Kitabı oku: «Something Beautiful», sayfa 2
Jillian asked her, hearing the angry note in her voice come through, despite her attempts to quell it, “Do you know why my new paintings all have that jeweled effect, that brighter-than-bright sheen to them?”
Her friend murmured an uneasy negative.
Jillian felt her lips curve, but she knew it wasn’t in a smile, unless this time it really was born of bitterness. “They’re that way because the whole time I’m painting, I’m crying. And I paint what I see.”
She heard Elise murmur a placating something, but her heart was pounding so loudly, the words didn’t penetrate. She couldn’t sit there any longer. The restlessness that had so thoroughly claimed her during the past year triggered, and forced her into action. She moved back to the window and stared out at the courtyard.
Steven was no longer absorbing the dying rays of the setting sun. He was standing facing the doors, just in front of the pile of leaves, looking as though he’d risen from them, a golden phoenix from unburned ashes. His hands hung loose at his sides, the rake abandoned against the trunk of the apricot tree at the far south end of the courtyard.
His eyes were open now, and filled with light, as if he truly had taken in the sun’s rays and transformed them into a startling green. The color was oddly out of place in the late-afternoon desert Southwest, and was as luminous as the jeweled colors in her paintings. Blazing emeralds.
It was at least three seconds before she realized she was gazing directly into his eyes, staring at him, frozen, and when she did, she felt strangely linked with him, her heart pounding in a strange combination of fear and poignant recognition.
Had her swift rise from the table called his attention, or had he been watching her all along, as she all too often watched him?
She could read nothing in his closed expression, no understanding, no pity, yet she felt a powerful emotion emanating from him all the same. That emotion wasn’t tenderness or concern, nor did it seem to carry any nuances of sexuality or even sensuality, though he certainly exuded all of those things on a physical plane. But whatever he was thinking or feeling seemed to radiate out from him like an aura taking flight, dark and filled with purpose, but its meaning obscured, hidden from her. She could have sworn she felt it race across the distance, and gasped at the raw intensity of it.
Shock rippled through her. He’s like my paintings, she thought, and instinctively raised her hand between them, laying her palm against the cold glass. Was she reaching for him, or warding him off?
She could feel his power, and didn’t understand it. He was dark and light at the same time. Extremes. Sharp contrasts and angles, hidden messages and sparkling truths.
Staring at him, linked with him, she felt words form in her mind. Were they coming from him? No, from within herself. Again, like her paintings.
“Jillian?”
“Dark with excessive bright.”
She had murmured the words aloud, almost like a talisman. Or were they a plea?
Why hadn’t she looked away from him? Why was she continuing to stand there…locked in his gaze? And what was it about the words dark with excessive bright that had so captured her thoughts, snagged her memory?
Then she remembered. Steven had said the words the other morning while clearing the overthick woodbine from the side of the house. What had he meant then, and why had the words seemed to hold so much more than mere statement in them?
“What’s that from?” Elise asked.
“What?” she asked faintly, as though from far away. She couldn’t break his gaze, felt she was drowning in it, dizzy, aching. What was happening to her? She felt as if one of her dark doorways were opening slightly, and if she stared at him much longer she would see the roiling clouds with the haunted, hungry eyes seeking her.
“Earth to Jillian. I said, ‘What’s that from?”’
Steven Sayers—the gardener, she reminded herself, half hysterically—looked away first, turning his head as though purposefully ending this unusual connection. He walked slowly back to the apricot tree and took the rake in his left hand. Without looking back toward the house, he resumed his careful tending of the pile of leaves.
Jillian fought nausea, found herself shaking and raised trembling hands to hug her suddenly cold shoulders. Her grandmother, had she still been alive, would have said a wolf had just passed over Jillian’s grave. She knew it was far more serious than that, far more real. If she’d stayed linked with him a moment longer, she knew, she would have lost herself somehow.
“Sounds like something I’ve read,” Elise said.
“What?”
“That ‘dark with excessive bright’ thing.”
Jillian drew a deep breath before turning around. “I don’t know. It sounded familiar to me, too, but I…don’t remember where I…read…it.”
“Shakespeare? Donne? Maybe Spenser? It doesn’t sound like a standard biblical verse, but I could be wrong.”
