Unfinished Muse

by R. L. Naquin

  I refilled my bubbles, hooked them to my belt, and stopped by my desk to make sure I didn’t have anything sitting in my inbox. Nothing. My desk was as bare as I’d left it Friday morning. The chair wasn’t pushed in all the way. I readjusted it. Janitorial probably moved it to vacuum over the weekend.

  Frowning, I rummaged through my purse. Something had to be in there that I could leave on my desk to make it more personal—less vacant looking. A yellow hair scrunchy from before I’d chopped all my hair off floated at the bottom of the bag. I left it there. Two plastic barrettes seemed like a more believable choice, so I arranged those under the monitor to look like I’d taken them out and left them for later. A stale pack of gum fit nicely on the top of the keyboard. The purse didn’t give up anything else that might make it look like I worked there.

  Had I been a different kind of person, I might have had pictures of old friends in my wallet. Pictures would have looked nice. But I didn’t have any old friends. I had a few new friends, but no pictures of them.

  In desperation, I opened the single drawer they’d given me and found pens and sticky notes. I scrawled Pick up dry cleaning on Thursday on the bright yellow pad, then stuck the note to my monitor.

  I didn’t have anything to pick up at the dry cleaners, but nobody needed to know that.

  I took a step back. The desk was still pretty bare, but at least it didn’t look like it was waiting to be assigned to somebody.

  When did you start to care what the hell people thought, Wynter? I shook my head and wobbled out of the office in my inappropriately high heels.

  Whatever failure I might be at the office, at least I was doing well with my clients. At least, I had been before the weekend.

  First, I checked in to see how Alex was coming along with his toothpick house. He was right where he should be—in the basement, surrounded by piles of toothpicks and bottles of glue.

  He was not, however, hard at work building his dream project like he should have been. He was reading a book.

  I scooted around the basket of sleeping wiener dog and read the cover of the book Alex was reading: Beekeeping—Save the Queen, Save the Planet.

  I shook my head. “Dude. What the hell? I left you alone for three days. You were doing great.”

  At the sound of my voice, Oscar’s head popped up from the basket. He slapped his tail against the wicker a few times, then went back to sleep.

  Alex’s unfinished toothpick house had grown by maybe half a wall since I’d last been there. A separate section that looked like it might be the detached garage sat nearby without a roof or fourth wall. From the time I’d spent watching him build, I estimated he’d stopped working sometime Friday afternoon.

  “Let’s get you back on track, my friend.” I unclipped my bubbles, dipped the wand in the liquid, and blew through the hole. “Time to get back to work, Alex. Works of art don’t build themselves. You can do it.”

  The bubbles flew in a straight, steady line toward the side of his face and popped on his cheekbone and in his ear. Perfect.

  Alex shifted on his stool and looked up, frowning, with his finger keeping his place in the bee book. He glanced around the basement and let out a heavy sigh. “I’d better get some work done, Oscar.”

  Oscar whined in response and wagged his tail. Alex bent and patted the dog on the head before heading toward the stairs.

  I hadn’t intended that. “Hey. Where are you going? Work’s down here.” I dipped my wand and blew at him.

  He was a moving target, upping the difficulty level, but I managed to pop a few off his elbow.

  “You have work to do. Inspiration awaits. I know you want to get this project done. Come back and work on it. It’s fun!”

  He scuttled up the steps, leaving me behind with a dripping wand and no client. I heard footsteps above me, a chair scraping, and he was on his way back down. Relieved, I took a seat on a box and waited for him.

  When Alex reappeared at the bottom of the steps, he carried two kitchen chairs. I watched with growing trepidation as he spread a tarp on the floor, then set to work sanding the paint off the first chair.

  “No,” I said. “No, no, no.” I crouched close to him and blew bubbles at him until I felt light headed. “This is not your project. You’re building a house out of toothpicks for the competition in a few weeks. You’re not fixing kitchen chairs. Go back to the toothpicks, Alex. Come on, man. Help me out here.” He kept sanding, and I kept blowing until little stars sparkled around my head, reminding me that oxygen was important to staying upright. I stopped and caught my breath.

