The Inspiration (34 page)

My grandmother used to tell me that no matter how our rough circumstances are—large or small—life moves forward and we have to figure out how to carry on. I find the strength to climb back in my car and drive home.

Two horrid and hazy days later, I’m lying in bed, staring at the wall and willing myself to get up and make coffee. The phone rings. It’s Jess, which is a surprise, considering she never gets up early on Sunday.

“Hey, Ava.” She sounds tense, and I hear another muffled voice in the background. “Listen, when was the last time you talked to or heard from Max?”

“Friday night. Why?” A bad feeling settles in my stomach.

“What was his mood like when you talked last? Was he okay?”

She’s scaring me. “Why, Jess? What’s going on?”

“Answer me, Ava,” she snaps. “Was he okay?”

“No.” I take a deep breath.

“Fucking hold on.”

“Dylan!” she yells. She’s louder than I expect, even though it sounds like she moved the phone away from her mouth.

“Please, tell me what happened,” she asks me.

“We had a fight and I left.”

“Fuck! That’s just what I was afraid of.”

She speaks to Dylan again. “They had a fight. She hasn’t heard from him either.”

“How upset was he? I really need to know.”

“
Very
upset, and I’m getting
very
upset now too because you aren’t telling me what’s going on. Is Max okay?”

“Listen, can you come out here?”

“Come out where…Malibu?” I’m freaked out. What the hell’s going on? My heart sinks. Max’s house is the last place I want to go right now.

“Yes.” Jess sounds frustrated. “No one’s been able to reach Max since Friday night. He didn’t show up for a lunch meeting with Dylan yesterday. When Dylan still hadn’t heard from him, he drove out to Malibu. There’s no sign of him.”

“When I got to Max’s house on Friday evening, he was with that blonde, Sheila. Maybe you should call her?” I know it’s not likely they’re together, considering his reaction to her that night, but it’s worth a shot.

“Sheila?” she snaps. “He was with that idiot? Okay, we’ll try to reach her, but could you still come out here?”

“You know, Jess, I’ve been through enough crap with Max. I’m done. I really don’t want to come out to his place when I’m trying to forget him.”

“Please? I’m scared something bad has happened. When Dylan showed up, he thought Max had been robbed. His front door was wide open, and there was broken shit like the place had been trashed. But all the stuff robbers would take like TVs and cameras were still here.

“Dylan couldn’t find him, but his car is parked outside. And the paintings…Ava, I’m so worried. I’ve never seen anything like this. You have to come here and see what I’m talking about.”

My heart pounds in my chest. The fear in her voice compels me to set my own reservations aside. “Okay, Jess. I’m on my way.”

W
hen I pull up to Max’s house, the state of his house is even worse than I imagined.

There’s broken pottery, dead plants and potting soil everywhere. Max’s garage door and walls are dented and scratched from multiple impacts. There’s considerably more damage than I remember from before I drove off Friday. In the heat of his fury that night, Max must’ve kept throwing things.

I gingerly step over the shards and enter the front garden. Even though the sun’s burning through the fog, it’s still quite cool, and I shiver as I look around.

More pages from the book have blown into the yard, decorating the garden with the wandering pages. Several are perched in the trees, captured by branches. A few are in the flowerbeds and others float on top of the koi pond like a fine layer of snow. The sight of it humiliates me and fills me with hopelessness.

One of the dining room chairs is on its side on the lawn, a fallen soldier undoubtedly surprised to be part of the melee. I breathe a sigh of relief to see it’s nowhere near the tree as the image of a noose dangling from a branch comes to mind.

Jess stands in the doorway to the house and looks battle-worn. I’ve never seen her expression so bleak and my nerves instantly fray.

“Where’s Dylan?” I ask, not knowing what else to say.

“He’s in the studio. We’ll go see him in a minute. Come on.” She motions me into the house.

Broken glass litters the floor and the stench of alcohol permeates the air.

“Watch your step,” Jess warns.

There’s a scar where the glass hit the wall—probably the bottle of tequila. The sweater that’d been tossed on the floor is no longer there. White pages are scattered all over the room.

The dining room table is on its side and the remaining chairs are askew. One of the sheer white curtains has been ripped off the wall, the rod hanging at an odd angle from its uprooting. It’s as if a savage animal tore through the house.

Could Max have that much rage?

A framed picture is smashed on the floor and there’s a dent in the plaster where it collided before falling on the tiles. Jess carefully picks it up. It’s a photo of Max accepting an award amid the shattered glass.

“The Whitney Biennial. Damn, Max,” Jess whispers and narrows her eyes as she stares at the broken mess that framed one of his successes. She gingerly sets it on a nearby side table.

“I don’t even know how to process this,” I say.

Jess shakes her head. “It’s complicated. Let’s go to the studio. I want to warn you…Dylan’s really upset, so take anything he says with a grain of salt.”

So he’s going to blame this all on me?
I wonder.

To avoid facing the chaos inside, we weave between the palm trees along the side yard until we reach the front of the studio.

Jess grabs my arm to stop me before I go in. “I have to warn you…this may freak you out. But I’m here, okay?”

Am I wearing my heart on my sleeve? She’s scared for me. Am I that transparent? I take a deep breath, ready for more chaos, and slowly step inside.

At first, I’m surprised by the quiet cleanliness of the studio. Nothing’s smashed or overturned, and it’s as pristine as I remember it. But the look of accusation on Dylan’s face just before he turns away is intimidating.

What?

I look around the studio again, searching for the piece of the puzzle I’m missing. And then it hits me like a ton of bricks. Three large paintings are leaning against the wall. Are those the paintings that were supposed to be on their way to Barcelona? They’re gorgeous—all color and emotion. Or at least they
were
gorgeous until Max defaced them.

