Shadow Image by Martin J Smith Page B

feet scrabbled for leverage.
    Christensen was nearly dumbstruck, and not just because he hated mice. “Gerbil manicure?” he managed.
    Pearson looked up and snorted, the kind of laugh that would embarrass most people. “Yeah, right,” she said, and snorted again. “See those?”
    She pointed her left index finger at the rodent’s yellow front teeth, which jutted over her thumbnail like two half-inch strands of uncooked spaghetti. “If you don’t clip ’em, they get so long the poor things can’t eat.”
    â€œMaura,” he said, “it’s God’s plan. They shouldn’t exist in the first place. He’s just correcting a mistake.”
    The oral surgery took only a second, reducing the length of the gerbil’s teeth by half. Pearson returned her patient to a mound of cedar chips at the bottom of an aquarium on her bookshelf, then rummaged through her desk’s lap drawer. She found a packaged antiseptic wipe, tore it open, and rubbed it between her hands.
    â€œPet-store food isn’t rough enough to wear them down, and chew blocks upset his stomach,” she said. “This works fine. You coming to the opening?”
    A conversation with Pearson could be as hard to follow as a conversation with one of her demented art students. “The opening?” he said.
    She looked exasperated. “The Once-Lost Images exhibit? The Sofa Factory?”
    â€œI’m sorry. Of course. That’s
this
week?”
    â€œThe calendars just came back from the printer,” she said. “Want one?”
    Pearson clomped over to a box on her windowsill and pulled a glossy hanging calendar from inside. Its cover read “Once-Lost Images: The Visual Imagery of Alzheimer’s Patients”—the latest fundraising premium for the Three Rivers Alzheimer’s Association. The calendars were to be sold at the first public exhibit of art produced in Pearson’s class at Harmony.
    She offered one across her desk. “You’ve probably seen some of these pieces, but the calendar turned out great.”
    Christensen fanned the pages. He recognized some of the paintings, but he was struck again by their power. Coupled with the artist’s chosen title and description, the images offered eloquent testimony to remembered moments and forgotten feelings. He looked at the painting on the calendar cover: five flowers around a woman’s crude self-portrait, with one dark flower off in the upper left corner of the canvas. The artist, now dead, was a mother of five who lost a sixth child at birth. She’d titled the piece
My Beautiful Garden.
    â€œIt’s so damned easy to forget the feelings that are still inside them,” Christensen said. “All those memories. All that emotion. That’s the beauty of what you do, Maura. The art’s like a taproot into all that stuff. You give them a way to express some really profound stuff that their brain just won’t let them understand. It gives them a voice.”
    Pearson looked away, typically uncomfortable with his compliment.
    â€œAssume you heard about Floss Underhill,” he said, looking for a place to sit. He settled finally on the arm of a chair stacked with boxes of modeling clay.
    â€œPoor thing,” Pearson said, “but she’s a tough old bird. I’d be surprised if she’s out a full week. There’s a card going around. You should sign it.”
    â€œWhere is it?”
    â€œI’ll have it for the class to sign later. Do it then.”
    Christensen eyed the gerbil, whose recovery seemed complete and instantaneous. How high were the sides of that aquarium? Could gerbils jump?
    â€œActually, I stopped to say hello to her at Mount Mercy on my way here this morning,” he said. “You’ll be happy to know she was painting when I got there.”
    â€œPhillip came through, then.”
    â€œPhillip?”
    â€œDoctor friend. I asked him to