by Lindsey Hart
Joe’s movements stirred her from her perusal of the yard. She’d already walked out to an easel and a large canvas perched off to the side. He stood behind it, mixing up colors that she guessed were oil. She didn’t paint. Never had been any good at it. Give her a pencil or a pastel, chalk or charcoal and she was golden. Right from the time she was little more than a baby, she’d been fascinated with art. Drawing had been her escape. Graphic arts had been a natural progression from her passionate love of doodling and illustrating.
“I’m sorry for asking, but are you just about ready? Where would you like me to stand?” Her new boss looked up, fury battling in his eyes with a thousand other emotions. His hands never quit mixing paint.
“Just about,” he responded gruffly. “Stand over there please. By the garden” He pointed towards a spot over to the right, fifteen feet distant.
Charity slowly nodded, as she wasn’t about to point out that the tangle of weeds couldn’t pass for a garden. She moved off, weeds, brambles, thorns and briar scraping and scratching her bare legs. She instantly regretted her decision to wear both a dress and flip-flops, though she doubted jeans would have fared much better. A person needed a full armor suit just to get through the backyard.
“Stop. Right there.” His words swept over her, commanding and harsh.
She froze and turned about to face Joe. He was already brushing the canvas, long, noisy strokes that were disturbed only by the sound of insects chirping, buzzing and humming.
“How should I hold my face? What direction do you want me to turn?”
He never responded. He was already lost, after just a moment, in the world of his creation. His blush flew. It was almost like he was beating the canvas at some points, his motions were so sharp and punctuated.
What does he see when he looks at me? How does he see me? She was unnerved by his fluttering eyes, flitting over her, pausing for a second then glancing back at the canvas. His hand moved, so busy, creating, always creating. His brow furrowed in concentration. She was even more unnerved at her strange reaction. It was visceral and instant, heat pooling in her belly, a shiver racing up her spine, her heart beating irregularly. A fine sheen of sweat that she couldn’t blame entirely on the sun, stood out on her skin.
After a long time, probably made longer by the fact that she was standing, left with little to occupy her mind other than her own thoughts and worries about how strange it all was, the job, the house, the man himself, she noticed that Joe’s eyes changed. When he looked at her there was a strange glassiness to them, as though shimmering, clear shutters had been slammed in place.
He’d given her no instruction on how to stand or pose so she did her best. Charity shifted her weight from one foot to the other, trying to take the pressure of standing in one spot off of her aching back. The sun beat down on her from overhead, unrelenting in its heated fury. Beads of sweat formed at her hairline, but mercifully didn’t slither down her face. Her back was another matter. Her sundress clung to her perspiration-soaked skin.
In her quest to find a comfortable position to stand in, one in which she didn’t feel like she was being fried alive, she saw it. It caught her attention out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t bend to inspect it since she intrinsically knew that it would make Joe angry.
A rose. A single yellow rose. The kind that wouldn’t grow wild. No, the bush or tree or whatever it grew from, which was impossible to tell given the thick, weedy growth around it, had been planted.
The movement as Joe stood and just walked off, leaving his canvas and the easel behind, interrupted her secret perusal of the flower.
She waited, standing still, hardly daring to breathe, while she waited for Joe to return. Minutes passed. Minutes that seemed like hours. Finally, when she figured it was clear that he wasn’t coming back, she gave herself permission to move away.
The canvas and the easel beckoned her like a sinister crooked finger she knew she shouldn’t follow. She was helplessly drawn to it. She knew she shouldn’t look, but she edged up and peeked around the thick white edge.
Black. The entire canvas was black. Or at least, white with black streaks, black dots, angry slashed lines that had absolutely nothing to do with a garden or herself. It was an utter mess.
Anger flooded her chest and crept up her throat. She drew a shaky inhale. I stood out here, probably for hours, and he wasn’t even painting me! The sun nearly fried her, she was probably utterly dehydrated, bored, her back sore, her arms and legs lead weights from standing in a pose for so very long. All of it for nothing.
