A Woman Without Lies

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Nothing,” Angel said.

  “Keep searching,” Hawk said, the corners of his mouth curling in a secret smile beneath his mustache. “You’ll find it.”

  For a few seconds Angel took Hawk at his word and wriggled her fingers around in his pockets. Then she felt the heat and hardness of him swelling beneath his jeans.

  “You’re teasing me,” she said, trying to look angry and failing utterly.

  “I would have sworn I was the one being teased,” Hawk said, his voice deep and rich with hidden laughter. Then Angel’s hand moved inside his pocket and his breath caught.

  “My shirt pocket, Angel.”

  She smiled with an innocence that was belied by the dancing light of her eyes. Slowly, very slowly, she removed her hands from Hawk’s pockets.

  The insect repellent was indeed in the breast pocket of Hawk’s cotton flannel shirt. She applied the pungent lotion to his exposed skin and to her own. Then she put the small squeeze bottle back—in his front jeans pocket.

  “The repellent only works against insects,” Hawk pointed out.

  “That’s a relief,” Angel said, smiling with an invitation that made his eyes gleam.

  Then Angel turned and ran toward the raspberry brambles, making the silver bells at her ankle and wrist shiver with music.

  For a moment Hawk stood and watched her graceful flight, aching with a hunger that went much deeper than the temporary urgency of desire. Then he began to run, moving lightly despite his burden.

  Angel was soon lost to sight in the twists and turns of the bramble patch, but the sweet silver cries of the bells called to Hawk, telling him that she was close.

  He caught up to Angel in a clearing where the raspberries had not yet grown. The air was thick with the delicate perfume of ripening fruit. Leaves shimmered and stirred lazily beneath a caressing wind. Canes laden with fruit arched richly against the cobalt sky, and the serrated green foliage quivered with golden sunlight.

  “Derry was right,” Hawk said, turning to Angel. “You know every beautiful place on the island. Or maybe it’s simply that you bring beauty to every place you are.”

  “It must be you,” Angel said, her voice husky. “I don’t remember the homestead being like this before.”

  She took the buckets from his hand and waited while he spread the quilt and put the picnic basket in the shade. When he came back to her, she silently held out a bucket to him. Then she laced her fingers through Hawk’s as she led him toward the bushes heavy with fruit.

  “Berrying is a cross between clamming and crabbing,” Angel said. “Like crabs, raspberry bushes will get you if you’re careless.”

  “No free lunch?” suggested Hawk dryly.

  “No free lunch,” Angel agreed. “The first rule of berrying is that if the fruit were easy to pick, something would have picked it already.”

  Hawk smiled slightly. “Any other rules?”

  “Don’t eat more than one berry for every one you put in the bucket. Otherwise you’ll get sick.”

  “Learned that the hard way, didn’t you?” Hawk guessed.

  “Is there any other way to learn?”

  Angel showed Hawk how to choose the best fruit, ripe without being mushy, tart without being green. They picked side by side, sharing a companionable silence.

  “Is this one ripe?” Hawk asked finally, holding out a berry to Angel.

  “Only one way to be sure.”

  Angel opened her mouth expectantly. Smiling, Hawk fed her the berry. She made a clicking sound with her tongue.

  “A bit tart,” she said.

  Angel looked at a cluster of raspberries hanging from a nearby cane. Picking the most perfect berry, she turned back to Hawk.

  “Try this one,” she offered.

  Hawk sucked the raspberry from Angel’s fingertips, licking her skin as he did. He closed his eyes and made a sound of pleasure.

  “It tastes like you,” he murmured. “Incredible.”

  Hawk opened his mouth again in silent request. Angel popped in another berry. He opened his mouth again, and then again, until she laughed and stood on tiptoe, kissing him.

  The taste of Hawk and raspberries swept over Angel’s senses. Suddenly she clung to him, kissing him as wildly as he had kissed her on Eagle Head. When the embrace finally ended, they both were breathing raggedly.

