Distant Shores (27 page)

“Difficult?” Elizabeth said. “Difficult is making hollandaise sauce. This is a near-death experience.”

Marge laughed, then immediately sobered. “I'm sorry. I know it's not funny.”

Elizabeth actually smiled. “I'm glad my humiliation is amusing. Maybe I'll get hit by a bus later and you can really crack up.”

“You'll be okay, Elizabeth. Don't you worry.”

The bell above the door jangled.

“Oh, good,” Elizabeth muttered. She forced a fake smile.

Kim walked into the gallery. She looked pale and skittery; her gaze darted nervously from side to side. She was dressed in black lambskin pants and a black cashmere turtleneck sweater. Surprisingly, a scarlet pashmina shawl hung draped over one shoulder.

“Welcome to Eclectica,” Marge said.

Kim waved a hand dismissively and headed for the back wall. In front of Elizabeth's work, she stopped.

“The artist is right there,” Marge said loudly.

Elizabeth came out from the corner. “Hello, Kim. You missed the group.”

Kim snapped open her purse, digging through it. “And I so wanted to spend more time with them.” She cocked her head toward the wall. “Are these your paintings?”

“Yes.”

Kim looked at them. For a split second, her gaze softened, and Elizabeth saw the longing in her eyes.

She knew how it felt, that longing. For years, she'd been locked inside herself, unable to imagine a way out. That was where Kim stood right now.

“I'll take that one,” Kim said, pointing to the seascape.

“Sorry, the store has a policy against mercy purchases.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, as you and I knew would happen, I bombed today. The only thing less in demand than my paintings was the tofu-flavored ice cream. And Marge's hors d'oeuvres.”

“But what's a mercy purchase?”

“That's when a friend feels sorry for the artist and buys a piece. No thanks. But I really appreciate the gesture.”

Kim looked at her. “You think we're friends?”

“Of course we are,” Elizabeth said quietly.

Kim smiled suddenly, and the change in her demeanor was remarkable. “Take that painting down and wrap it up. And don't you dare call it a mercy purchase. I want to hang it in my living room. Every time I look at it, I'll remember that it's possible to start over. You'd sell that hope to a friend, wouldn't you?”

It was a lovely gesture; there was no way for Kim to know that it only made her feel worse.

Elizabeth took the painting down from the wall and carried it to the register.

To Marge, she said, “The price on this was wrong. It's—”

“No way,” Kim said, barreling up beside her. “Shitheel left me loaded. Let me do this my way.”

Elizabeth longed to feel good about this sale, but she couldn't quite make it over the hump. The painting hadn't sold because of its beauty. “Okay.”

When Kim was finished paying for the piece, she turned to Elizabeth. “Will you be at the meeting this week?”

“Of course.”

“Maybe we could meet for dinner afterward? If you have plans, I completely understand. I know it's short notice.”

“I'd love to.”

Kim actually smiled again. “Great. I'll see you there.”

Elizabeth hung around for a while longer, watching tourists mill through the store. Finally, she couldn't take it anymore.

The last thing she saw as she left the gallery was the wall filled with her work.

Jack stood at his office window, staring out at the beautiful spring day.

This ought to be the best day of his life. Twenty-four hours ago, they'd offered him the best job in broadcasting:
NFL Sunday.

He'd been dreaming of a moment like this for years, maybe his whole life, and yet, now that it was here, he felt curiously numb.

The door to his office cracked open. “There you are,” Warren said. “I just heard the news about your photo shoot.
People
magazine, huh? Pretty hot stuff.”

“I'll probably be the oldest guy in the issue.”

Warren frowned. “That's it. There's something wrong with you. Let's go.”

Jack grabbed his coat and followed Warren out of the building. By tacit consent, they went straight to the pub on the corner and headed for the back booth.

“Double bourbon on the rocks,” Warren said when the barmaid appeared.

She looked at Jack.

“Club soda with lime.”

“Now I
know
something's wrong,” Warren said. “A club soda?”

“I've been drinking pretty hard lately. It blurs the lines.”

“Isn't that the point?”

“I used to think so. Now I'm not so sure.” He paused, then said, “Fox just offered me
NFL Sunday
.”

Warren sat back. “Jesus, Jack. Most guys would give their left nut for that job, and here you are, slurping club soda and practically crying. What gives?”

Jack glanced to the left. It wasn't his way to talk about shit like this, but these silences—and the new loneliness—were killing him. And if there was anyone who ought to understand marital problems, it was the thrice-married Warren. “We told the kids about the separation.”

“Ouch. That's the reason I've never had kids. How'd they take it?”

