Restoration: A Novel (Contemporary / Women's Fiction) (9 page)

Francesca’s faraway gaze shifted back to Tess and the
present.  She glanced at her wristwatch.  “My dear Tess, you cannot avoid
returning to your chemistry lesson any longer.  Come.”  Francesca rose from her
chair.  “Let us return to our work.  Tomorrow we learn a little more about each
other.  Now, we must concentrate on other things.”

Tess stayed seated.  “You could try and find her now.”

“It has been over thirty years, and we are not the same
people.”

“You don’t know that.  You still care for her.  That’s
obvious.”

“In life, there are some things that cannot be changed and
done over again.”

Ben called from his cell phone.  He was running late.  It
was nearly eight o’clock when he arrived at Tess’s and bounded through her
front door with a wide grin stretched across his face.

“You look like the cat that just caught the mouse,” she
said.

“Better than that.  I was calling in a favor from a buddy
of mine.  Sorry I’m late.  You look great in that dress.”  He kissed her cheek
with the familiarity of an old lover, then walked over to her paintings, gazed
up at them and then at her.

“Peter McIntyre owns a gallery in Greenwich and a small
one in Chelsea.  He’s willing to consider showing your work in his Chelsea
gallery if it’s as good as I say it is.  Small hurdle.  Once he sees it for
himself, I know he’ll love it.”

“Ben, I told you I don’t paint anymore,” she rebuked him
while still standing by the open front door he’d just breezed through.

“I know, I know.”  Ben raised both hands in surrender. 
“Look, you don’t need to be painting now to show the work you’ve already
painted.  You can ask your father to ship your other paintings to you.  With
these pieces here, I’m sure they’ll make for a nice debut.”

“Is this what you’re so excited about?”

“You could sound just a little bit excited yourself.”

“I’m not, Ben.  I’m angry.”  She shoved the door closed. 
“I don’t paint anymore, I’m not interested in painting again and I’m not
interested in showing my work to anyone else, no matter how good you might
think it is.  Okay?  Now, can we just leave it at that?”

“Tess, this is a great opportunity.  I don’t understand
you.”

“No, you don’t!” she snapped.

“Then would you please explain it to me?”

“Why can’t you just leave it alone?”

“Because I don’t understand why a woman as talented as you
would so adamantly object to showing her work.  Are you afraid it’ll be
criticized?  It may be.  So what.  I’ve seen few artists who’ve been
universally praised.”

“It’s not that.”

“Then tell me what it is because I’m feeling as clueless
as a nun in a brothel.”

She marched past him, disappeared into her bedroom, and
returned holding a box.

“What’s that?”

“The other day you said something about Pandora’s box. 
You didn’t think you’d opened it.  Here it is.”  She heaved it toward him and
it thudded at his feet.  “See for yourself.”

Ben knelt down and opened the box.  Stacks of legal-size
envelopes filled it.  He picked one up, turned it over and saw that it was
addressed to Tess where she went to college.  There was no return address, just
a postmark from Starke, Florida. 

He pulled out the paper tucked inside and unfolded it,
revealing a charcoal drawing.  He emptied a few more envelopes.  There were
watercolors, other charcoal drawings and pencil sketches hidden inside.  They
were good.  Nothing to write home about, but the novice artist showed
potential.

He looked up at her.  “Your work?”

“From about age thirteen to seventeen.  Look at them
closely.”

He set the stack on the floor but kept one of the
watercolors.  He held it an angle, allowing more light to reflect off it.  Then
he saw it.  In the watercolor-created lake surrounded by palm trees was a crude
pencil drawing of a person who appeared to be holding another person
underwater.  Ben sorted through the other papers. 

Within each drawing, sketch and watercolor, he found a
second picture.  They were immature drawings.  The creator lacked talent but
not a violent imagination.  Each scene was always of a human figure harming
another: stabbing, raping, strangling. 

Ben glanced down at a charcoal sketch and found the
violent sub theme he knew would be hidden in it.  The same figure inhabiting
the others was dragging another person with a noose.

 “And these figures penciled in, you drew these as well?”