  “How many more berries does Mrs. Carey need?” asked Hawk, his eyes a clear brown fire.

  “Buckets and buckets.”

  Hawk swore softly.

  “Then we’d better get to it,” he said, reluctantly stepping back from Angel.

  They returned to picking, working quickly, watching each other with secret, sidelong glances. They filled their buckets, emptied them into a larger container, and returned to picking.

  “You’re eating more than you’re putting in the bucket,” Angel said after a time.

  Hawk turned toward her. His mouth was stained with the rich juice of the fruit he had been sneaking like a child.

  “But if I get sick,” he said, “I’ll have something better than a hot water bottle to curl up with.”

  Smiling, Hawk and Angel both returned to picking. Then Angel found an extraordinary raspberry. Full, richly colored, all but bursting with sweetness, the berry glowed like a jewel in her palm. She set down her bucket and ran to Hawk.

  “This is the most perfect raspberry I’ve ever seen,” Angel said, holding it between her thumb and forefinger. “Open up.”

  Hawk looked at the transparent red juice staining Angel’s lips rather than at the berry.

  “You found it,” he said. “It should be for you.”

  “It’s got your name on it.”

  The corners of Hawk’s mouth curled up gently. He looked at the bright, unblemished berry.

  “I don’t see my name,” he said.

  “The light must be wrong for you,” Angel said, letting the raspberry roll down and nestle in her palm. “See? Right there. Your name.”

  Hawk looked, but he saw only the love implicit in Angel’s gift. Slowly he bent his head. He licked the berry from her palm, then kissed the spot where the fruit had rested.

  The ache Hawk felt slicing through him had nothing to do with desire, and everything to do with the angel who watched him with love in her eyes.

  Hawk wanted to ask where Angel’s softness and strength had come from, to delicately touch every secret of her past and future, to know if he could ever love as she did, sweetness and fire and courage in equal measure. Yet even as he opened his mouth, he knew he couldn’t ask that of her.

  So Hawk asked the only question he could, and Angel heard the other question beneath it, the one he couldn’t ask.

  “Are these wild raspberries?” Hawk asked, looking at the thicket that all but surrounded him.

  “No. They’re like a house cat that has gone feral,” Angel said. “Bred and created by man, for man, and then abandoned to live alone. Most things that are treated like that wither and die. Some things survive . . . and in the right season the strongest of the survivors bear a sweet, wild fruit that is the most beautiful thing on earth. Like you, Hawk.”

  Hawk let the bucket of raspberries slip from his hand. He picked up Angel in a single, swift movement, and then he held her tightly, saying all that he could, her name a song on his lips until his mouth found hers in a kiss that left both of them shaking.

  He carried her to the quilt and undressed her as though it were the first time, his hands exquisitely gentle, his mouth a sweet fire consuming her. When she could bear no more he came to her, filling her mind and her body, loving her in the only way he could.

  It was the same later that night, a beauty that destroyed and created Angel, death and rebirth in the arms of the man she loved. She touched Hawk equally, fire and hunger, the promise of her mouth both hot and sweet, innocent and knowing, worshipping his body until he pulled her around him and was burned to his soul by an angel’s ecstatic fire.

  Long after Angel fell asleep in
his arms, Hawk lay awake, watching the patterns of moonlight and darkness beyond Angel’s windows. Then he slowly eased away from her, holding his breath for fear that she would wake.

  If she awakened, Hawk wouldn’t have the strength to leave her. He would stay and stay, drinking from the well of her love, giving nothing in return.

  If I stay, I’ll destroy her.

  For long, long minutes, Hawk stood beside the bed and watched his angel sleep. He bent down, aching to touch her, but did not. His hand hesitated over the pillow next to her head.

  Then Hawk turned and walked soundlessly out of the house, into the night.

  Sunlight woke Angel, sunlight spilling in golden magnificence across her pillow. She murmured sleepily and reached for Hawk. Her hand touched emptiness. She sat up quickly, looking around. And then she froze.

