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Jackson was built around bartering. Sure, the essentials were free. Food in the canteen was available for everybody, and the people who rotated through kitchen duty did everything they could to make it as filling and tasty as possible. Basic clothing stored in a large warehouse on the edge of town was free as long as residents filled out a careful log of what’s available and who took what. Same went for every other basic necessity. But, Ellie was quick to realize, any luxury item was bartered for.
Jackson didn’t have a payment system like Boston. The idea of a symbol representing value was a slippery slope towards money, according to the council, and most people wanted to share or could be easily persuaded to make a trade of some kind. It led to some long-winded transactions. Dina told Ellie about a time when she was little when she traded a fresh quiche for a bundle of spun wool for a fresh bouquet of wildflowers found from outside the town gates for a small sachet of dried camomile tea before finally being able to trade that for what she actually wanted: a hand carved yo-yo.
Ellie personally thought the system was fucking insane, but somehow it worked. Even rarer, somehow it worked in her favor.
Harriet, a crotchety woman who liked to be left alone on the far side of town, had a talent for mixing up dyes for wool, and paint. Ellie had met her while writing a paper about important but overlooked artisans in Jackson (which Ellie wanted to roll her eyes at considering everyone in town picked up some kind of craft just to keep from going insane during the cold winter months). They’d somehow hit it off when Ellie volunteered to shoot the gopher that was eating all of Harriet’s begonias last spring. Ellie had gotten a lecture about gun safety inside the walls of Jackson afterwards, but a few months later when she went to Harriet to try and barter for some of her paint she wasn’t too surprised when she let her have it for a song. Literally: Harriet asked Ellie to show her how far she’d progressed on the guitar and then loaded her up with a literal wagon-full of paint afterwards.
“They’re about to go bad anyway,” she’d said, looking down at the perfectly sealed large jars of vibrant paint. “It’s oil paint so you need to be careful about letting everything dry properly. If you need any more you come back after you’ve managed to learn more than Smoke on the Water and Wonderwall, you hear? Learn some Pink Floyd and then we’ll talk.”
Ellie babbled out promises, her baby guitar calluses already twinging from what she was going to put them through as she stared down at the beautiful bounty before her.
She had no idea what to paint on until a few days later. She’d been complaining to everyone who would sit still enough to listen about the lack of the perfect canvas, not expecting anyone to actually, you know, want to help her out. Complaining was just a way to pass the time. She hadn’t complained in front of Tommy or Maria and especially fucking Joel who would bend over backwards to get her a place to work (and one day she’d ask for too much and he would get tired of her). So it was an equally pleasant surprise as Harriet’s kindness when Jackson’s art teacher, Mr. Leeds pulled her aside after class.
She kept her back to the wall and her eyes on the exit. She didn’t like being in an empty room with a man she didn’t know. Mr. Leeds was 6 foot 5 and built like a linebacker - at least that’s what Joel called him when she’d asked for more football information during one of their rambles together - but he hunched most of the time and kept his hands interlocked behind his back as he moved around the classroom, which Ellie appreciated.
“I heard you were looking for a canvas to paint.”
“Oh. Yeah,” Ellie said, wrongfooted. “But I haven’t worked out who to barter with for that yet. And I don’t know what I want to make. I guess I could always do more dinosaurs. You’ve got any art prompts for me Teach?”
Mr. Leeds smiled at the nickname. “As much as I love your creative interpretations of the prompts in the past: the anatomically correct heart when I asked for an inner representation of yourself was inspired even if poor Paul needed to leave the room, I actually have a solution to your problem. A decision was made at the last council meeting about the northwestern block of houses on Willow Street.”
“No shit?” Ellie said, attention already dropping at the mention of the council. Jackson contained more empty houses than the citizens could fill, so there was constant debate about what to do with the few barren rows of suburbia still left untouched. Willow Street in particular was a swath of McMansions made of grandiose-looking cheap material. The houses weren’t insulated or built well enough to be at the top of the list to refurbish.
“The council has finally decided to send a team to gut and remake them into community spaces. Smaller club rooms, dedicated buildings for hobbyists who contribute, that kind of a thing. If you were looking for a blank canvas to test ideas on I could think of no better place.”
