Behind the Canvas (3 page)

She snapped off her flashlight.

“Wait!”

It was a voice, from there in her room.

Claudia's heart was in her throat as she flicked the flashlight back on.

Cheeks flushed and eyes shining, a boy stood in the painting as though he had been there all along. His tousled brown hair was in dire need of a comb, and he wore some sort of old-fashioned buttoned shirt and vest. And if he hadn't been shifting slightly from one foot to the other, she would have sworn that he had been created with the same brushstrokes as the rest of the painting.

And his eyes were crystal blue and unmistakable.

Her knees gave way and Claudia dropped to the bed.

The boy ran a hand through his hair without much result. He looked behind himself and then back at her, squinting in the beam of the flashlight. “I'm sorry. I stepped away just now because I didn't think you'd turn the painting around again so soon. But you did! They don't usually come back, not after … well. I didn't mean to scare you earlier. I guess I'm sorry for that, too.”

Claudia inched closer to the painting, staring at the boy's tiny mouth. It actually moved as he spoke, as if repeated brushstrokes were rapidly applied and erased by some invisible artist's hand.

The boy seemed encouraged by her approach. “I don't suppose you would mind…” He motioned at her. “The light?”

She looked down at the flashlight. “Oh, sorry.” She turned it toward the ceiling so that it cast a soft glow over the bed.

“I couldn't believe it when I saw you here in this room,” the boy continued. “I mean, after seeing you in the museum. It's almost like we were meant to meet each other.”

Claudia couldn't help herself. An excitement bubbled up in her like fizz in a soda can. He seemed harmless enough. She reached out a finger and touched the canvas where the boy stood. Dried paint, nothing more.

The boy glanced at the place on the painting she had touched. “Your name is Claudia. You told me that in the museum. You asked me my name, too. It's Pim.” His voice held the smallest trace of a foreign accent. Not Spanish like her grandpa. Something different.

Claudia looked at the painting as if for the first time. “Pim.”

“Great work on your sketch, by the way. You have a real talent. You're still budding, of course, but you have talent.”

“That's what my grandpa says, too,” she mumbled.

“I wouldn't mind meeting your grandpa. He sounds like a smart fellow. I don't get to meet many people, as you can imagine.”

She had no idea what to imagine.

“Hey, do you want to hear an art joke?”

“A what?”

“An art joke. Try this one: Why was the art collector in debt?”

Claudia shrugged. Was he really telling a joke?

“Because he didn't have any Monet. Get it?
Monet
sounds like
money
?”

“What are you? Are you a ghost?”

Pim laughed, a hollow sound. “No. Not a ghost. In fact I'm very much alive. Flesh and blood, just like you, but … well.” He became silent and thoughtful for a moment before continuing. “Not a ghost. Although, I get that a lot. Once when I was at the Louvre,
3
I scared an old woman so badly that she … well, anyway. Not a ghost.”

“You've been to the Louvre? But that's in France, isn't it?”

“Indeed. Paris. And what a museum. There aren't words to describe it. Enormous. Gigantic. Immense. A masterpiece in every corner. Thousands upon thousands of paintings. Just when I think I've been in them all, I come across a new one I haven't seen before—at least not that I can remember.”

She shook her head, trying to picture what he had just said. “So you, what? Hop around from one painting to another?”

He shrugged. “It's not quite as simple as that. I do like paintings, though. I can tell you do, too. The Louvre has some of the most famous paintings in the world. Vermeer, Delacroix, Leonardo. You know about the
Mona Lisa
, don't you?”

“Of course I do, but—”

“I've seen her many times.” The boy's gaze suddenly seemed to reach past Claudia. “Taken counsel in her court. Listened to her stories…”

“I don't get it. You say you're not a ghost, that you're flesh and blood. But how's that possible? Where are you?”

“Ah, now that's the question, isn't it? Where am I?” Pim studied her, stroking his chin. Claudia had the feeling she was being evaluated, like those flexibility tests in gym.

“You can tell me,” she encouraged. “I want to know.”

He took a deep breath, his mouth twisting with indecision. Finally he said, “How many oil paintings have been created in the last five hundred years?”

She shook her head. “I don't know. Thousands. Millions.”

“And how many of those were painted on canvas?”

“Well, probably most of them were.”

“Yes. Oil and canvas. That is what makes up the world I live in. This wondrous and terrifying world. The world behind the canvas.”

“So you live
in
the paintings?”

“Well … how to describe it?” The boy paced back and forth within the frame. “You go to a museum and see paintings on the wall. And to you, they appear static—people and creatures and places all frozen, never changing. But what if I told you that every painting ever created over the last five hundred years
lives
, here in the world behind the canvas.”

“
Lives?
Lives how?”

“Well, if you paint a man in your world, in this world that man comes to life. Your painting will never change, but here he talks and walks and thinks and—though he'll never get a day older—he lives.”

“Lives,” Claudia repeated. If she hadn't been speaking to a boy whose face appeared on canvas, she would have laughed at the idea. “So if I paint a picture of a cow…?”

“That same cow will appear here in this world.”

“And my landscape painting I'm looking at now?”

“You will find it here as part of the great patchwork quilt of landscapes that makes up this world. Every person, every place, every creature ever painted.”

“You can't really mean
every
painting. That's millions of paintings. That world would have to be huge.”

“It's not small, I can promise you that,” Pim said with a smile.

“And how can you show up in my painting? And the one in the museum?”

“Every painting is like a, I don't know, a window. Those windows are scattered all over the place. Through them, I can look out into your world.”

A world behind the canvas. Painted people. Living people. “So you started out as a painting, then?”

“No!” Pim snapped. “I told you. I am flesh and blood. I am real.
I am real
. I—I don't belong here.”

