"'Everything else on these walls is mine and I am proud to sign it. The corner is my signature too. It is just written in pencil.
"'M.H., October 1985.'"
Ellen put the page back in the folder with the care of a woman closing a door on a sleeping house. The room was quiet. Somewhere a radiator ticked, approvingly.
"Now," Ellen said, "that note has waited forty years to be carried out, and I see no reason to make it wait through the cake." She looked out over the children cross-legged on the carpet. "I am not going to choose. Choosing isn't done by librarians. But I will tell you what Mrs. Agnew wrote under Mrs. Hartley's note, in the branch's own record." She did not open the folder again. She had it by heart. "'The corner is to be finished,'" she recited, "'by a child who was read to here. When the room knows her, the room will know.'" She let that sit. "The room has had forty years to think it over."
It happened the way such things actually happen: it was decided by the children before the adults had finished arranging their faces. There was a girl of eight named Wren, in a yellow sweater with one cuff longer than the other, who had been read to in this room since before she could hold her own head up — first by her grandmother Margaret, who had read to three generations from the low chair by the boat; then by her mother; then, these last two years, to her little brother, from the same chair, with the unfinished corner at her shoulder like a fourth listener. Wren had not pushed forward. She had simply been looking at the corner for some minutes with the expression Marlene had painted onto every one of her animals: the look of a creature who can see the other side of the river.
Her grandmother, cane in hand, said into the quiet: "She's been asking me all week what goes in the empty part, Mrs. Voss. I told her I didn't know, and she said—" Margaret stopped, and laughed once, wetly. "She said, 'Gram, it's not empty. It's just not started.'"
"Well," Ellen said. "The room knows her."
Amos got out of his chair in the two stages Ellen had taught him that week — hand on the chair arm, hand on the table edge, letting his knees file their objections and overrule them — crossed the room, which was not far, nothing in that room was far, that was the whole design of it, and knelt carefully, the way a man of eighty kneels who intends to get up again under his own power. Kessler's hand was under his elbow before his knee reached the carpet — not lifting, simply there, the way a rail is there. Amos nodded once, in thanks, in dismissal, in absolution, and Kessler stepped back to the wall, and it was Amos and the corner and the girl.
From his toolbox he took the brush. It was Marlene's: not one of her good sable brushes, but her wall brush, her everyday brush, its wooden handle worn to the exact shape of one woman's grip, a ferrule gone slightly loose in 1997 and tightened by Amos with a pair of pliers and a muttered apology. He had kept it in his toolbox for forty years, underneath a gross of lesser brushes come and gone, because a man does not throw away his wife's handwriting. He had cleaned it that morning at the kitchen sink, working the old dried sky out of its heel with his thumbnail, patient as prayer.
"Now," he said to Wren, who had knelt beside him without being asked, because children kneel the way birds land. "Mrs. Hartley wrote that this part was yours. She didn't say what goes in it. She drew where the river goes, and the stones, and left the sky empty in pencil, so whoever came next could put in what she saw." He held out the palette — a small enameled tray Ellen had produced from the staff room — with a thumb's worth of Marlene Blue, wet, dark, lit from beneath, and beside it a smaller thumb's worth of the gold of Marlene's stars, matched by Iris from the archive card and mixed by Elena yesterday.
"One star," Wren said. She did not say it as a question.
"What makes you say one?"
"Because the others are already up there." She pointed along the wall, at the whole long sky of the river, two hundred and ninety-one strong. "There's a space. Down here, where the river bends. A space the size of one, and it's low, so it's for somebody low. A star that lives down by the water. So the fawn can see it when she drinks."
Amos Hartley, who had sat in a thousand meetings where grown men used the word palette to mean a quarterly report, held the tray steady in both hands at the height of a child's shoulder and said, "Then paint it low."