by Dianne Dixon
…Evelyn wanting to know if Livvi has slept. Livvi looking down at Grace, nestled at her side. Saying, “I’m too happy to sleep.” Evelyn gently advising Livvi, “You have a lot to sort out.” Livvi murmuring, “I don’t know where to begin.” Evelyn saying, “A nice, long walk is where I always used to begin.”
…Evelyn pulling a chair close to the bed. Taking Grace’s hand with a carefully light touch. Ensuring that Grace’s sleep will be undisturbed. And whispering, “I’ll watch over her, you go…”
These are the images flowing through Livvi’s mind as she’s jogging the quiet streets that are leading her away from the serenity and safety of Evelyn’s home.
Dawn has broken and Livvi is moving briskly toward the rising sun, the light of the new day, a silver-white gleam. Her face is tingling with the Christmas cold. Her breath leaving puffs of fog in the morning air.
She’s entering the town’s business district. Slowing her pace to a walk as she’s coming onto Main Street.
The storefronts are charming. Each one scrubbed and pretty. Dressed in pine boughs and plaid ribbons. Livvi is passing a drugstore and a real estate office. And a brick-fronted restaurant decorated with wreaths of sparkling pin-lights.
Farther down the street is a store that appears to belong to a decorator. A shop with a dark green door recessed between a pair of wide, multi-paned windows. While Livvi is walking toward the store she’s noticing, in one of the windows, an Aubusson carpet draped over a stately Federalist sideboard.
In the other window, there is a delicate Venetian-glass vase filled with out-of-season peonies. And just behind the vase—there’s a painting. A full-length portrait. The style and colors are clearly from another era. A card tucked into the frame identifies the subject of the painting as a young heiress named Miriam Moran and the year of the painting’s completion as 1922.
As Livvi is coming closer to the window.
And to the painting.
She’s horrified.
Everything is there. The dress shimmering like a column of starlight. The high-heeled shoes fastened with a strap at the instep, each strap, anchored by a single pearl button. The glittering bracelets. The chestnut brown hair styled with a C-shaped curl on each of the woman’s cheeks. And the lips that are fiery red.
Livvi is experiencing an upheaval that’s racing from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head.
The woman in the pearl-button shoes is no longer an apparition haunting the dark of Livvi’s nights. She is a reality. Existing in the cold clear light of Christmas day.
Micah
Boston, Massachusetts ~ 2012
The cold reality of what she’s doing is hitting Micah like a blast of Arctic air. She wants to be rid of this man hovering at the foot of her bed, in his dark-rimmed glasses and black Savile Row suit. The bed is draped in layers of orange-hued cashmere and snowy Egyptian cotton. He looks like a vulture in a flower garden.
His voice is sharp with irritation as he’s reminding Micah: “My clients made it clear there was a deadline on this.” He glances at Micah’s assistant Jillian, who’s sitting in a chair near the head of the bed. “There have been countless telephone conversations. Countless emails.”
He returns his full focus to Micah. “It’s unfortunate you’ve delayed things to the point where we have run out of time and I’ve been forced to come here on Christmas morning—to take possession on a delivery that should have been made months ago.”
Even though Micah knows the purpose of this meeting, even though she reconfirmed its terms late last night, even though up until this very moment she fully intended to give the man what he has come to take, Micah is now deciding she can’t do it.
To go through with this transaction would be a self-serving sin.
“You can’t have her.” Micah’s voice is faint. She’s weak; so ill she can barely speak.
“Her…?” the man asks.
Jillian gives Micah a pain pill and a sip of water, then tells the man: “In the contract, the print is called ‘Photo Number 101’ but Miss Lesser refers to the piece as ‘The Woman’…‘The Woman in the Pearl-Button Shoes.’”
The man is ignoring Jillian—looking at Micah as if she’s out of her mind. “Miss Lesser, this new museum will house the world’s premiere collection of photographic images. The main gallery will bear your name and have your finest work on permanent display. For generations, people will come to the Micah Lesser Pavilion to see Micah Lesser’s art—art made by a master photographer. And the centerpiece of that, the Holy Grail, will be ‘Photograph Number 101.’ An image that has become a legend. Without that photograph we will not honor our contract with you.”
