"Do you have any more like this?" the gallery owner would ask keenly.
Charlie would hesitate a moment and then answer, "Not like that."
Her mother would say quickly, "She has filled my screened porch with paintings."
And Charlie would look at her intently, then flush slightly with embarrassment or firmness, as she disagreed, saying, "Not like that. It is the first of three."
"Three?" the gallery owner would prompt.
"There will be three of them," Charlie would answer forthrightly.
"A trilogy!" the gallery owner would respond in delight.
Charlie would only shrug. "I need three to do it right," she would insist politely.
And the gallery owner would look avidly at Mary, saying, "I would like to do a show for her, if the other paintings are as good. This is talent, a bit raw, but talent that most of us would give our left arm for."
And Mary, strangely unsurprised at his response, would agree to show him the other paintings and to a public viewing.
And from that moment, Mary and Charlie would never look back. She would gasp when the gallery owner priced the paintings first at ten, then twenty, then fifty thousand dollars. Charlie would begin to show a polish in the public eye as she attended shows and interviews and talked with prospective buyers of her art from around the world. Quentin loved them all fiercely, and put Charlie's money aside for her, and there would never be a doubt in anybody's mind that this was a family, knit together by love, and holding strong.
Then Charlie would begin work on what she called the second painting, after a month of troubled dreams and fitful nightmares, and the finished canvas would be almost as much a subject of controversy as her young genius had been in the first place. The second painting would be as dark and horrifying as the first had been full of light and buoyancy.
But they would take it all in stride until the evening when Charlie would be interviewed on global news unveiling the painting, and she would go into seizure and collapse in front of God and everyone, and Mary would wonder if her own heart would stop forever.
Chapter Two
"Clarkson!"
Chapter Two turned around in the tiny, dingy locker room, tossed his scrubs into a nearby barrel for cleaning, and elbowed his locker shut. He wanted not to hear the bellow, but it thrust its way behind gummy eyes and a head that pounded with an ever thickening need to rest and sleep. With a sigh, he put his hand behind
his neck to rub muscles that felt lumpier than the sagging mattress he was heading for, and tried to knead them looser as he stumbled toward the door.
"In here, Dr. Phelmans."
The locker room door pushed open. A beacon of yellow light from the main hospital corridor came streaking across the old, brown glazed linoleum as the immense doctor entered.
"Not good, Clarkson, not good at all." Phelmans waved a clipboard full of performance evaluation sheets in his beefy hand.
Wade stared at him, fatigue seeping through every pore of his body, and wondered if Phelmans could ever have worked the kind of shift he just had. If he had once, he couldn't do it now the sheer bulk of the doctor's body would drop him in his tracks, just as it wearied Wade even to look at him.
Phelmans peered at him as though hoping for a response. Wade knew better. A response opened argument. He did not want to argue. He just wanted to be allowed to get in his car, drive back to his crummy apartment and lumpy bed, and crawl into oblivion. He looked down at his chief and inhaled deeply, as though fresh air alone could revive him. He did not take drugs to keep going, as some of his fellow residents did, nor did he rely heavily on caffeine. It was sheer willpower, and the love of what he did, and the adrenaline from doing it right that kept him going through shifts as long as seventy-two hours without more than a few hours sleep caught on the fly.
"Your reports, Clarkson, are late."
"I handed in my reports through the computer, Dr. Phelmans."
The doctor's heavy face flushed pinkly, and his piglike eyes glittered in hard triumph. "If there is one thing I have tried to pound into your minds again and again, it is not to depend on the computer system. The computer is down, Clarkson, and your reports are late."
A surge of irritation carrying a spark of energy not unlike a rush buoyed Wade up for a moment. Phelmans hated the computer system. He could not use it well himself, and Wade knew that the hatred covered the doctor's fear and inadequacies.
"What the frigging use is it if it never functions! I did my work."
"That is beside the point. You use an unreliable system for your reports, and expect the hospital to suffer the consequences? I hope you do not intend to leave until those reports are ready to hand in." A dark vindictiveness glittered at the back of Phelmans' eyes.
Wade took a deep breath. He would not win this fight he had never won any of them yet and did not expect to until the day he logged his last minute of work.
He reached for his locker and yanked it open, grabbed a sheaf of papers in a folder, searched through it, pulled out ten wrinkled forms, and replaced the folder. "Here's the originals handwritten. It's the best I can do." He shoved the forms at the doctor.