Warpaint Page 16

  “So you caved,” said Megan, checking her cell for messages.

  “You could call it that.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to move.”

  Quiola lifted her saddle and saddle pad off Splash, set the saddle on a tree and flipped the pad upside down on top of it. Somewhere in the distance, one of the horses whinnied. Splash let go some pungent gas. Quiola wrinkled her nose.

  “Thanks, buddy. Phew. Feel better?”

  Megan grinned. “He does. So?”

  “No, I didn’t want to move. But she’s going to need me. The cancer is back.”

  “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I thought –”

  “So did I. Hoped, anyway.” She clipped Splash’s lead to the halter. “Does he need a bath?”

  “Not really but you can give him one, if you want.”

  “I’d like to.” She stepped into the tack room, got a carrot from her stash, and offered it to the horse, who snapped it up in his soft lips. “You should see this house, Meg. It’s gorgeous.”

  “That’s a bonus, then, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure.”

  Megan put a gloved hand on Quiola’s shoulder. “It’ll be all right.”

  Quiola kept her face turned to Splash, and said, “I wish. But she’s lying to me. She told me don’t worry, she’s going to beat it. But I didn’t like the tone of her voice, so I phoned her doctor. She’s dying, Meg. Where she’s at, people don’t bounce back and she’s keeping that little fact to herself.”

  “Maybe. Maybe it’s a little bit of denial, too?”

  “Oh, yeah. That too.” She stared down at her own hands. “I’m not good at this.”

  “Hey, girl, nobody is. Listen, if you need anything, you know you can ask?”

  Quiola nodded.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Go on, Meg. I know you have a lesson, and yes, I’ll be here Monday.

  “Sorry I have to run. You try to have a good weekend.”

  Quiola leaned against Splash’s wither and took off her helmet, with a deep sigh. The horse craned its neck, nibbling at her shirt, then licking the flat of her offered palm.

  “Okay,” she said. “A bath. I can do that, at least.”

  ♦

  C.C. stood before the mirror, staring at her newly re-bald self. She could scarcely believe she’d been forced through another molt, hair coming out first in little tufts, then in large, extravagant clumps until she went back to a barber and had herself shaved again to save herself from looking like a mangy dog. A wracking cough came up from the bottom of her feet and pulled her into a fetal position at the sink as she gagged over a wad of greenish-clear mucous. Panting, she washed it down the sink and closed her eyes. Every morning now for the past whole month had started like this, in the bathroom like this, hacking up part of her lungs, panting, wondering if she’d ever catch her breath again. She leaned against the cold porcelain of the sink and closed her eyes, just breathing. When she opened her eyes, she sat down heavily on the terry-clothed toilet seat, a cheek in one hand, taking as much air as she could, weariness like water washing through her. After a few minutes, she got back on her feet, cleaned her face, put on her robe, slippers and tucked a brown plastic medicine bottle into a pocket. After brushing her teeth, she opened the glass door of the shower, turned the taps and adjusted the temperature. Stepping across the large master bedroom, in which she’d installed a four-poster queen, a relic from her childhood, she opened the bedroom door.

  “Quiola?”

  The cat appeared in the hallway, mewing.

  “Good morning, Amelia. Quiola? You up?”

  “Huh?” came a sleepy voice from the next room. C.C. stepped down to it and pushed open the already open door. “Do you know what time it is?”

  Quiola squinting, mumbled, “What?”

  “Rise and shine.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Six.”

  “Middle of the night.”

  “Just because it’s dark? Come on – you’ve got to help me decide which of the new things I should show.” She drummed her thin fingers against the door lintel. “I can’t believe it’s finally happening. A solo show! Do get up – Amelia wants her breakfast.”

  “You mean C.C. wants a soft-boiled egg,” Quiola muttered into the pillows. “Just give me five more minutes.”

  “Fine. I’ll be in the shower.”

  Back in her bedroom, C.C. shut the door and locked it. Sitting down before a small desk, she took the medicine bottle out of her robe’s pocket, put it on the desktop next to a stack of envelopes, which she quickly sealed, one after another, and stamped. Then she put both the bottle and the letters in a satchel and snapped it shut.