Her jaw line sharpened as she clenched her teeth.

“It’s understandable if you did.”  He waved his hand over
the charcoal sketch.  “I mean, I’m no psychiatrist, but it’s not a big leap to
think that with all the anger you were dealing with at that time in your life,
some of it came out through your art.  I can imagine that you wanted to hurt
this Randall Wright fellow and even your mother.”

“Those penciled-in scenes are his handiwork.”  Tess drew
in slow, deep breaths, steadying herself.  “That box is filled with paintings
and drawings I did for him.”

“You did these all for a man you hated?”

“No, I did them all for a woman I loved.”

Ben glanced up at her, the same confused expression he
wore while studying the papers now searching for meaning in her answer.

“My mother.”  Tess shook her head.  “My mother insisted I
make things for him.  She’d tell me it would brighten up his cell and make his
world a little nicer.  Of course, I didn’t want to do any such thing for him,
but I could do it for her.  She fawned all over me when I did, telling me how
wonderful I was and what beautiful work I did.  After that, I was hooked.  All
I had to do to hear her words of approval was draw and paint. 

“And so I did, for the next four years.  And whenever she
wasn’t visiting him or wasn’t wrapped up in his cause, I had the privilege of
seeing her.  I’d give her a new stack, and she’d give me another dose of love
and encouragement.”

Ben dipped his hand into the box, skimming his fingers
along the edges of dozens of envelopes.  He gazed at the corrupted charcoal
sketch still in his hands and shook his head.  “He did this to every one of
them and sent them back to you?”

“I started receiving them during my senior year in
college.  There was no note, at least at first there wasn’t; just my work with
his pictures scrawled somewhere in them.  As you get deeper into the stack, his
drawings are more prominent and violent.  Some are even in color. 

“And then I received a postcard from him.  All it said
was, ‘Did you like my pictures?  I drew them from memory.’  And I realized that
every horror he was accused of was recreated somewhere in my drawings.  If you
go through them, you won’t find any guns because he didn’t use a gun.  He
tortured his victims.  He used his hands, ropes and knives.  He raped some,
mutilated others.”

“Did you share these with your mother?”

“I told her about them.  Of course, she accused me of
making it all up, of putting the drawings in there myself.  She said if he was
sending my pictures back, it was only because the state was bound and
determined to kill him and he wouldn’t want them destroying my pictures he
loved so much when they cleaned out his cell.  That’s when I stopped having
anything to do with her.”

“I’m sorry, Tess.”  His face mirrored her pain.

“That was okay with her for a while because she was angry
with me for insisting he’d do something as horrible as what you’re holding in
your hands.  She said I’d become a part of the conspiracy against him. 
Somewhere along the line, she must’ve forgotten about it or forgiven me; I
don’t know which, but after a couple of years of not hearing anything from her,
I started getting messages from her passed through my brother and sister.”

“When did he stop sending these?”

She dipped her head in the wake of the question she
dreaded answering.  He’d connect all the dots; see all her flaws and all her
fears.  He’d figure out about Florence, not specifically, but that she was
destined for another city besides New York.  And then what?  Would he try to
stop her?  Talk her out of it?  Before she could think through the consequences
of her honesty, she told him.

“He hasn’t stopped.”

Ben sorted through the envelopes, methodically at first
and then hurried through them.  He saw the addresses to her post-college
residences; six in Atlanta and three in Chicago.  By Chicago, she’d gotten
better at packing up her life and moving on.

“Did you show these to the police?”

“What are the police going to do?  Arrest him?  For all I
know, my mother is the one mailing them at his request.  I expect to hear from
him soon.”

“Why keep them and hang on to such painful memories?”

Tess opened her mouth, her words innocently perched on her
tongue until she realized what she was about to say and stopped herself.

“What is it?”

She shook her head, pained by the image she saw of the
girl she was.  “They’re my proof.  I guess I’m waiting for her to believe me.”

Ben gave her a moment to grieve that thought before
asking, “How many has he sent to New York?”  

“None…yet.  But my mother’s tracked me down, so I expect
to hear from him soon.  I hope they fry the bastard before that.”

