| |
Casey already knew what it was like to hope that Ben’s absence was just a dream. The second time, she had to accept that it was real. All she could do was push through each day until its end, hoping for a time when all the pain would be nothing but memory, distant and numb. She hardly noticed the last groups of campers who passed through the grounds, preferring to keep to herself and avoid meeting anyone new.
Until the art dealer came.
September had been the final push of the busy season at the campground. Although the temperature dropped so low at night that her morning swims left her skin red, the afternoon sun lit up the trees, leaves exploding into color so that the whole range looked like fire dancing in the breeze. Most of the summer tourists had been driven away, but with a warm sweater and a fire crackling at night, there was no reason not to stay out soaking up the stars.
Then October chilled the grounds, until even Casey couldn’t drag herself into the water anymore. She had to content herself with getting her snowshoes out of the shed so she’d be ready when the long winter finally settled in and the campers arrived on snowmobiles laden with heavy gear for ice fishing and hiking knee-deep in the snow.
She was alone in the office, waiting for the clock to round the last hour before she could close up. The light was growing dim and a misty rain had descended over the mountains, settling into the damp corners for the night. She’d been working all day, taking on more and more responsibility around the camp as Geller found it harder to get around on his leg. She was tired as she reached for another sweater to wrap around her shoulders against the evening chill.
It had been quiet all evening, and she was sitting behind the desk with her sketchbook spread across the table, drawing deer. She wanted to capture that look they gave when startled in the forest, poised motionless, alert to the tiniest snap of a twig. The tension in the muscles, that sense of something stilled yet ready to pounce. It was only a split second before the animal—quivering, spellbound—darted away.
All fall she’d been diving into her artwork, the only company she needed throughout the days that kept getting shorter and the nights that grew interminably long. She pushed herself hard on the lake and the trails around camp, exhausting herself as much as possible so she wouldn’t have time to get cold—or to think. Anytime the stillness threatened to take over, she reached for a paintbrush or a wedge of charcoal and forced her hand to keep moving.
She had torn off one sheet of paper and was starting on the next, fingers sooty with charcoal dust, when the door banged open and a man appeared. He looked to be in his mid-forties, trim and fit with flecks of gray in his goatee and lines around his eyes. The girl that was with him was clearly his daughter. She had the same pointed nose and long, thin chin, with straight brown hair layered below her shoulders. Casey guessed her to be around twelve. She looked irredeemably bored from what must have been a long drive to the campground. The whole time her dad was signing them in, she was engrossed in her phone, probably trying to keep up with whatever her friends were doing back home.
The man was eager to get going when he first came in. It was late and he wanted to get set up at the cabin where they’d be spending the weekend. He extended a hand for the maps, not interested in going over them before he headed to his car to unpack. But when his eyes swept over the cluttered office desk and settled on Casey’s sketchbook, he seemed to pause, and his whole manner changed.
“Are these yours?” he asked, bending over the pages to take a closer look as Casey made out his receipt.
“My way to keep busy,” she replied. She wished she’d thought to put her things away when she’d heard the crunch of a car and footsteps coming up the path. She wasn’t much for conversation these days. Tonight, she just wanted the evening shift to be over so she could go back to her cabin, reheat some leftovers, and fall asleep.
But the man wasn’t taking the hint. In fact, he no longer seemed to care about his cabin at all. He rifled through the pages on the desk and then gestured toward her sketchbook.
“May I?” he asked.
Casey shrugged. Normally she wouldn’t share her work with anyone, but he’d been careful not to smudge the charcoal on the papers and she decided she didn’t much care. He probably just wanted to show his city daughter some deer in the area. He’d flip through the pages and then they would leave. Anything that would get him out of there faster was fine with her.
But he turned the pages of the sketchbook carefully, frowning over each one. Casey waited for him to glance at a few, give her some platitudes, and be done with it. But he was actually looking. His eyebrows furrowed over a picture of the deer half in motion, lines grounded straight down to show the deer standing tall, and then superimposed over the same image, brushes of dark charcoal where the deer turned its head and ran. It was stillness and motion on the same page, weighted and fleeing at once.
The man let out a low whistle.
“This is really something,” he said, glancing up at Casey. “You did this?”