  ♦

  Quiola pushed herself up on her elbows and looked over the wreckage of half-unpacked boxes, open suitcases, objects out of place. She’d sold most of her furniture, given to charity what she no longer wanted, paring her life down to this bedroom and C.C.’s former studio. The “shed” had become, both upstairs and down, pure studio space and since the two houses stood on adjacent lots, they’d had a gate put in the fence between them. That way, when they went to the “shed” they didn’t have to bother with cars or the road because the path lead out the back screened porch of the main Carriage House, across a gentle hill and right to the shed’s front door.

  Frost made the grass brittle stiff, and a light dust of snow clung to the ground. Bundled in several thick layers of wool and flannel, C.C. carried a thermos of coffee. Quiola opened the gate, and they made their way under a flat milky sky to the “shed”. Once inside, Quiola pulled her hat off, chucked mittens, unbuttoned and began laying the fire, while C.C. went to the kitchen for two mugs. She poured coffee without taking off a single item of clothing, and carried it from the kitchen to the fireplace, where Quiola had the blaze at a nice snap.

  “Did we get everything out of the basement?” she asked.

  “Yeah. God it’s cold in here.”

  “It’ll warm up in a few minutes. So. What have you decided already?”

  C.C. shrugged. “Nothing. I just can’t believe Kempton & Shelf want to represent me, after all these wasted years. I hope Naomi isn’t too upset by my leaving her, but Kempton & Shelf! When a gallery like that calls, you jump. Must be Lizzie’s doing.”

  Quiola fanned her palms near the growing fire. “I expect you’re right – but it isn’t as if you dropped into a well. You’ve been showing.”

  “Mostly not and you know it. I’ve had the six in Naomi’s gallery shipped over to Chelsea already. Should I build the show around them?”

  “It’s your show.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know but –” a cough stopped her and held her, made her find a tissue in her pocket to spit. “Disgusting,” she muttered, panting a little.

  “You okay?”

  She put her palm to her forehead, as if taking a temperature. “I wish it would just stop but it won’t, will it? No. Let’s go back to the house – I can’t do this now, I can’t make any decisions right now.”

  “Go back? When I just got the fire started? Oh, no. Wait a minute. Tell me you didn’t. You didn’t, did you?”

  “Oh, damn it, of course I did. You know I did.”

  Quiola stood up. “Jesus, C.C. when I said not to.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “But I don’t care. I didn’t want you to do anything.”

  “It’s nothing big. Some champagne. No cake and no candles, okay? No candles. I bought a duck. You like duck.”

  “But you can’t taste it, can you? Why torture yourself?”

  “It’s not torture. I think my taste buds are coming back.” She smacked her lips. “Duck sounded good to me.”

  “You are incorrigible. But it’s not even lunch yet. Let’s first make some choices about your work, before you run amok in the kitchen.”

  “All right – I think I should use the Paris group – you know, the ones I fi
nished in the late eighties? At the heart of the exhibit, and then move to more recent stuff. ”

  “Nothing before the 80s? Nothing from –”

  “No. I’m done with that.”

  “But for context –”

  “No. This is about the artist am I now, not the student I was.”

  “Fine,” said Quiola, moving to the other side of the room. “Let’s have a look through everything, shall we? Do you think you might find the energy to do something in the next month, to add in?”

  ♦

  Lizzie bent her head low over the paper, trying to steady her hand. The perfect and perfectly dead bee sat beside the paper on the big wooden table, its black lace of wings stiff and flat, its hairy legs curled underneath the bright yellow and black furry body, an ordinary drone that had simply died. Trying to capture the bee precisely, she found herself annoyed at how her hand sometimes did not do what she wanted, and how sometimes when she started a sketch the proportions were wrong – the wings too small or the polished bug-eyed head too big. At the sound of the back door opening, she looked up, checked on the baby in his cradle by her feet, and then retrieved her pencil, which had rolled to the edge of the table.

  “How’re you coming along?” said Parker, stepping in from the kitchen. His face and ears were ruddy with cold. She shrugged as he took her sketches off the table.

