The Very Image
by Ivy Grimes
When I was eleven, my parents made me and my sister pose for giant oil paintings. Beth was thirteen, and she warned me the pictures would come back to haunt us someday. She begged our parents to change their minds, but they said she was being dramatic. For me, it meant a few boring afternoons wearing my stiff navy suit and a stiffer smile for the painter who was so thoroughly bored by painting me that she warped my features until I looked like a young John Kennedy. My sister posed outside on the porch swing. The painter seemed to find her more interesting; she managed to capture the grief in my sister’s eyes.
My portrait didn’t embarrass me. I’d show it to my friends to get a laugh out of them, and it always worked. My best friend John told me he’d expected me to be dressed like Henry VIII. I wished my parents could have been that clever.
I never meant to embarrass my sister. I never told anyone about her portrait. Sometimes forgot she had one, too. My friends always noticed hers when I showed them mine, but that was never my plan. I knew she wouldn’t want anyone to see her dressed the way she was in the portrait.
In high school, after Mom died, she started dressing like a raven. She told me that’s what she was doing. Along with feathery black shirts and sweaters and capes and coats and long skirts, she wore thick stacks of silver bangles and rings almost completely covering the skin on her arms and fingers. I guessed (correctly, she said) that the jewelry was supposed to make her hands look like raven claws, except silver. It was a cool idea if you thought of it that way. If you didn’t think of it that way, it looked really weird.
Anyway, my friends laughed and laughed whenever they saw the painting of thirteen-year-old Beth in a fluffy white dress with a white satin ribbon in her ponytail. My friend Jamie laughed so hard when he saw it, he had to lie down on the floor for a minute to recover. I think the laughter gave him a cramp. We had just eaten a whole platter of chicken fingers. Unfortunately, Beth walked in while he was on the floor laughing underneath her picture, and she dropped her bookbag and ran upstairs, bangles clanging all the way.
“Oh, man,” Jaime said. He was a nice guy, really. He was on the basketball team with me. “Can I go apologize?”
“I guess?”
I didn’t think it was a big deal either way. Beth was always mad about something, but she never stayed mad.
I sat on the floor in the living room and studied my history textbook while Jaime was upstairs apologizing. The other funny thing about the living room was that it didn’t have any furniture. It just had those two oil paintings hanging on either side of the fireplace. Mom said she was waiting until she found the perfect furniture to complete the room. My mother was always looking for that furniture, I guess. She died when I was thirteen. Dad kept the house the way she left it, but Beth was free to dress and act however she wanted. I had always basically done what I wanted, though to be fair, I didn’t want much.
I felt pretty ready for my history test by the time Jaime descended the stairs, clutching a brown journal in his hand. I recognized it as the type my sister used to record her daily musings. I had never been curious about what was inside.
“Sorry I was up there so long,” he said. He was shifty-eyed, red-faced. “Your sister is really cool.”
“And now you’re…” I pointed at the diary.
“I told her I wanted to know her better, and she gave me this.” He held it up in the air for a moment, grasping it like a bowling ball.
“Do you, uh, like her now or something?”
“I might be in love with her,” he said. Jaime always told me the truth when I asked him.
I was surprised, which made me realize I hadn’t thought anyone could come close to loving Beth as a raven. Maybe I was picking up on Mom’s cosmic disapproval. I was mildly amused by Jamie’s crush, but I kept it to myself. Unlike Jaime, I wasn’t going to lie down on the floor and laugh at anyone.
When Beth, Dad, and I had dinner that night, she was quiet. Dad and I were always quiet, so usually Beth had plenty of time to talk about whatever book she was reading or the phonies at school or weird bands from the 80s. But that night, I was thinking about my history test and an upcoming basketball game and a girl I liked, and I didn’t think much about her silence.
After dinner, she pulled me into her room. I hadn’t been in there since Mom died. Beth didn’t like visitors, and I’d had no reason to visit. She had books stacked everywhere without a shelf, and for some reason, she’d covered her bed and lampshade with black silk. It all looked so depressing, I wanted to leave right away.
“Look, Peter, I’ve never bothered you with my problems. I know you’re busy with your own life. But it’s time to let you in on a little secret.”
“A secret,” I repeated in a neutral tone, trying not to be too encouraging or discouraging. If the conversation got too weird, I would excuse myself. I’ve never liked drama or weird stuff. I’m the opposite of Beth in that way.
“Yes. Have you ever heard of automatic writing?”
“Uh, no?”
“It’s where you communicate with the dead by channeling them and writing down what they say. Usually the medium doesn’t even know what he or she is writing. You know, I didn’t hate Mom. I know she loved me. But she is completely and totally my opposite.”
