Scratch, page 3
What else lurked in the recesses of his psyche, just waiting to feed?
He went back to his car. He needed to drive for a while. Holly would be home by now, waiting for him. If her meeting went well she would have good news about her career. He hoped so.
He didn’t have one anymore.
CHAPTER TWO
Holly Evans-Mansfield looked at the stovetop clock as she pulled the steaks out of the marinade. Seven thirty-seven. Adam was usually home before this. She was running late herself, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. Sometimes there was an emergency at work with one of his clients and he had to stay until things were settled. One time he had been there until nearly midnight talking a kid out of suicide. He finally got the knife away and took him to the hospital for observation.
Still, she was so excited by her news she couldn’t wait to tell him. She hummed out loud, an off-key version of “Walking On Sunshine,” and placed the steaks on a metal tray. Cooking wouldn’t take long; they both liked their meat pretty rare. She would slide them into the broiler when Adam walked in, which better be soon, because the broccoli and potatoes were done.
“Michaela, honey,” she called into the living room. “Is your show done?”
Michaela toddled into the kitchen clutching a ragged beanie-baby bear. Strands of fine blond hair hung over her face. Her thumb was plugged into her mouth, a habit she had only when she was sleepy. She walked over and laid her head against her mother’s leg.
“Sleepy, Mike?” Holly placed a loving hand on her daughter’s warm head.
Mike nodded and said, “I wanna drink.”
“Not before bed,” Holly said, but relented when she saw her daughter’s face. She got a sippy cup from the cupboard over the sink and put a small amount of milk in it. She took the bear so Mike could use both hands on the cup. Mike took a sip, then put the cup on the table and reached up for Mom. Holly lifted her into her arms and gave the bear back.
“Are you and Buggly ready for bed?” Michaela’s head dropped onto Holly’s shoulder. Holly took that for a “yes.”
“Let’s go get your jammies on.” Holly opened the refrigerator door with one hand and held it open with her foot. She slid the steaks into it and closed the door. Then, daughter and toy bear in her arms, she left the kitchen and went up the steps to the second floor.
Holly made sure Mike used the bathroom, then slipped her out of her jumper and into a pink nightgown with a fairy on the front. Holly brushed the hair away from Mike’s forehead. She decided to forego a bath tonight. Michaela had had a busy day, but she wasn’t filthy. Holly pressed her lips against the top of Mike’s head in a kiss and inhaled the perfect scent of her child. Mike’s eyes were closed for most of this.
“Let’s hit the sack, kiddo,” Holly said, and then picked Mike up again.
“Buggly,” Michaela whined as they started to leave the bathroom. Holly sighed and went back and picked the bear up by its red shoestring collar. She handed it to Mike, who immediately closed her eyes again. The bear, and its silly name, had been a gift from Adam when she first began to date him. It was the second time he had seen Michaela, and Holly knew he was courting her as surely as he was her mother. Mike hadn’t gone anywhere, or slept a single night without it since then. She even carried it in her duties as flower girl at Adam and Holly’s wedding last summer. Holly thought Mike was getting a little too old for it, but she knew some things from childhood were hard to let go of.
She wondered if Michaela would grow up to be as obsessed with bears as she herself was with angels. If it paid off as well, that would be okay.
Mike was asleep long before her head hit the pillow. She had missed her nap this afternoon, and though she had slept in the car it wasn’t enough. Adam usually read a story to her at bedtime, or more often, just made one up. That made Holly smile. She had worried about whether or not her daughter would bond with a new dad. She certainly had no contact with the old one. But Holly’s fears proved groundless, at least initially. Recently Mike seemed to be withdrawing from him somewhat. Holly thought it was just a shy phase, but she was concerned nonetheless.
She pulled the blanket up over Michaela, then leaned forward and kissed her cheek. She stood and looked at the oil painting that hung on the wall behind the bed. An angel, wearing a black topcoat and blue jeans and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Adam, stared out over the room, standing vigilant watch over the sleeping child.
“Do your job,” Holly whispered to the painting. She turned out the overhead light, made sure the nightlight was still on, then left the room.
She crossed the hall and entered the bedroom she shared with Adam. The clock on the nightstand closed in on 8 pm, and there was still no sign of him. She glanced around the room, eyes flitting over the paintings that lined the walls here, like they did in almost every other room of the apartment. She supposed some people would think it vain to display your own work this blatantly, but Holly didn’t care. Flat against the wall was the best place to store them. It was better than in the back of a closet somewhere. She was especially pleased with them right now. Four of the pieces in this room were going to be in a calendar. So was Michaela’s guardian. She had signed the deal this afternoon.
Like the angel in Mike’s room, a winged being graced each of the canvases. Many were angels – all of them in Holly’s view, though not everyone would agree. She had always been obsessed with the idea. She wasn’t particularly religious, aside from some basic Christian beliefs. She certainly didn’t practice anything. But angels had soared in her imagination since she was Mike’s age. She remembered telling her mother she had seen an angel once. She knew now that it was just the whimsy of a child, but her memory was still clear. It was in many ways more real to her than things she knew had happened.
