The Girl Made of Clay

by Nicole Meier

  A buzzing settled over Sara, as if someone had suddenly filled the room with mind-numbing static. Her father was alive, and he was apparently hurt.

  And he’d asked for her.

  “What does that mean, exactly?” Visions of bandaged limbs and seeping, raw wounds came to mind.

  The woman cleared her throat. Spurts of intercom announcements crackled in the background. “I apologize if this is all a bit of a shock to you. But there has been an accident. A Mr. Thomas Robert Harlow has been injured and is currently in our care. The only name we could get out of him was yours. I’m calling to inform you of his condition. We can only release information to a family member. Are you related to Thomas Harlow?”

  Her throat constricted, and the words wouldn’t come. On reflex, she opened her mouth wide and attempted to gulp for air. Only a guttural sound escaped.

  “Ma’am?” The weariness changed to concern.

  Sara’s mouth hung open as she tried to process. “I . . .” A wave of grief rolled through her. She squeezed her eyes shut while faraway memories flashed behind her lids. A little girl on the beach holding her father’s hand, a roomful of people with champagne and flashbulbs, loud arguing, the earthy smell of wet clay, a man enveloping her in a clumsy, drunken embrace, and her mother slumped and wailing on her knees.

  He’d left her alone as a child, with an adult’s mess to clean up. He’d claimed Sara was the best thing in his world, his “little muse.” But it hadn’t been enough. He went away, leaving Sara alone with her unstable mother. For that, she swore she’d never forgive him.

  “No,” Sara stammered as the tears threatened to pool. “You’ve reached the wrong person. I’m not related.” With a shaky motion, she pressed “End” and let the phone slip to the tile floor.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SARA

  Watery ice settled inside the glass tumbler as a stream of honey liquid filled the lower half. Sara watched behind a set of drooping eyelids as her friend prepared her second drink of the evening. Sara was drinking more than usual, but at the moment she didn’t care.

  She glanced over at Birdie, her heart thawing a little. Warm, inviting Birdie. Lucky for Sara, her next-door neighbor’s living room was always open for late-night company. And tonight she needed a friend. She’d left a note for Sam, in case he woke up and wondered where she went. She nodded and raised her glass in salute, thankful for a port in the storm.

  Over the course of the day she’d tried to distract herself with running Sam between school and soccer practice, drafting emails, and trying to reach Charlie. But all this couldn’t ease her gnawing guilt. She’d thought more than once about picking up the phone and calling the hospital back.

  “Tell me again what happened with Charlie.” Birdie’s hazel eyes were glassy and slightly bloodshot, probably from long hours working behind a bank of steaming restaurant equipment. Plus the hour was late, but her friend swore this was her time to relax, take a load off, and decompress after a long day’s grind at her restaurant. Sara could appreciate that.

  The ice slid past Sara’s teeth as she tipped back her drink. She was more thoughtful now, the nightcap putting a soft focus on her present surroundings. Her neighbor’s house was comfortable, with a Northwest cabin feel. Leather sofas and downy cushioned chairs faced a stacked stone gas fireplace that now burned on a low flame. Wide-planked wood floors spread out along the single-story bungalow style house, a contemporary touch Birdie and her partner had recently added to the century-old home. Sara envied the relaxed vibe of the place, something she’d tried desperately to achieve in certain parts of her own home but couldn’t quite accomplish.

  She curled her socked feet underneath her and considered Birdie’s question. “I don’t know. But when someone takes forever to call their fucking wife after she texts that she needs him, that’s a problem. Is it not?” The alcohol was causing her to curse, something she’d been trying to stop since Sam was old enough to repeat her language. It wasn’t totally her fault; she blamed some of this on Joanne. Her mother had always treated her like an adult, even when Sara had been a small child—no filters, no boundaries.

