Canvas for Love

by Charlotte Greene

  “You don’t have to worry anymore, Meghan. I promise I won’t hurt myself.”

  The relief in her eyes was obvious, and we hugged one another, hard. I felt guilty for putting her through this, but I also knew I couldn’t send her away. Even if she believed my promise, she’d keep staying over until Aunt Kate told her it was okay to stop.

  Meghan grabbed a movie at random after this, and we both zoned out as it played. Instead of watching, I began my own mental movie—a series of memories I couldn’t let go, playing them one after another in my head. Meeting Amelia. Falling for Amelia. Kissing Amelia for the first time. Making love to Amelia. Sex, laughter, tears, fights, makeups, dinners, breakfasts—all of it was burned into my mind, impossible to forget. The movie ended, and as Meghan put things away and cleaned up a little, I continued to stare into space, locked in my memories. Eventually she sat down next to me, and I snapped out of it a little. She looked worried, and I grinned to reassure her. She frowned a little more.

  “I was serious earlier,” she finally said. “You should get rid of all the things she gave you. She accuses you of being a money-grubber—send it all back to her in boxes. Every last thing she bought you.”

  The little black box was still in my purse, and my stomach clenched with a sharp pain. I hadn’t opened the box yet—doing that was much too painful to contemplate.

  “In fact,” Meghan said, “I know you love this place, but you might think about moving out. Lot of memories here.”

  I couldn’t help a sad smile. “Actually, I’m going to have to move out of here.”

  “What? Why?”

  I shrugged. “I won’t be able to afford the rent. I have some savings, but not enough to make it until my new job starts in the fall, not unless I get something temporary, and soon. I’ll have to move out at the end of April if I don’t get some more money coming in.”

  Meghan sat forward, her brow furrowed. “Are you telling me that bitch not only broke up with you, but she basically evicted you, too?”

  I didn’t like her word for Amelia, but I nodded.

  “Damn,” Meghan said. “She really is cold.” She blushed and looked sheepish. “I’m sorry, Chloé. I don’t want to talk badly about her in front of you, but it’s kind of true.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I replied, too tired to argue. I was starting to believe that what she said was accurate. Maybe Amelia really was just a cold bitch.

  Amelia’s coldness had been there all along. I’d simply ignored it. When I heard stories about her past, when I saw her chill toward people around us, I’d accepted it as part of her defense mechanisms. She was, like all of us, afraid of getting hurt. Despite her seemingly infinite confidence, she was actually quite shy. She had few friends and even fewer confidants. She might have been warmer with me than most people, but she’d held me at a distance, too. I knew next to nothing about her past, after all, and she’d always given up the small amount I did know with true reluctance. She was, in fact, still mostly a stranger.

  The acceptance of this truth this last week sometimes made me angry with her. After all, her lack of candor had led, in part, to what happened with Sara. I’d been curious to hear Sara’s story in part because of what it would tell me about Amelia. Still, most of the time when I reflected on how little I knew about Amelia or her past, I was sick with myself for not pushing harder, for not forcing the issue. I had been a coward—I knew that now. I’d wanted to avoid making her uncomfortable, but I should have insisted she tell me about herself. I didn’t entirely blame myself. I’m not a doormat. The truth was, Amelia was clearly a coward. Things had become a little rough and she’d simply bolted.

  I couldn’t tell Meghan any of this, however. Not only was it too complicated, but she was also simply too angry to hear any of it with an open mind. She would think I was defending Amelia, justifying her actions. That was partially true, but I didn’t forgive Amelia, either. I was still too upset and hurt to forgive her, even if I could understand, in part, why she was doing what she was doing. Still, not being able to talk to anyone about what I was thinking was weighing on me. In addition to feeling awful—truly terrible—I felt frustrated and alone.

  Meghan excused herself to go shower. She and Aunt Kate had taken turns staying overnight this past week, both of them sleeping on my little couch. I knew I couldn’t convince Meghan to leave me alone for the night, even if I begged her, so I didn’t bother to try. I waited for her, sitting on the couch like a stone. It had become my spot over the last week. If I wasn’t there, I was in bed. I moved back and forth between those two places alone.