  After what felt like forever, Alex stopped and wiped he forehead with the back of his hand. He glanced at the table where his toothpick creation sat untouched, then looked away with a pained expression.

  He picked up a new piece of sandpaper, wrapped it around the wooden block he was using, and started on the back of the chair.

  I threw my arms in the air. “Gah! Really? Okay. You do what you’ve got to do. I have other clients, you know. I can’t sit here all day holding your hand when you’re not even listening.” I tightened the cap on my half-empty bubbles. “I’ll be back tomorrow. Hopefully you’ll have this out of your system by then.”

  I was a little nervous going to see Missy after the disastrous visit with Alex. But the odds of them both being in trouble were slim. Alex was probably overwhelmed with nagging from his mother. Missy would be fine.

  Or not.

  I found Missy stalled on page three of her scrapbook. She sat curled on the sofa watching Golden Girls and painting her nails. The scrapbooking supplies were scattered across the coffee table. The baby’s car seat wasn’t by the door like it usually was, and when I checked, she wasn’t in her crib, either. Someone must have taken her out for the day. I had Missy all to myself.

  Page three of the scrapbook lay in the center of the table, a half-finished tribute to a trip to New York City on New Year’s Eve. At least, that’s what I gathered from the photo of Missy’s parents wearing hats that said 1966 on them. Missy had glued a silhouette of the New York skyline on the bottom of the page, and a cutout of an apple sat loose in the upper left-hand corner. That was as far as she’d gone with it.

  A sheet of letters lay on the floor bent in half. A pile of colored paper collected a wet ring from the glass that sat on top of it.

  Missy had given up.

  I unhooked my bubbles and got to work. “I will not lose both of you today.” I blew a stream of bubbles directly into her face. “Come on, Missy. You were doing such a beautiful job. Look at all those fantastic shapes and colors. Your parents will love it when it’s done.”

  Missy paused in her manicure. I thought I’d made an impression, but she barked a short laugh at something Sophia said to Blanche, then went back to her nails.

  “This is ridiculous. What are you doing?” I blew another stream at her. “You had this. The New York thing is inspired. Go back and finish it. It’ll be gorgeous.”

  I was grateful she couldn’t actually hear me. The desperation in my voice was alarming.

  After a moment, she tilted her head and held out her splayed fingers, then blew on the nails to speed the drying process. To my relief, she leaned toward the coffee table and grabbed a pair of scissors and a thick piece of paper.

  “There you go. Good girl!” I blew a fat bubble at her for good measure.

  She cut something small from the paper, then set the scissors down with the leftover paper. She held a tiny scrap cut in the shape of a skyline. The New York skyline.

  “Gorgeous. When did you learn to do that?” I sent a bubble to pop on the bridge of her nose. “It’s so tiny.”

  She sprayed the back with adhesive, then, to my horror, stuck it over the nail of her ring finger, not on the abandoned scrapbook page.

  “Missy, no. What are you doing?” My fingers tightened around the bubble wand, leaving an indentation in the skin.

  She took out a second color of nail polish and used the tiny skyline as a s
tencil. After the polish dried enough, she peeled off the paper skyline and revealed a sunset over New York painted on her fingernail.

  I held my head in despair. For two hours, I sat and watched her create an intricate design on each of her fingers. Shoes. Champagne glasses. Apples. I gave up blowing bubbles at her a half hour into it. There didn’t seem to be any point. I was inspiring her to do the wrong thing.

  Some Muse I turned out to be.

  When she took her socks off and started on her toenails, I decided to call it a day. I couldn’t watch her do a pedicure, too. Enough was enough.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow. Try to get all this business out of your system, okay?”

  Missy didn’t respond, of course. But the scowl on her face as she painted the first coat on her toenails told me, at least at some level, she was listening.

