My skin crawls when I see him.

It shouldn’t have come as such a shock. Alice, my secretary, dug up enough information about the Mannings to satisfy this fetish of mine, this need to know about the people who come to meet me, to invade my space, plunging ahead with their questions and curiosities, the baggage they so thoroughly drag around.

I am vulnerable without this knowledge, easy prey to an unexpected attack. Call me paranoid. But I have lived enough of my forty-five years to understand that there are secrets inside all of us. Some secrets are just too horrible to disclose and yet, they reveal themselves in my paintings; portraits full of human weaknesses, lies, twisted reasonings. They are the parts of people so well hidden, they breed deep below the surface, under beautiful words and gentle smiles.

The Manning youth was born defected. He is obviously well into his late teens now but Alice says there were rumors. At birth, the doctors wondered why the fetus hadn’t aborted itself. Nature does that sometimes. She only allows the strong to survive. But even nature makes mistakes. I say this because the normal brother died, the twin who'd been perfectly formed from the blooming, opening fingers of God’s hand. A beautiful, pale infant whose eyes were the crystal silver of his mother's tears, whose tiny limbs flailed for just a moment in his father's grasp, his lungs gulping at the air he would sip at only once.

He was named Valerian. The other, they called Vincent.

They enter the studio: mother, father and son. Alice is making small talk, pouring coffee, arranging breakfast rolls she’d picked up on the way in, fragrant and steaming from the cardboard box she holds out like an offering. Her voice wings around the room, impaling the pockets of silence I’d entombed myself in since dawn. The Manning family moves carefully around my clutter: portfolios spilling charcoal sketches, discarded rags of turpentine, tubes of paint, crumpled paper. James Manning fixes on where I am positioned under the stark, morning light.

The door closes softly as Alice leaves.

I am working on a painting, a landscape of wind-whipped Lake Michigan under a gray dawn, the oils blending unevenly. The colors aren’t right, washed out. Manning approaches while I struggle with the frustration of this unwanted interruption.

“Marla Tennyson, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” He holds out a hand, the fingers long and smooth, unmarred by the calluses of hard living. His nails are blunt cut, clean.

“Alice says you want a portrait done.” Carefully, I lay down the brush.

Manning lowers his hand. “Yes, but if this isn’t a good time--”

“No time is good, Mr. Manning. Who do you want painted?” I glance at his wife whose smile is a bit uncertain. She is dressed impeccably; a tailored suit the color of ripe mango; a string of small, delicate pearls lying against skin so pale you couldn’t tell where one color ended and the other began; flat, sensible shoes. Her lips are precisely drawn, a smooth pink that tugs the eye away from the fine lines rippling around her mouth, like water softly disturbed on a cool, quiet morning. Generous eyes. Blue, with hints of an innocence long gone, shadowed somewhere beneath her stilted, half-smile.

I don’t look at the thing in the wheelchair.

Manning hesitates. “I’d like you to do a portrait of my son, Vincent.”

The light in my studio washes through glass panes in waves of gold, like embers drifting and coming together in union on a breeze. Dust motes collide and separate around the boy and my eyes are drawn first to the transparency of these tiny filigrees bobbing in the air above his head. Then I can look. Then I can see the way he is in his wheelchair, head thrown back at an awkward angle, the claws that are his fingers scratching at his face. His mother gently pries them off. She smoothes the skin.

"Why?" I ask Manning, a blunt edge to my voice.

"He’s dying."

I stare at him. "A camera won’t work?"

Manning's jaw locks. "I'm willing to pay double your normal fee."

"Getting him on canvas isn’t a problem. A dash of color here, a touch of blue there and voila - your son’s immortalized for all eternity, flaws and all.” I wipe my hands on a rag and look him directly in the eye. “But you want more than just his picture.”

Manning is reddening, his face and neck staining with the rush of blood pooling under his skin. Mother and son have moved across the studio. They don't notice our heated conversation. Vincent is suddenly, surprisingly, still.

They are gazing at my paintings hung haphazardly against the far wall, strewn across the floor at their feet. There are pencil sketches and charcoal drawings of kids among them -- reflective, unsmiling faces.

These are the students I teach each week; my contribution to charity. I have sketched them in their quiet moments, their angry solitude; I have gripped their indifference and struggled beyond the closed facade they present to the world and still, I’ve been unable to cull something worthy to turn into oil. I have so immeasurably failed to reach beyond their skin, maybe because they remind me, with every turn of their head, every taut, clipped sentence that slips from their tongue, of my own childhood in the dark barracks of Chicago’s underbelly.

On Tuesday afternoons, they arrive on a rumbling bus, a dash of yellow flashing between the trees moments before they appear on my driveway, tumbling and stinking of the streets. They heave the chains of ghetto life with them, their wan faces peeling with a void so complete, I hear the resounding echoes somewhere deep inside myself.

“Tell me why, Mr. Manning,” I say again, quite deliberately.

"I won’t stand here and beg.” Manning speaks through gritted teeth. “If you think I need your insolence, think again. There are other artists --"