“Mrs. Xavier, may I introduce Mr. Erik Lehnsherr, chair of Fine Arts of West Point College.” Marie got the words out in polite tones.
“Mr. Lehnsherr. How nice of you to visit.” Amelia extended a thin hand, which looked as if it had been covered in wrinkled parchment paper.
“Enchanted to meet you.” Erik lifted it to his lips. “Our dear Marie has spoken nonstop of you around the department.”
What a whopper. She’d done nothing of the sort.
Miss Amelia assessed him instantly and lowered her sparse lashes over a coy smile. “Has she?”
“Yes, indeed. You’ve been so helpful with the research for her book.”
True. Okay, he was one for one now.
“She’s a lovely person. How could I not help?”
Amelia Xavier’s skin might be as pale as the hospital sheets, but her personality made up for it. Marie repressed a chuckle when she saw that the cheesy mallard print of two days ago now had a caricature taped over it. It was rapidly drawn on computer paper, and depicted a doctor hanging from a noose. The noose was formed by his stethoscope, and he hung from a peg on the door of his office. A patient looked at him with revenge in her eye, and the caption read, “say ‘ah’.”
Amelia had also had someone supply her with a portable CD system, which was playing big band tunes from the forties. She lay propped against at least five pillows, and in her lap was a large basket with knitting spilling out of it.
As she and Erik exchanged small talk, Marie eyed the basket with curiosity. In the eight months she’d known Amelia, she’d never once seen her knit. Come to think of it, she hadn’t once seen even an afghan lying over a sofa in her home, and the multicolored sweater she was so fond of had been made for her as a gift by a friend.
“Your late husband’s work is marvelous, both as a monument to American painting itself and as an inspiration to the young artists and students of art history today…”
Erik wound up for his preliminary pitch. Miss Amelia’s face reflected serenity as she placed her hands on her knitting. She took the long needles into her right hand and twiddled them like a pair of chopsticks, while her left hand dug under the wool.
Marie had never seen a true knitter handle the needles like that. Something was just a little off here.
“…his skill with not only the brush, but the palette knife…” Erik droned, and then said a hasty “Excuse me!” before he let out a bellow of a sneeze.
“Bless you, dear,” exclaimed Amelia. And then her basket sprouted a couple of whiskers.
Marie covered her mouth with her hand and tried to repress the sudden shake of her shoulders. The old lady shot her a glance positively dewy with innocence.
Erik scrubbed rather violently at his nose. “As I said, these paintings are quite a legacy---“ Haaah—Choo! “---to American painting---“ HaChoo…
Marie squashed her laughter, but then Amelia’s knitting basket sprouted the tip of a tail, and she had to fake a coughing fit.
How had the old lady managed to smuggle her cat into the hospital? The nurses would have a coronary if they found out. Not that Marie would tell. First of all, she understood the need for Amelia to see her pet. And second, Erik richly deserved to be punished this way.
His adenoids obviously inflamed, he forged on in his quest for the collection, doing his dishonorable best to be subtle.”Bissus Ezavor, have you thought about the future of the paintings?”
Cat dander notwithstanding, she was going to make him sweat. “Why, what do you mean, Mr. Lehnsherr?”
“Ahh—choo. Beg pardon. We all know that saying about art imitating life. That is very true. And for the most part, it’s a poor second. Yet art does have one advantage over fleeting existence…”
“And that would be--?” Miss Amelia continued to play dumb. She simply cocked her head and looked at him askance.
“Its permanence. Its ability to commudicate to later generations the transient dature of a moment, caught in tibe.”
“I see. You mean that my late husband’s paintings aren’t subject to mortality, as I am. That they can’t be eaten up by… shall we just say it? Cancer. As I am.” Amelia smiled gently, but her eyes had turned flat, like a shark’s. “And I imagine you have some sort of eloquent recommendation to make concerning my husband’s work. Out with it, then.”
Marie almost felt sorry for Erik, who’d turned the exact shade of the petunias in her window box.
“I merely thought that you might wish to consider----“ he interrupted himself with another violent sneeze.
The old lady regarded him sweet-faced, while her hand moved furiously under the knitting, sending a fresh batch of cat dander into the air.
“West Point College, as I’b sure you know, has a very fine museub. In the light of the work Biss Mree has dud on your husbad, what better institution to leave the collegtion to?”
Marie wanted to die of shame. She sent a silent look of apology toward Miss Amelia, and strode to the window, mentally propelling herself out of it.
“I do have a grandson, Mr. Lehnsherr.”
“Blahchoo! You do?”
“Yes, she does.” A deep, grim voice came from the doorway.
Marie whirled to find Logan leaning against the wall, eying her as if she were cockroach dung. Judging by his expression, he didn’t find Erik even that valuable.
Oh God. Oh, no. Now he’ll think I’m part of this.
He wore dry jeans today, with an ash blue shirt that did little disguise his solid torso. She could see each ridge of muscle along his flat stomach, and though he wore no cologne, he simply reeked of machismo.
Your average male with a shaggy brown mane would look like an overgrown beach boy, but Logan looked like a wild, testosterone-driven legend. The legend of her fall.
