Phoebe pushed a shoulder into the cerulean blue door of her home and shoved. She’d have to take a wood planer to it before the rainy season started. The old wood warped more and more each year, no matter how much she did to try to salvage it.
Phoebe’s whole home was actually salvaged; a refurbished packinghouse, one of the many buildings left over from the citrus groves that had been wiped out to make room for places like Midtown. She’d purchased the property with its ramshackle building using her portion of the life insurance left to her after her parents’ death. She then lived in her grandparents’ RV while she worked alongside construction crews and handymen who converted it into an artist’s dream house.
It had taken almost two years, but it had turned out exactly the way she wanted it. The open great room on the ground floor was a combination of living space and art studio, sporting huge windows that let the north light in. The building’s original office space had been converted into a guest room, but Phoebe now used it for a changing room for her clients. She’d mounted a bank of five lockers along one wall for personal belongings, had put in a hair and makeup vanity station, and had mirrored one whole wall. A small storage room next to it now housed costumes from a variety of cultures, eras, sizes, and colors, most of them made by Phoebe herself.
The kitchenette was open as well, and although Phoebe enjoyed cooking now and then, she rarely did much more than warm things up in the microwave or on a burner of the apartment-sized stove. She didn’t like the idea of residual food smells tainting her work, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually stuck something edible inside the oven. Currently, it was being used to store her collection of Gossamer, the issues with her work in them. Tucked away where no one would see them.
Her pride and joy, however, what made the place her sanctuary, was not the studio, although she loved it to distraction with its wild disarray of creativity, but the loft bedroom at the top of a spiral staircase. A huge, hand-hewn mahogany four-poster bed was the focal point of the room, draped with a down comforter with a white-on-white damask duvet cover, and matching shams, throw pillows piled high. White faux sheepskin pelt area rugs lay scattered around on the dark wood floor, and delicate white sheers hung from the windows. Everything up there but the flooring and bed frame was varying shades of white, and although it wasn’t stark and sterile by any means, it was clean and rife with possibilities; a sparkling fresh canvas. The few people who had seen it were always a little shocked by the monochromatic decor, but the furniture and textiles used were whimsical and feminine, giving the room an almost cloud-like feel. Even her silk pajama sets were white, and Phoebe liked the image she created in her mind of an ebony-haired, red-lipped angel, sleeping on a cloud at the edge of Heaven, finding respite after a long day’s work.
She unbuckled her sandals and kicked them off just inside the front door, and then made her way across the open floor plan, and drew the blackout blinds on the windows. In the near dark, she climbed the stairs to her bedroom where she flung herself across her bed, relishing the feel of the fluffy comforter plumped up around her.
She was exhausted. She’d been exhausted for what seemed like weeks. No, months, if she was being honest with herself. Somewhere deep inside, she knew why; she just didn’t want to think about it. Instead, she just wanted to sleep. And if she couldn’t sleep, she’d lie there and try not to think. The desire to move as little as possible overrode any shame over how lazy she was becoming.
Phoebe wasn’t sick. And she didn’t think she was suffering from depression. Lethargy, maybe, but not depression, as far as she could tell. She wasn’t exactly sad…but she was weary. She felt like she’d been waiting for something, or someone, all her life, but there was no end in sight, and she was tired of waiting. Yet until she could figure out what she was waiting for, she had no idea how to go about finding it. Which meant more waiting.
Today’s G-FOURce had shaken her up; the conversations sat now like boulders on her chest. Ren had become increasingly uncomfortable throughout the afternoon, her late stage pregnancy making her more irritable and impatient than she usually was. Or rather, than she used to be. Lately, Renata had seemed so much more at peace with the world, with herself, and with them, rarely rising to the bait Phoebe habitually threw out to her. Surely, it had a lot to do with her new marriage and the much-awaited arrival of baby Charise in the next few weeks. But still, when Ren didn’t get her hackles up, Phoebe ended up just looking antagonistic and plain old mean. Juliette was justifiably excited about her pending nuptials, but even Gia had been a little more squirrelly than usual, prodding at Ren’s stomach to get a reaction from Charise until Ren had grumpily called her ‘Pokemon’ and ordered her to sit across the room from her.
It was the discussion of Angela Clinton that had really unsettled Phoebe the most, though. The girl had changed the Gustafson girls’ lives forever on that fateful day more than fifteen years ago, and the thought of her coming back to Midtown after all this time made Phoebe’s stomach churn. If she never laid eyes on Angela Clinton again, it would be too soon.
Angela Clinton had started drinking hours before her and Juliette’s high school graduation ceremony. By the time she got behind the wheel of her car to get to the event, the girl was plastered. And late. She never saw the Buick Park Avenue pulling into the intersection in front of her, she stated in court. She did see the light turn red, but not soon enough to stop for it.
Angela had plowed her El Camino into the side of Paul and Simone Gustafson’s car, killing Simone almost instantly. Paul had died about an hour later, his hand clutched tightly in Grandpa G’s, who had made it to the hospital in time to say goodbye.
