Something Beautiful

Shock rippled through her. He’s like my paintings, she thought, and instinctively raised her hand between them, laying her palm against the cold glass. Was she reaching for him, or warding him off?

She could feel his power, and didn’t understand it. He was dark and light at the same time. Extremes. Sharp contrasts and angles, hidden messages and sparkling truths.

Staring at him, linked with him, she felt words form in her mind. Were they coming from him? No, from within herself. Again, like her paintings.

“Jillian?”

“Dark with excessive bright.”

She had murmured the words aloud, almost like a talisman. Or were they a plea?

Why hadn’t she looked away from him? Why was she continuing to stand there…locked in his gaze? And what was it about the words dark with excessive bright that had so captured her thoughts, snagged her memory?

Then she remembered. Steven had said the words the other morning while clearing the overthick woodbine from the side of the house. What had he meant then, and why had the words seemed to hold so much more than mere statement in them?

“What’s that from?” Elise asked.

“What?” she asked faintly, as though from far away. She couldn’t break his gaze, felt she was drowning in it, dizzy, aching. What was happening to her? She felt as if one of her dark doorways were opening slightly, and if she stared at him much longer she would see the roiling clouds with the haunted, hungry eyes seeking her.

“Earth to Jillian. I said, ‘What’s that from?”’

Steven Sayers—the gardener, she reminded herself, half hysterically—looked away first, turning his head as though purposefully ending this unusual connection. He walked slowly back to the apricot tree and took the rake in his left hand. Without looking back toward the house, he resumed his careful tending of the pile of leaves.

Jillian fought nausea, found herself shaking and raised trembling hands to hug her suddenly cold shoulders. Her grandmother, had she still been alive, would have said a wolf had just passed over Jillian’s grave. She knew it was far more serious than that, far more real. If she’d stayed linked with him a moment longer, she knew, she would have lost herself somehow.

“Sounds like something I’ve read,” Elise said.

“What?”

“That ‘dark with excessive bright’ thing.”

Jillian drew a deep breath before turning around. “I don’t know. It sounded familiar to me, too, but I…don’t remember where I…read…it.”

“Shakespeare? Donne? Maybe Spenser? It doesn’t sound like a standard biblical verse, but I could be wrong.”

Jillian’s chill fell away as swiftly as it had come upon her. She moved back to the table, but didn’t sit down. Was she subconsciously signaling her need to be alone?

She leaned against one of the high-backed oak chairs and said, “I always forget you’re a scholar.”

Right now she wished Elise were really the white witch she professed to be, could really see into one of her myriad crystal balls and explain what Jillian had just experienced. Because it had been something. Or as Allie was fond of saying lately, something beautiful. Beautiful in the sense of “awesome,” a concept with a dual-edged sheen, at one and the same time both exceedingly lovely and woefully dangerous.

Elise winced and waved her hand. “You’re the scholar, sweetie, remember? You’re the one who reads everything known to man. Before you started painting, anyway. Maybe that’s the secret to your art, you bring it a little old-worldliness.

“Anyway, nowadays, scholars do research and get to read all the time. They’re eligible for Nobel Prizes and a billion grants. I’m one of the publish-or-perish crew, remember?”

Elise stood up and shook her pleated wool skirt as though such an effort would remove the long-creased wrinkles in it. “Speaking of which, I have an abstract I have to finish by Thursday, and this being Monday and I haven’t even begun reading the material, let alone writing the damned thing, I’d better set my sights on the computer—”

Allie burst through the front door at that moment, bringing a blast of chill air with her as she sprang into the dining room. She spun her bookbag onto the small desk reserved for just that purpose and skidded to a semihalt.

“Have you seen Lyle?” she called, then, apparently remembering some semblance of manners, muttered a breathless greeting to Elise and her mother.

“How was school?” Jillian asked.

“Fine. Have you seen Lyle?”

Jillian felt rather than saw Elise’s ironic gaze and heard Elise murmur, “None of us ever have, hon.”

Allie didn’t seem to notice. She ran on through the kitchen and down the hallway to her bedroom.

Jillian heard the door slam open, and heard her daughter’s cheerful voice recounting snippets of her day. To Lyle. She felt a momentary stab of unreasonable jealousy; Lyle received all of Allie’s confidences, those little details once shared with her mother.

Jillian waited a moment before turning to meet Elise’s eyes. As she had expected, Elise was studying her with a cross between amusement and commiseration.

Elise gestured toward Allie’s unseen bedroom and said, “Now that really does give me the creeps.”

“Gloria says—”

Elise held up her hand. “Spare me Gloria’s immortal words. I know she’s got a degree in realigning your head, but let’s get real, Jillian. Allie is down the hall this very minute, talking to an invisible rainbow creature. And from what I can see—and hear—he talks back.”

“You can hear him, can you?” Jillian asked, smiling faintly, but feeling a frisson of reaction nonetheless.

“Not him, I can’t, but I can tell from the things Allie’s been saying that she sure thinks she does.”

“That’s the whole point of having an imaginary friend,” Jillian argued.

She hoped her light tone masked the doubts she held about the wisdom of maintaining the fiction that Lyle was something real. But the grief therapist thought Lyle’s appearance was a breakthrough of sorts, that his presence signaled an attempt on Allie’s part to rise above the trauma of her father’s death.

Gloria claimed that Lyle would allow Allie to communicate many of the difficult aspects of dealing with the pain of having actually been in the car and having had to watch her father die in her presence. And Jillian had to admit that since Lyle had come on the scene, Allie had finally started acting out her anger, her completely understandable rage.

So Lyle had to be a good thing, no matter how little Jillian might appreciate the acting out, the breakage of an old vase, the temper tantrums resulting in books knocked from the shelves, the scattering of papers, art supplies, anything of value to Jillian, then the lies about it afterward. Perfectly normal, if wholly disliked.

Elise said now, “You know, I’ve resisted the idea of you guys taking off for the wild blue, but I’ve gotta tell you, between your Steven and Allie’s Lyle, I’m changing my mind.”

“He’s not my Steven,” Jillian protested, but even to her, the words lacked conviction.

Luckily, Allie came running back into the dining room; her appearance blocked Elise’s quick rejoinder.

“Can we watch TV?” her little girl asked, making it clear by her actions that Lyle was with them in the room.

If she was entirely honest about Lyle, Jillian thought, she would simply tell her daughter that she hated the invisible creature, that he frightened her a little. A lot.

But she said instead, “There’s still a few minutes of daylight left. Why don’t you—and Lyle—run off some energy? I’ll bet if you ask, Steven will let you jump into that pile of leaves he’s just raked.”

Allie looked willing enough, and transferred her gaze to an empty spot some three feet away from her, and apparently at eye level. The question was obvious on her face. She nodded once, and then, her face stiffening, turned back to Jillian. The honey-brown eyes so like Dave’s met Jillian’s pleadingly, as if asking for understanding. As they did the times she lied to her mother.

“Lyle says he doesn’t want to go outside.”

Jillian could have sworn that Allie did want to go. She withheld a shudder. How could Allie have created an imaginary friend with such a fierce hold over her? Was Gloria right in believing order was the whole point of Lyle, a search for some kind of control in a world gone to chaos? Or was there something else going on here?