  My stomach was in knots by the time I pulled into a parking space at my apartment complex. Two out of three of my clients had gone off the rails for no reason I could decipher. That didn’t mean Mark had done it, too, but my gut said he had. Of the three of them, Mark seemed to be the most easily distracted. I braced myself and climbed out of the car.

  There was no need to go invisible and sneak around. Nor did I need to knock on Mark’s door to find out what he was up to. He was right there in the middle of the courtyard, hard at work.

  Power washing the buildings.

  I thought I’d prepared myself for his inevitable slide into procrastination. The other two had done it. Why not Mark?

  Why not, indeed.

  I was fuming. My job depended on three people completing three tasks. All three were acting like they had all the time in the world.

  “Three weeks, people,” I muttered. “You have three weeks or I fail.”

  I’d have thought failure would come naturally to me after the life I’d lived. But this was different. I didn’t want to fail. I wanted to be good at this. Was that so much to ask?

  “Mark!” I trotted across the courtyard and tapped him on the shoulder.

  He shut off the water and turned toward me in surprise. “Oh, hey, Wynter. You’re home early. Want to get some dinner?” His eyes flicked over my cleavage and then away. His cheeks turned a little pink.

  He was soaking wet, and his white T-shirt clung to him like fresh paint. I swallowed and refocused, hoping my cheeks weren’t pink, too. “What the hell are you doing?”

  He blinked and stared at me, as if he didn’t understand. “Just as friends, if you want.”

  “What?” Now I was blinking and staring.

  “Dinner. If it’ll upset you, I won’t even try to pay for yours. Or my treat. I did suggest it. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Mark, I meant what are you doing out here washing the building? Why aren’t you working on Carry’s playground?”

  His expression changed—one minute hopeful, the next, completely blank and unreadable. He turned toward the building and turned the water on again. “I’m just not feeling it today.”

  For some reason, a lump formed in my throat and my eyes burned from unshed tears. “But Candy Land. It was going to be epic. What happened?”

  Mark didn’t look at me. His shrug looked less carefree than I imagined he’d intended. “Nothing happened. I’m not in the mood today. Maybe tomorrow.” He shut off the water. “I think maybe I’ll take a rain check on dinner, if you don’t mind. I’m pretty tired.”

  He went inside without another word, leaving me alone in the courtyard wondering what I’d said wrong.

  And wondering how the hell I was going to fix all this with less than three weeks left.

  Chapter 18

  Tuesday morning I went into the office early. Somebody was going to help me if I had to camp outside Polly’s door for the rest of the week.

  My concern was unnecessary. For once, the office was filled with people. Dave and Jeremy stood outside the prop room, hands in their pockets and heads tilted toward each other in discussion. A general buzz of conversation came from the far end of the room. I couldn’t see more than the tops of people’s heads, since they were gathered in groups in a few cubicles, but they were there.

  I headed for Polly’s office and found Audrey and Kayla standing across from the door, whispering fiercely back and forth. A twinge of regret shot through me as I realized I was wearing sensible office attire again. The one day I tried to fit in, everybody missed it. Now I was back to sticking out again.

  Audrey gave me a hard look, and Kayla snorted.

  “If you’re planning to talk to Polly, you might want to wait until tomorrow.”

  I knocked on the door. “I don’t need her tomorrow. I need her today.”

  The door flung open, seemingly on its own. I poked my head in and found Polly sitting behind her desk and no one else inside.

  “Yes?” Polly’s melodic voice was icy. “Wynter, can it wait?”

  Butterflies be damned. My stomach felt like an entire herd of wildebeests were trampling through. “For a few minutes, I guess. If you’re busy, I can come back in a little while.”

  She pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “No, no. Come in. I’ve been meaning to check up on you for the last week. Today was bound to happen. I saw it coming. No reason for you to suffer for it. Close the door behind you.”