Jillian’s chill fell away as swiftly as it had come upon her. She moved back to the table, but didn’t sit down. Was she subconsciously signaling her need to be alone?
She leaned against one of the high-backed oak chairs and said, “I always forget you’re a scholar.”
Right now she wished Elise were really the white witch she professed to be, could really see into one of her myriad crystal balls and explain what Jillian had just experienced. Because it had been something. Or as Allie was fond of saying lately, something beautiful. Beautiful in the sense of “awesome,” a concept with a dual-edged sheen, at one and the same time both exceedingly lovely and woefully dangerous.
Elise winced and waved her hand. “You’re the scholar, sweetie, remember? You’re the one who reads everything known to man. Before you started painting, anyway. Maybe that’s the secret to your art, you bring it a little old-worldliness.
“Anyway, nowadays, scholars do research and get to read all the time. They’re eligible for Nobel Prizes and a billion grants. I’m one of the publish-or-perish crew, remember?”
Elise stood up and shook her pleated wool skirt as though such an effort would remove the long-creased wrinkles in it. “Speaking of which, I have an abstract I have to finish by Thursday, and this being Monday and I haven’t even begun reading the material, let alone writing the damned thing, I’d better set my sights on the computer—”
Allie burst through the front door at that moment, bringing a blast of chill air with her as she sprang into the dining room. She spun her bookbag onto the small desk reserved for just that purpose and skidded to a semihalt.
“Have you seen Lyle?” she called, then, apparently remembering some semblance of manners, muttered a breathless greeting to Elise and her mother.
“How was school?” Jillian asked.
“Fine. Have you seen Lyle?”
Jillian felt rather than saw Elise’s ironic gaze and heard Elise murmur, “None of us ever have, hon.”
Allie didn’t seem to notice. She ran on through the kitchen and down the hallway to her bedroom.
Jillian heard the door slam open, and heard her daughter’s cheerful voice recounting snippets of her day. To Lyle. She felt a momentary stab of unreasonable jealousy; Lyle received all of Allie’s confidences, those little details once shared with her mother.
Jillian waited a moment before turning to meet Elise’s eyes. As she had expected, Elise was studying her with a cross between amusement and commiseration.
Elise gestured toward Allie’s unseen bedroom and said, “Now that really does give me the creeps.”
“Gloria says—”
Elise held up her hand. “Spare me Gloria’s immortal words. I know she’s got a degree in realigning your head, but let’s get real, Jillian. Allie is down the hall this very minute, talking to an invisible rainbow creature. And from what I can see—and hear—he talks back.”
“You can hear him, can you?” Jillian asked, smiling faintly, but feeling a frisson of reaction nonetheless.
“Not him, I can’t, but I can tell from the things Allie’s been saying that she sure thinks she does.”
“That’s the whole point of having an imaginary friend,” Jillian argued.
She hoped her light tone masked the doubts she held about the wisdom of maintaining the fiction that Lyle was something real. But the grief therapist thought Lyle’s appearance was a breakthrough of sorts, that his presence signaled an attempt on Allie’s part to rise above the trauma of her father’s death.
Gloria claimed that Lyle would allow Allie to communicate many of the difficult aspects of dealing with the pain of having actually been in the car and having had to watch her father die in her presence. And Jillian had to admit that since Lyle had come on the scene, Allie had finally started acting out her anger, her completely understandable rage.
So Lyle had to be a good thing, no matter how little Jillian might appreciate the acting out, the breakage of an old vase, the temper tantrums resulting in books knocked from the shelves, the scattering of papers, art supplies, anything of value to Jillian, then the lies about it afterward. Perfectly normal, if wholly disliked.
Elise said now, “You know, I’ve resisted the idea of you guys taking off for the wild blue, but I’ve gotta tell you, between your Steven and Allie’s Lyle, I’m changing my mind.”
“He’s not my Steven,” Jillian protested, but even to her, the words lacked conviction.
Luckily, Allie came running back into the dining room; her appearance blocked Elise’s quick rejoinder.
“Can we watch TV?” her little girl asked, making it clear by her actions that Lyle was with them in the room.
If she was entirely honest about Lyle, Jillian thought, she would simply tell her daughter that she hated the invisible creature, that he frightened her a little. A lot.