  Joanne Harlow hadn’t exactly been a figure of maternal perfection. She’d been an emotional wreck for years after TR’s departure. There was a lengthy, dark period, during Sara’s youth, when the shades were always drawn and the house was never cleaned. Sara had been too young to be counted on to warm the microwaveable dinners and make sure the dirty underwear made it through the wash, and Lord knew her mother couldn’t have been bothered. Looking back on this as an adult, Sara understood Joanne’s inaction to be a result of depression, but back then it had just seemed purely neglectful.

  Birdie raised an eyebrow. Sara didn’t normally lose her cool in front of other people.

  She took another sip of her drink. The Charlie thing was worrisome, true. But it was taking a back seat to the alarming news of her father. What Sara desperately wanted to confess to Birdie was her underlying predicament with TR. Being aware of him lying in a hospital bed, perhaps vulnerable and alone, was creating a well of mixed feelings she couldn’t ignore.

  But unraveling her childhood story required more detail than she was prepared to share. Even now. Even with Birdie, the friend whom she trusted the most. Birdie would likely wonder why Sara had hidden elements of her past; she’d want to know about TR’s history. Sharing any of this now meant the opening of an old, fragile wound that Sara had worked so hard to protect. It was far easier to steer the conversation back to Charlie. There’d be fewer questions that way—and less shame than in exploring why she, her father’s only child, wasn’t running to his bedside.

  “It’s just that he’s been doing this a lot lately,” she continued about Charlie. “Leaving for long periods of time, being unavailable.”

  Birdie’s solid frame sank back into the folds of an overstuffed armchair. She gazed thoughtfully into her whiskey. “Maybe,” she said without looking up, “you should ask him where he’s been.”

  Sara startled. “What do you mean? Like ask if he’s been fooling around or something? He just says he’s been busy with work.”

  She’d considered this possibility before. It was hard to imagine her husband with another woman, but it happened in marriages all the time, right? People grew apart; they made mistakes. But she knew Charlie well; his excuse was always the airline.

  “Perhaps,” Birdie said, abruptly leaning forward and narrowing her eyes. “But hold him accountable, Sara. You need to face this. I mean, I like having you as my post-work drinking buddy, but hiding out here isn’t going to solve your problems.”

  Sara blinked. She’d forgotten Birdie could be brutally blunt sometimes. She took another long sip, allowing the heat to travel down her throat as she pondered her friend’s advice.

  She had asked Charlie where he’d been when they’d spoken earlier. It had taken hours to track him down. When she finally reached him, Sara was nearly inconsolable.

  “I’m sorry, hon,” Charlie had said over the phone. “I thought I mentioned my flight changes to you.”

  “You did, but didn’t you read your phone and see that I needed to talk to you?” Every fiber of her being shook as she responded. She hadn’t even informed him of the calls from the hospital yet, and she was already becoming more upset. What was worse than her escalating worry over the TR situation was being met with Charlie’s apathetic I-can’t-believe-you’re-making-such-a-big-deal-out-of-this tone. She detested that the most—as if her fears were unfounded.

  “What if something had happened to Sam and I needed to get ahold of you?” She’d been incredulous. “What if I had been hit by a car and he was left all alone?”

  A puff of exasperation blew through the earpiece. “Well, it didn’t. Nothing fatal happened. You and Sam are fine, Sara.” She could almost hear Charlie’s jaw clench as he said her name. She’d been noticing this kind of interaction between them lately, her harried and him evasive, placating.

  It wasn’t alway
s this way; in the beginning there’d been a lot of good years, trips together using Charlie’s airline miles, where they’d cozied up under beach umbrellas and hardly kept their hands to themselves, tender times when he consoled her over the madness surrounding her unpredictable mother, and later around Sam’s deliciously lovable infancy and toddler stages. When everything smelled like warm milk and baby’s breath. But somewhere along the line things shifted. It was like the invisible force that once pushed them together was now drawing them apart. Lately, Sara felt as if her very presence somehow bothered Charlie. Like he’d rather be elsewhere.

  “I think you’re missing the point,” she said to him, measuring her words.

