Something Beautiful

Jillian shook her head, trying to shake away the memory of that agonizing day, the worse-than-despairing year of days since.

“I’m fine,” she said.

Elise, ever the cheerleader, leaned forward slightly, her ruddy face free of any smile now, her mouth drawn into a serious line, her eyes urgent. “At least you’re painting again,” she said.

Jillian nodded. It was a true statement, but it made her feel guilty nonetheless. She was painting again, not the light, airy abstracts that had so delighted Dave. Instead, she was creating dark, angry, real and surreal accounts of the fury and confusion that reigned in her. And most of all, these new and frightening paintings all too often depicted the helplessness she felt upon hearing her daughter’s screams in the middle of the night. Surreal doorways, openings to terrible, evil places, horrific eyes darkly beckoning. Were these desperate paintings wholly representative of her life now?

Only yesterday she’d discovered that the pairs of haunted eyes in the roiling clouds beyond the jambs of the last three nowhere doors were the same exact color as Steven’s. What did that foretell? What did it mean? His eyes were the doorways of her own soul? That was too heavy and too complex even for Jillian’s present dark mood.

“So, that damned bullet didn’t get everything, did it?” Elise asked almost harshly.

Jillian looked up in surprise. Was this the secret to their friendship, that Elise was able to tap into some underlying empathetic emanation, or was it that she was nearly telepathic?

Elise nodded, as if Jillian had voiced these questions aloud. “I know, Jillian. Don’t you think I’ve been angry about it, too? It was bad enough to lose Dave, his gorgeous music. And to see what you and Allie were going through? But, my God, you stopped painting, too. It was like that murderer stole you also.”

Jillian nodded slowly, fighting tears that threatened to spill, to blur her vision. She blinked rapidly, willing them away. Elise was right, and too terribly on target. She had felt that way, still felt that way to a large degree. That bullet had stolen her joy in living.

“It’s okay, you know,” Elise said. “It’s just me here now. Not some shrink with nasty questions about your mother and your second cousin’s older brother. I know what hell it was to live with Dave sometimes. I knew him before you did, remember?”

Jillian smiled weakly, and then, almost to her relief, found herself saying, “Sometimes at night, when I wake up and remember that he’s not here, I’ve gone to sit at the drafting table, or maybe in front of the easel. And nothing would come. Not even a glimmer of an idea. All I could think about was, who would I show it to now that Dave was…gone. At least he kept me honest.”

“You could always call me, you know. I want to see your work.”

Jillian looked away from Elise, unable to continue while directly meeting her friend’s blatant sympathy. She half turned in her chair, profiling both Elise and the outside doors. She thought of the way Steven had stood so still in the courtyard, and drew on that image for some semblance of strength.

How could she explain to Elise that the paintings weren’t ‘work’? They were agony, despair, rage. They were the darkest, angriest part of her. The guilt over the marriage, which had been broken long before Dave’s death? The guilt over knowing that both of them, no matter how much they might have loved, had held some special ingredient back? Whatever they represented, whatever they displayed, Jillian knew they were the doorways to the ultimate torment in her soul.

“Anytime, Jill,” Elise said.

Jillian didn’t tell Elise that it wasn’t—couldn’t be—the same as showing Dave. She didn’t have to; Elise knew. But just yesterday, hadn’t she considered showing a recent piece to Steven? Somehow she’d thought he would understand it, perhaps even be able to explain it to her. Was it because he’d told her, only last week—when she’d said he didn’t have to call her Mrs. Stewart, but could call her Jillian—that someone had once told him that even “the prince of darkness is a gentleman.”

She couldn’t remember the context, why he’d said it. She only remembered being teased by the odd phrase, feeling it fit him somehow. A browse through Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations had revealed the quote as coming from Shakespeare’s King Lear. A man who quoted Shakespeare while cleaning out gutters was a man who might understand the dark side of life, she’d thought then, and remembered now, smiling a little.

She’d thought it a remarkably apt remark from him. “Child Rowland to the dark tower came…” That was what Steven reminded her of, a haunted man in search of himself, in search of some dark and terrible truth.

Elise, perhaps encouraged by Jillian’s smile but misunderstanding it, said, “Jill, you’re actually drawing something. And, honey, they’re good.”

