Page 86 of Just One Look
Steel and Sand Dollars
She gotthrough the drive somehow. She was so cold. So very cold. They’d be home soon, though. She’d be home, and she could get warm.
When they were driving up the hill to Ponsonby, though, he said, “I think you should come to my place.”
“I don’t …” Her teeth were chattering, and all of her was still trembling. “I’m … I’ll be fine.”
“Yeh? Got a couch there, have you? Somebody to hold you? Something to eat? Bottle of wine?”
“Well, no..But I have … I have Webster. What if he’s s-scared of s-storms?”
He said, “Want me to get him? Would that help?”
She wanted to lay her head against the window and cry. This was too much. All of it. “I want …” She had to take a breath. “Yes.”
“Done.” He was swinging into the turn on the word, then pulling up to her house. “Key?”
She reached for it in her purse, but her hands were still shaking, and finally, she just handed the purse over. He extracted the key, and five minutes later, he was back with Webster, loading the big dog into the back seat, where he panted happily, wagged his gigantic brush of a tail like there’d be a prize for it, lunged halfway into the front seat, sniffed at her cheek, and breathed Dog Breath on her face.
“I should grab some clothes,” she said, as Luka levered himself back into the front seat again, soaked once more. She was so embarrassed, she wanted to shrivel up and die, but she was also so tired that she couldn’t manage to do anything about it.
“Nah,” he said. “Borrow mine. Easier. Big clothes are more comfortable.”
She wanted to make a joke, to make this less raw, but she couldn’t. She still had a hand buried in Webster’s fur, and the tears were right there behind her eyes.
A few minutes more, and he was pushing the button to open the door on that blank brick wall and pulling the car inside, and when he said, “Hang on,” and came around to get her, she let him do it. It didn’t feel like a choice.
Up some stairs, through a door, and through the main body of the house, Webster’s toenails clicking a bit on the polished wood floor. Into a bedroom at the far end, then a bathroom, and Luka was going away, coming back with a handful of soft clothes, and saying, “No bath here, just a shower, but I reckon it’ll do. Stay in until you’re warm.”
It was odd, that shower. She was always so resolutely in the now, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t pull her mind back. It was almost an out-of-body experience, like her brain was floating free, watching her lean against the wall with the warm water streaming over her the same way that other, frigid downpour had done. She was in the water again, her legs were too weak to hold her up, and she could barely lift an arm. The water was comforting, and it was frightening.
Outside the shower, Webster curled up on a ridiculously too-small rectangle of bathmat and watched her, and she shivered and shook and tried to think and couldn’t. She tried to cry, and couldn’t do that, either. Some things were buried too deep for tears. Some things were all the way closed over.
Finally, though, she got out. She had to. You couldn’t stay in a shower forever. She dried off, finger-combed her damp hair as best she could, pulled on the fleece sweatpants, the T-shirt and hoodie and socks, didn’t look at herself in the steamy mirror, took a breath, opened the bathroom door, and took in the bedroom for the first time.
Mellow, weathered brick that looked a hundred years old, and wood. A brick wall behind the king-sized bed, minimalist furniture in pale wood, a skylight, and no windows. The room was a cave, but such a cozy one. Painted white, it was decorated only with seven framed photos of objects, each image surrounded by an off-white mat, placed in an identical black frame, and hung as precisely as in any gallery. Three big pictures on one wall and three on the opposite one, straight across, and one over the bed.
They were shells, shot in extreme closeup. The beaded geometric perfection of a sand dollar. The pale-pink swirls of a cone-shaped something-or-other, its raised whorls descending down the cone like a spiral staircase. The flared ridges and bands of a scallop, the bands of color varying from gray to cream to soft orange. And over the bed, the vibrant turquoise and green and purple of abalone, streaming across the frame in wavy bands and ridges like an otherworldly sunset. The patterns were dreamy, almost meditative, inviting your eye to follow them, and to linger.
Not what she’d have expected, shells. Not at all. She spent some time studying them, maybe because she didn’t want to go out there. She wanted to climb into the big bed, with its cozy-looking cream duvet and pillows, its pinstriped blue sheets. She wanted to curl up, close her eyes, and let the monster that had been stirred up go back to sleep again along with her.
She couldn’t do that, though, and she couldn’t put this off any longer, so she headed out there with Webster so close at her side, she could put her hand down and touch his broad head. Through double doors made of the same reddish wood as the floors, inlaid with rectangular panels of glass. Out past a door leading to a little study and into the main part of the house, which was more brick and wood, with black metal trusses supporting the high ceiling and windows framed in the same black metal that ran the entire length of the house. The rain was still coming down, but the Sky Tower was right there, lit up bright in the deepening gloom.
Luka was in the kitchen, which was done in gray, white, and stainless steel. She could see that, because the whole place was one big room.
She was going to have to face him. She was going to have to explain.
She didn’t want to explain.
* * *
He sensedthem more than he heard them, because he turned for some reason he couldn’t identify, and there they were, Webster escorting Elizabeth to him like she was the queen of the night. Of course, the dog lost his dignity pretty quickly, because as soon as he made eye contact, he was bounding forward, his tail turning happy circles. Fortunately, Elizabeth laughed.
He said, “Sit,” and grabbed the big animal’s muzzle, and he did it. His backside slid away on the slippery floor, and then he was lying down, which meant that Luka could finally get a good look at Elizabeth.
She didn’t look like a surgeon now. She looked exhausted, her face white, dark smudges under her eyes, her wet hair hanging dark around her face. How could she have gone from the woman who’d challenged and laughed and raged at him to this, in barely an hour? He’d have said she had nearly inexhaustible energy. If she did, she didn’t have it now.
She still had that upright posture, though. She might lose it at some point, but it would take more than this.