“Right.” I glanced at the closed bedroom door, feeling like a cat trapped at the vet’s office.
“Let me show you some of what she’s told me.”
She went to a stack of at least a dozen journals of the kind she had lent to Jamie, pulled one out and pointed me to a particular passage.
It said: “Dear one please Beth love don’t forget to love the loved one, remember that your spirit is love, that love is a material, that love comes with many faces, and one face is passion, and you will meet a man named James and you will wear the face of passion and your life will be blessed…”
I looked up at her. “James?”
“Yeah. Like Jamie, see? It’s obviously from Mom. She’s still telling me what to do!”
“Why do you think it’s Mom? She doesn’t talk like that. I don’t think I ever heard her use the word passion.”
“She’s changed since she died! Don’t you get it?” Beth’s eyes filled with tears, and she sat on the carpet and wiped the tears away with the edges of her huge black cardigan.
“Wait…you gave Jamie one of these journals with writing you think is from Mom?” I said, my face burning. If he read it out loud at practice, I would die.
“No! I gave him my poetry journal,” she said. “He seemed interested, and in spite of everything, I was tempted to get close to him. He’s distinguished-looking.”
As I saw it, she was lucky someone normal like Jamie was interested in someone super weird like she was.
“So you think Mom is trying to get you to date Jamie? There are other Jameses in the world. I even have another friend named James. He doesn’t go by Jamie, either. Just plain James.”
“Yeah, but just look at the coincidence! Him laughing beneath that painting of me, then coming up here…” She put her hands in her hair and shook out her roots.
“Do you do the automatic writing thing a lot?”
“Once a week. On Sunday afternoons when you and Dad are watching sports, usually.”
“If you don’t want her telling you what to do, then why do you keep talking to her?” I thought I was semi-successfully psychoanalyzing her.
“So I know what not to do!” She said. She leapt to her feet and began pacing, fluttering the wings of her cardigan as she walked around the room. “If she thinks I should love Jamie, then I can’t! I just can’t.”
Of course, that meant she did love Jamie. They were star-crossed now. And I didn’t want anything to do with it.
“That’s your business. You should love who you want. Or…don’t,” I said. “What do you want me to do about it?”
Beth gave me a wounded look. “You just want to have an easy life. Unbothered. You weren’t cursed like I was. Fine, I’ll talk to Jamie myself. If the rejection destroys him, then you’re partially responsible. You’re the one who should break the news to him. He’s your best friend.”
“John’s my best friend. This was the first time Jamie’s even been to our house,” I said.
We squabbled like that a few more minutes, but nothing changed. I wasn’t going to help her talk to Jamie about my dead Mom and her posthumous machinations.
I was fifteen then, and she was seventeen. I knew Mom’s death was hard on her, especially since they hadn’t gotten along, but I didn’t know what to do about any of it. A week later, Jamie didn’t show up at our usual cafeteria table. John said he’d checked himself out for a doctor’s appointment. I knew it was because of Beth. The warned-of broken heart. I was worried it would mean a shift in our friend group, with our friends either choosing Jamie or me. I admit I was angry at Beth for putting me in the situation.
After practice that afternoon (which Jamie was conspicuously absent from,) I didn’t invite anyone home with me. I needed to decompress, I thought. Unfortunately, I walked through the door to find Beth sitting on the living room floor staring up at the painting of her younger self.
“There’s such an evil emanating from this portrait,” she said.
“Right. Well, I’m going to do some homework.”
“Wait. Don’t you want to know what happened with Jamie?” She turned to face me, grasping her knees with her hands, and I noticed she had removed the silver rings from her left pinky finger. The skin was pink and creased where the rings had been. Was it a symbol of something? And damn it, once I started wondering about that, I found myself wanting to know about Jamie, too.
“I told him at lunchtime,” she said. “I asked him to meet me behind the bleachers in the gym.”
“But our game is this Friday! It’ll mess with his head.” It seemed like psychological torture to break the bad news to him in the place where the magic needed to happen.
“I wasn’t trying to do that. The last thing I want to do is hurt him.”
An unsettling noise came from somewhere in the house. I felt like a baby, but it made me shriek a little. Beth arched her eyebrows, indicating wordlessly that our house was haunted by our late mother.
“You’ve been inviting ghosts into your bedroom every week for like three years, Beth! What do you think is going to happen?”
“So you believe me? About the automatic writing?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to believe. All I knew was that I couldn’t wait for college when I could stop worrying about my family.
Her eyes filled with tears. “Jamie was heartbroken, but he accepted what I said. I told him I thought he was very handsome and quite a gentleman, but that I knew in my heart that Mom wanted me to fall in love with him, and so I just couldn’t. I couldn’t do it.”
“You told him all that stuff about the ghosts?”