Ellie snapped into focus with the hungry intensity of a teen being told she was allowed to mess with public property. Mr. Leeds noticed her attention and leaned forward conspiratorially.
“They’re redoing everything anyway: fresh paint, new drywall, better insulation. I asked around and the council said they wouldn’t mind any…experimental projects in the area. The construction is slated to start tomorrow but they’re starting at the north end of the street and won’t reach the other side for at least a month. I know you sometimes do not want to share in class, which is perfectly fine. But I thought this may be an option for you, to express yourself.”
Ellie waffled. On the one hand if this was anyone other than Mr. Leeds she’d be full of suspicion at some adult trying to get her to a secondary location. On the other hand, she’d seen the look in his eyes every time he tried to get her to open up in class and she’d paint another dinosaur tea party, or massacre (although the two were more interchangeable than some might think). Mr. Leeds ran a few of the group support meetings in town designed to help survivors who had gone through terrible things. She was 99% sure he was just providing her an outlet to make art after she’d fucked around so many times in class.
“Thanks for the heads up.” She nodded, gathered up her backpack and headed out the door. She’d bring her gun, the one that was confiscated after the mole shooting incident that Joel had slipped back into her bag before the end of that same day. It would take care of the 1% of worry she had. She’d also bring the paints and see what she could really do.
-
“Are you going to be moping the entire day?” Tommy asked at Joel’s stony silence after yet another story about Maria’s pregnancy. Joel glared, but his brother knew him too well for him to outright deny that he was acting differently, although he’d never admit to moping.
“Is this about my niece again? What, is she still not telling you where she’s going after school?”
Joel grunted and stomped to the other side of the room with a level and measuring tape. It wasn’t that she was telling him nothing, she just wasn’t giving the whole story. Her over-dramatic pantomime of gathering eggs didn’t distract from an afternoon with her gone. He couldn’t keep overlooking the fact that tending to the chickens typically took less than an hour and didn’t account for all the lost time.
“She’s probably just being a teenager and hanging out with friends,” Tommy continued blithely, ignoring the silence. “It’s natural.”
Joel was skeptical. His brother was in no way as much of an Ellie expert as he was. If there was trouble within a ten mile radius Ellie would inevitably find it. No way was she doing something as innocent as spending time mooning over Dina (she hadn’t told him yet, but don’t think he didn’t notice the calf-eyes his daughter gave that girl) and not telling him about it.
He also shied away from calling Ellie a teenager. It shouldn’t be true, not yet. As much as he didn’t want Ellie to be in actual trouble. it somehow felt just as bad if she was doing something innocent and didn’t want to tell him about it. It already felt painful when she stopped following him around like a lost duckling. It was a healthy distance, yes, good for her to grow, but it still felt like a missing limb.
For want of anything else to do he grunted and started measuring a pointless wall sconce. Tommy sighed and gathered up their stuff and the notebook full of measurements to head to the next house.
When Jackson’s council went looking for a crew to redo the Willow Street project Tommy had volunteered both of them for it. Joel didn’t mind: it was quiet and the old routine of looking at the bones of a building and seeing what could be done to it was a familiar role to take on. They technically weren’t starting in these houses yet. The council got it into their heads that they’d go in order, finishing one house completely before starting on another. It probably made sense on paper, but Tommy and Joel had worked enough jobs to know things worked differently in reality.
Before starting any actual job they’d do a full walkround: examining everything that needed doing. Nothing was worse than reaching a new part of a job and realizing it needed the supplies you just busted your ass to put away only a few days earlier. Better to go through and see what needed the most repair first: scope out the actual size of things.
They were headed into the final house on the block: a grandiose mess of a building that had unreasonably high ceilings with not enough duct work to back it up and a sweeping staircase for no good reason. Joel was just heading into the comically large living room when he ducked back behind the wall, heart kicking into gear. He leaned down slowly, silently, pulling his knife out of his boot.
Tommy, bless him, mirrored him. He crouched down and flashed one of their shared hand signals.
“Trouble?”
