Retreat to Love (2 page)

Guess my thoughts translated, because his cheeks flushed. “Okay, it’s a little silly now. You can call me Caleb.”

“I think that would be best.”

Wren handed Zach the plate she’d picked up from the corner of the sideboard. “You eating?”

“If nobody minds. What’s on the menu?” he asked, peeking over the skinny guy’s shoulder to scope out the spread. “Oh, artist food,” he said. “Salads, fruit and quiche.”

“Not store-bought, I hope,” said Caleb. Zach raised an eyebrow at him. Caleb elaborated. “True artists only eat food made from scratch. Preferably all organic and from their private gardens.”

“Zach’s a computer programmer,” I told them. “He wouldn’t understand. All they eat is fast food and frozen pizzas.”

We loaded up our plates with what was, admittedly, pretty appealing food and sat down. Caleb joined our half of the table, taking the seat deserted by Wren’s food partner. He’d stayed at dinner long enough to eat a slice of quiche and a scoop of Salad Nicoise, minus the olives, judging from his plate. “You suppose he’ll be back to help me wash these?” Wren asked, utilizing his napkin to move his dish to the kitchen pass-thru.

“From the way he slinked off down the porch I’d say he’s gone for good,” said a woman on the other side of Caleb.

Zach and I asked simultaneously, “South Dublin?”

“Dalkey. How’d ya know?” she said, pushing her gold-rimmed glasses up her nose and studying me.

“Pappa was from Dalkey, Gran from Rosslare, and they trained us to tell the difference—to them it was obvious. I’m Ashlyn. This is my brother, Zach.”

“Hi. Lizzy Murphy.” She nodded at us, her glasses slipping back down in the process. She had the traditional Irish freckles and fair skin, but a startling, almost punkish combination of black eyes and very light spiky hair. With a blunt rough-nailed hand she picked up her fork and gestured toward the man sitting beside her. “I was just discussing with Brandon here that the only thing I cook is rice, so he should be prepared to do a lot of cooking next week.”

Brandon nodded at us, flipping back his long dusty locks to get a clear view. “I thought guests weren’t allowed.”

“Don’t worry, I’m leaving soon. Right after we help Wren do the washing up.”

“Suit yourself,” he shrugged. “I just woulda brought my girlfriends along if I knew.”

“More than one?” Lizzy asked.

I suppose he thought his smirk was a sly grin. “They like to travel in pairs, what can I say?”

His food partner sized him up. It didn’t look like she would take his measure if offered. “Just let me know if they’re going to show up. You cook for a week for each one I convert.”

“Yeah, well, whatever.” Brandon stood up and stacked his dishes with the others. “See you all later.”

“Good night, partner!” Lizzy drawled after him as he shut the porch door behind him. “You think I made him uncomfortable?” she asked us.

“God, I hope so,” said Caleb. “He was on the bus from Austin with us, and he thinks that he’s the hottest new photog in the world. If you call running every shot through a diffuser either ‘new’ or ‘hot’, I’m in serious trouble.”

“You’re a photographer, too?” I asked. Having missed Margie’s introductions, as well as the informative shuttle from Austin’s airport, I was out of the FireWind loop.

Turned out that Brandon and Caleb were the only photographers. I, to exactly no one’s surprise, was the only fiber artist. Lizzy, Wren, and the other woman there, Angelica Starlight, were all sculptors, but Wren concentrated on small-scale ceramics while Lizzy and Angelica worked on larger pieces. The skinny guy, Theo, as well as the amazing disappearing Rafael were painters. So was Margie, to judge from the small watercolors of hummingbirds in flight strewn about the dining room and hallway, but the general consensus was she might be better off trying her hand at cross-stitch or stained glass or something else with which she could use a pattern. Caleb suggested quilting for her, but at least had the decency to redden at my look.

After the meal was cleared and the dishes dried, Zach and I walked first Wren then Caleb back to their cabins, all of which had the requisite earthy names. Wren was at RiverStone and Caleb at LakeFire, but mine stole the prize for most uncertifiably organic: ValeSong. It wasn’t even in a valley, more of a dip in the road.

