Page 60 of Between Two Strangers

Finally, I drop the glue stick on the table, ready to call it quits for now, but then catch myself. As frayed around the edges as I feel, there’s one more thing I need to add. From a small pad of paper, I tear off a sheet and scrawl the wordowedon it with black marker. I swipe the glue stick along the back of the paper and press it onto the collage, right next to the photo of myself.

This is what I need to focus on now, isn’t it? If Christopher Whaley thought he was in my debt, I need to know why.

29

Now

LATE SATURDAY AFTERNOON, I GET A TEXT FROM AN ART DIRECTORI regularly work with, pleading for me to take on an eleventh-hour job due Monday. I say yes. Not only is the money good, but it will keep my mind off Jane Whaley. I need to stop dwelling on her, wondering what her barracuda-like lawyers are up to or what act of intimidation she might be planning now that she knows I’m not waving a white flag of surrender. I end up working like a maniac most of the day Sunday, dressed in flannel pajamas and with Tuna curled on my lap.

I’ve told myself I need to keep my head clear by avoiding the collage until after the opening, but the table in my tiny living room is only three feet from my desk so it’s hard to do. I eat dinner Sunday night on the couch and later, as I’m returning from the kitchen with a mug of herbal tea, I end up wandering to the table, where my gaze is drawn immediately to the last word I pasted there:owed. Why in the world did C.J. think he owed me?

I drop onto one of the two rickety dining chairs. Most of what I learned about him came from our rounds of Two Truths and a Lie.He’d been fun to play with, I recall, clever with the statements he made, so that differentiating fact from fiction wasn’t easy for me. When I’d played the game with new college friends, the fabrications they cooked up were often either ridiculously far-fetched, likeI grew up on an island, or boring, likeI hate milk in my cereal, but C.J.’s lies were intriguing and plausible enough to be true. In one round, he told me that he’d broken off an engagement with a college sweetheart and had regretted it for years—a lie.

As I’m standing by the table with my mug in hand, I suddenly remember another one. He told me he’d taken the LSAT—the law school admission test—for a friend who’d been ill and hadn’t been able to study. I’d immediately guessed that one as a lie because he seemed like someone with a stronger code of ethics—ironic, I know, since he was cheating.

But what if hehadbeen the kind of guy to take the test for someone else? What if some or all of the “lies” he’d told me were actually true? Maybe he was voicing transgressions so that he could finally get them off his chest while simultaneously seeing what type of reaction they prompted. And then later, he might have wondered if I’d guessed what he was up to.

This could be why he thought he’d owed me, because I’d never done anything with the lies that might have really been truths. But how could I begin to know what was actually true and what wasn’t, without him being here to tell me?

ON MONDAY MORNING I FINISH UP MY FREELANCE DESIGN PROJECT,shoot it off to the art director, and spend the next hour speed walking around Tompkins Square Park because the only recent cardio I’ve had is the spikes in my heart rate from anxiety. After returning to the apartment with a take-out salad, I eat at my desk and then buckle down to prepare for the opening. First, I try on the new sweater and skirt I bought with my brown unconstructed blazer andshort brown boots I’m planning to wear with them. Once everything is on, I examine the results in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. To my horror I discover I look like a greeter in a college admissions office, not an emerging downtown artist.

Maybe accessories will help, I think, and I spend fifteen minutes picking through my Ziploc bag of costume jewelry and trying on the five pairs of dangly earrings I own. None are perfect, but the ones with the fake amber stones at least go with the outfit and make it seem a tiny bit hipper. Next, I tidy up my boots, using one of those little kits that comes with polish, a brush, and piece of white buffing cloth and lets you pretend you shine shoes for a living. Finally, I wash out a pair of dark brown tights from the back of my drawer, which I’m relieved to see are free of runs.

I’d thought that getting my outfit together would give me a sense of control, but by the time I swing the wet tights over the shower rod, my panic is mushrooming. In college, I’d dreamed of having a gallery show in New York, where people would gaze at my work on the walls and then some of them would buy it fortheirwalls. But now that it’s upon me, I’m terrified, and not just because of the party tomorrow night. What if none of my collages ends up selling?

Like many galleries, Josh explained to me once, his no longer signals that a piece of art has been sold by sticking a red dot beneath or to the side of it on the wall. So if no one purchases a collage, I’ll be spared public humiliation during the reception, at least. But still,I’llknow at the end of the night if nothing sold, as Josh will, too, of course. And though my mother will be in the dark initially, she’ll probably find a way to worm the information out of me at some point.

In an attempt to assuage my unease, I curl up with Tuna and watch a couple of hours of TV, but it doesn’t help much. Before changing for bed, I rifle through the back of my medicine chestfor the plastic container of clonazepam that my last therapist prescribed me for social gatherings. There are a few pills left, which thankfully means I’ll have enough for tomorrow, but I also take one before crawling into bed. Still, it takes me forever to fall asleep, and it doesn’t help that Tuna, perhaps sensing my disquiet, jumps on and off the mattress repeatedly.

I WAKE THE NEXT DAY RAGGED FROM LACK OF SLEEP AND WITH MYnerves on fire.

Staggering out of bed, I decide to drink tea instead of my usual morning coffee and eat only dry toast for breakfast. I feel vaguely like a hospital patient recovering from an appendectomy or an exploded gallbladder, but I get it down.

After dressing in jeans and a black turtleneck—I’m saving my opening outfit for later—I lock up the apartment to head off for my preview of the exhibit. As I step outside onto the stoop of my building, a guy jumps out of a delivery van that’s double-parked right in front of me. He’s carrying some kind of floral arrangement wrapped in paper, with colorful flower heads poking out at the top. He peers at the number on the building and bolts up the steps.

“Morning,” he says distractedly and moves past me.

Are they for Mikoto? I wonder. She seems like the type of woman people send flowers to. I turn and watch as the delivery guy scans the buzzers, and then to my surprise, I see him press the one next to my name.

“Wait,” I ask. “You’re looking for Skyler Moore? That’s me.”

“Yup, Skyler Moore,” he says, looking back at me. “You got ID with you?”

I fish through my messenger bag for my wallet and then flash my driver’s license at him.

After I scrawl my signature on his device, he passes me the bouquet and scurries back down the steps. I tear off half the paper,and though the flowers are even lovelier than I realized—a fall-color-themed mix of mums, roses, and sunflowers in an antiqued black ceramic vase—it’s the name on the card I’m interested in. Who could possibly be sending me a bouquet?

Congratulations, Sky! We are so excited for you. Love, Mom, David, Nicky and Matt.

My eyes prick with tears. The last time my mother sent me flowers was when I was bedridden with bronchitis my first semester in grad school. I’ve been thinking that tonight could be a turning point of sorts with her, that she’ll be impressed with the art I’ve done and begin to view me in a fresh light, as someone capable of success. The flowers seem to be proof that I’m right.

I make a quick dash back to my apartment, where I set the vase of flowers on the kitchen counter, and then return to the street. I’m running a little behind now, but I stick to my plan to walk to the gallery because I need to try to burn off at least some of my jitters. I make reasonably good time, but the sidewalks on the Lower East Side are clogged with pedestrians and I have to hustle for the last few blocks. I reach the gallery at exactly eleven and, glancing through the window, I spot Nell at the desk. I try the door, and when it opens, I step inside the gallery’s front room.

“Ah, right on time,” she says.

She calls out Josh’s name and he yells, “Be right out,” from the back. As I wait for him to appear, I run my gaze over the stunning black-and-white photographs that line the walls in the front room. It’s not hard to picture every one of them selling tonight.

A minute later, Josh strides into the front room.

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