Page 87 of All These Beautiful Strangers
I balanced my feet on his dashboard. It was midafternoon now and we were headed back to Greyson’s house. We stopped at a red light and I glanced out the window. There was a homeless man sitting on the bench near the bus stop. Uncover the Facts. Discreet and Confidential, the sign behind him read.
As the light in front of us turned green and we started to move, the man shifted in his seat and lay down on the bench. When he moved, I saw the whole bench ad. Under the title Hindsberg & Thornton Investigations, there was a shot of two men in suits, from their shoulders up. They looked straight on and smiled confidently. A shock of recognition ran through me.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Stop the car.”
Greyson ground his Corolla to a halt in the middle of the intersection. I jerked forward in my seat. The driver in the car behind us laid on his horn.
“What?” Greyson asked. “Charlie, what is it?”
The man on the right in the bench ad was older than when I had last seen him. His hair had receded at the temples, and he had gained some weight in his face. But it was him. I was sure it was him.
“Look,” I said, pointing at the bench. Greyson’s gaze followed the direction in which my finger was pointing. “It’s him,” I said. “The man in Uncle Hank’s photographs. The guy in the diner with my mother. That’s him.”
Twenty-Two
Alistair Calloway
Summer 1997
The Hillsborough art gallery was in an old brick building off Main. Inside, it was crowded. I squinted at the bright recessed lighting that reflected off the white walls and concrete floors, scanning the room for the only familiar face I could expect to see there, but Grace was nowhere in sight.
I’d received the flyer about the gallery show for local artists in the mail a week ago. Grace’s return address was on the envelope. She had scribbled a short note on the flyer: “Alistair—In case you’re interested . . .” I’d put the note in my top desk drawer, out of sight. I wasn’t interested. Well, I shouldn’t have been interested. But this morning, I’d taken the flyer out again. Before I could think better of it, I’d thrown on a button-down shirt and called down to the valet to pull around my car.
I meandered idly around the perimeter of the gallery by myself, looking at all the artwork in different media that hung on the walls—photographs, oil paintings, drawings. I spotted her finally. Grace was standing across the room by the hors d’oeuvres table, talking to a group of people I didn’t know. The man next to her placed a hand casually on her back and Grace went on talking like it was the most natural thing in the world for this guy to be touching her. Something tightened in my chest.
I shouldn’t have come. It had been an idiotic, impulsive decision, made all the more asinine by the fact that I should have been working. We’d fired our lead design consultant for the Murray Hill project, and I should have spent the afternoon going through the résumés HR had sent over for his replacement. I glanced at my watch. Without traffic, I could be back in the city in an hour and a half. I was contemplating where I might stop off for a bite to eat, when I looked up and saw it—Jake’s eternally youthful face staring right at me.
It was an abstract oil painting on canvas. The bright colors on his features were startling—yellow, orange, blue. Such vibrant, happy hues, and yet something about his gaze was somber. The paint was thick and textured on the canvas, spread by a palette knife, making each angle of his face, his sadness, palpable.
“You came.”
I looked over to see Grace standing next to me. She smiled and held out a glass of white wine.
“I got your note,” I said, taking the glass.
Grace nodded. “I never got to thank you for, you know,” Grace said.
I cleared my throat and looked away. I hadn’t seen or talked to Grace since Teddy’s graduation ceremony. That image of Grace as I reached out to steady her in the corridor between buildings, her eyes slightly teary, her ankle twisted, as she babbled on about Teddy and his stupid game, still haunted me. “Teddy’s an idiot,” I said.
“Yeah,” Grace said, nodding. “It just took me a while to figure that out.”
She turned and gestured at the canvases on the wall.
“So, what do you think?” she asked, changing the subject.
I glanced back at the wall. I had only noticed the canvas of Jake at first, but now I realized there was a series of abstract portraits—a middle-aged woman who looked vaguely like Grace (Grace’s mother perhaps?) standing at a kitchen sink; a long-limbed teenage boy skateboarding; a young blond woman on a beach, her shoulders sunburned. Each portrait was in the same bright colors as Jake’s, with the same texture, but they seemed lighter somehow, happier.
“They’re really something,” I said.
“You know, I looked back through all these pictures I had of him, trying to find the right one to paint,” Grace said. “I picked my favorite memories—Jake out on the lake in the summer, Jake at the boardwalk, Jake hanging out on my porch. And somehow, they all came out looking like that—no matter how bright the colors I used, somehow the mood stained it. It’s not how he was, but it’s how I remember him now.”
We were silent for a moment. We both looked at each other. Over Grace’s shoulder, I saw the man she had been talking with earlier looking at us. Something in his stare seemed territorial and not exactly welcoming. He nudged the guy he was talking to and nodded in our direction, like he was asking who I was. I returned my attention to Grace.
“I don’t want to take you away from your friends,” I said.
“You’re not,” Grace said.
“Well, I think your boyfriend isn’t too keen on you talking to me.”