The guys planned to have some sort of ‘Zeke and Ned’ reunion, so Caleb invited us in while he fetched a notebook for Zach’s email address. We’d all be banned from bringing our cell phones, and apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d followed the rule. LakeFire shared darkroom facilities with Brandon in the adjoining cabin, but otherwise Caleb’s layout was almost a mirror of mine. I forced myself to admit to a stab of jealousy. He’d only been there a few more hours than I, but already his working space looked not only organized but like he’d actually used it. Three cameras were out of bags, a portable light table was on a desk back by his bedroom, and a multi-pocketed safari vest and light gauge hung over a chair near the door.

Back at ValeSong we surveyed the carload of unpacking ahead of me. “You need any help with all this?” Zach asked.

“No, thanks. You’d best to get back home. Some of us have to work in the morning and need their rest.” Zach programmed for a firm in the Silicone Hills of Austin, and not only did he pull some tidy cash, he also got to set his own hours and work near-exclusively from home. “Hey, listen, I appreciate your coming to get me and bringing me up here and all. And, you know, sorry I was a little brusque in the car.”

“A little brusque? I was ready to call the exorcist by Bastrop. But what are brothers for? I’m glad you’re doing this thing. I hope it helps.”

I hugged him and walked him to the door. “It should. I feel good here already, and that’s always a plus. Will you give Gran a call in the morning, let her know I’m settled in okay? I’ll email her later on.” The computer room in the Main House was already shut up tight for the night.

“Sure, and I’ll drop a note to Frank and Bernadette, too.” Our parents would hardly have been looking for a message from me, but they’d be overjoyed to hear from their precious Zach.

“Thanks, hon.” I smiled and gave him one last squeeze. “Safe home.”

“Goodnight, then. See ya’ later.” I waved as Zach got into his car, lowered my hand as he backed out onto the main road and headed back towards Austin.

Unpacking my clothes and toiletries didn’t take long, nor did arranging the few books and photos I’d brought. But other than storing the boxes of fabrics and threads in the studio cabinets and setting my machine on one of the wood tables, I was at a loss as to how to arrange my new working space. I would use the easel for sketches, the drafting table for layout drawings and making templates, and the floor as a canvas for my cloth. That much I knew from experience with the way I worked.

But I had no idea, despite my bravado with Zachary, what my first project at FireWind would be. I hoped in the eight weeks I would compile a number of sketched ideas and renditions, and complete three or four large pieces. I couldn’t waste too much time wandering in the woods or socializing, but lacking any concrete idea of where I would begin, I couldn’t envision myself doing anything else. I’d had the same problem when I moved from Gran’s to my accursed rental on the outskirts of Houston’s museum district, except there I lurked in galleries and cafes instead of wooded clearings and cabins.

I’d been in the rental since the previous fall and had only completed twelve pieces, ten of which were commissioned via my online storefront. I’d had to up my part-time hours at the fabric store and run a couple of quilt-making classes to make ends meet, which was distinctly not in the plan when I’d projected my costs and time ratios before moving out. I’d found myself dropping in on Gran more often than planned, and even spent a winter weekend with our parents, since Zach had come in to absorb the brunt of their Yule-season festivity. He’d pretty easily figured out from my restlessness that my work wasn’t working for me. Gran knew it, too, and broached the idea of my moving back in with her, even though she was the one who’d pushed me from her comfortable nest to let me figure out how to fly on my own. And I was determined to prove her faith in me justified.

Lying on my back on the studio floor, I watched the treetops disappear in the darkness. My spine wanted to rebel against the solid floor, but I forced it straight and still, my muscles relishing the stretch. This close, the hardwoods smelled almost musty, but in a more woodsy than moldy way. It was peaceful.

The wind blew a bit, and I caught sight of a star through the waving branches, and smiled. I hadn’t seen a lot of stars since moving to Houston, and added ‘stake out a good gazing spot’ to my mental to-do list. It didn’t hold much else: finish unpacking find out if there was hot cocoa mix I could take to my cabin, create something new and marvelously expressive of my inner self.

