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At first she thought it was nothing more than the glowing snail-trails of light spots she had yet to blink away, the remnants of the dim downtown bar and her drunken fascination with the glass lamps hanging from the ceiling. But the streetlamp was steady; she squinted, and the trails never moved. The brick wall of the abandoned mattress factory was covered in thin lines of light blue paint, swirls and abstract shapes that seemed to move as she stared, to coalesce and shift like clouds. She had been here yesterday—they weren't here then.

She didn't realize she'd stopped to stare until someone tugged at her arm and she nearly fell. A wave of nausea rose into her stomach, left goosebumps all over her skin, though the night was thick and warm. "Shit," she said. She was not a liquor person.

"Cat," said the someone—Tom, she finally remembered, a friend of a friend, who was a liquor person and had talked her out of her usual beer. "Cat—you OK? I can call a cab..."

"That wasn't there before," she said, stumbling towards the wall until her palm hit brick. When she pulled her hand away there was a smudge on her lifeline the color of a robin's egg. Tom reached for his cell phone and dialed.

* * *

Cat woke up in her mom's old office, curled up on the ratty couch. Since her mom had died a year and a half ago, she'd only slept there twice, both times by accident, both heralded in the morning by enormous hangovers. This morning was no exception—her head was pounding. Light slipped in through the dusty blinds, making stripes of her body bright and hot. A Modigliani print gazed coquettishly at her from across the room. It was Jeanne Hébuterne in the white shift, her mother's favorite. Something about the slanting blue-green eyes was familiar, but she couldn't place it.

It wasn't until she'd sneaked out of the office and into the bathroom, careful to avoid her father, that she realized Jeanne's eyes were the same color as the paint she was scrubbing away from her palm.

Statesville wasn't quite a small town, but it wasn't huge, either. It had more than one stoplight and a small community college. Unfortunately for Cat, it was small enough that she was always running into people she didn't want to see. The squinty-faced, blue-haired woman who always sat behind them in church before they stopped going. Her mom's art history students, their faces barely remembering her from the dinners her mom used to host every semester. The ex-roommate who'd hooked up with her older brother at a party. Today's walk to work was a blissful exception, nothing to accompany her but the muggy morning heat and the sluggish remains of her hangover.

She lived on the border of the suburbs and downtown, an area mostly abandoned now. There were a few businesses, a few cheap bars, but for the most part, it was dead. She walked past the "for rent" signs every morning and every couple of weeks she would stop and think they looked a little more faded than before. Every morning she saw the same two panhandlers, a man and woman who sat holding hands outside of the old post office, their heads bowed and their clothes stained and tattered. Today was a Friday, so she dropped their weekly dollar in the upturned baseball cap and kept walking as they mumbled thanks. Sweat was beginning to drip down her back. Florida in June. She needed a car.

The electronic chime that sounded as she walked into the Kinko's never failed to make her cringe. Before Nick Bronson could greet her with his consistent grating cheerfulness—"Well hello there, Cath-er-ine!"—she held up a hand and walked to the back to get her uniform apron. Cezzie peered out of the storeroom. "Need me to help you tie?"

"Thanks." To Cat, Cezzie had always seemed like one of Gauguin's Tahitian women—curving body, caramel skin, dark hair, limpid black eyes. The colorless background of the Kinko's spoiled the illusion, not to mention the fact that she was from New York and had a clipped accent that was anything but island. She patted Cat's shoulder and smiled when she was done. "There ya go."

"Thanks." Cat studied the schedule. Register today. Shit.

"Hey, did you have a good time last night? You looked hot."

Cezzie had gone out with all of them the night before—a mix of people Cat had gone to school with and a few of Cezzie's friends from somewhere. She couldn't remember. Cezzie had brought Tom. Cat had caught him staring at her hips as she danced, memorizing her mouth before she downed shots. It felt different, being noticed. She had been wearing her going-out jeans, the ones she could barely squeeze into. They bit into her skin and left red lines circling her waist. Cezzie lent her a shirt that hid her stomach but left little to the imagination up top—she felt naked all night, as if the cool green satin would melt into thin air at any moment. She hadn't done that in so long—dressed up like that. Usually it was just beers with the guys who, Cat was pretty sure, thought she was a lesbian. But Cezzie—she'd finally convinced her to go.

"Yeah, I did."

"Tom seemed to like you... anything there?"

"What? No. He called me a cab, I think. I woke up at home." Cezzie's eyes were asking more. "Alone. You shouldn't have let me drink that much." She was piecing together bits of the night. "Did you see that painting on the old LaVilla factory?"

"What?"

"On Davis and Beaver. It was like... little trails. All one color."

Nick Bronson interrupted. Cat could never think of him as simply Nick. It was always both names. There was something about him. Maybe it was the way his pants always skimmed his legs with the same pressed line, or how he said everyone's name in a way that was simply intolerable at nine in the morning.

"Saw that on the morning news today! No one knows who did it—the man's pissed."

