Emerald Windows (23 page)
Turning her back on her sister, Brooke ran out of the house.
T
lME IS RUNNING OUT, LORD,
Nick prayed as he sat alone in the darkness of his Buick.
It’s just a matter of time until Brooke leaves again. I don’t want her to go.
He opened his eyes and looked at the church, dark and dormant under the cover of night. Aloud, he said, “I don’t understand, Lord. I thought these windows were Your doing. I thought all the talent You had given me was about the windows in St. Mary’s.”
He had misread God. That was all there was to it. He had wanted it himself, so he made himself think he was following God’s will.
But now it had all tumbled down. His ma’s artist son had lost another job.
You be what God made you to be,
his grandpa had advised him so long ago, sitting at his favorite fishing hole and teaching him how to look busy while taking time to think.
And when they chide you about it, you just-a smile and nod and go on about your business. Soon they’ll get tired of you and find somebody else to bother.
He saw headlights pull into the parking lot, and Brooke’s car pulled into the space next to his. She saw his shadow in the car, got out of her own and came to the passenger side. Without a word, she got in next to him.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Thinking. Praying. Stay here with me for a minute,” he said quietly. “Then we’ll go in.”
Brooke laid her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. He could see that the thoughts raging through her mind were no more tranquil than his.
T
EARS BURNED DOWN
R
OXY’S FACE
as she paced furiously across her room. She heard a car outside and knew that her parents had come home from the grocery store. Peering through her mini-blinds, she surveyed their faces as they got out of the car. Had they heard yet about the latest scandal developing in their family? And if not, how much longer would it be? It would come out eventually. She hadn’t doubted that when the whole thing had started, and Bill had been very careful to remind her how humiliating the consequences could be.
She went to her mirror and tore a tissue out of its box, wiped her eyes carefully. Dabbing a little makeup on her finger, she tried to touch up the red circles under her eyes.
Maybe she should just come right out and tell them. Maybe she should just get the whole thing out in the open and accept whatever came of it. She was so tired of hiding. So tired of all the lies and the sneaking around. So tired of the limits it imposed on her life.
But what would they say? What would they do? Vividly, she remembered the night seven years ago when Mrs. Hemphill had called her father to tell him about his fallen daughter. Roxy hadn’t known, then, what was going on, but she would never forget her father’s storming across the house threatening to kill Nick Mar-cello. Would her dad want to kill Bill too? Or Roxy herself?
His reaction might serve to make the scandal bigger, she thought, starting to cry again. It would just be that much more to deal with.
“Hi, honey.” Her mother’s voice came from her doorway, and Roxy kept her face turned away. “I thought you’d be out somewhere tonight since you don’t have school tomorrow.”
“No, Mom,” Roxy said. “I had some studying to do.”
“Studying?” Her mother stepped into the room. “I’ve never yet met a senior who studied during spring break.”
Roxy shrugged and grabbed one of her books. “Yeah, well. I’m having a little trouble in history.”
Alice Martin sat down on her daughter’s bed. Roxy knew that she wasn’t fooling anyone. Her mother would have to be blind not to see the remnants of tears on her red-rimmed eyes or deaf not to hear the rasp of hoarseness in her voice. “Honey, I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t worry,” Roxy said too brightly. “I’ll pull my grades up. I’m just a borderline B.”
“I’m not worried about your grades,” her mother said. “I’m worried about the way you’ve withdrawn lately. You’ve been crying, haven’t you?”
“No,” Roxy denied, as if the thought was absurd. “Why would I be crying?”
“I don’t know,” her mother said, frowning. She cupped Roxy’s chin and tipped her face up. “But you have. And here you are, holed up in your room again, like you’re afraid to come out…”
Thankfully, the phone rang just as new tears emerged in Roxy’s eyes. Turning from her mother, she snatched it up. “Hello?”
“Hey, Rox. It’s me, Sonny.”
“Hi.” She glanced back at her mother, who waited for her to finish the call so that they could continue their talk. But the prospect terrified her.
“Listen,” Sonny was saying. “I was wondering if you might want to go out for a pizza or something. Now, before you say no, let me remind you—”
“Yes,” Roxy said quickly. “Yes, I’d like that.”
“What?” Sonny asked. “Did you say yes?”
“Yes,” Roxy said again. “When can you be here?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Sonny said. “No, ten.”
“I’ll be ready,” Roxy said.
She hung up the phone and turned back to her mother. “Well, looks like I have a date.”
“Really?” Her mother’s smile inched back over her face. “Who with?”
“Sonny Castori,” she said, rushing to the dresser to finish applying her makeup. “He graduated from Hayden last year.” Deliberately, she neglected to tell her mother that he was Nick’s nephew. All that concerned Roxy now was getting out of the house and away from her mother’s probing questions, at least until the rumors that had reached Brooke somehow reached her parents too.