  “Hmm,” he said, looking over the several attempts. “The wings on this one –”

  “I know. I’m gonna try again.”

  “Good girl.” Parker put the drawings back down. Crouching to the cradle, he checked on the baby, pulling the wooly blanket up to the boy’s chin. Standing, he gazed out the window.

  “Snow tonight,” he said. “I can taste it. Where’s you mother? Lizzie?”

  He turned around at her silence and found her as if in a trance, her light olive eyes mossy, almost blurred, her dark cheeks blanched, and her lips had thinned as if in a terrible wind.

  “What’s wrong? Lizzie? Are you sick?”

  She dropped her pencil, swung her legs around the bench and knelt on the floor near her brother’s cradle. She touched his little hand lightly, then glanced back at her father in a panic. “It can’t snow,” she said. “Daddy, tell me it won’t snow tonight!”

  “What the devil’s gotten into you? Child? Come here.”

  She got up off her knees and went to stand between his blue-jeaned legs, looking down at his socks.

  “Look at me when I speak to you, girl.”

  She did as she was told.

  He examined her face, but now her cheeks were rosy, her lips as plump as ever they got, her olive-green eyes, green. “I want you to get into your coat and boots,” he said, “and help me and your brothers round up the horses. Better get them settled before the snow. Your sister can watch Gus. Not that he needs watching when he’s dead to the world like that.”

  “Daddy, he needs watching. Please, let me stay with him?”

  “What the hell is wrong with you? You’re too old to whine at me like that. Run along, get your things and I’ll fetch your sister. Gus’ll be fine. Look at him. Sound asleep, big and fat and all full of milk.”

  “No he won’t. He won’t be fine.”

  “What the devil? Are you trying to weasel out of work? You ought be ashamed.”

  She stamped her foot. “Am not, Daddy. I have to watch the baby. Somebody might steal him.”

  Parker’s big farmer’s hand swung out and whacked the girl across the face. She staggered a little, and tears jumped as the side of her face burned.

  “That’s for foolishness,” he said, sternly. “Now do as you are told.”

  “What foolishness?” said Anita as she came around the hallway corner into the dining room, her hands full of folded kitchen towels. “Dad?”

  “Your sister is acting crazy. I can’t make out what’s wrong with her. Lizzie, ten minutes. In the near barn.” He walked into the kitchen, shrugged himself back into his working coat and boots and stepped outside.

  “What was that all about?” asked Anita.

  “Gus needs watching.”

  “’Course he does, he’s just a baby.”

  “I need to watch him. It’s gonna snow.”

  Anita put the towels down on the table. “So that’s it. Snow tonight? So early –”

  “It can’t snow. It just can’t.”

  “Lizzie, what do you mean? Father said you were being foolish. Were you?”

  Liz clasped her hands. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Something scary will happen, in the snow that’s coming tonight. And Park, too. He’s going to go this winter. Just like Gus.”

  Anita took her sister’s hands gently in her own. “Elizabeth,” she said. “You are talking nonsense. Do you hear me?”

  But Lizzie wasn’t listening, and her still, frightened face chilled Anita who squatted down and pulled her sister’s nose a little. “Pumpkin, you’ve just been having bad dreams. Look at Gus. He’s fine! And Park is going away – he’s going over there, like the song says.”

  “He is? I thought Daddy said no.“

  “He did, but your brother is a man, now and as stubborn as Daddy. Before winter’s over, he’ll be gone to fight the Krauts.”

  Lizzie blinked. “You’ll watch Gus?”

  “Of course I will. Mama will be done with folding the laundry soon, and we’ll both be with him. Nothing bad can happen, now, can it?”

  “I guess not.”

  Anita stood up. “You’d better go help Father.”

  ♦

  She hadn’t seen Ted since they’d settled their mother’s estate. But the Return of the Crab made her seek him out, one more time. Not for solace or comfort: she’d been through that portal of hope one time too many. No. She simply needed to say goodbye. She told herself that his response wouldn’t matter.

