Something Beautiful

Would the hurt of losing Dave ever go away? she wondered. Would the pain ever become just another of life’s more uncomfortable memories? A full year had slipped by in a time-warped blur, and grief still crawled into bed with her at night. Pain still taunted her in the early morning when she stretched her hand to feel her husband’s warmth and found a cold, empty pillow instead.

Too often she’d found herself standing beside the empty hammock, a soft drink in her hand, staring vacantly at the leaves caught in the now-frayed webbing. She couldn’t count the times she’d passed the den sofa on a Saturday afternoon and reached out to pat feet that would never again scuff the hand-carved armrests. And the silence from his studio still seemed deafening, Dave’s unplayed Steinway a constant reminder that more than her husband had been buried with him that stormy autumn morning.

Even the world outside their rambling adobe home seemed to tease her, mocking her efforts to maintain a semblance of normality. Everything about Santa Fe seemed to whisper Dave’s name, conjure his image. He had loved the city so, delighting in the sharp seasonal changes, the deep snows—Jillian, Allie, find your skis, grab your mittens, there’s a slope with our names on it— the lazy summer afternoons—Let’s skip your gallery opening and open a bottle of champagne instead—the biting chill of a spring evening—Do you need a jacket, hon? Or are my arms enough?—and the long, golden Indian summers, brisk and beautiful autumn days…days like today.

How many times in the past, when Dave was still alive, had she chastised herself for feeling that his love was tempered somehow, that he couldn’t reach the inner part of her, touch that well of love she had to give? How many times had she felt empty, longing for some undefined magic that he’d never touched?

Until he was gone.

Until days like today, when the sun would have beckoned him, would have made him call her name.

But now, this afternoon, another man held her attention. The man raking leaves outside had green eyes, not honeyed brown, and his chiseled face carried none of Dave’s softness, nor a hint of Dave’s tenderness. Somehow that made her feel easier about him, as though the sheer magnitude of the contrast to Dave distanced him, made him safe.

“Jillian—”

She didn’t answer, didn’t turn to look at Elise Jacobson. She scarcely even heard the question inherent in the inflection of her name.

“Jillian? Hey, do you hear me?” Elise asked. Her voice seemed to come from a thousand miles away.

Several times during the past year, she had forced herself to meet Elise at one of the sidewalk cafés that Dave had frequented, and had been unable to meet her friend’s sympathetic gaze, and her hands had trembled too much to lift the cappuccino to her lips. And how much of that trembling had come from guilt, from knowing that, like him, she’d kept some vital part of herself blocked from him?

Elise said now, “I was thinking we might go to Hyde Park this weekend, let Allie get dirty in the woods…You know, all that sort of females-communing-with-nature stuff. We could even play out some kind of welcome-to-autumn ceremony, kind of an equinox ritual.”

Jillian still didn’t turn around. She continued to watch the green-eyed stranger working with such intimate knowledge of her property, her land. Not for the first time, she found herself lulled by his steady progress, even as she tensed at some scarcely recognized power that seemed to emanate from him.

“Just think about Hyde Park…the sound of Stellar’s jays in the pines, the mushrooms and toadstools hiding underneath the brown needles…” Elise said. “Don’t you want to go?”

She didn’t know how to answer Elise, because no matter how much time had passed, no matter how many times she might take her daughter to Hyde Park to stroll in the pines at the edge of the Santa Fe National Forest, once she found the narrow creek that meandered through the canyon, she would inevitably hear Dave’s exuberant laughter, his lilting call, as she heard it for the entire span of their marriage. And she would turn to look for him through the pine branches, only to discover he wasn’t there. Again. As usual. And she’d have to once more realize that now he would never be anywhere, anymore.

God, how she missed his laughter.

The muscled man carefully drawing the golden aspen leaves into a perfect circle never laughed. At least she had never seen him do so in the two weeks he’d been with her. She was glad of that, too. She didn’t want to hear a man’s deep, rumbling mirth, no matter how she had once craved Dave’s, no matter how much she ached for it still.

In fact, she thought, Steven’s very silence, his seemingly innate sadness, soothed her. It kept him distanced from her, separate. And let her feel easier about his presence, because she recognized in him that need for solitude, a need almost as deep as her own.

Or would she be wiser to acknowledge the simple, undeniable fact that he intrigued her, and had from the first moment he’d shown up on her doorstep two weeks ago, telling her—not asking—that he would do odd jobs around her property in exchange for a place to stay.

Two weeks later, she still recalled that feeling of holding her breath when he spoke, of her heart pounding too furiously in her chest, not in fear of him, exactly, but perhaps in acute, nearly painful awareness.

She hadn’t been able to place his unusual accent, an odd combination of old-world courtliness and a hint of foreign parts, and while showing him the various courtyards and niches on her grounds, she had asked him where he was from.

His short “All over” hadn’t allowed her any clues to go on. Nor did his looks. His hair was a rich golden blonde, almost Nordic in its wheaten, honeyed color, and was longish in the back, shorter around his chiseled and deeply tanned face, creating the effect of a mane and an overall impression of lion-like tawniness. His lips were full enough, but they so seldom curved in anything remotely resembling a smile that they gave the impression of being thin.

