by Theresa Weir
He followed her gaze to a rack of papers. Staring back at him was his old face, his old young face. His old innocent face. Clean-shaven, thin, dark eyes staring straight at the world.
He picked up the paper. "Yeah, that’s me.”
Claire leaned her cheek against his shoulder. She put out her hand, tracing a finger along the face in the paper. "You were so sweet.” There was an ache in her voice. "So young. My God, Dylan. You were just a kid.”
Dylan continued to stare at the paper, trying to see a little bit of the man he had become in the child he used to be. But it was like looking at someone else’s face, a stranger’s.
Peripherally, he was aware of Claire, digging into her pocket and paying for the paper.
"I was too young. It was too much too soon,” he said, walking away, head bent toward a tribute that told about how the chess world was grieving over the loss of one of its greatest stars.
He’d been the same as a child star, except he hadn’t had the support of parents or relatives, or even close friends.
“The whole thing overwhelmed me. I didn’t know how to handle it, didn’t know how to stand up for myself the way I should have. And because of that, I overreacted. Al I knew how to do was run.” They stopped near a flight board.
“Our plane is leaving on time.” Claire looked up at him, a little smile on her face. “What?”
He was thinking how nice it was to have her there, with him. The hollow noise of people was almost deafening. The loudspeaker was announcing flight arrivals and departures. A couple of little kids were fighting over a stuffed animal. A baby was crying, and the father was jamming a pacifier into its mouth, trying desperately to calm it down.
“I like this you and me stuff,” he said.
Dylan took her to the roughest part of New Orleans where whores hung out on street corners and crack heads talked to walls and peed on the sidewalk right in front of everybody.
“What are we doing?” Claire asked, sidestepping something that looked like it might be vomit.
“I used to live here.”
“Here? As in right here?”
“A few blocks away. I used to hang out here in my free time.”
“That was a long time ago, though. It’s probably changed a lot, right?” She wanted him to say yes, she couldn’t stand to think of him growing up in a place like this.
“It’s changed a little.”
She let out a relieved sigh.
“It’s maybe a little cleaner, and there aren’t people shooting up in the streets.”
Claire looked around, unable to imagine anyone being there by choice.
An hour later, neither of them had any cash left. They'd given it all away. “Most of them will use it to buy crack,” Dylan said. “But a few might buy something to eat.”
He stopped in front of a bar. He checked out the name above the door, then looked back at Claire. “Do you want to go back to the hotel?” She shook her head and followed him inside. The place was dark, the floor sticky. Behind the bar was one of the biggest, blackest men Claire had ever seen.
“What'll it be?” he asked, hands braced on the wooden bar top.
“Hello, Jackson.”
The man looked at him closer, his brow furrowed. “Do I know you?”
“It's me. French.”
For a big man, he moved fast. He came around the counter, got Dylan in a huge bear hug, and lifted him off the ground. “I thought you were dead, man!”
“Only to the rest of the world.”
“Oh, man. It's so good to see you! Hey, I've still got your box. I’ll get it. You wait right here.”
Jackson went up a short flight of stairs, then returned carrying a gray cardboard box. He put it down on the counter, and kept smiling at Dylan, shaking his head.
“You’re a good guy,” Dylan said. “You always had food for me. I remember how you always wanted to do more for the street people.”
“Now I can. I opened two soup kitchens and built another shelter.”
Dylan's eyebrows lifted. He looked around the dingy bar.
“I didn’t do it on profit from this place,” Jackson said, laughing. "Every year I get a check from an anonymous benefactor. "
“That's great, man.”
They said their good-byes. Dylan picked up the soft-edged box from the counter, looked at Claire, whose eyes were glistening just like big Jackson's, and smiled. She smiled back. Together they walked out of the bar into the bright sunlight.
~0~
At the hotel, Dylan put down the box on the bed and both he and Claire stared at it.
“So, this is what we came to New Orleans for, I take it?"
“That's right. ”
“Are you going to open it?” She got the distinct idea that he was afraid to.
“I don't know if I can.”
She sat down behind him on the bed, her hands on his arms, her chin resting on his shoulder. “What's in it, Dylan?”
“My past.” He took a deep breath.
He lifted the lid.
Earthly treasures.
The scent of things old drifted to her. There on top was a dried rose.
“From Olivia's funeral,” he said, lifting it out, crumbled pieces falling on the bed. There were photographs, faded and dusty and stained. Now that she'd seen the picture of Dylan in the paper, she could recognize him with his family, his mother, his father, his sister. Also in the box were two embroidered handkerchiefs. He brought them to his face, inhaling. “My mother always smelled like this. I guess it's perfume.”
The next thing was a chessboard—with the most beautiful, intricately carved pieces Claire had ever seen. He passed the black knight to Claire.
“This is amazing,” she said, her voice a whisper. And then she realized it was Dylan's tattoo. A knight. A dark horse.
“A friend of mine made them.”
She didn't have to ask. From the way Dylan was acting, and from the other contents of the box, she knew that friend was dead. He'd had so much sorrow in his life, so much sadness. She wished she could take it all away, but then if she could, he wouldn't be who he was, he wouldn't be Dylan.