Jillian tried letting this sink in, attempted to feel the truth in Elise’s words. The paintings were well drawn, well executed, but good? That was a judgment, not an absolute, an abstract instead of a truth. What was good about doorways that led nowhere, openings that only revealed glimmers of dark, terrible universes beyond?

For some inexplicable reason, the doorways reminded her of Steven. The dark tower? Was that why she’d thought he could explain them to her?

Elise said something else, something about the new “jeweled” effect in her recent work.

Jillian asked her, hearing the angry note in her voice come through, despite her attempts to quell it, “Do you know why my new paintings all have that jeweled effect, that brighter-than-bright sheen to them?”

Her friend murmured an uneasy negative.

Jillian felt her lips curve, but she knew it wasn’t in a smile, unless this time it really was born of bitterness. “They’re that way because the whole time I’m painting, I’m crying. And I paint what I see.”

She heard Elise murmur a placating something, but her heart was pounding so loudly, the words didn’t penetrate. She couldn’t sit there any longer. The restlessness that had so thoroughly claimed her during the past year triggered, and forced her into action. She moved back to the window and stared out at the courtyard.

Steven was no longer absorbing the dying rays of the setting sun. He was standing facing the doors, just in front of the pile of leaves, looking as though he’d risen from them, a golden phoenix from unburned ashes. His hands hung loose at his sides, the rake abandoned against the trunk of the apricot tree at the far south end of the courtyard.

His eyes were open now, and filled with light, as if he truly had taken in the sun’s rays and transformed them into a startling green. The color was oddly out of place in the late-afternoon desert Southwest, and was as luminous as the jeweled colors in her paintings. Blazing emeralds.

It was at least three seconds before she realized she was gazing directly into his eyes, staring at him, frozen, and when she did, she felt strangely linked with him, her heart pounding in a strange combination of fear and poignant recognition.

Had her swift rise from the table called his attention, or had he been watching her all along, as she all too often watched him?

She could read nothing in his closed expression, no understanding, no pity, yet she felt a powerful emotion emanating from him all the same. That emotion wasn’t tenderness or concern, nor did it seem to carry any nuances of sexuality or even sensuality, though he certainly exuded all of those things on a physical plane. But whatever he was thinking or feeling seemed to radiate out from him like an aura taking flight, dark and filled with purpose, but its meaning obscured, hidden from her. She could have sworn she felt it race across the distance, and gasped at the raw intensity of it.

Shock rippled through her. He’s like my paintings, she thought, and instinctively raised her hand between them, laying her palm against the cold glass. Was she reaching for him, or warding him off?

She could feel his power, and didn’t understand it. He was dark and light at the same time. Extremes. Sharp contrasts and angles, hidden messages and sparkling truths.

Staring at him, linked with him, she felt words form in her mind. Were they coming from him? No, from within herself. Again, like her paintings.

“Jillian?”

“Dark with excessive bright.”

She had murmured the words aloud, almost like a talisman. Or were they a plea?

Why hadn’t she looked away from him? Why was she continuing to stand there…locked in his gaze? And what was it about the words dark with excessive bright that had so captured her thoughts, snagged her memory?

Then she remembered. Steven had said the words the other morning while clearing the overthick woodbine from the side of the house. What had he meant then, and why had the words seemed to hold so much more than mere statement in them?

“What’s that from?” Elise asked.

“What?” she asked faintly, as though from far away. She couldn’t break his gaze, felt she was drowning in it, dizzy, aching. What was happening to her? She felt as if one of her dark doorways were opening slightly, and if she stared at him much longer she would see the roiling clouds with the haunted, hungry eyes seeking her.

“Earth to Jillian. I said, ‘What’s that from?”’

Steven Sayers—the gardener, she reminded herself, half hysterically—looked away first, turning his head as though purposefully ending this unusual connection. He walked slowly back to the apricot tree and took the rake in his left hand. Without looking back toward the house, he resumed his careful tending of the pile of leaves.