A few deep breaths as I concentrated on the smell of the floor and the sound of the cicadas, the feel of the groove between planks on the pads of my fingers. I’d been entirely too disjointed in recent months to tap the creative core I knew was lurking somewhere within me. Eyes closed, still, I gently willed it to surface, to let the artist in me know any old time would be a great time to decide to thrive. I meditated for a good half-hour, but never felt a change.

I hauled myself off the floor, and off to bed, hollow and alone.

I woke up confused. It felt for a moment like my room at Gran’s house, but there wasn’t enough light from the north and west facing windows to make that possibility plausible. And the north window was tapping. I sat up and looked out at Wren, who scraped a long branch of deadwood against the pane. She dropped it and waved, then headed towards the front door.

I met her with the log cabin quilt around my shoulders.

“Did I wake you?” she asked, entering.

“Do you always do this?”

“No, I swear I won’t make a habit of it. But I’ve been up for two hours and I’m bored and breakfast won’t be for another forty-five minutes.”

“Maybe you should have tapped on the windows of Team One to make sure they’re going to serve you on time.”

She sat on the love seat and tipped her chin towards the road. “I saw Angelica walking out by the lake already, so I figured we were okay. She’s bound to wake up that Theo guy if he’s not up already.”

I went through the bedroom to the studio. “Make yourself cozy. I’m going to shower.” Yawning, I shut the bathroom door behind me.

The hot water heater, at least, was working well. It seemed the coldest room in the cabin was the bedroom, and I regretted leaving my clothes behind in the chilly bureau. Once I’d figured out the arcane neo-Victorian shower controls, I rapidly shampooed and conditioned my hair and scrubbed myself with the oatmeal body bar I’d found in a basket of toiletries on a shelf above the commode. The shower was in a garden tub with a window looking into the woods, and if Wren hadn’t been sitting in my cabin I would have slept past breakfast then soaked in a bathtub of bubbles long enough to be almost late for lunch.

As it was I made quick work of my morning ablutions, threw on yesterday’s jeans and a Berkeley sweatshirt I’d stolen when Zach was a freshman, and went back into the sitting room with my hair in a towel and my sneakers and socks in my hands.

“Is the heating in your cabin this screwy?” I asked, sitting beside her.

“In a word, yes. I was wondering if it was the goal of the HVAC engineers, to keep us working till all hours instead of lying abed.”

“I guess it worked for you this morning.”

“I’m an early bird on East Coast time, so I woke up just after five with enormous hunger pangs. I went to the Main House to get coffee, but Margie was in the kitchen so all I did was grab a cup and retreat.”

“You’re from Connecticut, right?”

Half-shrug. “It’s where I live now.”

“Oh. Where’s home?”

“Everywhere. Nowhere. Military brat, you know? That’s what I’m trying to do now, really.”

“What is?”

“Defining home. Or creating it, maybe. My brain is full of images of homes—of houses—and I’m sorting them out, trying to categorize what makes them the same, or keeps them distant.”

“Wow.”

A slight snort, and Wren said, “Well, wow if it works. If it doesn’t ….”

“Did you get any work done this morning?”

Wren laughed. “Yeah, right. I’ve just been wandering around, thinking, getting oriented. I’ve found two shortcuts to the Main House from my cabin, and one from yours to Caleb’s, plus I’ve been along the river bed until it headed uphill pretty steeply.”

I went to drape the towel in the bathroom and comb out my hair. “We’ve still got half an hour until grub,” she called. “I’ll show you around if you want.”

“Sure. Let’s go.”

Wren waited by the front door for me to join her. As she opened it, I glanced back at the huge east-facing windows of the studio, and saw the growing light land upon a fat, probably pregnant, whitetail doe in a clearing twenty feet from the cabin. There was a salt lick set up there, and she stood rather confidently enjoying it in the otherwise still landscape. By the time we’d gone outside and rounded the wall of ValeSong, she was gone.

The clearing was edged with cypress and pine trees, which crowded out the view of Wren’s porch across the creek. Turning away from the water, she led me to a path with an almost overgrown entrance, but which widened out and was lined with pine bark once we were on it.

