Restoration: A Novel (Contemporary / Women's Fiction) (16 page)

“It sounds like you need to find your muse more than I
need to find mine.  How can I help you paint again?”

“Help me?”  Her pinched expression told him she found his
question absurd.  “No one can help me.  Unless you could slip into my skin and
paint for me, there’s nothing you can do.”  She rested her hand on the doorknob
and scanned the art-filled room.  “Thank you for sharing this with me.”

“You sound sad rather than thankful.”

Her gaze stayed transfixed on his work.  “It reminds me of
what might’ve been, that’s all.”

“Can I take you out for coffee?”

Her eyes came to rest on him.  “This is the second time
you’ve asked me out for coffee, but I get the distinct feeling you’re really
asking me for something else.”

He smiled.  “Coffee first.”

“That wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“And why is that?”

“You know the answer to that, Kenyon.”

“You intrigue me, Tess Olsen.”

Her eyes shifted back to his paintings.  “It seems many
women intrigue you.”

“You’re different.”

“Different from them but the same as you.  People like you
and me choose passion over love, don’t we?  It’s much easier submitting to
passion than to love, so we’re not reluctant about yielding to it.”   

“There you go intriguing me again.”  His smile was
alluring.

Her eyes traveled the outline of his strong body. 
Although he was clad in a green chamois shirt and jeans, she could tell he was
well-muscled beneath his clothing.  Tess liked what she saw; she also liked the
sound of his voice, his confidence, and she loved how he painted. 

Once, it would’ve been so easy for her to go have coffee
with him and then to bed.  Now, there was too much debris cluttering her life. 
Ben had rummaged through the parts of her soul she’d closed off from others. 
He’d disturbed and broken loose pieces that now bobbed within her like flotsam
from a shipwreck.  She questioned her ability to navigate through it, making
her every move through life even more tentative.

“You act like you know me, yet you won’t give me the
chance to know you,” Kenyon said.

“I’d prefer not to put myself in that situation.”

“Personally, I would choose temptation over restraint.”

She spurned his smile with a smirk and opened the door. 
“I know,” she said, then closed the door behind her, went back to the lifeless
studio with its one empty canvas, picked up her purse and left.

The day before Thanksgiving, Tess embarked on her annual
pilgrimage to her father’s and hopped an eight-fifteen in the morning, non-stop
flight from New York’s JFK airport to Tampa.  She rented a car and made the
short drive across the bay from Tampa to St. Petersburg.  Palm trees and
oleanders lined the interstate median.  The oleanders still bore a few leftover
flowers, but in late spring the leafy bushes would burst with white and fuchsia
petals.

Until moving away, she’d never appreciated just how green
the landscape was and how brilliantly the blue sky overhead reflected the
ever-present sunshine of her home state.  The November landscape of New York
City was neutral and subdued.  Grays and browns were the palette of the city. 
In the winter, sunlight filtered through gray clouds that descended upon the
skyline.  Sometimes the sun hid behind this gray veil for weeks.

It was barely past eleven in the morning.  Her father
still would be at the hospital or at his office.  Her sister was arriving from
the other coast in the early evening.  No one was quite sure when her brother
would show up.  Tallahassee was a five-hour drive from St. Petersburg, but
Brice had been vague about when he’d leave the Florida State University
campus. 

Tess headed for downtown St. Petersburg and parked along
the street in one of the many vacant curbside parking spaces.  The place seemed
deserted compared to New York’s packed pandemonium.  Her father’s home was only
a few minutes from downtown.  Growing up, she’d often make the fifteen-minute
walk from her home in the Old Northeast section to the art history and Dali
museums not far from where she was parked now.

Tess left her rental car, walked into a nearby building,
scanned the directory just inside the front door and then rode the elevator up
to the eighth floor.  It didn’t take much height in a state that was a virtual
sandbar to garner an amazing view.  With its stubby buildings, St. Petersburg’s
downtown didn’t have the unique and dramatic profile New York’s skyline did. 
From eight floors up, she saw miles of St. Petersburg’s neighborhoods and acres
of water where Tampa Bay hugged the shores of Pinellas County.