“I see.”  Ben nodded while staring at the postmark of the
last envelope sent to her in Chicago and kept whatever thoughts were
circulating in his mind to himself.  He tucked the drawings back into the
envelopes, returned them to the box, and stood up.  “And you stopped painting?”

“My senior year, yes.”

“How do you go from painting to maintaining someone else’s
work?”

She paused.  The conversation that had started about her
painting had come full circle.  Tess anticipated questions about her frequent
moves, not about her career.  “My minor was in restoration.  After I stopped
painting it made sense for me to pursue it as a career.”

“Restoring museum-quality work and painting contemporary
art are very different.”

“I didn’t have a lot of options.”

“But you must miss painting?” he persisted.

“I did, especially at first.  Oh, Ben, don’t look at me
that way.  You have to understand I was like a person in a wheelchair who’d
severed her spinal cord.  There was no way I could walk again or even be the
same person I was.  Once I got past that realization, I was able to make a new
life for myself.  In these situations, you do what you can do instead of pining
away for what’s lost.”

“I can’t accept that, Tess.” 

“What do you mean, you can’t accept that?” she asked,
suddenly annoyed.  “You don’t have to accept anything.  It’s my life.  They’re
decisions I’ve had to make, realizations I’ve had to accept.  Not yours.”

“But your paintings, Tess, you must…”  He stopped when he
saw her close her eyes and ball up her quaking hands into tight fists.

“I tried, Ben.  I tried, but every time I faced an empty
canvas, I saw his drawings on them.  And when I tried painting those images
away, they kept surfacing, and I kept trying to cover them until pain mangled
the canvas.  I can’t see it anymore.” 

She squeezed her eyelids shut tighter until deep lines
radiated from the corners of her eyes.

“I had a gift.  It was like having visions.  Michelangelo
said about his sculptures that he merely freed the figures from the marble.  I
knew what he meant, because I could look at an empty canvas and free the
picture that was hiding within it.  But I can’t now because I don’t see like
that anymore.”

She felt Ben’s arms enfold her.  She pressed her face into
his chest, hiding there while tears escaped her closed eyes and trickled down
her cheeks.  She hadn’t cried in years. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered with her face still hidden in
his chest.

“I’m not.”

When her tears stopped and all she felt were the sticky
tracks of the fallen ones, she looked up at him.  “I didn’t think I was still
in mourning.”

Tess grimaced beneath the shadow of his tender smile.  It
pained her and pulled her at the same time, reminding her of the first intimate
touch she’d experienced as a teenager, the awkward hand of another teen
touching the virgin skin on her chest.  She remembered how it made her flinch,
electricity seemingly jumping from her date’s hand to her skin.  The intensity
was too much for her, and she recalled shooing his hand away, yet finding
herself strangely attracted to the new unrecognizable feeling circulating
through her body. 

And yet Ben wasn’t even touching her and she felt this
strange sensation.

She reached up, wrapped her hand behind Ben’s neck and
pulled his head toward hers.  As their lips met, their kiss wasn’t the frantic,
hungry kiss of the other night but an unhurried discovery of each other.  When
their lips parted company, their faces remained close.  They held one another
in their gazes.  She didn’t want to blink, afraid his tender features would
change in the instant of her blinking eyelids.

“Can we cancel dinner plans for tonight?” she asked.  “I’d
rather stay here with you holding me.”

He hugged her tighter until she led him into her bedroom,
where they lay down on top of the covers.  She caught his smile as he noticed
the roses he’d sent her displayed on her nightstand.  She nestled next to him
as he lay on his back and found it strange but refreshing to lie in bed with a
man, fully clothed and without any intention of removing them.

Her past relationships left undefined what she was feeling
with Ben.  Absent was the highly charged sexual inclination that ruled past
relationships.  Something else besides her physical being was present,
something she had no words for, something more intimate; whatever it was, she
didn’t want to trade this intimacy for sex, at least not yet, and she wasn’t
sure if or how the two co-existed.  Uniqueness permeated every facet of her
relationship with Ben.