by Susan Gloss
But now, he knew that what Sloane had brought out in him had been there all along. And it lived on, still, even in her absence. Other people, and other things, could inspire him. Paige had motivated him to stop worrying so much about what other people thought, and to make the art he wanted to make. Annie encouraged him to always keep moving and keep creating, with the rebel nature she donned as a guard against her ever-present fear of disappearing, of losing relevance and significance. And then there was Nell.
Nell, with her heart as jagged and raw as his own, maybe even more so. When he first met her, it seemed as if her dreams had been scrambled and tossed onto the table like dice. He knew that sense of powerlessness. But somewhere over the last six months, it seemed she’d leaned into the game again.
Odin would be lying to himself if he said he would not have taken the opportunity, in a millisecond, to be Nell’s lover as well as her friend. But the friendship was what he needed more. And he realized that his attraction to her served, more than anything else, as proof that his ability to connect with someone had not died when Sloane did. He just had to be patient. Still, Odin was relieved that he wouldn’t be around to watch as Nell found her way back to Josh. Already the space between them had shrunk.
With his truck loaded up, he walked around the side of the house to take one last look at his favorite work of art on the property. It was a sculpture of a flame made up of several steel beams, now reddened with rust. The beams were curved and positioned in such a way that they gave the impression of a flickering fire. The plaque at its base read: IN LOVING MEMORY OF WALTER BARRETT, WHOSE SPIRIT SHINES ETERNAL.
At the sound of voices, he walked back toward his truck. Everyone came down the steps of the front porch just then. Nell squinted in the afternoon sunlight. She had on a sundress (God, he loved summer) that hit a few inches above her knees and showed off her legs, which he told himself were fine to admire silently, even if he’d resigned himself to the fact that they should keep things professional.
As usual, Paige had her phone clutched in her hand, as if it were an extension of her body. Odin felt flattered that she glanced up for a full five seconds to meet his eye and say goodbye. He hugged her, and she acted awkward and stiff at first, then squeezed him hard before she pulled away.
“You let me know if you ever make it up to the Twin Cities, okay?” Odin said. “It’s worth a trip. The art scene there is pretty great.”
Paige nodded. “For sure.”
Annie didn’t wait for Odin to approach her. She threw her arms around him and patted his back with a firm slap.
“You’re one of the good ones,” she said.
When Odin hugged Nell, he held on long enough to take a deep inhale of the soapy-sweet smell of her hair, then pulled away and said, “I’ll be in touch.”
“You’d better. I’ll be keeping tabs because I expect big things from you,” Nell said. She looked over at the others. “That goes for all of you.”
Odin got into his truck, rolled down the driver’s side window, and waved as he pulled out of the driveway. He stole glances at the mansion in the rearview mirror until, finally, he turned the corner and kept his eyes fixed forward.
Chapter Thirty-two
Nell
PIECE: Drawing of the Mansion Hill Artists’ Colony, colored pencil on paper.
June was crazy, with all of the artists wrapping up projects and moving out. But July was quiet and, at first, Nell missed having the residents around. She missed their conversation, their ideas, the hum of creative energy that had filled the rooms while they were here. It felt strange to come to work in an empty mansion. Nell never felt entirely alone, though, just as she suspected Betsy never did—not with all the artwork on the walls, shelves, and lawn.
Nell soon slipped into the long, languid days of summer, keeping shorter hours at work and convincing Josh to do the same. A few times, he came over for lunch and they ate together on the pier, taking their shoes off and dipping their toes into the water. Things weren’t perfect between them, but they were better than they’d been in a long time.
Sometimes, during those lunch breaks, Nell would take out a notepad and doodle with colored pencils—something she hadn’t done since childhood. She was under no illusion that she had any particular aptitude for drawing, but it didn’t matter. Combining colors on the page gave her a joy she hadn’t realized she’d missed, a creative release she hadn’t known she needed. She drew what she saw or what came to mind—a box tied with a pink ribbon, the peaks and valleys of the waves lapping against the pier, or the angles of the mansion, with its wraparound porch and red door.
Often, Nell took her laptop outside to work from the porch or pier, answering emails from the new crop of artists—a young man who had just graduated from the university with an MFA in studio art, a woman from nearby Spring Green who did ceramics, and a landscape painter in her late fifties. The painter had lived near and painted Lake Superior for decades and said she wanted to try her hand at abstract painting, but worried that if she stayed put, she’d chicken out and keep doing the same old thing she’d always done. Nell was pretty sure Betsy would have thought she’d chosen well.
Nell used the downtime to write some community guidelines for the incoming residents (she preferred the word “guidelines” to “rules,” especially in the context of an artists’ colony). Josh helped her write them. She knew she couldn’t police everything the artists did, nor did she want to, but she hoped that laying out some reasonable expectations in the beginning would prevent problems down the road.