“This is the way to Caleb’s?”

She nodded. “Lucky you. You can have private rendezvous and we’ll never know to gossip about it.”

“I’m not sure that’s really on the cards.” I shook my head. “He’s nice and cute and all, but I’m not sure he’s my type. Too intense. Or intent, maybe.”

“I don’t know. He seems pretty promising to me. We sat together on the bus down from Austin, and he’s got quite a charming crinkle to his eye when he smiles.”

I shrugged. “My Gran says crow’s feet on a youngun’ are an indication a person won’t age well.” I glanced at Wren, who was smiling inwardly. “But if you think he’s so all-mighty, why not do something about it yourself?”

She smiled openly. “I’m thinking about it. I just don’t know how to approach him.” She laughed a little derisively. “But, then, if I knew how to approach men, I wouldn’t be a desperate single woman at thirty-two.”

“That’s hardly old.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six in September.”

“No wonder. The blush of youth is on you yet. I’m turning into an eccentric old crone, just me and my clay, all day long.”

“So, maybe you and Caleb are destiny. Find out.”

She’d reached her fingers around my wrist when I’d said ‘destiny.’ Stopping, she glanced towards LakeFire, so I did, too. We were too far away for sound to carry through his lit bedroom windows, which Wren fixed her eyes upon as she talked. “The destiny thing. You know, Ashlyn, there really has to be something to it. I mean, I haven’t left the state of Connecticut for over a decade. I haven’t been on a plane in a dozen years. Then all this happened with my house—I’ll tell you about it later, it’s a long story—and the same day I read about FireWind. It seemed like destiny, so I applied. And here I am, and here he is.” She hesitated. “Doesn’t it seem predetermined somehow?” I nodded, hesitant, but she wasn’t looking at me.

“Thing is,” she said, finally releasing her clutch on me. “I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve been mulling it over all morning, but I don’t know what my next move should be. Will you help?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Well, you know him. Or at least, your brother does. And he’s your food partner. I just thought, maybe you could sound him out a little. Or invite me along if you and Zach do something with him. Things like that.”

Her glance rested on me for half a second before she fixed her bright eyes again on Caleb’s window.

“Sure,” I smiled, “whatever I can do.”

She hugged me. “I knew you’d do it! I could tell from the moment you walked in last night you were great. Thanks so much.”

For such a soft-focus looking woman her grasp was bone hard. I stepped away from her and took her arm. “Well, if we’re going to be friends, we may as well try to make each other happy, right?”

“That’s just what I was thinking when I woke up this morning.” She looked at her watch. “They’ve got to have something ready to eat by now. Come on, I’m starving.”

We skirted past LakeFire and walked up the drive to the Main House. Wren was humming off and on, and I caught sight of a blue jay rising from an oak near the little lake.

When Lauren’d made room for me at the general meeting, she’d had no idea Caleb and I were vaguely connected. But something about her waking me up to lead me off towards his cabin, love plans on her mind, put me off. I sighed. Maybe I was just tired and worried about work.

And hungry. When we entered the dining room and smelled the coffee and biscuits, my stomach responded greedily enough to deserve personification. Theo and Angelica were hard at work, making omelets and a melon salad. Caleb and Lizzy were already at the table, Lizzy looking jet lagged and raccoon-eyed, Caleb reading the thin local paper. No sign of Rafael, which it seemed already was norm, nor of Brandon.

I sat down two seats from Caleb when Wren told me she’d get me a cup of coffee, and pushed back the chair next to him when she brought it to me. Her blue eyes were wide as she sat down, but I figured if I had a friendship mission, no matter how genuine the friendship, I was going to complete it as quickly as possible. We only had eight weeks at FireWind, and the last thing I wanted to be doing for the bulk of it was devising ways for Wren to run into her intended.

Putting my mug down, I stood up. “Talk amongst yourselves, I’ll be back.” Caleb folded up the paper and smiled at me as I walked past him into the hallway. I didn’t see any crinkles in his eyes, but maybe it was a special thing for Wren.