Joel didn’t know. He’d seen something: a human sized figure standing with two arms out, perfectly still in the empty room. Maybe it was a squatter? Best case scenario it was a local kid looking for a place to get drunk. Worst case, it could be an infected. Like cockroaches, you see one with ten more hiding out of plain sight.
Achingly slow, he peered around the corner. The figure hadn’t moved an inch. In fact, the more his eyes adjusted to the gloom the more he realized how off it all seemed. How artificial.
In one smooth movement he rose from his crouch, flipped on the lights, and turned to the living room.
It was a painting of some kind. A human figure on a backdrop of glowing neon. It looked female, with worn clothing and incomplete hands. The face was only a dark blob. A strong smell of linseed oil was in the air. Motes of dust from the small shaft of light let in by the window made the air gold around the painting.
Joel stepped across the absurdly sized room and touched the paint. Still wet, but then, he half-remembered from some long forgotten high school art class, that oil paint could stay wet a long time after being applied. More damning though was the fresh trail of dust leading from the dining room to the living room from a dragged chair. Apparently the painter was short enough to need to climb up on something to finish their work.
“Oh man, I could see why you thought it was a person,” Tommy said looking close. “What are you thinkin?”
Joel’s eyes flitted around the room once more, looking for any sign of danger.
“I’m thinkin we check in on this place tomorrow. Maybe our artist will get sloppy and give us more information.”
Tommy gave Joel a side-eye that meant he thought his brother was being paranoid but Joel ignored it. Better paranoid and informed than the alternative.
The next time they visited the girl was fully complete. She had a neon halo. Not a simple circlet but a sunbeam behind her head all lit up the same electric blue and purple of the tones on her skin. Her previously unfinished hands held a pipe bomb in one hand and a blank book in the other. She was a gilt angel with the modern equivalent of a sword. Joel guessed that made the book a bible. There was a rough outline of wings sketched onto the wall in haphazard charcoal.
A smaller figure was on the girl’s right. Slight, with the proportions of a child. It had the same dark skin but all the features were unfinished.
“It’s amazing,” Tommy said, voice hushed. “It’s like the fucking…Mona Lisa or something.”
It was amazing, Joel thought begrudgingly. It was more photorealistic than the day before. Small highlights and details made it even more striking. The bomb in the girl’s hand worried him though. Hell: the idea of religion like this bothered him after what had happened in Colorado. Still, the work wouldn’t be out of place in a museum. The completed girl looked as if she could start breathing. Joel was no fine artist but he knew quality when he saw it. Someone in Jackson had a real talent.
“We’ll keep checking on it,” he said roughly. “See what we see.”
The next day would prove all his fears of religious zealots unfounded, but also felt like he’d taken a step down a stair only to be falling out of an airplane.
There was Sam on the wall.
There was no mistaking it. The little figure, a boy, had a red mask of paint smeared across his face. His hands, detailed down to the lines on his knuckles and fingernails, were shaped into sign language. Only one person could’ve painted this - would’ve known that face. A glance at the now completed book in the girl’s hand confirmed it. It was Will Livingston - volume too.
It was Ellie’s work.
Joel staggered on the patchwork carpet, now dotted with paint.
Tommy seemed oblivious to his brother’s revelation, instead admiring the work. He got his face a few inches away from the wall, squinting at the brush work.
“These are something special. Think whoever it is is looking to do any contract work?”
Strangely, Joel felt a heady rush of relief at hearing his brother’s words. Ellie had been special twice over before: special because Joel would burn down the world for her, and special again because of the bite on her arm, but this talent would make her special in a way that could keep her safe. A talent like this once proven could be powerful. In the Boston QZ there were a few rich and lucky souls who would pay a month’s worth of ration tickets for a family portrait like this, especially with camera film degraded and scarce.
Joel silently pointed to the jokebook. Tommy looked over with interest, his face going from incomprehension, to surprise, to a bright smile.
“No! Ellie did this? Did you know she was this good?”
Joel manfully resisted the urge to say that of course she was good. Everything his daughter did was perfect. Tommy blithely continued on, ignoring his parental struggle.