Her hormones clucked again, nervously flapping their wings. Why did they have to do the Funky Chicken every time this guy showed up?
His expression softened when he turned his gaze to Miss Amelia. “Been a while, huh?”
Her mouth trembled. “Oh, Logan, yes it has.”
He stood a bit awkwardly in the doorway for a moment, then moved to her bedside. He covered her hand with his own and bent to kiss her cheek. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? Too much dancin’?”
“Always, my dear. I’ll never learn to behave.” Two tears rolled down her papery cheeks.
Marie forgot her own mortification as tangible emotion arced between the two: love dipped and wheeled there like a gull on the shoreline, yet it remained a silhouette on the horizon. Waves of regret pounded the sand, yet couldn’t wash away every particle of anger and misunderstanding.
What was this whole rift about? Why hadn’t they just sat down and talked it through? She didn’t understand the concept of a twelve-year silence between two people who had obvious love and respect for each other.
Amelia had closed her eyes, but more tears squeezed past her lids and rolled down her cheeks. Logan kept her hand in his and sat next to her on the white hospital blankets. He took a tissue from a box on the nightstand and dabbed at her face.
After twelve years, they deserved some privacy, especially from the likes of Erik, who looked as if he were about to introduce himself. “Blaaachoo!” He said instead.
“We were just on our way out!” Marie grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him to the door.
“Yeah. I’ll bet you were,” said Logan, not turning his head.
His grandmother opened her eyes. “Oh, dear. I’m forgetting myself. Logan, meet Mr. Erik. Lehnsherr, chair of Fine Arts at West Point College. And I believe you met Marie yesterday.”
Erik raised his brows at her. Great. Now she was going to have to explain her actions to him, as well as to Logan. The day was shaping up even better than she’d originally thought.
Logan raked his eyes over Erik with an almost imperceptible nod, then skewered Marie in his next glance. Any humor or tolerance from the day before vanished, leaving his brown eyes cool, suspicious, and protective of his grandmother. “Yeah, we’ve met. And believe me, we’re going to meet again.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Grandma, why does your knitting basket have a tail?” Logan asked with a chuckle.
“Why, all the better to wag at you, to show you how glad I am that you’ve come.” His grandmother stuffed the telltale tail back inside.
“Uh-huh. And why does it have a paw pokin’ out the far left corner?”
She tilted her chin. “Why, all the better to greet you with.” She poked gently at the paw, and it disappeared.
“Right. And why did your basket just meow?”
She raised her liquid brown eyes to his in a silent plea. “Why, that will just have to be our little secret, won’t it?”
He sighed. “Your secret’s not exactly hygienic, you know.”
“Pooh. Who cares?”
“This is a hospital.”
“It’s a horror shop where they do beastly things to one. Allow me my small pleasures.”
“How did your small pleasure get here?”
“With my friend Mabel. She’s gone to the library to get me the latest saucy romances, but she’ll be back soon, and then my knitting will depart with her.”
“Does your knitting have a name?”
“Lancelot.”
Logan’s lips twitched. “Does he hang out on a round table?”
“No,” said Amelia. “He lances me a lot.”
Logan laughed. He’d forgotten how entertaining his grandmother could be. “You could have the thing declawed.”
“Absolutely not. Then he wouldn’t be able to frighten the maid with half-eaten birds. He’d lose all sense of purpose and identity, and go into a terrible depression.” She plucked at the white cotton blankets covering her ribs and absently tossed a tuft of fuzz to the floor.
Logan had a feeling she wasn’t talking about her cat any longer. He cursed himself for a bastard. How could he not have visited for so long?
“Amelia,” he said, “you haven’t lost your claws. Not by a long shot.”
Her head jerked. “Keep your observations to yourself, Logan.” But she smiled anyhow. “Or you’d better be wary of what I bring home to scare you with.”
He grinned. “I don’t scare easily.”
Her eyes danced. “Is that so? Let’s see… what could I hunt down that would frazzle you?” She thought for a moment. “Oh, yes. I believe I have it.”
Logan raised his eyebrows at her.
“I’m thinking of a very dangerous animal, one that pretends to be domesticated, but actually functions mostly on instinct and sheer intelligence. With sleek, long legs, smooth hair, and polished claws. It only bites occasionally, but when it does--- watch out.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I give up.”
“A woman! Ha—when you snap your brows together like that, you look like an angry lion.”
“Yeah, well, I’m definitely not on the hunt for a woman.”
“Told you it would horrify you.” Amelia grinned.
Logan knew that all this lighthearted banter flowed between them to disguise deeper currents. The ones with an ugly undertow that might pull them down into painful topics. But it was no use avoiding them forever.
“Amelia,” he murmured, taking her hand again. “I’m sorry I stayed away so long.”
Her lips flattened, but in regret, not anger. “I thought you’d at least come for your grandfather’s funeral.”
“I moved, and your letter didn’t get forwarded for weeks. By the time I got it, a month had passed. Then I left the country.”
