Elena mixed it the archive way, from the card, by hand and by eye, with Iris murmuring once — "slower with the umber, child, blue remembers everything" — and the color came up out of the base the way it had come up in 1972, deep and quiet and unhurried, a blue with green standing behind it like trees behind water. She sealed the can and wiped its rim and set the little daub of color on the lid, and carried it to the counter herself.
Amos paid for it at the Studio counter, full price, counted out of a wallet that had been old when the Studio was new, and he would not hear of a discount, and he would not hear of a bag, and he would not — though Kessler offered, and Julie offered, and Dylan, from the doorway, very nearly offered — let any living soul carry it for him. He took the gallon by its handle in his right hand, the founder's hand, stained at the nails, steady as a plumb line, and he carried it out himself, the length of the flagship, past the color wall where ten thousand chips stood in their ranks and one of them, small and deep and quiet, was the blue in the can swinging gently at his side.
The October light came through the glass doors the way it must have come through the doors of Store No. 1 on the first morning in 1972, slanted and gold and full of dust and promise, and Amos Hartley went out into it at the pace of a man with work he loves waiting for him — because the river at the library was only three walls done, and the fourth wall was waiting, and it was only Thursday, and he intended, God willing and the light holding, to finish it before Saturday.
Amos Hartley arrived at the Eastown branch library at seven forty on Saturday morning, an hour and twenty minutes before the doors were meant to open, carrying his toolbox in one hand and a paper sack in the other. The toolbox he did not need anymore — everything that could be varnished had been varnished, and the ladder had gone back to the flagship on Thursday in Kessler's pickup. But a man who has carried a toolbox through fifty years of Saturdays does not leave it home on the one that matters, and Amos set it down inside the children's room door the way another man might take off his hat in church.
Ellen Voss was already there, of course. She had been there since six, clipboard held against her chest like a hymnal, and when Amos came in she did not say good morning. She said, "Look at it with nobody in it first. That's what I did. I stood here an hour and let it be empty, so I'd remember it both ways."
He set the paper sack on the low table. "I brought the good shortbread," he said. "The tea you make here tastes like the inside of a filing cabinet."
"It is a comfort to work with a gracious man," Ellen said, and took the sack.
Amos walked the length of the mural slowly, the way he had walked it every morning that week with a rag in his hand, but this morning his hands were empty and his eyes did the traveling alone.
The Night River began at the east wall by the picture-book bins, where Marlene had painted its source: a spring no bigger than a dinner plate, dark water welling up out of painted stone, two painted frogs keeping the solemn watch that frogs keep over all beginnings. From there the river ran — down the long north wall in one great unhurried curve, over the reading nook and under the high windows, past hills painted in greens so deep they were nearly blue themselves. The animals crossed the whole way along: the heron first, high-stepping in the shallows, a minnow in her beak like a letter she refuses to hurry; then the doe and the spotted fawn, belly-deep; then the otter family in a shining comma of bodies; then the snapping turtle, ancient and unbothered, a dragonfly riding his shell; and at the mural's end, where the river widened and the sky deepened into the true dark of the story, the little boat — green-hulled, lantern-lit, riding low and glad under its cargo of books, a painted cat asleep on the stern thwart, the lantern's light laid on the water in a path of gold coins.
And above it all, and in the water, the stars — hand-sized, slightly lopsided, gold and silver and a few plain white, scattered with the unembarrassed generosity of a woman who believed the sky could afford it.
"Two hundred and ninety-one stars," Ellen said, beside him now. "I counted one summer. I have never told anyone. It felt like knowing how many freckles somebody has."
"She'd have liked knowing you counted," Amos said.