“This must be what she’s getting up to in those evenings you were worried about. Should’ve expected something unexpected from that girl. But then-” he faltered. “We should stop coming by.”
“No,” Joel said. “We’ll keep checking on it every day.”
Tommy sent him an accusatory glance. “Really Joel? She’s not doin anything wrong. Do you really think she’d want you looking into this?”
No. Joel knew she probably wouldn’t want him to see, and there would probably be hell to pay if (when, if he was being honest with himself) she found out, but now that he knew these were Ellie’s paintings he felt drawn to them.
Ellie liked to talk, was the thing. Less so, after what had happened in Colorado, but she put in a concerted effort to keep up a constant patter of noise most days. It usually didn’t amount of much of meaning though. Her chatter was just like her bedroom: full to bursting with odds and ends, all making up part of her, but underneath it all was everything sharp and hidden, like the knife on her bedside table and the second gun under the loose floorboard.
These paintings seemed truer than anything Ellie had said to him in their last few months in town. Joel wanted to see what she’d make, what was worth putting on the wall.
“You don’t have to come with me. I’ll take a few minutes before our shift and take a look,” he finally answered Tommy.
Tommy heaved a sigh and straightened up from where he was crouching by the painting of Sam. His knees clicked as he stood up. Joel wondered when his brother had gotten old.
“No, I’m coming too. Hell, maybe we could be each other’s alibis if things go south.” He stared down at the painting. “But in return, maybe tell me who this is? I know you recognize him.”
Joel’s mouth turned down. Fair’s fair, he supposed. He was invading Ellie’s privacy, Tommy was invading his. Besides he was trying to become a more open person and all that self-help bullshit.
He heaved a sigh and jerked his head toward the door. Tommy glanced back at the paintings before following Joel’s voice as he moved onto the empty street.
“We were in Kansas City…”
-
Ellie didn’t know why she was keeping her mural a secret from Joel, except it felt freeing in a way that few things had before. In FEDRA and on the road, privacy was a concept rather than any sort of reality. Even here, she kept her thoughts in a journal and couldn’t help wondering who could come across it at the wrong time. Anything she said to Joel would be picked through. He did it because he cared, sure, but sometimes Ellie didn’t want to have to worry about saying the wrong thing about her bite or the Fireflies.
Plus with no one to see it she could make whatever she wanted. And what she wanted was a petty Michelangelo moment.
FEDRA didn’t care much about history, but all books lead to Rome, or whatever the saying was, and all stories about art eventually made a Sistine Chapel reference. She’d picked through the tiny school library for the books she could find and what she found was fucking hilarious.
Michelangelo was paid actual money, like money to buy shit, to paint a ceiling. He’d painted his bosses as little demons and naked babies and he still got paid. He couldn’t draw women at all and was super Catholic which Ellie couldn’t really grasp, but she could admit there was something comforting about it, when she pushed past what happened in Colorado. In an abstract sense, she liked thinking about Riley in a warm, happy place. She was gone. She was gone and no one knew - except the little bit she’d shared with Joel, so no one knew Ellie was walking around bleeding out from a missing limb no one expected her to have. It helped to think of her somewhere bright and loved and wanted, just like Ellie wanted her.
When Ellie started painting she knew the far wall would be heaven.
She wouldn’t have any bland puffy clouds and naked babies. No, Riley would look electric. And who would be at her side but Super Sam: defender of all, bravest of everyone. The next figure was harder to decide. It started as an amorphous blob - taller than the other two. Ellie had vague ideas of painting her mom. It would be a woman holding the same knife that dug a comforting groove in her side pocket. What she would look like Ellie didn’t know, except maybe a version of herself with Joel’s forehead wrinkles.
She hadn’t meant to paint Tess.
Still, once she started, she committed.
Tess had windswept hair and a tender smile. She was wearing a tanktop to show off the complete lack of bite on her neck because fuck injuries, this was Ellie’s temporary heaven.
Painted heaven had things the way they should be. Riley’s clothes weren’t worn or dirty like they had become from sleeping rough in the mall, or before that from wearing third generation hand-me-downs washed sparingly. Sam’s cheeks were full from baby fat instead of the hollow eyed hunger every survivor got after years of barely enough followed by splitting open a 20 year old tin. The rusted taste of badly preserved vegetables lingered on the tongue. Ellie could still taste it in her dreams. Even that rust taste was better than the sour tang of starvation.
