The Secret of Lions (2 page)

Her father had run off years ago. Barbara
remembered little about him. He was a speck of dust in the
hourglass of her memories.

Suddenly, she stopped painting. She realized
that she was lost in the wasteland of memories. A single tear
escaped her eye. It rolled down her cheek and stopped below her
glossy, red lips. She let it hang there for a moment, existing in
limbo.

She wiped it away.

Her attention returned to her current
project. She looked beyond it to the far wall where one of her
award-winning paintings hung. It was of a sparrow. It was the
painting that had won her admittance to finish her study at the
King’s College School of Art.

“Oh no,” she said, noticing the clock
hanging near the painting. She was supposed to be visiting her
mother. She would have to hurry. The hospital’s visiting hours were
only from 10 a.m. till 6 p.m. It was already 5:35 p.m.

Barbara dropped her paintbrush and leapt out
of her chair. She stopped at the exit of the studio. Her reflection
peered back at her from the mirror next to the doorway. She saw the
paint on her face. She took the sleeve of her sweater and wiped it
off. She rushed out the front door and down the sidewalk.

Barbara made her way to the hospital in a
little over twenty minutes. She stopped outside the front doors and
tried to catch her breath. She could feel her legs and chest
pounding. The exhaling breath was fighting the air that was trying
to come in. Although she was tremendously lean, twenty minutes
across several city blocks during heavy traffic was no easy
feat.

She stood outside the double doors to the
hospital’s lobby for a moment, giving her lungs time to slow to the
normal rhythm of breathing. Once they steadied, she pushed through
the doors.

Barbara walked past an empty receptionist's
desk. She made her way to the stairs. She had climbed these stairs
almost every day for the last year. As she climbed each step, she
felt her calf muscles throb. It was a slight pain, but it was sharp
enough to remind her of when she had taken ballet.

Barbara’s mother had forced her to take
ballet when she was a young girl, another way of making a proper
young woman out of her; although, ballet probably achieved the
opposite. Barbara had always thought of herself as clumsy because
she could never keep up in class. But she never quit. She never
gave up anything her mother convinced her to try. But she was never
that good at it either.

Despite being clumsy and feeling awkward in
her teenage years, Barbara realized that she was a beautiful woman.
Boys flirted with her frequently. The only person who noticed her
beauty more than the boys was her mother. Not having a father
around meant that Barbara's mother had to scare off the teenage
boys. Her mother never approved of any of them for Barbara. And
when Barbara thought back to all the boys she had gone out with,
she was grateful that her mother had never let her settle for any
of them.

Barbara made her way to her mother’s
hospital room. She saw that the light was off. She thought that
maybe her mother had gone to sleep early, so she decided that she
was only going to peek in on her.

Barbara grabbed the handle to the door,
opening it slowly. Inside she saw the bed was neatly made up, but
no one rested in it. Suddenly, a feeling of panic filled her like a
flame engulfs a stream of gasoline. She felt confused.

Must be the wrong room, she thought. She
looked up at the number on the door. It was the right room. It was
the same one that she had visited many times before. Then, she
thought, they moved her.

She walked back to the desk. A short woman
with red hair was now seated behind it. The woman flipped through a
book so fast it appeared that she was frantically trying to find
out what happened next. She wore a nurse’s outfit. Barbara did not
recognize her. She figured that she was new.

“Excuse me,” Barbara said. “Where is Mrs.
Howard?”

“You mean the woman from room 208?”

“Yes,” Barbara answered, panic-stricken.

“Oh dear. Are you kin?” The nurse asked. She
stood up and put down her book.

“I’m her daughter. Where is she?”

“Wait here,” the nurse said. She left for a
long, excruciating moment and then returned with a gray-haired
doctor.

“This is Mrs. Howard’s daughter,” the nurse
said, pointing at Barbara.

