| |
Winter fell hard and fast, a sheet of ice coating the lake. Casey’s paintings from the previous year had been soft, with a delicate touch of snowfall that spread like a blanket, enveloping and warm. The cold could be forgiven if it was kind. She had been healing then and looking for the goodness in things. Bonnet had seemed a place of possibility. It had seemed the place for her.
This year, the canvases told a different story. The winter of her newer paintings had a dangerous edge lurking beneath the calm. The snow was treacherous, tinged with blue. The deer looked less startled than afraid, eking out a meager subsistence from the unforgiving land. Casey wouldn’t have said that she felt bitter, only that she was depicting the truth. This was the way things were.
Still, as she packed up her car with Geoffrey’s choices, alongside the new ones Lee had urged her to bring, Casey wondered whether the gallery would be happy with her selections. There was a meanness to them that wasn’t in the work Geoffrey had first seen. It left her shaky to realize what she had made.
“Your work is growing,” Lee had said, encouraging her to pursue this new line. Casey hoped that was all it was, and not that there was something wrong with her that everything she touched seemed to come out angry and sad.
Winter was the season that always reminded Casey of how far she was from New York City. It was bitterly cold up in Bonnet, and the was snow piled high around her cabin. Down in the city though, they’d been having a mild year. The farther south Casey drove, the less white she saw, until all that was left were a few icy patches on the hard, frozen ground.
She’d been afraid the drive to New York would seem endless, but all too soon the city skyline rose into view like a mouth of crooked teeth. When she crawled over the George Washington Bridge with the rest of the traffic and then down the West Side Highway toward Chelsea, she couldn’t believe what she was about to do.
Geoffrey was waiting for her at the gallery, along with Stefan, the curator Josie, and Margo, an intern right out of college. Stefan had flat green eyes, brown hair that spiked up all over, and he hardly ever smiled. Josie wore only black accented with colorful scarves and talked airily about light and energy as she spread out the canvases to see what she’d be working with. Margo had a bright blonde bob straight from a bottle and took notes on everything, from initial ideas about how the paintings should be spaced to Josie’s requests for more tea.
The dull winter sun pulsed through the large windows overlooking West 23rd Street and it wasn’t long before Casey found herself with a massive headache. All the time spent squinting at her pieces and digesting everyone’s remarks, punctuated by sirens and street noise, made her feel like she was inhabiting someone else’s body. By the time she got back into her car, pleading exhaustion from the drive to get out of having dinner with Geoffrey and the rest of the team, she’d turned to jelly. How was the show ever going to be ready to go up by Friday? They only had four days to get everything together, and she had no idea how it was going to work.
Once she finally made it over the Manhattan Bridge and crossed into Brooklyn, she wanted to take a hot shower and sleep forever. But her friends were waiting and she still had to make it through all the hugs and kisses and excitement of seeing them again. She was staying in Fort Greene with her best friends from college, Hannah and Jen, who’d offered up the couch in the living room of their one-bedroom apartment. The two women had been roommates their first year at Berkeley, down the hall from Casey. Casey had become friends with Hannah first, and eventually the more outgoing Jen wormed into their social group. When they finally told Casey during their junior year that they’d secretly been dating for months, Casey had to try not to laugh. It had been obvious there was something going on.
Casey had fallen out of touch over her two years in Bonnet, but they hadn’t forgotten about her. Two sets of arms grabbed her bags and two rounds of tight, giddy hugs enveloped her as soon as she came up the stairs.
“It’s so good to see you!” they both gushed as Casey staggered in.
“Did you find the place okay? You didn’t have any trouble with traffic, did you?” Classic Hannah—she was always the worrier. Casey assured her that everything was fine. She was just exhausted, that was all.
“Come put your things by the couch,” Jen directed, commenting with a frown that Casey had hardly brought enough to outfit her for a week at a fancy gallery. “Do you have more in the car? What about a garment bag?”
Casey shook her head, biting her lip. What else was she supposed to bring?
“It’s okay,” Hannah said quickly. “You can borrow something of mine for the opening. God, it’s really great to see you.” And then she was pressed into another round of hugs as Hannah and Jen kept chattering around her.
“How are you?”
“How was the drive?”
“How was the gallery?”
“What’s this guy Geoffrey like?”
“Tell me everything!” they both said at once.
Casey laughed. Some things never changed—like the way they talked over each other, finishing each other’s sentences, weaving in and out of the conversation like a well-practiced dance.
“First let me sit down,” she said, and they cleared the way for her to get to the couch, fussing over her all the while.
“Beer? Wine? Cocktails?” Hannah asked, booking it to the kitchen.
“Water,” Casey said weakly, sinking into the couch.
“I promise we’ll stop carrying on over you,” Hannah teased in a way that said she had no intention of doing anything of the sort. “It’s just so exciting to see you!”
She brought the glass of water, then plunked down on one side of Casey as Jen took the other, both of them pumping her for news. But Casey was so tired that everything seemed stuck on pause. She laid her head back and groaned.
