Heart Stopper (25 page)

Catherine was standing at the kitchen door watching a lime green van leave. The horn beeped and a hand waved from the driver’s window as the van passed under the canopy of trees. She beamed as she hugged Reyna and then Skyler and hustled all of them into the kitchen.

∞

Reyna slumped down at the kitchen table and put her face in her hands. Skyler had agreed that Trio needed sleep as much as he did and was now asleep on the couch in the living room. The dog had jumped onto the couch and waited on the boy’s feet until he slept, then hopped out of the house.

Catherine made them tea and sat down at the table with Reyna.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch in the last month.” Reyna’s voice was muffled in her palms. “After Priya’s decision, I just took off with Skyler. Did you try to get in touch?”

Catherine said nothing and Reyna looked at her through her parted fingers. The look of confusion on Catherine’s face matched Priya’s face earlier.

Catherine said, “You asked us not to contact you.” She shook her head. “I thought you and Simone didn’t want contact with me.”

“What?” Reyna stared at Catherine. “What the hell would Simone have to do with it?”

Catherine sighed. “I knew I should have called you to check. But Priya was so upset and so sure.”

“Priya? Mother, you are going to have to tell me what the hell is going on.”

“From your reaction, I gather Simone is what is going on. I think that woman has managed to mess you up again.” Catherine patted Reyna’s hand. “Priya spent the six months healing. After the last few years, she needed that. And so did you. I didn’t protest at the time when you both decided to wait the six months. I knew you both needed to sort your own messes out and to heal. But I hated the idea that it would come down to one phone call.”

“Which she didn’t make.” Reyna said bitterly.

“Yes she did. She called you at 6 p.m. on February 1
^st
as you both agreed.”

Reyna said, “No, she didn’t. I waited by the phone.”

Catherine paused, and then said, “You know I wonder sometimes how you two managed to agree on anything. Did you forget the time difference?”

Reyna leaned back in the chair. A sheepish look wandered onto her face.

“I guess there was so much going on…No, we didn’t clarify that bit.” She paused and thought back. “So Priya must have called at noon New York time when Simone was dropping Skyler off at the house. I left them there when I collected the papers from the lawyer’s office.”

“Well, it was Simone who answered the phone. Which upset Priya anyway, but not as much as what Simone told her. Which was that you two were back together, that you had never stopped loving your wife and that no bit of fluff could ever come between you.”

Reyna felt the familiar rage at Simone creep into her.

Catherine continued, “It was devastating for Priya. She had moved out here soon after her surgery. She got to spend a lot of time with her father when he lived with us for a few months. She adopted Trio, finished her Art Therapy course. She started painting again and we set up the therapy room in Spiddal at the gallery. I was starting to heal as well; I spent a lot of time with her dad, Joe. We were all doing really well, coming to terms with all that loss and grief. You should see the portrait Priya did of you if you really want to know what she feels about you. Or felt. I’ve had to keep it in my room since that phone call. And then she calls you to ask you to come back and hears this from the woman she thinks is your wife. And I have to hear that you don’t want anything to do with us because I had tried to separate you again.” Catherine’s voice had risen as she spoke.

Reyna couldn’t speak.

Catherine lowered her voice. “After what happened with your grandfather, I think I hid away from you as well. I was scared you would never forgive me if you found out. I don’t know if I can forgive myself, but it was his choice in the end. I just gave him the means.”

It was Reyna’s turn to be confused.

Catherine got up and dragged a chair over to the kitchen cupboard. She climbed up, felt around the top of the cupboards, and retrieved an object that she carefully placed on the table in front of Reyna.

The matchbox-sized device lay on the table winking silver in the light of the sun.

Catherine whispered, “I hope you can forgive me.” She took the device in her hands and walked out onto the patio. She put the device down, grabbed one of the curbstones from the edge of the patio, and brought it down hard, smashing the device. The slivers of metal spread in a circle, wires and miniature circuits curling at their centre. Catherine gathered up what she could, dumped the pieces in the trash, her movements slow and tired.