  When the doorbell rang, I was startled but not surprised. My aunt had dropped by a couple of times this week to relieve Meghan last minute and stay over herself. I got to my feet, my joints almost audibly groaning, and made my way over to the door. When I opened it, however, my aunt wasn’t waiting for me: it was Emma.

  She looked terrible—almost as bad as she’d looked all those weeks ago when she showed up shivering on my doorstep. Instead of cold, however, she looked ill. Her hair was disheveled and her face a sickly, pallid green. We stood there, staring at each other silently, for a long pause.

  Finally, she shook her head. “Well, at least you look terrible, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She opened her mouth to reply and then shook her head. “Can I come in? I think you owe me that much at least.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She looked angry now. “Can I come in or not?”

  Meghan spoke up from behind me. “No, you can’t.”

  Emma and I turned to look at her, and then Emma’s face turned a dark shade of red. “Who the hell are you?” she asked.

  I suddenly realized how this might look to an outsider. Emma and Meghan had never met, and Meghan was in a bathrobe, toweling her hair, clearly naked underneath her robe. She looked as if she were at home here in my place, which she was, especially after this last week. I was in pj’s and a robe, which suggested we were heading to bed.

  Emma looked at me. “I can’t believe you, Chloé. I really can’t. I thought—I thought…” She and shook her head. “I thought you loved her.”

  “I did love her, Emma.”

  Emma gestured at Meghan. “Then what the hell? You’ve been broken up for, what? A week?”

  “That’s not your concern,” Meghan said, stepping up to the door and slightly in front of me, her face a mask of pure rage and hate.

  Emma took a wary step back.

  “I take it you’re one of Amelia’s friends?” Meghan asked.

  “I’m her sister.”

  Meghan’s face darkened. “Well, you can tell your sister to go to hell!” She slammed the door in Emma’s face.

  “Meghan!” I said. “What the fuck?”

  “You don’t need that shit, Chloé. She’s trying to manipulate you. Screw her.”

  “Emma deserves her say, Meghan. She hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  “Yet. She hasn’t done anything yet, Chloé, but she will. Trust me. She’ll do something to get you and Amelia back together.”

  “You seem to suggest I would be stupid enough to go back,” I snapped.

  Meghan laughed. “Well, aren’t you? Wouldn’t you go running if Amelia called you right now?”

  I didn’t answer, and after a long silence, Meghan nodded. “Exactly. Stay away from her, Chloé, and stay away from her family. Please. Let Amelia rot in her own shit. She doesn’t deserve you, and she never did.”

  It was out in the open now. All the peace I’d made between Meghan and Amelia in the past few months had been a façade. I wasn’t surprised—I’d known all along that Meghan didn’t like her and that she put up with her for my sake alone, but her hatred for Amelia was clearly very deep. I’d hoped it was simple antagonism, perhaps something like jealousy, that fueled Meghan’s distaste, but this was much deeper, much darker than that.

  “I never understood why you hated her so much,” I said. “Or
why Aunt Kate hated her. What did she ever do to you? Is it a lesbian thing?”

  Meghan shook her head and sighed. “No, Chloé, it has nothing to do with that. I’m glad you’ve finally discovered who you are.” She paused and looked at me evenly for a long moment. Finally, she shook her head. “I don’t think I should tell you why. Not after the way you were acting earlier this week.”

  “Tell me what?” I asked. When she didn’t answer, I touched her arm. “What are you hiding from me, Meghan?”

  She looked into my eyes again, and as if seeing something reassuring there, she finally nodded. “Okay, I’ll tell you. But you’re not going to like it one bit.”

  “What, for God’s sake?”

  Meghan sighed and indicated the couch. “Let’s sit down first.”