“Badly. They cried and screamed and stomped around. Then they went back to school. I've been getting the silent treatment ever since.”

“It'll pass. They'll come to accept their new family after a while. Trust me.”

There it was, the source of his sleepless nights.
New family.
“What if I can't accept it, either?”

“What do you mean?”

“I miss Birdie.” There, he'd said it.

“You made a bad trade, Jacko, but you're not the first guy to do it. You thought the heat of all this was real, but at the end of the day, all that matters is finding a woman who loves the real you.” He looked at Jack. “One who'll be there for you in the bad times. And that, my friend, was Birdie. You never should have let her go.”

“She left me.”

“Birdie left you?”

“The marriage went to shit slowly. I'm not even sure when. I think it started with me, though, when I lost football. All I could think about was what I'd lost. I'd gotten married so young; I never got to be the young hot shot of my imaginations. You know, the superstar who slept with a different woman every night. I wanted that.” He sighed. “For years, I dreamed about going back in time and making a different choice. I guess, after a while, all that dreaming of somewhere else became a goal; it ruined our marriage. Maybe a part of me even blamed her for tying me down. I don't know. All I know is that I was desperate to be
someone
again. Then this job came along, and I got it all back.” He smiled bitterly. “For the first time in my whole adult life, I'm free, rich, and famous. I can do anything I want. Hell, I'm sleeping with a beautiful woman half my age, and she doesn't care that I don't love her. It's what I always dreamed of. And I hate it. I miss Birdie all the time.”

“Have you told her?”

He looked up. “I'm afraid it's too late.”

Warren took a sip of his drink. “I've never met a woman who'd stay with me for twenty-four years. Who'd get me off dope and forgive my screwups. If I found a woman like that, Jacko, I'd never let her go.”

“What if she tells me it's too late?” He paused. “What if she doesn't love me anymore?”

Warren looked at him. “Then you aren't gonna have a movie ending, my friend. Sometimes, a bad choice can haunt you forever.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

The drive home from the gallery seemed to take forever.

Elizabeth had failed.

The realization was like a canker sore; no matter how much it hurt, you couldn't leave it alone.

She felt Anita looking at her from the passenger seat, staring worriedly every now and then, but fortunately, her stepmother kept her opinions to herself. This was not the time for one of those pumped-up pep talks. Elizabeth had listened to plenty of those in the last few months, from Meghann and Anita and Daniel. She'd listened to her friends and let herself believe.

And here she was. Forty-six years old and a failure.

She turned onto Stormwatch Lane and drove home. When she'd parked the car, she turned to Anita and forced a tired smile. “Thanks for everything today. It meant a lot to me that you were there.”

Anita looked stricken. “Birdie, I don't know what to say.”

“Don't say anything. Please. It was bad enough to live through. I can't talk about it, too.”

Anita nodded. If there was one thing bred into southern women, it was the ability to politely ignore unpleasantness. “I'll go cook us a nice dinner.”

“I'm not very hungry. I think I'll go soak in a hot bath.” She almost sat there a second too long, looking at her stepmother. She felt the first hairline crack in her composure. If she wasn't careful, she'd break like old porcelain, and that wouldn't help anyone. She reached for the car door and shoved it open, then hurried toward her beloved house.

It welcomed her with soft lights and sweet scents and safety.

She drew in a deep breath and slowly released it. When she heard Anita come up behind her, she bolted upstairs and shut the bedroom door behind her. She went to the window, trying to draw comfort from her view, but night came early this time of year, and there was nothing but darkness beyond the glass.

She ran a bath and poured a capful of almond-scented oil into the water. She let the tub fill past the point of caution, knowing water would spill over when she climbed in. So, she would clean up the mess. That, at least, was something she did well.

She undressed and lowered herself into the nearly scalding water. Sure enough, it splashed onto the tile floor. Heat enveloped her; steamed up toward her face. The sweet, cloying scent of almonds filled the tiny bathroom.

She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Images of the endless day tumbled through her mind. Customers buying sculptures and lithographs and photographs and other artists' paintings … walking past her work.

She wished she could cry, but it wasn't that kind of hurt. She felt numb. A prisoner who'd dared to believe in parole and then been sent back to her cell, unforgiven.

The worst of it was she'd
believed
in herself. She'd known better, and yet still she'd stumbled into that quicksand and been caught. She'd believed, she'd dared, she'd dreamed.

And she'd failed.

Her work wasn't good enough. That much was clear.

What now? She'd walked away from every good thing she'd ever built so that she could find herself.

Well, she'd found a woman whose greatest gift lay in helping others, in loving people and supporting their dreams. As she sat in the hot water, she asked herself why that hadn't been enough.