She was staying with her grandmother Dora one summer, way out in the country where her mother never wanted to visit. Holly remembered a tent, and a church, and the most beautiful girl she had ever seen, with white-gold hair and snow-white wings.
She had been trying to capture the essence of that image in her work ever since.
Her earliest paintings were filled with imagery that was as cliché as it was poorly rendered. Wings and white robes and halos, harps and clouds and pearly gates. It was embarrassing to think about. She had thankfully passed through that phase pretty quickly. By the time she entered the University of Pittsburgh she had already begun to copy the Masters.
From there her work progressed rapidly as she began to find her style. By her junior year she had had two gallery shows. The second featured her “Everyday Angels” series. The canvases were images of ordinary people engaged in angelic acts: a firefighter saving a child, a volunteer at a soup kitchen, a worker in an AIDS clinic. They were thematically linked by the suggestion of a halo and wings. With the help of one of her professors, who appeared in a later painting, Holly began to market her work. The imagery caught the public imagination and soon a postcard set of her paintings was carried in New Age bookstores across the country.
College was a good time, for the most part, right up until she met Billy Haught. Even then, it was good to begin with. He was a graduate assistant who took a lot of interest in her work. And in her, of course. Handsome and charming, she couldn’t resist when he finally asked her out. Unfortunately, the charm decreased with every drink he had that night, and even though he took her home when she asked, he misread her intentions. In his mind a mediocre dinner was payment enough for sex from her, and the word “No” was meant as foreplay.
Unbidden, the memories washed over her. Billy had seemed so nice… so harmless. He was the stereotypical artist. He was a soft-spoken liberal who wore little round John Lennon glasses, and had long blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. But then, when he had taken her home, it was like he became another person. Holly watched as something sinister crawled up out of him and took control. His irritation turned to anger, his anger to violence. He was stronger than he looked and, fueled by drink and the fear he saw on her face, Billy took what he wanted.
Holly shook her head to dispel the memory. That was all behind her now. Billy was out of her life, and Michaela was more than enough to make up for the experience.
She looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. She wasn’t vain, really, but tonight she wanted to look special for Adam. She knew he loved her, and thought she was beautiful, but more often than not these days he came home to find a paint-stained ragamuffin in ratty sweatpants. She smoothed out a wrinkle in the dark paisley peasant skirt she wore, and then unfastened one more button on her white blouse. A little additional cleavage wouldn’t hurt anything, after all. She fluffed her curly brown hair out a little, then decided the bracelet was too much. She slipped it off her wrist and laid it on the dresser.
She leaned closer to the mirror to check her makeup. She rarely wore any, preferring a natural look simply because she couldn’t be bothered with it most of the time. She rubbed a spot of foundation into her cheek, wishing for the millionth time in her life that her freckles would just go away.
Headlights swept across the paintings as a car pulled into the driveway. Holly took a quick peek through the window and saw that it was Adam. She flicked off the bedroom light and went back into the hallway and down the stairs. She paused to make sure the door to the den, her makeshift studio, was completely closed. It was, of course, but Holly pushed it anyway. Rule number one in the house was to keep Mike safe, and the studio had way too many dangerous things in it for her to be allowed inside without supervision. A faint odor of turpentine lingered around the door.
Holly went to the foyer and waited anxiously for Adam to come in. She smoothed her skirt again as she felt her nervous excitement build. It had been such a good day, one of her best. The deal she signed meant a lot to her. She had been working on it for ages. She would have a consistent market for her paintings, and the money, while not enough to qualify her for Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, was good. She couldn’t wait to share it with Adam, to see him smile with the I-told-you-so look on his face that held all of his belief in her.
The face Adam wore when he walked in was not what she expected. Behind him she could see the first fat snowflakes of winter, carrying with them their intention to stay long past their welcome.
“Adam,” she said and reached out for him. He fell into her embrace and clutched her tightly, like a man being washed away in a storm grabbing for a lifeline.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
CHAPTER THREE
The winter passed for Adam and Holly, though their individual experience of that time was vastly different. Holly worked in a frenzy, and the days passed quickly. Her star as an artist was on the rise. Her contract had catalyzed her creativity. She was motivated and excited by her work, and this prompted her desire to paint. She committed to another calendar for the following year. In addition, Holly’s work was going to be repackaged as post card sets, posters, and limited prints. The initial orders from the bookstores and New Age shops had far exceeded her hopes.
She spent hours in her studio, working and reworking her art. As daylight stooped before the darkness of winter, Holly became more absorbed in her canvases. She left the house primarily for supplies and reference materials. She still wanted to paint angels, but she was dissatisfied with the way she painted wings. She spent hours researching how they worked in the real world. The studio was littered with diagrams, like something torn from an Audubon sketchbook. Concept drawings were taped to the walls and stuck on the refrigerator.