But she said instead, “There’s still a few minutes of daylight left. Why don’t you—and Lyle—run off some energy? I’ll bet if you ask, Steven will let you jump into that pile of leaves he’s just raked.”
Allie looked willing enough, and transferred her gaze to an empty spot some three feet away from her, and apparently at eye level. The question was obvious on her face. She nodded once, and then, her face stiffening, turned back to Jillian. The honey-brown eyes so like Dave’s met Jillian’s pleadingly, as if asking for understanding. As they did the times she lied to her mother.
“Lyle says he doesn’t want to go outside.”
Jillian could have sworn that Allie did want to go. She withheld a shudder. How could Allie have created an imaginary friend with such a fierce hold over her? Was Gloria right in believing order was the whole point of Lyle, a search for some kind of control in a world gone to chaos? Or was there something else going on here?
“Why doesn’t he want to go outside?” Elise asked, with a degree of probing Jillian didn’t care for—not because Elise was too curious, but because, as Jillian had come to realize lately, she wasn’t any too sure she wanted to hear the answers.
Allie cocked her head again, as if listening, her eyes taking on that intent focus on absolutely nothing. Jillian knew some actors would have paid a fortune for the secret of that particular trick.
As was usual while watching Allie listen to “Lyle,” Jillian fought the feeling that Allie really was seeing something, something that wasn’t her imagination, something all too real.
Allie turned her gaze to Elise, and said, “Lyle says Steven’s out there. He says he doesn’t want to run into Steven yet.”
Elise shot Jillian a sharp look, her round face filled with What-did-I-tell-you?
“What do you mean, yet?” Jillian asked.
Allie shrugged. “I dunno. That’s just what Lyle says. Can we watch TV now? I don’t have any homework.”
Jillian absently consented and carefully avoided Elise’s gaze as Allie left the room. Allie elaborately stepped aside, allowing her invisible friend to precede her through the archway leading to the den. Her slender young body arched against the doorjamb, precisely the way a person would do to allow someone—or something—with considerable girth to pass through.
Elise cleared her throat, then slowly said, “I’d say an extra little chat with Gloria Sanchez is in order here.”
“Based on Allie’s comments about Steven?”
“Based on everything, Jill. I’m not kidding when I say there’s something scary about this whole picture—”
“Mommy?”
Jillian felt a jolt of adrenaline course through her, and couldn’t hold back the slight start her daughter’s sudden reappearance had caused.
Elise also seemed startled. She muttered a curse beneath her breath and dramatically held one hand over her full breasts. “Sweetie, if you don’t want Aunt Elise to become invisible, too, don’t, for the love of heaven, sneak up on us like that again!”
Allie smiled, but Jillian could see the abstraction on her daughter’s face. “Lyle says not to ask Steven to come in the house, okay?”
Jillian felt a chill work down her arms. She couldn’t help it, she looked over Allie’s shoulder, as if expecting to see the invisible friend standing there, gauging her reaction. Allie had often referred to him as something beautiful. What was beautiful about this sort of control, these implications of danger?
She forced herself to speak. “Why would Lyle say something like that?” she asked. She hoped her voice didn’t sound either accusatory or as nervous as she felt.
Allie shifted, as though allowing something to pass back through the archway, again politely offering room.
Jillian deliberately focused her gaze on Allie, refusing to let her eyes slide to the nothing beside her daughter.
Thinking of Elise standing there watching, warning undoubtedly lining her face, she asked, “Doesn’t Lyle like Steven?”
Allie turned to stare into space again, and she nodded a second time.
“I’ll tell her,” she said before turning back to her mother. “Lyle just doesn’t want Steven in the house. He says it’s too soon.”
There’s no such thing as Lyle, Jillian told herself firmly.
But, much as she might want to do so, she couldn’t say this to Allie. Because for Allie, Lyle was very, very real. Too real, maybe.
When Gloria had suggested that the imaginary Lyle might be a means of breaking through Allie’s grief, Allie’s way of attempting contact with the outside world, Jillian had agreed to go along with the myth that Lyle was a real being, that his presence in their home was a welcome one. But, if she was to be honest, she had to agree with Elise. The whole concept was vaguely disturbing, and made her feel deliberately distanced by her little girl.