  “And what point is that?” Again with the placating. “That I’m working and wasn’t reachable for a few hours? It wasn’t on purpose, Sara. I was flying.”

  Sara bit down hard on her lower lip before responding. She’d practically paced a hole into their bedroom rug, dividing her worry between one man who appeared to be slipping from her life and another man who was being thrust back into it.

  Before allowing her to answer, Charlie had mumbled something about how they’d talk things over when he returned at the end of the week, and then the line had gone dead. She’d been cut off.

  That was how she found herself slinking across the darkened front yard and into her neighbor’s living room, just after she’d put Sam to bed.

  Sara wondered how to share with Birdie the real reason she’d come knocking on her door. She yearned for an objective opinion. All day long her mind had played tricks on her. Perhaps the old man had summoned her because he’d finally grown up and changed his ways. Could it be possible? But Sara just couldn’t bring herself to find out. She feared falling back into his orbit might mean she’d be once again be discarded.

  Plus, what would she tell the people at the hospital if she did call back? That she’d had a bout of amnesia and only now just remembered their patient was indeed her father?

  How could she reunite with the one person from her past she’d tried so hard to forget? It hadn’t been easy. The media and, for years, even her own mother had a difficult time giving up the subject. For one thing, there was the inescapable fact that Sara was TR’s spitting image, as Joanne used to say. The thick head of strawberry hair, the green eyes, the nose with a prominent bump at the ridge. These were all his traits, passed down to her.

  And then there was the sculpture.

  A painfully recognizable piece of art that was created in Sara’s very likeness. A little girl laughing and hiking up her overalls at the water’s edge, forever encased in bronze and paraded around from one traveling exhibit to the next. It was the piece that rocketed TR and his artistry into instant limelight and out of his family’s lives. The precious piece of Sara’s life, her history, that TR extracted for his own gain and used as a golden ticket to a famous career.

  A ticket away from her and into a whole other world.

  Sara had come across articles over the years. Ones portraying her father as an arrogant and reckless artist known for his string of eclectic celebrity girlfriends and his ability to close down a nightclub or fill an exclusive art gallery. From a distance, TR’s life had played out like one never-ending party.

  Now their worlds were colliding: her father apparently needed her after so many years of her needing him.

  From where she sat, Sara had a decision to make. She couldn’t turn to her mother; Joanne had passed away several years ago. Birdie was clearly fading after her hard day at work. And Charlie wasn’t planning to return home for several more days. This choice was solely up to her.

  Maybe TR had realized the error of his ways and called Sara wanting to make things right. Maybe now that he was injured and facing his mortality, his view on the world had been altered.

  It was that little maybe, finally, that had her saying good night to Birdie and stumbling back to her house to ponder how she was finally going to reconnect with her long-lost father.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TR

  No one ever warned TR how lonely a thing like pain could be. Epic, mind-numbing pain. The kind that pulverized you with a singular blow and threw you down into a dark, cavernous ditch from which you couldn’t climb. That’s what it was. God-awful. Until the drugs came. And then it was a rushing blur of pleasurable sauce dispensed through the veins, sending all that damned pain into hibernation for the time being. That was the state into which TR’s once-colorful life had now dwindled. A sad song set on a never-ending loop of the unbearable, followed by the gentle softening of Lady Morphine.

  All the while images faded in and out, distorted as if obscured by a funhouse mirror. He’d tried to blink them away, pushing back the guilt right along with them. But Marie’s angry face floated to the forefront anyway. And Bo’s, too, his face twisted with the expression TR had come to associate with him almost immediately after they met—a mixture of scorn, anger, and disappointment. TR had left the people in his life behind. Or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, it haunted him.

  He was able to gather bits of outside information as the days progressed. The local authorities appeared, wearing shiny badges and false sympathy. They unceremoniously laid out a list of events surrounding the fire, not so subtly prodding TR to fill in the missing blanks. They sought details regarding any other people on the property, and TR was nervous as to whether details of the fight had been divulged.