  Resting on Hawk’s pillow was a small candy cane wrapped with a shiny green ribbon.

  Angel put her head in her hands and wept, knowing that Hawk had gone.

  26

  Derry looked at Angel’s wan face and determined smile.

  “I don’t have to leave for Harvard right away,” he said. “I’ll wait until Hawk wraps up whatever he had to do and comes back.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Angel’s voice was calm, but her eyes too dark in a face that was too pale, her skin almost transparent.

  “Are you sure?” Derry asked.

  “Yes.”

  Angel said no more. There was no reason to disturb Derry’s assumption that Hawk had left her only long enough to put his business in order. Derry had enough to worry about with moving thousands of miles and learning to walk on his leg again. He didn’t need to add Angel to his list of problems.

  Nor was there any reason for Derry to stay with her. Not really. She needed to be alone, but she didn’t think Derry would understand that.

  “Do you need any help packing the last of your things?” she asked.

  “No. Matt, Dave, and I got it done while you were out berrying yesterday. Hawk told me not to worry about the furniture or anything. Said to leave everything just as it is.”

  Emotion seethed through Angel, fighting against the serenity that she had finally imposed over her grief.

  It was only yesterday that she and Hawk had been together, feeding berries to one another, laughing, staining their hands and mouths with the bursting summer sweetness of ripe fruit until passion flared and they kissed each other deeply and tasted a wilder, sweeter fruit.

  “All I have left here is the suitcase that I’m taking on the plane,” added Derry, “and it’s already packed.”

  A horn sounded out front. One of Derry’s friends who was also going to the mainland had come to take him to the ferry. The horn sounded again.

  Angel looked at the clock in her studio. She bent down and picked up the small suitcase Derry had set by the door.

  “You’d better hurry,” she said.

  “Angie—”

  Angel turned and walked into Derry’s arms. For a long time they hugged each other.

  “I love you, Derry,” Angel said, her eyes bright with tears. “I’ll always be here if you need me.”

  “I don’t feel right about leaving you,” Derry muttered, concern showing in his voice. “I know how much you’re missing Hawk.”

  Angel looked up and saw Derry’s love for her.

  “Get out of here before I cry all over the shirt I just ironed for you,” she said softly, giving him a smile that trembled.

  Derry smiled in return. He handed Angel a piece of paper.

  “I’ll be at that number by eleven o’ clock tonight. Call me, okay? I’m going to be homesick as hell.”

  Derry kissed Angel quickly, grabbed his suitcase, and walked down the hall, limping slightly.

  Angel watched him from the window until she could see nothing but her own tears. Then she went down to the beach and walked until darkness came and she could see nothing at all.

  She had not known how much she loved Hawk until she felt the pain of his loss. It was like breathing shattered glass, each instant a new lesson in agony.

  After dark, Angel paced through the empty house until it was time to call Derry. Then she went to her studio, turned on every light, and began to sketch. As the dark hours melted into dawn she drew and discarded design after design, seeking one that would summarize her pain and love, and in doing so, forge new beauty from the painful shards of the past.

  By dawn Angel had found her design.

  She worked all day, submerging herself in the demands of her creation. She enlarged the proportions of the sketch until it would fill a panel six feet tall and four feet wide, as wide as the window in her bedroom.

  She traced the working drawing onto heavy paper, using a black marker as wide as the lead bead holding the glass would be. Then she pinned the working drawing to the wall and numbered each segment of paper according to the color she had chosen for it.

  Choosing the glass consumed many more hours. Every piece had to blend with and enhance the bronze and brown flashed glass Angel had chosen for the major figure. She tried several shades of gold muff glass before she found one that she liked.

  Satisfied, she went to her bedroom, propped the muff against the floor-to-ceiling window there, and watched light pour through it. She turned the glass several times.

  Suddenly Angel stood absolutely still. The hair on her arms stirred in primal response as she looked into the extraordinary flawed glass . . . and saw the suggestion of a woman’s awakening smile.