Through Lyle, Allie had, in the past month, said the most unusual things, comments that seemed remarkably adult, phrases that sounded strange upon the lips of an eight-year-old child. The grief therapist claimed this was consistent with trauma survival.
Jillian wondered.
And now Lyle didn’t want her asking Steven into the house. It wasn’t as if she had, or had really even considered doing so. So why had Allie brought it up? Was this an important key to Allie’s thoughts? She hadn’t said she didn’t like him, she’d said it was “too soon.” What exactly did that mean to Allie?
Jillian wondered how Dave would have handled something like an invisible creature living within their safe walls, and knew with a sharp pang that the situation would never have arisen. It was due to Dave’s death that the imaginary creature was there. And it was due to his loss that Allie clung to Lyle’s company.
Jillian fought the rise of anger against Dave, that overwhelming sense that by dying, he’d abandoned her, left her to grapple with things he should have been there to share with her. Forever, he’d said, but he’d lied. Right from the start.
For Allie’s sake, she now strove to find a light note. “Why would Lyle be worried about Steven coming into the house? Is he afraid he’ll have to give up some space, that we’ll ask him to move back to the lilac hedge?”
Apparently she’d hit the right tone, because for a split second Allie’s face lightened, and she actually seemed on the verge of a giggle. But then she sobered and her eyes turned to that empty—but all-too-real—spot where she could perceive that which no one else could.
It was more than simply disconcerting to see her daughter’s eyes unerringly return to the same exact height every time she turned to look at the ever-present Lyle. And it was even more unsettling at times to watch Allie’s gaze follow an imaginary being’s apparent progress around the room.
Jillian found herself tensing, waiting for Lyle’s next pronouncement, not even able to correct herself, to remember that it was Allie doing the thinking, the translating, the speaking. Because it didn’t seem like Allie at all.
Allie’s eyes turned back to Jillian’s, looking up, and she frowned a little, as if puzzling out Lyle’s unheard comment. “Lyle says Steven isn’t real.”
“What?” Elise and Jillian said in unison.
Jillian couldn’t begin to understand this latest twist of her daughter’s mind.
“Whoa…” Elise murmured. “This, I don’t like.”
Allie cocked her head, listening, not to Elise, but to that invisible, inaudible voice, then said, inexplicably, “Lyle says, just whatever happens, don’t let Steven inside.”
Allie turned to leave the room. For some reason, this chilled her mother more than her words had done; Allie was unconcerned by her comments. She didn’t appear to even know what she was talking about. This was wholly and utterly consistent with someone truly listening to another voice.
But that was patently impossible.
“Honey…” Jillian called after her, only to let her words trail off. Could Elise be right, and Allie did know or sense something about Steven that she herself refused to see? Or was there something else going on here, something related to Dave’s death, perhaps a general distrust of everyone?
Jillian wanted to call her daughter back, but didn’t. She didn’t because she knew that merely summoning Allie back to the entry hall wasn’t what she truly needed from her little girl. What she wanted in her heart of hearts was Allie back…period. The way she used to be, filled with giggles and sunshine, light, airy steps dancing through life, the way she’d been for a moment when coming into the house, the way she’d been a year ago.
She turned and met Elise’s concerned gaze. She was certain her own was equally troubled.
Elise raised her hands as if in surrender and said, “I’m out of here. But I don’t feel good about it. There’s more going on around here than doesn’t meet the eye. And I gotta tell you, I don’t like it. Any of it.” She looked over Jillian’s shoulder, out to the darkening courtyard.
Jillian turned to follow her friend’s scrutiny. Steven had apparently paused in the act of loading the piled leaves into a large black plastic bag. His profile was to the house, but something about his stilled hands, his tensed body, conveyed the impression he’d heard every word spoken by those inside. His face seemed even grimmer than usual, and his jaw like chiseled granite, his lips pulled into a tight grimace that could have been either pain or anger.
Jillian couldn’t help it; she turned her eyes to that spot in the archway, a place some four feet above the ground, an empty pocket of air, a space where no one stood, but where something had spoken.
CHAPTER TWO
In the glow of the small mock-kerosene lantern on the adobe guesthouse wall, Steven rocked in the old-fashioned chair, his shoulders pressed against the carved oak. His head was bent slightly forward, a furrow on his brow, as he read the book in his lap.