  But he kept these thoughts to himself. Most of his time in the hospital was spent either knocked out by pain meds or drowsily attempting to spoon-feed himself chocolate pudding with his left hand. Enduring an interrogation was the last thing TR wanted.

  As far as he could tell, he was burned up pretty badly, and it hurt like a son of a bitch. White-coated doctors loitered in hallways, putting their heads together and rattling off terms like “surgical skin graft.”

  The whole affair made TR nauseous. Partly because anything medical made him uneasy, and partly because it was imperative both hands remain intact.

  But the idea of getting back to work seemed implausible at the moment. In his current state, a good percentage of him was bandaged and oozing.

  He’d been told it was coming up on two weeks in that bed, being fed rivers of fluids through a blasted tube that plunged into his skin at the center of an ugly, purple welt. And things were starting to itch. But primarily TR worried about getting some kind of pain-free rest.

  Even that had proved difficult so far. Most of the time he nodded off, he’d jolt right back awake after dreaming he was running from the blaze. Flames so hot they felt like the gnashing teeth of an attacker, snapping viciously at his right side. He’d come to in a swath of perspiration, immobilized by fear and heavy narcotics, desperately pinging the nurses’ station for help.

  Just as he’d told the cops, TR recalled smelling smoke and then running from the fire. Despite uncertainties surrounding Marie and the nasty fight that had erupted between them like a bed of provoked snakes, he chose to offer little detail on how the fire had started or how he had ended up soaked with seawater and slumped on the sand. He wasn’t ready to think about that yet.

  After jotting down notes on a pad, one of the detectives explained how TR had been found in his pajamas, facedown in the secluded cove just below the property. The edges of his right side were charred up and down, and his house up on the hill was engulfed in flames. One detective made an inquiry about alcohol and flammable art supplies. A bolt of fear had shot through him. But it seemed they had no real clues.

  TR asked critical questions of his own. Was anyone hurt? How much of the house and its outer structures were left unscathed? What had happened to his collection of art? He couldn’t lose his entire life’s worth of work. Was anything spared? His tongue was so thick with emotion that he’d choked on the words as he waited to be told the fate of his beloved sculptures and drawings.

  The investigators just looked on with pitying expressions, as if to say, A tragic case if there ever
was one.

  What did they know? These small-town hacks. TR would be goddamned if he’d let them see him crumble. His thumb slammed down on a red button until, at last, a familiar dulling of medication slipped over him like a soft veil.

  In his alert moments, TR was aware he was beginning to lose track of time. Close to two weeks had only been broken into dismal increments of searing pain and drug-induced sleep. How much longer could this go on? Wanting to seek the comfort of his own bed, he’d asked the staff to contact Marie.

  “She says you aren’t welcome back home,” a nurse offered apologetically. They both knew he’d be discharged soon, and he appeared to have nowhere to go.

  TR had sagged back into his pillows at the realization he had few options left. He could only think of one other person who might be willing to take him in, but he dismissed the notion. It was ludicrous.

  Helplessness was creeping in.

  And then something surprising happened.

  TR didn’t realize it right away. How could he? He wasn’t in his right mind, and the hospital was a constant sea of strange faces. All types of nurses and specialists had been coming and going at odd hours; the only thing differentiating these women was the color of their hair and the occasional tight ass. He knew everyone in that sterilized ward considered him too doped up to notice. A pathetic old man with sour-smelling skin, unwashed hair, and clad in a papery gown.

  But they were mistaken. TR may have been immobile and pushing seventy, but he was still a red-blooded male with an eye for beauty. Even if only half-awake, an artist always observes.

  He was rousing from another night of fitful sleep, and the optics were hazy at best. Suddenly he sensed a certain energy present in his bland little room.

  Here came an inexplicably familiar woman, appearing to be in her early forties, wearing mop of fiery hair and lips pursed so tight it looked as if they’d been glued shut. Accompanying her was a bird-boned boy, the type who looked as if he might be a touch too fragile for this world, traipsing behind and staring down at some kind of device.