What kind of artist was Joe? She had the impression, from what he said, but also from the fact that he seemed to have been in some sort of frozen state for the past years, that he was rich. He had no need to work since it was pretty obvious that he hadn’t in a long time. He’d led her to think it was from selling art. Certainly not this kind, although who knows what people will buy?
It didn’t feel right. Not the overgrown yard or the crumbling house or the mysterious, enigmatic man. None of it felt right. Certainly not the canvas.
She finally tore her eyes away from the painting and left it there, as Joe had, but the chill all those black lines gave her, stayed with her even as she stepped onto the wrap around porch and into the cool darkness of the house.
She wanted to ask if he was done with her for the day, but she sensed he was. She wasn’t sure where he had gone. The house was eerily still and silent. Finally, she walked back to her room, a smaller area with the same wainscoting and faded floral wallpaper and scuffed up floorboards as the living room. She’d neatly made up the bed, an ancient thing with a sagging mattress and wrought iron headboard. The patchwork quilt was old too, she could tell. Probably hand stitched.
Her purse and her car keys were where she’d left them the day before, on a rather large, imposing vanity. She’d never seen furniture like it before, a huge scalloped mirror backing the ornately carved wooden piece. Even the legs had been carved. They were thin and intricate. A massive wardrobe took up what was left of the room and it too looked like it had stepped out of the mid eighteen hundred.
The stuff in that room was probably worth a fortune alone, yet she’d had to brush off layers of grime and dust the night before to reveal even half of the true beauty.
Before she left, she stopped at the bottom of the massive winding staircase that led to the top floors. “I’m leaving. Going into town to get some books. Is that alright?” She paused, waiting for an answer she knew would never come.
After a minute of silence, she turned and left. Though the sun was oppressive and hot and her car was like a sweltering sauna, she’d never been so happy to get out of a building in her life. She couldn’t shake the chill those horrible black lines had seated firmly in her heart.
CHAPTER 4
Joe
The voice of the stranger, the intruder, the soft, incredible beauty, drifted up the stairs. The lyrical lilt seeped through the floorboards, the cracked walls and ceilings and surrounded him.
He hoped like hell she hadn’t looked at the canvas. What was I thinking bringing her here? He wasn’t ready. He’d never be ready to have another life in the house. To have a life at all. He should never have returned to the land of the living. He was lost, lost in the swirling mists of time. The hard grip of the past was as unrelenting as ever.
That brush. The feel of it in his hand, so right and true. He’d picked it up and produced absolutely nothing. He saw the new woman, Charity, her ethereal beauty standing in a tangle of weeds and hopelessness, that once beautiful garden now a hard metaphor for his pathetic life, and he’d seen black.
Blackness. Maybe it was gone for good. The painting. The art. His raw talent. Maybe it too had died with Ginny. God knew every other single good part of his soul had. His life had been torn to shreds, left disjointed, hanging. He didn’t know how to put it back together.
Joe breathed out a hard sigh. His hands trembled. He tucked them between his knees. He’d come up to his room, his place
of sanctuary. He’d sat down hard on the edge of the small bed and hadn’t moved. Not when he heard her voice. Not when he wanted to. Not when he tried to.
Forward. It was a direction he just couldn’t spur himself in. Even when he wanted to, needed to, the past sucked him back, a black vortex that ate up every good intention, every single want and desire. It ate away at him, chipped away at him, eroded him like he was a stone statue. Soon there would be nothing left. Nothing recognizable of the man he once was. The house was a sort of anomaly, trapped in time. It trapped him in a life that he could no more move forward from than he could move back. It used to make him feel trapped, that realization. Now he felt nothing.
And I thought I could overcome it. Or at least, start to move on. I was and am a fool.
He rose slowly, amazed that he could do that at last, and went to the shuttered window. It faced the front of the house and the dusty dirt driveway. He watched Charity descend the steps and stalk across the barren yard, her flip-flops kicking up little puffs of dust with each and every step. Even from there, his eyes locked on the spots that her sweat dampened dress clung to.