  Whatever was going on in the office, it didn’t sound good. I shut the door and took a seat across from her, hoping I wasn’t the cause of her shitty day. I’d only been working there less than two weeks. I couldn’t already be in trouble.

  Right?

  Polly took a swallow of coffee and made a face. “Cold.” She took another swallow anyway. “So. How are things going, Wynter? You finding your footing?”

  Well, on the bright side, she didn’t appear to be upset with me. Somebody else must’ve set her off.

  I smoothed my skirt over my knees. “Well, I thought I was doing fine.”

  “Uh huh.” A pair of glasses dangled around her neck from a chain. She placed them on her face and squinted at her computer monitor. “Toothpick art, scrapbooking, and urban renewal, yes?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  She slid the glasses from her nose and let them drop to her chest. “And they’re making adequate progress to make their deadlines?”

  “Well, no. I mean, they were. Everything was great before the weekend. I checked on them yesterday, and none of them are working.”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes that happens on Mondays. Some clients lose their inspiration over the weekend. You may have to check out some supplies on Friday and give them an extra boost Saturday and Sunday to keep the momentum going. It happens.” She wrote something in a notebook and tore off a sheet. “Here’s a weekend pass so you can take the supplies home at the end of the week.”

  I took the piece of paper, my hand shaking. Was I not supposed to take stuff home without permission? Someone should have told me, since I’d been doing it a lot lately. “Thanks.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.” She folded her hands together. “So. You got them back on track yesterday, right?”

  “Well, no. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. They won’t listen. I blow bubbles and think inspiring thoughts and they go off to do something completely different.”

  She did that nose pinching and sighing thing again. “Wynter, I can’t do your job for you. No one can. Those three clients weren’t assigned to you at random. They’re your clients. The Fates department sent down the orders to go specifically to your inbox. These people are depending on you and only you to complete their tasks—their dreams. No one else can do it.”

  I sat in silence, staring at a smudge on the edge of her desk, letting her words sink in. My clients. Fate gave them to me for a reason, and nobody else could help them.

  Holy shit. No pressure.

  “So.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. Part of me wanted to bolt out the door and disappear. “Do you have any advice at all? How do I make them listen?
”

  She shrugged. “Just keep trying. You’ll get through eventually. And if you don’t, you’ll do something else. Lots of people miss on their first department. If this isn’t the right one for you, maybe something else will suit you better.”

  “Like the Underworld?” I bit my lower lip.

  “Don’t be silly. Legacy’s don’t go to the Underworld.”

  I tilted my head and gave her questioning look. “And?”

  She frowned and put her glasses back on while tapping on the keyboard with her other hand. “You’re not…” She blinked at the screen. “Oh. I see.” The glasses dropped to her chest again. “You’re a Legacy with an empty god file.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “Well, then. I guess you have two choices here.” She leaned forward and fixed me with a hard look. “You need to either get your shit together or find out who your father is.”

  Not for the first time, I wondered how bad it must be to work in the Underworld. The more people talked about it, the more terrified I became of ending up there.

  “I’ll work on it.” I dragged myself out of the chair and turned to go. “Thanks for your time.”

  I hoped there was no sarcasm in my tone. None that she could hear, anyway.

  “Try to have a good day, Wynter. You’ll get them back on track. Whatever the reason they were assigned to you, trust that there was a reason.”

  I nodded and reached for the doorknob. “Hey.” I turned to face her again. “What’s going on out there today? Why is everybody standing around like they’re waiting for a fire drill?”

  Her eyes looked sad. “Trina didn’t make her deadline. Again. She’s packing up her desk.”

  Trina was the only person in the department who’d been nice to me—besides maybe Polly. “She’s still here?”

  “You can probably catch her if you hurry.”

  I slipped through the door and down the hall. Audrey and Kayla stood sneering at me in the hall, and I brushed past them without comment. I turned a corner and walked into the box Trina held in front of her.

  “Hey.” She smiled, but some of her light had gone out. “I guess you heard.”