Chapter Seventeen

 

I didn’t get very far on the house that afternoon. Anxious about the magnitude of Lulu’s chore and having to see Liam again, I had difficulty falling asleep that night. In my dreams, the job lasted for what seemed an eternity, the walls of Lulu’s house magically extending for entire city blocks. Just when it seemed I had reached the end, a new section of wall appeared, constructed within minutes. Soon, the chore stretched from months into years, with Liam appearing every morning, eager and willing to help.

“Aaarghh!” I screamed and rolled onto my belly, stuffing the pillow over my head. What is it with him? Deep inside, I suspected he had another reason for wanting to help me. If only I could decipher his motive.

Tossing and turning in bed most of the night, I finally drifted off only a few hours before sunrise and didn’t wake up until five minutes before eight the next morning. “Oh my God!” I gasped. My eyes flew open with shocked alertness. “He’ll be here any second!”

After throwing on a junky shirt and an old pair of cutoff shorts, I ran to the bathroom and splashed water over my face, forcing my mind into a state of coherent consciousness while hoping I could wash away the dark puffy bags under my eyes. Unfortunately, neither actually worked. Still groggy, I set a speed record for brushing my teeth and dragging a comb through my hair—pulling out a handful of snarled tangles in the process—and darted into the kitchen with less than a minute to spare before eight o’clock.

Just as the second hand of Lulu’s kitchen clock marked the hour, I heard a prompt knock at the front door. Breakfast will have to wait, I told myself. I strode to the door and opened it widely, reminding myself to thank him right away for his help, even if I didn’t entirely want it.

Thoughts of appreciation immediately fled my mind when I gaped openmouthed at Liam on the front stoop. Well, my attention didn’t fix on Liam himself, rather his nose.

“How is it?” I asked hesitantly, my gaze glued to the white noseguard taped over his puffy bridge and the pair of nasty purple bruises that traced the bottom of each eye.

“It doesn’t hurt too much…anymore,” he admitted, though by his expression I thought he withheld the full truth to avoid upsetting me.

“It looks straighter,” I said, for lack of anything else to compliment about its improvement. In reality, I thought it looked about ten times worse than it had yesterday when blood gushed into his hands.

“Yeah…I decided to take your advice and go see the doctor. You were right,” Liam continued. “It wasn’t that crooked before.” He chuckled and then reconsidered, like laughter itself caused unnecessary pain.

“What did they do?” I asked, remembering the hot pink cast the doctor had wrapped around my broken arm at the ER in Pacifica.

“Only reset it,” he said with a nonchalant shrug. “No big deal.”

“Ouch.” I flinched, thinking it seemed a much bigger deal than he let on. “Sorry about that.”

Liam tilted his head to one side, like my apology surprised him. He shook his head to refocus. “I brought a few brushes, just in case you didn’t have extras. And I wasn’t sure you’d gotten enough paint, so I mixed another two gallons for you.”

“That was nice of you,” I said, speaking the truth. By the time I’d gotten home from Lipoa’s yesterday, my arms burned from the strain of carrying the heavy gallons all the way back up the hill. “But you didn’t have to go to all the trouble.”

“It wasn’t any trouble. Things slowed down a bunch at the store after you left.”

“I’ll bet. Nothing like starting off your first day of work with a broken nose.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said, almost apologetically.

I looked back at him awkwardly, unable to think of anything to say in reply. Anxious to put some distance between the guy who aimed too high to please and myself, I mumbled, “Well, then, ready to get started?”

“No time like the present,” Liam replied with enthusiasm.

“I thought I could start in the front and you could start in the back,” I suggested.

His smile faded. “Oh, okay. If that’s what you want.” I detected a hint of disappointment in his tone.

Liam disappeared behind the house with a gallon of paint and a wide brush, and I set to work, opening my own can. After swooshing the stir rod until the paint turned a uniform shade of light purple, I dipped in the brush and coated the top half of the bristles. Starting from where I’d left off yesterday, I moved my hand in big sweeping motions from left to right and back again.

Drips of paint splattered off the brush, coating my forearms with a fine speckling of purple. Though I tried to stay clean, my shirt and shorts belied my attempts. Dots of Luscious Lilac flecked the ends of my black hair. I couldn’t imagine what the rest of my face looked like as the brush whimsically ejected paint with every stroke.

Dip, sweep, sweep. Dip, sweep, sweep. At first, I found pleasure in the work, watching the bright new color mask the old faded pink. However, the rhythmic motions quickly dissolved into mind-numbing tedium when I repeated the process over and over and over again. The minutes lagged, the muscles in my arm burning. Back and forth, back and forth I continued until my shoulder also turned numb. By the end of the first hour, my wrist ached with every slight movement and my fingers tingled with thousands of needles simultaneously stabbing my flesh. Even switching hands did not increase my productivity or stamina for long. Soon, the wall of house seemed to lengthen before me. I imagined it extending out to the end of the yard, over the road, and across the beach. Only it didn’t end there. Instead, the faded pink siding stretched into the sea, all the way to the horizon. I cringed, recalling my dream where an overly helpful Liam returned, morning after morning, as if haunting my very existence.

