Influence

Chapter 17

When Maris Garcia was a little girl, she'd wanted to be an artist. Not the kind with paintings in museums or fancy galleries, as she never experienced those sorts of places firsthand. The artists she was familiar with painted caricatures of tourists down by the wharfs. Her grandparents indulged her by letting her sit for a portrait after taking her to the aquarium on a warm day one July. A man who seemed ancient to her at the time but who was probably in his mid-fifties joked about chorizos and the Seahawks with her grandfather as he painted a seven-year-old Maris.

Maris squirmed while sitting in front of his easel, the Puget Sound and a contingency of pigeons in the background. The scents of salty air and salty pretzels from a nearby food cart stung her nose. When it was over, her grandparents paid the artist and Maris held up her portrait. A giant headed girl with long brown pigtails smiled up at her, toothy grin ready to bite into the hot pretzel she held in her tiny hand.

"Can I have a pretzel?" She asked her grandparents.

Maris didn't remember if they'd let her have one, but she did remember the feeling that art, even goofy caricatures, could affect you, make you want things you hadn't known you wanted. It had manipulated her, and she'd been fine with that the same way a commercial for sugary cereal made her want Fruit Loops.

She stuck with the artistic ambitions for two years, drawing the oversized, misshapen heads of everyone in her family, all of them holding whatever she'd deemed their favorite foods to be.

When she was nine, Maris drew her very last caricature. She sat in her cramped living room, crocheted linen doilies her grandmother crafted decades ago covering the fraying fabric on the sofa's arms. The subject of her current artwork, a man with a thick goatee, sat across from her in the brown recliner usually reserved for her grandfather.

As she drew, the man asked her questions. His voice managed to sound hoarse and gentle at the same time, like someone who loved to sing but was rather awful at it.

"Do you remember hearing a noise last night."

She used her darkest tinted pencil for the man's hair. The noise had woken her up. Of course, she remembered. She nodded.

"What did you do then?"

The man smelled like tobacco, something her grandfather would disapprove of. The whole chair would have to be sprayed down with Febreze to get out the stench. Maris drew a cigarette in the man's hand. She switched to grey and made a swirling cloud of smoke extending from it up to the top edge of the page. "I looked for Oma and Papa, but I couldn't find them."

The man leaned forward. He smelled bad but there was a softness in his expression. His brown eyes reminded her of Tommy, her pet golden retriever who'd gotten hit by a truck last year. Those eyes pleaded with her, like she might have a bone-shaped biscuit to offer him. "Not in their bedroom, no... but then did you go downstairs?"

Maris nodded. She gave the man a blue hat even though he wasn't wearing one. It suited him. "They weren't down there either."

The man sat back, paused, frowned. She hadn't said what he wanted to hear. "This is difficult, Maris. We are trying to understand what happened. It's very important that we figure this out. Maybe you know something you don't remember that you know. We want to help your grandparents."

Maris echoed the man's frown with one of her own. Her uncle had told her only Jesus could help her grandparents now. She couldn't understand why he'd said that like it was a bad thing. Didn't he want Jesus to help them?

Maris glanced behind the man through the open archway to the dining room. The kitchen was to the left of that room, but Maris wasn't allowed to go in there anymore.