When she was done she didn’t want to look at them: the row of people who had died from infection while she continued to live. She also didn’t know who else to add. There were so many dead. Would she have to keep going until the wall was full?
And what of Marlene? She had been kind after what had happened to Riley (she was the one who gave Riley those bombs and stationed her in a place with an infected). She’s the person who had given Ellie hope about being a cure (she was gonna have a doctor scoop out Ellie’s brain and give it to the world to eat).
No. For now, heaven had a population of three. Ellie would paint Henry later.
Instead she turned towards the far wall. It should be hell if she was gonna stay on theme. She eyes the white expanse grimly before kneeling down to unscrew the jars at her feet. Time to put orange and red to work.
-
Joel felt jumpy and guilty and knew he deserved it. That didn’t mean he was going to stop.
He’d wake up in the morning, eat breakfast with Ellie and horse around as much as possible as they procrastinated school, and work, respectively. Then he’d walk her to the schoolhouse before mosying to work. He’d meet up with Tommy and they’d see what Ellie made the night before. They’d work all day, almost sneaking out of the building site so they didn’t run into Ellie as she herself snuck in after school. Joel had a few hours to himself before Ellie came back for dinner and to make up stories about how she filled her day, all the while Joel would be wondering what he’d see on the walls of the house - Ellie’s mural - tomorrow.
It was odd how excited he felt. It wasn’t just the subject, although that had been a mix of shock and the good kind of pain to see Tess again, strong and beautiful. Seeing her also sparked conversation. Joel and Tommy mostly worked in companionable silence - especially when the job got labor intensive, but seeing Tess slowly appear on the wall led Joel to share stories. He kept it positive, influenced by the way the painting slowly morphed. Jagged suggested lines became texturing on leather and a story about a winter holed up in Boston and how the jacket was a rare Christmas gift. Feathering paint brush strokes became freckles and hair on skin. Joel got Tommy to choke on his lunch with a story of a time he cut Tess’ hair when her hands were too injured to do it herself and it came out looking a bowl cut gone wrong.
Joel had never been one for Bob Ross, but he used to have a buddy at work who swore by him: that watching someone create was soothing in and of itself. That calm feeling shattered the day Tommy and Joel entered and the opposite wall of the mural was on fire.
The flames looked surprisingly realistic, as if the oil paint would be hot to the touch. Joel didn’t know the level of artistry it took to make shadows and light look like that. He did know he didn’t like it.
The wall was covered: floor to ceiling. It was all fire and the suggestion of a room. There was a window worryingly white with only a thin band of blue sky, and snow falling. In the middle of the wall was a blank space, ominously tall and human shaped.
Tommy and Joel surveyed it grimly.
“Are you sure you don’t want to talk to her?” Tommy asked. It had been his go-to question at the end of each visit. This one was quieter than before.
Before Joel had always said nothing and walked out, forcing Tommy to follow him. This time he had an answer.
“I’ll tell her when we have to work on the last house. I’ll say I walked in on it then and see what she has to say.” He shot Tommy a look - the same look he’d given him when a suspicious Sarah had asked her trusted Uncle about the legitimacy of the Easter Bunny when she was 9. Tommy gave the same look back that seemed to say Joel couldn’t hide behind his child’s naivety forever.
Sooner or later, the truth would come home to roost.
The next few days were bleak. Their conversations dried up as the empty shape morphed into a human figure, flames licking at its feet. Tommy reckoned it was a clicker, but the head looked too normal, the clothes too clean. The positioning started morphing, as if Ellie couldn’t decide on a pose. In one version a sketch of a hand reached out as if grasping to get out of the wall, in another it gripped an outline of a weapon. Joel tried to find humor in the cartoonish cleaver Ellie had drawn as a placeholder but couldn’t manage it.
It was worse when the figure started getting fleshed out. Joel treated it like a fucking police sketch. Did he recognize the face of the man surrounded by flames, smirking, no - leering - at the painter? He questioned Tommy in case the painted man was some soon-to-be-dead Jackson citizen but Tommy had even less of a clue.