She nodded uncertainly.
“Here, where you show the turn.” His finger hovered over the sweep of black where the lines gathered in dark curves around the elongated neck. “You capture the quickness with this looseness in the line, but it’s still careful. At first glance it comes across as a hasty sketch, but clearly it’s not. Everything is precise, and it’s the very precision that gives it that sense of speed. Holly, come look at this.” He motioned for his daughter to come over.
Holly barely glanced up from her phone. She had bright turquoise braces and kept absently running her tongue over them as she scrolled through something on the screen. Casey could imagine she’d been asked to look at way too many mediocre drawings before.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, almost to himself, and picked up the sketchbook to look at another drawing under the light.
Casey stirred uncomfortably at the desk. She wasn’t used to her work being so scrutinized. She felt almost naked in front of this man with emerald eyes and perfectly manicured hair who was poring over every line she’d drawn.
“Thank you,” she said, reaching for the sketchbook to get it—and by extension, her—out of his gaze. “I can give you the map to your cabin now.”
“Do you have any more?” The man asked at the same time, so that he barked out a laugh as he closed the sketchbook and placed it back on the desk where he’d found it. “You must not be used to showing your work,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and eyeing Casey up and down, like she herself were a piece of art for him not to admire, but evaluate and judge.
Casey brushed off his comment with a shrug. “Not too much in the way of art up here.”
The man shook his head emphatically. “But that’s where you’re wrong. There’s art all around here. That’s what you’ve managed to show with these sketches. Not just what we can see around us in the woods, but the art contained in each step of the deer, each fall of the leaf.”
Casey tried not to laugh. These were sketches—things she did for fun. She’d given up on serious art ages ago, when it was clear she didn’t have the talent to take a real career all the way. That was why she’d stepped aside to support Nick in his creative work and gone into Art History instead. Nick would roll his eyes to hear how this man was talking about some quick sketches she’d passed off in an afternoon. Who was he, anyway?
“Would you excuse me one second?” he asked, looking at her curiously. “I’m going to make a quick call and then I’ll be right back about the cabin. Holly?” He turned to his daughter. “I’ll just be a sec.”
“Dad,” she whined, drawing out the vowel with an exasperated sigh and flashing her braces again. “You said you weren’t going to be working this weekend.”
“It’ll just be a minute, and then I promise we’ll spend the rest of the time together.”
“Whatever.” Holly flopped on the futon and went back to her phone, clearly unconvinced. Casey wondered with a pang what had brought the two of them to Bonnet and whether this weekend away could help fix whatever was going on between them.
Fortunately, it wasn’t her business. She nodded as the man held up a finger to her signaling one minute and pushed open the screen door, phone already out and dialing.
“Stefan, it’s Geoff,” Casey heard him bark into the phone. “Yeah, no, I know it’s late—but get a load of this.” The sounds of their conversation drifted through the door. There was a pause as Geoff listened for a beat and then the crunch of footsteps on gravel and leaves as he paced in front of the office.
“I’m telling you Stefan, this is—”
There was another pause of Stefan speaking, and then Geoff’s voice muffled by the night as he walked farther away.
Casey stole a glance at Holly, but the girl was intent on her phone. She tried to busy herself putting the maps and things on the desk in order, but mostly she just felt strange. What was going on? She was half relieved but still on edge when she heard the sound of footsteps returning to the cabin and the unmistakable boom of Geoff’s voice.
“Yes, for sure. I think so too.” A pause. “Listen, I’ll call you when I see more.”
The door opened and he entered, phone still cocked to his ear. “No, no, Holly’s still here but it’s fine, she doesn’t mind. We’ll catch a big one for you!”
He flashed her a grin as he hung up the phone. At the mention of her name, Holly looked up from her phone and her nostrils flared. She switched off the screen, put it in the pocket of her skinny jeans, and folded her arms across a puffy lime-green jacket loosely covering a matching sweater underneath.
“Let’s go, Dad,” she said pointedly.
“One sec, sweetheart.” He was talking to her, but he was smiling straight at Casey. “Big weekend with my girl, but I’ll tell you what.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a dark leather wallet. “Here’s my card. Geoffrey Stone, Stone Limited. We’ll be here until Sunday—perhaps we could set up a time to see more of your work. Say tomorrow, five o’clock?”