Across each canvas, a large letter has been slapped across the face in dripping black paint. It’s savage—the most brutal form of graffiti to deface something so beautiful with so little regard.

“No,” I groan, reaching for the paintings, as if I can undo the mess with a wave of my hand. I stumble forward and Jess catches me. Max has crushed me with his final message scrawled across his work. My eyes move left to right, painting to painting.

A-V-A.

One letter per painting, each one a cry in the dark, a surrender, a loss.

If there’d been any lingering doubts about Dylan’s theory that Max was obsessed with me, there aren’t anymore. Replacing them is a feeling of anguish that, if I’d understood the depths of Max’s feelings, perhaps I could’ve handled everything differently.

“I’m fucking tempted to just send them to Barcelona like this, damn it!” Dylan spits out, as he paces back and forth in front of the paintings.

“I don’t think so. You don’t want to leave him open for ridicule,” Jess says.

“What the fuck was he thinking, Jess? He knew these paintings were late.”

“Obviously, he wasn’t thinking. That’s the problem.”

“Can’t he fix them?” I ask.

“Well, we’d have to find him first, wouldn’t we?” Dylan says, exasperated.

“And so far, we have no idea where he is.” Jess’s defeated expression and the hopeless tone in her voice surprise me.

“Did you reach Sheila?” I ask Jess.

“Yes, but she wasn’t very helpful. She said she hoped she never saw the fucker again. Before she hung up, she said she left Friday night right after you; she didn’t know about the rest of what happened around here.”

The jealous part of me is happy to know she didn’t stay and party with Max after I’d left.

“Dylan, what about that art restoration guy? The one you used last year after the rain damage at your place,” Jess says.

“I’ve already called him and he’s on his way. Hopefully, he can fix them. I’m going to try him again to see where he is.” Dylan steps into the garden with his cell phone.

“Now do you see why I called you, Ava? You had to see all this to understand the depth of it,” Jess says gently.

I nod but I’m confused. Is this an obsession or something more?

Jess shakes her head. “Remember my party in New York? I had an argument with Max that night because I wanted him to stay away from you. He’s too messed up for a relationship right now.”

I study her face. I know she’s right…he’s a mess…and now he’s a missing mess.

“I see now that he tried to avoid falling for you, but in the end, he couldn’t help himself. Max is a force of nature. Once he focuses on something or someone, I’ve learned to just get out of the way. There’s no stopping him. And now that he knows he’s ruined everything…”

“But Jess, none of us can know for sure what he’s thinking.”

“I have two more things to show you.” Jess leads me to his desk and carefully opens a large folder. On top, there’s a computer printout. In the margin of the print-out I notice that he’s doodled my name a number of times in different sizes and styles.

“This doesn’t mean anything. He could’ve been talking to me on the phone while he was doodling,” I argue.

“Really?” she asks with raised brows like I’m deluded.

I give her an exasperated, wide-eyed look and let out a long sigh.

She gently lifts the paper out of the folder and holds it up me. “It’s a love poem, Ava.”

I take it out of her hand to examine it more closely.

The printout is of an E. E. Cummings poem, “Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, Gladly Beyond.” My breath catches—he couldn’t possibly know it’s one of my favorite poems. My gaze drops down to the last graph and I silently recite it to myself.

“Oh, Jess,” I whisper. I press my hand on my chest to keep my heart from unfolding.

She rests her hand on my shoulder to steady me.

“But Jess…all this time I thought he had no romantic interest in me. Sure, he’d flirt, but more often than not he’d treat me like a buddy. I didn’t know what his intentions were until the night of the printing, and even then I thought he only wanted sex.”

“I know, babe. And now you know you meant so much more to him. Here’s the last thing…look at this.” She turns back to the folder and tenderly peels back a sheet of parchment paper. There’s a piece of heavy watercolor paper with a drawing of the photo he emailed me from the day we went thrift store shopping for paintings. It’s exquisitely detailed with accents of soft pastels.

He’s rendered me far more beautiful than I am, and for a moment I’m transported away from our current crisis and my heart soars. It takes my breath away that such a beautiful piece of art was created in my likeness. But more than that, this drawing was done when things were good between us. Unlike my angel painting, which was
my
gift, this drawing was for him. It’s quietly beautiful, not the rage-filled scrawl of my name on the paintings that stand before us.

This drawing holds the truth of how Max once saw me, and I ache now for all that we’ve lost.

Jess points out something in the bottom corner and I lean in closer to see. Handwritten in small letters Max has written:
My Ava…

Overcome, I rush out of the studio and down to the beach. Tears fight their way down my face as my mind races. I need to get away from all of this, both the drawing Max created, and the paintings he destroyed as he pulled me into his heart and ripped me out again.

When I reach the shore, I stop, close my eyes and picture Max’s face, from his brilliant eyes to his perfectly-sculpted jaw. When he smiled, he was too beautiful. Everything about him was too much, perhaps more than I could ever handle. His presence was so commanding that, even when he was quietly standing, I was drawn to his energy.

Now I understand that he was powerfully drawn to me too.

In my heart, I know I won’t be at peace until Max is found and gets help. So I make up my mind that I’ll be a force of nature too, if that’s what it takes to bring Max home. Only then can I know what the next chapter of our gothic romance novel holds, or if the cover is closed forever, forcing us to move on with our lives.

I look to the horizon and brace against the gale that curls off the ocean, carrying part of its mysteries and the stories from its depths yet to be told. I wish my words could travel with the current to places near and far, where answers linger in hallways and nestle in corners, waiting to be revealed. I close my eyes and whisper into the wind…