The Doctor's Undoing. Allie Pleiter

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      “See how that makes a circle right there? How it meets that line from the other side?” He caught Miss Landway’s voice as he turned a corner toward the front of the compound.

      “It’s just shapes?” a child’s voice, full of wonder, came in reply. Daniel slowed his steps, not wanting to intrude but still curious. He peered to his left to see Miss Landway seated on the stone bench by the front gate. She had a pair of girls on each side of her, more at her feet and a large pad of paper perched upright on her lap.

      “Shapes and color. That’s how an artist sees the world.” She moved her hand over the paper, and Daniel shifted closer to improve his view. “Look at the gate and tell me what shape it is.”

      “A rectungle,” one girl said. Miss Landway’s laugh chimed across the courtyard in reply.

      “A rectangle, yes. Very good.” He watched her sketch out the shape in the center of her page. “But not just any old rectangle. What’s special about this one?”

      “It’s got a moon on top,” Gwendolyn Martin, on the bench right next to Miss Landway, piped up as she pointed to the gate’s rounded arch.

      The nurse’s smile was warm and bright as she nodded toward her seatmate. “Right you are, Gitch. The moon is also a shape, called an arch or a crescent, and if you plop that big old moon sideways on top of our rectangle—” she added the curve to the top of the drawing “—you get our gate.” Miss Landway spun the drawing around so that the girls at her feet could see, and a chorus of wide-eyed ooohs met her display. The part of him that worried how long the Parker Home could retain a nurse was happy to note she used the word our when she referred to the gate. Lord, You know I was looking for someone entirely different, but I’d still be grateful if this one actually stays. He could try to learn to see the world in colors and shapes if it meant she stayed here where she was most definitely needed.

      As if she’d heard his thoughts, Miss Landway opened a tray of watercolors on her lap with a flourish and announced, “Now we’ve got to add the colors. Call out the ones you see.”

      “The gate is black,” young Miss Martin offered.

      “Only it’s got red and orange around the hinges and in spots on the side,” added another girl.

      “The dirt is brown but the leaves are green,” another girl spoke up, pointing to the objects she named.

      “But not the same color as those leaves over there,” came another comment. “Those are a different green.”

      The children called out half a dozen colors and a few more shapes as they peered hard at the landscape before them. Miss Landway held up her pigments and had each girl match the color she saw with a color from the tray. For a woman who continually bemoaned the lack of color at the Home, she was wasting no time in digging up a palette right here. He stood and watched, fascinated, as she used each color to create a painting of the gate and the plants around it. Miss Landway had skill; the image was pleasant enough to hang in the staff dining room.

      If only she had stopped there.

      “The best thing about art,” she said once she’d finished with each child’s color, “is that we don’t just have to leave the world the way we found it. We can have more fun than that.”

      Daniel felt his jaw go slack as Miss Landway dove into her palette and created a riot of hues around the gate. Under her enthusiastic brush, a full and wild garden sprung up around the gate on her paper. In a matter of minutes, two outrageously colored birds perched on the wall under a blinding yellow sun. A bright red house rose up beyond the gate whereas in real life only a dull gray shed stood on the other side of the street. Before she was finished, every inch of the paper was filled with motion and color until the canvas looked more like a tropical circus than the scene Daniel saw before her. When Miss Landway flipped the painting around to show the children, giggles and applause echoed across the courtyard along with her loud and musical laugh.

      How had she done that? Daniel’s gaze flicked back and forth between the real-life gate and Miss Landway’s fantastical painting. It irked him that suddenly the Home’s serviceable but pleasant front gate now looked dull and dreary, even to him. He’d liked the gate just fine before, and ought to still like it now. He didn’t care for the funny, poke-in-the-ribs feeling Miss Landway’s artwork produced, nor did he care one bit for the sad dissatisfaction that filled the eyes of some of the children after a moment.

      She didn’t realize what she had done. It would probably never occur to the plucky Miss Landway that she had just shown them a world they could never have, and left reality that much worse for the visit to a fantasy. How on earth was he to explain such a thing to the likes of Ida Lee Landway?

      He walked over to the group, flipping his watch open as he came closer. Gwendolyn saw him first and stood up, a streak of fear in her eyes. They all looked as if he’d caught them doing something naughty, and that bothered him immensely. He took pains to soften his voice when he asked, “An art lesson, Miss Landway?”

      “The girls wanted to watch me paint.”

      “Our gate is a rectangle with a moon,” Gwendolyn pronounced. It bothered him that the little girl offered it like the grandest of compliments.

      Miss Landway raised one eyebrow, a “what are you going to do with that?” gesture that made Daniel feel as if he were being tested. It should have been the other way around. Even ten minutes later, Daniel still hadn’t quite figured out how Miss Landway had turned the tables on him so that he walked away without uttering one word of the lecture on appropriate reality he had planned. An hour earlier, he had thought his biggest fear in regards to Miss Landway was the possibility that she would leave. Now he had a new fear entirely—that she would stay, and fill the children’s heads with dreams that were out of their reach.

      His mother’s admonition echoed in his brain as he made his way back to his office, stumped and more than a little worried. “Be careful what you pray for—the Good Lord just might give it to you.”

Chapter Five

      Daniel was just sitting down to enjoy his weekly indulgence of an hour’s quiet reading before Saturday supper when the sound of yelling reached his rooms. He put down his book and cocked his ear, listening. No, it wasn’t yelling, it was crying. Girls crying. Several girls crying. Something was most definitely amiss.

      Ignoring his disappointment, Daniel pushed himself out of his chair and made for the door. The cries were coming from the dining hall, where Mrs. Smiley and the girls ought to be setting out the dishes for supper. Had someone cut themselves? Was one of the girls ill? He started walking in the direction of the noise, half expecting to be ambushed by one of the children or staff coming to get him, but he met no one on his way toward the torrent of girlish tears.

      Of all the things Daniel steeled himself to see, a flock of angry girls slamming down tin plates in tearful fits was not on the list. No one seemed to be injured, but each of the five girls on supper table duty that afternoon was crying.

      “I want some,” the youngest girl moaned as she slapped a napkin into place. “Why can’t we all have them?”

      Daniel scanned the room for Mrs. Smiley, hoping for an explanation to the sea of unhappiness swirling before him. He found her, two tables away, having angry words with...with СКАЧАТЬ