  We sat, and I waited as Meghan seemed to gather her thoughts. My apprehension grew the longer I waited, as she was clearly struggling to figure out how to tell me. It had to be big, I knew, if both she and Aunt Kate, who were both warm and friendly people, had been soured on Amelia because of it, whatever it was.

  “First off—do you have a tablet or a laptop? I can use my phone, but a bigger screen would be better.”

  I was confused where she was going with this. “My tablet’s upstairs in the drawer in my nightstand.”

  “I’ll go get it.” She stood up and went upstairs, taking two stairs at a time.

  I waited, still confused by what all of this meant. I heard her open the drawer, but she remained upstairs for a couple of minutes before coming back down.

  When she reappeared, her face was grim. “I wanted to find the articles first, Chloé, and they’re worse than I remember. Did you say that woman’s name is Sara? The one who attacked you?”

  “Yes,” I said, my heart racing.

  “Take a look at this.” Meghan handed me the tablet.

  Meghan had opened three articles from the online version of the local newspaper on my web browser. When I saw the headline of the first, my heart clenched with shock. I read the whole thing quickly, barely believing my eyes.

  LOCAL HEIRESS TO WED

  September 10, 2012

  Society Staff Writer

  NEW ORLEANS—Amelia Winters, 26, one of the many heirs to the Winters family fortune and local businesswoman, has announced her engagement to Sara Felina, 23. Miss Felina is Miss Winters’s employee and daughter of local businessman Chris Felina, CEO of Allbright Industries.

  Miss Winters and Miss Felina have told us they plan to wed here in their home city, but with some reported estrangement between both women and their families, it remains to be seen if their wedding will merit the kind of pomp and circumstance we might generally expect from the union of these two illustrious families.

  Neither woman would comment on a possible venue or date, but Miss Felina seemed to suggest to one reporter that we can expect a winter wedding. Smart move, say I! Leave summer weddings for northern climates.

  The article was accompanied by a photograph of Sara and Amelia, both of them smiling widely. Amelia’s arm was around Sara’s waist, and she was young and happy—happier than I’d ever seen. Sara was gazing at her, eyes shining and warm, almost as if she didn’t believe she could be so lucky. I read the article several times but kept returning to that photograph. It was unbelievable. If I hadn’t known better, I might have thought it was all Photoshop.

  I let the tablet drop into my lap and sat there, staring at Meghan. “I can’t believe it.”

  “She never told you they’d been engaged?”

  I shook my head. “Never. Sara didn’t tell me that either.”

  “What did Amelia say? I mean about Sara?”

  I paused for a long moment and then shook my head. “Not a lot. From what I remember, the first time she brought her up, she said they kind of drifted apart. Sara got a job in New York, so they decided to break up.”

  Meghan shook her head, disgusted. “Have you read the other articles?”

  “No.”

  “It gets worse.”

  I didn’t think it could, but I was wrong. When I opened the other tab, the second headline was staggering.

  HEIRESS SUES FORMER FIANCÉE

  January 10, 2013

  Society Staff Writer

  NEW ORLEANS—Amelia Winters, 26, one of the many heirs to the Winters family fortune and local businesswoman, is suing her former fiancée, Miss Sara Felina, 23, daughter of local businessman Chris Felina. The news came to our desk via court proceedings submitted by Miss Winters’s lawyers earlier this morning. No details about the trial were forthcoming from lawyers, but the lawsuit appears to be related to the Winters Corporation, Miss Amelia Winters’s business. With all of the money and influence the Winters family wields in the City of New Orleans, and with a team of power-hungry lawyers at her disposal, this reporter believes it will likely be an open-and-shut case, leaving the much-younger Miss Felina in dire straits.

  A source close to the women has reported that their engagement was severed within the last week, but this same source was close-lipped about the cause. This writer, however, has no doubts: if you plan to sue your fiancée, you’re not going to be engaged very long.

  The final article reported that Amelia and Sara had settled out of court a few months later for an undisclosed amount of money, though it was reputed to be hundreds of thousands of dollars. I couldn’t begin to imagine how Sara had paid, knowing that her family had disowned her. Perhaps Daphne had paid.

