Forests of the Heart (10 page)

He glanced over his shoulder and found his gaze drawn to the booth where the hard men were sitting. One of them caught his gaze, his eyes narrowing, and Hunter quickly looked away.

He supposed there were worse things that could happen. He could have those hard men decide to beat the crap out of him. Or the store could go belly-up and he’d have to declare bankruptcy. Instead all he had was an ache in his heart and this forlorn sense of confusion.

Miki gave him a little poke in the side.

“You’re doing it again,” she said.

“What?”

“Thinking too much. Brooding. Trust me, I’m like a doctor. I know all about this sort of thing and it’s really not good for you. Tell the little voice in your head to shut up. Have another drink and just listen to the music.”

“Easier said than done.”

Miki sighed. “I know. But it’s worth trying because, what’s your other option?”

“Just being depressed.”

She gave him a smile. “Exactly. And where’s the fun in that?”

“None at all,” Hunter agreed.

He looked at her for a moment, wondering what it would be like to kiss her, to feel the press of her body against his, to wake in the morning and have her impish face on the pillow beside him, smiling that smile. He almost leaned in toward her to taste that smile, but the moment passed. He reached down and plucked his glass from the floor at his feet. Taking a sip, he leaned back on the bench and tried to concentrate on the music.

S
ATURDAY
, J
ANUARY
17

The timer went off, but Bettina held her position. She knew from previous sessions when she’d posed for Lisette that the artist always needed that one more minute before Bettina could relax her pose and stretch cramped muscles.

“Just a moment more,” Lisette said, right on cue.

“Está bien,’
Bettina told her. “It’s no problem.”

She’d never known how hard an artist’s model had to work until she’d become one herself. She soon discovered that the human body had never been designed to be held motionless for long stretches of time, protesting the abuse with cramps and aches where she’d never even known she had muscles. But she also enjoyed the meditative aspect of it, the way she could let her mind range free while she listened to the sounds the artist made at the easel. The scratch of pencil or charcoal on paper during the preliminary sketches and, later, on canvas. The scrape of the brush, loaded with pigment. The small, inadvertent sounds the artists made as they worked— everything from grunts and sighs and snatches of melodies to Lisette’s habit of stepping back and sucking air in through her teeth as she studied the work.

Lisette Gascoigne was a tall woman, lean rather than slender, and fine-featured, with short black hair and eyes almost as dark as Bettina’s. Not so much attractive as handsome. She was one of the artists who’d propositioned Bettina the first time they’d met—during Bettina’s first week of living in Kel-lygnow. Bettina had been nervous about sitting for her later, but Lisette was all business once they were in her studio. Still, Bettina had to wonder why Lisette even required a model, never mind a nude one, unless it was that she simply liked to look at what she couldn’t have while she worked. Lisette always had her pose in the nude, and the watercolor and pencil studies she did were absolutely wonderful, detailed realistic work that rivaled anything done by the great masters of portraiture and life drawing. Bettina had one that Lisette had given her taped up to the wall in her room, a loosely rendered figure study that she could never show to her mother even if her features were hidden behind the curtain of her dark hair.

But once Lisette took up her brush and began to fill the canvas, Bettina felt she might as well have been a handful of colored scarves, hanging over the back of the chair where she was sitting. The finished paintings were swirls of pigment—fascinating pieces for how the colors pushed against one another, but they bore no resemblance to anything even vaguely recognizable, never mind the human form.

Still Bettina wasn’t one to complain. If posing for Lisette’s abstracts were part of what allowed her to live at Kellygnow free of charge, then she was happy to do it.

“Good, good,” Lisette said finally.

She stepped back to look at her canvas, whistling faintly as she drew the air in through her teeth. Bettina slipped on the silk kimono that one of the artists had given her on her first week and began a series of brief stretching exercises to get her circulation flowing once more. She looked out the window as she loosened up. It was sunny today, if cold. A new blanket of snow covered the lawn where
los lobos
had gathered last Sunday evening. The untouched drifts looked so inviting that she was tempted to take Chantal up on her offer to go cross-country skiing except that she’d promised Salvador she’d help him this afternoon. Earlier today a couple of loose cords of firewood had been delivered to the house and it all needed to be split, carried back to the woodshed, and stacked.