“I got your damned flowers and tried to trace you through them. But you’d paid cash.” She removed her hand from his and raked it through her hair.
“Then I hired a detective, but fired him just as fast. I told myself that you had every right to your privacy, that you’d show up when you were good and ready.” Her mouth trembled again. “That was the hardest thing I’ve had to do since Charles died.”
He closed his eyes. Damn it. “I always thought it’d be easy for you to locate me if you wanted to. And took it as a sign when no guy in a trench coat ever showed up on my various doorsteps. I knew you had the money to hire someone…” he met her gaze levelly. “I just thought it was lack of interest.”
Amelia balled her hand into a weak fist and brought it down on his jeans-clad knee. For the first time, she looked angry. “You were a stupid, stupid boy! I was a silly old bat, but that doesn’t excuse you. I’ve loved you ever since your pointed head emerged into this world, and you were a homely little critter.”
He choked on an unexpected laugh. “Are you sayin’ I was an ugly baby?”
She nodded. “Like a red, squalling human raisin. I fell in love with you immediately. Your mother took one look at you and said you obviously weren’t done cooking yet. She told them to put you back in.”
Logan stared at her, his mouth working.
“She was kidding, of course.” Amelia reassured him. “Never lost her sense of humor, that woman.”
At least not until she and his father had died together in a tribal uprising in Mali. Logan and his brother Scott had been too young to understand where Mali was, much less what their parents were doing there or why they’d been involved in the Peace Corp. Their grandparents had raised them ever since.
“Don’t worry,” Amelia reassured him. “Scott was an ugly baby, too.”
Mr. Clean Cut? No way.
“He was just as raisinlike, but not as loud as you were. I remember him blowing a lot of silent spit bubbles. You howled.”
Logan shook his head. “Grandma…”
“At least you boys began to get cute after a week or so. Your father, bless him, looked like an enraged shar-pei for the first six months of his life.”
“You know, people tend to be a little sensitive about babies. I hope you don’t go around describin’ other folk’s children like this.”
“It’s far too late in life for me to learn tact, Logan. Don’t even bother.”
On that note, a nurse came in to check his grandmother’s vitals. Logan paced the room, uncomfortable with the fact that they needed to be checked. Once she’d left, Amelia patted the edge of the bed again. “Makes you antsy, ‘eh? Dials and needles and hoses. Disease, mortality. That’s why you came, isn’t it? You didn’t want to read about my funeral in a forwarded letter. You’re not here because of any damn will, are you, Logan?”
He shook his head.
“Eloquent, like your father, I see. Except that you’re stronger in some ways. You’ve got the same stiff neck, but you’re capable of bending yours. I never heard him apologize to anyone his entire life. It simply wasn’t in him. It’s not really in you, either, yet you told me you were sorry.” Her bony chest rose and fell.
“Charles would have apologized, my dear. He searched the whole rest of his life for the chance to do it, but the thoughts and words stuck in his craw. In the end, the only way he could express himself was through the brush. You’ll find his message to you in those paintings, Logan. He said what he could, in the single solitary way he could say it. I know you don’t care about the money. But please, study the work.”
The neck Logan had bent just for her stiffened again. “Grandma, I don’t know the first thing about squiggles on canvas, and I don’t want to. How can you say his apology lies in the paintings?”
“Because I knew him. We were married for forty-seven years, and after that amount of time I could read him like the morning paper. I knew his secret visual alphabet like nobody else.”
“That doesn’t mean I know it—or want to know it.”
“He mourned you both, my dear. I don’t know how to make you believe that. Both of you. Not just Scott. Oh, he could always talk to Scott more easily, since they had the art in common. But he didn’t love you any less. Just didn’t know quite what to do with you…
“You were larger than life, and full of adventures you hadn’t yet undertaken. You challenged him instead of worshipping him, and he didn’t know what to do with that. He’d been worshipped for so damned long!”
Logan shook his head. “I don’t think—“
His grandmother cut him off, as desperate to say these words as she was to continue breathing. She’d probably had them stored up for years. “There you were, four inches taller and with every bit as much heart and soul, but in his eyes, you were misusing them. He didn’t understand that your version of painting was to make marks in God’s landscape, that your version of music was the libretto of a mountain stream. I tried to explain it to him…” she wiped her eyes. “But then the accident occurred, and he said those things, and you were gone. Gone for good.”
Logan rolled his stiff neck around his shoulders. It was getting stiffer by the second, and he didn’t know what to say to her.
For some reason, he found himself thinking about Marie.
“Logan,” his grandmother said. “If Charles could have shot those words clean out of the air before they reached your ears, he would have. He didn’t mean them. They were said in shock and anger and pain. You have to believe that. You have to look at the paintings. Study them as a series. Please.”
He rolled his shoulders, since he didn’t think he could move his neck another millimeter. It ached, sending shooting pains to the back of his cortex.
He walked to Amelia’s bed again, took her hand, and kissed it. “I’ll think about it.”
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Solo L and M scenes will come soon. I'm just trying to set the stage first. And I wanted to take a little time to get the feel for Logan's relationship with his only living relative.