Page 64 of Just Say Christmas
Silence for a moment, until Casey breathed,“Oh.”
“Don’t touch yet,” Nyree said. “A few things are still wet.” She looked a bit worried at the lack of response. Nyree was classically trained and fiercely talented, and she had her first show coming up at a major gallery, but she was worrying anyway that she hadn’t painted a little girl’s bedroom wall well enough. It might be because the little girl was Marko’s coach’s daughter, but Hayden didn’t think so. He suspected that she just threw herself that hard into everything she did. If Nyree had ever had a secret, he didn’t think it had stayed a secret long.
Also, he wasn’t sure how she’d done it. The mural had looked good when he’d been painting the grass. Now, though, it looked . . . immense. Endlessly detailed. Absolutely three-dimensional, like stepping through the looking glass.
A cliff rose up the left side of the wall, craggy and gray with rock. Nyree had painted in the texture with so much precision, you felt like you could climb it. In fact, thereweretiny figures climbing it. Gnomes with red hats, blue jackets, and green trousers, scaling the cliff walls with the aid of ropes, digging into it with picks and shovels. Above the cliff, a castle soared, colored creamy white with gray roofs, probably like the buildings in Paris, at least in Nyree’s version of Paris. It had turrets and windows and tower rooms galore, a courtyard with wagons holding teeny-tiny bags of flour and logs of wood, and green pastures spilling down to one side of the cliff and into the foreground. A stream wound through the green and cascaded into a waterfall that dropped from the cliff and ended in a plunge pool, a shimmer of rainbow dancing behind it. Dragonflies darted over the water, and two fairies perched on a lily pad, having a tea party. There was a fairy riding a beetle, fairies flying over mushrooms . . . fairies everywhere.
“Magic horses,” the little redheaded girl, one of Finn and Jenna’s, said, because, yes, there was a herd of horses in the meadow outside the castle, and a few of them had wings, including a magnificent black stallion. One of the mares had a foal, too. A white mare, pushing her foal with her nose, and the black foal just trying out his wings, his sparkling silver hooves a few centimeters above the ground. Overhead, spilling onto the ceiling, three horses rose into the sky, their feathered wings beating, while sapphire swallows flew around them. On the opposite side of the wall, overlooking it all, a blue dragon perched at the top of the green hills, his wings outstretched, his chest scaled with gold and glittering in the light. Protecting or conquering, you couldn’t say, or maybe you could tell the story either way.
“Look,” Casey breathed. “It’s me. And you, Isaiah. It’s us.” It was. A forest extended beyond the wall, over onto the next one. The forest Luke had painted, and a little girl climbing up the largest tree, hand over hand. Casey’s wavy dark hair, Casey’s eyebrows, determination galore, and Casey’s peat-colored eyes, and Isaiah, perched on a branch, looking out to study the world.
“And bunnies,” Finn’s littlest kid said. His mother pulled his hand back from where he would have touched them. To be fair, theydidlook realistic enough to stroke.
“It’s Cocoa! And Cinnamon!” Casey said. “And now that Nyree’s done painting, they can come home to my room, instead of having to be outside all the time, being lonely.”
“Can’t wait,” Rhys said. The bunnies were famously not completely house-trained. Casey was meant to keep them in their cage, but it didn’t necessarily happen.
On the wall, a non-messing dark-brown bunny and a reddish one munched on the grass at the bottom of the trees. The mice were there, too, that Hayden had watched Nyree paint, complete with beady little eyes and twitching whiskers, one of them nibbling on a kernel of corn. Rhys was eyeing the mice without much favor, like he was expecting to have to put his foot down about pet mice any day now.
“And Oreo and Marshmallow,” Isaiah said. “Look, Casey, they’re playing under our tree.” That was happening, too, because they were chasing each other around the trunk. Four tiny lop-eared bunnies, duly accounted for. There was also a bad witch, black-haired and cruel-looking, lurking in the forest like she was just waiting to interfere, and a fairy in a long white dress with silver hair, rainbow wings, and a magic wand beside the pool, ready to fly to the rescue.
“It’s a wall of stories,” Zora said. “I’d say you can pretend away in here, Casey.”
“It’s magic,” Casey said. She was standing on her princess-coach bed now, hugging herself, then spinning, arms outstretched. “It’s a whole magical world. It’s igg-zackly what I would ever, ever dream about.”
“It has some real things, too,” Isaiah said, “which is important.”
Nyree was laughing, her head against Marko’s chest, his arm around her. “It’s my best,” she said. “I did my best. All you can do is your best, right? And I did it.”
“Your best is good,” Rhys said. “It’s very good. Thank you.”
Casey jumped down from the bed and threw her arms around her father, than around Nyree.“Yes,”she said. “Thank you for my magical room. It’s the best room I ever saw.”
Rhys said, “So. Who wants sausage rolls? All the best short-notice parties have sausage rolls. At least if I throw them, they do.”
“I shouldn’t,” Hayden’s mum said, bang on cue.
“And I can’t,” Nyree said, “and neither can Jenna, sadly, because sausage rolls are awesome, but I’m guessing there’s something Icaneat, and I’m going to. I’m starved. Marko, why am I so starved?”
“Because you’ve been forgetting to eat,” he said. “Carried away by magic. And you finished. Good job.”
“It means we can get married, too,” she said. “Bonus.”
32
Challenge Accepted
RHYS
Rhys pulled sausage rolls and tiny meat pies out of the oven, piled them onto platters, inclined his head at Marko and Kors, who carried them out to the terrace, and tried to work out what felt off.
It wasn’t the mural, because itwaspretty wonderful, and Casey was ecstatic. Isaiah was happy, too, although, as usual, more subdued about it.
He needed to block out a time for book discussion with Isaiah. A walk before dinner once a week, maybe, because Isaiah talked more readily when he didn’t have to look you in the eye, and when he was talking about something outside himself. Just because a kid was quiet, that didn’t mean he didn’t need you.
It wasn’t Marko or Kors or even Kane. He could read his players’ body language at a glance, and though he knew Kane’s less well, he could tell he was pretty bloody relaxed. It wasn’t Zora, either, because he knew what was wrong with Zora. Too many deadlines, and too much work. Lately, it was like she was in some film, running from the villains, jumping fences and ducking through buildings, sure that at any moment, she’d turn down the wrong alley and find that it was a dead end. She wasn’t quite at panic stations, but she was close.
Also, possibly, the thing a week or so ago, the night when they’d been meant to take advantage of her basal temperature rise and she’d fallen asleep instead.
