The Muse

by Anne Calhoun

  “There are too many stairs. I told your father to put in an elevator, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “We can put in a lift. Or, Garry bought that apartment on East Fourth years ago—”

  “It hasn’t been renovated since the seventies, and Garry’s coming home. He’ll want to stay there.”

  Arden took a deep breath and counted to ten. Her town house was nearly three thousand square feet. Garry probably wouldn’t stay longer than it took for things to settle down. Her mother didn’t want her problem solved. She wanted to roll back time to the end of the summer, when she was the queen of their rarefied social circle, with homes all over the world. She wanted Arden to listen.

  “Garry’s not going to stay, Mom. He’s got the ranch in New Zealand. That’s his home now. And Joni’s offered you their guest house in West Palm. You love Florida in the winter.”

  “I can’t go to Florida,” her mother said in a tone of disbelief.

  “Why not? You’d be close to the girls—”

  “I can’t leave your father. He told me yesterday he hired a new lawyer, one of the Delmonicos, I forget which one, but Charles went to Yale with his daughter, and that everything would be cleared up. It’s all just a big misunderstanding.”

  Suddenly wide awake, Arden sat bolt upright in bed. “He’s fired Neil?”

  “He said Neil wasn’t being aggressive enough.”

  “Mom, it’s not a misunderstanding. I’ve seen the accounts, the fake trades, and statements. The IT people who automated the process gave depositions earlier in the week. It’s over.”

  “Your father says it’s a very complicated mathematical model, too complicated for anyone but him and Charles to understand, certainly more complicated than the government could understand.”

  Or Arden. Arden, the mathematics major with an econ minor, certainly couldn’t understand it, or have the nerves to run any part of the business. The sheer megalomania in that statement, even when presented with evidence, took Arden’s breath away. “It’s actually really simple, Mom. He took in money from new investors to pay out old investors, and himself. What was complicated was constructing elaborate lies to make the returns make sense. Dad’s been lying to you for decades, and he’s still lying to you.”

  “Don’t you dare talk about your father that way! He is your father, and my husband. He’s a good man, a good provider, and if you were a good daughter, you’d go defend him.”

  Arden bent her head. “A good daughter. I don’t even know what that means anymore. I’ve tried so hard to be a good daughter I’ve lost sight of the goal. Those words are meaningless.”

  “They are not meaningless,” her mother said, outraged. “You know perfectly well what they mean. They mean standing by your family, fighting to retain what belongs to us.”

  “Mom, when you support your family with money stolen from people, nothing belongs to you.”

  “He didn’t steal it. He just didn’t have enough to pay everyone back at that single moment in time. It was a cash flow problem. He says this new lawyer will clear everything up, and there’s no need for me to leave the house.”

  “Mom,” she repeated, “I need you to listen carefully. If you don’t willingly leave the house, the government will forcibly remove you, in front of television cameras from all over the world. The images of you being evicted by the sheriff will play on every major television station in every country and make the front page of every major newspaper and Internet news site. That will only make things worse.”

  “Rick Dunlop would never do that to me. I contributed to his reelection campaign every year.”

  “A fact he’s now having to explain to voters,” Arden shot back, searching desperately for something, anything, that would convince her mother to leave Breakers Point of her own accord. “Think of the girls. Think of Serena having to explain that to the girls.”

  “I’m sure she’s not letting them watch the news right now.”

  Her mother wasn’t living in reality if she thought the girls’ friends at school weren’t taunting them with this. She waited in silence, out of arguments.

  “They’re punishing me,” her mother said in a small voice. “I didn’t do anything except love your father and use a significant percentage of what he made to do good in the world. Doesn’t the foundation count for something? Surely they can’t take that away, too. You’re going to make sure they won’t take it away. It’s our work. Yours and mine. What will you do if you don’t have the foundation?”

  In her mother’s mind, it was simple. She’d keep her house, Arden would keep the foundation, and her father would make everything all right again. “I don’t know, Mom. I’ll find something.”

  “I’m going to do what your father tells me.”

