The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone

Sometimes I thought Jonah was nuts for Addison because she was the same lawless as Sugarfoot. It was hard for me to compete with that.

Jonah didn’t care about sports except for snowboarding. That’s partly why he’s out in Colorado now. Most girls keep tabs on their exes, right? I always will on Jonah. His eyes are the color of Jim Beam, and he’s got those broad shoulders, and at school you could hear him coming from a mile in those size thirteen shit-kicker boots. I know I’m rambling about Jonah … I wish I could have put the same spell on him that Addison did. Instead she used him like a winter coat. Useful till the day he wasn’t. All she cared about was herself. Addison Stone was in love with Addison Stone. I’m sure all these interviews are making that crystal clear.

DREW MACSHERRY: Jonah’s been my pal since we were ten. His grandma’s farm is across from MacSherry Dairy, my family’s farm. Jonah’s dad took off when he was little. Then one day he returned out of nowhere, and Sugarfoot got out her rifle and ordered him off, and she shot the sky. Everyone talked about that for years. In eighth grade, me and Jonah formed a band, “Shoot the Sky,” with my kid brother, Mac, on drums, me on vocals, and Jonah playing lead guitar.

We’d practice out in Jonah’s barn. We stank, but we were loud and free. Then one day who’s in the barn but this pantherish girl, sitting up on the seat of the broken tractor, sketching us.

“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m here with The Lenox.”

She was a gypsy. But Jonah said she was just someone from school. Like Mac, I’m homeschooled, so I didn’t know anything about her. But then she was there the next day, and the next, and by the next week Addison had put up an easel, and she’d taken over a corner of the barn. She told me she sold her paintings to the school. I thought she was taking the piss outta me. Who’d have the balls to do that? I always liked that idea, though, of a principal writing checks to a student.

Me and Mac kinda fell in love with Addison—it got to be that on afternoons when she didn’t show, we didn’t even feel like practicing.

Maggie Lenox Playing Dress-up by Addison Stone, courtesy of the estate of Addison Stone.

JONAH LENOX: Sometimes Addison didn’t like to be around her mom, and she hardly ever liked to be around her dad. Roy was a wimp who liked to drink, and then he’d get a head full of steam, and he’d pick on Addison’s mom or switch off the music or the TV and shove open the window, even if it was blasting cold out.

“Damn sauna in here,” he’d say while we all shivered. “Fresh air’s good for your health! TV rots your brain! You’ll thank me for it.”

So yeah, sometimes Addison came over and slept in our barn. Right in the hayloft, unless Sugarfoot knew she was around, and then she’d coax Addison inside like a stray cat and get her to eat a home-cooked lasagna.

Addison once gave me a painting she did of me, with Sugarfoot hovering in the back, and it was just exactly the right vibe. Me and my grandma didn’t talk much, but she was always there, and we were family, real and deep. Sugarfoot had my back. The picture’s at Waverly Heights Senior Home now, in her room, right over her bed.

In the House of The Lenox by Addison Stone, courtesy of Ruth Lenox.

ARLENE FIELDBENDER: As co-heads of the South Kingstown High School art department, my husband, Bill, and I had known of Addison Stone since she was Allison back in middle school. Even by that time, she had won a number of local art contests. So when the annual W.W. Sadtler contest was announced, we saw it as a key opportunity for her. William Wentworth Sadtler was a New England businessman who made his fortune in tin and lived most of his life in his wife’s hometown in East Warwick, Rhode Island. You see his name a lot on plaques around here, in hospitals and parks.

Sadtler collected many beautiful paintings in his lifetime, mostly portraits, and his foundation had created an annual twenty-thousand-dollar grant for a high school junior or senior in pursuit of an education in art. It’s a windfall, and Bill and I have witnessed it as a truly life-changing experience for a student. Not just the money, which is incredible, but just as a way to affirm a young talent. RISD students, Providence College of Art students all submit. It’s the brass ring.

So I said to Addison, “Create a portrait, and this money will be yours.”

“How do you know?”

“Because, my dear, you are that good.”

BILL FIELDBENDER: Addison picked me as her subject. She was making studies of me all that winter. Pencil, charcoal, pen-and-inks. I didn’t mind; why would I? I was her most available model. Chances were high that if Addison was in the art room, I’d be there, too. That winter, I was also using the school art room to work on some of my own projects. I’m a dabbler.

“Okay, Bill,” she’d say—she never called me Mr. Fieldbender—“you’re gonna need to sit down for two or three minutes and let me create exactly the perfect shadow to capture how your neck bags like a baby elephant.”

“You sure know how to make your teacher feel handsome,” I’d tease.

But I always gave her the time she needed. She never stopped surprising me. Even her early studies were evidence of her extraordinary talent.

Billfold/#1 by Addison Stone, courtesy of the estate of Addison Stone.

ARLENE FIELDBENDER: As soon as Addison committed to a canvas and began to apply the oils for the work that would become Billfold/#1, the first of that series, we knew. We just knew. She’d hit another level. On a personal note, I was glad she’d chosen to paint Bill. He was as good to her as a father, certainly better than her own. Sure, there was maybe a touch of hero worship there, but it was harmless. Sweet, even. Addison also really knew Bill. She “got” him—his solitude and curiosity and intelligence. His soul, even. Addison’s portraits work psychologically because she wanted to understand the inside of personality every bit as much as she could.

Addison gave the Sadtler submission her all, but she did make a slight joke out of the contest and its hype. In the end, she painted an ornamental gold frame around Billfold/#1. As if presenting her entry as a gift.

Once she’d turned in the Sadtler submission, she began Don’t Even Think (About It). She planted two “trees” made out of bent wire and wash buckets, and then she strung a web of threads and thin cords and tiny blinking Christmas-tree lights between them. The branches of the Contest Tree were taped with hundreds of fluttering Monopoly money bills. The Addison Tree was knotted in a snarl of shoelaces and frayed purple ribbons, and she’d used a pocketknife to nick into the wire, creating them to look just like her wrist scars.