She’d set him off. It was her. One look at her in that garden, the garden that was purely Ginny’s domain and what was left of his stone heart crumbled to dust.
Their eyes had locked on the rose at the same time. He knew they were out there, thriving and surviving, despite all odds. Despite the choking weeds and the scorching sun and the bracing winds, they were there. Ginny’s roses. The roses she’d loved so very much and taken so much pride in.
He raised a shaking, bronzed, calloused hand, to the shuttered window. She couldn’t see him. She didn’t know that he was there or that he watched her. And yet she looked back. Once. Her pale grey eyes sweeping over the house.
Was it his imagination or did she shudder as she pulled her car door open. She probably felt it too. The sorrow that weighed him down and wrung him out, stole his breath and his life force and left him a shell of the man he’d once been.
“I don’t even know who that man is.” His voice sounded odd and scratchy in the darkened room. “I should tell her to leave for good.” The money meant nothing. He could easily afford to throw it away.
Charity had no idea just how dangerous she was. She was a stranger, a stranger full of life and light, piercing the darkness of his home and his heart and it hurt. It hurt more than anything Joe had felt in a very long time. He’d grown used to the pain and the numbness, but this ache was something new. It was violent and battering in its intensity.
He couldn’t quite define it, but he knew Charity brought it with her. Yes, she was dangerous. She stirred emotions he didn’t dare examine. She did something to him, roused his wounded, aching spirit with her tender beauty and the kindness in her eyes.
Against his will, he thought again of the hue of her lips. He hadn’t even tried. He’d mixed the paint and then he’d just lost it.
He should tell her to leave, but he just couldn’t set her free. He’d never wanted another tortured soul chained to the house in the way he was, but now that she was here, he couldn’t fathom going back to being truly alone.
CHAPTER 5
Charity
The library in the small town of Tilsa, Kansas, was a small building with a single room, not more than a thousand square feet. Rows and rows of shelves lined the walls. Freestanding shelves, like islands in the small rooms, boasted yet more rows and stacks of books.
“Can I help you find something?”
Charity started at the soft voice behind her. She whirled, cheeks flaming when she took in the young woman standing right behind her. “I… uh-”
“I’m the librarian here. Jill.” The woman, a petite brunette who couldn’t be more than thirty, stuck out a hand.
Charity wrapped her own palm around the much smaller, cool one. She shook gently before releasing it. “I don’t know, I just came in to get a couple books. I don’t read much. I wanted something to fill up the time, I just- I don’t really know what I’m looking for. Something good I guess.”
Jill’s eyes twinkled. Her dark hair was wrapped around the base of her neck in a bun. She wore glasses, but her look was unlike the classic librarian. She wore black slacks and a pink blouse. Her shoes were practical, black leather flats.
“Everyone expects an eighty-year-old woman.” She laughed softly.
“No, I- yes,” Charity finally admitted. “I expected a cute old lady with cat eye glasses and a perm.” She too laughed. They were the only ones in the library, so she wasn’t afraid of disturbing anyone. “I would love some suggestions. Like I said, I don’t really read much. I’ve never really had time.”
“You’re here on vacation?” Jill stepped to the left and began perusing the shelves of books, thumbing through, pulling the occasional one out. She moved adeptly, a creature of habit and practice, at home in her domain.
“Not exactly.” Charity took a breath, wondering how much she should divulge. Joe had said something about feeding small town gossip. She didn’t want to heap fuel on the fire. “I’m doing a modeling job here for a month.”
Jill’s dark brows nearly shot to her hairline. “Here? In Tilsa?”
“I know. It’s unexpected. I… it’s for Joe McAllister.”
She didn’t think it was possible for Jill’s brows to shoot up any higher, but she was proved wrong. “Oh.” Jill’s hand fluttered to her chest for a second before she caught herself and went back to thumbing through books. “That’s a surprise.” She kept her eyes trained on the books.
