Below the painted quote, six of her prints lay on a drying rack. I examined them cautiously, flipping the wire shelves up with care. The dense paper, pressed flat, was handmade, edges raw and uneven. Marlin used more than ink—it looked like iron dust on magnetized paint—and so the prints were fuzzy, built up from the surface in a pattern of tiny hexagons. The images were of different anatomies: a hand, a leg, a torso. The edges were executed with such a specific, meaningful line that I found it hard to look away.

But they were not mine to look at. I was here for myself. I wheeled the rack of her prints carefully into the washout room, draped the whole thing with plastic, and looked at the studio. It would work—it would more than work. We know each other by our lines. I was, in one small way, home again.

*  *  *

I spent the morning unpacking my haul from Manhattan. There were power tools, sheets of plywood and copper, bags of powdered fiberglass, a thousand dollars’ worth of powdered pigments, gallons of turpentine, then pints of linseed, safflower, and walnut oils, along with Liquin and Galkyd (chemical drying additives, cheaters, which I rarely used, but would be desperately relying on) and a host of other toxic mediums, resins, and plastics. When I found the superglue, I ripped off my makeshift bandage and squeezed the cold gel into the wound in my leg. Not bad, I thought, smoothing masking tape across the top. There’s always med school, I joked to myself. At least then I’d have health insurance.

I refilled the truck with the borrowed pile of furniture, tarping it into place until there was time to unload it at the house, then locked myself in the studio. For the thousandth time, I said a silent prayer on behalf of Hayley Thomas, the professor who ran the Academy’s freshman foundation course.

“There are no rules to this life,” Hayley said, every year, “so you’d better write it all down or you’ll never be able to remember. Write down your paints, the humidity, the time of day. Record everything about a piece—beyond your materials, I mean, who you spoke to about it, or how much it cost to ship it, and when you’re having a hard day, you’ll be able to look at your notebooks and remember how much work you did. When you have a success, you’ll know how to repeat it. And when you make a mistake, you’ll have a record of that, too.”