She squats down to switch off his headlamp—battery life is precious out here—and realizes it’s sitting on his open sketchbook.
Unlike his bright, lively sketches of Beauty, this drawing is mostly dark except for the faint illumination spilling over the central figure.
As if hypnotized, Ripley puts on the headlamp and picks up the sketchbook.
She stares for a long time before flipping back to the first page—a study of the ranch house and paddocks at Yellowtail. The sketch is simple yet evocative, full of movement. Next, there’s a landscape of the canyon. It’s guarded by a distant figure with a long pale braid and an unwelcoming set to her crossed arms.
Some of the sketches are a dozen quick strokes; others are almost photorealistic. Most are in pencil, but a few—like a tiny, painfully exquisite Montana sunset—are tinted with watercolors she didn’t know he had.
There’s a portrait of Geraldine, her laugh lines given loving emphasis. James’s tidy, old-fashioned lettering marches across the bottom of the page:Geraldine Yellowtail, Montana, USA.A sketch of a field with lines of wheat that part and close around a thick-trunked oak tree the farmer surely must have considered felling but never did. An old man changing a tire on a vintage pickup truck. A rabbit, its nose mid-twitch—how still James must have been not to scare it away.
And herself, bent over her excavation, her hands poised more elegantly than she’s ever held them, she’s certain. At the bottom, he’s writtenRipley, Brushing.
The next one is all the more passionate for being untidilydone—drunkenly done, maybe. Ripley’s sprawled across a pair of legs in the back seat of a car, her outstretched hand not quite obscuring the way her eyes are hooded with alcohol and desire and badly concealed plans:Ripley, Reaching.
She’s everywhere in this book. Eating a club sandwich. Squinting suspiciously from under her hat. Sitting with her feet dangling over the side of the canyon. Laughing behind the wheel of the Charger. There’s a drawing of what looks like the pine trees near the showers, although it’s not quite accurate, as if he drew it from memory. The illustration is overlaid with an agonized scribble she doesn’t understand until she reads the caption, the letters pressed into the paper so hard, she can see where the pencil tip broke on theg.
Ripley, Showering.
And then she’s back to the last drawing.
She’s kneeling on the floor when the door creaks open.
“Ripley.” James’s tired voice contracts with shock.
“ ‘Ripley, Sleeping,’ actually.” She traces a fingernail under the lettering, careful not to touch his lines.
On the page, half her face is in darkness, the other half lit by the moon. She rebraids her hair at night, but he’s drawn it rippling over the pillow, spread out the way he arranged it in the museum.
He’s made her far more beautiful than she is in life, flattering her the way royal portraitists did when their work could earn them a king’s ransom or get them beheaded.
Or the way artists do when they stop seeing with their eyes and start seeing something visible only to the heart.
She stands up, her knees creaking. She pulls the headlamp off and lets it dangle from one hand; the beam of light swings back and forth across the plywood floor.
“How many times did you draw me, James?”
“Nine,” he says like he wants to cause himself pain. “I can explain.”
She looks at his carefully blank face. “You’re a really good artist, James. Really, really good. I’d say these don’t need an explanation.”
He exhales, nodding. His long legs are barely covered by navy-and-white-striped cotton shorts that match the collar showing at the neck of his zippered riding jacket. How veryJamesto be collared and buttoned even at night—although he does seem to be wearing his boots with no socks. His hair is a mess, like he’s spent an hour with both fists clenched in it. Behind his crooked glasses, his eyes are shadowed with resignation.
“I’m so sorry, Ripley. I can go if you’re not comfortable with me here. I’ll sleep in one of the jeeps. I can leave tomorrow, first thing.” He retrieves his monogrammed weekend bag from underneath his bed, sets it on the mattress, and starts stuffing clothes inside with barely controlled movements that look almost like punches.
“James.The issue is not the drawings. It’s that you said we should stop before there were deeper feelings involved.”
“I did,” he says.
She flips to another drawing. “ ‘Ripley, Unconvinced,’ ” she reads. Flips the page again. “ ‘Ripley, Hoping.’ You. Had.Feelings.And not shallow ones.”
He crushes his towel into the bag so ferociously, Ripley can hear stitches popping.
“Yes,” he says, straightening. “I had feelings for you.”
“You lied,” she breathes hotly. “You let me think I was the only one.”
He spins around so quickly, she expects…she doesn’t knowwhat she expects, but it isn’t James gently extracting the sketchbook from her hands and setting it on top of the bag. “I’ve never lied to you, Ripley. Never. Maybe I elided certain things, but I never lied.”