“Of course. Jamie understands me. We have a special soul connection.” She chewed at the nail of her bare pinky.
“And where did your rings go?” I hated myself for asking.
“I gave them to him as mementos of a love that was never to bloom. And really, maybe it’s time for me to move on. To molt.” She stared sadly at the outfit that had enabled her to seem strange to everyone at school. To be Mom’s opposite.
“I wish you the best,” I told her.
And I meant it. I knew things couldn’t be easy for her and that they wouldn’t be easy in the future. Anyone could see that. What I didn’t realize was that things were about to get hard for me as well.
That night, shouts woke me from sleep. I was terrified. I wanted to seem brave to myself, so I grabbed my camping knife and walked out into the upstairs hall. From Beth’s room, I heard Jamie’s voice. He was telling my sister he’d do anything for her. I almost stormed into her room to fight him, but I heard Beth’s voice answering that she couldn’t help but love him.
It all seemed so wrong. I had no idea what to do. Beth always said Dad was no help, but I had talked to him a couple of times about problems with my coach, and I thought he gave really sensible advice. So, like a child, I went into his bedroom to ask for help. I knocked, and when there wasn’t a response, I entered, thinking he was sleeping deeply. Instead, his bed was empty.
“Wow,” I said to myself. He’d left us alone without telling us where he was going. Still, I figured it was none of my business if he had a new girlfriend, even though he could have just told us about her. And it was none of my business if Beth and Jamie were playing some stupid angsty game.
I went back to my room and read my biology textbook until I fell asleep.
The next morning, when I went to the kitchen for breakfast, Dad and Beth were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking their black coffee as usual.
“Morning, Partner,” Dad said. He was alert as usual, dressed for work. What a sly guy, I thought.
Beth had puffy circles under her eyes, but her irises glittered with the thrill of the drama. Now there were no rings on either her left pinky or her left ring finger. More mementos for Jamie, I guessed.
My crush at school hadn’t looked twice at me, and I hadn’t done anything to change that. I was left behind. My fear of drama—had it made my life boring? I had to do something, didn’t I? And I was starting to feel the evil emanating from the paintings downstairs, too. Something wasn’t right in our house, and I couldn’t keep ignoring it. I decided to try to fix the problem, and if I couldn’t fix it, I’d move out. I’d see if I could stay with one of the other guys on the team. Their families all seemed normal.
I got a chance to pull Jamie aside on my way to lunch that day. He protested that he had somewhere else to be, but I told him it was urgent that I speak to him. I pulled him over to the lunch tables outside on the lawn before anyone else got there, and I told him plainly that whatever was going on with my sister was messed up, and he had to stop it. It was against our code, I told him, though I didn’t say if it was the bro code or the team code or what.
“I’m in love,” he said. “What’s the law against that?”
“But like, you got a ladder out of our garage. Climbed it at three in the morning? That’s not okay. It’s my house too.”
“It’s against the bro code to make a sweeping romantic gesture? I think not,” he said, and he excused himself from the conversation and hurried off. If my debate skills wouldn’t cut it, I decided I’d have to be more forceful.
I took a few minutes to collect myself before going to the lunchroom to look for him so I could challenge him to a real fight. Since he wasn’t there, the next place I headed was the gym, but when I got to the double doors Beth ran out, followed by a tearful Jamie. As she got away, I put my arm in front of his chest to block his escape, and when he tried to knock me down I got him into a headlock and held him until he gave up.
“What did you say to her?” I asked once we were both upright and hiding in the empty locker room.
He hung his head. “The horrible truth.”
“Which is?”
“The truth about your mother and my relationship with her.”
I got up in a hurry, ready to fight again, anticipating his slander of my dead mother, but he interrupted me.
“Listen! She paid me, man. She paid me to date your sister. I didn’t expect to really fall in love with her, but that’s what happened.”
“What?” My heart and stomach seemed to liquify and mix together. “She died when I was thirteen! That means you would have been no more than thirteen when my Mom paid you. Why would you make up such a dumb lie?”
He looked up at me, and for the first time, I noticed how different he was from me. He was a little smaller, but his eyes had a light. An intelligence, a kindness. I saw what my sister must have seen. It silenced me, made me listen.
“Your mother was worried about Beth. She knew she was vulnerable. She said she saw something special in me. You and I weren’t very good friends then, but we knew each other a little from basketball. I wasn’t even good back then. I was just sitting on the bench. And no one had seen something special in me before, and it felt good. It was a lot of money, too. I spent a chunk of it on a bike I had to hide from my parents, but I still have a bunch of it. And I’m a man of my word. So eventually you invited me over to your house. I didn’t think your sister and I had much in common, but I was wrong.”
