Forests of the Heart (7 page)

“And the rest of the time?”

“I imagine what it’s like to be somebody else who doesn’t have my problems. ‘Course the downside of that is I have too good an imagination and end up obsessing over what I think could be depressing them. So we’re talking way moody and not really a solution that works or anything.”

“I never think of you as moody.”

“I’m not—except when I’m in that kind of mood.” She grinned. “Mostly I just play some tunes on my box and have a drink with a friend—at the same time, if I can arrange it. Works wonders.”

“I think I’d need a whole orchestra and brewery, and even then I’m not so sure it would help.”

Miki shook her head. “It’s not the volume or quantity—it’s the quality. And it’s the being with a friend that helps the most.”

“That makes sense.”

“So instead of going home and brooding over Ria and store invoices after work, why don’t you come out with me and have a little fun? There’s a session at The Harp tonight, Caffrey’s on tap, a lovely bottle of Jameson’s behind the bar, bangers and mash on the grill.”

Hunter started to shake his head. The last thing he needed right now was a pity date. But then he realized that wasn’t what Miki was offering. She was just being there as a friend.

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

Who knows? Maybe he’d actually feel better.

“Cool.”

On the CD player, Casey was now singing a Yeats poem that someone had set to music. The front door opened and three customers came in, brushing snow off their coats and stamping their feet. The mat at the door was going to be soaked before the end of the day.

“Must be noon,” Miki said.

She slid off her stool and walked out from behind the counter to see if she could give anyone a hand and all three men aimed themselves in her direction. Shaking his head, Hunter started to clear off the counter. When two more customers came in, one of them asking what was playing, he took the Casey CD off, made a mental note to order more copies, and put on something that they actually had in stock—a reissue of recordings Stan Getz had made for Verve back in the fifties.

Miki looked up from the worldbeat bins where she was talking up a recording by Violaine Corradi and gave him a thumbs-up.

Ellie made herself wait until she was well and truly awake before going over to the part of her loft that served as her studio. She sat at her kitchen table with a mug of coffee and had a bowl of granola while flipping through an old issue of
Utne Reader
that someone had passed along to her.

This issue’s cover story was “Wild at Heart: How Pets Make Us Human.” It made her wish, and not for the first time, that she had the sort of lifestyle that could accommodate a pet. The trouble was, she wasn’t a cat person, and a dog needed way more attention than she would be able to give it at this point in her life. Between her work with Angel, private commissions, and the part-time graphic design work she did for the weekly arts paper
In the City,
she was already scrambling to find time for her own art, never mind take care of anything as dependent as a pup as well.

But one day …

She closed the magazine. Sometimes it felt as though her whole life revolved around things that might come into it one day instead of what was in it now.

Putting her dirty bowl in the sink, she poured herself another cup of coffee and walked across the room to where her current work-in-progress stood under a damp cloth. The sculpture was far enough under way that she could see a hint of the bust’s features under the cloth—brow, cheekbones, nose, the rest lost in the drapes of the fabric. Viewing it like this, a vague, ghostly shape of a face under cloth, supported only by the length of broomstick she was using as an armature pole, it was hard, sometimes, to remember the weight of one of these busts. She could almost imagine it was floating there above the modeling stand, that it would take no more than a slight breeze to start it drifting away across the room.

The illusion only lasted until she removed the cloth and laid it aside. Now the still roughly sculpted head of gray clay was all density and weight, embracing gravity, and the wonder was that the armature pole could support it at all.

It was barely noon, though you wouldn’t know it from how dark it was in the loft. The storm outside made it feel more like late afternoon and she had to put on a couple of lights to see properly. She pulled up a stool to the modeling stand, but before she could begin to work, the sound of the wind rattling a loose strip of metal on her fire escape distracted her, drawing her gaze to the window. She shook her head as she looked outside. The thaw over Christmas had lulled everyone into thinking that they were in for a mild winter for a change, but true to form, it had only been a joke. At least it wasn’t freezing rain.

