Art-Crossed Love

by Libby Rice

  The screen door leading to the back veranda slammed with a haphazard bang. Trevor joined the mess in the kitchen, immediately surveying his wife at the fridge and his brother and uncle on the floor. A pair of hedge clippers dangled drunkenly from Trevor’s right hand. His left raked roughly through short, spiky hair, probably pulling in an effort to clear a vision he didn’t want to see. “What the…?”

  Bewilderment only lasted a second. Then Trevor looked to Lissa and the phone she clutched to her ear. “Ambulance?”

  Lissa nodded, and Trevor immediately fell alongside Cole. “Nitro tab under his tongue?”

  These men knew their uncle well. Lissa doubted she could be so cool if a loved one were to collapse to the kitchen floor at seven o’clock in the morning. Today she could keep it together because Kent was more of an acquaintance, though the burn in her chest said the man had a way of worming himself into the heart.

  “Can’t find them,” Cole gritted between compressions.

  At first Trevor didn’t reply. Then, “He always has the pills.”

  So we’ve heard.

  “Except today.” Self-blame laced Cole’s disavowal. He might as well have added, When Kent had a heart attack while looking after me in BFE.

  Trevor’s massive shoulders rose to his ears in a wall of solid indignation. “Don’t start. Some things don’t get to be your fault.” When Cole released Kent’s chest to begin the breath portion of the cycle, Trevor swatted him away. “You pump, I’ll blow. We switch off if necessary.”

  With that, the two men fell into a rhythm, not an easy one, but one Lissa prayed could keep Kent alive until the paramedics arrived with their shockers and nitrates. Even she knew that poor flow of blood and oxygen meant brain damage. Fast. And help was coming from the far side of the county.

  Blood rushed in her ears, drowning out the soothing voice of the operator, so Lissa focused through a murky tunnel on the activity buzzing on the floor. Cole pumped and Trevor puffed and Rhea packed towel-covered frozen meals around Kent’s sides. If the situation weren’t so dire, Lissa might have laughed. At least all those refined carbohydrates and processed “cheese products” were being put to good use. Save the day they would not, but Lissa supposed an icy tuna casserole to the groin couldn’t hurt.

  Having a concrete job had snapped Rhea out of her immobilizing shock, but while the anxiety sat well on her shoulders, obligation did not. Unhurried hands wrapped each plastic container in a tea towel before placing it against one of Kent’s extremities. Lissa understood why Rhea couldn’t put the cold packs on top of Kent—they’d only slide off with the next chest compression—but she couldn’t help but notice the redhead’s lack of strategy.

  Or that Rhea, in all her robust athleticism, moved like an old woman competing in a bingo tournament. Sluggish. Robotic.

  Hesitant.

  Sirens finally bounced off the front of the house, and Lissa ran to escort the medics to the kitchen. Within seconds, Rhea’s cooling packs had been scattered, Kent’s shirt cut off, and the pads of a portable defibrillator adhered to Kent’s chest. After a warning to stay back, Kent’s torso jumped off the tile like he’d taken the blunt end of a cattle prodder. Then again.

  And again.

  Cole and Trevor had never looked more like brothers. Glassy eyed, they shuffled away with a visible hesitance to stand aside, as though afraid to turn Kent’s care over to anyone who didn’t love him enough to pour soul into the beating of his heart.

  Little was said. Instead, Kent’s family was forced to look on in hopeful, but uninformed, horror. The EMTs loaded the once-jolly Kent onto a stretcher and wheeled him out, only his gray and aging face peeking above a tan blanket.

  Lissa looked skyward.

  Thank you.

  So long as they didn’t cover Kent’s face, no matter how limp and colorless, he lived.

  ******

  Lissa’s shoulder trembled against one of Melina’s front pillars. She didn’t belong at the hospital. Not yet. The touch and go waiting at Boulder Community should be reserved for family, and she wasn’t among those exalted ranks.

  Cole climbed into the ambulance behind the stretcher while Trevor and Rhea barreled to Trevor’s truck. Before the red-and-white doors slammed shut, Cole turned with a guarded look. He didn’t beckon her to join him, didn’t motion for her to jump in with Trevor. He lifted his hand, pinky and thumb extended, and shook it next to his head. He’d call. When his arm dropped, he mouthed, “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” she whispered, knowing he couldn’t hear.