“Sure,” Casey said tentatively, more to get him out of the office than because she wanted to commit to talking to him again. Or rather, having him talk at her. He seemed to like the sound of his own voice.
For all he acted around Holly as if he wanted to spend the weekend camping with her, Casey got the distinct impression that something was always pulling him away. Some people came up to the lake to relax, but others didn’t know how to relax unless it came with a step-by-step instruction manual—preferably one you could plug into your laptop or phone to have with you on the go. It seemed that whatever he did, Geoffrey Stone of Stone Limited spent every minute occupied. And for some reason, what he’d seen of Casey’s artwork had sent him straight into busy mode.
After they left, with Geoffrey promising to stop in the next morning to find out more about fishing sites—which made Holly say “yuck” under her breath—Casey turned over the business card in her hand. Name, phone, email, and an address on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, smack dab among all the other galleries and dealerships in Chelsea. The card had a logo with a green tendril snaking up the side that transformed into leaves. Toward the top, the leaves blossomed into flowers and then a person burst forth, back arched like a dancer, legs bent forward in a running leap like a stag. It was a small image, but even on the card, it teemed with energy. Kind of like Geoffrey himself, mouth constantly moving, green eyes darting around the room.
Casey pocketed the card. When she shut down the office for the night, she slurped Mrs. Geller’s vegetable soup soaked up with hunks of day-old bread and Googled Geoffrey Stone.
Stone Limited, it turned out, was no joke. It was a small gallery in Chelsea with a dedicated following among art dealers in London and New York. Geoffrey was described as alternately “hands on” and an “obsessive micromanager,” both traits of someone heavily involved in all aspects of the business.
Their last few shows, though, had been total flops, if the New York Times was to be believed. “Pompous,” “overdone,” “too much effort and not enough talent,” were just some of the choice phrases. Casey was glad she wasn’t any of the artists who had been so publicly eviscerated, although looking through the images, she was inclined to agree with the reviews. It did seem like Geoffrey was trying too hard to be edgy. There was something shallow—hollow, almost—to the installations that had been put up. Cutting edge was no longer cutting edge, it seemed. That was the trouble with being at the forefront of anything. Two weeks later, you were already passé.
Geoffrey’s right-hand man was Stefan Prinsky, who must have been on the other end of the phone and undoubtedly urging his boss to stop working on his weekend away and go fishing already.
Recollecting the side of their phone conversation that she’d overheard, something lit up in Casey’s mind. Working on the weekend. Was Geoffrey scoping out art for his gallery? More specifically, was he looking at her art?
She shook her head and then hugged her knees to her chest as she perched at the table in her cabin, looking for more information about Stone Limited. Slowly, and far too late, the reality started to sink in. She had shown a New York gallery owner her sketches and he hadn’t thought they were total crap. In fact, he’d puffed her full of praise.
If she had been actively trying to get a gallery to notice her, there was no doubt she wouldn’t have been so lucky. She probably couldn’t have gotten the Stefan Prinsky’s of the world to take a second look at her slides, had she been circulating them around. But there she’d been, sitting at the office desk in the middle of nowhere in Bonnet, thinking she’d thrown all her second chances away, when the head honcho himself had sidled up, taken one look, and asked to see more.
Her heart was threatening to flutter out of her chest, but the weight in her stomach kept it grounded like a rock. She knew what her mother—hell, what anyone would say. Don’t get too excited. She had no idea what he wanted. He’d probably say he thought they were nice and then be on his way. Most likely, he’d decide her work wasn’t what he wanted, anyway.
And even if the impossible were to happen, would she really want to show her work in New York? She’d given up that life, moved away first from art and then from the city. She didn’t want some half-forgotten pipe dream to pull her away from the happiness she had started to find in Bonnet. Even without Ben, it was still worth it to be here.
She’d see what Geoffrey had to say about her work, but only out of curiosity. She wouldn’t get wrapped up worrying about him.
She slept fitfully that night, strange strands of deer and the mountains filling her dreams. When she woke up, she knew something was missing. But whether it was Bonnet or New York that would have filled the empty space, she couldn’t say.