Charity froze. She could tell that Jill knew what happened. She weighed the harm she could possibly do against her own curiosity and she was ashamed when her need to know what she’d walked into outweighed her good sense.
“I- do you know why- uh- or… anything about the house?”
Jill whirled, book in hand. Her dark brown eyes flittered over Charity for a passing moment before she finally nodded. She spoke quietly though they were the only ones in the building. “Yes. We all know what happened. Such a tragedy.”
“What- what happened?” The bottom of Charity’s stomach dropped out. What if Joe had done something terrible? The look on Jill’s face froze her blood.
Jill shook her head. “The house didn’t have anything to do with it. Or, maybe it did. I suppose they wouldn’t have been here if it wasn’t for the house.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Just that the McAllisters arrived in town just past six years ago. They bought that old house. It had stood empty for so long, perched in the middle of that field. It became an icon for the town, even though it’s not overly close. Everyone knew about it. People went out of their way just to drive by and see it. It’s quite spectacular, probably more so because it’s crumbling and so out of place. The whole town knew about it when it was sold. No one even knew it was for sale. There had never been an owner and it was never occupied that I knew of. A month after it sold, a couple, early thirties, rolled into town. They were in love. You could tell just by looking at them. She was a sweetheart, Ginny McAllister. She loved to garden. She checked out every single book we had on growing things. I think she already knew what she was doing. She didn’t need the books. She just wanted to make friends. It wasn’t long before she was the darling of the town. Everyone loved her. She was always helping people out, volunteering at this or that. The kind of woman who had a huge heart and it was pure gold.”
Charity waited, tense and unspeaking. Whatever had happened to Ginny, it was clear it had been a true loss. She suspected Joe had once had a wife. It was the way he talked, the reverent way he touched this or that in the house, the sheen of loss in his eyes. All that black on that canvas.
“She was driving home one night, Ginny McAllister. She’d been helping out at an event we had in town. Something for the senior’s home. I can’t even remember what it was. Apparently, she’d stayed late to help clean up. The back roads aren’t great, but they’d freshly graveled them. I don’t
know if she wasn’t used to it, or if her car just lost control or exactly what happened. She ended up going off the road. Her car rolled a couple times. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. She was thrown through the windshield.”
“Oh my god.” Charity covered her hand with her mouth, shock and sorrow sweeping through her.
“Yes. They intended on fixing that old house up. The funeral was huge. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. Even though they were fairly new in town, I don’t think there was a soul that didn’t come out for it. The church was overflowing. People had to go in in shifts. She’s buried in the graveyard here. People still bring flowers all the time. There is always a fresh supply on her grave. This town had an angel for a short time and we lost her.”
“And Joe?”
Jill shook her head. Her knuckles whitened on the book in her hand. Her dark eyes reflected the sorrow that weighed heavily on her soul. “The whole town tried to help him out after. He just shut down. We all thought he’d eventually leave, but he hasn’t. He’s still shut into that house. People talk about him. It’s changed. You have to understand that people around here mean well, but they are scared easily. It’s a small town. There isn’t much to talk about. I think they wanted to help at first, but his grief was so frightening, so strange, that it drove them away. Unfortunately, Joe is usually at the forefront of conversation and that means that his legend has grown. No one knows why he’s still there. It’s like he’s chained to that house. He can’t leave. He can’t fix it and it’s just decaying around him. Maybe they’re a pair, that house and him. Lost. Stuck in time. Growing old and dying together. The sadness that clings to that place is unreal. It never used to feel like that, but it does now, if I happen to drive by. I can feel the loss and the pain.”
“I’m- sorry.” What else was there to say?
“Me too. It’s terrible what happened. Just terrible. People don’t know how to help Joe, so they’ve stopped trying. They’ve given up on him the way he’s given up on life. He comes into town, maybe once a month, for supplies and groceries. I’m surprised he doesn’t drive somewhere else, where people don’t know who he is. He doesn’t talk to anyone, even if they try. He walks around like a ghost. Like the night Ginny died, he was in that car too.”