"The man?"

"You know—city government. Guess you need a permit or something for public art. They would probably pressure-clean it off if it weren't for the drought."

Cat remembered the wall as strangely beautiful, and wondered if her mother would have agreed. A man at the counter was asking for a thousand copies of something or other. The ozone heat-smell of copying filled the store. It was going to be a long day.

* * *

Cat usually ate lunch on the tiny back stoop of the Kinko's. It faced an alley that filled with sunlight at midday, silent and blinding and peaceful. Today she walked to the old mattress factory instead, eating her bagged lunch on the way: a bruised apple and a turkey sandwich on the slightly stale bread her dad had left on the counter.

In the noon sun, the painting was even more astonishing. The lines of blue covered a space perhaps twelve feet tall and thirty feet wide. And something had been added since last night—the beginnings of crosshatching, shading. The wall was becoming a space, although as hard as she tried, she couldn't figure out what that space was. On a whim, she took a marker out of her back pocket and knelt on the sidewalk, ignoring the grit and the heat. She wanted to write something profound, some insightful quote about art, but she didn't know any. Glancing around to be sure she was alone, she wrote, PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH. -The artist in her neatest fourth-grade cursive, and smiled as she capped the marker.

* * *

Cat and her father had few traditions, but almost every night since her mother died they had dinner together in the family room, sitting in front of the TV for the six-thirty news. They didn't talk much. Her father had come back from the morgue a different person, with a directionless anger beneath his skin that hadn't been there before. That first night, he'd ordered a pizza and left it untouched on the coffee table while a young blond reporter matter-of-factly narrated the scene of the accident that had killed his wife. Cat sat next to her silent father, eyes raw, feeling as if she had no tears left. He didn't cry until the funeral, wrenching animal sobs she'd never heard out of anyone before.

Cat had tried to reinvent herself after it happened, in a way that was painfully unoriginal. She dropped out of school, chopped off her hair and pierced her nose, fell in with a crowd of guys who knew her brother but didn't have his ambition to move away. With them it was okay to be tough, immune to emotion. The first couple of months, she got messily drunk more than once. Her wildness calmed into an aching sadness, but her father's anger remained. His mourning frightened her. She sat with him every night because she was afraid of what he might do if she didn't.

"How was your day?" he asked. Dinner tonight was a bucket of fried chicken from the place next to his hardware store.

"Pretty good."

"What time did you get back last night?"

She couldn't even remember getting back. "Around one."

Her father nodded and stared at the television. They listened together to news of the drought, the citywide unemployment problem, the rising crime rate. Then the camera cut to the painted wall downtown. "You seen this?" he said. "Crazy."

"In a new development in the mystery painting downtown, the artist has left a statement on the sidewalk." The camera cut to Cat's cursive, looped and off-balance. "Authorities are urging anyone with information on this incident to contact them immediately."

More colors had started to appear. Cream splotches, blues, and greens lit up the television. Cat bit into her drumstick to keep from smiling.

* * *

As the weeks passed, the mural kept changing and the identity of the artist remained a mystery. The news channels didn't have the staff to watch constantly for suspects, and the police force was spread thinly enough as it was. It seemed whenever anyone turned their back, something new appeared. Nick Bronson, the only one in the store who woke up early enough to watch the morning news, began to greet Cat with crisply enunciated updates on the painting. "He's begun what looks like foliage." "It's a full-blown forest now." "He's painted clouds on the upper left quadrant."

Nick Bronson thought the artist was a man, but Cat felt absolutely sure it was a woman, for reasons she couldn't explain. The irrational part of her wanted it to be the ghost of her mother. Cat was raised on art books, with her mother's tales of Fra Lippo Lippi and the demented genius of Van Gogh, of Hopper's gift with light and the revolutionary canvases of Rothko. But as much as her mother had loved art, she'd never had the gift of creating it. The doodles she made with her daughter when she was young were awkward, out of proportion and barely recognizable. "I knew I was never going to be one of the greats, so I teach them," she used to say, laughing.

Cat imagined that if there was a heaven, her mother was one of its finest artists. Part of her wouldn't be surprised at all if her mother's spirit paid a daily visit to Davis and Beaver, somehow able to hold on to an earthly paintbrush. But Cat was primarily a rational type. Lots of art students at the college came into the Kinko's to make large-scale prints of photographs and to copy artwork for portfolios. She began to check their fingernails as they handed her their payment, looking for the new colors that appeared in the mural each day. She figured the artist would be careful enough to scrub away the evidence, but you could never be too sure.

* * *

"You know, I've been noticing that whenever we put extra custom paint samples out by the dumpster, they're gone before the garbage van comes." It was 6:28 on a Tuesday evening, and Cat and her father were opening up boxes of Chinese for dinner in preparation for the evening news. Cat looked up. This was the most she'd heard her father say in a long time, and the first time she'd seen him smile in even longer.