I hoped if I let my brain wander, I could block the pain raging through my arms. It figured my mind quickly settled on images of Sully. And the more I thought about him, the more my blame for losing him fell upon Pele’s shoulders. By sending me off on all those missions, I missed my opportunity to apologize to him. Worse, her magical training seemed largely ineffective. Sure, I could get back on my own from Colorado after the avalanche, but a simple request of sending me where I was needed went entirely ignored. With renewed determination, I decided I would weasel more details about my purpose from the goddess on my next visit. There had to be a real reason she called me back. Why else go through the trouble of healing Cam and me?

Unless I abandoned her training altogether. Did I possess enough skills to protect myself from the Elementals in the future? I couldn’t be sure. Skye’s powers had grown since she located me in Old Chicago. Quite possibly, her skills now exceeded the powers she had possessed then. Was it worth taking the risk and leaving my training incomplete?

While I contemplated my desire to return to the volcano at all, Auntie Lulu called Liam and me to the porch where she had laid out a mid-morning snack—steamed white rice with two slabs of fried Spam each. Before I could ask why anyone would elect to fry meat from a can, I realized something. Lulu was acting uncharacteristically pleasant—she’d never whipped up a snack for me before, regardless of how much time I’d devoted to her chores. Could she be putting on a show for her old friend Liam? Or did she seem grateful simply for the improvements to her home?

In between bites, Liam chattered amiably with Lulu. I focused on my food to avoid looking at his bandaged nose. Bandaged, I reminded myself with a heap of guilt, because of my carelessness.

Before Liam inhaled his final bite, he asked Lulu, “Do you have a ladder?”

My brow pinched with confusion. A ladder? I thought, wondering how far he’d gotten already if he couldn’t reach a spot with his tall frame.

She led him into the carport to take one down from the rafters. I cleaned up my plate, lacking the enthusiasm to paint. Still, the sooner I completed this project, the sooner I could find Pele and demand an explanation for my magic’s failure.

While my brush slid from side to side along each panel of pink wooden siding, I reached the conclusion that I definitely had too much time to think. Unresolved issues plagued my mind, accompanied by tragic scenes of lost lives of those I could not save. And here, I’d thought my new purpose would change all that. Instead, I painted the side of a house. Some help I was, dwelling on the failures of Pele’s near-death missions and the hurt from Sully’s break-up.

Suddenly, Liam appeared behind me. “I finished the back of the house.”

I quickly mopped my face with a clean square of my shirt, not wishing him to see me in my pitiable state. “You what?” I exclaimed, certain I misheard him.

“The back’s all done,” Liam repeated. He licked his thumb and rubbed it against my cheek. “You’ve got a spot on you,” he explained.

I glanced down at my speckled arms and splotchy clothes. “More than a little,” I admitted, surprised he had stayed perfectly clean.

“Sorry, I can’t help you finish,” he apologized, “I’ve gotta go to work now. If you’d like, I can swing by and check on you later.”

“Sure,” I said, kicking myself for sounding opportunistic. There were probably a hundred thousand things he would’ve rather done on his morning off from work than painting…and not getting paid for it. “Did you really finish the whole back?” I asked with a hint of disbelief.

His lips stretched into a proud smile. “Let me show you,” he offered and headed toward the back of the house.

Following close behind, my jaw dropped in an instant. “Wow,” I exclaimed with a low whistle, honestly impressed with how much he’d accomplished. While I struggled on the front, leaving faded pink on one half and crisp Luscious Lilac on the other in its current two-tone state, he had somehow managed to complete the entire back of the house, just like he’d claimed!

“How’d you do that?” I wondered, awestruck. Had I really been that distracted by my own thoughts?

“Told you I was pretty good with a brush.” Liam joked and flashed me a friendly grin.

Speechless, I stared at his work, feeling pokey and inadequate. “You know, I’m really sorry I can’t pay you.”

“No big deal. Like I said, I owed Auntie Lulu a favor.”

I blinked. Actually, I hadn’t heard him say that before. I merely thought she was an old family friend. Was there something more he hadn’t disclosed?

He continued, “And maybe you can help me out with a favor some time? Just to call it even.”

“Maybe,” I said, noncommittally. True, Liam had saved me at least a full day’s worth of work—especially at the rate I was going. So it made sense I should owe him big. Still, the prospect of being indebted to Liam made my stomach churn. Why did he have to be so nice it made me sick? I already felt bad enough about the whole nose thing. And now he’d heaped another huge serving of guilt on my plate from painting the house. Regardless of what Liam had in mind, it would have to wait. I needed Lulu to get to Pele so I could find out how I had botched up my magic. The last thing I wanted was another task to delay my visit to the goddess.