If the truth didn’t come out of its own accord, Roxy wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold the sordid secrets tightly within herself. And she wasn’t sure how much longer she wanted to try.
Her energy was almost gone, and the humiliation of having to face Brooke with the truth had already been too much. How much worse could it be for her parents to know, after all?
T
HE CHURCH WAS DARK WHEN
Brooke and Nick went inside for what was to be their final time. Nick flipped the switch on the wall, casting the place in a dim half-light. Tonight the shadows around them seemed too big to conquer, providing a mystery that couldn’t be unraveled. Together they walked to the center of the large room and looked up at the boarded windows they could have transformed into such enchanting works of art.
“Funny,” Nick said, his soft voice echoing in the room’s emptiness. “Art is supposed to be expression. It’s supposed to be pure and untainted. But what it really comes down to, what really is the bottom line, is the almighty buck.”
Brooke walked across the floor and lightly kicked the drop cloths. “When I accepted this job, money wasn’t an issue,” she said. “I just wanted a chance to prove myself as a stained-glass artist. Make a name for myself.”
Nick brought his hand up and clenched it into a fist. “It could have been so good, Brooke. It could have been
so…beautiful.” His eyes misted over as his voice broke. He turned from her, inhaling a deep breath that made his shoulders rise and fall in weary defeat.
Brooke offered no answers, and he sensed that her own pain kept her reflectively quiet.
Finally they walked back to the workroom to view the progress they had made, the seeds of masterpieces they had planted together. Their work, spread out on the tables and around the room, greeted them like still-hopeful children about to be abandoned.
Nick went to one pattern pinned to the table with the cartoon and working drawing beneath it. He slipped his fingertips under the edge, poised to rip it off the tacks, but Brooke reached out and stopped him. “Let’s…let’s just keep them together,” she whispered. “We worked so hard…”
“Why?” Nick’s face reddened as he brought his eyes to hers, and she could hear the anger in his voice. “Why should we hold onto them?”
His hand whipped across the pages, ripping the heart out of the drawing. “We might as well just rip them
all
up!”
“No!” Brooke grabbed both his hands and held them. “Don’t, Nick,” she cried. “They’re ours. The church can stop us from designing them for this building, but they can’t keep us from creating them somewhere else. Don’t tear them up, Nick. Please.”
He looked at her then, his eyes softening. Nick regarded the torn drawing in his hands helplessly and dropped down onto a stool. “We can’t do this anyplace else,” he said in a metallic voice. “It wouldn’t be the same. This building is perfect for them.”
Brooke wouldn’t give up. “It would work if we tried hard enough to make it work,” she whispered. “If God was with us.”
If God was with us.
The significance of her words struck him full force. Was this the first seed of her faith? Had it been planted? Was it taking root? Was she beginning to believe?
If God was with us.
He swallowed and tried to find the words to voice his thoughts. “You know, a few years ago when I became a Christian, it all came together for me. My art…my gift…I knew God planned for me to use it to His glory. It never occurred to me that any part of it could be about money. I knew the Bible said the workman is worthy of his wages, so I didn’t have any guilt about taking payment for my work, but that wasn’t the force behind it, you know?” He raked a rough hand through his hair and shook his head. “Now, I’ve made so much money on my work that I
expect
to make money on it. It’s almost like I can’t conceive of doing it just for the love of it. And when it starts to be about money, somebody who knows nothing about my calling can always come along and take it away.”
“I know,” she said, leaning her back wearily against the table and gazing off into the distance as memories gave an extra clarity to her life. “Looking back, I see that my deepest expression, my most intense work, was on the sculpture of the hands. I haven’t been that absorbed in my work since then, but I’ve made a lot of money. And I never dreamed, while I was working on it, that that sculpture would ever be worth a cent.”
Nick set his palms down on the tabletop. “My family was so down on my being an artist that I always felt I could prove my worth by putting a big dollar sign on it. But these windows meant so much to me.” He looked at her with sad eyes. “I would have done them for free, Brooke.”
Brooke inclined her head and inhaled a breath that seemed weighted with the tragedy in Nick’s eyes. “So would I,” she admitted. “But our salaries were only half of it. It costs thousands to construct windows like these.”
Nick’s eyes lit up like lanterns that had suddenly been turned on to flood the night. “Do you mean it, Brooke?” he asked. “Or are you just saying it because you know it’s moot now?”
“Saying what?” she asked. “That I would have done it for free? Of course, but…”
Nick’s heart leapt as an idea came to him. He grabbed her shoulders and sat her down on the couch, then stooped in front
of her. “I have no right to ask this,” he whispered, breathless with brimming excitement, “but I’m going to. Would you consider— even consider—staying here and finishing this project without pay…if we could come up with the money somehow to finance the windows?”