Joel had taken to carrying his tool box inside the mural room with him so he could feel the comforting weight of it, and so he could imagine that weight collapsing the man’s skull.
“Maybe he’s not real?” Tommy questioned as they worked on a house a few blocks down, Joel taking his aggression out on a rotten baseboard. “Could just be that she imagined him, or he’s not that bad of a guy.”
“Could be,” Joel said, voice flat and disbelieving. “Could be from that time in Colorado when I was out of it. There was a fire then, and Ellie…” He clammed up. They’d never talked about it. He’d speculated, but that’s all it ever was.
The next day Joel entered the room, again ready to examine the evidence of the man like a dog with a bone. Instead, he dropped his toolbox on the floor, narrowly missing his foot.
“Well look at that,” Tommy said, grinning big enough you could hear it.
-
The nightmares were getting worse.
At first, painting David felt powerful. He was nothing. A figment of Ellie’s memory up on a wall she could control. He was a rotting corpse that his followers couldn’t even eat since the char went too deep.
Then she kept moving his arms around like a puppet. Every position brought a memory. Did she want him with his hand out, stroking his shockingly warm fingers over her hand? Did she want to put his arms over his head, as if those same hands were holding her down with sickening strength she couldn’t fucking fight off? (She didn’t want any of these things. She wanted him in the ground, out of her head, gone).
Every stroke of paint both pushed him out of her head, which felt like she had more space to breathe, but into the world, where she had to remember what he did. What she did.
She spent a good hour with her head between her knees when she thought of painting his face how it looked in the end: like meat.
So she took a break. Fuck it. It was her fucking art project, her fucking paint. She’d use the middle wall, in between heaven and hell. If she was an old dead Catholic asshole she’d paint purgatory where all fat babies went, and unmarried people or whatever Catholics believed. She steered away from the multi-faith chapel in Jackson whenever she could, and no way in hell had she ever spent the one free day they had gotten off in FEDRA school sitting in a church listening to old people cry about the good old days.
No, the middle wall was for the living. It was gonna be green.
A lot of older people didn’t like how green overtook the world. Enough people in Boston wouldn’t stop talking about the ugliness of kudzu or trialing ivy, the hatred of mycelium. Privately, Ellie thought it was kind of pretty. It was better than barren landscapes where no food would grow, or the suffocating blanket of winter. Plus, she’d had plenty of experience seeing it to paint it.
The living wall was full of half sketched out plants that were more blobs of green that could be ferns or bushes or fruit trees. She was practically throwing paint at the wall because it really didn’t matter, what mattered was Joel.
Day one, she just did the outline, only his head was in detail. She made him frowning: the concerned protector frown he got on when he was scanning a landscape to see the best way forward. His eyes were squinty from the sun, head cocked slightly so his good ear was primed to pick up any errant sounds, hair wild.
She made him less than accurate and instead how he made her feel. He was taller and broader than he should be, but that’s how it felt to be tucked under his shoulder when he was protecting her from everything from rain to grenades.
She spent more time drawing him than anyone combined. Joel deserved highlights in his hair and three different guns lovingly rendered, and his favorite flannel with a fully detailed pattern.
The painted Joel had his gun up, pointed directly at David in hell. Stupidly, it made her feel safe enough to turn and face the painting of fire again. With a shaky sigh she knelt down and mixed her colors. She wouldn’t stall anymore.
-
Joel was acting weird at home and he knew Ellie was noticing. Didn’t make it easy to stop.
He felt oddly giddy every time she trounced him at Scrabble or he gave her the best looking pancake of the batch. Ellie painted him like she loved him. They never said it - Joel because he was fucking pathetic. He never knew why Ellie didn’t say it, but didn’t want to ever push anything onto her she didn’t want. Instead he showed her everything he knew about survival and played her the same chords on the guitar until his fingertips went numb and she got the hang of it. He’d show her in a hundred little ways every single day and wouldn’t ask for anything in return because that’s what being a parent was. But the painting was tangible proof of how she felt in return.