“Where is my mother?” Barbara asked. She
nervously tugged at the bottom of her sweater. She could feel her
calf muscles throbbing again. They pounded so badly that they were
almost unendurable. Her throat began to swell up. She felt a hot
sensation clamped to the back of her neck. It was so warm it made
her notice that her fingers and toes were freezing. The saliva in
her mouth watered up and began flowing between the crevices of her
teeth.

“Mrs. Howard,” the doctor began, trying to
maintain a calm voice.

“Where is she? What have you done with her?”
Barbara asked. She could hardly control her balance. She was
waiting for an answer.

“Your mother passed about an hour ago,” the
doctor said. “She’s gone. I’m sorry.”

Barbara stared at a set of scuffed shoe
prints tracking down the corridor. She didn't know what to say or
how to react. Everything changed. Everything.

4

After weeks of thinking about her mother,
Barbara sat alone in her NYU dorm room. Her friends could barely
get a word out of her. Her mind swung from one thought back to
another like a pendulum inside her head. The blade was sharp, but
it never quite connected with any one decision, at least not until
her roommate crashed through the door one day with information that
would stop the swing of the pendulum.

“Barbara, a Professor Charles Blake is on
the phone. He teaches in Great Britain. He says he’s calling from
London,” her roommate said.

Barbara looked up. She knew his name.
Professor Blake was known to the art department at NYU, but he
worked in London. At least, he was known to the seniors. They knew
that he had been advertising a new Graduate Assistantship. Her
entry into the contest had been a paper on WWII paintings that had
survived the war. Charles Blake must have been impressed with it.
Why else would he be calling her personally?

She was a little shocked that he had reached
out to her. Perhaps it was because he was new to King’s College. He
had only been there for a semester. And even though he was already
reputable, he still needed to fill the empty slots in a graduate
program. So perhaps he chose her more out of desperation rather
than on her merits. Either way, she did not care.

Barbara read his scholastic publications.
She knew that he specialized in investigating the mysteries of the
art world. He had written published articles on Michelangelo and
Monet. He was perhaps best known for an article he wrote about Da
Vinci that suggested that Mona Lisa was in fact the artist himself
in drag.

Blake’s article surmised that Da Vinci
actually painted Jesus Christ as the perfect specimen of a man,
because of an insatiable sex addiction that Da Vinci had. In
Blake’s opinion, much of Da Vinci’s obscure inventions were not to
better mankind, but actually for sexual purposes.

The only real thing that mattered about
Charles Blake was that he was a respected scholar, and now he was
on Barbara's house phone, calling to ask her to accept an
assistantship under his tutelage. Of course Barbara would
accept.

5

King’s College Summer of 1949

Out of all the grand architectural designs,
Barbara’s favorite was the Chapel. It stood tall and attracted most
onlookers as the first thing they noticed about King’s College. The
Chapel had four tall towers. The ceiling was high and majestic,
even titanic.

This is what a church should look
like,
Barbara thought.

She walked along the lawn with her
belongings. She didn’t have many possessions anymore. The traveling
stipend the school provided left little money to pay for the trip
to England. Which did not matter since she naturally travelled
light. Although, she did have to sell most of her belongings as
well as her mom’s apartment. Her mother had left her a small
inheritance, but she spent much of it on the funeral and to pay off
her mother’s hospital bills. The little that was left, she put into
a bank account.

Barbara carried one suitcase and one
backpack. The pack was sand-colored with a buckle. She wore a
black, cotton jacket, much like a thick windbreaker.

Barbara’s youthful body and foreign look
made people think that she was a freshman, even though she was in
the graduate program. She held out a map of the campus, hoping to
find her dorm room soon so she could unpack. She was tired and
disoriented. She’d only stepped off a transatlantic ship hours
before. All she wanted to do was unpack and lay her head on a cushy
pillow, one that she would never feel like rising from.

It was the end of the summer semester. The
student body was trickling onto campus, moving into their future
dorms, adjusting their minds away from the adventures of summer and
back to a life buried in studies. Young freshmen scurried around
searching for their dorm rooms. Occasionally, they stopped their
gallivanting in order to try to make new friends or socialize with
old ones.