  The medical caravan took off as fast as the gravel would allow, and Lissa sank to the top step, dizzy with worry and fatigue. Her decision to rise at 3:30 am to search Cole’s basement had left her drained in the aftermath of the morning’s events. She vaguely welcomed a fuzzy nudge from Sasha that enveloped her in stale bacon breath. His soft panting whirled around her head like it came from all directions.

  Trevor’s corporate logo grew blurrier and blurrier until his truck dropped out of sight with the fading wail of the ambulance. Lissa made out a computer, a brain, and a padlock in the shape of a white triangle, seeming to suggest computer security of some kind. “Rathlen Cyber,” said the tagline. “Be sure.”

  The distinctive symbol did render the truck unmistakable, and the sight caught her off guard. No matter how heinous the last forty-five minutes, Lissa’s brain automatically rewound to the basement and Cole’s latest revelation.

  Remembering injected life back into her limbs.

  Bingo. In one gut-wrenching sentence, Cole had revealed the link she’d been searching for. I almost wish I’d been right.

  Cole had accused his wife of adultery. And hell, why stop there? He’d marked her for sleeping with his only sibling, apparently realizing his lunacy too late.

  Continuing to stroke Sasha’s glossy fur, Lissa eased backward until she lay belly up on the veranda, staring at the ceiling formed by the second story porch. She checked her phone for no good reason.

  Surprise, surprise—no news yet.

  Knowledge was supposed to be power. Stupid cliché. The tawdry story that had sent Kate over a cliff had arrived with all the surprise of Kent’s heart attack. Neither had been outside the realm of possibility, given Lissa’s campaign to understand Cole’s backstory and Kent’s history with coronary disease, yet both had been unexpected.

  Complicated and complicating.

  When Lissa hadn’t known the extent of the fear driving Cole’s blind inflexibility, she’d held firm in the idea of him as a self-righteous, closed-minded ass in need of her infinite wisdom.

  There went that luxury.

  Now she saw a stubborn, self-flagellating man whom fate continuously sought to lay low with blows to the people he loved. He saved the ones he could, and mourned the ones he couldn’t, all with the same acerbic severity.

  Lissa glanced at her phone again, then blew out a breath she couldn’t stop holding.

  Down periods, even stints of despair in Lissa’s life had been the result of passing external forces rather than an internal darkness pulling her under. Never having faced depression, Lissa couldn’t empathize with Kate. A misunderstanding had left the woman without options. In Kate’s shoes, Lissa would have brained Cole over the head with a Birkin bag charged to his credit card until he’d straightened out. Kate hadn’t been able to do that and had settled on an irreversible retreat. She must have felt hopeless and powerless and unable to cope.

  Especially since the accusation that had alienated Cole had taken Rhea, too. One savage blow had divested her of a better half and a BFF.

  Yet the chemical makeup of Kate’s brain had lied to her, told her to leave it all behind. Now Cole lied to himself. He believed his active imagination had killed his wife when a disease had taken Kate, an insidious force that had crept between husband and wife through no fault of their own.

  A headache started behind Lissa’s eyes, joining the concern that churned in her stomach. She rolled up off the
wooden planks, leaning her torso against Sasha’s side. He, of course, leaned in. They met in the middle, balanced, both of them staring down the tree-lined driveway in morose silence.

  The game had changed. A week ago her strain might have been born of concern for the project and how another brush with death might affect Cole’s attitude, her career, and the ongoing efforts to persuade Cole to relent.

  Now Lissa worried about the grim recognition in Cole’s eyes when his uncle had collapsed. She worried about the fervency with which Cole had worked to save him. Most of all, she worried about the flat acceptance in Cole’s voice when he’d called Kate’s death his fault.

  Today she worried about the man.

  Years of channeling emotion into her work had rendered the two inseparable. So it didn’t surprise Lissa when, almost as if in a dream, she found herself in her room, paintbrush in hand. This time she let herself ignore the bargain with Cole and simply create. She didn’t worry about making a painting that would please or impress or convince an onlooker she’d changed her ways. The sadness poured out like the telling of a story to an old friend.

