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Now that Clara isn’t confined to her room, I have to search the main house for her. In my memory, I always saw her in the garden, either by herself or with Raleigh, drawing or playing or just talking. But that garden below my old bedroom window no longer exists. Just like the rest of the house, it was lost in the fire Morgan made of my old life.
But there is a new garden, a smaller one, tucked away on the side of the house. If Clara’s been making use of the last couple days and done some exploring, I’d bet she’s found it.
Sure enough, my first clue that I’ve found her is finding Iris lounging in a patio chair in the back of the house with her tablet. She doesn’t normally enjoy working outside, preferring the climate control and lack of insects in her own office. But if she’s keeping an eye on a certain guest of ours…
I follow a stone path off the patio and around the side of the house. Trees and shrubs close in around me, native flowers crowding in around my feet. In a small tiled clearing, a bench sits in sunshine, a low rattan table sitting beside it. Clara sits sideways on the bench, her knees pulled up so that her sketchbook can be propped up against them. She’s sketching furiously, and for a moment I hang back behind a tree, just watching.
Watching her draw is different from watching her paint. When she paints, each stroke of her brush is precise, deliberate. It’s obvious she’s thought through what she wants to create, and knows how to make it happen.
But when Clara draws, her energy is almost manic. I can see the ideas crowding around in her head, and that her only outlet is the tip of her graphite scratching over the paper. She scribbles with her pencil and then smudges the tips of her fingers along the page, maybe blending shadows or softening lines. There are grey stains on the meat of her palm and each of her fingers, even her forehead and cheek, as if she swiped her hand over her face and forgot. I wish I could see what she was drawing with such frantic focus, but if I step any closer, she’ll see me, and the moment will be broken.
Which reminds me. I came here with a purpose. Tomorrow is the banquet, and I’m running out of time to decide how exactly I should handle Clara’s involvement in it. Trust her to be complicit in my deceit, or deceive her myself. It’s a question I often have to ask myself when dealing with business partners and potential allies, but this time… it feels different.
“Oh!”
Clara startles violently in front of me, and I realize that while I was lost in my thoughts, she must have looked up and spotted me spying on her from behind the tree. Hardly the way I wanted to start this conversation.
Except, when I step into the little clearing, I don’t say anything about the banquet coming tomorrow night. I don’t ask her about her uncle, or even the boutique, or the sex we had in the car.
Instead, I ask, “Have you always wanted to own an art gallery?”
Clara stares up at me, her sketchbook forgotten in her lap. I steal a glance down at it. She’s drawing a portrait of a woman, one who looks remarkably like her. Her mother? There are smears of graphite all over the page, and parts of the woman’s face have been erased and redrawn several times, judging by the ghosts of old lines sitting underneath the current ones.
Has she… begun to forget what her mother looks like?
Again, I must have forgotten myself- a troubling habit that’s been forming lately. Clara notices my look and quickly hugs her sketchbook to her stomach, hiding her work. “No,” she says tightly. “Not always.”
I stay silent, waiting for a deeper explanation. Clara was reluctant to talk about this before, and I wonder why. If it’s such a precious wish, why keep it hidden?
Under my silent scrutiny, though, Clara relents. “As a kid I wanted it. It sounded so… surreal, to think of my work being framed and put up for hundreds of people to see. Maybe I wanted that much praise, or… maybe I just wanted to create a beautiful gallery so my mom could see my drawings in their best light.”
Her eyes drift down to the whorls in the wood of the bench. “So after she died, it stopped mattering that she got to see my work in a pretty frame in a pretty building.” She rolls her eyes, but I can see the glassiness in them. “That sounds so shallow, doesn’t it? My dream was just to get praise from my mother?”
I think about the last time I really cared about being praised by my father. It was a long time ago, before the schism even, back when I still considered him more a god than a man. “Shallow isn’t the word I’d use,” I say.
Clara blinks and looks away, and I realize I might have said something more offensive than reassuring. Quickly, I coax. “You still want an art gallery, though.”
“I do,” she says, her words clipped. She takes a deep breath, and I realize she’s trying to keep herself from crying. “Paul helped me a lot.”
That surprises me. Her uncle’s enforcer? I wouldn’t have suspected that he had a nurturing side.
“He encouraged me to keep drawing, if only because my mother would be upset if I stopped because of her. And the more I created, the more I realized that… it didn’t matter who saw my work. I needed to make it.”
I think I know the answer to this question, but I want to hear it from her. “Does your uncle like your artwork?”
Clara’s fingers tighten, almost imperceptibly, around her sketchbook. “No, he… doesn’t.”
There are many, many more words hidden behind those three, and the flat tone in which she says them. “What did he do?” I ask, more sharply than I mean.
Clara is very determinedly not looking at me anymore. I fight the urge to go to her and grab her chin, forcing her to look at me like I did the night of the fire. I don’t want to intimidate this answer out of her. I want to know it… for my own sake.
“He… He would destroy my sketchbooks if I ever made the mistake of leaving them lying around,” Clara says, sounding like she’s forcing the words out of her mouth. “He said I was too old to spend so much time daydreaming.”
My own disgust and rage startles me. “Exactly why did it take you ten years to run away?”
Clara’s head whips toward me. “I was a kid. Where was I supposed to go?” she demands. “It’s not like I could come back here, where I’d be no better than a prisoner just because of what my uncle did.”
I open my mouth to protest that, but how can I? Clara can wander the grounds, but she’s no freer now than she was when I first brought her here, not really. Iris is right around the corner of the house, after all, probably eavesdropping on this entire conversation.