The boys walked around studying the girls,
which they tremendously outnumbered. Barbara was one of the few
female students. The girls walked around studying other girls to
see who their competition was.

While staring at the campus map, she was
utterly confused about where she was on it. Barbara looked around
and noticed that the one person who seemed as if he belonged leaned
against the Liberal Arts building’s ivied exterior brick wall. She
approached him. At first she thought that he was a student, but as
she neared him, she noticed that he was holding a watering hose.
Realizing that she had caught him lounging instead of working, he
immediately returned to watering a charming garden that occupied
the space between two footpaths.

“Excuse me,” Barbara said. Either he was
ignoring her or he didn’t hear her over the sound of the spraying
water. The fresh-looking garden bloomed as if it were the beginning
of spring and not the nearing of autumn. Bright red roses, vibrant
daisies, and colorful plants mixed into the luscious garden as if
it were a kaleidoscope of plant life.

“Pardon me,” Barbara repeated, loudly. This
time she tapped on his shoulder.

He spun around and looked straight into her
eyes. For a moment, it was as if he was really seeing her and
knowing her without saying a word. Barbara had never experienced a
look like that before. American men did not have the same look. She
wondered if it was something all European men did.

The man standing before her was in his early
twenties. He seemed quiet and withdrawn. He had piercing green eyes
and long, fair hair that was pulled back. Then she noticed that he
wore a pair of gardening gloves and a tattered brown vest with a
pair of handheld shears poking out.

He must work here,
she thought.

“Yes, sorry to bother you. I’m looking for
my dorm. It’s right here on the map,” she said, pointing at the
building on the map.

Then she said, “Harrison Building.”

He never looked down, never broke eye
contact with her. His piercing, emerald eyes gazed into hers. Then
she asked, “Harrison Building?” It was a brief question—two
words.

After a brief, but noticeable moment, he
raised his gloved hand and pointed in the direction of the building
that she sought.

She looked at it. The building had a couple
of construction workers standing on a scaffolding on the outside of
the upper floors. There were a couple of others doing work on the
bottom. She saw hammers, nails, and various other tools. It looked
like they were renovating.

“Thank you,” she said.

The young man returned to watering the
garden. In a brief moment, Barbara’s eyes glimpsed that his
watering can was completely covered in stenciled sketches of
animals. The work was faint, yet dark. Before she could get a
deeper appreciation of the drawings, the man shifted in such a way
that the sunlight flooded her vision. Instantly, she squinted and
readjusted her stance so that she could see him.

“Excuse me, again. I’m sorry,” she said. He
looked back at her. She held out her hand as if to shake his. “My
name is Barbara Howard. Are you a student as well as the
gardener?”

At first, the young gardener didn’t
acknowledge her hand. Finally, he looked at it and then he rudely
returned to watering the plants.

“Okay,” she said. Confused, she lowered her
hand. As she began to distance herself from him, she heard him
clear his throat as if it had remained unused for ages, like a
deep, boarded-up well that was only now being uncovered.

“Evan,” he said. “I’m the groundskeeper.”
That was all he said, his focus unaltered from watering the garden.
His watering can remained steady.

“Nice to meet you, Evan,” Barbara said.

She smiled and returned to her quest to find
her building. She grabbed her suitcase and headed in the direction
that Evan had pointed out. As she got farther from him, she decided
to take a look back and see if he was still watching her. She
turned right before she entered her dorm building’s main foyer.

Evan was no longer standing by the garden.
He had vanished. She searched the clusters of girls moving into the
dorms but found nothing. She turned her gaze to a crowd of
students, all heading in different directions, but she couldn’t
find him anywhere.

Evan,
she thought.
Hope I see you
again.
Normally, Barbara was not so aggressive, but it’d been a
long time since she’d felt attracted to someone so much. She
wondered if Evan would let her paint him. He was striking. The gaze
from his eyes arrested her to the core. He was tall, with a lean
and muscular body. Barbara was enamored.