Jillian fought nausea, found herself shaking and raised trembling hands to hug her suddenly cold shoulders. Her grandmother, had she still been alive, would have said a wolf had just passed over Jillian’s grave. She knew it was far more serious than that, far more real. If she’d stayed linked with him a moment longer, she knew, she would have lost herself somehow.

“Sounds like something I’ve read,” Elise said.

“What?”

“That ‘dark with excessive bright’ thing.”

Jillian drew a deep breath before turning around. “I don’t know. It sounded familiar to me, too, but I…don’t remember where I…read…it.”

“Shakespeare? Donne? Maybe Spenser? It doesn’t sound like a standard biblical verse, but I could be wrong.”

Jillian’s chill fell away as swiftly as it had come upon her. She moved back to the table, but didn’t sit down. Was she subconsciously signaling her need to be alone?

She leaned against one of the high-backed oak chairs and said, “I always forget you’re a scholar.”

Right now she wished Elise were really the white witch she professed to be, could really see into one of her myriad crystal balls and explain what Jillian had just experienced. Because it had been something. Or as Allie was fond of saying lately, something beautiful. Beautiful in the sense of “awesome,” a concept with a dual-edged sheen, at one and the same time both exceedingly lovely and woefully dangerous.

Elise winced and waved her hand. “You’re the scholar, sweetie, remember? You’re the one who reads everything known to man. Before you started painting, anyway. Maybe that’s the secret to your art, you bring it a little old-worldliness.

“Anyway, nowadays, scholars do research and get to read all the time. They’re eligible for Nobel Prizes and a billion grants. I’m one of the publish-or-perish crew, remember?”

Elise stood up and shook her pleated wool skirt as though such an effort would remove the long-creased wrinkles in it. “Speaking of which, I have an abstract I have to finish by Thursday, and this being Monday and I haven’t even begun reading the material, let alone writing the damned thing, I’d better set my sights on the computer—”

Allie burst through the front door at that moment, bringing a blast of chill air with her as she sprang into the dining room. She spun her bookbag onto the small desk reserved for just that purpose and skidded to a semihalt.

“Have you seen Lyle?” she called, then, apparently remembering some semblance of manners, muttered a breathless greeting to Elise and her mother.

“How was school?” Jillian asked.

“Fine. Have you seen Lyle?”

Jillian felt rather than saw Elise’s ironic gaze and heard Elise murmur, “None of us ever have, hon.”

Allie didn’t seem to notice. She ran on through the kitchen and down the hallway to her bedroom.

Jillian heard the door slam open, and heard her daughter’s cheerful voice recounting snippets of her day. To Lyle. She felt a momentary stab of unreasonable jealousy; Lyle received all of Allie’s confidences, those little details once shared with her mother.

Jillian waited a moment before turning to meet Elise’s eyes. As she had expected, Elise was studying her with a cross between amusement and commiseration.

Elise gestured toward Allie’s unseen bedroom and said, “Now that really does give me the creeps.”

“Gloria says—”

Elise held up her hand. “Spare me Gloria’s immortal words. I know she’s got a degree in realigning your head, but let’s get real, Jillian. Allie is down the hall this very minute, talking to an invisible rainbow creature. And from what I can see—and hear—he talks back.”

“You can hear him, can you?” Jillian asked, smiling faintly, but feeling a frisson of reaction nonetheless.

“Not him, I can’t, but I can tell from the things Allie’s been saying that she sure thinks she does.”

“That’s the whole point of having an imaginary friend,” Jillian argued.

She hoped her light tone masked the doubts she held about the wisdom of maintaining the fiction that Lyle was something real. But the grief therapist thought Lyle’s appearance was a breakthrough of sorts, that his presence signaled an attempt on Allie’s part to rise above the trauma of her father’s death.

Gloria claimed that Lyle would allow Allie to communicate many of the difficult aspects of dealing with the pain of having actually been in the car and having had to watch her father die in her presence. And Jillian had to admit that since Lyle had come on the scene, Allie had finally started acting out her anger, her completely understandable rage.

So Lyle had to be a good thing, no matter how little Jillian might appreciate the acting out, the breakage of an old vase, the temper tantrums resulting in books knocked from the shelves, the scattering of papers, art supplies, anything of value to Jillian, then the lies about it afterward. Perfectly normal, if wholly disliked.

