“Can I pour you a cup of herbal tea? I made a pot just before you arrived.”
“Yes, please, as long as you’re having a cup, too.”
She smiles serenely and heads toward a wooden stand next to her worktable, where an electric kettle sits along with a large clay teapot and several mugs.
“I’m working on something now that I’d love your thoughts on,” she says, glancing over her shoulder. “It’s at the other end of the room.”
I wander to the opposite side of the studio, where another easel holds an unfinished work. Next to it is a wooden storage rack with about ten pieces of art tucked into the slots. As I stop to examine the new work, I spot a flash of silver in one of the paintings on the rack. Curious, I slide it out a foot or so. I think it’s the painting of the woman with three zippers running up her arm from her wrist.
“This one’s on your website, right?” I call over to her. “Do you mind if I take a better look?”
“Um, sure,” she says, and her comment is followed by the quiet tread of her suede flats on the laminated floor. Suddenly, she’s standing right next to me, empty-handed, as if the plan for tea has been abandoned.
Does she not want me to see this one? Perhaps, I wonder with a start, this work reflects suicidal ideations on her part, and she’ll feel uncomfortable showing it to me.
She slides the painting out and leans it against the wall. It’s indeed the painting from her website, with a young woman lying prone on a kind of trapeze or swing, her face in profile and her right arm dangling over the side. Three zippers run side by side from her wrist to the elbow. And the colors in this work seem more somber than those in the other paintings I’ve viewed.
“And this is a dream, too?” I say. “I mean, one you can imagine yourself having?”
“Perhaps. It’s an older painting of mine, and I don’t remember everything I was thinking of at the time.”
“Is it about self-harm?” I ask, surprised that I’ve dared to go there.
“No, no. I can see how it might come across in such a way, but that’s not anything I’ve ever considered. It’s—just based on something someone told me once.”
I finally tear my gaze away from the bright silver zippers and glance upward. Since the young woman is lying with her face in profile, it’s hard to get a good sense of what she looks like, but I study the image more closely than I did the other night on the website: the slightly wavy brown hair cascading over the side, the blue-green eyes and highcheekbones, the full lips turned upward in the tiniest of smiles. All suddenly so familiar.
I let out a small gasp.
“Is this—Melanie?” I say.
Behind me there’s only silence now, as if Alison has exited the room, but when I spin around, we’re only inches apart. She’s biting her lower lip, clearly caught by surprise.
“Yes,” she says quietly. “Yes, it is.”
My heart has begun to thrum.
“She told you she hated buttons? That’s why you painted the zippers?”
“Yes.” Alison has composed her face so that it’s now a total blank.
“And—and did she actuallyposefor you?”
“For several sessions. And I also worked with photographs I took of her.”
In my mind, fragments of thoughts trip over each other: Mel being secretive when Harry asked if she had a new squeeze; her acting awkward around Handler when she and Logan bumped into him; the words “returning to birch” in her haiku.
“Were you and Melanielovers?” I blurt out.
Alison lowers her gaze, her lips pressed tightly together, and then she looks back at me.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” she says finally. “We were lovers, yes—that last fall before she died.”
Chapter 28
My hand flies to my mouth, and I press it hard against my lips. There’s a whooshing sensation in my head, like I’ve bent down to the ground and come up way too fast.
“Your daughter wasn’t gay, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Alison says. “She was just, uh, curious, I think ... experimenting. We’d felt a strong connection at the end of her sophomore year, and as soon as she got back to campus, it turned into something physical.”
