Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
It was Christmas morning in Oahu. Wearing a soft linen dress and a pair of sandals, Jasmine opened the double-wide doors of the convenience store and watched as the sunlight flickered across the rolling waves.
All across the world, she could feel the ecstasy and joy of millions of families, celebrating the holiday.
And now, as she padded around the counter, she saw that many families who’d opted for a holiday in Hawaii were staking their claim on the beach, stripping down to their suits and plunging into the waves. She couldn’t help but smile.
It hadn’t been Jasmine’s initial plan to “celebrate” Christmas from work.
She’d had Thanksgiving off, and she’d enjoyed the hours with her grandchild and the safety and warmth of Cynthia’s family immensely.
But when Jenny had told her last week that she, Walton, and the kids were planning a “small Christmas dinner, just the five of us,” Jasmine hadn’t fought to trade shifts.
Maybe in the future, her grandkids would fight to spend Christmas with her.
Perhaps they were too scared of their father (and their mother?) to say what they wanted.
Or they were too young to understand the nuances of their parents’ and grandmother’s difficult relationship.
It didn’t matter.
A man in his sixties came into the convenience store, holding the hand of a little girl he called Margo.
Margo had a long sand-colored ponytail and a turquoise swimsuit she seemed very proud of.
When she looked up at Jasmine, she called out, “Merry Christmas!” in a way that shattered Jasmine’s heart.
“Merry Christmas to you,” Jasmine said, smiling. She poured the man’s coffee and scanned the rest of his items: bags of chips, bananas, and cut pineapple.
“We’ve never had a Christmas at the beach before,” the man said sheepishly. “It’s strange. We’re used to White Christmases. I guess those sound strange to someone like you.”
“I haven’t seen a White Christmas in fifty years,” Jasmine affirmed.
The man clucked his tongue and gathered his bags. Jasmine couldn’t tell if he thought she was crazy or a genius for avoiding the snow and the ice and the hardships and the gray.
It was more of the same as the day wore on.
Christmas music jangled nonstop from the speakers, but Jasmine didn’t mind it.
She caught herself singing, celebrating the songs she’d known her entire life.
Some of the kids who came into the shop to buy candy sang along with her.
Some of them looked at her ruefully, as though they couldn’t fathom why she’d embarrass herself like that.
A small, private part of Jasmine prayed that her grandkids or daughter would come to the shop to say hello today. But she knew better than to hope too much.
At around two in the afternoon, after the lunch rush had subsided and many of the beach-goers were slumbering under their umbrellas, a girl of maybe seven or eight came into the convenience store.
She wore a yellow bikini and had long black hair.
On her shoulder, she wore a little linen bag, within which was what looked to be a pad of paper.
She looked Jasmine right in the eye and said, “Why are you working? It’s Christmas, you know. ”
As ever, Jasmine was amazed at how open and honest children could be. They didn’t see social limitations. They said whatever came to their mind.
“I’m working because I have to work,” Jasmine said.
“Don’t you celebrate Christmas?” the little girl asked.
“I’m a Christian,” Jasmine said. “I celebrate Christmas, all right. It’s one of my favorite holidays.”
“You’re supposed to take the day off,” the little girl said. “My mom and dad took the day off, and they work all the time.”
Jasmine laughed. “Do they?” She imagined that the little girl and her parents were city slickers, New Yorkers who’d abandoned their corporate jobs for a little bit of sun.
She imagined that their little girl was far more mature than most her age, that she had a way about her on the streets of Manhattan that Jasmine herself wouldn’t have.
“Where are your parents?” Jasmine asked. It was rare for parents to let their kids roam free, in and out of the convenience store, especially now. Previous generations would have been okay with it.
“They’re asleep,” the girl said.
“Don’t you think they’ll wake up and wonder where you are?” Jasmine asked.
The little girl waved her hand vaguely behind her and said, “I can see them. They’re fine.” She said it with so much authority that Jasmine could only believe her.
Suddenly, the little girl pulled her pad of paper out of her bag and said, “I came in here because my pencil broke.”
And so she had. The pencil the girl had been trying to draw with was already short and measly, the kind of thing that needed to be thrown away. But Jasmine didn’t have any pencils on sale. She guessed the girl didn’t have any money to buy supplies, anyway.
“I might have something,” Jasmine said, heading to the back office.
Previously, she’d seen the owner’s daughter bring a package of colored pencils into the office.
She was pretty sure they’d been abandoned, left to gather dust as his daughter developed other habits and interests.
Jasmine’s fingers had itched to take them out of the package and watch the colors flow across the page.
The colored pencils were just where the other girl had left them. Jasmine took them out to the girl in the yellow bikini and handed them over. The girl draped her black hair behind her shoulders and said, “How much?”
“What do you have?” Jasmine asked.
The girl glanced back at her sleeping parents. “Two hundred?” she said, presumably because she was from the city and prices like that were standard.
“Tell you what,” Jasmine said. “You can have them as long as you draw me a picture.”
The girl narrowed her eyes, as though wary that Jasmine was tricking her into something. “Can it be anything I want it to be?”
“Anything you want in the world,” Jasmine agreed.
The girl set to work immediately. She drew a camel next to a massive bonfire.
On the camel, she placed a snake wearing a top hat and a dialogue box that read: “Give me the password.” But she’d misspelled “password” like “paswurt.” It was legible and understandable.
Jasmine gushed that it was super creative.
“My mom said I can be an artist one day,” the little girl explained, handing over the paper.
“It looks like you’re already an artist,” Jasmine said.
“Do you know any artists?” the girl asked.
