A Woman Without Lies (33 page)

Angel said no more. There was no reason to disturb Derry’s assumption that Hawk had left her only long enough to put his business in order. Derry had enough to worry about with moving thousands of miles and learning to walk on his leg again. He didn’t need to add Angel to his list of problems.

Nor was there any reason for Derry to stay with her. Not really. She needed to be alone, but she didn’t think Derry would understand that.

“Do you need any help packing the last of your things?” she asked.

“No. Matt, Dave, and I got it done while you were out berrying yesterday. Hawk told me not to worry about the furniture or anything. Said to leave everything just as it is.”

Emotion seethed through Angel, fighting against the serenity that she had finally imposed over her grief.

It was only yesterday that she and Hawk had been together, feeding berries to one another, laughing, staining their hands and mouths with the bursting summer sweetness of ripe fruit until passion flared and they kissed each other deeply and tasted a wilder, sweeter fruit.

“All I have left here is the suitcase that I’m taking on the plane,” added Derry, “and it’s already packed.”

A horn sounded out front. One of Derry’s friends who was also going to the mainland had come to take him to the ferry. The horn sounded again.

Angel looked at the clock in her studio. She bent down and picked up the small suitcase Derry had set by the door.

“You’d better hurry,” she said.

“Angie—”

Angel turned and walked into Derry’s arms. For a long time they hugged each other.

“I love you, Derry,” Angel said, her eyes bright with tears. “I’ll always be here if you need me.”

“I don’t feel right about leaving you,” Derry muttered, concern showing in his voice. “I know how much you’re missing Hawk.”

Angel looked up and saw Derry’s love for her.

“Get out of here before I cry all over the shirt I just ironed for you,” she said softly, giving him a smile that trembled.

Derry smiled in return. He handed Angel a piece of paper.

“I’ll be at that number by eleven o’ clock tonight. Call me, okay? I’m going to be homesick as hell.”

Derry kissed Angel quickly, grabbed his suitcase, and walked down the hall, limping slightly.

Angel watched him from the window until she could see nothing but her own tears. Then she went down to the beach and walked until darkness came and she could see nothing at all.

She had not known how much she loved Hawk until she felt the pain of his loss. It was like breathing shattered glass, each instant a new lesson in agony.

After dark, Angel paced through the empty house until it was time to call Derry. Then she went to her studio, turned on every light, and began to sketch. As the dark hours melted into dawn she drew and discarded design after design, seeking one that would summarize her pain and love, and in doing so, forge new beauty from the painful shards of the past.

By dawn Angel had found her design.

She worked all day, submerging herself in the demands of her creation. She enlarged the proportions of the sketch until it would fill a panel six feet tall and four feet wide, as wide as the window in her bedroom.

She traced the working drawing onto heavy paper, using a black marker as wide as the lead bead holding the glass would be. Then she pinned the working drawing to the wall and numbered each segment of paper according to the color she had chosen for it.

Choosing the glass consumed many more hours. Every piece had to blend with and enhance the bronze and brown flashed glass Angel had chosen for the major figure. She tried several shades of gold muff glass before she found one that she liked.

Satisfied, she went to her bedroom, propped the muff against the floor-to-ceiling window there, and watched light pour through it. She turned the glass several times.

Suddenly Angel stood absolutely still. The hair on her arms stirred in primal response as she looked into the extraordinary flawed glass . . . and saw the suggestion of a woman’s awakening smile.

Quickly Angel marked out the area to be cut. Though she never cut glass piecemeal, this time she did. She pinned the pattern to the light table and cut out the golden cloud that had first emerged on her sketch pad.

As soon as the cloud was cut, Angel broke another rule and continued working out of sequence. She took a fine brush and filled in the vision she had seen in the glass. The shadow of a smile, the suggestion of eyes slowly opening, a few elegant strokes to evoke hair rippling in the wind, and it was done.

Angel turned on the kiln and went back to choosing glass. She worked for hours until she realized that there was only one choice. Since the accident, she had refused to use clear glass, for to see its shards glittering was to see again wreckage and death.

Yet there was no other backdrop possible for the summation Angel had chosen to set in glass—daggers of beveled crystal glass radiating outward from the focal point of the picture, a hawk’s extended talon as the bird of prey swooped down out of an empty sky.

Hours slipped into days as Angel worked. She ate when the demands of her stomach became too insistent to ignore and slept only when her eyes refused to focus on her work.

She dreaded those times, the night closing around her, her heart as empty as the echoing rooms of the house. She began wearing her silver jewelry all the time, letting the tiny cries of the bells speak for her, filling the silent void.

The hawk itself took several days, for each bronzed highlight was brought out by acid eating into different levels of the brown and bronze flashed glass. Etching was a long, patience-stretching process, but Angel immersed herself in its demands eagerly. When she worked she was totally absorbed, unable to think or feel beyond the instant in which she lived.

Finally she finished the hawk. More than seventy pieces of etched glass lay gleaming on her worktable, each brown feather highlighted in a fabulous network of bronze.

Angel began to assemble the pieces. She took the polished mahogany frame she had chosen to set the glass in and fastened the frame to a large, unusual table. It was rather like a drafting table on wheels, except that it was a table within a frame consisting of two thick, metallic runners with grooves deep enough to hold both the table surface and the frame of whatever Angel was working on at the time.

The table surface itself was rigged so that it could slide out and the frame could be tilted vertically, allowing light to pour through the panel while still holding it securely in place. Angel used the device to build and display stained glass panels that were too large for her to lift easily.

