Shelter in Place (Page 52)

“I must’ve been in a hellfire mood when I did.” She drew back, then kissed her mother’s cheek. “Thank you. I’m better, but I don’t want to go back in. I couldn’t face dessert anyway.”

“Are you well enough to drive?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry.”

“I will, so you’ll text me when you’re at your grandmother’s.”

“Okay. Tell Nat—”

“I intend to tell Natalie exactly what happened so we can gossip about that stupid, ugly woman over dessert and coffee.”

This time the laugh came easier. “I love you, Mom. That must be why you constantly exasperate me.”

“I’ll give you one touché. Your color’s better. Text me—and have CiCi make you one of her crazy teas.”

“I will.”

Rather than go through the club, she walked around the building to her car. She hadn’t wanted to come, she thought, and couldn’t claim she’d had a good time of it.

But she could be glad she’d come. However strange and awful, the fences got mended, and they felt stronger for it now.

Maybe they could keep them that way awhile.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Simone couldn’t forget Tiffany’s face—the before, and the now.

She couldn’t forget the smugness on it then, the anger on it now. They pushed and prodded at her, both sides of the coin: the smugness of the young girl who prized her own beauty, and the anger of the woman who believed she’d lost it.

While she worked, those faces revolved in her head.

She’d never gone back to the DownEast Mall or any other. She’d never sat in a movie theater again. She’d done everything to push that night and all that surrounded it out of her mind. Away from her life.

Now, with that single encounter, those two faces playing through her head, that night and all that surrounded it pushed into her.

Unable to block it out, she made it a project. She sketched Tiffany’s face at sixteen from memory: the well-balanced features, the confident, blossoming beauty, the perfect sweep of hair.

Then she sketched the now, the woman who’d confronted her at the club: the scarring, the slight drooping of the left eye, the drawn-up lip, the reconstructed left ear.

Flawed, she thought, studying the two faces, visibly flawed. But hardly monstrous. In fact, as an artist, she found the second face more interesting.

But … Did the anger come from being reminded, every time she looked in the mirror? Did the horror flood back? Instead of being able to shut it away, move on, the results of that single night lived in the face in the mirror.

Wouldn’t it take a particular kind of strength and resolve to face that and move on?

How could she criticize? How could she dismiss that anger and resentment when she’d refused to face her own? She’d just locked hers away.

Rising, she walked to the window. Outside, snow fell soft out of moody gray skies and piled in soft mounds on the rocks. The water blurred with the sky, and winter closed off everything but that water, that sky.

The quiet and peace, the solitude of winter on the island spread before her. The chaos and ugliness of that long ago summer night waited behind.

She heard Tiffany’s voice in her head.

You walked away without a scratch.

“No. No, I didn’t. So…”

On a deep breath, she turned.

She chose her tools, her clay.

Half-scale, she thought as she spread out some canvas and began to roll clay into a rectangle. She could stop anytime, she assured herself. Or just change directions. But if she wanted the faces out of her head, maybe she needed to make them real.

She trimmed the slab of clay before rolling it, bending it into a cylinder. Once she’d flipped it vertically, she used her hands to smooth the walls. She cut the angles, scored, overlapped, joined, compressing the seams, created the void.

The practical, the technical, came first, laid the foundation.

She sketched the outline of the face with a rounded tip, checked proportions.

With her hands, she began to shape it. Eye sockets, forehead, nose, adding clay, pushing from the inside of the cylinder for cheeks, cheekbones, chin.

She could see it just as her hands could feel it. A female face—still any female face.

Depressions, indentions, mounds.

Thinking of the then, the now, the smug, the bitter, she turned the clay to do the same on the opposing side.

The two sides, she thought, of a life.

Now the dome of the head, coiling seams, compressing, adding a slit, until she left an opening only wide enough for her hand.

She studied the work—yes, simple, basic, rough—letting the clay stiffen a bit before cutting another dart, the shape of a football, on the sides. Her transition from neck to skull.

She darted the front, taking her time to create the chin and neck. Repeated on the back with the subtle changes from damage, and the years.

Rising again, she walked around the worktable, studying the roughed-in faces, the sketches.

She sat, made her commitment by using her thumb to draw down the depression of the left eye socket.

“Here we go,” she mumbled, and began to roll a small ball of clay. “I don’t know what I’m trying to prove, but here we go.”

The eyeballs, the corners of the eyes, the lids—she structured with fingers and tools.

As was her habit, she jumped from feature to feature, roughing in the eyes, moving on to the nose, the chin, the ears, and back again. Shifting, as her mind and hands demanded, from face to face.

The mouth, so perfect on the then, and with that hint of smug. On the now, that drawn-up corner—not a smile, she thought, adding clay, scoring with a square-edge, pushing with her thumb, her fingers. Flawed, yes, flawed, but it was bitterness hardening those lips.

As the snow fell, she worked in silence. No music today, no background. Just the clay, giving under her hands, building, forming.

She felt it, real as life even before she went back to the eyes. The anatomy, of course, with the folds, the tear bags, the creases; but it was always the life in them, the expressions that opened the windows. The thoughts and feelings of a single moment, or a lifetime, could come through the eyes.

And here, in the face of a lovely teenage girl, the eyes shined with confidence—borderline arrogance. In the woman, the eyes reflected not just the horror and fear of one night, but the results in the face and the mind and the heart of a woman who’d lived through it.

* * *

While Simone worked, so did Patricia Hobart.

Snow fell outside her window as well, as she studied someone else who’d lived through it.

She’d about had it with Toronto, wanted a change of scene, a change of place. Bob Kofax offered just that.

He’d been a mall security guard on the big night, had survived two gunshot wounds. His story, his survival, had garnered him more media exposure than Patricia deemed appropriate. Added to it, he continued to—in her opinion—feed off her own brother’s misfortune by continuing to work at the mall.

A slap in the face!

Bob, it seemed, considered his survival a message from a higher power to make the most of the gift of life, to help those in need, and to start and end each day with gratitude.

She knew this, as it said so on his Facebook page.

Part of making the most would be celebrating his fiftieth birthday with his wife and his two children—one of whom was gay and “married” to another gay, which just offended every fiber of Patricia’s being. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they’d adopted some Asian kid. At least his other son married an actual woman and had a couple of real kids.