LITMIR.BIZ

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pail. But none of Dave’s anxiety, concern or even occasionally scattered solicitude had stopped the random bullet from that drive-by shooting. And not a single element of the loving regard that Jillian had poured into their marriage had prevented that .38 caliber thief from stealing Dave, or his music, his passion, his fathering, his soul, and so very much more.

      Something in her rigid smile, or perhaps something lurking in her eyes, let Elise catch a glimpse of her thoughts, for her friend said quickly, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I know there are things you can’t foresee.”

      Her voice dropped nearly an octave, and she nearly spit out an epithet before continuing, “Forget I said anything. I’m just a worrywart.” She patted the table, as if touching Jillian’s hand.

      Jillian shook her head, trying to shake away the memory of that agonizing day, the worse-than-despairing year of days since.

      “I’m fine,” she said.

      Elise, ever the cheerleader, leaned forward slightly, her ruddy face free of any smile now, her mouth drawn into a serious line, her eyes urgent. “At least you’re painting again,” she said.

      Jillian nodded. It was a true statement, but it made her feel guilty nonetheless. She was painting again, not the light, airy abstracts that had so delighted Dave. Instead, she was creating dark, angry, real and surreal accounts of the fury and confusion that reigned in her. And most of all, these new and frightening paintings all too often depicted the helplessness she felt upon hearing her daughter’s screams in the middle of the night. Surreal doorways, openings to terrible, evil places, horrific eyes darkly beckoning. Were these desperate paintings wholly representative of her life now?

      Only yesterday she’d discovered that the pairs of haunted eyes in the roiling clouds beyond the jambs of the last three nowhere doors were the same exact color as Steven’s. What did that foretell? What did it mean? His eyes were the doorways of her own soul? That was too heavy and too complex even for Jillian’s present dark mood.

      “So, that damned bullet didn’t get everything, did it?” Elise asked almost harshly.

      Jillian looked up in surprise. Was this the secret to their friendship, that Elise was able to tap into some underlying empathetic emanation, or was it that she was nearly telepathic?

      Elise nodded, as if Jillian had voiced these questions aloud. “I know, Jillian. Don’t you think I’ve been angry about it, too? It was bad enough to lose Dave, his gorgeous music. And to see what you and Allie were going through? But, my God, you stopped painting, too. It was like that murderer stole you also.”

      Jillian nodded slowly, fighting tears that threatened to spill, to blur her vision. She blinked rapidly, willing them away. Elise was right, and too terribly on target. She had felt that way, still felt that way to a large degree. That bullet had stolen her joy in living.

      “It’s okay, you know,” Elise said. “It’s just me here now. Not some shrink with nasty questions about your mother and your second cousin’s older brother. I know what hell it was to live with Dave sometimes. I knew him before you did, remember?”

      Jillian smiled weakly, and then, almost to her relief, found herself saying, “Sometimes at night, when I wake up and remember that he’s not here, I’ve gone to sit at the drafting table, or maybe in front of the easel. And nothing would come. Not even a glimmer of an idea. All I could think about was, who would I show it to now that Dave was…gone. At least he kept me honest.”

      “You could always call me, you know. I want to see your work.”

      Jillian looked away from Elise, unable to continue while directly meeting her friend’s blatant sympathy. She half turned in her chair, profiling both Elise and the outside doors. She thought of the way Steven had stood so still in the courtyard, and drew on that image for some semblance of strength.

      How could she explain to Elise that the paintings weren’t ‘work’? They were agony, despair, rage. They were the darkest, angriest part of her. The guilt over the marriage, which had been broken long before Dave’s death? The guilt over knowing that both of them, no matter how much they might have loved, had held some special ingredient back? Whatever they represented, whatever they displayed, Jillian knew they were the doorways to the ultimate torment in her soul.

      “Anytime, Jill,” Elise said.

      Jillian didn’t tell Elise that it wasn’t—couldn’t be—the same as showing Dave. She didn’t have to; Elise knew. But just yesterday, hadn’t she considered showing a recent piece to Steven? Somehow she’d thought he would understand it, perhaps even be able to explain it to her. Was it because he’d told her, only last week—when she’d said he didn’t have to call her Mrs. Stewart, but could call her Jillian—that someone had once told him that even “the prince of darkness is a gentleman.”

      She couldn’t remember the context, why he’d said it. She only remembered being teased by the odd phrase, feeling it fit him somehow. A browse through Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations had revealed the quote as coming from Shakespeare’s King Lear. A man who quoted Shakespeare while cleaning out gutters was a man who might understand the dark side of life, she’d thought then, and remembered now, smiling a little.

      She’d thought it a remarkably apt remark from him. “Child Rowland to the dark tower came…” That was what Steven reminded her of, a haunted man in search of himself, in search of some dark and terrible truth.

      Elise, perhaps encouraged by Jillian’s smile but misunderstanding it, said, “Jill, you’re actually drawing something. And, honey, they’re good.”

      Jillian tried letting this sink in, attempted to feel the truth in Elise’s words. The paintings were well drawn, well executed, but good? That was a judgment, not an absolute, an abstract instead of a truth. What was good about doorways that led nowhere, openings that only revealed glimmers of dark, terrible universes beyond?

      For some inexplicable reason, the doorways reminded her of Steven. The dark tower? Was that why she’d thought he could explain them to her?

      Elise said something else, something about the new “jeweled” effect in her recent work.

      Jillian asked her, hearing the angry note in her voice come through, despite her attempts to quell it, “Do you know why my new paintings all have that jeweled effect, that brighter-than-bright sheen to them?”

      Her friend murmured an uneasy negative.

      Jillian felt her lips curve, but she knew it wasn’t in a smile, unless this time it really was born of bitterness. “They’re that way because the whole time I’m painting, I’m crying. And I paint what I see.”

      She heard Elise murmur a placating something, but her heart was pounding so loudly, the words didn’t penetrate. She couldn’t sit there any longer. The restlessness that had so thoroughly claimed her during the past year triggered, and forced her into action. She moved back to the window and stared out at the courtyard.

      Steven was no longer absorbing the dying rays of the setting sun. He was standing facing the doors, just in front of the pile of leaves, looking as though he’d risen from them, a golden phoenix from unburned ashes. His hands hung loose at his sides, the rake abandoned against the trunk of the apricot tree at the far south end of the courtyard.

      His eyes were open now, and filled with light, as if he truly had taken in the sun’s rays and transformed them into a startling green. The color was oddly out of place in the late-afternoon desert Southwest, and was as luminous as the jeweled colors in her paintings. Blazing emeralds.

      It was at least three seconds before she realized she was gazing directly into his eyes, staring at him, frozen, and when she did, she felt strangely linked with him, her heart pounding in a strange combination of fear and poignant recognition.

      Had her swift rise from the table called his attention, or had he been watching her all along, as she all too often watched him?

      She could read nothing in his closed expression, no understanding, no pity, yet she felt a powerful emotion emanating

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