I nodded. All of us on the basketball team were men of our word.
“But I fell in love. Have you read her poetry?”
I hadn’t. Instead of thinking about Beth’s poetry, I pictured Mom. She’d been thin-limbed, with hummingbird energy. She’d worked hard to think of ways to make us happy. She was the one who’d started playing basketball with me when I was a little kid, getting on her knees and showing me how to dribble. But Mom had made a contract with a minor. That didn’t sound like Mom
“So anyway, it sucks,” he said.
Beth walked in on us as we were trying to sort through Mom’s intentions. I noticed she had lost the rings on her left middle finger as well. I knew that if Jamie ran around the room, his pockets would jingle. She looked at him instead of me.
“I know what we have to do. This was Mom’s fault, not yours. She put her energy into those paintings. That’s what’s infecting us.” She turned to me. “Didn’t I tell you all along those paintings were bad? Evil! Well, we have to do something about it. Come with me.”
I nodded. I was ready to believe whatever crazy thing she said. I was overwhelmed with some powerful feeling I couldn’t name. I loved Mom, but I hated her. And I saw what Beth meant—we had to do something.
Jamie drove us home. On the way, we waited for Beth to tell us her plan, but she was silent. When we arrived, Beth stood in the empty living room and pointed at her younger self.
“We have to burn them!”
I felt what a knight of old must have felt on the cusp of battle when his commander gave a rousing speech. I was ready to burn, to bleed, to kill and be killed. For the sake of my enemy.
I stood in front of my own painting. It only seemed right that I take mine and Beth take hers. Jamie helped her with the heavy portrait and I swung my own down, not caring about the damage to the wooden floors. Mom would have been furious at us. I wanted to her to be.
I was about to haul my portrait to the backyard and make a bonfire but Beth called me back. She pointed at the wall where our portraits had been. To my shock, I saw two tiny holes where my portrait had been, and two more holes where hers had been. The dots looked like pinpricks from far away but were the size of my pinky when I got close to them. They were placed to line up with the eyes on our portraits.
“A spy,” Beth whispered.
There was a rustling in the wall, a sound I had always assumed was birds nesting in the chimney. Beth snapped out of her delirium more quickly than Jamie or I did, and she ran out to the garage and came back with an ax. She began whacking, starting with the spot where her own portrait had hung. The three of us took turns axing at the wall until there was a hole big enough for each of us to squeeze through.
Inside, we found a small corridor that held two small cots, the foot of one lined up against the head of the other. The beds were meticulously made, the covers pulled tight. Under the beds were little baskets—one filled with snacks, one with decks of cards, one with makeup. At the far end of the corridor, a tiny door was left open. The spy had escaped, and there was no question in my mind who the culprit was. I ducked my head and ran through the doorway where I found a dark passage leading to the cellar. The cellar door was open, too, leading out onto the lawn. She had escaped. Of course she had. As soon as we removed the portraits, she knew she had to go. No doubt, she was always ready to run when she watched us from the corridor. She was so energetic, so tight-lipped, so nervous. Ready to teach, to hug, to instruct, to protect, to bribe, to have us painted.
I jumped out of the open door and ran across the lawn and into the thick woods near our house. I looked behind every tree and bush but couldn’t find her. I searched and searched, and I was sure I felt her presence, but I couldn’t look forever. The night was coming on. When I went home, it was empty. I peered into Beth’s room and saw that her journals were gone.
I was on my own now. Mom wasn’t watching me. At least, I hoped she wasn’t watching me. I felt nervous as I packed a couple of bags of my own. By the time I got to John’s house and asked for a place to stay, I felt like it was okay to relax. I knew Mom wouldn’t follow me to John’s. She hated his mother.
Knowing Beth, I knew she was still out looking for Mom, or Mom’s ghost, or whatever had been watching us all those years from behind our own painted faces. I knew Jamie was a man of his word, and he would try to keep her safe. I decided it was time for me to figure out what I wanted for myself, and if Mom found a way to spy on me, let her watch me and weep.
In college, my friends and I rented an apartment. We got thrift store furniture for the living room, and I love it. I’ll never live again in the presence of another portrait. I let the guys hang up logos and landscapes and abstract paintings if they want, but from time to time, I still check behind them.
Ivy Grimes is originally from Birmingham, Alabama, and she currently lives in Virginia. She has an MFA from the University of Alabama. Her stories have appeared in The Baffler, Vastarien, hex, Maudlin House, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Seize the Press, ergot., Potomac Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Grime Time is available from Tales From Between. Her novella Star Shapes is forthcoming from Spooky House Press in January 2024. Her collection Glass Stories is forthcoming from Grimscribe Press in late 2024.
COLD SIGNAL 