  “And I’m telling you to call Joni and take her up on her offer of the beach house in West Palm. Go to Florida for the winter, see your granddaughters, and let me deal with this.”

  “I’m glad Garry will be here to help you.”

  Arden bristled. “Garry has spent the last eight years herding sheep in what can literally be described as the far side of the world. Sheep, Mom. The stupidest animal alive.”

  “His IQ was higher than yours or Charles’s. So much potential.”

  He was the one smart enough to get out of this. The words trembled on the tip of her tongue, but she bit them back. “I’ll be glad to see him,” she said. And wring his neck.

  “When does he arrive? Did we send the jet for him?”

  “Mom. The FBI took the keys to the jet the day of the raid. You’ve been allowed to stay in the house only because Neil called in favors. His reprieve won’t last much longer. You need to decide. Me, Fourth Street, or Joni’s house in Florida.”

  Her mother hung up on her. Arden slid down in the sheets and rubbed the heels of her hands against her eye sockets. The tension was ratcheting up, tightening all the muscles in her neck and back. Maybe Neil was right. Maybe an exercise program was the way to go.

  She checked the day’s weather: calm, clear, and cool. Then she texted Seth. Still interested in going for a bike ride?

  Going back to sleep was a lost cause. She got up, made coffee, and took a cup upstairs to the living room where her easel stood. She sipped the coffee and flipped through her sketchpad. She’d toyed with working up poses of Seth from Betsy’s class, but she couldn’t get the sketch of Seth sitting on his heels with his back to the wall out of her mind.

  She clipped her sketchbook to the frame, then put a sheet of heavyweight paper on the easel. She closed her eyes and called his face to mind, the narrowed, wary eyes, the stubble that was heaviest around his mouth, the dip at the center of his upper lip, the slight curve of his lower lip. She would ask him to sit like this for her again, because this was the essence of Seth. She drank coffee and drew until her trembling fingers prompted her to eat something. A container of Greek yogurt in hand, she stood back and looked at the drawing. It was a good start. Something was happening she found difficult to describe. Her vision was clearing, not her eyesight but rather the filter through which she viewed the world, the one she was only vaguely aware of.

  Her phone buzzed at seven, startling her out of her zone. The text was from Seth.

  Absolutely. Runner’s Gate at nine ok? Weather looks good this AM but not afternoon.

  Aren’t you working?

  I’m giving myself a day off.

  She tried not to read too much into that, and failed. Sounds good. See you then.

  Then she went downstairs into the basement storage room and looked at her bike. During a year at Oxford, a year away from being a MacCarren, she learned the basics of bike maintenance, so even though both tires were flat, the chain dry, she could get it ready to ride. She pumped up the tires, greased the chain, and then hoisted the bike onto her shoulder and carried it up the stairs, the brick walls snagging on the seat and handlebars as she did. She peered through the gap in the curtains. No photographers today. Maybe it was too early, or a celebrit
y’s life had imploded. She wasn’t about to turn on the news and find out.

  Dressed and ready, she pushed the bike up the sidewalk and across Fifth Avenue to Runner’s Gate, where she stopped. She adjusted the strap of her bike helmet and tucked her shades more firmly at the bridge of her nose. Hair in a ponytail, head and face mostly hidden by the helmet and straps, she wore jogging leggings, a cropped zippered jacket in Manhattan’s ubiquitous black, and a pair of running shoes notable only for being boring white with equally boring white laces. No neon, no trendy blue or pink or green. She was as anonymous as she could possibly be. This was a brilliant idea. She smiled, actually anticipating being outside in the chilly fall air, riding through the park’s glorious show of color, using the pretty morning to talk down the anxiety.

  I’m fine. It’s not like what happened. I’m not on foot. I’m on a bike. Central Park has bike lanes and only a couple of stoplights. The north end isn’t heavily traveled, either. It’s not the same. I’ll be fine.

  “Hi,” Seth said.

  “Hi yourself,” she replied.

  Seth wore black tights like her own, a jersey, and his helmet. He leaned his bike against a park bench and turned to hers, squeezing the tires, testing the brakes, checking the handlebar alignment.