She made him look stronger than he’d felt in at least 10 years. His finger wasn’t on the trigger of his rifle, his stance was sure. It was larger than life - two to three inches taller than he actually was but not looming. She’d spent at least a day on the skin of his face. He wanted to swing her around and demand why she had to draw in all his wrinkles, then hug her tight until she knew how proud he was of her, how grateful he was to be seen like that in her eyes. Then he remembered he couldn’t do that because he was invading her privacy, which put a damper on everything.
He was ricocheting between dopily happy to guilty faster than a misfired bullet. Tommy couldn’t stop pointing it out. Joel started using heavy machinery whenever possible on the job, just to drown out his “well meaning” comments.
That seesaw of joy and guilt only made it more like stepping into a bath full of ice water when Ellie went back to the man on fire.
The man had a sickeningly kind smile and a knife in his side. He had a swollen finger. One hand held a severed ear. The other reached at his belt, as if undoing it.
Tommy and Joel stared at it in silence for a solid minute. Tommy opened his mouth as if about to say something but closed it carefully.
“It’s gotta be Colorado,” Joel said grimly. “They had bodies hung up on meat hooks, cleaned and drained of blood. I had hoped - Jesus, I don’t know - that she hadn’t seen it. That she…”
He looked at the man’s hand on his belt buckle. Ellie was so jumpy back then, still was. She’d always been odd about personal space. The two of them would drift together all the time, but he let her control when she needed someone around, and after Colorado it got worse. Some days she didn’t want to be three feet away from him, always within eyesight. Others she’d fade in and out and drift listlessly away from him unless he tethered her to the world.
A week after they’d left Silver Lake Resort behind Ellie had scrounged up a beat-up saucepan and boiled her DivaCup in the same casual way she dealt with all bodily functions. All of the stigma around periods disappeared around the same time that working plumbing and regular hygiene became a thing of the past. He’d been too much of a coward, too bad at remembering how to be a dad, to push her into talking at the time, but he’d paid attention to her gait. She hadn’t moved gingerly and she wasn’t pregnant. That was all he knew.
Looking at the mural of the man he knew that wasn’t enough.
-
In the end it’s an accident. Mrs. Baker called in sick and let English class out before it even began so Ellie raced over to her mural to put the finishing touches on before she had to paint the whole thing over. Joel and Tommy were ambling over for their daily perusal before starting the work day. They entered the house from opposite sides and met in the middle like some perverse sitcom. Ellie and Joel stared at each other slack jawed: cue laugh track.
Tommy broke the odd stand off.
“I’ll start on the next house without you. Join me when you can. Ellie, Maria and I want to commission a family portrait when you get a chance. If you make me look half as overly fancy as you made butterface over there, you can name your price.”
He reached over and took Joel’s toolbox from his lax grip, shooting Ellie a grin before leaving the house. Joel wanted to run after him to escape the situation. Instead he shuffled awkwardly on the increasingly paint stained carpet.
Ellie looked at Joel, then, with all the grace of a slow motion car crash, turned towards the Joel she had painted on the wall.
“So I kind of wish you let the Fireflies lobotomize me right now.”
Joel struggled not to flinch. He was glad Ellie was joking about it rather than not talking to him, but any thought of her being harmed made him shy away as if he was burned. His eyes flickered to the man on the wall at the idea of Ellie being hurt. She followed his gaze and clicked her tongue. More awkward silence grew between them as the physical manifestation of Ellie’s fears leered from the wall.
“Yeah. He’s an ugly fucker. I uh, I wanted to cut it up but, well, I kind of did that to the real thing so…”
She looked over as if expecting judgment.
“That’s good babygirl.” The term of endearment slipped out at the idea of Ellie needing comfort. She relaxed as soon as she heard it. They stood awkwardly and stared. Down the block they could hear Tommy banging away at the construction.
“So this is the job you were working on? Willow street?” she asked. He nodded.
“And this is what you were doing all those evenings you said you were collecting eggs?” he asked. She nodded back.