“But then … how did you get there?”

The boy's countenance fell. “Some stories are best left untold. You don't want to get tangled up in it.” He stared at the ground, biting a fingernail.

“If you don't belong there, then … what? Are you stuck? Or trapped there?”

His eyes lifted to lock with hers.
Yes,
they said.

She breathed in sharply. “You're
trapped
there? How did that happen?”

But Pim only shook his head in response.

“Don't you have any friends there? Anyone to keep you company?”

“There are many people, but no one like me.”

Her mind overflowed with questions, but they were pushed aside by her own memories. Pictures, as clear as a painting, of reading by herself in the corner of a crowded playground, of pretending to be busy with her backpack or homework every morning in class before the bell rang, of wishing for a party on her birthday but too afraid no one would come. She'd never been stuck in a painted world before, but she knew something about feeling out of place and all alone.

“You must be very lonely,” she said.

Pim's laugh was short and bitter. “That doesn't even begin to describe my life. But…” His eyes met hers and they shone with a new light. “But now I have found a friend.” He extended his hand toward her. “Perhaps fortune is smiling on me at last.”

I could be friends with a kid like that
. That's what she'd thought in the museum. Perhaps she was right.

A smile slowly spread across Claudia's face. She lifted the tip of her finger, hesitated a moment, then pressed it against Pim's hand. A tiny painted hand that belonged to a mysterious boy trapped in a world behind the canvas.

“Smiling on us both,” she said.

 

C
HAPTER
3

T
HE NEXT
MORNING,
Pim was waiting for her in the painting.

The morning after that, he was there as well.

And in the mornings that followed.

Claudia had never met anyone who was so easy to talk to. She didn't have to rack her brain for something to say, or analyze her words before they came out of her mouth in case they sounded stupid. She just said what was on her mind and he listened. And he would tell her stories or ask questions and she listened.

So this is what it's like to have a friend
, she thought more than once.
I could get used to this
.

He wasn't always there. At times he excused himself, disappearing as the brushstrokes of the painted background folded over him. But when he returned—sometimes minutes, sometimes hours later—he always came with an art joke.

“What did the artist say to the dentist?”

“Hi, Pim. I don't know. What?”

“Ma
tisse
hurt.”

“Why did the artist go to jail?”

“Beats me.”

“Because he was
framed
.”

She had always wished her painting was a little bigger. Now she was glad it was so portable. Her yellow backpack had a large mesh pocket in the front that just fit the painting, allowing Pim to look out and hear without being noticed. She took it with her everywhere, even to school. Pim was especially good at history.

“Who remembers the name of the Confederate general who surrendered at Appomattox?” asked Mrs. McCoy.

“Robert E. Lee,” came a whisper from Claudia's backpack.

Claudia raised her hand. “Robert E. Lee.”

“Very good, Claudia. That's right.”

“There's a painting of it in the Smithsonian,” said the whisper.

“Did you say something else, Claudia?”

“No.”

Pim loved to tour the small town of Florence—especially any place that didn't typically have paintings hanging nearby.

“You mean you've never seen inside a supermarket?” she asked.

“I've never seen the outside of a supermarket, either.”

“We can fix that.”

Claudia took him down to the local Food 'n' Things and walked the aisles.

On aisle seven: “Why is there a colorful bird on that box? Is that what it contains?”

“No. The bird's just there so kids will beg their parents to buy that.”

On aisle ten: “Peanut butter? You can make butter out of peanuts?”

“You've never had peanut butter? Are you kidding me? When we get home I'm totally making you a peanut butter and jam—” She stopped herself and looked at her friend in the framed painting. “Oh. Sorry.”

“It's all right. I should like to try peanut butter someday.”

On aisle fourteen: “Water in bottles? Why do they sell water in bottles?”

“Because people drink it.”

“But don't people have sinks in their houses?”

“Yeah, most people.”

“Then why would they buy water in bottles?”

Claudia thought about it but came up empty. “I guess someone thought of the idea, and people went along with it.”

Pim laughed. “Pig whiskers!”

“What?”

“Pig whiskers. Where I grew up, in Haarlem, in the Netherlands, there was a man who sold pig whiskers. Just one whisker was enough to cure anything, any illness. No one really knew if they worked, but everyone had to have them. He sold a lot of pig whiskers—until the pig finally died.”

She laughed, too. “Yeah, bottled water is probably the same thing. Pig whiskers.” And she filed away the first piece of information Pim had revealed about his mysterious history: He was Dutch.

Because for all the talking they did and the comforting conversation that passed between them, Pim constantly deflected any questions about where he came from or how he became trapped in the world behind the canvas.

*   *   *

More than two weeks after Pim first appeared in her painting, on a Friday afternoon, Claudia sat with Pim in the park across the street from the Florence Museum of Arts and Culture. They stared at a shapeless bronze sculpture made up of twisty waves and bulbous blobs.

“A mother and her newborn child. That's what I see,” Pim said. “It evokes the concepts of security and comfort.”

“Well, I think it looks like a melted candle squished by a giant hand.”

“Push aside your initial reaction to it. Look deeper.”

She shook her head. “That's as deep as it gets, Pim. Melted candle.
Squish
. Poor thing never saw it coming.”

“Well, I like it. It's evocative. Emotional.”

“Come on. A third grader could have made that.”

Pim sighed. “Well, Cubism does take some getting used to, I suppose.”

“Cubism? You mean, Picasso
4
and all those guys? You don't actually like that stuff, do you?”

“I understand it. There are a thousand ways to look at the simplest object. The great artist opens her mind to them all and sees the object as it truly is.”

Claudia paused to think about that. But not for long. “Okay, next week I'll take you into Mr. Griffiths's third-grade class and show you how they work with clay.”