A Broken Kind of Beautiful (16 page)

Stefan grabbed Ivy’s waist with one hand and set his other against the archway of the door. Davis rolled his eyes. He zoomed in closer to Ivy and took three steps to the right. If he only got Stefan’s profile, then the look on his face wouldn’t matter. Nobody would notice him. All eyes would be on Ivy in that dress.

Focusing all his energy, he shot the pictures and did exactly what he told Stefan to do. He looked past Ivy’s angles. Past her lines. He looked past her smile and her forced laughter. He found something real behind the lens
of his camera and captured pieces of a woman nobody else saw. Veracity behind perfection. Vulnerability hiding behind beauty. And beyond all that, deeper still, was a brokenness that pierced his heart and made him ache for hers.

Ivy ignored the thrumming of her heartbeat and the flush in her cheeks. She lavished her smiles and her laughter on the man who held her in his arms. Stefano. A man she understood. A man who didn’t slice her open and expose her insides the way Davis did behind that camera.

She’d done a million shots in her lifetime, and never once had she felt so exposed. Or hot. They’d moved to the outdoor shots, and even as late afternoon melted into early evening, the day’s heat refused to wane.

The camera clicked. Davis moved around them, telling Stefan to take her hand, Ivy to turn away and smile. She focused on Stefano’s hand holding her palm—the warmth and smoothness of it. She focused on the flowers bursting from the ground—like orange and yellow fireworks exploding against a green sky. She focused on the silkiness of the dress against her skin. A group of tourists talking as they stopped to watch the action. She focused on putting everything into the pictures.

Stefano pulled her arm toward him. She landed softly against his body, her hand on his chest. He tipped up her chin, his eyes glowing with desire. Here was a man who made sense.

He bent toward her ear. “You are ravishing.”

She cocked her head as if Stefan had told her an amusing secret.

A few more clicks and finally, “That’s a wrap.”

Ivy pushed off Stefan’s chest, eager to get away. Not only because of the building pressure in her bladder, but because she needed a moment to gather her wits. She twisted her hand out of Stefan’s grasp and made a beeline toward the mansion.

Davis caught her elbow as she passed. “Hey. Are you okay?”

His touch against her skin did nothing to calm her. “Yeah, fine. Just need to use the rest room.”

He let go.

Ivy focused on putting one foot in front of the other, searching for an explanation for her flustered emotions. Why this feeling of embarrassed nakedness when she’d lost all traces of modesty ten years ago? She took off her shoes one at a time without stopping and clawed at the pearls strangling her neck. She needed to breathe. She opened the front door of the Primrose mansion and pried herself loose from the shrug.

Her feet padded to the staircase. She gripped the banister, then crouched over her bag and swallowed the cool air. Was she having a panic attack? She’d never had one before, so she didn’t really know what they felt like. Her phone vibrated against wood. She rummaged inside her purse and found a familiar New York number lighting her screen. The air whooshed out of her in a puff of relief. Bruce said he wouldn’t call unless he got her a job. She hit Talk. “Bruce. It’s you.”

She cleared away the hysteria edging her voice, trying not to sound so shocked that her agent had called. “We finished the photo shoot. Do you have a job for me?” New York City’s fashion week loomed around the corner. Maybe several designers wanted her to walk for them. She’d proven her market acceptance over the years. The public liked her. Maybe not as much as Alessandra Ambrosio or Gisele Bundchen, but enough.

“I’m not sure how to tell you this.” He sounded far away or scrunched, like he’d squished his words through a pinhole.

Ivy gripped the phone with both hands and pressed it to the side of her face. “Bruce, I think we have a bad connection. Can you hear me?”

Silence.

“Bruce? Are you there?”

“It’s Annalise, Ivy.”

“Annalise? Bruce, what are you talking about?”

“She’s dead.”

15

Waves crashed against rock, spitting salt and sea into the air. The night enveloped Ivy like the giant towels Mom used to wrap around her body when she came shivering out of the pool as a little girl. Warm and soft. No streetlights shone from the strip. The only light came from the moon—a crescent sliver pinned against blackness—and a smattering of faraway stars—pinpricks of light that defused the dark like shimmering dust. These glimmers of white trickled from the sky and turned the surf into choppy bone.

Ivy didn’t remember how she got there. She only knew she had her toes buried in the sand and her sandals dangling from her wrists and her arms wrapped around her shins. Compared to the immensity of the ocean melting toward the expansive horizon, she felt like a grain of sand. Or like one of the million glowing dust particles overhead.

Annalise is dead … James is dead … Annalise is dead … James is dead …

You, Ivy Clark, are dead
.

She hugged her knees tighter and expelled a rattling breath. How could Annalise be dead when she’d talked with her on the phone two days ago? How was James dead when for her entire life he’d always been there—not in the emotional, fatherly sense, but in the physical sense—several states down in South Carolina? One minute here, the next minute gone. Snuffed out like a candle flame. Death was a permanent, mysterious, unknowable beast to anyone on this side of it. And those who did know it had no way of letting those who didn’t in on the secret.

What did it feel like to be dead?

Ivy released her shins and dug her fingers into the sand. Grainy and damp, it pushed underneath her nails. Was death much different than this?
She ground her knuckles into the earth. Sand scoured her skin. Marilyn used to say an afternoon at the beach beat a professional pedicure any day. Did the same apply to a person’s hands? If she rubbed them hard enough into the ground, would they come up clean and new?