He fixes Micah with an icy stare. “If you refuse to relinquish this photograph, you will be turning your back on immortality.”
Micah’s thoughts are traveling to the spa in Newport—to Christine. The first person Micah betrayed on her clawing journey to immortality. Micah is hearing herself say to Christine, “As good as you were, I was better. I’m the one who deserved to make history.”
Now Micah’s memory is returning her to the house on Acorn Street…and she is twenty-three. The photograph propped up on Miles Gidney’s desk is the photo of the woman in the pearl-button shoes. With one hand Gidney is pulling Micah’s blouse open to reveal her breasts. He’s shoving his other hand under her skirt and plunging his tongue into her open mouth. While Micah is staring into space. With a smile in her eyes. She’s picturing her name in headlines—right beside the word “Famous.”
Then Micah is remembering herself, again, in that same house. A short time ago. Telling Gidney’s son Eric, “I was betraying something sacred when I showed your father that photograph. But I did it anyway. Because I was so greedy I was evil.”
And the man in the black Savile Row suit is asking: “What’s it going to be? Do I leave here with the photograph or not?”
Micah isn’t answering him. She’s returning to the moment in which the photograph was created…she’s feeling the weight of the camera in her hands and the brush of her eyelashes against the viewfinder. The camera shutter is clicking, and the words “Oh my God” are coming out of her mouth. Because she’s startled. Overwhelmed by the indescribable, haunting beauty of the image she has just captured—and by how passionately she loves the woman on the other side of the lens.
And the man in the Savile Row suit is announcing: “Without ‘Photograph Number 101,’ there will be no Micah Lesser Pavilion. By not allowing us to have that photograph, you are walking away from the pinnacle of your creative fame.”
Micah—who has always hungered, who will always hunger, to have her talent held higher than anyone else’s—is struggling to sit up straight. Grappling for strength. As she’s telling the man hovering at the foot of her bed: “Go away. It’s over. You can’t have her.”
Jack
Glen Cove, Long Island ~ 1986
Jack is fighting to keep from falling facedown onto the freshly mounded earth of AnnaLee’s grave.
The sun is at the edge of the cemetery. Fading and golden-low. Jack is alone. The only remaining mourner. A late summer wind is beginning to scatter flowers from the bouquets that were laid only a few hours ago—at the conclusion of AnnaLee’s funeral. When Jack was watching her coffin being delivered into the ground.
Jack is staggered with grief, snatching at wind-blown petals and blossoms that are sailing beyond his reach. He’s losing his footing, his balance. And as he is being brought to his knees, he’s noticing something he hadn’t seen before—two uniquely different objects that have been left on AnnaLee’s grave. Tucked in among the flowers.
The object closest to Jack is a sheet of lavishly thick paper containing a set of brush-stroked Chinese characters: each of the strokes precise and flawless. The other item is near the foot of the grave, glinting like a jewel in the setting sun. A delicate, copper-wire cross.
The attendance at AnnaLee’s funeral was sizeable—large numbers of people crowded the church and
the graveside. Jack has no clue as to where these two offerings have come from. But he knows he somehow needs to find a way to take them home and keep them safe.
It will be dark before he’ll be able to succeed in grasping each of the items and maneuvering it into a coat pocket.
His shoulder is broken—his hands, clumsy with bandages.
***
The drapes are tightly closed. The only intrusions into the almost total darkness are three slim fingers of moonlight. Coming from the spot where a drapery panel has been torn away from a terrace door—and there are narrow gaps in the pieces of plywood covering the door’s shattered glass.
In a corner of the darkened room, a male voice is announcing: “Arrests have been made in connection with the murder of a young mother who died at her Glen Cove home during a burglary last week.”
Jack is huddled in an old leather chair. Staring blankly into the bluish glow of the television. While the man on the screen is saying: “This is the news for September 3, 1986. I’m Anthony Sasso.”
