The Muse

by Anne Calhoun

  She peered out from behind the easel, startling him, then came to stand in front of him. He looked up at her.

  “May I?” she asked softly.

  Another quick, jerky nod, although he had no fucking clue what she was going to do. Or why she would do it. She went to her knees in front of him and sat back on her heels, then reached out and put her hands on his thighs, behind the spot where his forearms rested on his knees. Slowly, she slid her palms down his thighs to the join with his hips, her thumbs coming to rest on his cock. She wasn’t trying to turn him on or feel him up; after a pause, her hands glided up his torso to his shoulders. Another pause, then they continued to cup his jaw. She was staring at him, studying him, her gaze restively curious.

  She turned his head slightly to one side, then the other. “You have different tan lines,” she said.

  “The bike helmet straps are different from the combat helmet straps,” he said, curtly, trying to close a barn door when the horse was out and in the next county. Arden was in. Whether she knew it or not—and he prayed she didn’t—she was in.

  “Hmm,” she said, and went back to drawing. She drew for what felt like hours, but based on the incremental changes in the sun was probably less than the forty-minute sits at a drawing class. “That’s all,” she said finally, distantly.

  He straightened, slotting his spine and hips back into place. She stretched, too, fingers woven together above her head, up on tiptoes, side to side. Her back cracked and popped. She was looking at him, but he couldn’t read the look in her eyes. Desire? Maybe. Curiosity? Definitely. Sympathy? Unbearable.

  He couldn’t do it. Memories crowded close, and suddenly he couldn’t bring himself to touch her, to be touched, so he started moving toward the door. “See you tomorrow?” he said to cover the fact that he was all but fleeing her house.

  “Unfortunately, no,” she said. “I’m going to spend the day with my mother. I won’t be back in time for class.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

  “Good night, Seth,” she said. She didn’t say anything more, just followed him down the stairs, opened her wallet, counted out the twenties, and handed them to him. His fingers brushed hers when he took them, the brief contact electric, tingling.

  He gave her a wordless nod, trundled his bike out the front door and down the steps to street level, then fled.

  * * *

  Only when he was biking across the bridge did he wonder why she’d been so quiet. This should be no big deal, using stances drilled bone-deep in his body as fodder. He was her muse, helping her learn. But somehow this had become about him, not just Arden. Not the sex—he swerved around a truck emerging from an alley, ignored the honk and yell—okay, maybe the sex started it. Maybe it was the combination of sex and drawing, the sex the bold foundational lines, the framework to contain the more subtle elements, the shading, the texture, the negative space inside every human soul.

  What seemed like a simple thing to do for others had started to work away inside him. Without his knowledge, let alone his consent, whatever this thing with Arden was it wasn’t just about her anymore. It was about him.

  He rode to Brooklyn, let himself into the motor home, and paced the short, narrow hallway for a minute. The sketchbook in his closet all but glowed in the fucking dark, like he should toss the one in his pocket and pick up the one he’d set aside while it was still damp with blood. Draw what he could to fill the gap in his life.

  That was a hopeless task. Nothing could fill this emptiness, no drawing, not even if he had a hundred years and the skill of a draftsman. He was just a grunt who liked to draw knights and dragons, who knew that dreams of quests were nothing more than entertainment. To shake it off, he reached instead for his phone, sent another text to Ryan Hamilton, and to his shock, got three dots and an immediate response. I’m fine. Thx for checking in. Just off the grid for a while.

  Relieved, he pulled up his recent calls, tapped Phil’s name, then sat down on the bench seat, and cradled his head in his hands. When Phil answered, he said, “Do you miss it?”

  “Fuck, no,” Phil said, amused, knowing exactly what he meant. The background noise, music, laughter, conversation, sounded like a party. Then the noise quieted. Seth heard the flick of a lighter and a quick draw. “All the time. Every fucking second of every fucking day.”

