What Came From the Stars by Gary D. Schmidt

portrait.
    Mrs. Lumpkin opened her eyes very wide and half walked, half ran down the railroad-tie steps toward her yellow Mazda.
    Tommy stepped onto the dune. His fingers spread out and his hand curved around the sea fog.
    He felt Patty beside him. She was shaking her head.
    Tommy uncurved his hand and let the fog go.
    Mrs. Lumpkin drove away very quickly.
    The Peppers went back to cleaning their house.

    By the end of the week, the Peppers had replaced the smashed windows—no need to fit the new screens until next summer—and cleared out the broken furniture and brought in new beds and dressers for Tommy and Patty and repaired the kitchen table and three of the chairs, and they were only a little tippy. They’d hung a new front door and the wall in the hall had new sheetrock and was spackled and primed and ready for painting. Tommy asked for pale yellow—his mother’s favorite color. And there was a new chair in the empty living room and their father had guessed they needed some paintings for the walls since they looked pretty bare and Patty had nodded and smiled and he had set up his easel. He had gotten one or two ideas after he saw Tommy’s chain, he said, but in three days he finished seven seascapes—with lots of green and lots of silver—four for their walls, three for the Plymouth Fall Festival. One of them had two suns. “Just a crazy idea,” said Tommy’s father.
    Tommy smiled. They weren’t thrimble, he thought—but pretty close.
    They
were
illil.
    On Saturday, Tommy’s father bought the pale yellow paint. He did the close brushwork around all the edges in the hall while Tommy watched, fingering the warm chain. Walls are supposed to be flat, but this was an old house and Tommy could see this wall wasn’t even close to flat. It leaned in a little bit at the top and leaned out a little bit at the bottom. And there were ten, twenty, a hundred places where the wall bumped up, a thousand places where it nicked in. And Tommy had never noticed before, but there was a curve to it. If he looked with his head cocked to one side, the wall had a horizon.
    His father poured the pale yellow paint into a pan and gave Tommy a roller to finish the hall while he went into the kitchen to see what could be done about the ruined cabinets. Tommy stepped back and looked at the bumps and nicks arranging themselves together across the horizon. He thought he might ... Well, he wasn’t sure what he might do.
    But the chain was very warm.
    He ran the roller into the pan with the pale yellow paint.
    He looked at the wall again.
    Then he began to roll the paint across the hallway wall. He finished quickly so that the whole hall was a pale yellow.
    Then he began again—his chain was almost hot. He felt the way the wall curved, its bumps, its nicks. He pushed harder on the roller, lighter, then along the roller’s edges, quickly, slowly, and then barely touching at all—the lightest whisper of pale yellow paint.
    When Patty came out into the hall—she’d been sorting all the books that hadn’t been stained green back onto the shelves their father had put up again—she looked at the pale yellow walls. She squinted a little, then tilted her head, then leaned back. Then she smiled, smiled, smiled.
    “Do you like it?”
    Patty put her arms around Tommy’s waist.
    Their father glanced into the hall as he was carrying out the last box of shattered dishware.
    It was a good thing that it was only shattered dishware in the box.
    “Tommy,” he said. He squinted a little, then tilted his head. “Tommy, how did you do this?”
    “I remembered,” said Tommy.
    His father put his hand to his face. He reached up and almost touched the wall. Then he stood back. “You remembered,” he whispered.
    He went outside. Tommy and Patty followed him.
    They sat on the dune, a surprisingly warm breeze coming up from the sea. The long grasses were bobbing back and forth to each other, carrying the day’s news as they do. Quiet seagulls hove