Jack’s bandaged hands are limp in his lap. His feet are about eight inches apart, planted flat on the floor. He is in the same rumpled suit he wore to AnnaLee’s funeral. Dirt from her grave is dusting the tips of his shoes and caught in the cuffs of his pants. His hair is uncombed. He has the deadened look of a refugee waiting to be taken to a prison camp.
The reporter’s face has disappeared from the television screen, replaced by footage of three handcuffed individuals being hustled into a police station—a thin, heavily tattooed man in his mid-twenties, a slightly younger man with spiked orange-colored hair, and a cold-eyed teenage girl. The reporter’s dispassionate monotone continues to drone on. “Being held in connection with the murder is twenty-five-year-old Marco Brigante…twenty-two-year-old Sean Thomas…and eighteen-year-old—”
At the sight of these people, Jack, with his feet still flat on the floor, moving only his upper body, has leaned over the arm of the leather chair and vomited. The vomit has landed in a bucket—the slowly filling receptacle into which he has been vomiting for hours.
Now there’s footage of Jack’s neighbor, a beefy middle-aged dentist, a former football player, looking into the television camera and explaining: “My wife and I were out back having a glass of wine. We heard shots coming from next door.” The man pauses, flushed with emotion. “Jack’s a hero. The first thing I saw when he was coming toward me—asking us to call for help—was that his face and both of his hands were bleeding. He was banged up like you wouldn’t believe. He put up one hell of a fight trying to keep those punks from murdering his wife. AnnaLee. Her name was AnnaLee…”
“…her name was AnnaLee,” Jack murmurs.
He is imagining—in ghastly staccato flashes—what must have happened in the last few seconds of her life.
…AnnaLee coming down the stairs in her dazzling, shimmering dress, the costume from the gala.
…Someone—the man with the tattoos or the fellow with the orange hair or perhaps the girl—in the kitchen doorway. Raising that matte-black gun. Aiming it at AnnaLee’s heart.
…AnnaLee in terror. Inching along the wall. Trying to make her way to safety. To the living room. To the place where Jack is.
…The BANG. The fired bullet.
…AnnaLee’s flesh tearing open—a steel bolt exploding in her chest.
…AnnaLee sliding down the wall, helplessly watching a shape emerge from the shadows at the bottom of the stairs—the shape of something she thought was safely tucked away.
…Then AnnaLee’s lips—her beautiful, beautiful lips—slowly parting. Preparing for a scream she won’t live long enough to utter.
The shape emerging from the shadows is Bella.
Jack believes that what he is imagining is exactly what happened. Because he knows Bella was upstairs, asleep, when the trouble began. And he also knows that when he came back into the house with the police, after AnnaLee was dead, the first thing he saw was Bella. Crouched at the bottom of the stairs.
And while these horrific visions of Bella—and AnnaLee, and AnnaLee’s death—are flashing through his mind, whatever in Jack that was clean is turning to rot. Whatever was whole is breaking. Whatever was honest is being forever corrupted. Whatever was alive is dying.
Livvi
East Norwich, New York ~ 2012
Images of the shimmering dress and fiery-red lips are still flashing through her mind, transforming whatever certainty there was in Livvi into chaos.
It happened over twelve hours ago—plenty of time for the shock to subside. And for Livvi to have calmed down. After seeing the woman’s portrait in that store window, in Oyster Bay. But the shock is steadily growing stronger.
A fantasy in a nightmare has become reality.
And the eeriness of it, the fright of both the nightmare and the reality, have taken Livvi’s thoughts into the past. Into those nights when she would wake up screaming. And her father would already be on the other side of her doorway. In the dark. With a look that was soft like sadness then harsh like the sharp edge of a stone.
The memory of that look—the sorrow and the stone in her father’s eyes—is the thing that has now compelled Livvi to find him. And confront him, before it’s too late.
The cell connection is bad. Calista’s voice sounds thready and distant. She’s asking: “Do you need me to repeat the address?”