  “Yeah,” Seth said. “It was miserable. The suck. Some days I’d do anything to go back.”

  “So go back.”

  He thought of the people who weren’t there anymore, and the people here he owed. “I can’t.”

  Another inhale. Seth heard a door open, then close. “How are you?” Phil asked.

  No way was Doug’s brother supposed to be checking up on him. That was his job, not Phil’s. “Fine,” Seth said. “Working. I sleep fine; I’m eating. Working.”

  “Let’s try that again, without the bullshit. How are you?”

  “It wasn’t bullshit,” Seth said, thinking back less than an hour to his session with Arden, the way he bolted afterward. The press of his nearly empty sketchbook against his thigh as he hunkered down in her living room. “I’m fine,” he said, heard his voice grow stronger before the silence rushed in again, nearly drowning his final words. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  – TWELVE –

  Arden woke early on Sunday morning. The plan was to be in East Hampton for brunch around eleven, but the advantage to insomnia and bad dreams was being up early enough to beat traffic. She texted Derek, asking him if he’d mind leaving earlier, not expecting a response at this hour. She pulled on a robe and padded into the kitchen, too tired to yawn. She started the water for the French press coffee, and her phone vibrated in her hand.

  Sure. What time?

  Pick me up at 8.

  She stepped into the shower more to wake up than to get clean, towel-dried her hair, then pulled on a pair of khaki pants and a sleeveless linen top. The pants were loose on her hips, so she added a belt and a pair of worn brown leather sandals, her go-to favorites. The coffee she poured into two travel mugs just as Derek texted he was turning the corner.

  She should have looked outside before she opened the town house door, but she didn’t. One second she was standing on the landing outside her front door, the next the world splintered into shards of images and sounds, photographers crowding forward, shouting her name, blocking her path to the street at the same time tires screeched and a horn blared on Fifth Avenue, then the sound of a thud she knew in her bones, metal hitting the human body, a hoarse cry. Her hand flew up to protect her head, her heart rate soared, her vision tunneled, and her knees buckled. The energy emanating from the paparazzi took on a fierce glee; they crowded closer, what’s happening why are you fainting Arden are you sick Arden does your family make you sick now.

  Then a hand closed around her upper arm and hauled her both upright and through the crowd, knocking people to the side. Both travel mugs tumbled to the sidewalk. Arden barely held on to her purse as Derek, using his body as a shield, shoved her into the backseat. The slamming car door missed her foot by an inch. An intrepid soul hauled open the other passenger door and shoved a camera into the space. She recoiled, the body and camera were hauled back, and that door slammed. Derek all but hurled himself into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and hit the locks.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, then hit the horn loud and long.

  “It was a pedestrian. Someone hit a pedestrian,” she whispered. “I heard it. I heard the cab hit her.”

  Flashes went off, visible even through the tinted windows. Bodies blocked the windshield, cameras hoisted, their shouts muffled into a dull roar. The engine revved up. She could see the needle spiking hard to the right. Photographers scattered like birds, their fists hitting the sides of the vehicle in frustration, or anger. Derek roared down the street, away from the horde. The last thing Arden saw was the Ciao Bella Gelato sign before Ninety-second Street tunneled to black.

  * * *

  So
meone was saying her name. MacCarren. Ms. MacCarren.

  “Arden!”

  Derek. She was shaking, sweating, and her stomach, which had nothing in it except two swallows of coffee, lurched sickeningly. “I’m okay,” she whispered. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

  It was a litany, a prayer, one she recognized from the moments after the cab struck her, when the world was a dizzying spray of streetlights and lit windows and shouts. The doormen from the building she’d been hit in front of, crouching over her, yelling at the cabdriver, hovering in the background. I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.

  Except she wasn’t okay. Broken shoulder and collarbone. Torn ligaments, a shattered knee, a moderate concussion. Blood trickling down the side of her face. She felt no pain, was crawling like a wounded animal in the middle of the street, trying to get away. I’m okay. I’m okay.