The results of her research made their way into her paintings. Angels began to bear the wings of hawks, sea gulls, blackbirds and hummingbirds, creating new personalities and situations, and taking the familiar concept into new arenas. Eventually the angels moved away from feathers and began to be clad in colorful butterfly and moth wings, stained glass dragonfly shards, and leathery bat wings. They began to resemble fairies and demons as much as angels. Holly’s agent was thrilled when she saw the sketches. This slight shift in focus opened Holly to a whole new market.
“Your imagination has taken wing,” Adam said to her on one of his good days. Holly smiled, not because the joke was good, but simply because he had tried to make one.
For Adam time was slow and interminable. The short slashes of sunlight that passed for days in the winter crawled by for him, mired in the dark gray depths of depression. He slept too much and ate too little. He stopped shaving, and on some days bathing. He sat in front of the television, staring at images that held no meaning for him. He watched over Michaela while Holly worked, and the only time he seemed happy at all was because of her.
Adam rode his mood like a roller coaster that was all downhill. His thoughts ran circles in a small room made of recriminations and self-doubt. For years, his identity had been based on his work as a counselor. He had needed to help others, and now that had been taken away from him.
No, not taken away… thrown away. He was responsible, no matter how much he tried to blame Kevin Jones, or the system, or anything else. He threw the punch. He threw away his self-control. He threw away the life he had known.
Now, he didn’t know who he was, or what he was supposed to do. His income was gone, though he did have a savings. Holly received a large advance check for the calendar, larger than any single check either of them had ever seen, so they weren’t going to go hungry any time soon. But that wasn’t the point. Just as she had emerged fully into her vocation his had disappeared, and he could see nothing to replace it. Intellectually he knew that his worth as a human being wasn’t based on his job, but his feelings were at odds with that knowledge.
Adam wore his disposition like uncomfortable clothes. He wanted to be happy for his wife and, on some level, he was. But her success and happiness felt like an inadvertent mockery of his situation. He was short with her, and with Michaela, overly critical and easily angered. He was never violent, but he said hurtful things, and though he apologized for them later, and meant it when he did, they still came out of his mouth. It was as though the only way he could get relief from the wounds he felt was to project them on someone else. He knew this wasn’t true healing. In the end that kind of transferal only drowned everyone in more suffering. But once the storm was unleashed it had to run its course.
Once the monster was free, it was hard to put the chains back on.
Holly was patient, preferring to channel her energy into her work rather than face Adam’s depression head on. In truth, it frightened her. The sudden change in his demeanor was hard for her to understand. The image of him actually hitting someone was so out of character that she just couldn’t wrap her head around it. She almost expected someone to nudge her in the ribs and say, “Just kidding.”
She didn’t believe he would become violent at home, with either her or Michaela. She couldn’t believe that, couldn’t allow herself to stay if she did. But the things he said hurt as much as, maybe more than, any physical blows. She knew he regretted it the moment it was out of his mouth, that he was as hurt by his anger as she was. But it still happened, and when it did it precipitated another downward spiral in his depression.
It was too much like Billy, and Holly worried that she had made the same mistake again. Were all men like this? Some of them wore their anger on the outside, of course, but how many good men out there carried a core of rage in their soul? Were they all just savages in Sunday clothes, waiting for some excuse to take up their clubs and strike out?
She didn’t know. Didn’t know if anyone did, so she buried her head in her work and she buried her hurt in her heart.
And so they passed the winter.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I’m gonna take it, Mom,” Holly said into the portable phone. It was lodged between her head and shoulder as she dabbed a burnt orange highlight on the moth wing she was painting. “I know you don’t like it down there, but it’s something I want to do.”
“Canaan’s in the middle of nowhere,” Carol Evans said. Holly could hear the soft whoosh of smoke being inhaled and released as her mother spoke. There was thirty years of tar in her voice. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”
“I know, I know,” Holly said. “Left as soon as you met Daddy. Ran off and got married and traded the rural Appalachian life for the big city of Appleton, Pennsylvania.”
“Oh, ha-ha,” Carol said, returning her daughter’s sarcasm. “I know Appleton isn’t Pittsburgh, but it’s not the Hicksville that Canaan is, either. You don’t know what people are like down there honey. You haven’t been there since you were a child…”
“And I loved it.”
“You were a child, you barely remember it,” Carol continued. “They’re all a bunch of narrow-minded rednecks down there. Culture is an NBC movie of the week. There’s nothing to do. You’ll be bored out of your mind.”
“The quiet will be good for my work,” Holly persisted. “Isn’t there a sun room in the back of the house? That would be perfect for my studio. Lots of light and room, and it would be easier to keep Michaela out of it.
“And,” she said, pressing on before her mother could interject anything, “it’s not like the city is full of good people. You didn’t want me to move here either, remember? Should I quote your lectures on how city people aren’t like us? I thought you’d be glad I was getting out of this den of iniquity. I think you’re just mad Gran’ma didn’t leave it all to you.”
“I wish she had,” Carol said. “I’d sell that old house and never look back. What does Adam think about moving?”