She was no artist. She must have known that twenty-five years ago. That was why she hadn't pushed harder to attend grad school. She'd known the truth, or suspected it. Turning away from that road had saved her from this terrible moment.

She stayed in the bath until the water turned cold and her skin pruned. Then, reluctantly, she climbed out. Wrapped in a towel, she flopped on her bed.

She saw the phone, and she thought,
Call Jack.

She wasn't sure why exactly, except that he had always been her safe place. She scooted toward the nightstand, picked up the phone, and punched in his number. Bits of conversation flitted through her mind as it rang. She searched for the perfect first sentence.

I love you.
Nice and direct.

I miss you.
Certainly true.

I need you.
The God's honest truth.

The answering machine clicked on, told her that Jack and Birdie weren't home right now.

Jack and Birdie.

He hadn't changed the message. That gave her courage. “Hey, Jack,” she said, rolling onto her back, staring up at the peaked ceiling. “I thought maybe it was time we talked about the future.” She paused, trying to think of what to say next, but nothing came to her. She was afraid that if she spoke, she'd start to cry.

She hung up, then dialed her daughters' number.

Another answering machine. She left a forcibly upbeat message, sneaked in a short apology and a thank-you for the flowers, then hung up.

She lay there a long time, staring up at her ceiling, watching a spider spin a web in the rafters. He was always there, that same little black spider, returning to his spot no matter how many times she dusted his web away. There was a life lesson in that.

There was a knock at her door. “Birdie, honey?”

Elizabeth closed her eyes. She really wanted to be left alone in her misery a while longer. “I'm okay, Anita.”

“Dinner's ready.”

“I can't eat. Sorry. But thanks for cooking. I'll see you in the morning.” She heard footsteps walking away … then coming back.

The door opened. Anita stood there, clutching a flat black metal strongbox. “Come on, Birdie. It's time for you to see this.” She patted the box in her arms. “This belonged to your mama. If you want to see what's inside, you'd better come downstairs.” Then she turned and walked away.

Elizabeth didn't want to follow, but Anita had dangled the biggest carrot of all: Mama.

With a sigh, she rolled out of bed and got dressed.

Downstairs, she sat down on the sofa beside Anita. That metal box was on the coffee table now, waiting.

Elizabeth stared at it. For a blessed few seconds, she forgot about the debacle at the gallery.

She imagined a letter to a daughter, or better yet, a journal of precious memories. Photographs. Mementos. She turned to Anita.

Anita looked pale in the lamplight. Fragile. She'd chewed on her lower lip until it was raw. “I brought this with me. I knew I'd know if the time was right to open it.” She tried to smile, but the transparent falsity of it only underscored her nervousness. “Your daddy loved you. More than anything on this earth.”

“I know that.”

“He was a man of his time and place, and he believed that men protected their women from anything … unpleasant.”

“Come on. I know that.”

Anita reached for the box, flipped the latch, and opened it. Elizabeth noticed that her stepmother's fingers were shaking as she handed the box over.

Elizabeth took it onto her lap.

Inside, a rubber-banded pile of scallop-edged photographs were piled in one corner. A long cardboard tube lay diagonally from end to end.

She withdrew the pictures first. There, on the top of the heap, was Mama. She was sitting on the porch swing, wearing pink pants and a flowery chiffon blouse with small cap sleeves and a Peter Pan collar. Her legs were tucked up underneath her; only a bit of bare feet stuck out. Her toenails were polished.

She was laughing.

Not smiling, not posing. Laughing.

A cigarette dangled from her right hand and a half-finished cocktail was at her feet. She looked marvelously, wonderfully alive.

For the first time, she saw her mother as a real woman. Someone who laughed, who smoked cigarettes and wore pedal pushers, who polished her toenails.

“She's beautiful,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes.”

The next picture was of a different woman. Someone with intense, flashing eyes and curly black hair that hung in a tangled curtain to her heavy hips. She looked like an Italian peasant, earthy and hot-tempered. In every way the opposite of her delicate, aristocratic mother.

All of the remaining pictures were of the other woman. At the beach … on a white-painted porch … at a county fair … flying kites.

Elizabeth frowned in disappointment.

At last, she picked up the cardboard tube, uncapped it. Inside was a rolled-up canvas. She eased it out, spread it on the coffee table.

It was a painting of the dark-haired woman, done in vibrant acrylics. She was reclined on a mound of red pillows, with her black hair artlessly arranged around her. Except for a pale pink shawl that was draped across her ample hips, she was nude. Her breasts were full, with half-dollar-sized brown nipples.