  A blurred background took immediate shape. Black faded to blue and then back to black in inconsistent patterns that shrouded the canvas in gloom. She chose a lighter shade, still blue but more electric, to highlight a shape off the center of the painting. Symmetry would be too perfect, the opposite of what she sought to convey.

  Out of the shadows grew a wavering form, an amalgamation of head, heart, and Casper the Friendly Ghost. In the center of the figure, she added faint, unstructured highlights as a reminder that light could shine on the worst disappointments.

  This wasn’t a painting she would share, at least not with Cole. Her previous abstract efforts at Melina had been real, but they’d also been designed to provoke. Shock and awe, as Trevor had suggested on her very first day in Colorado.

  She didn’t want that anymore. If Cole directly associated her brand of imaginative exercise with the death of someone he’d loved, asking him to embrace it felt wrong, cruel even.

  Blunt force trauma was out. Gradual acceptance, in.

  The path was clear.

  Lissa would help Cole heal after all.

  Chapter 15

  Hospitals smelled of death. To Cole, that’s all they’d ever brought. After his parents’ accident, they’d been rushed to this very facility.

  Only to die shortly thereafter.

  Kate, too, had spent nearly an hour in the familiar intensive care unit down the hall.

  Before succumbing to head injuries.

  Not this time. Twelve hours ago, the doctors had performed emergency angioplasty surgery and placed a stent in one of Kent’s coronary arteries. The way Cole understood it, they’d used a tiny balloon to inflate the blocked blood vessel and then propped the thing open with a mesh tube to guard against a repeat closure.

  Kent would never consume saturated fat again, even if Cole had to tie him to the chair and feed him three squares a day. Standing by the bed and staring down, Cole mentally apologized to his frail, unconscious uncle for all the deprivation easing down the pipeline.

  On the other side of Kent’s beeping contraption of a bed, Trevor shifted on a hard-backed couch that must have been designed to discourage overnight visitors. No pillows cushioned the L-shaped slabs, and yet Trevor appeared right at home. “You saved him,” said his brother.

  Their uncle would live.

  “No,” Cole replied. Trevor always assumed the best of Cole, never vilifying him, offering unconditional care when Cole had proven himself incapable of the same. “I performed CPR. So did you. Let’s hope Kent remembers us when he wakes.”

  “You moved fast”—Trevor sat forward, draping beefy forearms over his knees—“so at least we have hope.”

  Suddenly Kent blinked. Bruised rings circled each eye, and his lips were as pale as the surrounding skin. Dry and waxen. His heavy gaze roamed the room without focus. “Boys,” he whispered on an inhale, and Cole’s pulse jumped. “Where the hell am I?”

  Trevor bent chin to chest and murmured, “That answers a couple of questions.”

  “The hospital”—Cole tried to inject humor into his tone to diffuse Kent’s worry—“where all the butter addicts go.”

  “Former butter addicts,” Trevor clarified.

  “What happened?” Kent sounded bewildered, almost afraid to hear the answer.

  Cole and Trevor started in unison. “You—” “We—”

  With a nod, Trevor dropped off.

  “We found you on the kitchen floor,” Cole explained. “You’d been loading the freezer with Rhea and went down without warning. The doctors performed surgery successfully.” Those details could come later. “You’ll be all right.”

  Kent’s eyes drooped wearily, and Cole suspected the conversation would be short lived and soon forgotten. “Whose freezer?” Kent finally asked. The words leaked out painfully, a shameful admission of his lack of recollection.

  “Mine.” Cole answered as though Kent had asked the most normal of questions.

  “Why?” Kent’s pitch was rising. The doctor had called the mind “unpredictable.” Some of Kent’s memories would return soon. Some later. Some never. They were to treat the lapses with kindness and patience, pretending all was right with a complete blank about one’s recent whereabouts.

  Trevor jumped in. “You’re a male version of a mother hen, that’s why. Plus Cole’s got a beautiful painter nestled away in the spare bedroom. Naturally, you’ve had us up there constantly.” He crossed his arms over his chest and whistled to the ceiling. “Can’t imagine why.”