She found the suite of offices she sought and stepped into
a reception area.  A woman at a desk asked if she could help her, but before
Tess answered, Lydia Walker peeked out of her office.  Except for the perm that
had replaced her long tresses and was held together in Florida’s humidity with
too much hairspray, the years had brought only subtle changes in Lydia.  Her
stout frame had filled out a little more, and a few more lines were etched into
the loosening skin around her soft, caramel eyes.

Tess remembered she always dressed as if she’d stepped
from the pages of a professional woman’s dress etiquette book.  During the past
twelve years, the rest of the business world had grown more casual, but Lydia
still held firm to her own professional style.

Except for her hair, the fifty-three-year-old defense
attorney in private practice didn’t look much different from the
forty-one-year-old public defender Tess had seen last.  How much different she
must look to Lydia.  Gone was the gangly, awkward teenager she’d been when her
mother’s once best friend had introduced Alish to Randall Wright. 

Everything had changed after that day.  Nothing was spared
of the insidious plague that followed Wright and Alish’s courtship.  It had
ravaged everything.  Things seen and unseen.  Tess was no exception.  The
angry, motherless teenager was now a woman Lydia recognized but no longer knew.

“Tess, what a surprise.”  Lydia lingered by her office
door.  “You look great.  How are you?”

“I’ll be better in another month.”

Lydia frowned and nodded in acknowledgement of Wright’s
pending execution.  Tess returned like a time traveler shuttled into the future
and bringing her past along.

“How about a hug for an old friend?”  Tess asked, removing
the unspoken barrier between them. 

Lydia hurried to her and Tess bent her taller frame to
embrace the woman she’d once considered family.  The two hugged with the whole
of their bodies, their checks pressed together, their hands kneading and
squeezing each other, and their arms tightening in an embrace that seemed
inadequate.  She heard Lydia’s emotion slipping from her in small gasps.  They
hesitantly allowed one another to pull away, each one grasping the other’s
forearm.

Lydia reached up and ran her palm across Tess’s cheek. 
“You’ve grown into such beautiful woman, Tess.”

“Thank you, Lydia.  It’s good to see you.”

“Yes” was all she could say while composing herself.

“Have you eaten lunch yet?  If you can spare the time,
I’ll buy.”

Lydia nodded like a remorseful child given an early
reprieve from a timeout.  “Let me grab my purse.”

They walked the few blocks from Lydia’s office to Beach
Drive, where the British Colonial-themed restaurant she’d suggested was
located.  As they strolled along the sidewalk, Tess browsed the windows of the
specialty shops lining Beach Drive and told Lydia about her work and life in
New York.

Arriving in front of a 1920s oversized bungalow converted
into a restaurant, they ascended a wooden staircase and chose a table on the
fan-cooled front porch.  Floridians hibernated indoors during summer’s peak
daylight hours, but this was November, when the state enjoyed enviable weather
through April.

Tess moaned as if she could taste the view they admired. 
Right in front of them was an expansive park that preserved the downtown
waterfront view.  The city’s founders had resisted urbanizing this property,
and residents and visitors had enjoyed it ever since.  Growing up here, Tess
had enjoyed many free concerts and other outdoor events in this park.  It
wasn’t nearly as grand as Central Park, but its view of the basin where private
boats bobbed and pelicans drifted in the currents was part of St. Petersburg’s
charm.

The Vinoy, a pink hotel that hosted the likes of Babe Ruth
and F. Scott Fitzgerald in its heyday, majestically rose to her left.  In the
distance, St. Petersburg’s landmark pier, something resembling an upside down
pyramid, jutted into Tampa Bay.

“They have a nice selection of imports on tap here,” Lydia
said as she opened the tri-folded menu.  “I can’t have any because I have to go
back to the office, but you’re on vacation, so feel free to indulge yourself.”

“I’d better stay away from that.  I think I’ll have an
iced tea,” she said to the hovering waiter, thinking about her beer-inspired
encounter with Conner.

Lydia shook her head as if she couldn’t believe Tess was
sitting across from her.  “I can’t get over how much you’ve changed.  You look
so much like your mother, even more so now than when you were younger.”