She closed her eyes and lay back against the shore. The waves crashed, then whispered.
Crash. Whisper. Crash. Whisper
. She breathed its rhythm, letting the push-pull of the ocean’s heart caress her own. And when she opened her eyes, Davis Knight stood over her. Darkness shadowed his face, but the moon created the familiar silhouette Ivy would recognize anywhere.

“We’ve been looking all over for you.” His words came out breathless, like he’d finished a fast sprint.

She sat up. “We?”

“Marilyn and Sara. Even Stefan. You disappeared.”

“Can a person disappear?” In the dark. Or when she talked to Sara. When a person couldn’t see her, did she still exist? It was a question without an answer, like the one about the tree falling in the forest, only hers wasn’t about sound. It was about her. When nobody can see Ivy Clark, does Ivy Clark disappear? She fisted the sand and let the grains spill through her fingers.

Davis sat and draped his arms over his knees and peered not at the ocean but at her, his face the color of dark denim stitched with pale moon. “Ivy, what happened? Why did you leave like that?”

“Weren’t we finished?”

“With the pictures, yes. But you hadn’t signed the model release form and …” His voice slipped into the waves. He turned to the sea, the roaring, crashing, enormous sea. “I didn’t get to thank you.”

“For what?”

“For the photo shoot. You were magical.”

Her—magical? She couldn’t muster a laugh, though his words deserved it. That photo shoot had made her feel anything but magical. “Do you think, when we die, we turn into sand? Or maybe stars?”

He cocked his head.

“Like maybe”—Ivy lifted another handful of sand and let it spill to the ground—“James is in this sand.” She crushed the remaining grains in her fist, then cast her gaze to the white-freckled black abyss overhead. “Or maybe he’s up there, somewhere, in the stars.”

Davis dropped his knees and sat crisscross applesauce.

Ivy smiled. Mom forbade the term “Indian-style.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, anyway, Ivy?”
she’d asked one evening while they painted each other’s toenails—before Ivy’s summer visits to Greenbrier, when life was still good.
“ ‘Indian style’? I don’t think people in India sit that way any more than people in America.”

“Mom, not India Indians. But Indians. You know.”
Ivy had started play-acting like one of the Lost Boys from Peter Pan, ending with her hand in the air and a deep-voiced
“How.”

Mom had clutched Ivy’s shoulders and gave her a grown-up look. Like she wasn’t six but twenty-six.
“What, dear daughter, are they teaching you in school?”

Ivy exhaled the memory.

“I don’t think your father’s in the sand or in the stars.”

“Where is he, then?” She didn’t have to ask. Davis hung a cross from his mirror. He thought he was in heaven. Or hell. Or maybe purgatory. Didn’t Christians believe in purgatory? Or was that Catholics? Who knew. Maybe the two were one and the same.

“Why are you out here thinking about the dead, Ivy?”

“Because nighttime makes me think of death.” She looked over her shoulder at the strip. “Doesn’t Greenbrier believe in streetlights?”

“Sea turtles.”

“What?”

“It’s nesting season. Female turtles come to the shore and lay eggs along the beach. Then, about three months later, the eggs hatch and the baby turtles make their way to the sea. The lights confuse them. Sometimes,
instead of crawling to the sea, they’ll crawl toward the lights and onto the road. So the mayor has a lights-out rule at nine o’clock. For the sea turtles.”

Something about the story reverberated in a deep place, like the echo of a gong in the depths of her soul. She was a sea turtle. Only nobody had bothered to turn off the lights, not for her.

“Sometimes I think we’re like sea turtles.”

Ivy stared at Davis the mind reader. “How so?”

“It’s like this world is one big distraction. A bunch of lights. So many of us are crawling in the wrong direction. Away from the sea. Sometimes we have to turn all that off to get ourselves headed the right way again.”

“Is that why you left? New York City was your streetlight?”

“You could say that.”

Her shoulders hunched. She felt old and weary. Like if somebody flipped her inside out, the beautiful part of her would disappear and the real her—the her on the inside—would be nothing but wrinkles and age spots and saggy skin.

She took a deep breath. Closed her fist around a handful of sand. “Annalise is dead.” The cold words clashed against the humidity.

“Who’s Annalise?”

“A friend.” A mentor. A combination of the two. “When I first got to New York, I wasn’t even fourteen. Bruce introduced us. We lived in the same apartment for a while with four other models, which is a bad idea, in case you’re wondering. She was two years older than me, but it felt like a lifetime.” Ivy combed the sand and piled it beneath her knees. “She took me under her wing. Showed me the ropes. Taught me what to say, how to act, who to trust.” Ivy wouldn’t have lasted two weeks without Annalise.

“Is that why you left tonight? You found out she died?”

“Bruce called. That right there should have tipped me off that something was wrong.” Her muscles cramped with sudden and unexpected anger. Annalise sniffed coke and popped diet pills and guzzled Red Bull.
Ivy knew. Bruce knew. But neither said a word. Why should they? It was a normal part of the industry. “She collapsed at some nightclub. By the time the paramedics arrived, she was already dead. Supposedly, the culprit was heart failure.”

“Heart failure for someone so young?”

“Cocaine pays no attention to age.”

Davis let out a long breath. “Do you … I mean …”

“Don’t worry, Davis. My drug of choice has always been men.”

Her words must have stunned him into silence, because he didn’t respond.

A grim feeling of satisfaction stole through her body. He would be disgusted now. He would judge her, maybe even hate her. He definitely wouldn’t stick around and try to get to know her. “Hey, at least men are safe though, right? Oh, and free. Don’t forget that. At least I stay in control. Annalise should have stuck to men.”