Skin Deep (21 page)

Alasdair nearly slammed the door shut after them, locked it, and yanked the curtains across it. Only then did he turn to her and Conn. “
Oganach
,” he said softly, taking Conn from her. “Why did you go out there?”

Conn sniffled and hid his face, and shoved the flowers toward Garland.

“Thank you, Conn,” she said. “They’re beautiful.” They were also probably from the Luffords’ yard next door, but they were never around until June and wouldn’t notice. “Did you fall down and hurt yourself?”

Alasdair’s face tightened. “He should be cleaned. This—this filth will burn if left on the skin.”

Garland opened her mouth to ask him how he knew and where Conn had been to get it on him, but his expression made her change his mind. At least until Conn was scrubbed.

They brought him upstairs and bathed him twice, and Garland ran the purple shirt through the wash so that he could have it back again. While she helped clean and comfort him, she watched Alasdair. He had been about to say something important when Conn came in, and then had reacted very strangely to Conn’s misadventure. Once the boy had fallen into an exhausted sleep on her bed, wrapped in her shirt and down comforter, she went in search of him.

He was standing in front of her design wall, staring at the Storm at Sea quilt as he often did. But she had the sense that he had been waiting for her, for he turned and looked at her without surprise. Before she could say a word, he spoke.

“I knew it before, but it is made clearer now by what happened to Conn. We must leave, and the sooner we do, the better it will be.”

She came to stand next to him by the design wall. “What’s made it clearer? What does a little boy wandering off to pick flowers have to do with it?” She looked down and almost whispered, “Why can’t you stay here with me?”

“Garland…” He touched her shoulder, and when she looked up at him he rested his hand against her cheek, as he had when they’d first met on the beach…but this time it
was
a caress. “I don’t want to leave. I—” he swallowed. “If I stay here, it will be bad for you.”

“Isn’t that up to me to decide?”

He smiled, but pain and longing dimmed his eyes. “No. In this instance, it is not.” He traced the line of her cheekbone then let his hand drift up into her hair. His fingers trembled. “But I would ask a favor of you. Will you finish the gift of your quilt for me to take when we leave?”

“But I don’t want you to leave,” she whispered, reaching for him. “I lo—”

He pressed his fingers against her lips, stopping the words. “Please, Garland. Don’t make this any harder for me than it already is.”

She took a breath, and another. “I’m sorry,” she said against his fingers, and he let his hand fall.

“Then will you finish the quilt?” he asked gently.

She nodded.

She went back to work on Alasdair’s quilt, standing at the cutting table so that she would not have to look at him. She picked up her rotary cutter then put it down again because her hands were shaking. She had been a heartbeat away from telling him that she loved him. The thing that had sprouted within her as he’d held her hand had come into leaf.

This was crazy. Rob was the one she was supposed to fall in love with. Rob, not Alasdair.

All right. So maybe she had a school-girlish crush on him. Or maybe something more, some deeper and richer emotion. And maybe he even felt the same for her.

But he was going to leave and return to his old life, wherever that was, and there wouldn’t be room for her in that life. They both had to set aside whatever feelings they had, pick up their pieces, and go on.

She stared down at the piles of triangles and squares neatly stacked to one side of her cutting mat, all in shades of blue and turquoise. Storm at Sea. How appropriate this pattern had turned out to be, with storms within and without…

A memory came to her of a Storm at Sea quilt she’d seen a few years back in a quilting magazine, an otherwise-ordinary quilt with one difference. The quilt’s maker had played with the angles that created the illusion of curves, and pieced a heart into her quilt, keeping the pattern and using only contrasting colors to form the design within the design.

Sorting through the cut fabric, she found pieces of the right shape and similar dark turquoise, and constructed a heart like the one in that other quilt. Then she fit it into the already laid-out pieces on the design wall. Surrounded by all the other shades of blue and green, it could only be seen if you knew where to look. The heart of the storm.