After working out a final tight muscle in the nape of her neck, she came around to Lisette’s side of the easel where she was surprised to find a rough likeness of herself looking out at her from the canvas.

Lisette smiled at her. “I
can
paint realistically,” she said.

“I never … that is …”

Flustered, Bettina gathered the front of her kimono closer to her throat with one hand and let her words trail off.

“I know,” Lisette told her. “You never said a thing. But I could tell by the look on your face every time you’ve come around to see what I’ve been painting.”

Bettina shrugged. “I wondered …”

Lisette reached forward and brushed a lock of hair away from Bettina’s brow. Bettina tensed, but the gesture was friendly, not flirtatious.

“I can see you in all the others,” Lisette said. “But in this piece—” She indicated the painting on her easel. “I want others to see you, too.” She smiled again. “It’s early yet, but the likeness will come.”

Some of the paintings from earlier sessions hung on the wall of the studio and Bettina turned to look at them. They were unframed, the paint on many of them still not quite dry. Their colors seemed to leap out from the canvas toward the viewer, barely tamed to Lisette’s will, pigments laid on with thick brush strokes, complementaries pulsing against each other. Try though she might, Bettina could see nothing of herself in even one of them.

“What is it I’m missing when I look at them?” she asked.

“You’re searching for form,” Lisette said, “where I’ve painted only the impression of what the form clothes.”

Bettina shook her head, still not getting it, but before she could speak, Lisette went on, saying, “How can I explain this better? You carry yourself with a languid grace, as though nothing matters, but one has only to look in your eyes to see that for you, everything matters. Under the skin, intense fires burn. Standing near you, I can almost feel the heat.” She made a motion with her hand, encompassing the abstracts that hung on the wall. “These are about the fire. Now I want to clothe the fire with your skin.”

Bettina glanced at Lisette, then turned back to regard the paintings in a new light.
Bueno,
she thought. This would teach her to make assumptions. Because now she understood. Lisette hadn’t been simply playing with color. Instead, she saw
la brujería
and that was what she had been painting. Her abstracts were like small windows looking into
la época del mito.
They captured images of myth time, how the trace of it hung from Bettina’s shoulders like a cloak, vibrant, but puzzling in all its mystery and confusion.

“I see it now,” she said. She turned away from the paintings and smiled. “But we all carry that light inside ourselves. I’m not special.”

“Perhaps,” Lisette said. “Perhaps not. But in you it seems more intense. More tightly focused.”

Bettina almost laughed, thinking what her
abuela
would have thought to hear this. The most-used phrase in her grandmother’s vocabulary had been,
“¡Presta atención!”
It was always, “pay attention.”
“¡Presta atención, chica!”
Because Bettina’s mind had always been wandering, her attention captured by everything and anything and not always the task at hand. There was no place in the mysteries for a
soñadora,
a daydreamer. Only for true dreamers. “Remember this one small piece of advice,” Abuela would say. “You must always be focused. You must see everything at once, as it is, or you will lose yourself in all the possibilities of what might be, and for you and I, who can so easily slip into
la época del mito,
that could take us a very great distance indeed. It could take us so far we might never return.”

“You’re amused,” Lisette said, bringing Bettina back to the studio from that place where her memories had taken her.

Bettina nodded. “I was thinking of my grandmother. When I was young, her one complaint to me was always that I wasn’t focused enough.”

“Something you’ve outgrown, I assume.”

“So it would seem,” Bettina agreed, though she wasn’t entirely sure. Sometimes she felt she was still too much the
soñadora,
not the true dreamer. Not serious enough. Though, she remembered, Abuela could be anything but serious, too. If the fancy happened to take her, she could readily play
la tonta loca,
the crazy fool.

Lisette walked back behind her easel and picked up a brush.