Outside the dining room was a hallway running the length of the house. Doors to the kitchen and a half-bath were on the dining room side, and the far end of the hall widened into a laundry room under the stairs to Margie’s lair. The other half of the house had two rooms, the lounge and the computer center. Brandon was in the latter, using the scanner and whistling in a way I guessed meant he knew I was there but wanted to pretend he was so absorbed he could ignore me. There were three other computers and two printers, and hummingbird feeders hanging outside each of the four windows.

I backed out of there and went to the lounge. Two walls were covered with bookcases, filled mostly with art books and biographies, but interspersed here and about with thick paperback novels. A keyless locked hutch undoubtedly hid the TV and DVD player, but two accessible side doors to it revealed the colony’s selection of movies, which tended towards old Oscar material but ranged from
Max Headroom
to
Howard’s End
. The telephone on a side table had a sign taped to the base:
Local, Collect, and Emergency Calls Only!!!

Taking a pencil and unopened sketchpad from the coffee table, I settled myself into a wing chair and began to draw. I traced in a largish portrait of Gran in the upper left corner, and just a light impression of me alone in the woods in the lower right, and connected the two with a few tentative diagonals. As I found the angle I liked and emphasized it, rotating the pad to give my hand more freedom and reach, I realized the lines were just the beginnings of the pattern. Flipping to the next page, I blocked out a rectangle and filled it in with a traditional Double Irish Chain quilt design.  Then I redrew Gran in the upper left diamond, but this time she was the locus of a web, and my shape at the other end was just one of the elements extending from her, and bound up by her.

When I paused to look at the overall effect, I was pleased. Generally I’m not happy with pencil sketches, because the way the fabrics feed into and bounce off of each other is so much different than the diffused scratchings of a #2 lead, but I quite simply liked this layout. I was thinking about the ways I would fill the other spaces, and how best to make the chain into the unifying element, when Caleb knocked on the door.

“Sorry to interrupt, you look so lost, but we’re about to eat your share.”

“No, it’s okay. Only lost in creation.” I closed my sketchpad and stood, indicating the pile of pads on the table. “I hope these were for general use.”

He smiled, and then I saw what Wren had meant about his eyes. “They were. Margie gave us some inspirational lecture at that point of the tour, telling us how the founders felt it was important to encourage us to create whenever the urge took us, even if it was in the middle of Judge Judy, and truckloads of these pads were ordered direct from the manufacturer and placed about the house and grounds for our use. There were even a couple in the bathroom.”

I laughed and let him lead me back to the table, where Angelica passed me a pitcher of orange juice. “Fresh squeezed,” she explained. “There was no ready-made. And no juicer. Theo had to strain it with the colander.”

“But it was good for my soul,” Theo said, with more than a touch of sarcasm. Angelica laughed an in-joke sort of laugh, but it looked like everyone else had heard it one already.

No one spoke for a while. The silence was less than an easy one, but it was only our second meal together and few of us had become bosom pals yet. Then Caleb leaned past Wren to catch my eye. “So what were you making?”

“Oh, just sketching out an idea. I’ll have to play with it a little, but I think it’s going to end up taking off from a traditional pattern. A story-telling piece.”

“What is it you really do? I mean, is it basically just quilting?” Lizzy asked.

Time for the big eye roll. “‘Oh, I thought quilts were just for sleeping under!’” Our gazes locked. “I’m not making fun—I just hear it all the time. Traditional art form, blah, blah, not just Wedding Rings and Flying Geese, blah, blah, creativity, technology and history intertwined, etcetera.” I sipped at the pulpy juice. “I make art. Just because it’s related to something basically anyone can do doesn’t make it less valuable as an art form. It’s like asking Caleb or Brandon what’s the difference between my vacation photo album and what they do.”

Wren nodded at Lizzy. “Or why what we make is more important than some Hummel figurine.”

Lizzy’s counter was instant. “I don’t know about that. Sculpture has a long tradition as art. Collectibles are fine for what they are, but no one’s going around asking why
The Thinker
is magnificent.” She stopped and let out a breath, then turned more calmly to me. “Do you have any here?”