“I know!”
“Oh, honey,” she said. “I do, too. ‘I have found the key to my courage locker,’” she said. He recognized it as a saying from The Artist’s Path, and he had to admit it was true. This painting was courageous-it seemed to shout at him across the room.
“Now I know why you’re so happy,” he said. And she squeezed him tightly and pressed her head against his chest as if trying to smother a scream or stop herself from bursting into tears.
“It’s back,” she whispered. “I am recovered.”
“I’m so proud of you, Mom,” he said, drinking in her excitement.
Then she pushed him away again, though she held on to his hands tightly. Unconsciously, he rubbed his thumb along the scar on her left hand. Then he stopped himself, lest it set her off. But she seemed happily oblivious of her painful past. She gazed at the painting, the way he’d seen people in movies gaze through the window at a baby in a maternity room. Then she looked up into his eyes. “There’s more where that comes from,” she said confidently. “I mean it.”
“That’s good news,” he said.
She turned around to give the painting her complete attention. “We’ll be rich again,” she said, and laughed because they had never been rich, but they had once been happy, for a while.
“I know it,” he said.
“There’s just one thing,” she said.
He could hear the hesitation in her voice. He braced himself.
“I’m going to need more paint and more canvas,” she said hurriedly. “A lot more paint, a lot more canvas.”
He didn’t speak for a moment. Hardly breathed. She felt the change in him. She turned. “It will be worth it,” she said.
“I know.”
“I’ve made a list,” she said. “I phoned the supply place in Ottawa.”
“Good,” he said, not wanting to lose her.
“Five hundred dollars ought to cover everything,” she said. “For now.” She held his eyes for a moment longer, then her gaze skittered away.
“Okay,” he said quickly, not wanting to let her down. “I’ll handle it.”
“Of course you will,” she said. Now she looked up at him again, and her eyes went all coquettish, the way she’d get with Waylin when she wanted something from him. She rubbed Cramer’s upper arms, squeezing his biceps. “God, when did you ever get to be so strong?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. His mind was reeling. Five hundred bucks, he thought. Where would he ever get five hundred bucks? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he would.
“You can count on me,” he said.
Her smile softened. She shook her head in amazement and respect. “Whoever that girl is I smell on you, she is one lucky lady.”
He didn’t bother to argue with her. Kind of liked the idea that there could be a girl-a lucky girl-who was his alone.
CHAPTER TEN
Jay sat in bed listening to Gabriel Zouave’s Sang-Froid on his iPod, reading the score along with the music. The oversize manuscript was propped against his knees. He had seen the premiere, heard Zouave talk about it. Jay dreamed of writing something this good-this big. But right now all he wanted was for the music to take him away. He did not want his mind to wander. Did not want to think of Mimi down the hall.
There was a knock on his door. He paused the iPod, instantly felt a panic attack coming on. He waited. The knock came again, softly. He glanced at his alarm clock: 11:45. It would be her. She’d want to talk about what happened. About the video footage: her own image on her own camera captured by an unknown watcher. His unknown watcher. Had to be. It seemed fatherhood wasn’t the only thing he and Mimi shared.
He wasn’t sure he could face this right now. But it surprised him, bothered him that only half an hour after saying good night, how much he wanted to see her again.
“Jay?”
He let out his breath. It was only Mom. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved.
“Enter.”
The door opened and there was his kind mother in her terry-cloth robe and sheepskin slippers.
“Am I disturbing you?” she said. He had to laugh.
She gently closed the door behind her, crossed the room, and sat on his bed. She patted his foot, under the comforter.
“That a good read?” she asked.
“Yeah, a real thriller,” he said. He held up the score so she could see the cover. She took it, looked at the open spread, and shook her head. “I can’t imagine how you do it,” she said.
He shrugged. “I can’t imagine how you take out somebody’s tonsils.”
“Tonsils are a piece of cake. But reading all these parts. And you actually hear it in your head, don’t you?”
Jay pointed to his earphones.
“I know, but you do read scores. I’ve seen you.”
Jay placed his iPod on the bedside table. “Zouave told me the only time music was ever perfect for him was when he read it. No one’s flat; no one plays too loud. Perfect balance. Perfect harmony.”
His mother nodded in an abstract way, as if perfect harmony was something she didn’t see a lot of at the clinic. She handed him back the score. There was a shift in the expression on her face. He closed the score and dropped it to the floor beside his bed.
“Pretty weird night, huh?” he said.
Lou nodded. “You might say.” She brought her hands together in her lap. “I thought I should tell you I phoned Marc.”
Jay wasn’t sure what he had been expecting her to say-something about Mimi, no doubt. “Really?” She nodded. “You know how to reach him?”
She nodded but with her chin pulled in as if this wasn’t quite the response she had expected. “He’s at the same number I reached him at when you wanted to use the house on the snye for band practice, back in high school. He still pays property taxes on the place, which means he’s on the township roll. Jo found his address and phone number easily enough.”
Jay thought about the balding man in the shades. He imagined him in the same cafe, as if that was where he lived, with a glass of wine in one hand and a phone in the other, talking to Lou.
“What’d he say?”
Lou folded her bathrobe over her knee. “Well, he was a bit surprised.”
“That makes a whole bunch of us.”
“He remembered that he had given you permission to use the house but that it was a long time ago. Seven years, I told him. He also knew you’d gone out west to school.”
“How’d he know that?”
“I wrote him,” said Lou.
“Jesus! So you two are like buddy-buddy and I don’t even know about it?”
“What do you think, Jay?”
That was the sixty-four-million-dollar question. What was he supposed to think? “My father suddenly crash- lands right in the middle of my life via this pretty much grown-up daughter-aka my half-sister-and now I find out my mother is all palsy with the guy.”
“Nonsense,” she said.
“Mom!”