“Do you ever see her?”

“No.”

“You two used to be so close.”

“Like sisters,” Lydia lamented.

“She destroyed everything, didn’t she?  Her marriage.  Her
children.  Your friendship.  Everything.”  Tess propped her elbow on the table,
rested her cheek in her palm and gazed at the condiment tray in the middle of
the table. 

“She was like a plague, sweeping over everyone without
mercy, destroying who we were.  I used to hate you for that, Lydia.”

“I know,” she said quietly.

“I blamed you.”  Tess rolled her chin into her palm and
gazed out at the park.  “If you hadn’t gotten her involved in the public
defender’s office, she’d never have met Randall Wright and none of this
would’ve happened.  It was so much easier to hate you than to hate her.” 

She shifted her gaze to Lydia.  “I don’t hate you
anymore.”

Lydia pursed her lips and nodded at Tess’s verdict,
humbled and grateful like so many of her clients she’d successfully defended in
her career.  The waiter set two glasses of iced tea in front of them, a basket
of pita bread and a small bowl of tabouli in the middle of the table and then
took their orders.

“How could she have done it?”  Tess asked after the waiter
left.  “She gave up so much, for what?  My father is a good man.  They rarely
argued.  Cassie was an honors student.  Brice was, well, he was Brice.  He was
a good little kid.  And what about me?  I always thought I was closer to her
than the others.”  

“Tess, you can’t answer that question by looking at
yourself or your family.  It lies somewhere within your mother.”

“Did you even see it coming?”

“How could I foresee something like that?”

“How can someone be so flawed and no one noticed?”

Lydia reached for a piece of pita bread and used it to
scoop out a lump of tabouli.  “I’ve spent many hours contemplating that
question and replaying the past to see if there were any clues.  She could be
the life of the party at times and so unsure of herself at others.  When she
pledged my sorority and I became her big sister, I took my role literally and
spent a lot of time propping up her ego.  She needed a lot of stroking, a lot
of encouragement. 

“The first time your father asked her out she was out of
her mind with excitement, then almost said no.  She couldn’t believe the handsome
young man who was going to be a doctor was interested in her.  I remember all
the way up to their wedding day her questioning why he’d want to marry her.”

Lydia shook her head as if skeptical of her own
recollection.  “In life, I’ve doubted myself at times.  The world is filled
with insecure people, but they don’t generally self-destruct.  What was the
difference with your mother?  Maybe her insecurities had nothing to do with any
of it.

“So, what could it be about her?  That’s a question I
don’t think we’ll ever have a satisfactory answer for and if we did, would it
really make us feel better?”

“When did you realize what was going on between my mother
and Wright?”

Lydia rested her hands in her lap.  “You know I’d rather
look at you and marvel at how you’ve grown into a woman and talk about your
life now.”

“I want to know.”

Lydia stared at her hands.  “Whenever we were in a court
recess or I was working with my team on his defense strategy, I noted how he
flirted with your mother, but I didn’t give it much thought.  One of Randall’s
appeals was his charm.  I didn’t pay attention to what was going on between
them.  My job was to keep him out of the electric chair.  That’s what I was
focused on. 

“I suppose I recognized she was enjoying his attention,
but it’s a far stretch for the mind to think anything would come of it.  Never
in my wildest imagination would I have thought those flirtations would turn
into what it did.

“I can’t even call it an affair.  They talked and wrote
notes to each other.  That was it.  I didn’t even know about the notes.  By the
time I found out they were passing love notes to each other and had read one, I
confronted your mother about what she was professing to him in writing.  Things
came out of her mouth that I didn’t even recognize.  She talked about their
love for each other, how he was the only man who’d ever truly understood her. 
I was stunned.”

“Didn’t you try to talk her out of it?”

Lydia’s face contorted.  “God, yes.  I tried to get her to
see the insanity in what she was doing.  It was like talking to a
thirteen-year-old experiencing her first crush.  The harder I tried, the more
it put a wedge between us.  I was sick over it.  When she left your father and
you kids, I felt like someone had died.”