Emerald Windows (13 page)

There was none. “Did you hear me?” he asked.

“I heard you.” She locked her eyes on the sculpture again, then quickly set it back on the pedestal and backed away, staring at it as if it were a foreign, unfamiliar object. Assigning it that kind of price tag cast it into the realm of something alive and mysterious. Nothing an eighteen-year-old girl could have created.

“Why didn’t you sell it?” she asked, still staring at the sculpture.

“Because it wasn’t mine,” he said.

She tore her eyes from the hands and looked up at him, stricken. “Yes, it was. I gave it to you.”

“You gave it to me before everything fell apart,” he said. “I always planned to give it back when I saw you.”

He lifted the sculpture carefully and handed it back to her. Tentatively, she embraced it, not taking it from him, but holding it just as he did. “I want you to take it back,” he said. “When you gave it to me, it was a poignant gesture of thanks. But after what happened, I don’t think you really should have thanked me. Not for messing up your life, running you out of town….” He swallowed and looked down at the sculpture, unable to meet her eyes as he finished.

“But I don’t want it,” she said.

“Take it, Brooke,” he whispered. “And when you start doubting your talent, you can remember just how powerful an artist you really are.”

Brooke accepted the sculpture with mixed feelings, delighted that he had kept it in such a place of honor all these years…and a little sad that he had given it back now.

CHAPTER
   

IT
WAS MIDNIGHT WHEN
B
ROOKE
slipped into her house and saw that Roxy was still up, sitting in the living room staring at some Japanese martial arts movie on television.

“Hi,” Brooke said.

Roxy didn’t look away from the screen. “Hi.”

Brooke dropped her case on the couch, but she kept the wrapped sculpture in her hands. She was bone tired, and her spirit was full of holes, shot from every direction that day. She wanted nothing more than to collapse into bed and sleep unhindered, but Brooke knew that this talk with Roxy about the scene she’d interrupted earlier couldn’t wait. She had to start laying some kind of foundation for a new relationship.

“Look, about tonight—” Brooke started.

But Roxy immediately cut in. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Brooke sat down next to her, looked at the screen, and realized that her sister couldn’t possibly have been
interested in the badly dubbed film. Roxy had stayed up, Brooke surmised, exactly because she did want to talk about it.

“I want you to know that I only walked in on you because I heard your voice and the light was out, and I was afraid you were in trouble. I’m sorry, okay?”

Roxy kept her blank stare on the television, her eyes so devoid of feeling that Brooke began to wonder if her sister was, indeed, preoccupied by the movie.

“Who was he, anyway?” Brooke asked.

Roxy pulled her feet up on the couch and wrapped her arms around her knees. “No one you know.”

“I might surprise you,” Brooke said. “The town’s pretty small. I got to know a lot of the kids your age going to school functions when you were little. What’s his name?”

“He’s not my age,” Roxy said. “He’s older.” The tension on Roxy’s face grew more pronounced, and her lips quivered. “It doesn’t matter, anyway.” She picked up the remote control and flipped the station.

“All right,” Brooke said, crestfallen. “It’s none of my business.”

She sat motionless for a moment, struggling for some common subject she could broach. Her hands closed more tightly around the sculpture. Slowly, she began unwrapping it.

“Do you remember this, Roxy?” she asked.

Roxy looked down at the sculpture, and a grudging spark of interest ignited in her eyes. “That’s the piece you did in high school. The one that won you the art scholarship.”

Brooke nodded, turning the hands over, tracing the smooth lines with her fingertips. It fascinated her. Holding
Infinity
was like holding a part of herself she hadn’t glimpsed in seven years. “Nick kept it all these years.”

Roxy’s gaze climbed to Brooke’s face, amazement and wonder covering the jaded grays that had reigned there before. “You worked so hard on it. I always thought you had it or that you’d sold it or something.”

Brooke shook her head. “I gave it to him. I couldn’t have finished it without his help. Wouldn’t have won the scholarship.
Wouldn’t have even tried for it.” She looked up and met Roxy’s eyes. “Nick was a good teacher, Roxy.”

The shutters over her sister’s eyes drew shut again, and Roxy looked back at the television. “Why did he give it back?” she asked, her tone deliberately uninterested.

Brooke’s eyes glazed over as she looked at the sculpture. “He said he always intended to. Just never had the chance until tonight.” She laughed softly for a moment as the conversation played back over in her mind. “He told me that a gallery owner in St. Louis once offered him $25,000 for it. Can you believe that? And he turned it down.”

Roxy’s eyes left the screen and focused on her sister, her antagonism blatant. “Guess passion does crazy things to a person,” she muttered.

“It had nothing to do with passion,” she said tightly. “He just felt that it was mine, and that he didn’t have the right to sell it.”

“So are
you
going to sell it?” Roxy asked.

Brooke looked at the sculpture and realized just how much it meant to her, now that she held it again. She had put so much into it.

“No, I couldn’t ever sell it. It means too much.” Quickly she looked up at Roxy, as if she’d caught herself in her own trap. “Nothing happened between us, Roxy. And now our relationship is strictly business.”

Roxy didn’t seem content to let things go at that. Brooke saw the subtle challenge in her eyes. “If he doesn’t mean anything to you, it seems like you could let it go. Especially since you haven’t had it all this time, anyway.”