  I reread all three articles several times. I’d been forced to look at the society page more often in the last few months than I ever had before, in part because Amelia and I were in the news so often. We usually made fun of it and laughed about it, but it could be infuriating to see some of the ridiculous things they wrote about us. I recognized the tone of one of the more aggravating reporters we’d run into before, a young man who could never quite keep his snide remarks to himself. Society pages are essentially editorials, after all, so he could compose his “news” in whatever fashion he deemed fit. That said, the facts here were still clear: Amelia had been engaged to Sara and then broke it off and sued her. She had never mentioned any of this to me. It cast my entire relationship with her in a new light. If she could lie about this, what else had she been covering up? Further, why had she sued Sara?

  “I don’t understand any of this,” I told Meghan.

  Meghan shrugged and then shook her head. “Neither do I, and neither does Aunt Kate. But it was in the news a lot when you were still in Paris. Then, when you came back and took a job with her, and especially when you started dating her, we both remembered this story. That was why we never really trusted her.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about all of this before?”

  Meghan winced. “Well, at first, neither of us could remember the details about the case. I recalled that she’d sued some poor girl and won, and Aunt Kate thought she’d been engaged before. By the time we thought to look it up again, you and Amelia seemed to be doing so well that it seemed, well, petty to mention it. The trial was a couple of years ago, after all. And when I reread those articles a while back, it still isn’t really clear what happened between them.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “But she was engaged. And she did sue her. And she never told you about any of it. I thought she might eventually—Kate and I both did. We thought we’d give her the chance to come clean.”

  I swallowed the hurt lump that rose in my throat. My eyes were burning with rage and sorrow.

  Meghan touched my arm. “Are you okay? Was I right to show you this?”

  For a long time I didn’t reply. I stared straight ahead, mulling over all the little things that had seemed strange about Amelia’s story regarding Sara. She’d hesitated to bring it up, and when she did, she’d given me few details. It had seemed strange to me that she hadn’t called the police right away when Sara started threatening me or Amelia’s previous girlfriends. The fact that Sara was an ex-fiancée, not just an ex-girlfriend, mad
e her hesitance a little clearer. Whether Amelia still loved her or not, she’d probably wanted to help her avoid going to jail, if, at the very least, to avoid embarrassment, if not something more severe. Judging by the engagement photograph, they obviously had, at least at one time, cared about each other, loved each other. Amelia looked positively radiant in the photo, clasping Sara like a prize she never wanted to let go.

  I finally gazed at Meghan. “Yes, you were right. And you and Aunt Kate both were right to wait. She should have told me and she didn’t. She was lying to me the whole time.”

  Meghan pulled me into her arms for a hug. I was still stiff, unyielding. I was so hurt, I was like a statue. She continued to hug me anyway, and eventually I relaxed into her, gripping her back. My eyes, however, stayed dry.

  I was too angry for tears.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I’d been extremely fortunate during my mini-breakdown. The provost at New Orleans State had been out of town, so the final part of the hiring process had been delayed. Christophe, the dean, called me Sunday afternoon to set up the final meeting for Monday, and Aunt Kate helped me get ready before I drove up to campus. Even with her help, I still looked terrible. Staying inside for over a week, barely eating, and oversleeping had wrecked my looks. Even to myself, I looked like a changed person—sick and worn. I was still moving around with a kind of stiff pain, slow and unsteady as I walked.

  I could tell that Christophe was shocked by my appearance, but he was too polite to say anything. Still, the meeting went extremely well, and I was offered the job on the spot. I’d promised my aunt not to accept immediately, as she wanted to look at the contract with me, and by the time I made it back to my apartment, she was almost as nervous as I was. A former teacher and current sub, Kate had some experience negotiating state budgets, and we talked about the contract together for a couple of hours that evening. I called them back the next morning with a counteroffer, and to my surprise, they met it. As of September 2015, I would be an assistant professor at New Orleans State.