  A smile ghosted across Kent’s lips. “That’s hopeful.” Then he drifted off again, looking worse than he had two minutes ago. Cole had long viewed this moment as inevitable. Kent had a genetically weak heart, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and a penchant for the finer things in life.

  His uncle had earned his lamb chops, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t kill him. Beta blockers could only do so much. Like Kate before him, Kent had a disease. His kind hardened the arteries, while hers had softened the mind. Yet the two sicknesses stole through the body with equal treachery.

  Underhanded and fatal and hard to fight.

  Cole wondered about a world where you could protect people from the dangers that might befall them, a foolish thought that didn’t bear contemplation. Striving for that kind of divine control only called forth a terrible darkness in him, the locked-away part that knew any efforts in that direction were doomed to fail. So he silenced those yearnings, or at least covered them with rules and sarcasm and denial.

  “Cole.” Trevor’s patient prodding cut through the musings. “You should call. She’ll want to know Kent’s all right.”

  Trevor didn’t have to explain whom.

  “You think she’s beautiful.” Good thing Rhea had gone long before her husband’s offhanded comment.

  “Just like you do.” Trevor shrugged. Grinned. “I’m allowed. We’ve established I’m a monument of restraint, remember?”

  That they had. The hard way. Cole had been late to catch his mistake about Trevor and Kate, but Rhea still clung to the belief that her husband had been unfaithful. Yet she stayed, periodically hoarding the past over Trevor with a biting reminder he wasn’t to be trusted.

  Another log on the flaming wreckage at Cole’s feet.

  “I don’t think about how she looks.” He obsessed. The truth might not be so unacceptable if that were all—if he didn’t dream of her smelling like peaches or almonds or coconuts, and tasting like all three. If he didn’t secretly bait her because he liked to watch her mouth move, especially when she was angry enough to talk fast and certain with that telltale flush sweeping down her neck and over the breasts he needed—any other emotion implied choice—to see.

  A choked sound spewed from Trevor.

  “That’s funny?”

  “You’re the worst kind of liar—a bad one.”

  And Trevor was the wor
st kind of brother—a right one. Cole rolled his shoulders in a smooth, indifferent shrug. “Fine.”

  Looking unconvinced by Cole’s easy capitulation, Trevor threw an ankle over the opposite thigh and flopped back against the rigid couch. “I’ve known you for thirty-six years. I gave you your first bloody nose, taught you to drive, and bought a pregnancy test for your panicked high-school girlfriend. I felt the relief on your face when the results came up negative. I taught you calculus and how to use a compass. When Mom and Dad died, I worried over you more than I did them. I carried your wife’s casket and have bought your favorite candies every week since she died, all on the heels of your breach of trust. Because I know you and why you believed the worst. Of me. Of her. Just like I know your back teeth are throbbing with want for Lissa Blanc.”

  Cole’s fingers curled around Kent’s bedrail. The need to turn inward might have been an instinctive rejection of Trevor’s insight, but… no. The solid grip really represented what Cole wanted to do with Lissa. Touch. Not let go. Give.

  Take.

  Maybe for a little while. Maybe forever.

  “Go home, little brother.” Truck keys sailed through the air, forcing Cole to pry his white knuckles from his uncle’s unforgiving bed rail. With the snap of a wrist, Cole snatched the keys from their flight path before they landed on Kent’s stomach.

  “Come back once you’ve gotten her off your… chest.” Trevor paused, not bothering to mask the speculative gleam in his eyes, the one that gave away the other things Cole would get Lissa off of. “And bring her with you. This is where she should be.”

  ******

  Lissa’s room sat dark and still and quiet. No signifying lump rose beneath her comforter. Sasha didn’t lounge on her floor. An unexpected chill wandered over Cole’s shoulders. He shouldn’t have been surprised now that October had given way to November. At this altitude, November passed for winter.

  Cole dropped in front of Lissa’s hearth and arranged logs in the grate. Next came the crumpled newspapers kept at the ready in a wicker basket beside the mantle. Flame crawled from a lit match, through the paper and over the bark clinging to the bottom log.