Dance Away with Me(109)

Then she’d ruined it by rejecting him. How could she think he was a threat to Wren when that baby belonged to him as much as to her? All that bullshit about him not being domestic. If that was true, why was the schoolhouse and their life on the mountain all he could think about? She’d even had the gall to accuse him of looking miserable when he told her he loved her. What the hell kind of thing was that to say?

His head ached. Maybe he was running a fever. He should go out to the drugstore and get something to take, but if he opened the door, they’d be waiting for him.

“Ian, I don’t want to bother you, but could you take a look at—”

“Ian, I’m not sure it has anything to say . . .”

They were great kids, talented, and deserving of the studio space he was happy to give them. He just didn’t want to talk to them right now. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. Yet now that he was back in Manhattan, his phone wouldn’t stop ringing. He turned it off, then turned it right back on again. What if there was an emergency with Wren? What if Tess finally realized how unreasonable she was being and called to apologize?

He replayed their last conversation a thousand times in his head, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember her ever once saying she loved him.

*

He was up at dawn. He should go train, but his dojo here didn’t smell of pine and leaf mold. No weeds brushed his calves. No birdsong mingled with the sound of his own breath.

He forced himself back into the studio. It was more functional than his schoolhouse studio, but its cement floor; high, open ceiling; and cold, industrial walls weren’t nearly as welcoming. And why, with all the noise around him, was it so quiet here?

He flipped through those small canvas squares. What he really wanted to do was sketch—a squirrel scuttling through the underbrush, early wildflowers in the meadow. Tess. Wren. Sketching calmed him, but therapy wasn’t art.

In a fit of frustration, he grabbed a canvas he’d abandoned months ago, a big, insipid, tonal composition. He turned it upside down and set it on the easel hard enough to make the frame shake. He snatched up the closest tube of paint and squeezed all of it into his hand. Primary yellow. Good enough. He rubbed the thick paint between his palms and smeared it over the canvas without caring where it went or how it looked. He picked up another random tube, squeezed it out, and did the same. He found another and then another—edges bleeding, no regard for line or form, shape or value.

He glued the canvas imprints from Tess’s body on top and pulled a random can of Krylon from the shelf. He shook it and spattered it in short, choppy bursts without attempting a pattern. He found another can and did the same. And then another. He was breathing hard as he finally spelled out IHN4.

He dropped back, drained.

It was a madman’s mess, lumpy, disjointed and nonsensical. It could have been done by anyone or anything. One of those elephants who’d been given a brush and a bucket of paint. He set his pigment-smeared hands to his knees, trying to catch his breath. He looked again. The chaos in front of him had no purpose, no reason for being.

Like him.

He needed order, some kind of structure and sanity. He rubbed his palms on the legs of his jeans and reached for the one thing in the studio that held the order he craved: his sketchbook. He opened it without looking and tore off a random page.

Tess’s profile.

He taped the drawing to the top corner of the messy canvas and stepped away. Rubbing his hand over the back of his neck, he first studied the small sketch and then the canvas. He turned the easel to better capture the midday light and grabbed a black illustration marker with an extra fine point. He went to work, recapturing a miniature of Tess’s profile on a dry speck of the canvas.

When he was finally satisfied, he put aside that sketch, taped up another, and began again. He worked through the rest of the day, through the night, and into the next morning, moving from the second sketch to a third.

It was dawn before he finally stumbled to bed, but he slept for only a few hours before he got back up, made a pot of coffee, and returned to the studio.

He lost all reference to time. The shadows moved across his studio floor, disappeared, reappeared. He changed the angle of an eyelash here, the length of a fingernail there. He slept for a few hours, made more coffee, and began again, hiding each of the minuscule, detailed drawings in the chaos of his random streaks of color. He didn’t shower. Didn’t eat. His stomach burned from the endless cups of coffee he drank out of a paint-spattered mug.

Sometime in the midhours of the third night, he left the studio and shut the door behind him. Reeking of sweat and paint, he fell into bed.

When he finally awakened, he took a long shower, shaved, and made himself a decent breakfast. Only after he’d done all that did he let himself go back into the studio to look at what he’d created.

From a distance, only the chaos was evident. But up close . . . Up close, visible only to those who wouldn’t pass by too quickly—those with the patience to stop and see—were the tiny, hidden drawings: Tess’s profile, her spine, her nose, all of it executed with exact, precise detail. There was Wren’s foot, caught in a ribbon of dioxazine purple, her dimple captured in a stroke of gold. In this canvas, he saw it all—the violent, rebellious kid who only cared about destruction and the grown man who’d lost his heart to a single-minded widow and an orphaned child.

This.