Now You See Her by Linda Howard

he kissed her, she had left safety far behind.
    *   *   *
    Sweeney picked up first one canvas and then another, trying to decide which she should take to the gallery. She didn’t like any of them, and the thought of anyone else seeing them embarrassed her. The bright colors looked childish to her, garish. Twice she started to call Candra and tell her she wouldn’t be bringing anything over after all, but both times she stopped herself. If what she was doing was crap, she needed to find out for certain now before she wasted any more time. She didn’t know what she would do if it
was
crap; therapy, maybe? If writers could have writer’s block, the equivalent had to be possible for artists.
    She could just hear it now; a therapist would solemnly tell her she was trying to resolve her childhood issues by
becoming
a child again, seeing things through a child’s eyes. Uh-huh. She had resolved her childhood issues a long time ago. She had resolvednever to be like her parents, never to use her talent as an excuse for selfish, juvenile behavior, never to have children and then shunt them aside while she pursued her art. Her mother advocated free love and went through a period of trying to “free” Sweeney from her inhibitions by openly making love with her various lovers in front of her young daughter. These days, she would have been arrested. She should have been then, too.
    The wonder, Sweeney thought grimly, was that she had had the courage to paint at all, that she hadn’t gone into something like data processing or accounting, to get as far away from the art world as possible. But she had never considered not painting; it had been too much a part of her for as long as she could remember. As a little girl she had eschewed dolls, choosing colored pencils and sketch pads as her favorite toys. By the time she was six, she had been using oils, snitching the tubes from her mother whenever she could. She could lose herself in color for hours, stand enraptured staring not just at rainbows but at rain, seeing clouds as well as sky, individual blades of grass, the sheen of a ripe red apple.
    No, there had never been any question about her talent, or her obsession. So she had tried to be the best artist she could, and at the same time to be normal. Okay, so she sometimes slipped and forgot to comb her hair, and sometimes when she was working, she forgot and shoved her hands through said hair, leaving bright streaks of paint behind. That was minor. She wasn’t promiscuous; she paid her bills on time; she didn’t do drugs even on a recreationalbasis; she didn’t smoke; she didn’t drink. There wasn’t a swag of beads anywhere in her apartment, and she was a regular June Cleaver in her personal life.
    The most abnormal thing about her was that she saw ghosts, which really wasn’t so bad, was it? Like maybe a sixty-seven on a scale of one to ten.
    Sweeney snorted. She could stand there and philosophize all day, or she could pack up some canvases and get them over to the gallery.
    Because she had said she would, and because it didn’t matter which she chose, finally she just picked three at random. She thought they were all equally bad, so what difference did it make?
    As an afterthought, she picked up the sketch she had done of the hot dog vendor. She was pleased with that, at least. She had just guessed at how he would have looked at six years of age, as a teenager, as a young man, but she had kept that same sweetness of expression in all the sketches in the collage. She hoped he would like it.
    Her mind made up, she left the apartment before she could talk herself into dithering further. The rain the day before had left the air fresh and sweet; after a moment, surprised, Sweeney had to admit the weather forecast had been accurate: it
was
a beautiful day. That weird chill was gone, chased away by Richard’s body heat, and she felt warmer than she had in a long