Reyna still couldn’t speak and Catherine laid a hand on her shoulder and said, “I’m going to lie down with Sky. I think there is somebody you need to talk to.” She wandered out of the room to join the boy before Reyna could correct her.

∞

Priya wasn’t in the extension and there was no sign of Trio either. Reyna heard the sound of barking from the direction of the lake and walked down the path through the forest.

Priya was sitting on the grass where they had lain. She was throwing stones for Trio who dashed into the shallow water after every stone. He barked as he stared at each stone under water and then looked back at Priya for the next one.

“Are you being cruel to the poor thing?” Reyna sat beside Priya. “Throwing things to him that he can’t get.”

“I’m not the one who makes an art form of that. Besides, he goes in for them after I throw a few. He gathers them up in a little pile on the shore. He’s just delaying, and possibly showing off for you.”

Priya threw another stone and Trio chased it, grabbing it in his mouth and hopping to the grass bank where he dropped it. He splashed off again and stuck his head in the water emerging drenched, but triumphant, with his prize, which he deposited beside the other stone before repeating the process.

“Priya, there is so much I need to tell you.” Reyna caught her breath as Priya turned those eyes on her. She hurried on. “There was so much to deal with. I closed down the Research Company and sold TechMed and settled with the families of the technicians who died and with John Landon and also with Liam Whelan. I’m still going to run the Fairer Foundation, but I’m going to do it from here as I keep an eye on the clinic. I sorted out the divorce and custody.”

She smiled as Priya’s mouth fell open.

“Yes, Priya, my divorce. I have not been married in any sense of the word since Simone had the affair with that kid and got pregnant. I stayed with her because of Skyler, because she threatened to take him away. And I knew he needed me. She didn’t want him. When we finally reached an agreement, she came to the house to drop him off. I hear she spoke to you.”

Priya nodded.

Reyna said, “When I didn’t hear from you, I thought… But I couldn’t let it go like that. I figured that if I moved over and hung around, you might feel something for me again. I had a speech all ready for you and it was a really good one where I could finally tell what I felt. Then I see you and all the planning goes out of the window. I just know that you make me feel alive again, make me trust, make me laugh. I keep remembering your smile, your gentleness, your courage, your kiss. The cute way you misquote stuff and don’t even know you’re doing it. I didn’t expect to find out you had called.”

She stopped speaking as Priya leant over and kissed her.

They laughed as Trio interrupted a few minutes later with a shake and a spray of muddy water over them. He rested his head on Priya’s lap. His wet fur was sticking out in every direction.

Priya said, as she smiled back at the dog, “I know he’s a mutt, but he’s beautiful to me.”

Reyna pulled her close. “The way you’d say it, beauty is in the heart of the beholder.”

THE END

R J Samuel
was born in Nigeria, to Indian parents from Kerala. She grew up in Nigeria with a brief stint in boarding school in the Nilgiri Hills in India and occasional summers in Kerala, London, and New York. She moved to Ireland at 17 to complete her medical studies and vividly remembers the shock of arriving at Galway Train Station on an icy October night. Despite that traumatic first meeting, she fell in love with Galway and has remained there since, apart from a 3-year episode in the southwest of France. She is an Irish citizen and now considers herself almost Irish as well as almost Indian. She has been writing creatively for many years, apart from her period in France where she wrote nothing creative, probably because she was running a restaurant-bar despite having a background in Medicine (she is a qualified medical doctor) and IT (she has a Masters in IT) and absolutely no background in restaurants, apart from eating in them.

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Also by R J Samuel

The Vision Painter Series

Falling Colours
– Kiran is a vision painter. The only vision painter working in Ireland. Her practice isn’t doing too well and she works as a waitress in a struggling restaurant in Connemara. Everything changes when she meets a woman. And makes a tiny wee mistake.