"Yeah?" she said, smiling back. "You think it's the 'mysterious muralist'?" The evening news had become increasingly creative in its descriptors.

"You seen it lately?"

"Yeah. I go see it every day at lunch."

"I drive the long way home so I can see it," her father said, absently moving his chopsticks through a carton of rice. "It's beautiful."

It was beautiful. It had slowly moved from a web of outlines to a lush jungle that made Cat think of the works of Rousseau, his surprised tiger bounding through thick forest. Standing in front of it in the heat, it was easy to imagine yourself in another world. Cezzie had started to take lunch breaks with her. They sat cross-legged on the Davis Street sidewalk, eating and chatting in the shade of painted trees.

The mural was the lead story on the news today—it had been a quiet one. The city council was arguing over what to do about it. The news anchors were wondering out loud as to who the artist could be. Their suits looked strikingly out of place against the jungle. "Mom would have loved this," Cat said, without thinking.

To her surprise, her father laughed, a rich, deep sound she hadn't heard in years. He took her hand and squeezed it. "She would have."

* * *

By late July the bricks were blooming. Cat sat cross-legged on the sidewalk across from the painting with a few other strangers, mesmerized by the color and brilliance of the newly painted flowers. One gray-haired man in a business suit was standing just in front of the wall, inspecting a flame-orange tigerlily the size of his head. A mother had brought a picnic basket and her two young children. They were copying the mural in crayons, gripping the colors in tiny fists. She was explaining basic composition to them as they drew. Cat felt an ache in her chest as she watched.

"Cat! Hey!" someone said, and she looked up, squinting in the sun. It was Tom. She blushed and stood.

"Hey." He smiled at her and she remembered his dimples just as they formed.

"How are you doing?"

She was trying to recall more of the night they'd met, the first and last time she'd seen him. The memories blurred and stopped after a certain point. "Better than the last time you saw me, I think."

He laughed and walked towards the mural. She followed. "Do you remember this from that night? You touched it."

"I remember." They stood and stared at the flowers. The one nearest Cat was a bright yellow chrysanthemum. Tom's was a rose in deep red.

"You going out with us on Thursday?" She looked at him, confused. She'd gone out with Cezzie a few times since that night but hadn't seen him once. "I've been out of town for a while," he said. "You should come."

"I will," she said, surprised at her own voice, how easily and calmly it answered.

* * *

"Animals," Nick Bronson said the next morning. "He's painted in animals." There was a record crowd of gazers at lunch; they closed the store temporarily so everyone could come and see. He shook his head in wonder. "A-ma-zing." Cezzie traced the eyes of a golden lion with quiet reverence. Cat studied the bird perched on a giant fern, all purple and gray plumage; the shy leopard hiding in the shadow of the giant vine-covered tree; the faint outlines of giraffes and deer and butterflies yet to come. They looked so natural there, so hopeful and content that she couldn't help but smile. Around them, people took photos and sketched. A few vendors had wheeled their carts onto the sidewalk and were selling hot dogs and ice cream to the spectators. A little girl was being interviewed by a newswoman, speaking gravely about her favorite animal, the tiny spotted mouse in the lower left-hand corner.

* * *

Cat bought a new outfit for Thursday night on Wednesday, her day off, though she hadn't shopped for herself in ages. Dark-wash jeans and a shirt she never would have chosen a few weeks ago, the colors of the bird's purple and gray feathers. It swept over her collarbone into a deep V and tied around the waist. Her hair was growing out, and something about her face had softened. She smiled experimentally into the mirror and blushed.

When she met Cezzie and her friends at the bar Thursday night, she could feel Tom's eyes tracing her body. He met her smiling gaze and stood, looking guilty at being caught. "Can I buy you a beer? No liquor this time—I promise." Cezzie laughed.

"Sure," said Cat, sliding into his spot at the table.

He walked her home that night. They stopped in front of the mural on the way there. In the midst of the jungle's finely textured leaves, colorful flowers, and graceful creatures were two tall new outlines in a pale blue-green. A woman and a man, holding hands. Suddenly she understood.

"It's Eden." Cat touched the wall with her palm. The paint was still wet. Tom took her other hand so that the outlines traced their own bodies. The night was cool and still. He took her face into his hands and kissed her, and she accidentally smudged his face with blue as she kissed him back.

* * *

The next morning, Cat woke up early; her father was at the table eating oatmeal and leafing through one of her mother's old art books. She leaned over him in an awkward hug and he patted her arm, smiling. Walking out the door into the morning, she felt the oppressive heat of summer finally beginning to ebb. She paused by the panhandlers as she passed them and dropped a dollar into their hat.

"Thank you, ma'am," said the man. She smiled and began to tell him he was welcome, but stopped when she saw his fingers, intertwined with the woman's. They were both covered in smudges of pale blue, the exact color of the Modigliani model's eyes, of the line of paint on her palm. It was under their fingernails. The world seemed to slow and quiet. The couple smiled at her expression, and after a moment, Cat smiled back.