“I have it,” Livvi says. She’s looking at the note she’s just made. The numbers and letters seem to be swimming on the page.
Livvi is afraid. Afraid of the woman she sees in her nightmare—and of the woman she saw in the portrait—and of what the explanation for their existence could possibly be.
She’s tightening her grip on the phone to steady herself as she’s ending the call—saying to Calista: “Tell my father I’m coming to see him.”
When Livvi puts the phone down, she’s turning toward David’s grandmother. “I need to ask you a question, Evelyn. How do I—” Livvi stops, takes a deep breath. She doesn’t want Grace to see how upset she is.
Grace, in this moment, is happily content. She’s wearing the pink butterfly wings sent by Santa, and delivered by Evelyn, early this morning; and she has Granger, Livvi’s little dog, snuggled in her lap. Grace is at Evelyn’s kitchen table, with David. Eating ginger cake and playing checkers. Using a red felt-tipped marker to keep score—on the back of a Christmas card.
And while Livvi is watching the two of them she’s struck by how accepting David is of Grace’s presence in his grandmother’s house, how unquestioning and welcoming he has been.
As if he senses Livvi’s gaze, David looks up and smiles at her. Grace’s attention remains on the checkerboard—focused on her next move.
Livvi glances in Grace’s direction and quietly tells David: “You’re a remarkable man…being able to be so nice. To a perfect stranger.”
David studies Grace for a second, then says: “It’s funny you should use the term ‘perfect stranger.’ For a while, when I was a kid, I thought perfect stranger meant something entirely different. I thought it was the name for an earthbound angel…one who was a little shy. And absolutely terrific.”
“Where did you get that idea?”
“From books. From the kind of story where a boy on his bike is hit by a car, and somebody steps out of the crowd and holds his hand until help comes…or a poor family wakes up hungry on Thanksgiving morning and finds a feast waiting on their doorstep. The people who brought those little, quiet, unanticipated gifts—they were always described as being perfect strangers.”
David sends Livvi another smile, then turns his attention to Grace and the checkers. Livvi is realizing that David is extraordinary beyond measure. A man whose goodness—whose love—knows no bounds.
Livvi is about to tell David how much she treasures him—but Evelyn is saying: “Finish your question, dear. What were you wanting to ask me?”
And immediately, the anxiety is back.
Livvi quickly crosses to the kitche
n counter, where Evelyn is putting away leftovers from the Christmas dinner of baked ham and roasted green beans that she, Livvi, and Grace shared earlier in the evening—before David returned from celebrating with his cousins in the city and joined them for dessert.
“Evelyn, I need to go to New Jersey—right now,” Livvi says. “How do I get there from here?” Livvi asks the question very softly. She doesn’t want Grace to hear.
A flicker of worry crosses Evelyn’s face. “It’s getting late. Are you sure this is the best time to go?”
“I can’t just sit here not doing anything—the shop where I saw the portrait is closed for Christmas and won’t be open until noon tomorrow. If I have to wait that long to start looking for answers, I’ll go crazy.”
Simply talking about the painting, and the woman from her nightmare, has Livvi in a cold sweat.
Evelyn leads Livvi to a chair at the table where Grace and David are, while she’s telling her: “My mother used to say life is mostly a game of hide-and-seek. All of us looking for something. All of us hiding something.”
When Livvi has settled in at the table, Evelyn adds: “Some people are defined by what they’re looking for. Others by what they’re hiding.”
“I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to tell me,” Livvi says.
“It’s been my experience that the people who define themselves by what they’re hiding are in greater pain than the rest of us. And they can be a little dangerous—without meaning to. On this trip to New Jersey tonight, you should be careful. Take care of yourself.”
David looks up from the checkerboard, surprised. “You’re going to New Jersey? Tonight?”
In a flash, Grace has rushed out of her chair, upset. “You’re going away, Livvi? Don’t go away. Don’t go!”
Livvi is taking Grace into her lap, assuring her: “I’ll only be gone for a little while. I’ll be right back.”
