Authors: Nora Roberts
“No, I like it this way.” Clare stepped into the kitchen, which was little more than an alcove in the corner of the studio. “It helps me create.”
“You can pull that artistic temperament crap on someone else, Clare. I happen to know you're just a lazy slob.”
“When you're right, you're right.” She came out again with a pint of Dutch chocolate ice cream and a tablespoon. “Want some?”
“No.” It was a constant irritation to Angie that Clare
could binge on junk food whenever the whim struck, which was often, and never add flesh to her willowy figure.
At five ten, Clare wasn't the stick figure she had been during her childhood, but still slender enough that she didn't check the scale each morning as Angie did. Angie watched her now as Clare, wearing her leather apron over bib overalls, shoveled in calories. In all likelihood, Angie mused, she wore nothing under the denim but skin.
Clare wore no makeup, either. Pale gold freckles were dusted across her skin. Her eyes, a slightly darker shade of amber-gold, were huge in her triangular face with its soft, generous mouth and small, undistinguished nose. Despite Clare's unruly crop of fiery hair, just long enough to form a stubby ponytail when it was pulled back with a rubber band, and her exceptional height, there was an air of fragility about her that made Angie, at thirty only two years her senior, feel maternal.
“Girl, when are you going to learn to sit down and eat a meal?”
Clare grinned and dug for more ice cream. “Now you're worried about me, so I guess I'm forgiven.” She perched on a stool and tucked one booted foot under the rung. “I really am sorry about lunch.”
“You always are. What about writing notes to yourself?”
“I do write them, then I forget where I've put them.”
With her dripping spoon, she gestured around the huge, disordered space. The sofa where Angie sat was one of the few pieces of furniture, though there was a table under a pile of newspapers, magazines, and empty soft drink bottles. Another stool was shoved into a corner and held a bust of black marble. Paintings crowded the walls, and pieces of sculpture-some finished, some abandoned-sat, stood, or reclined as space allowed.
Up a clunky set of wrought-iron steps was the storeroom
she'd converted into a bedroom. But the rest of the enormous space she'd lived in for five years had been taken over by her art.
For the first eighteen years of her life, Clare had struggled to live up to her mother's standards of neatness and order. It had taken her less than three weeks on her own to accept that turmoil was her natural milieu.
She offered Angie a bland grin. “How am I supposed to find anything in this mess?”
“Sometimes I wonder how you remember to get out of bed in the morning.”
“You're just worried about the show.” Clare set the half-eaten carton of ice cream aside, where, Angie thought, it would probably melt. Clare picked up a pack of cigarettes and located a match. “Worrying about it is a lesson in futility. They're either going to like my stuff, or they're not.”
“Right. Then why do you look like you've gotten about four hours′ sleep?”
“Five,” Clare corrected, but she didn't want to bring up the dream. “I'm tense, but I'm not worried. Between you and your sexy husband, there's enough worrying going on already.”
“Jean-Paul's a wreck,” Angie admitted. Married to the gallery owner for two years, she was powerfully attracted by his intelligence, his passion for art, and his magnificent body. “This is the first major show in the new gallery. It's not just your butt on the line.”
“I know.” Clare's eyes clouded briefly as she thought of all the money and time and hope the LeBeaus had invested in their new, much larger gallery. “I'm not going to let you down.”
Angie saw that despite her claims, Clare was as scared as the rest of them. “We know that,” she said, deliberately lightening the mood. “In fact, we expect to be
the
gallery
on the West Side after your show. In the meantime, I'm here to remind you that you've got a ten A.M. interview with
New York
magazine, and a lunch interview tomorrow with the
Times.”
“Oh, Angie.”
“No escape from it this time.” Angie uncrossed her shapely legs. “You'll see the
New York
writer in our penthouse. I shudder to think of holding an interview here.”
“You just want to keep an eye on me.”
“There is that. Lunch at Le Cirque, one sharp.”
“I wanted to go in and check on the setup at the gallery.”
“There's time for that, too. I'll be here at nine to make sure you're up and dressed.”
“I hate interviews,” Clare mumbled.
“Tough.” Angie took her by the shoulders and kissed both her cheeks. “Now go get some rest. You really do look tired.”