She would have been bitter. He should have hated Trevor Davis. Instead, Dylan had agonized over his imprisonment. He should have hated New Orleans, a place that hadn't been good to him. Instead, he actually seemed glad to be there. He should have hated the world. Instead, he was facing it once more with an almost childlike wonder.
“He didn't believe in creating anything that would last more than a few days, and yet he made these,” Dylan said. “I never did get it.”
“He must have done them for you. So you would have some tangible memory of who he was.”
“Maybe.”
“We live on in the people who have gone before us, the people who have touched our lives.”
“Don't bullshit me. I'm not going to fall apart, if that's what you think.”
“Dylan, it's true. Weren't your parents missionaries?”
“Yeah.”
“And aren't you the anonymous benefactor?”
He didn't admit it, not in words, but his expression said, How'd you figure that out?
“I know you.”
She knew him and understood him more every day, loved him more every day. She knew the box wasn't the only reason he'd needed to come to New Orleans. He'd needed to see what Jackson had done with his gift. He may have spent too much time hiding in the desert, but it hadn’t been idle time. He'd still managed to make a difference.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked, curious, half smiling, half knowing.
“Because I love you.”
Chapter 30
Things fell into a pattern. Claire sketched and painted during the day, and Dylan ... Well, Dylan piddled around. There was only so much wood that needed to be cut, and only so many ways to haul it in. There were only so many leaky faucets to repair, so many roofs that needed to be fixed. Even though it wasn’t obvious, Claire sensed his res
tlessness. He was going through a transition. She just hoped she wasn't part of that transition.
One evening she found him sitting on the couch in the dark, the fire in the stove forgotten, the room cold. On his lap was the chess set Uriah had made.
She sat down beside him. “You have to go back. Chess is your life.”
It might mean losing him, it might mean breaking her heart, but she loved him too much to go along with what he was doing to himself.
“I'm not ready.”
“Will you ever be ready?”
“I don't know.”
“You can't turn away from something that's so much a part of you.”
“I was thinking that maybe I'd put an ad in the paper, start teaching chess.”
That was a beginning.
The first person to show up was a ten-year-old boy named Josh who had absolutely no interest in learning to play chess. During the third lesson, when he still hadn't grasped the basic movement of the pieces, Josh finally admitted that his father had suggested the lessons, and he'd gone along with it to make his dad happy.
“Don't tell him, okay?” he begged.
“You can't keep coming here, wasting my time and your father's money,” Dylan told him.
“Maybe we could do something else. Do you have any cool video games? I have this one where the players' heads get chopped off and blood goes everywhere.”
Dylan looked down at the chessboard. It wasn't the one Uriah had made. This was a set Dylan had picked up at the grocery store. He looked at the knight, the queen, and the king. Sure, they were plastic, but how could Josh not feel the same sense of excitement and wonder Dylan felt when he looked at the pieces? “Do you know how old this game is?” he asked.
Josh shook his head.
Dylan figured he’d give the benefit of the doubt. “Nobody knows for sure, but it started before the sixth century. Do you know how old that video game is you're talking about?”
“It came out this year. It’s new. It’s, like, really new. And I’ve heard they’re working on another one that's supposed to be even better.”
“Why play a game that’s been played in feudal Europe? Why play a game that’s been played during the Crusades, and by Greek philosophers, when you could be sitting in front of the television, joystick in your hand, playing something that just came out yesterday and by tomorrow be heading for the landfill?”
Josh totally missed the sarcasm, which was probably all for the best, Dylan figured.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought. Except for the landfill part.” The kid was looking at him in that slightly confused way most adults had looked at Dylan all his life. How could he expect a kid to understand? If he ever had kids of his own, would they stare at him in that same way, or would they speak his language? He hoped to hell they'd speak his language, at least part of the time.
His second student was an eighty-year-old man who’d always wanted to learn how to play chess. But ten minutes into the lesson, he asked, “Do you have any checkers? I like checkers. How 'bout you?”
Dylan couldn't win. On one hand, the world was moving too fast for a game that was centuries old, on the other, it was moving too slowly.
“I'm stuck between two worlds,” he told Claire that night when they were lying in bed, tangled and sweet from making love, the voodoo doll that Claire refused to part with perched on the dresser, handcuffs dangling from the top railing of the bed.
Claire dropped a soft kiss on his mouth, so sweet, so tender, causing an ache in his chest.
“I’m sorry.”
“It's not your fault.”
“That reminds me. Libby stopped by and said that she's sending over some guy who's working for her. He supposedly wants lessons.”
“I can't take it anymore. These clowns are an insult to the game.”
“It's too late to do anything about it. He's coming at ten o'clock.”
Dylan groaned and let his head drop back on the pillow.
~0~
At exactly ten o'clock Dylan answered a knock at the door. Standing there was a kind of scrawny guy with bleached-blond hair, dark eyebrows, and one of those short beards that just covered the chin.
“Don't you recognize me?” the man asked.