She stepped back to survey it. There. Schoolgirl crush or something more, she would still give Alasdair her love whether he knew it or not.

Chapter 12

O
n April 29th, Rob called.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been calling all along. She’d seen him several times since the night they went to the movie when he’d made his declaration. They’d gone out for brunch and to a fundraising dinner for the Historical Society and to a local quilt show up in Wellfleet. He had been much his usual self, smiling and pleasant if restrained, only giving her chaste pecks on the cheek when saying hello or goodbye. But as soon as she heard his voice this morning on the other end of the phone, she knew something had changed.

“Hi, Garland. So, uh, I was wondering…are you doing anything special for dinner the day after tomorrow?”

“Hmm. Would that be the evening of May first?” She stuck her needle into Alasdair’s quilt and leaned back in her chair, trying to match his casual tone.

“As a matter of fact, it is.”

“The first…yes, I think I’ll be free.”

He laughed. “I know you will. In all senses of the word. That’s why I’m calling.”

“You’re not wasting any time.”

“Why should I wait any longer than I have to? Actually,” his voice sobered, “I’m not calling from entirely selfish motives. I thought you might like some company to mark the occasion. It’s a milestone in your life, after all. The world makes a fuss over the start of a marriage but always turns its back on its ending. And anyway, it’s as much a beginning as it is an ending. I’d like to celebrate your new beginning with you.”

She felt teary-eyed all of a sudden. He was right. The quilt was nearly done, and Alasdair would leave. It was time to think about new beginnings. Especially with Rob.

She looked down at Alasdair’s quilt, all pieced and sandwiched with its batting and backing fabric in her hand-quilting frame, a cross between an easel and a stretching rack. She supposed she could have quilted it by machine, which would have only taken a day or two. But machine quilting wouldn’t have been right for this quilt. The fact that hand quilting took longer had nothing—nothing!—to do with it.

But she wondered if she shouldn’t have compromised her artistic principles and quilted it on the machine. Then Alasdair and Conn would have left already and she could file these last weeks away as an interesting episode in her life, the Time I Found the Perfect Man On My Beach or something like that. More importantly, she could begin to recover for the second time in a year and a half from being left by a man she loved. May first would be the day she was officially free of Derek. Maybe it ought to be the day she renounced Alasdair, too.

“Oh, Rob, that’s really sweet,” she said. “Thank you. I would like to have dinner with you.”

“Then I’ll come get you around quarter to seven. Love you, Garland.” He hung up before she could respond.

Garland switched off her own phone and sat staring at it in her lap. Sweet, kind Rob. He would wipe away the memories of the other men who had so bruised her heart. She could start to forget, to pile the rest of her life on top of the memories the way an oyster secretes layers of mother-of-pearl around a grain of sand in its shell.

She picked up her needle once again, took a deep breath, and dove back into Alasdair’s quilt. Storm at Sea. She’d always loved the pattern but had never made one. The time had just never been right, and other ideas and projects had clamored for her attention first. So when she’d decided to make it for Alasdair because of the manner of his appearance, she’d decided to make it as well as she could. All those blues and aquas that she’d loved and accumulated for years had been put into this quilt so that it was an ocean of color, of the sea in all its moods. When she’d laid out the fabrics for it she’d felt like a mermaid diving through endless indigo depths or frolicking in tropical turquoise surf.

And like King Midas whispering the secret of his donkey’s ears to the reeds, she’d confided her feelings for Alasdair to the fabric, pouring into the quilt all the tenderness and passion and simple joy of being with him that she felt. But unlike the reeds in the legend, the quilt wouldn’t tattle. No one would ever know what she felt for him except her and the quilt. It wasn’t the most satisfactory confidant, but she felt better for it.