  She looked down at her hands. A bit of coffee had splashed from the open spout onto her chinos. Her purse, which had been dangling from her elbow, lay on the seat beside her, phone and red leather journal disturbingly close to spilling out. “Where’s my coffee?” she said stupidly.

  “You dropped the mugs,” Derek said. “I thought, under the circumstances, I’d leave ’em.”

  “I’m okay,” she said. She would not burst into tears. “Did they see?”

  “I got you into the car before you . . . I don’t think they saw.” Derek’s eyes flashed to hers in the rearview mirror. “You really should think about hiring more security. A bodyguard.”

  She would not, under any circumstances, erect another barrier between her and life. “I’m sorry. Dealing with this isn’t part of your job description.”

  He shrugged. “No skin off my nose,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said again. “Have you had breakfast?”

  “No,” he said.

  He was changing his answer. She could tell. Maybe he’d eaten. Maybe he had plans to eat lunch in East Hampton after he left her at the house. Derek was a local and knew all the best greasy spoon diners. But he’d said no, and she’d asked, and she was grateful to him.

  “Let me buy you breakfast,” she said. “For getting you out of bed so early.”

  He pulled over and double-parked in front of a deli, then turned on the flashers. “I’ll get it,” he said. “What do you want?”

  She handed him yet another twenty. “A bagel with lox and cream cheese,” she said. She wasn’t sure if her stomach could handle anything else. “Another coffee, too, please.”

  He came back with a full white paper sack, handing her sandwich back to her without ceremony. Her heart was jittering six different directions in her chest. Hands shaking, she shoved her phone back in her purse, but set the journal on her lap and dug around for her pencil bag. After Seth left the night before, she’d started to rough out her drawing for the show at the end of class. The Marine-ish poses had been the breakthrough, the insights into Seth’s character he’d never shown her before. She had a better understanding of the impulse behind everything he did, enough to feel she could perhaps draw something worth showing.

  Except that wasn’t the right way to approach it. Her fingers doodled Seth’s hands, dangling in space. She got the impression they weren’t often empty, held a gun or a pen or a piece of equipment, and the emptiness seemed wrong. Was he holding on to something that wasn’t there anymore, refusing to let go of what he needed to leave?

  When she looked up from the sketchbook, they were in the heart of East Hampton, driveways curving back to shingled houses set back from the road on green-velvet lawns and protected by thick privet hedges, then into the dead-end roads lined with trees leading to “beach houses” backing to the ocean. Derek pulled through another, smaller cluster of paparazzi, neatly contained at the gates by two suited men.

  With the fainting episode outside her town house, she’d just handed the paparazzi another excuse to dig into her life, extend the MacCarren news cycle another day, or longer. The panic attack on the trading floor wasn’t news, but someone would remember, when prompted. They’d use this as an excuse to dig deeper into her family’s history, expose what little they had left to the world, dig out the cabdriver who hit her, the doormen who protected her on the street, the EMTs, doctors, and they’d all talk . . .

  Derek braked to a halt beside the house. Tufts of beach grass sprouted from the sand piled against the weathered fence. Beyond that, the beach was empty, secured in all likelihood by more of the suited men at the gates. The ocean was a sullen gray, matching the sky. Arden got out of the SUV and hitched her bag higher onto her elbow.

  “When should I come back and get you?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. She needed to stay strong for her mother, but she already felt a quart low, and it wasn’t even ten in the morning. “I thought I’d stay through dinner.”

  “But you plan to go back to the city tonight?”

  “Yes. I’m not sure. Perhaps. I’m sorry,” she added. She used to send Derek an hour-by-hour timetable for the week, with adjustments made on the fly, but very few of them.

  “Not a problem. Fifteen minutes’ notice and I’m here.”

  “Thank you,” she said, then stopped Derek when he turned to circle the car. “Derek. Thank you. Your loyalty . . . right now . . . means so much to me.”