Elise said now, “You know, I’ve resisted the idea of you guys taking off for the wild blue, but I’ve gotta tell you, between your Steven and Allie’s Lyle, I’m changing my mind.”

“He’s not my Steven,” Jillian protested, but even to her, the words lacked conviction.

Luckily, Allie came running back into the dining room; her appearance blocked Elise’s quick rejoinder.

“Can we watch TV?” her little girl asked, making it clear by her actions that Lyle was with them in the room.

If she was entirely honest about Lyle, Jillian thought, she would simply tell her daughter that she hated the invisible creature, that he frightened her a little. A lot.

But she said instead, “There’s still a few minutes of daylight left. Why don’t you—and Lyle—run off some energy? I’ll bet if you ask, Steven will let you jump into that pile of leaves he’s just raked.”

Allie looked willing enough, and transferred her gaze to an empty spot some three feet away from her, and apparently at eye level. The question was obvious on her face. She nodded once, and then, her face stiffening, turned back to Jillian. The honey-brown eyes so like Dave’s met Jillian’s pleadingly, as if asking for understanding. As they did the times she lied to her mother.

“Lyle says he doesn’t want to go outside.”

Jillian could have sworn that Allie did want to go. She withheld a shudder. How could Allie have created an imaginary friend with such a fierce hold over her? Was Gloria right in believing order was the whole point of Lyle, a search for some kind of control in a world gone to chaos? Or was there something else going on here?

“Why doesn’t he want to go outside?” Elise asked, with a degree of probing Jillian didn’t care for—not because Elise was too curious, but because, as Jillian had come to realize lately, she wasn’t any too sure she wanted to hear the answers.

Allie cocked her head again, as if listening, her eyes taking on that intent focus on absolutely nothing. Jillian knew some actors would have paid a fortune for the secret of that particular trick.

As was usual while watching Allie listen to “Lyle,” Jillian fought the feeling that Allie really was seeing something, something that wasn’t her imagination, something all too real.

Allie turned her gaze to Elise, and said, “Lyle says Steven’s out there. He says he doesn’t want to run into Steven yet.”

Elise shot Jillian a sharp look, her round face filled with What-did-I-tell-you?

“What do you mean, yet?” Jillian asked.

Allie shrugged. “I dunno. That’s just what Lyle says. Can we watch TV now? I don’t have any homework.”

Jillian absently consented and carefully avoided Elise’s gaze as Allie left the room. Allie elaborately stepped aside, allowing her invisible friend to precede her through the archway leading to the den. Her slender young body arched against the doorjamb, precisely the way a person would do to allow someone—or something—with considerable girth to pass through.

Elise cleared her throat, then slowly said, “I’d say an extra little chat with Gloria Sanchez is in order here.”

“Based on Allie’s comments about Steven?”

“Based on everything, Jill. I’m not kidding when I say there’s something scary about this whole picture—”

“Mommy?”

Jillian felt a jolt of adrenaline course through her, and couldn’t hold back the slight start her daughter’s sudden reappearance had caused.

Elise also seemed startled. She muttered a curse beneath her breath and dramatically held one hand over her full breasts. “Sweetie, if you don’t want Aunt Elise to become invisible, too, don’t, for the love of heaven, sneak up on us like that again!”

Allie smiled, but Jillian could see the abstraction on her daughter’s face. “Lyle says not to ask Steven to come in the house, okay?”

Jillian felt a chill work down her arms. She couldn’t help it, she looked over Allie’s shoulder, as if expecting to see the invisible friend standing there, gauging her reaction. Allie had often referred to him as something beautiful. What was beautiful about this sort of control, these implications of danger?

She forced herself to speak. “Why would Lyle say something like that?” she asked. She hoped her voice didn’t sound either accusatory or as nervous as she felt.

Allie shifted, as though allowing something to pass back through the archway, again politely offering room.

Jillian deliberately focused her gaze on Allie, refusing to let her eyes slide to the nothing beside her daughter.

Thinking of Elise standing there watching, warning undoubtedly lining her face, she asked, “Doesn’t Lyle like Steven?”

Allie turned to stare into space again, and she nodded a second time.