The detail was exquisite. It reminded her of an early Modigliani. Elizabeth could almost feel the angora of the shawl and the velvet softness of the woman's tanned skin. There were hundreds of pink and yellow rose petals scattered across the pillows and on the woman's flesh.

There was a sadness to the work. The woman's black eyes were filled with a desperate longing. As if, perhaps, she were looking at a lover who'd already begun to leave her.

Elizabeth glanced at the signature.
Marguerite Rhodes.

Time seemed to slow down. She could hear the thudding of her own heart. “Mama was an artist?”

“Yes.”

There it was, after all these years, the link between them, the thing that had been handed down from mother to daughter, a talent carried in the blood. Elizabeth looked up. “Why didn't Daddy tell me?”

“That's the only painting there is.”

“So? He knew I dreamed of being a painter. He had to know what this would have meant to me.”

Anita looked terribly sad. For a frightening moment, Elizabeth thought her stepmother was going to draw back now, too afraid of what she'd revealed to go forward. “Remember when I told you that your mother had run away from Edward? That was in 1955.”

Elizabeth noticed the date on the painting:
1955.

Anita sighed heavily. “The world was different then. Not as open and accepting of things … as we are now.”

Elizabeth looked at the painting again; this time she saw the passion in it. The falling-snow softness of the brushstrokes, the poignant sorrow in the woman's eyes. And she understood the secret that had been withheld from her all these years. “My mother fell in love with this woman,” she said softly.

“Her name was Missy Esteban. And, yes, she was your mother's lover.”

Elizabeth leaned back in her seat. Dozens of vague childhood memories made sense suddenly. The closed door to Mama's bedroom; the sound of crying coming from within. “That's why she was depressed,” Elizabeth said aloud. Her whole life seemed to settle into place, a puzzle with all the pieces finally where they belonged. It felt as if it should matter more, as if she should feel more betrayed. But she'd never really known her mama; that much was painfully clear. “That's why Daddy wouldn't talk about her. He was ashamed.”

“You know your daddy; he thought he was better than other men. The whole danged town treated him as if he owned the patent on fresh air. To have his wife run away was one thing. He could handle that because she came back. He could laugh with his friends about how spirited his little filly was, but when he found out that she'd fallen in love out there—and with a woman—well, there was no handlin' that for Edward. So he shut it up tighter than a drum. Pretended it had never happened.”

“How did you find out?”

“Twenty-year-old bourbon. Your daddy got liquored up one night and spilled the beans.”

Elizabeth sat back. It all made sense. The silences, the lack of photographs, the missing family stories. Mama had inflicted a terrible blow to Daddy's self-esteem. No wonder he clung to Anita so tightly.

“But why don't I have any memories of her? She didn't die until I was six.”

“She loved you, Birdie, somethin' fierce, but after she got back, she was broken inside. Lost. She couldn't care for you. She would hold you close one day and then lock herself in her bedroom and ignore you for weeks at a time. It almost killed your daddy. 'Course, she was on serious medications. Back then, a woman who did a thing like that was crazy. Everyone would have thought so—especially her. And she was from a good, church-going family, don't forget. Good girls just didn't have sex with other women.”

That sparked a sudden memory. On the day after her fourth birthday, Elizabeth had gotten up early and run into Mama's bedroom. She found her mama sitting on the floor, with her knees drawn up to her chest, crying. Elizabeth couldn't remember exactly what she'd said, but she remembered Mama's answer.
Don't you be like me, little Birdie. Don't you be afraid.

Anita reached out, touched Elizabeth's hand. “Your mama found what she wanted in life, but she turned away from it. She let family pressures be more important than what was in her heart. She walked away from her love and her talent. And it killed her. I know you, Birdie. You were up in your bedroom, thinking of quitting, telling yourself you were a fool to think you had talent.”

Elizabeth felt transparent suddenly. “When did you get to know me so well?”

“Don't you dare give up on Elizabeth Shore. You've come too far and worked too hard to go back to your old life because you're scared. If you give up, you'll be making the same mistake as your mama. It might not kill you, but it'll break you, Birdie.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes. She wanted to deny it, but there was no point. She knew.

What had she said to Kim that day?
For years, I failed by omission.
It was true, and each untried thing had left her emptier.

Now, at least, she'd tried and failed. But she'd tried. She could take pride in that.

She managed an uneven smile. “You're something else,” she said softly, remembering so many times Anita had reached out to her and been turned away.

“You, too, Birdie.”

“All these years I thought I had no mother,” Elizabeth said. “I was wrong, wasn't I? I had two. I love you, Anita. I should have told you that a long time ago.”