“No,” Brooke said, feeling as if the walls of free choice were closing in on her. She stood up and turned her back to her sister. “He could have sold it, but he didn’t. I can’t do it, either.”

“Twenty-five thousand is a lot of money,” Roxy said.

“They could offer me a hundred twenty-five and I wouldn’t change my mind,” she said. Then, looking down at the sculpture
carefully cradled in her hands, she started out of the room. “Good night, Roxy. I’m going to bed.”

L
ater that night, as Roxy lay awake in her bed, she thought again of Brooke’s attachment to the sculpture.
Twenty-five thousand dollars.
Just the thought of that amount of money made her heart beat faster. Twenty-five thousand dollars could take her so far away from this oppressive little town.

She turned over on her side, thinking of the sentiment Nick Marcello had shown in keeping the sculpture instead of selling it. She had to admit, it was a little out of character for the womanizing cradle-robber she’d always imagined him to be. And the same old question that she supposed plagued everyone in Hayden cropped up again: Why would a handsome, gifted art teacher risk his career for an eighteen-year-old girl?

Brooke was different.
The intuitive knowledge, the awestruck memory, invaded her thoughts. Her sister had never been ordinary. So much style. So much substance. So much emotion. No one in Roxy’s life had ever made her feel quite as special as her big sister had when she was little.

Maybe she was still angry at Brooke for driving away that day and leaving her on the doorstep, she admitted in the solitude of darkness. Maybe that was the big sin she couldn’t forgive her for. That and all the others that had followed.

Time to grow up,
Roxy told herself, staring at the ceiling.
Life won’t let you stay innocent forever.
She understood that better than most people her age. She’d been fighting the inevitable for years. But the fight was coming to an end. If Brooke hadn’t barged into her office tonight, her innocence would have been surrendered like the adoration she’d once had for her sister.

An angry tear rolled down her temple and over her ear, and she closed her hand over her mouth to muffle her sob.

When would her choices get less consequential? When was it supposed to get easier to make it through each day? And when could she stop caring about the hopeless, heartless whispers
behind her back, the people waiting for her to mess up so that she could take her turn to wear Brooke’s scarlet letter?

It was inescapable, really, she thought, burying her face in her pillow. It was just a matter of time until the bomb dropped. She would go on making choices based on the fickle, fathomless whims of other people, and stave off the chaos within until she could run away like Brooke had.

But unlike Brooke, Roxy knew she would never look back.

CHAPTER
   

T
HAT’S SO INTERESTING.”
I
T WAS A
thought Brooke had not meant to utter, but she couldn’t help herself. Her fascination with Nick’s concept for the windows had sent her to a bookstore for a Bible. Instead of answering her questions, her reading of it had raised many more.

Nick looked up from his sketch. “What’s interesting?” he asked.

“The idea that God provided that ram.” She swallowed and tried to steady her voice. “I know you’re gonna think I’m incredibly stupid. I’d never read that before, about Abraham and Isaac, or how God provided that ram in place of his sacrifice of Isaac.”

“Pretty powerful. Do you think we should show Isaac on the altar? The knife blade as Abraham prepared to sacrifice him?”

“Anguish and tears on his face.”

“But his eyes focused on heaven,” Nick added. “Because he knew God doesn’t break covenant, and He had promised that a great nation would come through
Isaac. God would have to either stop Abraham from killing Isaac, or else raise Isaac from the dead.”

She looked up at him. “Can we capture all that in stained glass? The very simplicity of the images might diminish the message.”

“I think we can do it,” he said. “We can give enough of it to make people hungry to read more in the Scriptures.”

Brooke grew quiet as she looked down at her own sketch. “You’re smart, Nick,” she whispered. “This isn’t just about art to you, is it? It’s about getting people to read the Bible.”

He smiled. “Shrewd as serpents, guileless as doves. That’s what Jesus said to be.”

She reached for the stack of sketches he had already finished and began to look through them. Her hand stilled as she came to the one of Mary holding her limp, bleeding son in her arms, weeping over him.

“This one,” she whispered. “It just tugs at something…so deep.”

He looked up at her. “Do you think it goes too far?”

She kept looking at the sketch. “It depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you want people to be able to glance away.”

He smiled. “I don’t.”

“The pastor may have a hard time getting people to listen to him, when they can’t keep their eyes off Jesus.”

“That’s the whole point of
having
a pastor,” he said. “To keep people’s eyes on Jesus. Horace will be thrilled.”

She was quiet for a moment as not-so-quiet thoughts passed over her face like movie credits on a screen. Then she flipped through more of his sketches, stopping at a rough drawing of a man dressed in modern-day clothing—jeans, a T-shirt, tennis shoes—carrying a cross on his shoulder. “I don’t understand this one,” she said.

“Jesus is the New Covenant,” he said. “And if we enter into that covenant with him, we’re to take up our cross and follow him.”

Take up her cross? How? What did that mean? But she didn’t want to appear ignorant—not to Nick. So she vowed to find the
answer herself when she had time to pore through the Bible more on her own.

“Is something wrong?” he asked quietly.

She shook her head. “No. I just wish I’d paid more attention in Sunday school when I was little.” She didn’t know why tears stung her eyes as she spoke, or why that yearning in her heart— for what, she wasn’t sure—kept getting stronger.

He reached across the table and touched her chin. “I can tell something’s wrong. Tell me, Brooke. What is it?”