“I’ll tell her,” she said before turning back to her mother. “Lyle just doesn’t want Steven in the house. He says it’s too soon.”

There’s no such thing as Lyle, Jillian told herself firmly.

But, much as she might want to do so, she couldn’t say this to Allie. Because for Allie, Lyle was very, very real. Too real, maybe.

When Gloria had suggested that the imaginary Lyle might be a means of breaking through Allie’s grief, Allie’s way of attempting contact with the outside world, Jillian had agreed to go along with the myth that Lyle was a real being, that his presence in their home was a welcome one. But, if she was to be honest, she had to agree with Elise. The whole concept was vaguely disturbing, and made her feel deliberately distanced by her little girl.

Through Lyle, Allie had, in the past month, said the most unusual things, comments that seemed remarkably adult, phrases that sounded strange upon the lips of an eight-year-old child. The grief therapist claimed this was consistent with trauma survival.

Jillian wondered.

And now Lyle didn’t want her asking Steven into the house. It wasn’t as if she had, or had really even considered doing so. So why had Allie brought it up? Was this an important key to Allie’s thoughts? She hadn’t said she didn’t like him, she’d said it was “too soon.” What exactly did that mean to Allie?

Jillian wondered how Dave would have handled something like an invisible creature living within their safe walls, and knew with a sharp pang that the situation would never have arisen. It was due to Dave’s death that the imaginary creature was there. And it was due to his loss that Allie clung to Lyle’s company.

Jillian fought the rise of anger against Dave, that overwhelming sense that by dying, he’d abandoned her, left her to grapple with things he should have been there to share with her. Forever, he’d said, but he’d lied. Right from the start.

For Allie’s sake, she now strove to find a light note. “Why would Lyle be worried about Steven coming into the house? Is he afraid he’ll have to give up some space, that we’ll ask him to move back to the lilac hedge?”

Apparently she’d hit the right tone, because for a split second Allie’s face lightened, and she actually seemed on the verge of a giggle. But then she sobered and her eyes turned to that empty—but all-too-real—spot where she could perceive that which no one else could.

It was more than simply disconcerting to see her daughter’s eyes unerringly return to the same exact height every time she turned to look at the ever-present Lyle. And it was even more unsettling at times to watch Allie’s gaze follow an imaginary being’s apparent progress around the room.

Jillian found herself tensing, waiting for Lyle’s next pronouncement, not even able to correct herself, to remember that it was Allie doing the thinking, the translating, the speaking. Because it didn’t seem like Allie at all.

Allie’s eyes turned back to Jillian’s, looking up, and she frowned a little, as if puzzling out Lyle’s unheard comment. “Lyle says Steven isn’t real.”

“What?” Elise and Jillian said in unison.

Jillian couldn’t begin to understand this latest twist of her daughter’s mind.

“Whoa…” Elise murmured. “This, I don’t like.”

Allie cocked her head, listening, not to Elise, but to that invisible, inaudible voice, then said, inexplicably, “Lyle says, just whatever happens, don’t let Steven inside.”

Allie turned to leave the room. For some reason, this chilled her mother more than her words had done; Allie was unconcerned by her comments. She didn’t appear to even know what she was talking about. This was wholly and utterly consistent with someone truly listening to another voice.

But that was patently impossible.

“Honey…” Jillian called after her, only to let her words trail off. Could Elise be right, and Allie did know or sense something about Steven that she herself refused to see? Or was there something else going on here, something related to Dave’s death, perhaps a general distrust of everyone?

Jillian wanted to call her daughter back, but didn’t. She didn’t because she knew that merely summoning Allie back to the entry hall wasn’t what she truly needed from her little girl. What she wanted in her heart of hearts was Allie back…period. The way she used to be, filled with giggles and sunshine, light, airy steps dancing through life, the way she’d been for a moment when coming into the house, the way she’d been a year ago.

She turned and met Elise’s concerned gaze. She was certain her own was equally troubled.

Elise raised her hands as if in surrender and said, “I’m out of here. But I don’t feel good about it. There’s more going on around here than doesn’t meet the eye. And I gotta tell you, I don’t like it. Any of it.” She looked over Jillian’s shoulder, out to the darkening courtyard.