He was cheating today, drawing the action sequences, because they were the most engaging. He always jumped around the story, to keep himself from overdoing it on the first panel he drew. But just in case he started running out of time on a deadline, it was easier to draw straight lines and buildings and roads than to dynamically draw a figure.
Daniel began sketching the outline of an ungainly, birdlike creature, half man and half woman. He roughed in a wing . . . no, too batlike. He was just blowing the eraser rubbings off the Miraweb paper when Laura walked into his office, holding a cup of coffee.
He set down his pencil and leaned back in his chair. Laura rarely visited him in his office. Most of the time, she wasn't home. And when she was, it was always Daniel seeking her out, instead of the other way around.
“What are you drawing?” she asked, peering down at the panels.
“Nothing good.”
“Worried about Trixie?”
Daniel rubbed a hand down his face. “How couldn't I be?” She sank down at his feet, cross-legged. “I know. I keep thinking I hear the phone ring.” She glanced down at her coffee cup, as if she was surprised to find herself clutching it. “Oh,” she said. “I brought this for you.”
She never brought him coffee before. He didn't even really like coffee. But there was Laura with her hand outstretched, offering the steaming mug . . . and in that instant, Daniel could imagine her fingers reaching like a dagger between his ribs. He could see how a wing that grew from between her shoulder blades might sweep over the muscles of her trapezius, wrapping over her arm like a shawl.
“Do me a favor?” he asked, taking the mug from her. He grabbed a quilt that he kept on the couch in his office and leaned down to pull it around Laura.
“God,” she said. “I haven't modeled for you in years.” When he was just starting out, he'd pose her a hundred different ways: in her bra and panties holding a water gun; tossed halfway off the bed; hanging upside down from a tree in the yard. He would wait for the moment when that familiar skin and structure stopped being Laura and became, instead, a twist of sinew and a placement of bone, one he could translate anatomically into a character sprawled just the same way on the page.
“What's the quilt for?” Laura asked, as he picked up his pencil and started to draw. “You have wings.” “Am I an angel?” Daniel glanced up. “Something like that,” he said. The moment Daniel stopped obsessing about drawing the wing, it took flight. He drew fast, the lines pouring out of him. This quick, art was like breath. He couldn't have told you why he placed the fingers at that angle instead of the more conventional one, but it made the figure seem to move across the panel. “Lift the blanket up a little, so it covers your head,” he instructed. Laura obliged. “This reminds me of your first story. Only drier.” Daniel's first paid gig had been a Marvel fill-in for the Ultimate X-Men series. In the event that a regular artist didn't make deadline, his stand-alone piece would be used without breaking the continuity of the ongoing saga.
He'd been given a story about Storm as a young child, harnessing the weather. In the name of research, he and Laura had driven to the shore during a thunderstorm, with Trixie still in her infant seat. They left the sleeping baby in the car and then sat on the beach in the pouring rain with a blanket wrapped around their shoulders, watching the lightning write notes on the sand. Later that night, on his way back to the car, Daniel had tripped
over the strangest tube of glass. It was a fulgurite, Laura told him, sand fused the moment it was struck by lightning. The tube was eight inches long, rough on the outside and smooth through its long throat. Daniel had tucked it into the side of Trixie's car seat, and even today it was still delicately displayed on her bookshelf.
It had amazed him: that utter transformation, the understanding that radical change could come in a heartbeat.
Finally, Daniel finished drawing. He put down his pencil, flexed his hand, and glanced down at the page: This was good; this was better than good. “Thanks,” he said, standing up to take the blanket off Laura's shoulders.
She stood, too, and grabbed two corners of the quilt. They folded it in silence, like soldiers with a casket's flag. When they met in the middle, Daniel went to take the blanket from her, but Laura didn't let go. She slid her hands along its folded seam until they rested on top of Daniel's, and then she lifted her face shyly and kissed him.
He didn't want to touch her. Her body pressed against his through the buffer of the quilt. But instinct broke over him, a massive wave, and he wrapped his arms so tightly around Laura he could feel her struggling to breathe. His kiss was hungry, violent, a feast for what he'd been missing. It took a moment, and then she came to life beneath him, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt, pulling him closer, consuming him in a way he could not ever remember her doing before.
Before.
With a groan, Daniel dragged his mouth from hers, buried his face in the curve of her neck. “Are you thinking about him?” he whispered.
Laura went utterly still, and her arms fell away. “No,” she said, her cheeks bright and hot.
Between them on the floor, the quilt was now a heap. Daniel saw a stain on it that he hadn't noticed before. He bent down and gathered it into his arms. “Well, I am.”
Laura's eyes filled with tears, and a moment later she walked out of his office. When he heard the door close, Daniel sank down into his chair again. He kept brushing up against the fact that his wife had cheated on him. It was a little like a scar on a polished wooden table - you'd try to see the rest of the gleaming surface, but your eyes and your fingers would be drawn to the pitted part, the one thing that kept it from being perfect. It was two-fifteen; only another half hour until he picked up Trixie at school. Only a half hour until she could serve as the cushion that kept him and Laura from rubbing each other raw. But in a half hour, lightning could strike. Wives could fall in love with men who weren't their husbands. Girls could be raped. Daniel buried his face in his hands. Between his splayed fingers, he could see the figure he'd sketched. Half of a demon, she was wrapped in her own single wing. She was the spitting image of Laura. And she was reaching for a heart Daniel couldn't draw, because he'd forgotten its dimensions years ago.
The Tenth Circle
* * *
Jason was missing practice. He sat in the swanky law offices of Yargrove, Bratt & Oosterhaus, wondering what drills Coach was putting the team through. They had a game tomorrow against Gray-New Gloucester, and he was on the starting line. Trixie had come back to school today. Jason hadn't seen her someone had made damn sure of that - but Moss and Zephyr and a dozen other friends had run into her. Apparently, she'd practically shaved her head. He'd wondered, on the drive down to Portland, what it would have been like if he had crossed paths with Trixie. The judge at the arraignment had said that was enough cause to have Jason sent to a juvy prison, but he must have meant Jason would be in trouble if he sought Trixie out. . . not if Fate tossed her in his path.
Which is sort of what had happened in the first place. He still couldn't believe that this was real, that he was sitting in a
lawyers office, that he had been charged with rape. He kept expecting his alarm clock to go off any minute now. He'd drive to school and catch Moss in the hallway and say, Man, you wouldn't believe the nightmare I had.
Dutch Oosterhaus was talking to his parents, who were wearing their church clothes and were looking at Dutch as if he were Jesus incarnate. Jason knew his parents were paying the lawyer with money they'd scrimped together to send him for a PG year at a prep school, so that he'd have a better chance of making a Division I college hockey team. Gould Academy scouts had already come to watch him play; they'd said he was as good as in.