The fall of the snow was mesmerizing. She’d always wanted to find a way to capture its delicacy in clay, the drift and spin of the individual flakes as they fell, the random patterns they made, their flickering dance and the ever-changing contrast between light and dark, all conveniently framed by the window. But it was something she had to leave to the painters. The closest she’d ever come was an installation she’d done for a group show once where the viewer peered into a large, black box she’d constructed to see confetti being blown about by a strategic placement of a couple of small, battery-driven fans.

She’d painted tenements and alleys on the back and side walls of the box and placed a small sculpture of a homeless man, huddled under a rough blanket of newspapers, up against the painted buildings. Moody interior lighting completed the installation, and it had all worked out rather well—for what it said, as well as how it said it—only it wasn’t clay. It wasn’t a sculpture, but some odd hybrid, and the dancing confetti didn’t come close to capturing the snow the way she’d wanted it to. Snow, such as was falling outside her window today, had both delicate presence and weight, a wonderful tension between the two that played them against each other.

She watched the storm a while longer, then finally turned back to her sculpture, thinking that at least the latest cold snap had broken. The street people would still have drifts of wet snow to deal with, but they would be spared the bitter cold of the past few nights for now.

The businessman whose commission she was working on wasn’t available today, so she was stuck working from her sketches and the photographs she’d taken during earlier sittings. She collected them from the long worktable set against the back wall with its peanut gallery of drying busts, all looking at her. One, a self-portrait, her long hair pulled back into a loose bun at the nape of the neck, was almost dry enough to make its trip to the kiln. The others had all been hollowed out, but weren’t nearly dry enough yet. Three were commissions of rather stodgy businessmen like the one she planned to work on today, the sort of portrait work that helped pay the bills. The last few were of friends—hopefully to be part of a show if she could ever get the money together to have them cast.

Returning to the modeling stand, she spread out her reference material and gave the bust a spray of water from a plastic plant mister. Then she began to work on the detailing, constantly referring to her sketches and photographs as she shaped the clay with her fingers and modeling tools.

When her doorbell rang, she sat up, startled to realize that three hours had simply slipped away unnoticed while she’d been working. She rolled her shoulder muscles and stretched her hands over her head before standing up. It didn’t help much. Her back and shoulder muscles still felt far too tight. The doorbell rang again. Giving the bust another spray of water, she draped the damp cloth back over it. She wiped her hands on her jeans as she crossed the loft, adding new streaks of wet clay to the build-up of dried clay already there, stiffening the denim.

Opening the door, she found her friend Donal Greer standing in the hallway, the shoulders of his wool pea jacket white with snow. He was a little shorter than her five-ten—the discrepancy evened out by the heels of his boots—and a few years older. At the moment, the snow on his full beard and long dark ponytail made him seem gray-haired and far older. As the snow melted, it dripped to the floor where his boots had already started a pair of puddles. He gave her such a mournful, woe-bedraggled look that she wanted to laugh.

“It’s snowing,” Donal told her The pronouncement was uttered in an Eeyore-like voice made stranger by the slightest burr of an Irish accent.

Most people didn’t see through the moroseness he liked to affect. Ellie wasn’t one of them, though it had taken her a while to catch on. They’d met at one of Jilly Coppercorn’s parties, each of them having known Jilly for ages on their own, but never quite connecting with each other until that night. They’d talked straight through the party, all the way through the night until the dawn found them in the Dear Mouse Diner, still talking. From there it seemed inevitable that they’d become a couple, and they had for a while—even living together for a few months—but eventually they realized that they were much better suited as friends.

Donal gave a heavy sigh. “Truly snowing,” he went on. “Great bloody mounds of the stuff are being dumped from the sky.”

She smiled. “So I see. Come on in.”

“I was beginning to think you weren’t home,” Donal added as he stepped inside. He looked over to the studio area. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“I needed to come up for air,” Ellie said. “How’d you know I needed a break?”

Donal shrugged and toed off his boots, one by one. They immediately began to work at forming a new puddle around themselves.

“You know me,” he said. “I know all and see all, like the wild-eyed Gaelic fortune-teller that I am. It’s bloody depressing, I tell you. Takes all the mystery out of life.”