Angel worked steadily, disregarding midnight and noon, breaking only rarely to eat or catch a quick nap on the studio sofa.

And then she stopped sleeping at all, caught wholly in the creation coming together beneath her fingertips, glass polished and gleaming, a suggestion of a smile, a large crimson drop glowing amid the radiant gold, a subtle echo of that drop on the hawk; and all of it surrounded by the hard brilliance of beveled crystal shards.

Finally the last piece was leaded, the cement worked in and then removed, each glass surface polished until it shone.

With a sigh so deep that it made her earrings swing and cry, Angel leaned against the table. She knew that her summation was fin-ished, yet she was unable to accept it. She wasn’t ready to face the emptiness ahead of her, inside her, nothing left but the numb gray of exhaustion.

She pushed the special table into her bedroom. With hands that shook, she removed the plywood panel and fixed the frame in its vertical position, leaving nothing between the stained glass and the night beyond.

The panel was almost colorless, as bleak as Angel’s soul, for there was no light pouring through the stained glass, only darkness.

She looked at the bed that she hadn’t slept in since Hawk left. The small candy cane lay on the pillow, untouched, green ribbon gleaming in the light from the bedside lamp. With a silent cry, she picked up the candy, hearing the rustle of its clear paper wrapping, hearing even more clearly the echo of Hawk’s bleak past, the single sweet thing he had known of childhood.

Despite the exhaustion that made Angel tremble, Angel couldn’t face the thought of lying down, of sleeping, of wakening again.

And again finding Hawk gone.

Angel went back to the studio. For the first time in weeks, she really looked at it.

The room was a shambles. Normally Angel cleaned up as she worked. This time she hadn’t. Shards of glass covered the small worktable, colors she had tried and rejected, pieces she had broken and forgotten.

She walked into the studio, hearing silence and the tiny songs of the bells she wore.

As Angel stood near the worktable that was cluttered with brilliant fragments of glass, she realized that she was dizzy. She reached for the table, trying to brace herself, but it was too late. The table tilted, shaking off Angel, sending her into darkness.

A powerful black car pulled up in front of the Ramsey house. For a long time the driver sat unmoving in the darkness, staring up at the lights in the north wing.

Hawk had fought against coming back, was still fighting against being there. He hated himself for returning to Angel with no more to give her than when he left. Yet he could not stay away.

Life without Angel was as close to death as Hawk had ever come.

Slowly, he opened the car door. The stones of the front walk gleamed palely beneath the waning moon. He moved soundlessly, more shadow than man. He paused, then tried the door.

It was open.

He walked inside and called her.

“Angel?”

Only an echo returned. “Angel!”

The silence was like another shade of night, another kind of death.

Abruptly, Hawk ran down the hall to Angel’s studio. He saw the tilted table, the glitter of shattered glass—Angel unconscious, veiled in brilliant, lethal fragments.

He called her name as he knelt beside her, and the sound of his voice was like glass breaking. His hand trembled over her neck, seeking her pulse. When he found it, he bowed his head to the weakness and relief coursing through him.

Delicately Hawk removed each shard of glass covering Angel. As he picked off the last bronze fragment, he saw that Angel’s hand was clenched around something.

With infinite care he opened her fingers, afraid that he would find a piece of razor glass pressed against her palm. It was not glass that he found, but a candy cane wrapped in a green ribbon.

For the first time since he was a child, Hawk wept.

Angel didn’t awaken when Hawk undressed her and carried her to bed. She didn’t stir when Dr. McKay examined her and then told Hawk in sleepy, irritable tones what Hawk had already guessed. Angel had pushed herself too hard and her body had shut down, hurtling her into a deep, restoring sleep.

Hawk undressed and went to Angel’s bed, gathering her into his arms, giving her his warmth. His clear brown eyes watched her sleeping face through all the hours of night. He watched her as the strong morning sun climbed above the mountains and poured in the bedroom window, flooding the stained glass panel with life and light.

Beveled crystal daggers split sunlight into rainbows. Fantastic colored shadows crept across the room until they spilled over Angel, bathing her in beauty.

Distracted by the dancing light, Hawk looked from the rainbow shadows on Angel’s face to the panel that stood in the midst of radiance.

And then Hawk forgot to move, forgot to breathe, forgot everything but the stained glass so silent and yet so incredibly alive.

A hawk descending from a transparent sky, a single talon outstretched to pierce a golden cloud. Where the talon touched the cloud, a large crimson drop welled, glistening with light.

And there was something more . . . something in the cloud itself.

Compelled by beauty, Hawk came to his feet and approached the panel, drawn by the enigma within the golden cloud. As he walked, he saw first the swirl of evocative lines that transformed part of the cloud into a woman’s hair lifted on the wind.

Next he saw the slightly tilted eyes, a blend of shadow and brightness that shifted from moment to moment, extraordinarily alive. Her enigmatic smile could have come from agony or ecstasy or a beautiful, terrifying combination of both.

Hawk made a muffled sound and leaned closer, staring at the blood-red drop that welled from the point where the hawk’s talon pierced the cloud.

A rose was deeply etched into the crimson teardrop.

For a moment Hawk closed his eyes, afraid to look further. Yet he knew he must. He couldn’t evade the hawk, its coldness and cruelty, the talon ripping into the defenseless golden cloud.

Slowly, he opened his eyes and confronted Angel’s vision of him.

The hawk was magnificent.

Captured at the ultimate moment of its descent from the sky, the bird of prey shimmered with light in every shade of bronze and brown. Power and grace and speed were implicit in each line of the wings and body, the talon reaching down, the topaz eye fixed on its prey.