“Do you have time for one more twenty-minute session?” she asked.

“Sí,”
Bettina said.

But she paused as she passed the window, her gaze caught by a stranger she saw standing on the lawn by the tree line. Something in his stance reminded Bettina of that part of
la época del mito
where
el lobo
had taken her last weekend, of the priest she’d seen by the salmon pool whose existence
el
lobo
had denied. The figure wore a dark overcoat with an old-fashioned cut and stood with his back to them, facing the forest.

Even from this distance Bettina could see how
la brujería
clung to him, like shadows to the branches of the trees beyond him. It was not a healer’s magic, not quite witchcraft either, but something new to her. Potent and strange.

“Ah,” Lisette said, joining her by the window. “The Recluse is back,”

“The who?”

Lisette shrugged. “I don’t know her name, but she winters every year in the old cottage—you know, the original one that Hanson’s supposed to have built and lived in. She usually moves in again around the end of November, the beginning of December.”

Bettina remembered seeing smoke rising from its chimney the other night, but that hadn’t struck her as odd. She’d thought that one of the writers was living in it.

“This is the first time I’ve seen her this year,” Lisette went on. “I wonder where she spends her summers?”

Bettina turned to look at her. “You keep saying ‘her’ and ‘she,’ but… ?”

Lisette smiled. “Oh, I know she looks butch, but she’s a woman, the same as you or me.” Her smile broadened a little. “Well, probably more like me than you, if you know what I mean.”

Bettina returned her gaze to the stranger who was walking along the tree line now, her face in profile. She still didn’t look like a woman to Bettina. Not with her short-cropped hair and strong jaw, the man’s gait and the masculine set to her features. Bettina thought of Kellygnow’s housekeeper Nuala. She might dress as a man, but for her it seemed more a choice of style and a man’s clothing could do nothing to disguise Nuala’s womanly shape. This woman Lisette had referred to as the Recluse appeared to be deliberately confusing the issue.

And she still reminded Bettina of the priest by the salmon pool, though she wore no priest’s collar today.
La brujería
had been strong then, too, but she had put that down as their being in myth time.

“Is she a writer or an artist?” Bettina asked.

Lisette shrugged. “I don’t really know. She doesn’t mix with the rest of us. Someone told me a couple of years ago that she’s an old friend of the family— the Hansons, that is.”

“I thought they were all dead and gone—that some foundation looked after all the business now.”

“It does,” Lisette said. “But that doesn’t preclude special dispensation for certain individuals. Consider yourself. I don’t think there’s ever been a model in residence for as long as you’ve been—not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

“And speaking of modeling,” Bettina said.

Lisette nodded. “Yes. We should get back to it. I’m sure someone else has you booked for the afternoon.”

Bettina shook her head. “Not today. I’m going to work with Salvador after lunch.”

Lisette had been squeezing some paint onto her palette, but paused now.

“Really?” she said.

“Mmhmm.”

“Lord, you even have the look of one who relishes the idea.”

“Oh, I do. I love physical labor. It helps center me.”

Lisette smiled. “I’ll take paint on my hands over dirt under my nails any day.”

With that she went back to considering her palette. Bettina returned to the chair where she’d been posing. She lined up the chalk marks on the floor for her feet, on the arms of her chair for her hands, found the sightlines to get her head back in the right position once more.

“Move your head a little more to the left,” Lisette said. “And bring your chin up just a touch. A little more. There. That’s it.”

Bettina and Salvador had most of the wood split when Nuala came out to join them. Normally they would have had it all split and stacked by the end of summer, before the first snow fell, but Nuala’s intuition had told her that it was going to be a long winter so she had Salvador order in a couple of extra cords of seasoned wood just to be on the safe side.

Bettina was always comfortable in Salvador’s company. He reminded her of the men on her mother’s side of the family: strong and tall, darkly handsome, good-humored and generous of spirit. Now in his sixties, he was still straight-backed and strong, his hair and moustache a grizzled gray. And like her uncles, he was forever teasing her.