It had taken Angela several months to recover enough to stand trial, but when the time came, she stated she’d known what she was doing when she started drinking, and had gotten behind the wheel, also knowing she was too inebriated to drive. “My intention was to end my life that day,” she murmured, her voice trembling, but clear. “I never dreamed I’d end anyone else’s.” She took full responsibility for killing the two beloved parents, accepted her sentence without recourse, and made a brief, heartfelt statement to the Gustafson family members who were in the courtroom about how terribly sorry she was to have caused them so much suffering.
But suffer, they had. Each of the four sisters grieved in their own ways, their individual strengths and weaknesses rising to the forefront of the battle to survive. Juliette, steady and quiet and thoughtful, had caved in on herself, at first falling into a depression so severe, their grandparents thought she might die, too. Once she finally came out of that dark period, she remained reserved and unassuming, almost afraid to really live, lest her happiness be once more taken from her. Phoebe thanked the God her sisters worshiped that Victor Jarrett had come along when he did, his love for Juliette breaking through the last of those barriers binding her to the past. Juliette claimed most of her change had actually stemmed from her acceptance of Christ, but she was pretty sure that was just church talk. Phoebe saw the way the two of them looked at each other, Victor and Juliette. Jesus couldn’t hold a candle to the glow emanating off the two lovebirds.
The same could be said of Renata these days, but it hadn’t always been that way. Born with maternal instincts and the rallying charisma of a cheer captain, Ren had stepped into the combined shoes of both their parents and Juliette’s when the eldest Gustafson sister had disappeared inside herself. But those traits had morphed into something ugly and often insufferable, turning her motherly sister into a cantankerous shrew over the years. A good man in her life—John Dixon, devoted husband and father to their four sons—had taken the edge off in the early years of their marriage. But like a hedgehog, Ren’s quills, although smoothed down by love, had remained intact and poison-tipped. Over the years, slowly, but surely, she’d become prickly and toxic again.
When the unthinkable happened, leaving Renata’s world devastated, however, something had changed in her. The need to jab and judge, to poke and punish, seemed to have leaked out with her tears, leaving behind a softer, almost sweet version of Ren, a version Phoebe struggled to relate to after all these years of the love-hate relationship they’d shared.
Gia, darling Georgia, only four when their parents were killed, had born up the best of them all, as far as Phoebe could tell. Perhaps the young are the most resilient in situations like theirs, although Phoebe felt certain Gia would be darling and effervescent and vivacious even if she’d been a teenager like the older three. But Gia carried a different burden than the others, something Phoebe sensed was shifting, rising, becoming more of an issue in the youngest Gustafson girl’s life. Gia had a tendency to float, to be whatever the circumstances and crowd of the moment demanded. She wasn’t really a chameleon, at least not at this point. No, she tended to simply say less, demand less, be less, when she thought being fully Gia might make waves. Phoebe wasn’t really worried yet; Gia was in that transition period from teenager to adult, having just graduated from high school and figuring out what it meant to be a grown up. But Phoebe had made the decision to pay attention, something no one had really done for Phoebe when she was that age and desperate for someone to notice that she was disappearing behind the facade she’d created just to survive.
Because Phoebe, maybe more than any of the sisters, had missed her mother most of all. When her parents died, she was fourteen, and was in the process of embracing her individuality, her artistic expression, her identity, and Simone had been her loudest cheerleader. Her mother had encouraged Phoebe’s flamboyant fashion, her vivacious thirst for living out loud, giving Phoebe license to resist the constraints of the accepted “norm” in a traditional home town. Simone had urged Phoebe to push herself, to dig deep into the part of her that made her unique and courageous and powerful.
When Angela took the lives of Paul and Simone Gustafson, Phoebe had dug even deeper, not to expose and share her great gifts with the world as her mother had wanted, but to bury herself, to hide behind them so that no one would see the gaping hole the loss of Simone, her most stalwart champion, her truest believer, had left behind. On the outside, she retained her flamboyance, but it became distorted somehow, her flair for color and style transforming into something more provocative and gritty, the courage and power she’d unearthed with her mother’s gentle guidance taking on a decidedly darker bent. Her eyes stayed open, but not as a window to the soul, as many believed. No, in Phoebe’s bold gaze was a challenge to any who looked a little too long or too closely, daring the beholder to draw back the inky blackout curtain draped across that window, to see the real girl sitting alone in the dark inside.
In order to compensate for her lack of transparency, she worked hard to make the outside look good, to draw—and hold—attention for as long as she needed it, or could stand it. Although the act had backfired on her once or twice, she’d grown comfortable with the mask she wore, perhaps even addicted to it, and no longer thought of it as a separate version of herself.
And now Angela Clinton was returning to Midtown, dredging up old memories and secrets best kept buried, and the mask Phoebe wore might very well be exposed for what it was. Phoebe didn’t know if she could bear it.