“I have two daughters. It was no place for them to grow up.”
Fathers. So protective. There’s a tightness in my throat I don’t want to be there. It’s terrible to be angry at someone who isn’t alive to defend himself. The older I get, the more sure I am that he knew what would happen at that will reading. Maybe he would have changed it if he and Mom had started dating for a while, but at one point he knew he would humiliate her.
He did it to protect me. He knew I would hate him for it and did it anyway.
“Don’t believe anything they tell you,” Abdel says. “They will try to sell you a thousand artifacts in the streets and around the pyramids. Mummified cats, but you open them—only birds and rocks and dirt inside.”
“Why would I want a mummified cat?”
“Ancient scrolls that are made of plastic. Convincing plastic.”
“Okay, I’d like an ancient scroll. I might have fallen for that one.”
“They charge you so much money, that’s why you believe it’s real. That is the irony. If it was cheap to buy, then you would know.”
Abdel takes me to Walmart, because it’s the only place that sells paint at midnight. He accepts cash for waiting in the parking lot and helping me load the supplies into his trunk.
Then we go to the library.
“This place doesn’t look open,” he says, eyeing the dark corners in all directions. “Or safe. This looks like a place you will experience the stealing.”
“Better that than the killing,” I say, moving the gallons of paint to the curb. There’s a lot to do before morning, and I think construction crews start sooner than art gallery exhibits.
He walks toward the driver’s side door. Sighs. Comes back. “I don’t think I should leave you here. Probably you’ll get stabbed and then they’ll take away my Uber license.”
Clear as day I can hear Christopher’s voice telling me I have a death wish.
Maybe I did, back then. It’s not that I wanted to die, but I didn’t really know how to live. There was always money in the way, always something that had to be fought over. Always a struggle to survive.
“I’ll call a friend,” I say because I’m a long time from sitting on a railing alone.
On my phone there’s a long list of contacts. People from Smith College who always knew where the best parties would be. Artists from New York City. Actors in LA. There are only a handful of people in Tanglewood. I’m not going to call the newly expectant parents, Bea and Hugo, to the west side in the middle of the night, even if they would come.
Even though I know I can’t call him, that I lost that right, it still hurts to see Sutton’s name. It would be nice to have his steady, capable presence beside me while I do something inadvisable. My finger hovers over his number, not pressing.
And then there’s Christopher, who helped me paint a mural once. I thought I might have fallen in love with him that night, the night he kissed me, but I think it was earlier than that. When he wrote me a letter at my boarding school in Germany.
When he dived into the water after me.
I’m not sure who I am if I’m not the girl hopelessly in love with Christopher Bardot.
Tonight I’m going to find out.
There’s no listing for the Den online. None for Damon Scott, either. Finally I have to call Avery who has connections in the cit
y. She gives me Penny’s number, but there’s no answer. In the end I have to settle for leaving a message and hoping she gets it in time.
And that she’d even want to help if she knew.
Abdel parks with his headlights angled so I can see what I’m doing. He also orders pizza, which is initiative I appreciate in a man. “I didn’t drive you around the city for two hours so you could get murdered,” he says when I tell him to leave. I’m pretty sure I’m going to send his daughters to college. I’ll be past twenty-five when they need the tuition, finally and forever in charge of that damned trust fund.
By the time Penny arrives, I have the eyes painted, which is no small feat considering I’m using a fifty-dollar ladder that had clearly been used and returned before I bought it. It leans up against metal and glass that’s decades old, shaking with every brusque wind. My canvas isn’t a wall, not really. It’s the entire south side of the building. Mostly windows. Some brick.
The eyes are the most important.
Usually that’s true in a portrait, but it’s a million times more true right now.
This Cleopatra isn’t sexy. Isn’t seductive. Unless it turns you on to be with a woman who wants to destroy everything you’ve worked for, which some perverse men probably do.