  “What are you doing?” she said, amused.

  He looked at her. “Checking everything over. It’s a habit.”

  “An interesting one,” she said. Never before had she gone on a ride with someone who did a safety check before they set out.

  He unzipped a small bag on the back of his bike and riffled through the contents. “I’ve got a spare inner tube that will fit your tires,” he said.

  “Do you normally carry spares?” she asked.

  “For my bike, yes. For yours, no. I took a guess at the size of your bike and picked them up today on my way here.”

  “Thanks,” she said, touched.

  “You should get a kit, just the basics to repair punctures, air up your tires, that kind of thing.”

  “Seth, I rode a bike for a year during my exchange year.” She remembered daily rides through Oxford’s cobbled streets and narrow lanes, thinking she was finally cured. When the panic attacks returned, she resolved to find another way to deal with them. Unlike Garry, leaving for another continent wasn’t an option. “I can fix a puncture and a loose chain. If I can’t fix it, I’ll call Derek to come get it, deliver it to a bike shop, and pick it up later,” she said with far more bravado than she felt.

  He laughed, the sound rich. “Let’s go,” he said, and swung his leg over.

  She followed him into the park. At midmorning on a weekday there wasn’t much traffic on the drives that circled the park, mostly nannies or moms with swaddled kids in strollers or on trikes with handles. They rode north along the east drive toward 110th Street. The north end of the park was less busy, hilly, wilder than the south end, large chunks of rock erupting from the earth, and trees loomed over the path, their leaves thick and rich in color made brilliant by the sunshine. Seth rode on the outside, next to her, but without talking as he looked around. Always alert.

  She downshifted to compensate for the slow climb to the northwest corner of the park. Seth just eased back on the pedals, keeping pace with her. It was a gorgeous day for a laid-back ride through the park, and it went so smoothly it tricked her. She was fine as they rode down the West Park Drive, past the American Museum of Natural History. She was fine as they negotiated joggers and nannies, passing the Delacorte Theater, then swinging wide to pass Strawberry Fields.

  She was fine until she turned onto Central Park South and merged into traffic. Cabs and cars were bumper to bumper, merging into one lane to avoid a power district crew at work. She could hear Manhattan on the other side of the wall enclosing the park, the cars and the jackhammers. Her heart rate accelerated, at first imperceptibly, then faster and faster as she couldn’t draw a deep breath. One car honked, startling her, then a second, then there was an all-out honkfest as drivers vented their impatience into the park’s serene air. Braced as she was, when a truck’s horn went off right next to her, her heart swelled to the point where she thought it might explode, her throat closed off, restricting her breathing, and her vision tunneled to a pinprick of light.

  The bike’s handlebars wobbled in her sweaty hands, nearly tipping her into the truck, or under its wheels. Arden’s stomach lurched up to her throat; the only thing that prevented her from vomiting was the fact that she could neither breathe nor swallow. She was going to lose control of the bike, swerve into a vehicle, and die. She tipped sideways, put out a foot to stop herself, felt her knee buckle. The bike’s frame dug into her calf and thigh. Sound dopplered around her, amplifying over, then disappearing under her racing heart.

  Then the clatter of a bike hitting the pavement. Not hers, which was still tangled around her leg. From a distance she could hear Seth’s voice. A big hand closed around her handlebars, guiding her back upright, Seth’s strong arm caught her and supported her to the curb. Somehow he got her and the bike to the side of the road and up onto the paved path. She sat down hard, right in the middle of the path, hands curled into talons and trembling near her face.

  “Arden,” Seth said. “Arden.”

  All she could think was how uncommon her name was, and he kept repeating it, and everyone was watching. Staring. At her. At Arden MacCarren, falling apart once again. “Stop saying my name,” she managed to gasp out.