That was why she had to quilt it by hand and let the rest of her love get worked into it, stitch by tiny stitch. No simple echoing the seams lines or “stitching in the ditch” for this quilt. Instead, she was subtly outlining the heart she’d pieced into the pattern with swirls of silver thread, leaving it calm and unquilted—the heart of the storm. The silver thread would be storm winds and rain, and great sweeping curves of shaded blue thread would create waves. She smiled. Would Kathy complain of seasickness if she saw this quilt?

It felt strange not to be quilting a pattern in chalked or penciled lines, to just quilt where and how it seemed right. If she thought about what she was doing too much she would stop, feeling lost and confused. But if she half-closed her eyes as she worked her eleven stitches per inch, not looking exactly at what she was quilting at that moment but letting her mind range ahead, then the designs seemed to flow from her needle by themselves. It was like sitting down to draw with closed eyes and finding when you opened them that you’d made a perfect sketch of the Eiffel Tower.

After a while, she began to feel as if she were dreaming. A vision of being carried on the wind like a feather, swirling and pirouetting on the puffs and eddies of air, made her feel giddy. Yet all the while she could feel the needle in her fingers, the faint prick of its tip on her left index finger under the quilt as she stitched, the slightly rough silver thread no longer catching but gliding, flowing through the fabric. Then, changing to a length of blue thread, she felt as though she were dancing across the tops of storm-tossed waves, leaping from one foaming crest to another or rolling down the billows like a child on a snowy slope. Silver or blue, wind or water, she was reaching out to catch the essence of wild weather and capture it in patterns of thread.

* * *

Rob was a few minutes early picking her up but she was ready.

“I made you and Conn tuna salad plates, and there’s plenty of bread for toast. No knives in the toaster, please. And don’t wait up. I’ll probably be late,” she said to Alasdair, who stood in the kitchen watching her.

“I…yes. Thank you for telling me.” He did not meet her eyes. She’d not told him she was having dinner with Rob but he’d probably figured it out.

She and Alasdair had been even more distant with each other since the day Conn had gone flower-picking. Or maybe it would be more true to say that she had been more distant with him. Only when she’d been working on his quilt had she let her feelings for him out, like a prisoner let out of a cell for fresh air. But that morning, looking at the quilt, she’d realized she was nearly done. Another two days of work and the prisoner would be walled up in the cell forever. Alasdair would leave, and she could concentrate on falling properly in love with Rob.

The day had been bright and sunny, perfect May Day weather, and the evening still held some of the day’s golden warmth. Garland wore a linen dress with a long jacquard shawl in shades of olive, rose, and amber. Rob’s eyes gleamed as he opened the door for her. “You look incredible,” he said, pausing for a kiss. “I wish we could just go home and have pizza delivered at some point.”

“Aren’t you hungry?” She returned his kiss, wondering if Alasdair was watching from the window.

“Oh, yeah. But I suppose we have to eat.” Rob squeezed her arm and gave her a wicked, lop-sided grin.

At the Coq d’Or they had wine and an earthy tapenade spread on slices of toasted baguette at a table basking in the last of the rosy evening light, and a rich duck confit tart and bouillabaisse. Rob’s eyes on her were almost as warm as the setting sun, and his hand kept straying to play with the fringe on her shawl.

“Would you like dessert?” he asked after their dinner plates were removed. “Or if you want, we can have coffee and whatever back at the house.”

It wasn’t hard to guess which alternative he preferred. It also wasn’t hard to guess that coffee might not be all he wanted to have. She hesitated, then remembered that this was the night she was making herself begin to forget. “Let’s do that.”

They drove back to his house mostly in silence. Rob drove one-handed, holding her hand. He pulled into his driveway and turned off the car. “Well,” he said, smiling at her. “Here we are.”

She returned his smile and took a deep breath. “Here we are.”

He watched her for a brief moment, then reached over with one hand and cupped the back of her head before leaning in to kiss her—not a peck this time, but a full-on, this-means-business kind of kiss. She closed her eyes and let him take her lips, resolutely shutting out all thoughts of another mouth, another man.