  It took her three days to get him, not just his assistant, on the phone and even then he wasn’t responsive to her suggestion that they meet, so she ended up ambushing him, by taking a train into the City and showing up at his office at precisely the moment his assistant said he’d be in. He agreed to meet her that evening before dinner for a quick drink at a place their parents used to take them to lunch, an on-again, off-again family reunion, before Tom Davis’s heart, and Nancy’s memory, began to fail. It was a rather large basement space called The Bistro. She was surprised to find it still in business after thirty-odd years, then surprised again when she came through the revolving doors to a techno-retro ’50’s-modernist fantasy, all white and chrome and clean, minimalist design, lime and light blue. She remembered the place as darkly lit with fake-Tiffany pendants hung over mahogany tables hugged by red-leather banquettes with brass fittings.

  Ted was already at the glass and chrome bar, nursing a two-olive vodka martini. She was shocked at how old he looked, but seeing her surprise reflected on his aging face, she laughed. “Cancer, Ted. You know what it can do.”

  “Charlie,” he murmured, standing briefly to brush a kiss past her cheek.

  She hopped on to the barstool next to him. Well, she tried to hop. She made a pass at hopping, and landed well enough to feel proud of her attempt. “How’re the kids?”

  “I have three of them,” he said, morosely. “Which one do you mean?”

  “All of ’em. How are they?”

  He closed his eyes and swirled the olive-laden twizzle stick around the martini glass. “Anna’s gone to graduate school in California; Jason gave up on drag-racing and is studying law; Theresa’s about to enter high school. They’re fine.”

  “And their mothers?”

  “Getting alimony on time.”

  “And the wife?”

  “Her name, Charlie, is Belinda. She’s fine.”

  “Good. Now that we’ve gotten all the niceties out of the way, I’d like to order tonic water and lime.”

  He waved the bartender over, asking, “What happened to a G & T?”

  “Go
ne with the Crab,” she said, as the young woman in black and white headed their way. “You want another round?”

  “Sure.”

  After the order was put in, he turned his chair around a bit and said, “I thought you were through with chemo?”

  “How would you know?”

  “Belinda. She knew.”

  “Okay, then, how did she know?”

  He shrugged. “But aren’t you, Charlie? Done?”

  “Done. Yeah. That’s the word.”

  “So why did you suddenly get the urge to lay eyes on me? Can’t be Mom, we were just up to the cemetery last week. You know the last time I saw her alive she thought, when she could think of anything at all, that we were Al and Pam Kroenen, of all people. I had to tell Belinda those two have been dead longer than I can remember.”

  “She wasn’t well.”

  “Of course she wasn’t well. I’m just glad she never had to hit the end-stages of Alzheimer’s and forget how to swallow. Let’s talk about something else, shall we?”

  C.C. stared at him. How was she going to tell this man anything? Who was he, this Ted Davis, a physician with no compassion, her brother? She hadn’t a clue. An image of their father diapering Tucker clicked suddenly, without warning, into view like an old-fashioned film slide. She clicked it off and took a long, cold sip of tonic.

  “So?” said Ted. “Just what did you want to talk to me about? Remember I’ve got a dinner date in twenty minutes, uptown.”

  “Would you look at that,” she said, wonderingly. “A whole basket of ’em.”

  “Yeah, hard-boiled eggs. Protein, to keep the drinking crowd afloat.”

  She reached up and took one, cracking the shell on the bar. “Salt and pepper? Thanks.” She took a bite. “Honestly, Ted, I just came to say goodbye.”

  “Oh, what are you moving overseas again? Back to Paris?”

  “No. But I have – plans. Nothing’s settled you understand, but I wanted to be sure to tell you in person.”

  “Really? I don’t see why. You haven’t bothered to call since Dad died.” He sounded bitter. She could’ve shot back my phone hasn’t been ringing off the hook either! and equaled his bitterness, but what she said was, “Well, here I am, telling you,” and then, having finished her egg, she pushed herself off the stool, downed her tonic in one long swig, found a twenty and, laying it on the bar, said quietly, “Goodbye, Ted. Hope you have a nice uptown dinner. I’ve got a train to catch.”