  He waved her off. “I’ll wait until you’re inside.”

  She crossed the parking area, skirting the six-car garage and taking the flagstone path to the multilayered deck at the back of the house. Through the kitchen window she could see Marla, the housekeeper, slicing fruit at the big island. Her mother was nowhere in sight. She looked around the compound, remembering the FBI vehicles parked in the driveway, the grass, blocking the garage doors, men and women in windbreakers tromping through the house, including Daniel Logan, handing her a search warrant, asking her and her mother to take the children upstairs while they ransacked her father’s study, taking computers and God alone knew what else.

  Her mother couldn’t continue to live here much longer. Arden rapped on the sliding glass door hard enough to make her knuckles sting.

  Marla wiped her hands on her uniform apron, removed the security stick from the track, and unlocked the door. “Miss Arden,” she said.

  “Hello, Marla,” Arden replied, and set her purse on the opposite end of the rectangular granite-topped island. She inhaled a shaky breath and sat rather heavily on one of the barstools.

  Other than Marla’s local radio station, the house was eerily quiet. Normally her mother entertained here year-round, inviting relatives from out of state for sailing and beachcombing for weeks at a stretch, friends for days, business associates for weekend trips. The compound had eleven bedrooms, a guest house on the property, and another smaller beach house around the point. On a typical Sunday, for brunch Marla would supervise three kitchen helpers and servers, serving buffet-style. Today the house was completely empty.

  “Who’s here?”

  “Your mother,” Marla said.

  “No one else?”

  “Miss Serena hasn’t been back since the day of the raid,” Marla said.

  No one else. A month ago the house had been full of people, including Ryan Hamilton and some model he’d brought with him. Ryan Hamilton, who’d played them all so very well, sitting at their table, eating their food, sailing on the Indomitable with Grandpa and Arden, and all the while gathering information to bring them down. Expose them. “Did she go back to Greenwich?”

  Charles’s wife, Serena, was a Connecticut socialite who’d pursued Charles with exactly the right combination of interest and independence. She was a carbon copy of their mother, beautiful, elegant, interested in art and decorating, in charity causes and international travel. She’d spent two years gutting their apartment in the city and redecorating it, and four months choosing their private jet. When she did a thing, she did it well, which meant the divorce would be quick, severing Charles from her life, and the girls’.

  “West Palm,” Marla said, t
aking a cantaloupe from the fridge. “Her parents’ place down there. Farther away from the press.”

  “Mom must be devastated.” She lived and breathed her granddaughters’ lives.

  “I don’t think she feels much at all right now,” Marla said with the bluntness of a longtime family employee.

  “Valium?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Arden?”

  Arden turned to find her mother standing at the foot of the stairs curving around to the second floor. The main floor of the house, broken only by the fireplace, was open on all four sides, the chimney rising through the second floor. Floor-to-ceiling windows on the south and west sides opened to the beach and the ocean beyond. Beyond the kitchen was an east-facing breakfast room, and a formal dining room that could seat thirty. The space was broken into different seating areas, one around a grand piano, another a cluster of overstuffed chairs around the fireplace.

  Her mother shuffled slowly forward into the gray light, and Arden sucked in her breath. Her mother looked every single second of her fifty-seven years. More. Lines normally animated by laughter and the sheer delight of being alive now looked clawed into the skin around her eyes and mouth. Antianxiety medication reduced the energetic spring in her walk to an old woman’s tentative step. She wore chic Chanel ballet flats, not slippers, but the moves were as tentative as her grandfather’s shuffling down the nursing home hallway.

  Raw emotion propelled her across the floor to sweep her mother into a hug. “Shh,” she said. “I’m here, Mom.”

  “Arden,” she said again as she looked at her only daughter, then at Marla, then at the food. “Is it time for brunch?” she asked, her voice somewhere between its customary cheerfulness and a bewildered child’s.