The sounds of the restaurant disappeared as she caught the dull anger in the broken veins across his nose, the aggression in his down-turned mouth, the heavy sadness of his hanging jowls.
He was avoiding home. Using work as an excuse to stay as far away as he could from the grandson he and his wife were raising. The child was violent, hyperactive, with learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder. His wife was exhausted, desperate, at her wit’s end. So angry at him for abandoning her to deal with it all alone. Again.
He fled that situation every day, just as he’d fled similar problems with the boy’s mother, his promiscuous, drugaddled daughter. He felt like shit about it, but he could not change. He didn’t have the strength.
Oh, God, how sad, how awful. Edie dragged her eyes away from the unlucky guy and stared out at the lights on the street, trying to get the taste of the man’s guilt and sour self-loathing out of her mind.
When she went into that place in her mind, she started picking up stuff from the airwaves. Whatever people were projecting. And there was no shutting it out. Not if she tried.
She looked around, for someone else to tune in to. Someone more upbeat, more hopeful. Like that cute couple across the aisle from her.
Yes, they looked promising. He was handsome, in a stiff, prosperous looking way. She looked sweet. Edie sketched her, smearing ink with her finger, trying to catch that glow, the shadows and curves, that unfocused, blurred look of shifting possibilities…oh, God.
Pregnant. That girl was pregnant. Just a few weeks along. It was still secret. Her dinner partner didn’t know. She was planning on telling him. Tonight. Nervous about it. Smiling until her mouth ached from it, but her guy was not responding to her smile. He looked preoccupied.
Edie drew the stern line of his Roman nose, his sealed, thin-lipped mouth. His eyes, deep-set, sharp, pinched looking. Energy was gathering inside him. A storm brewing. He intended to hold forth, say his piece, present some watertight argument. He would bolster himself with arrogance, condescension. He thought only of himself; his freedom, his future, his own best interests. They filled his mind so completely, he didn’t even really see the girl. How beautiful she was. How hopeful. The cliff she was poised upon. He was bored by her puppyish clinging. He felt suffocated. He was wondering if he could do better. Snag someone sexier, more interesting, more educated. Smarter. Richer.
He was about to to tell his girlfriend that he thought they should be seeing other people. Edie’s pen faltered, digging a hole in the paper.
Maybe she was projecting. Casting this guy as another Eric. An ex who had worn a similar hateful look on his face when he’d dropped that same bombshell on her. But probably not. She was never wrong in these things. Not even when she desperately wished that she were.
Ouch. She capped her pen, laid down the sketchbook. Threaded ink-stained fingers together. Studied her wineglass. She should stick to horse skulls, stuffed birds. Drawing real people was too dangerous.
So she defaulted to the next best thing. Fictional characters. She could draw them, have intense insights into their heads, and call it creativity, rather than delusional craziness. Or obscene invasion of personal privacy, depending on your mood.
She didn’t mean to do this, to anyone. She didn’t want to. It was just something that happened to her, since she was fourteen. Since the Haven, and Dr. Osterman’s cognitive enhancement techniques.
She’d been enhanced, all right. Practically into the mental ward.
But dwelling on that was not useful. She did some quick sketches of Fade Shadowseeker, the main character of her graphic novel, trying to catch the right pose for the part where Fade was holding the knife to the throat of the sex-trafficker villain of the fifth Fade Shadowseeker book. Demanding to know where the girls were, because his lover Mahlia was being held among them. His face was a taut mask of fear.
Drawing Fade made her think of the argument she’d had with Jamal that afternoon, while the kid was systematically inhaling everything in her fridge. Jamal was her eight-year-old upstairs neighbor and her very good buddy. He came down and slept on Edie’s couch when his mother was entertaining her clients in their two room-apartment, on the floor above Edie’s. Which was quite often.
The argument had come about because Jamal had been having problems separating fantasy and reality. Jamal was insisting that Fade Shadowseeker was real, and walking the streets of their neighborhood. Jamal claimed to know people who had seen Fade with their own eyes, people who’d been saved by him. Jamal knew of places to which Fade had given big wads of money that he’d taken from bad guys, after beating the shit out of them, of course. He had shown his Fade books to people who had seen this guy. They said yeah, it was him. He totally existed.
Jesus, what had she done? It gave her a wobble in her stomach. She was the one who had created Fade and put him into Jamal’s mind, so Jamal’s problem was partly of her own making. And it made her heart hurt, how intense Jamal’s need for escape must be. It wasn’t right. Reality should not have to be so bleak that the kid had to escape from it at all costs. But it felt hypocritical to scold him about it. After all, escape into fiction was one of her coping mechanisms, too. And it was a better one than most. Better than drugs, for sure.
It scared her, though, when Jamal’s fantasies strayed into the realm of actual delusion. Jamal’s mom was too busy with her clients and her own drug addiction to be bothered with the problem, so Edie wondered uneasily if she herself should track down Jamal’s social worker, or school psychologist. Someone ought to know. But who?
She spotted her father coming through the doors. The host pointed Charles Parrish her way. She popped up, waving. Smiling.
Her father jerked his chin, waving her down. His disapproving smile said, sit, Edith. Try not to make a spectacle of yourself.
She sank back down, trying to be decorous. Ever since she learned to talk, she’d been trying. Though come to think of it, when she’d learned to talk was more or less when the trouble began.
She shook away that unworthy thought as he walked toward her. Her cheeks ached with tension. They were both making an effort, and that was positive, right? Being defeatist or sulky would not help her get to see Ronnie. She was going to keep it together. Oh, so good, oh, so mellow, oh, so very normal and natural. No need for meds.
She got up when he reached the table, and they did the stiff, awkward kiss and half-body embrace. Always timing it wrong, jostling the eyeglasses, bumping chins, going for the wrong cheek and hitting a jawbone, or kissing an ear. Nervous, muttered apologies.
Finally, they were safely seated on opposite sides of the table. Searching for an entry point in the seamless marble wall between them.
Charles Parrish’s eyes fell on the pile of sketchbooks on the table, the pens scattered on the smudged tablecloth. Her blackened fingertips. She suppressed an urge to gather them up, mumbling apologies. She stopped herself. She was twenty-nine, a woman, a successful, well-known professional artist. Not a naughty child caught misbehaving.
The waiter arriving to bring water and take their order was a welcome distraction for a couple of minutes, but soon they were left alone, staring at each other. At a loss.
Her father made an unfriendly gesture with his hand toward the sketchbooks. “Hard at work?”
“As always. It’s going well.” She waited for him to ask for more details. In vain.
“Is it?” he murmured vaguely. “Is that so.”
The dismissal in his voice killed the urge to pull out the sheaf of reviews she’d printed up for him, for her latest graphic novel. They said things like “ground breaking,” “genre defining.” They referred to her, awkward, shy Edie Parrish, as “one of the freshest new voices of a disillusioned but stubbornly hopeful generation.” They used phrases like “immensely powerful,” and