Willow Farrow's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Willow drove back to the windmill at dawn with a list of questions and no answers. She had not found Jolt at the jar-nest or at the warm window. She climbed the ladder anyway, because the wall above her road still held a mark she did not understand, and she could not paint another mile until she read it in full light. She reached the cap and stopped. The jar and sparks were only the corner of it. The rest of the wall carried three faces. A girl with steady eyes. A younger girl beside her. A boy below them both. Names ran down the paint in blunt white letters. Rosa. Kai. Leo. Around the portraits, smaller words in a hand she knew from a hundred notes on her kitchen table. Last seen. Mile nineteen. Mile twenty-two. Never came home. Willow read every line before she touched a brush. Her arrow from yesterday pointed down at the road under all of it, and she understood now what the arrow had joined. She sat on the plank floor. Jolt had not warned travelers off her road. Jolt had put the missing above it, where anyone climbing for the view would have to meet them. The mural below promised welcome. The mural above said some had left and not arrived. Both were true. Willow had spent a year planning forty miles of lit windows and open hands. She had planned none of this. She pressed her palms flat to the wood and let the ache settle. She climbed down without adding a stroke to the wall. She left the faces whole. At the base of the hill she opened her truck and found the bucket of soft white she had saved for the largest window at mile two. She pried the lid. The paint caught the sun like a clean sheet. She carried it back to the first marker, where her green river ran along the barrier and the gateway stone waited for its first symbols. She mixed a little of the white into each of her other cans until the colors lifted. Then she knelt at mile one and painted between the shapes she had already planned. A welcoming hand. A warm window. Between them, a lantern with no flame. She painted a second lantern further on, and a third past that. Three empty lanterns facing the road, spaced along the first mile, waiting. She did not write names under them. The names were up the hill, where Jolt had put them. The lanterns were hers. She capped the bucket and stepped back. The mural read differently now. Welcome for those still coming. Light held for those who had not. She wiped her brush on her jeans and looked up the highway toward mile two, where the largest window was still only a plan. Whatever she painted next would have to carry both.