See
Chapter One of Falling Colours
after the Acknowledgements

Casting Shadows
– The sequel to Falling Colours. A story of love, sacrifice, betrayal, and guilt. Of love and hatred that spans time and place. Of history that casts shadows on the future.

To Jesse, Hamish, Clio, and the rest of the menagerie, past and present. Love is not a strong enough word.

Thanks to all my readers, especially those who have given feedback. Thanks to Maeve Healy and Felicia (Flish) McCarthy for pushing the boat off the shore and keeping an eye on it during the journey, with a steadying hand and encouraging words. Thanks to Mary McGann, Bernadette White, Yvonne McEvaddy, and Evelyn Parsons, my early readers who provided excellent feedback and helped me to continue and to finish. And to Susan Millar DuMars, for her thoughtful and very helpful critique. Thanks to the members of the Kujowriters group who patiently listened to the early chapters at Java’s (where one can find the best ‘vegetarian’ chicken Panini).

My research into pacemakers took me to many websites where I found a lot of technical information, but I am also grateful for the human stories that influenced my approach to the technical aspects of the novel.

The client shifted in his chair, the creak loud in the room and Kiran tried to hide her worry; she wasn’t sure she could afford a new chair. He tapped the pen against his teeth and stared at her. His expression was blank. She sighed inside. Why did people come to her before they had worked out what they wanted? They had one session. Only one. Those were the rules. But that session could last the day if, like this client, they didn’t bloody well think it through before taking up her time.

But then clients weren’t exactly camped outside her door. And she was supposed to be the caring, sharing, healing Indian type. She wondered if he had absorbed the payment details. They usually did. While they were at the session. They were thrilled to discover that they couldn’t pay. Not with money. And not immediately. They had to wait for the vision to materialize and then paint in their gratitude to her. She was beginning to think that Ireland was either full of very forgetful people or bad painters.

The client was finally scratching his pen across her Vision Painting Application Form. She’d been bored and had used a graphics package to design a text logo and a few empty boxes. She couldn’t use images; she wasn’t allowed to influence their visions, not by words, deeds, images. Most times, as she gazed at the forms after the clients left, she wished she could change the images as she painted, adjust a little hope here, add a dream there. But the punishment for breaking any one of the myriad rules was the failure of the visualization. And who was she to design a life; hers was not a pretty picture.

His stubby fingers gripping the pen produced a floral script that remained neat and within the lines. His forehead glistened as he wrote. Kiran was glad the heating was off. It was still technically summer in Connemara in August but the house could get cold if she didn’t leave the boiler on. She wondered whether she had enough kerosene in the tank; another worry that she would have to put off until the winter.

He had finished applying for his dreams and the chair squealed loudly this time, the soft leather seat fluffing itself back out with an indignant puff when he raised himself out of it. He handed her the form and smiled and her heart burned at the hope in his eyes. The energy would come and she would paint him a powerful picture; she prayed he had made the right choices.

Kiran saw him to the front door and watched as he climbed into a grey middle-aged car. The car crunched over the gravel driveway as he struggled to get the seatbelt around his torso. She smiled and waved back as he tooted the horn and waved at the rear-view mirror.

She wandered back into the office that doubled as a studio. The shine off her well-used desk was dulled by stacks of papers but they were bills, not completed Vision Painting Application Forms. A screen cordoned off half of the room that included the area in front of the large bay windows which was reserved for her easel, a battered pine table, a second-hand armchair, and a bookcase that held her paint supplies.

She examined the form.
Great! Again!
How the hell was she supposed to paint ‘mortgage debt forgiveness’ and ‘happiness’?
They were concepts, people, not visions
. All he’d had to do was figure out what would make him happy and write that down. Well, at least she had some physical features to paint. He wanted to be tall, with broad shoulders, a slim tapered waist and the profile of a Roman God.
Lovely
, now she’d have to research what Roman Gods looked like, she had a vague feeling they just had prominent noses. Or was that Greek Gods?