He hesitated before turning towards the three figures backlit by neon. “What you did here. It’s special. And if you want to keep it-”
“No,” Ellie interrupted. “I like them but they were always meant to be temporary. I was gonna come and paint them over today with the white wall paint you guys use. I was supposed to do it earlier but I put it off.”
Joel held back his protest at erasing Tess from the wall. He would support Ellie in everything she was doing. He offered to help her and her shoulders dropped tension he didn’t even know she had.
“What about Tommy? Aren’t you working with him?”
“He can work on his own for a while.” It was what the little fucker deserved after leaving Joel to face Ellie alone.
They spent the morning slowly painting over the walls, covering them in fresh white paint. Except for the man, David, Ellie called him in a small voice. Joel took vicious satisfaction of scraping him off, the paint still tacky where it was layered most deep. Ellie instead focused on quickly painting over the Joel on the wall as if she went quick enough the real Joel wouldn’t ask about him.
He saved his questions for the first girl on the wall, the one with the joke book.
“You don’t have to tell me about any of them if you don’t want to,” he said. “It’s your business. But I’m here to listen, and she looked like someone special.”
Ellie hesitated from where she was covering the field of mushrooms on the wall. She looked at the girl with a lovesick expression before moving the paint roller in a wide cleansing sweep.
“Remember that girl I told you about?”
Joel paused for a moment to think. “The one in the mall.”
Ellie nodded and paused. She didn’t want to tell the story of the mall. Instead she painted and told a nothing story where two girls got into fights and stayed up late and wrung what happiness they could out of being child soldiers in training. And as the paint covered more of the flames and greenery and neon Ellie said things about Colorado that she had never said before. The light turned golden on the white paint as the quiet susurrations of brushes filled the air, with the percussion of Tommy’s hammering in the background. When the first coast was complete Ellie felt clean for the first time in a long time.
-
There was a fallout, of course. Ellie got the whole story from Tommy and shot Joel betrayed looks for the next few days at him invading her privacy. There were plenty of pointed conversations that Joel was too soft to fight back on considering he was still feeling high from the memory of himself on the wall in Ellie’s mind. Joel couldn’t forget about David. He went back to dogging Ellie’s steps and couldn’t help poking at her when she looked even the slightest bit upset.
Things calmed down as the Willow street project was finished and Joel had some downtime and more money - or, not money, because of Jackson’s aversion to the stuff, but social credit of a kind - to burn.
Ellie came home from school one innocuous day to be greeted by the familiar smell of paint and sawdust that she associated with the art room. Something was off. That, and Joel standing by the kitchen table looking uncertain, though he was trying to hide it.
“I thought I’d make use of one of the extra guest rooms,” he said. “Come take a look.”
They were in a larger suburban house and neither of them really knew what to do with the space. One room was a makeshift armory at this point with the other awkwardly vacant. Ellie thought nothing of it to shrug and follow him upstairs, only to stop dead in the doorway.
The room got good light, with a large window and curtains fluttering in the breeze. There was a dropcloth on the floor and an honest to god easel made out of pine. Newly stretched canvases were propped up against the wall, along with an array of paint colors. A new shelving unit was put in and lined with supplies.
Ellie whirled around to find Joel trying and failing to be nonchalant.
“I thought maybe you could paint here. I put a lock on the door.” He leaned over to touch it as if she would be confused by what he meant. “And there’s only one key so people like Tommy, or, you know, others can’t come in if you don’t want them in.”
He held out the key and Ellie took it as if it were as fragile as a baby bird. She cupped it in her hands.
“Thanks.”
They shared a look of things unsaid but shown in a thousand other ways. It stretched until Ellie smiled mischievously and jumped into the room leaving Joel on the outside.
“Ok, gonna go paint now in my private painting room where you can’t come in, bye!”
She slammed the door in his face then pressed her ear against the wood. She could make out faint chuckling on the other side.
“Alright. You have to come out for dinner though!” he yelled through the door.
“What? Sorry I couldn't hear that. I live here now!” Ellie yelled back. Joel sighed theatrically in a way that Ellie privately thought of as a very dad-like sound. There were the soft thuds of his feet as he walked down the hall. Then it was Ellie and the paint.
She opened up a jar, chose a canvas, and got to work.