”

  He took a deep breath, his mouth twisting with indecision. Finally he said, “How many oil paintings have been created in the last five hundred years?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Thousands. Millions.”

  “And how many of those were painted on canvas?”

  “Well, probably most of them were.”

  “Yes. Oil and canvas. That is what makes up the world I live in. This wondrous and terrifying world. The world behind the canvas.”

  “So you live in the paintings?”

  “Well … how to describe it?” The boy paced back and forth within the frame. “You go to a museum and see paintings on the wall. And to you, they appear static—people and creatures and places all frozen, never changing. But what if I told you that every painting ever created over the last five hundred years lives, here in the world behind the canvas.”

  “Lives? Lives how?”

  “Well, if you paint a man in your world, in this world that man comes to life. Your painting will never change, but here he talks and walks and thinks and—though he’ll never get a day older—he lives.”

  “Lives,” Claudia repeated. If she hadn’t been speaking to a boy whose face appeared on canvas, she would have laughed at the idea. “So if I paint a picture of a cow…?”

  “That same cow will appear here in this world.”

  “And my landscape painting I’m looking at now?”

  “You will find it here as part of the great patchwork quilt of landscapes that makes up this world. Every person, every place, every creature ever painted.”

  “You can’t really mean every painting. That’s millions of paintings. That world would have to be huge.”

  “It’s not small, I can promise you that,” Pim said with a smile.

  “And how can you show up in my painting? And the one in the museum?”

  “Every painting is like a, I don’t know, a window. Those windows are scattered all over the place. Through them, I can look out into your world.”

  A world behind the canvas. Painted people. Living people. “So you started out as a painting, then?”

  “No!” Pim snapped. “I told you. I am flesh and blood. I am real. I am real. I—I don’t belong here.”

  “But then … how did you get there?”

  The boy’s countenance fell. “Some stories are best left untold. You don’t want to get tangled up in it.” He stared at the ground, biting a fingernail.

  “If you don’t belong there, then … what? Are you stuck? Or trapped there?”

  His eyes lifted to lock with hers. Yes, they said.

  She breathed in sharply. “You’re trapped there? How did that happen?”

  But Pim only shook his head in response.

  “Don’t you have any friends there? Anyone to keep you company?”

  “There are many people, but no one like me.”

  Her mind overflowed with questions, but they were pushed aside by her own memories. Pictures, as clear as a painting, of reading by herself in the corner of a crowded playground, of pretending to be busy with her backpack or homework every morning in class before the bell rang, of wishing for a party on her birthday but too afraid no one would come. She’d never been stuck in a painted world before, but she knew something about feeling out of place and all alone.

  “You must be very lonely,” she said.

  Pim’s laugh was short and bitter. “That doesn’t even begin to describe my life. But…” His eyes met hers and they shone with a new light. “But now I have found a friend.” He extended his hand toward her. “Perhaps fortune is smiling on me at last.”

  I could be friends with a kid like that. That’s what she’d thought in the museum. Perhaps she was right.

  A smile slowly spread across Claudia’s face. She lifted the tip of her finger, hesitated a moment, then pressed it against Pim’s hand. A tiny painted hand that belonged to a mysterious boy trapped in a world behind the canvas.

  “Smiling on us both,” she said.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE NEXT MORNING, Pim was waiting for her in the painting.

  The morning after that, he was there as well.

  And in the mornings that followed.

  Claudia had never met anyone who was so easy to talk to. She didn’t have to rack her brain for something to say, or analyze her words before they came out of her mouth in case they sounded stupid. She just said what was on her mind and he listened. And he would tell her stories or ask questions and she listened.

  So this is what it’s like to have a friend, she thought more than once. I could get used to this.

  He wasn’t always there. At times he excused himself, disappearing as the brushstrokes of the painted background folded over him. But when he returned—sometimes minutes, sometimes hours later—he always came with an art joke.

  “What did the artist say to the dentist?”

  “Hi, Pim. I don’t know. What?”

  “Matisse hurt.”

  “Why did the artist go to jail?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Because he was framed.”

  She had always wished her painting was a little bigger. Now she was glad it was so portable. Her yellow backpack had a large mesh pocket in the front that just fit the painting, allowing Pim to look out and hear without being noticed. She took it with her everywhere, even to school. Pim was especially good at history.

  “Who remembers the name of the Confederate general who surrendered at Appomattox?” asked Mrs. McCoy.

  “Robert E. Lee,” came a whisper from Claudia’s backpack.

  Claudia raised her hand. “Robert E. Lee.”

  “Very good, Claudia. That’s right.”

  “There’s a painting of it in the Smithsonian,” said the whisper.

  “Did you say something else, Claudia?”

  “No.”

  Pim loved to tour the small town of Florence—especially any place that didn’t typically have paintings hanging nearby.

  “You mean you’ve never seen inside a supermarket?” she asked.

  “I’ve never seen the outside of a supermarket, either.”

  “We can fix that.”

  Claudia took him down to the local Food ’n’ Things and walked the aisles.

  On aisle seven: “Why is there a colorful bird on that box? Is that what it contains?”

  “No. The bird’s just there so kids will beg their parents to buy that.”

  On aisle ten: “Peanut butter? You can make butter out of peanuts?”

  “You’ve never had peanut butter? Are you kidding me? When we get home I’m totally making you a peanut butter and jam—” She stopped herself and looked at her friend in the framed painting. “Oh. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I should like to try peanut butter someday.”

  On aisle fourteen: “Water in bottles? Why do they sell water in bottles?”

  “Because people drink it.”

  “But don’t people have sinks in their houses?”

  “Yeah, most people.”

  “Then why would they buy water in bottles?”

  Claudia thought about it but came up empty. “I guess someone thought of the idea, and people went along with it.”

  Pim laughed. “Pig whiskers!”

  “What?”

  “Pig whiskers. Where I grew up, in Haarlem, in the Netherlands, there was a man who sold pig whiskers. Just one whisker was enough to cure anything, any illness. No one really knew if they worked, but everyone had to have them. He sold a lot of pig whiskers—until the pig finally died.”