  His mouth shut with a click. In her blurred vision, she saw him snag his abandoned bike out of the road, onto the patchy grass. Then sat down next to her and wrapped both arms around her. He murmured nonsense noises, soothing noises, put his big hand by her face and tucked her into his shoulder. It should have felt confining, the last thing she needed when she was flying apart, but somehow, she could breathe. Maybe it was like breathing into a paper bag, maybe it was the unique scent of Seth, his skin and clean sweat and the total lack of pressure in his embrace. He was so strong, so solid, he would hold her and hold off the world while she fell off the edge into the abyss.

  When it was over, she inhaled one long shuddering lungful of air, the first she’d taken since the panic attack started; she exhaled the same way, reminding her brain that her body knew how to breathe, and if it would just get the fuck out of the way, things would be fine.

  She felt his head turn, his nose nuzzle into her hair.

  “Where’s your phone?”

  “Zipped into the back of my jacket,” she whispered.

  His hands, strong, steady, gentle, circled her, unzipping the pocket, withdrawing her phone. “Passcode?”

  “Zero-two-seven-six.”

  His arm still around her, he tapped in the code. “I’m going to text Derek to come get you.”

  “That’s probably for the best,” she said. The attacks left her weak. Weaker. She could probably walk the bike, but there was no way she could ride it any distance. The only thing she could do was sleep off the aftermath, and hope the headache wasn’t too killer.

  More tapping. She sat up, inhaled crisp, cool air, then rubbed her face and eyes. A quick look showed no one was watching her. Just an average day in New York, crazy woman having a hand-flapping, breath-heaving, legs-shaking meltdown in the park. Nothing to see here. Her rational brain knew that, of course, but the crazy fear knew nothing but its own frenzy.

  Seth wasn’t looking at her. Giving her space, or creating distance between them. “He’s on his way,” he said.

  She didn’t know what to say. She should say something, explain this, but she’d told him nothing. Just then, an SUV pulled into the park drive and stopped at the yellow barricades. Derek got out, stuck two fingers in his mouth, and whistled. “Stay here,” Seth said. He walked her bike to the SUV, where Derek had the back open. Seth handed off the bike, then came back to get her. He put his arms under her elbow and half hauled her to her feet. “One step at a time,” he murmured when she tripped over her own feet. “Eyes ahead.”

 
She made it to the SUV, where Derek waited with the door open, and got herself into the seat with no more than the suggestion of Seth’s hand at her waist. “Go,” he said to Derek. Then Derek shifted into gear. She caught a glimpse of Seth holding back a line of taxis while Derek backed up into Fifth Avenue traffic.

  “That was a terrible idea,” she said to Derek, and closed her eyes.

  * * *

  She opened her eyes when the SUV braked in front of her town house, then fought back the urge to vomit. A couple of the most persistent photographers leaned against the wrought-iron fence enclosing her small front patio. Derek cursed under his breath. “Stay here.”

  He opened the hatch and pulled her bike out of the back of the SUV, carried it down the steps to the basement door, and trundled it inside. Then he came back and opened her door. “Now.”

  One last burst of energy carried her through the cameras shoved in her face, to the front door, and inside. Derek had to move the car, which was double-parked, and anyway, she didn’t want to see anyone right now. Instead, she sank to the foyer floor and closed her eyes.

  A minute later, the doorbell chimed. She ignored it, as Derek had a key and knew the security code.

  Knock knock knock. “It’s me.”

  Seth. She got to her feet, flipped the lock, and opened the door. He slid through the gap and shut it again in the photographers’ faces.

  “I still have your phone,” he said.

  God, he was handsome. Really handsome. Shoulders like the hilt of a sword, with his body the blade. “Thank you,” she said, hand braced against the wall for support. “Just . . .” Her knees weren’t up to much at this point, so she just waved her hand at the hall table, where her purse sat.

  He set it down and looked at her. His body was as relaxed as she’d ever seen it, his gaze as focused and clear as the brilliant fall sky. “I’m sorry,” she said shakily, fighting back stupid, useless tears. “I never cry. Just . . . that was the second one in a week . . .”

  He put his arm around her waist and looped hers over his shoulders. “Let’s get you upstairs. You’ll sleep better in your bed,” he said.