“Should I?”
He stepped inside and shrugged off his jacket. “It's me. Trevor.”
“You son of a bitch! You damn chameleon!” Dylan grabbed him and half lifted him off the ground. Then he shouted over his shoulder. “Claire! Claire, come down here. You aren't going to believe this!”
Claire came running and everybody started talking at once. The excitement wound down, and Trevor was finally able to explain how he'd turned himself in. “The police made it look like they'd figured it out themselves,” he said, laughing. “But I just walked up and gave them my spiel and they arrested me and threw me in jail.”
“Why?” Claire asked. “Why did you do it?”
Trevor looked from Claire to Dylan. “So he could go back. And so I could start at the bottom and work my way up. That's why I'm here. I came for lessons.”
“You're working for Libby?” Claire asked as they set up the chess pieces.
Trevor actually blushed. “Yeah. She's building this wall around her place.”
Dylan laughed.
He looked happier than Claire had seen him look in weeks. She backed away. And when she left the room, no one noticed.
Be careful what you wish for.
~0~
Trevor came almost every day for two months.
It was a bittersweet time, a time when everything felt so right and so good, a time Claire knew would pass.
The day came when Trevor announced that he was leaving, that he was going to take what he'd learned from Dylan and see if he could make it.
“I have a new identity. From now on I will be known as Elliot Lafayette.”
“Lafayette?” Dylan asked, laughing, but Claire could see the restlessness already seeping into his eyes. “Couldn't you have picked something a little less flamboyant?”
“I want to make a splash.”
Claire had a party, just the four of them. And while they joked and laughed, there was an undertone of sadness.
“I'm going to miss that little geek,” Libby confessed to Claire as they stood in the kitchen sipping wine and chewing on crackers neither one of them tasted. Trevor and Dylan sat at the table in the corner, playing one last game of insanity chess.
“You'll see him again,” Claire said with conviction. And she would. There was no doubt in her mind that Trevor would come back to Libby. So why didn't she feel that way about Dylan?
“Dylan is leaving, too.”
“^When? Why didn't he mention it?”
“He doesn't know it yet.”
“Claire. Don't go stewing about something that probably won't happen.”
“He has to leave.”
“Don't tell him that.”
“I love him. I want him to be happy.”
“How about simply content. Isn't that enough?”
“Remember how I tried to give up art? How I tried to convince myself it was the right thing?”
“You were miserable.”
“I didn't know it was apparent.”
“You went out of your way to act like you were having a good time. That's how I knew you were miserable.”
“I don't want to be this woman, waiting for her man to come back. I hate that kind of thing. It's so pathetic.”
“Claire, how much wine have you had?”
Claire looked at her empty glass. She tried to remember how many times she'd refilled it, but couldn't.
Libby lifted the glass from her friend's limp fingers. “That's what I thought.”
There was a shout from the corner table. “You let me win, you son of a bitch.”
Dylan shook his head. “I didn't. I swear.”
“You let me win,” Trevor said, packing up the pieces. “That's okay. Now I can go out into the world and say I beat Dani
el French.” He gave Dylan a hug and a slap on the back. “Don't hide yourself forever. Life isn't about hiding. Or about running. It's about playing the game. You always have to play the game or there’s no sense in being here.”
They left in a flurry of confusing good-byes. And then everything was silent.
Dylan continued to stand outside, hands shoved deep into the front pockets of his jeans, staring into the darkness in the direction Libby’s car had gone. He sensed Claire beside him.
“He beat me,” he finally said, stunned.
“Why are you surprised? You taught him everything you know.”
“Not everything. He made a play tonight that I’ve never seen. It was brilliant.”
“And didn’t you teach him that, too? To think for himself?”
Dylan was quiet. He had to tell her, but he didn’t know how.
“It’s time, isn't it?”
“How did you know?”
“I know you.”
“Come with me.”
She shook her head. “I have my art to finish. And I don’t want to be one of those women who follows her man around and in the process forgets who she is. I don’t want to disappear like that.”
“I wouldn’t want that to happen. I want you to always be Claire."'
That night they made love for what Claire feared could be the last time.
“I’ll be back, Claire.”
“Don't make promises you might not be able to keep. You might get out there and decide that this time the world is a pretty good fit.”
“We're a good fit.”
The night after Dylan left, Claire opened a bottle of dandelion wine, popped in her Leonard Cohen tape, then sat on the floor, her back against the couch. A minute later, Hallie came walking over, her head low. Heaving a dog sigh, she plopped down on the floor next to Claire, resting her head on Claire's leg.
Chapter 31
At first, Dylan wrote. In his letters, he told Claire how much he missed her. He told her how, after his initial return to the chess world, interest in him quickly waned. A seventeen-year-old grand master was news, a thirty-year-old grand master was old news. He didn’t say, but what Claire knew as truth, was that he no longer needed a retreat, because the world was no longer nipping at his heels.
Claire completed her sketches and watercolors for the card line. She mailed them in. Three weeks later she called her agent from the same phone she’d used the day she found out Cardcity wanted to sign her.