She also busied herself cleaning and organizing the house. She could have paid someone to do it—there was money in the trust for upkeep. And, in fact, she did hire a high school kid to do the lawn and a company to wash the windows (there was no way she was leaning out of that third-floor cupola to get at the highest ones). But the rest of it Nell did herself, and she sort of enjoyed the process. It gave her a chance to really notice things, like the way the light coming in from the windows at different times of day could completely alter the mood of a painting or print.
Nell settled so well, in fact, into the slower pace of summer that it took her a while to realize her cycle was off. She had to count back days on the calendar to realize that she’d missed a period. The realization brought a glimmer of hope, followed almost immediately by a wave of terror and sadness. She remembered the last time she’d missed her period, the twenty-two weeks she’d carried her and Josh’s daughter, and all that had gone wrong.
Today, Nell left work early, stopped at the pharmacy on the way home, and picked up a box of home pregnancy tests. As soon as she got home, she went into the bathroom and, with shaking hands, ripped open the box and dumped out the two tests. She picked one up. The crinkly wrapper rattled around in her sweaty fingers. She didn’t even know fingers could sweat, but apparently they could. Somehow, she managed to tear open the package and take out the plastic stick inside.
Nell didn’t need to read the directions. She’d taken dozens of this same brand of test before, always with a negative result, except for that one time. She’d gotten used to seeing the single, lonely pink line in the test window, with nothing but stark white space where the second pink line was supposed to appear.
Back when she and Josh were doing fertility treatments, she used to hold the stick in her hands and watch the result window for the entire three minutes the test instructions said to wait before reading the result. Nell remembered how she’d watch the control line come up, straight and scientific. So bold, that control line. Always bright pink, just to prove to her that the test was not faulty. As if to say, “The test is working. Yep. Definitely working. Just in case you’re hoping there’s a manufacturing defect or some sort of user error or something to explain the big fat negative you’re about to get, again.” Sometimes, her eyes used to play tricks on her. She’d swear she saw the faintest second line only to realize it was a reflection from the light fixture.
Now, after taking the test, Nel
l placed it on the bathroom counter, set the timer on her phone for three minutes, and left the room, shutting off the light and closing the door behind her. She went downstairs and out the back door, so as to curb any temptation to look at the result before the timer went off.
She walked around the perimeter of the small yard behind their bungalow. She’d been so busy with getting things ready for the next session at the Colony that she’d barely noticed that the border perennial garden was in full bloom. The grass was soft underneath her feet as she walked across the lawn to inspect the flower beds bordering the back edge of the property.
She remembered that she’d planted lilies there the previous fall. With Josh engrossed in the start of the semester, she’d been desperate for something to distract her between appointments at Dr. Lynch’s office. She’d never been much into gardening—when she lived in Chicago, she never had a yard. The closest she came to gardening had been to buy a couple of potted herbs from Trader Joe’s and then set them on the kitchen windowsill of her and Josh’s apartment, where they slowly turned brown and died. But when Nell purchased Stargazer lily bulbs at the farmers market, the vendor had promised her that no special skills were required to plant them.
“Just dig a hole, put ’em in the ground, and wait. Come next summer, if all goes well, you’ll have fragrant, showy flowers like these here.” He’d pointed at a laminated picture of how the plant was supposed to look when it was in bloom, with clusters of big, six-petaled pink-and-white flowers.
Nell had gone home, cleared the fallen leaves from one of the flower beds behind the house, and done what the man said. She doubted that anything would actually grow from the musty little clusters of bulbs she covered with soil, smoothing the back of her spade over the earth where she’d upset it. Not even a week after she spent an entire afternoon planting, she saw a squirrel digging in one of the beds, then running off with its cheeks puffed out, leaving a trail of chewed-up brown bulbs behind it.
After that, consumed by first their IVF treatments, then her work with the Colony, Nell forgot all about the flowers she’d planted, until now. The flower bed was crowded with plants that the previous owners had planted—bee balm, hostas, and coneflowers. But she didn’t see her lilies anywhere.
The timer on her phone went off with a chime. Nell was about to go back inside when something pink near the back fence caught her eye. She walked across the few feet of mulch and foliage and bent down to get a better view.
There, protected by the fence, stood a single pink lily in full bloom. Its long stalk shook in the wind, but the blossom was open to the sun, revealing a bright yellow center. She understood, now, the appeal of perennial plants. Because to plant them was to plant hope. There was something bold, almost brazenly optimistic, about hiding something away in the soil and then hunkering down for a hard freeze and having faith that there would be life and beauty on the other end.
Nell piled up a small mound of mulch around the flower, to better protect it from the wind. Then she went inside and upstairs, where she hesitated outside the bathroom door.
She remembered something Josh had said to her, back when they had been arguing over whether or not to do any more fertility treatments.
“This doesn’t just affect you,” he’d said. “I’m in this, too.” She also thought about how he’d stuck by her despite everything that had happened—the debt and deception, the distance between them. There were times when Nell thought she could practically hear the tension humming between them, like the high E string on a guitar tuned just a little too tightly, ready either to snap or sing.
She called him at work.
“I just took a pregnancy test,” she said.
“I thought we didn’t have any in the house,” he said.