  Quickly Angel marked out the area to be cut. Though she never cut glass piecemeal, this time she did. She pinned the pattern to the light table and cut out the golden cloud that had first emerged on her sketch pad.

  As soon as the cloud was cut, Angel broke another rule and continued working out of sequence. She took a fine brush and filled in the vision she had seen in the glass. The shadow of a smile, the suggestion of eyes slowly opening, a few elegant strokes to evoke hair rippling in the wind, and it was done.

  Angel turned on the kiln and went back to choosing glass. She worked for hours until she realized that there was only one choice. Since the accident, she had refused to use clear glass, for to see its shards glittering was to see again wreckage and death.

  Yet there was no other backdrop possible for the summation Angel had chosen to set in glass—daggers of beveled crystal glass radiating outward from the focal point of the picture, a hawk’s extended talon as the bird of prey swooped down out of an empty sky.

  Hours slipped into days as Angel worked. She ate when the demands of her stomach became too insistent to ignore and slept only when her eyes refused to focus on her work.

  She dreaded those times, the night closing around her, her heart as empty as the echoing rooms of the house. She began wearing her silver jewelry all the time, letting the tiny cries of the bells speak for her, filling the silent void.

  The hawk itself took several days, for each bronzed highlight was brought out by acid eating into different levels of the brown and bronze flashed glass. Etching was a long, patience-stretching process, but Angel immersed herself in its demands eagerly. When she worked she was totally absorbed, unable to think or feel beyond the instant in which she lived.

  Finally she finished the hawk. More than seventy pieces of etched glass lay gleaming on her worktable, each brown feather highlighted in a fabulous network of bronze.

  Angel began to assemble the pieces. She took the polished mahogany frame she had chosen to set the glass in and fastened the frame to a large, unusual table. It was rather like a drafting table on wheels, except that it was a table within a frame consisting of two thick, metallic runners with grooves deep enough to hold both the table surface and the frame of whatever Angel was working on at the time.

  The table surface itself was rigged so that it could slide out and the frame could be tilted vertically, allowing light to pour through the panel while still holding it securely in place. Angel used the devic
e to build and display stained glass panels that were too large for her to lift easily.

  Angel worked steadily, disregarding midnight and noon, breaking only rarely to eat or catch a quick nap on the studio sofa.

  And then she stopped sleeping at all, caught wholly in the creation coming together beneath her fingertips, glass polished and gleaming, a suggestion of a smile, a large crimson drop glowing amid the radiant gold, a subtle echo of that drop on the hawk; and all of it surrounded by the hard brilliance of beveled crystal shards.

  Finally the last piece was leaded, the cement worked in and then removed, each glass surface polished until it shone.

  With a sigh so deep that it made her earrings swing and cry, Angel leaned against the table. She knew that her summation was fin-ished, yet she was unable to accept it. She wasn’t ready to face the emptiness ahead of her, inside her, nothing left but the numb gray of exhaustion.

  She pushed the special table into her bedroom. With hands that shook, she removed the plywood panel and fixed the frame in its vertical position, leaving nothing between the stained glass and the night beyond.

  The panel was almost colorless, as bleak as Angel’s soul, for there was no light pouring through the stained glass, only darkness.

  She looked at the bed that she hadn’t slept in since Hawk left. The small candy cane lay on the pillow, untouched, green ribbon gleaming in the light from the bedside lamp. With a silent cry, she picked up the candy, hearing the rustle of its clear paper wrapping, hearing even more clearly the echo of Hawk’s bleak past, the single sweet thing he had known of childhood.

  Despite the exhaustion that made Angel tremble, Angel couldn’t face the thought of lying down, of sleeping, of wakening again.

  And again finding Hawk gone.

  Angel went back to the studio. For the first time in weeks, she really looked at it.

  The room was a shambles. Normally Angel cleaned up as she worked. This time she hadn’t. Shards of glass covered the small worktable, colors she had tried and rejected, pieces she had broken and forgotten.