Only his eyes gave anything away, and she was wholly unable to interpret what she saw there. Mystery, perhaps, or a measure of having witnessed too much, of having seen too many terrible things. And she often caught the impression of a deep, abiding loneliness, a separateness more complete than any she’d ever witnessed before. And she had to question whether her curiosity about him stemmed from this last supposition, whether in both of them having encountered terrible things they had something in common. She, too, had been through too much in the past year.

But beyond his looks, his accent, even his silence, Jillian had felt a strange recognition of Steven. A connection of some kind. From the first moment, she’d had the feeling she’d seen him often, almost as though from a distance, like a barely glimpsed face in a crowd, a character half remembered from a movie. As a child? In a dream?

“I don’t trust him,” her friend Elise said now.”

Who?” Jillian asked absently, watching Steven as he paused and again turned his face to the waning sun, as seemingly unaware of her attention today as he’d been yesterday or the day before. And yet now, as she had all the other times she watched him working, she had the distinct feeling that he remained totally alert to her presence, to her gaze upon him.

As he’d done several times in the past two weeks, he closed his eyes against the sun, facing it almost as if it were much more than a mere source of energy, as if it were his source, his private supply. His already deeply tanned face seemed to draw in the light, to hold it somehow on those granitelike golden cheeks. His muscled body was as still as a statue and as finely crafted. His entire stance seemed ritualistic, somehow, and this, too, stirred a faint eddying of memory. She’d seen this somewhere, sometime. But when…where?

“Him, your handyman…gardener, whatever you want to call him,” Elise said.

The man outside seemed far more than that. Somehow, when Elise gave a name to Steven’s profession, something in her tone made him sound like a person seeking a handout. From the first moment, he had struck Jillian far differently, almost as though he echoed some primordial chord deep within her, a musical note she scarcely understood.

Watching him absorb the sun now, Jillian realized that in very many real ways she’d been the needy one, not him. In an odd sense, by cleaning out a year’s accumulation of leaves, trash and old branches, he seemed to be cleaning out some dark corner of her soul.

She’d apologized for the state of the haciendalike grounds when she showed him around. He hadn’t smiled or tried to make her feel at ease.

He’d said, “Work is a fact of life. No task is ever quite finished.”

The words were simplistic, almost banal, and yet Jillian had been struck by the comment, and by the sorrow inherent in his voice as he’d spoken. And the almost supreme ennui—a stark boredom, or perhaps indifference. How could she not trust a man who had so effortlessly lifted the burden of guilt from her shoulders?

She said to Elise now, “His name’s Steven Sayers.”

Her words etched the cold glass with clouded breath, and she realized Steven’s absorption of the sun’s warmth had to be illusion only; the dimming afternoon was frigid. She thought of her daughter walking home from the bus stop. Should she go get Allie, cart her those last few blocks in the warmed Volvo?

“It might as well be Jack the Ripper, for all you’ve found out about him,” Elise said.

Jillian smiled, and looked at Steven even more closely, trying to see what triggered Elise’s doubts. He remained perfectly still, eyes closed, one hand holding the rake out to his left, the other open-palmed, stretched wide, conical fingers splayed. He appeared to be doing far more than simply drawing the warmth of the late-afternoon sun; he looked as though he were truly pulling it into him, collecting it for later use, storing it deep within him. What would it be like to touch him now, to feel that heat against him?

Jillian shivered.

Elise didn’t seem to notice and continued speaking. “No references, no background check. Get real, Jillian. You’re a rich woman. He could be anybody.”

He was anybody. And there was no way she could explain to Elise that she did know things about him, little things, bits and pieces of information that allowed her to form a tentative bridge of trust.

She’d taken over some linens for him that first night, and she’d seen the books he had neatly arranged in the small guesthouse bookcase. They were all hardbound, making her wonder what manner of man carted a trunkload of heavy books with him in his apparent vagabondlike lifestyle.

All the books appeared to be old and well read, and the authors ranged from Ovid to Malory to Anne Rice. Some of the texts were in what appeared to be Greek or Russian, while others were in German and Latin.

But she hadn’t told any of this to Elise, and didn’t now. The fact that the man could apparently speak several languages and yet sought a job as a handyman-gardener would hardly jibe for her friend.

“He’s a good worker,” Jillian said, trying not to sound defensive.

Aware of how long she’d been staring at him, and unwilling to give Elise even more food for thought, she dragged her eyes from the unusual man communing with the sun, turned finally and sat down at the table again. She deliberately sat with her back to the courtyard and the man.

Steven.

She smiled at Elise, and her friend smiled back, but said, “Admit it, honey, he’s as different as they come.”

Jillian couldn’t argue that, and didn’t even try. Steven Sayers epitomized “different.” His direct gaze gave nothing away, no hint of desperation for a job, no subservience, either. His broad shoulders remained squared and set and yet, oddly, presented no confrontational attitude, either. He projected a profoundly stark take-me-or-leave-me acceptance of the odd vagaries of life.

He responded to any of her questions—and, contrary to what Elise thought, she had asked a few—with simple one-or two-word answers. And he tackled the various projects around her house with a quiet and steady determination that was reflected in his progress, not his demeanor. But these “differences” were what made her welcome his presence.

“You slay me, Jillian,” Elise said now, shaking her head and, inadvertently, her coffee.