Nell let out a small laugh. Back when they’d been doing IVF, Josh had made Nell promise to turn over any pregnancy tests she had stashed in the bathroom, so as not to be tempted to test early. He’d helped her double-check all the drawers and cabinets, just to make sure she didn’t have a secret stash hiding somewhere.
“I went and bought a box of them today,” Nell said. “My period is two weeks late.”
“Oh.”
Nell read so much into that single syllable. Not just understanding, but also fear. The memory of all the frustration and the fighting. But also, above everything else, she heard hope. Hope she hadn’t known he still held on to.
“I haven’t looked at the result yet,” Nell said. “I was going to wait until you got home to even test, but I was so sure it would be negative . . . I didn’t see the point in dragging you along for the emotional roller-coaster ride. But then I remembered what you said about wanting to share things. About how we can’t be there for each other if we don’t really let each other know what’s going on. So that’s why I’m calling. I’m going in to look at the test.”
She heard Josh let out his breath on the other end of the line. “Okay,” he said. She could practically picture him rubbing his thumb over his beard, getting out of his office chair to pace.
“Are you okay?” Nell asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just . . . this is a surprise, that’s all.”
“Well, we don’t know what it’s going to say.”
“Right,” he said.
“It will probably be negative,” Nell said.
“Right.”
“But maybe it won’t be.”
“Maybe,” Josh said. He paused. “Are you okay?”
Nell thought about it. So many possibilities lay behind that door. Her heart thumped hard and fast with equal parts hope and trepidation. She’d just begun to feel confident at the helm of the Colony. She worried about having to disconnect from it, even for something as temporary as family leave, just as she was hitting her stride. She was getting ahead of herself, though. Even if the test turned out to be positive, she knew there were no guarantees about what would happen next. There was no way she could think about a new pregnancy, a new baby, without thinking of the one she’d lost.
But she’d learned, from the artists at the Colony, that there was value in contrast. Annie, with her photography, created beautiful and haunting images from the interplay of light and darkness. Odin coaxed smoothness and fluidity from something sharp and static. And Paige, with her monster prints, showed how beauty and fear could coexist. So, too, could joy and sadness. Neither one would mean anything without the other for contrast.
Nell answered, truthfully, “Yes.”
“Either way? Really? You’ll be okay?”
“No,” she said. “I’ll be more than okay.”
She turned the door handle and switched on the light.
Acknowledgments
As always, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my husband, Bill Parsons, to my parents, Frank and Kerry Gloss, and to my in-laws, Bill and Peggy Parsons. Without the support of family, I never could have finished this book.
Special thanks is also owed to my agent, Christina Hogrebe, and her colleagues at the Jane Rotrosen Agency, as well as to my editor, Rachel Kahan, editorial assistant Alivia Lopez, and the rest of the team at William Morrow for believing in me as a writer and making it possible to get this story out into the world.
The members of my critique group—Rebecca Brown, Erin Celello, Aaron Olver, and Angela James—provided invaluable feedback in the drafting phase, while the amazing women of Tall Poppy Writers provided moral support. Murali Jasti lent his expertise with criminal law practicalities, and Karla Schmidt and Christa Archual-Nie encouraged me to keep going with a difficult topic.
Finally, I’d like to acknowledge and remember some very special babies, lost too soon. Among them are Kenley, Sawyer, Kristina, Zachary, Arabella, Baby Girl, Grayson, Kamryn, Anastasia, Parker, William, Addison, Adair, Jackson, Elizabeth, Asher, Tavin, Casey, Orion, and Caleb. They, and so many others not named here, are loved and remembered.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
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M
eet Susan Gloss
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Interview: Author Susan Gloss on Fashion, Blogging, Her Novel Vintage & How Every Seam Has a Story
About the Author
Meet Susan Gloss
SUSAN GLOSS is a graduate of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin Law School. She lives with her family in Madison, Wisconsin. When she’s not writing fiction, Susan can be found working as an attorney, blogging at GlossingOverIt.com, or hunting for vintage treasures for her Etsy shop, Cleverly Curated.
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Reading Group Guide
The loss of a child, and longing for a child, threaten to overwhelm Nell’s life. Why do you think having a child is so important to Nell? Is it as important to Josh?
When Josh starts using the nursery for an office Nell feels as though Josh has moved on from the loss of their daughter: “She knew for the first time, then, that Josh had moved on from their loss, leaving her behind, still in the midst of mourning.” Do you think Josh had really moved on from the loss of their daughter? Why was his grief different than Nell’s, and how did he process it?
Betsy established The Elizabeth Barrett Trust for the Fine Arts to allow artists from all over the country to focus on their art and bring attention to the Madison art scene. Does the artist colony live up to her vision? Does it fulfill other needs besides what Betsy might have envisioned?
“Inside there are plenty of pieces by artists from all over the country, even the world, but Betsy said she felt strongly that if she was going to put artwork outside the house, where everyone would see it, she wanted it to be ‘native,’ just like the flowers she had planted.” Discuss the role Wisconsin plays in the novel. Is there a similar art/cultural scene where you live?