Clare perched an elbow on her knee. “Aren't you going to lay out my clothes for me?” she asked as Angie walked to the elevator.
“It may come to that.”
Alone, Clare sat brooding for a few minutes. She did detest interviews, all the pompous and personal questions. The process of being studied, measured, and dissected. As with most things she disliked but couldn't avoid, she pushed it out of her mind.
She was tired, too tired to concentrate well enough to fire up her torch again. In any case, nothing she'd begun in the past few weeks had turned out well. But she was much too restless to nap or to stretch out on the floor and devour some daytime television.
On impulse she rose and went to a large trunk that served as seat, table, and catch-all. Digging in, she riffled
through an old prom dress, her graduation cap, her wedding veil, which aroused a trio of reactions-surprise, amusement, and regret-a pair of tennis shoes she'd thought were lost for good, and at last, a photo album.
She was lonely, Clare admitted as she took it with her to the window seat overlooking Canal Street. For her family. If they were all too far away to touch, at least she could reach them through old pictures.
The first snapshot made her smile. It was a muddy black-and-white Polaroid of herself and her twin brother, Blair, as infants. Blair and Clare, she thought with a sigh. How often had she and her twin groaned over their parents′ decision to name cute? The shot was fuzzily out of focus, her father's handiwork. He'd never taken a clear picture in his life.
“I'm mechanically declined,” he'd always said. “Put anything with a button or a gear in my hands, and I'll mess it up. But give me a handful of seeds and some dirt, and I'll grow you the biggest flowers in the county.”
And it was true, Clare thought. Her mother was a natural tinkerer, fixing toasters and unstopping sinks, while Jack Kimball had wielded hoe and spade and clippers to turn their yard on the corner of Oak Leaf and Mountain View Lanes in Emmitsboro, Maryland, into a showplace.
There was proof here, in a picture her mother had taken. It was perfectly centered and in focus. The infant Kimball twins reclined on a blanket on close-cropped green grass. Behind them was a lush bank of spring blooms. Nodding columbine, bleeding hearts, lilies of the valley, impatiens, all orderly planted without being structured, all richly blossoming.
Here was a picture of her mother. With a jolt, Clare realized she was looking at a woman younger than herself. Rosemary Kimball's hair was a dark honey blond, worn
poufed and lacquered in the style of the early sixties. She was smiling, on the verge of a laugh as she held a baby on either hip.
How pretty she was, Clare thought. Despite the bowling ball of a hairdo and the overdone makeup of the times, Rosemary Kimball had been-and was still-a lovely woman. Blond hair, blue eyes, a petite, curvy figure, and delicate features.
There was Clare's father, dressed in shorts with garden dirt on his knobby knees. He was leaning on his hoe, grinning self-consciously at the camera. His red hair was cropped in a crew cut, and his pale skin showed signs of sunburn. Though well out of adolescence, Jack Kimball had still been all legs and elbows. An awkward scarecrow of a man who had loved flowers.
Blinking back tears, Clare turned the next page in the album. There were Christmas pictures, she and Blair in front of a tilted Christmas tree. Toddlers on shiny red tricycles. Though they were twins, there was little family resemblance. Blair had taken his looks from their mother, Clare from their father, as though in the womb the babies had chosen sides. Blair was all angelic looks, from the top of his towhead to the tips of his red Keds. Clare's hair ribbon was dangling. Her white leggings bagged under the stiff skirts of her organdy dress. She was the ugly duckling who had never quite managed to turn into a swan.
There were other pictures, cataloging a family growing up. Birthdays and picnics, vacations and quiet moments. Here and there were pictures of friends and relatives. Blair, in his spiffy band uniform, marching down Main Street in the Memorial Day parade. Clare with her arm around Pudge, the fat beagle who had been their pet for more than a decade. Pictures of the twins together in the pup tent their mother had set up in the backyard. Of her parents,
dressed in their Sunday finest outside church one Easter Sunday after her father had turned dramatically back to the Catholic faith.