“…that good comes out of evil; that the impartiality of the Nature Providence is best; that we are made strong by what we overcome; that man is good because he is as free to do evil as to do good…”
Steven read the passage again and sighed. Then, aloud, he recited the final line of John Burroughs’s treatise Accepting the Universe, “…that man is good because he is as free to do evil as to do good.”
His words echoed in the small guesthouse, seemed to sweep into the flames of the small fire and crackle and burn there.
Steven sighed and leaned his head against the chair’s high back. His thoughts were even darker than usual, and by nature he was inclined to somber reflection. After several long moments, he turned his gaze to the nightstand beside him and stared at the steel blade of the long-knife he’d set there earlier.
The weapon was a relic of the fifth century, a gift from someone he’d long ago forgotten. He’d had the knife for so many years, it had become a part of his wardrobe, his life. The blade’s polished steel captured the colors of the blaze and held them trapped there.
Like Beleale. Like himself. Both of them trapped in a world not their own. Each wanting, needing, the other gone. Brothers on one plane, enemies on another.
Steven stared at the blade as if it would transform, become something other than an instrument of bloodshed.
Once, just once let it be useless.
But it wasn’t useless. It was as sharp as ever, and as deadly.
Steven ran a finger along the knife’s thick shaft, the deceptively paper-thin, razor-sharp blade, and the curvature of the handle. Intricate carvings had once adorned the handle, but he’d worn them away over the long, long years.
It was only a knife. Just a simple tool.
He slipped his fingers into the grooves created by his countless years of handling it, and lifted the heavy weapon into the air, turning it, letting it catch the fire’s reflection. The blade caught the reds and golds of the blaze, and more, it caught his eyes, as well, shadowed, green, and hard.
Unable to bear seeing his own reflection, he rose and lowered the knife to his thigh, resenting the flow of memories of the innumerable occasions he’d used this blade before. Too many times he’d used it, and afterward, mortals had fallen victim to its bite.
And for the first time in this ten-thousand-year hell, Steven resented knowing the intimacy of the knife, hated the certainty that within the hour he would use it yet again.
He thought of that perfect moment he might offer Jillian Stewart. The day of her marriage? The birth of her daughter, Allie? That summer afternoon she, Dave and Allie had lost their way in the forest and huddled together like nesting cups, a day when her husband had clung to her and told her all the things a husband should? She might choose any of them. She’d called them all perfect days, perfect moments.
And he wondered, if he had that choice, what moment he would choose. What day, what instance, what timeless, perfect moment, would epitomize his entire existence?
There were none. No perfect moments. No perfect days, afternoons, nights. Only that almost endless stream of war, of living only to fight, of winning only to fight again.
Even to himself, he felt he was little more than an instrument, a machine in human guise, who was forever doomed to search for meaning in immortality, to live vicariously from the perfect moments he reflected back to the dying mortals who allowed him to vanquish one more of the fallen.
But he couldn’t even achieve that vicarious joy. He’d long ago realized that only mortals could measure joy by perfect moments. Only a mortal could feel that infinite pleasure of recognizing the brevity of life, of knowing that a single moment, one singular day, one hour, even one second, could put paid to an entire lifetime of pain.
He’d decided that only a mortal being could fully appreciate the notion of perfection of a moment, because, from the moment of birth, mortals were faced with dying. Carpe diem…. But seizing the day only had relevance when one was tortured by thoughts of the succession of days ending.
Steven’s hand trembled slightly as he turned the knife’s blade over and again, allowing it to catch his own reflection. He’d held this absolute evidence of his betrayal of humankind a hundred times—a thousand times—before. But it had never troubled him as it did now.
Did his betrayal bother him tonight because this was the final battle, the last one? One of them would win and the other lose for all time. Was he, after all these centuries, learning fear at last? Or was he merely afraid he would never understand the depths that could mean to a mortal?
If only he were simply a man. Just a man. A mortal. If only he could know what a single perfect moment might truly mean.
If only Jillian weren’t the one.
Steven slowly crossed the small room to the heavy wooden door. The long-knife felt like a lead weight in his hand.