Ellie rolled her shoulder muscles again. “I’d much prefer it if you’d suddenly decide to become a masseur,” she told him. “One who desperately needs someone to practice on.”

“It’ll never happen,” he said, passing over a paper bag with grease stains on the bottom. “Mostly because it’d take far more energy than I could ever muster.” He shed his pea jacket and dropped it against the wall by the door. “Instead, I’ve got these chocolate croissants and I was hoping to find someone to help me eat them. Would you have any coffee?”

Ellie glanced at her coffee maker and pulled a face. “Let me put on a fresh pot. That stuff’s been sitting there all day now.”

Donal followed her to the kitchen area, marked off from the rest of the loft by a kitchen table and chairs set up close to a large industrial steel sink, a long counter and the pair of old appliances that had come with the place: a bulky fridge and an equally stout stove, both dating back to the sixties. He settled in one of the chairs by the table while Ellie ground some fresh beans for the coffee maker.

“So I heard you were a bit of the hero last night,” he said.

Ellie turned to look at him. “Who told you that?”

“Tommy. I ran into him at the Dear Mouse Diner when I was having breakfast this morning with Sophie and Jilly.”

“God, what was he doing up at that time? We didn’t get the van back to Angel’s until six-thirty.”

“I don’t think he’d been to bed yet,” Donal said.

Ellie shook her head. “We have
such
weird schedules. It’s a wonder we can still function.”

“And you’re avoiding the subject. That was a good thing you did. Take the compliment, woman. We’re all proud of you.”

Ellie finished pouring water into the coffee maker. Turning it on, she joined Donal at the table.

“It was pretty yucky,” she said. “I don’t know what he’d choked on but it took me forever to get the taste of his vomit out of my mouth.” She looked at the bag of croissants that he’d brought. “And doesn’t that little thought do wonders for the appetite.”

“Sorry I mentioned it.”

“Don’t be.”

But she still wanted to go rinse her mouth out with mouthwash again.

“So your man’s doing fine?” Donal asked.

Ellie nodded. “I called the hospital to check on him before I went to bed this morning.” She paused, then added, “It’s weird. When Angel had us all taking that CPR course, I didn’t think I’d remember any of it. But when it was actually happening, it was like I went into automatic. I didn’t even have to think about it.”

Donal slipped into a broader Irish accent. It was easy for him to do, seeing how he’d been born and lived half his life over there. “Sure, and wouldn’t that be the whole point of the course?”

“I guess.”

Thinking about last night made Ellie remember the man who was actually a woman with her silver flask filled with Welsh whiskey.

“Have you ever tried metheglin?” she asked. “It’s this—”

“Oh, I know what it is. Miki has a friend who makes it. Not quite Guinness, mind you, but it’ll do. Bloody strong bit of the gargle. Sneaks up and gives you a kick like poteen.”

Ellie nodded, remembering how the liquor had made her eyes tear last night.

“Where did you have it?” Donal asked.

The coffee was ready, so over steaming mugs and croissants, Ellie gave him a rundown of the previous night’s events, finishing up with the woman she’d met while Tommy had been talking to the police.

“I would have thought she was a man, if it hadn’t been for Tommy,” she said.

“It’s like one of those old ballads,” Donal said. “You know, where your man finds out his cabin boy’s really a woman. I wonder what she’s hiding from?”

“Who knows? In this city, I’m not sure I even want to know.”

Donal shook her head. “Jaysus, where’s your sense of mystery? Maybe she’s a deposed, foreign princess and all she has left of her former life is that silver flask. She’d be carrying herself with a tragic air, am I right?”

“Hardly.”

“Fair enough. So she’s learned to hide it well. To live with her disappointments. To put the past aside and get on with her life.”

Ellie sighed. “You know, the way you and Jilly can carry on you’d think every street person is some charming eccentric, or basically a sweet and kind person who’s only had a bit of bad luck. But it doesn’t work that way. They need our sympathy, sure, and we should try to help them all we can, but some of them are mean-spirited and some of them are dangerous and some of them would be screwed up no matter where you found them. I don’t think it helps anything to pretend differently.”