There were newspaper clippings as well. Jack Kimball being presented a plaque by the mayor of Emmitsboro in appreciation for his work for the community. A write-up on her father and Kimball Realty, citing it as a sterling example of the American dream, a one-man operation that had grown and prospered into a statewide organization with four branches.
His biggest deal had been the sale of a one-hundred-fifty-acre farm to a building conglomerate that specialized in developing shopping centers. Some of the townspeople had griped about sacrificing the quiet seclusion of Emmitsboro to the coming of an eighty-unit motel, fast-food franchises, and department stores, but most had agreed that the growth was needed. More jobs, more conveniences.
Her father had been one of the town luminaries at the groundbreaking ceremony. Then he had begun drinking.
Not enough to notice at first. True, the scent of whiskey had hovered around him, but he had continued to work, continued to garden. The closer the shopping center had come to completion, the more he drank.
Two days after its grand opening, on a hot August night, he had emptied a bottle and tumbled, or jumped, from the third-story window.
No one had been home. Her mother had been enjoying her once-a-month girls′ night out of dinner and a movie and gossip. Blair had been camping with friends in the woods to the east of town. And Clare had been flushed and dizzy with the excitement of her first date.
With her eyes closed and the album clutched in her
hands, she was a girl of fifteen again, tall for her age and skinny with it, her oversize eyes bright and giddy with the thrill of her night at the local carnival.
She'd been kissed on the Ferris wheel, her hand held. In her arms she had carried the small stuffed elephant that cost Bobby Meese seven dollars and fifty cents to win by knocking over a trio of wooden bottles.
The image in her mind was clear. Clare stopped hearing the chug of traffic along Canal and heard instead the quiet, country sounds of summer.
She was certain her father would be waiting for her. His eyes had misted over when she walked out with Bobby. She hoped she and her father would sit together on the old porch swing, as they often did, with moths flapping against the yellow lights and crickets singing in the grass, while she told him all about the adventure.
She climbed the stairs, her sneakers soundless on the gleaming wood. Even now she could feel that flush of excitement. The bedroom door was open, and she peeked in, calling his name.
“Daddy?”
In the slant of moonlight, she saw that her parents′ bed was still made. Turning, she started up to the third floor. He often worked late at night in his office. Or drank late at night. But she pushed that thought aside. If he'd been drinking, she would coax him downstairs, fix him coffee, and talk to him until his eyes lost that haunted look that had come into them lately. Before long he'd be laughing again, his arm slung around her shoulders.
She saw the light under his office door. She knocked first, an ingrained habit. As close a family as they were, they had been taught to respect the privacy of others.
“Daddy? I'm back.”
The lack of response disturbed her. For some reason, as
she stood, hesitating, she was gripped by an unreasonable need to turn and run. A coppery flavor had filled her mouth, a taste of fear she didn't recognize. She even took a step back before she shook off the feeling and reached for the doorknob.
“Dad?” She prayed she wouldn't find him slumped over his desk, snoring drunk. The image made her take a firmer grip on the knob, angry all at once that he would spoil this most perfect evening of her life with whiskey. He was her father. He was supposed to be there for her. He wasn't supposed to let her down. She shoved the door open.
At first she was only puzzled. The room was empty, though the light was on and the big portable fan stirred the hot air in the converted attic room. Her nose wrinkled at the smell-whiskey, strong and sour. As she stepped inside, her sneakers crunched over broken glass. She skirted around the remains of a bottle of Irish Mist.
Had he gone out? Had he drained the bottle, tossed it aside, then stumbled out of the house?
Her first reaction was acute embarrassment, the kind only a teenager can feel. Someone might see him-her friends, their parents. In a small town like Emmitsboro, everyone knew everyone. She would die of shame if someone happened across her father, drunk and weaving.
Clutching her prized elephant, her first gift from a suitor, she stood in the center of the sloped-ceilinged room and agonized over what to do.
If her mother had been home, she thought, suddenly furious, if her mother had been home, he wouldn't have wandered off. She would have soothed and calmed him and tucked him into bed. And Blair had gone off as well, camping with his jerky friends. Probably drinking Budweiser and reading
Playboy
by the campfire.
And she'd gone, too, she thought, near tears with the
indecision. Should she stay and wait, or go out and search for him?