He had of course written down the word ‘money’, but again, there wasn’t all that much space on a canvas and she couldn’t draw out each banknote. She’d solved that problem before by drawing out 500 euro notes in stacks but she was getting fed up of the effort and since they didn’t have the courtesy to get back to her, probably now too rich she assumed, she didn’t know if was only the top notes that materialized.

Kiran pulled out a blank canvas from a stack of 1m x 1m canvases lying in the corner of the room. Another rule. She wondered if her father had made up some of the rules or whether they had actually been passed down to him as he insisted. The last time her parents had visited from their retirement home in Kerala he had explained, again, that the rules were out of his control. That things worked better in India because people remember to paint in the gratitude. That the vision painters there lived comfortable lives. And, of course the usual scolding, why had she chosen to stay on in Ireland where there were no vision painters. Only a few worked in the UK, not even enough for an Association or Union. Here in Ireland, for some reason, people seemed to think she was an Art Therapist.

They’d been sitting in the Roisin Dubh, her unfulfilled potential laying heavy on the table between them, and he had patted her hand and they both knew the rules meant no vision painter could paint for another. So they didn’t talk about her dreams. Which she couldn’t paint either. Onto any canvas. This was the only rule that, if broken, led to the immediate loss of the vision painter’s talent. Her father was halfway through his spiel on the mythic qualities of the latest tubes of paint that he was developing with an American manufacturer, the cream and black Guinness sliding in between the white hairs on his upper lip, when she’d sighed and told him to cut the Indian Swami shite. Fair play, he had stopped with a grin, and had left some of the test tubes of colour for her when they left.

Kiran set up the studio, turning on the heat and the lights even though the sunlight streaked in through the glass. While she painted, nothing else existed, and when she finished the room would be dark and cold if she didn’t prepare it.

She placed the blank canvas on the easel and laid out the tubes of paint on the pine table beside it. She unfolded a white cotton sheet, stained with the dreams of her previous clients, and arranged it on the floor; lifting the easel and resting it back down so that any stray paint would not mark the old oak wood floors. She caressed the paints onto the palette and lined the brushes in readiness.

Kiran curled up in the armchair and stared at the form, stroking the paper, absorbing every word, imagining pictures of his vision. For the next few hours she would be immersed in his dreams and she needed to empty her mind of her thoughts, to empty her heart of her desires, to focus solely on this person who had come to her, to justify his faith. When she was ready, she moved to the easel and picked up her favourite brush.

When she came out of the trance, the life she had breathed on to the canvas hummed behind her. She crawled onto the armchair and tried to regain her own.

∞
 
∞
 
∞

The sunlight wandered through the window and settled on her face and, despite her exhaustion, Kiran smiled as she blinked her eyes open. She remained in the depths of the armchair allowing the heat to seep through her skin. She was drained and while it took a few days to fully recover from each painting session she had to be at the restaurant the next day for the afternoon shift.

The doorbell pounded in her brain and Kiran put her fingers in her ears and buried her head further into the armchair. The noise didn’t stop so she rolled herself onto the floor and crawled to the front door. The caller had now stopped pressing on the ringer. Instead, a shaft of daylight slanted a line through the gloom of the hall as fingers propped open the letter-flap. Kiran knelt and looked out the flap. The light was sharp but the eyes that stared back at her were sharper. The angle of the light revealed the surface of a planet, a tan and shadow striated volcano that shrank into the encircling bands of gold as the pupils dilated. Kiran realized she was on her knees in her hallway staring through the letter-flap at a beautiful woman. And she hadn’t even combed her hair yet. She jerked to her feet and ran her fingers through her hair, cursing her luck.