Jillian didn’t deserve the gift of the perfect moment, he thought. Not because she wasn’t deserving, but because it wasn’t fair. She might carry the portals in her, but that was purely a random chance, a once-in-a-hundred-years occurrence. Like the others, the ones before her, she didn’t deserve dying. Like them, she had so much good to offer, such a tremendously strong life force in her. But also like them, her creation of the portals, her death because of them, was her ultimate destiny.
What moment would she choose?
Steven started to open the door and hesitated. For some reason, he didn’t want to do this tonight. He wanted to wait, delay the inevitable.
In so many of the others, those who had carried the portals, he’d perceived an arrogance, an awareness of their destiny, a brightness honed to the same sharp edge as his blade. Their gift moments had captured times of triumph, achievement.
Jillian was different from these. She seemed too vulnerable for this, too much love lingering inside her.
He knew this. Had seen it, had tracked it for years. Jillian hadn’t yet achieved what she could hope to find, hadn’t had the time to place her mark upon the world. And she had a child. It wasn’t fair that she was the last one to give her life for this too-long, too-bitter war.
But, of all beings, Steven knew that nothing was fair. Nothing at all. Perhaps that was the definitive awareness that an immortal carried…knowing with utter certainty that all life was unfair, an unending stream of imperfections.
He should know. He’d traded his entire being, his existence, for the dubious honor of fighting the fallen, others like himself, but those who had eschewed mortal form. He, better than other men, knew how little of life could be considered fair, because fairness was born of impartiality, of balance, and nothing about mortal life was neutral or symmetrical.
It didn’t serve any purpose to hesitate. The rules of this damnable war had been laid down long ago, and were carved in every fiber of his being, in his very soul. One couldn’t argue destiny, one didn’t dodge fate. Or duty. No matter how little sense it seemed to make, or how much he might be reluctant to act.
Steven depressed the handle of the guesthouse door, and with unaccustomed violence, wrenched it open, the long-knife held fast in his other hand.
Like Jillian, he had no choice in his role in this battle. But for the first time in his many years of battle, he found himself pausing, casting about for alternatives.
He knew he had no choice. No options existed for him.
And yet he frowned heavily, his heart pounding roughly in his chest. He knew the reasons Jillian had to die; he knew the consequences of this of all battles.
How was it, then, that even knowing these things, he could feel regret? When had he, an immortal, a warrior, learned remorse?
Jillian drew a deep breath after switching the cordless telephone to the standby position. Glad that Allie wasn’t in the kitchen or the adjacent dining room, she simply stood beside the counter, staring at the receiver still cradled in her palm.
“Dark with excessive bright,” she murmured. That had been the phrase she’d used after linking eyes with her gardener…after losing herself in Steven’s gaze. His words, repeated while thinking about his sharp contrasts.
The phone call had come from Elise, who had looked up the odd quotation as soon as she got home and riffled through her battered copy of Paradise Lost. The quote was from Milton, she’d told Jillian, taken from the epic poem that wove the tale of the creation of earth and the angels’ war over its governance. It was essentially the tale of fallen angels, beings “dark with excessive bright.”
Insignificant, inconsequential words, a snippet of a poem written eons ago, yet made somehow important by Elise’s agitation over them, her recounting of Allie’s strange comment—or rather Lyle’s—that Steven wasn’t real. Whatever that might mean to Allie.
How utterly ridiculous, Jillian had thought, but, oddly, she hadn’t voiced that to Elise.
The phrase had only occurred to her because Steven had said the words a few days earlier. Then, when she was standing there looking at him this afternoon, feeling the effects of that oddly compelling gaze and thinking about her dark, frightening departure into surreal paintings of doorways, she’d thought of them again, felt a connection with them.
Why didn’t Allie want Steven in the house, even if such an event was wholly unlikely to happen? Or was she asking the wrong question? Should she alter it to “Why didn’t Lyle want Steven in the house?”
For the first time since she’d hired Steven, she wondered if she might not have made a serious mistake. And for the first time in his two-week tenure on her place, she wondered if there wasn’t more to his being there than his needing a job, than her needing a handyman.
From the first day he’d come and taken up residence in the small one-bedroom guesthouse flanking the main structure, she’d slept a little more soundly, feeling safe because the somber-eyed man was close enough to respond to an alarm raised in the dark, lonely night.