Jasmine thought for a moment. She guessed that the little girl’s parents knew plenty of Manhattan-based artists, that they surrounded her.
It was likely that those people knew about Larry Calvin Johannes’s paintings.
It was likely they’d seen them either in person at an exhibition, in their friends’ houses, or on television. Jasmine’s heart leaped into her throat.
“I’ve known artists,” Jasmine said.
“But that means you aren’t an artist?”
Jasmine thought for a moment. “I think almost anyone is an artist, as long as they open themselves up to their creativity. Do you know what I mean?”
The little girl shook her head. “Are you saying that you could draw if you tried?”
Jasmine laughed. “I don’t know about that.”
But the girl seemed curious. “Draw me,” she ordered, maybe because she’d done this very thing with her Manhattan-based artists. She shoved a colored pencil into Jasmine’s hand and posed like a model, with her hips jutted out.
Jasmine laughed. “You won’t want to hold that pose for very long. It’s not comfortable.”
The girl loosened her posture and gazed out the window. “I don’t have all day,” she said to Jasmine, again echoing what she’d heard her parents say.
Jasmine worked quickly and dutifully. It had been a long time since she’d attempted a portrait like this, but it felt fluid, joyful.
She did only the girl’s face, as there was so much to work with, so much to the girl’s expressive eyes.
When she handed the paper back, the girl looked at it for a long time, then tilted her head.
“This is pretty good,” she admitted. It felt like a rare compliment coming from her.
“Thank you,” Jasmine said.
Right as she prepared to tell the girl she could keep it, a woman of about thirty-five entered the convenience store, rubbing sleep and sand from her eyes. “Gigi,” she said. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”
Gigi turned to scowl at her mother. She handed the paper over. “You were sleeping,” she accused before scampering past her mother and back toward her father on the beach.
Gigi’s mother glanced down at the drawing, then yawned, as though the image was really so dull. “I’m sorry about her,” she said. “I hope she wasn’t too much trouble?”
“She’s lovely,” Jasmine assured.
“I think the word is ‘precocious,’” the woman said. She wagged the paper for a moment, then said, “You aren’t that bad. Are there art classes around here or something?” She put the paper on the counter and twisted to grab a bottle of ice-cold water from the fridge.
“There are art classes, yeah,” Jasmine said, although she hadn’t taken them. She watched the woman leave the convenience store and return to her daughter and husband, leaving Jasmine’s drawing behind.
Jasmine wadded up the paper in her fist and prepared to throw it away. At the last second, she thought better of it, smoothed it out, and put it in her bag. She liked it. Returning to the creative pieces of her heart felt like a Christmas gift to herself.
Hours later, Jasmine made herself a quiche and sat in front of the television to eat. Cynthia had texted her numerous times, asking her to come over to the house for extended Christmas celebrations. But Jasmine was too exhausted after a day on her feet. She wrote back.
JASMINE: Tomorrow. We’ll see each other tomorrow.
For a little while, she flicked through the channels, telling herself not to watch the news.
But of course, just as she had every night since Thanksgiving, she wound up there, searching for news about Larry.
There had been only one other segment about him—an announcement of a painting he’d sold for half a billion dollars. The number astounded her.
Cynthia had told her not to go digging around for news about Larry. But Jasmine couldn’t help it if the news came to her, rather than the other way around.
And tonight, miracle of miracles, they had more news about Larry.
But this time, the news was far more dramatic than last time.
The lady news anchor was a redhead wearing an emerald-green blouse and bright lipstick.
But she frowned as she announced, “Tonight we have news of a developing story out of Nederland, Colorado.” Here, they showed a photograph of Larry, standing in front of the cabin.
“For weeks, we’ve been praising a rather new artist on the scene by the name of Larry Calvin Johannes.
His spectacular paintings have racked up millions upon millions of dollars and made him something of a household name.
But journalist Isabella thought she smelled a rat and brought us a different story—one of secrets, lies, and disappearances. ”
Jasmine leaned so far forward in her chair that she nearly dropped her plate of quiche. She hadn’t touched it. It was dry and cold on her plate.
“Evening, Fran,” the journalist Isabella said, wherever she was videoing in from. The dark blue background behind her made it hard to tell whether she was indoors or outdoors, in Colorado or not.
Had she met Larry? Had she been to Nederland? What did she think she would find?
“It’s been a few months since I traveled to Nederland to research for the puff piece about Larry Calvin Johannes,” Isabella said.
“Like everyone, I fell in love with Larry’s paintings and his iconic eye.
But there were whispers in the town of Nederland that gave me pause.
” Isabella went on to explain that Larry had once been married to a woman named Henrietta Johannes and that most everyone in Nederland assumed Henrietta was dead.
“The gossip channels are healthy in Nederland,” Isabella said, “as they are in every small town across the United States. But when I did some digging, I found no record of Henrietta Johannes after 1975. To get a full picture of our new ‘savior of the art world,’ I think we need to know more about Larry and about Henrietta. We need to hear the whole story.”
The video cut from Isabella and back to Fran, the redhead at the news desk.
“We’re asking you, our fellow Americans, to come forward with any information you might have about Henrietta Johannes.
” Again, they showed the young woman’s photograph, a young woman with a soft and nervous smile and an adorable early seventies dress on.
“If you know anything about the whereabouts of Henrietta Johannes, please contact our station or send a message to our contact box on our website.” She read the website’s name and included the link on the screen above her head.
“Thank you. We’ll be back with more news after this commercial break. ”
When a commercial for a very sweet cereal came on, Jasmine burst into tears so violently that they sent the quiche and its plate to the ground. Tears were in hot shoots down her cheeks.
She couldn’t believe what she’d just seen.