The flap sprung back with a metal clang. Kiran took a deep breath, placed a smile on her face, and opened the door. She stood staring at the woman standing there. She needed to say something; it didn’t look good for her to be wordless in front of her clients no matter how cute they were.
How insipid a word for a vision painter to find in her vocabulary
?
Cute
! This woman was a fire walking around in human form.

Oh no, how long had she been staring
? The woman was looking at her, a glimpse of a smile lurking on her lips which was where Kiran’s eyes were now drawn. Kiran closed her eyes. That was better.
She was a Professional
. The capital letter was important.
Great
, this
Professional
was standing in her hallway with her eyes closed, her hair falling in black shades with the occasional tuft freewheeling away from the crowd, her face devoid of decoration, looking like she had spent the night on the floor after a mad session at the world’s liveliest nightclub. And she had that inane grin still welded on her face.

Kiran opened her eyes as the woman spoke.

“Hello, I saw your card at the restaurant. I hope you don’t mind me turning up like this. I couldn’t get through on the phone number and I didn’t want to put it off in case I backed out.”

The timbre of her voice was the perfect shade of autumn. Her hair rustled with red and gold, dropping leaves onto her shoulders.

Kiran cleared her throat. Her voice still emerged as a croak. “It’s no problem. Come in. Sorry, I just finished a painting and that always lays me out for a while.”
And I wouldn’t normally take on a client the next day but Mother, may I
?

Kiran turned back into the house and led the way to the office studio. She snatched the bustling canvas off the easel and hid it away with the paints and palettes. Her previous client might as well have been draped in a toga, he looked so Roman. She pointed to the chair and sank into her own behind the antique desk. She’d get them coffee and clean up while her new client was writing.

“Do you know much about what this involves? Have you ever been to a Vision Painter before?”

The woman shook her head. Kiran dragged her eyes away from the flames curling around the straight lines of jaw and neck. It was harder to look into those eyes so she stared at the trees that peeked in through the windows peering back at her around the woman’s silhouette, their leaves comparing and admiring as Kiran had done.

“Okay. I’ll explain the process and the rules and if you’re comfortable to do it, we can start whenever you’re ready.”

The woman nodded.

“I need you to think about what you want in your life. Try to be as exact as possible. You can write this vision out in words, or draw it if you want. I can only paint what you describe. I’m not allowed to add or take away anything. What I paint will materialize in the timeframe you specify. There is no monetary fee.”

Kiran smiled at the look of surprise on the woman’s face.

“The payment, if you can call it that, comes later. When what I paint materializes for you, you can paint something onto your canvas for me. Or if you don’t have paints, just use a pen or pencil and draw it in.”

Kiran broke a rule. She couldn’t help it; she had to see more of this woman.

She said, “You can come in over the next few weeks and perfect your vision if you want. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Ashley.”

“Okay, Ashley. I’ll give you a form now and I’ll go and get us something to drink.”

She handed Ashley a form and went to the door. She couldn’t do it. She turned back and she could feel the heat of red in her cheeks.

“Actually, Ashley, we’re only allowed one session. It can be as long as you like but once you give me the completed form and leave, that’s it as far as that visualization is concerned.”

Kiran was glad blushes weren’t obvious on her brown skin, that her cheeks just turned a shade darker. As Ashley quirked an eyebrow, Kiran felt like sinking through the wooden floor, of blending into the pools of blue and gold in the silk rug. Again, a crimson tinged twitch of those lips. Kiran hurried to the kitchen. Ashley was getting coffee; that was all Kiran could manage and she was not waiting around to ask what the woman wanted to drink.

She cleaned herself up but didn’t put on any makeup. That would be too obvious.
Professional
, she reminded herself. Still capitalized. She wandered back into the office with their coffees and settled down to wait and drown in looking; she hoped this client would take the whole day and night and maybe the next morning too. After which, Kiran had her shift at the restaurant. Obviously none of her clients had figured out how to paint in ‘mortgage debt forgiveness’ for her either.