“Dinner?” Jen asked. “You must be starving.”
“Death, then dinner,” Casey said. “You can’t believe how much feng shui talk I had to listen to about how the paintings are going to hang. Apparently every wall in the gallery has entirely different ‘light quality’.” She imitated Josie’s floaty voice.
“But of course you want everything hung well,” Hannah exclaimed.
Casey worked to lift her neck enough to shoot her a skeptical look. “They should get some nails and stick them wherever.”
“Oh, you.” Hannah nudged her shoulder. “You were always too modest about your work. This is a big deal! We’ve been jumping up and down about it ever since you called. Imagine, our friend with a gallery show.”
“We always knew you’d do it, Case,” Jen said. “We’re thrilled, but not remotely surprised.”
Casey tried to summon the strength to roll her eyes, but all she managed was to sink down lower in the couch and rest her cheek on Hannah’s shoulder, just like old times. As though she hadn’t grown up and moved away and tried to heal, only to get her heart broken all over again. “I guess,” she murmured as Hannah ran her fingers through her hair, pulling out the knots.
“We’re going to have to get you fixed up for this weekend,” Hannah said gently. “But don’t worry. We’ll take care of you now.”
Casey sensed her giving Jen a look, some unspoken way of asking whether everything was okay with her, but she was already asleep and no longer cared.
* * * * *
SHE SPENT THE NEXT few mornings rising early to get to the gallery and work on the set up, even if she didn’t have much to contribute. She was quick to agree with whatever Geoffrey and Josie wanted, less because she thought they were right than because she didn’t care. She would’ve been happy to have someone hand over the power tools and let her work on the actual installation, but Geoffrey seemed to find it beneath an artist to deal with the finer points of drywall.
Her work looked strange as it went up, as though it wasn’t her own. Even her name spit out of the printer for the brochures looked like it belonged to somebody else. She’d gone back and forth between Casey and Cassandra, finally deciding her full name sounded more professional. Seeing the black block letters go up on the wall, though, only made her more certain she was living somebody else’s life. Every day that she pressed into the jostle of bodies on the subway and made her way back to Brooklyn, the sweaty, hurried insistence of the city left her even more deeply alone.
Her days at the gallery were long, but her nights were even longer. Hannah and Jen were as cheerful as ever, filling her in on the stories and details about their lives. But it was hard to keep track of all the characters and plot twists they described. Jen was a public defender, with short dark hair to match her serious dark suits. She may have been thin and petite, with fine bones and a watchful, birdlike face, but Casey knew not to mess with her—under the surface was a firecracker waiting to explode. Casey always thought her clients were lucky to have her, but it would have been hard sharing a bathroom with her on a regular basis. One step out of line and you’d hear about it for weeks.
Hannah was the easygoing one. She was a fourth-grade teacher, with kids’ books and colorful supplies permanently scattered across the apartment. She was medium height and always a little on the heavy side, brown waves framing her sweet, open face. Her winning smile must have endeared her to her students, and if she was shy when first meeting someone, she had plenty of excitement reserved for the comfortable circle of her close friends.
But underneath all the camaraderie, Casey knew her behavior was off in some way. When had it started to take effort to be with her friends? They ate overpriced sushi delivery and Thai and burgers and Cuban sandwiches and kebobs until the flavors ran together with the wine and sake and gin cocktails with muddled mint and lime that left Casey lightheaded and hating the sunlight streaming through the windows the next morning. The apartment was always too hot and she drank her coffee out on the fire escape to get a breeze. The only view was of the side of another building, a few empty flowerpots in a window, and a glimpse of slate-gray sidewalk. It was hard not to miss her cabin, her mountain, her lake, and her snow.
“Give her time,” she heard Hannah admonish Jen once when they didn’t realize the bedroom door had cracked open. It was like being twelve again—no matter how hard she tried to fit in, she couldn’t seem to follow the rules exactly right. Only this time, instead of being too tall and with too much hair, she was too quiet, too withdrawn, her head too high up in the clouds rather than focused on the concrete below.
It didn’t help that she was nervous. Or that Hannah kept asking how she felt. Did she need the reminder that her stomach was threatening to hop out of her guts and walk away every second of the day? No. Friday couldn’t come fast enough, and with it the opening of her show so that she wouldn’t have to wait any longer to read the negative reviews.
Or else, Hannah reminded her eagerly, they would be glowing and her career would be launched. Secretly, Casey thought that might be worse. What would she do then? Stay in New York? Return to Bonnet but come down for more shows? She wasn’t even sure she wanted anything to take off. Right now, all she really wanted was to go home.
Hannah and Jen were taking off from work early on the big day to help her get dressed, but before they got home Casey ducked out of the apartment to get a cup of coffee and call Lee for a pep talk.
Then she told herself sternly that it was time to suck it up and get this thing done. She couldn’t let everyone down. Even though what she really wanted to do was run.