Chapter 4
BIRDIE
It was the last Thursday of the semester, and instead of having a studio session, the students had come in to collect their work.
Tuesday had been an open house of sorts, a deeply uncomfortable event for me but a proud one for the students, and grades had been issued.
They were freed from my class, and I was freed from pretending to be a teacher.
I walked to the far end of campus, where my residency studio was located in what used to be a coach house back when Evelyn was a working monastery.
I had the day’s pomegranate in my hand—my last pomegranate—and I was thinking about how I never learned who’d been leaving them for me, how the notes had never gone beyond the markered Ms. Cooper.
It was a sullen, chancy kind of wind that gusted in the open spaces of the campus, sometimes quiet, abruptly harsh, and the raindrops were scattered but hard when they hit me, cold enough to be felt right away.
I had my head ducked and was walking at a pace that was just under a jog, the wind yanking at my clothes.
I have to tell you this so I can remind myself: there was a good reason I didn’t notice him following me. And as mundane as a storm in May might be, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good reason. It doesn’t mean I did anything wrong.
I didn’t flip any switches when I walked through the door, letting the eerie gray-green light fill the space through the arched windows.
It was a huge space, like the barn back home, and it was selfish to have it all to myself, especially when the college was forever short on room.
But the residency program was young, and they still hadn’t created another residency position yet.
Maybe one day, the old brick coach house would be sprinkled with marble chips or reek of turpentine, but for now, it was just me and my sawdust. It was heaven.
Even if it meant I had to build coffee tables and stepstools to supplement the stipend, even if it meant I couldn’t refuse to teach an orphaned studio session without looking churlish.
Here in the studio, it was just the basswood and mahogany and the light through the windows.
Just me summoning the memory of saints and angels and God himself out of the wood.
I set my satchel down but kept the pomegranate as I walked up to my carvings in their various iterations, saying hello, watching the storm’s shadows move over them, wondering what the wood would show me it needed today.
The Madonna and child was almost finished, but there was a new block of basswood in the center of the studio, earmarked for a Joan of Arc for a new church in Michigan, and I was itching to get my hands on it.
I’d already had a fixture of our local Renaissance festival pose in her armor for me, and I’d made a scale model out of clay to refine my plans before I actually picked up the chisel.
Maybe I could start penciling Joan onto the block today.
The chain mail would be a challenge but so worth it.
It had been only a minute or two, but I’d already forgotten about the outside world, and when the studio door swung open, my heart gave a huge thudding lurch in my chest, my lungs grabbing at air like I was preparing to run.
It was an unnecessary reaction, an autonomic one that flared before my mind could catch up, and normally, that would have been it; my lungs would have relaxed, my heart would have remembered itself, and then I would have felt silly for being startled by an opened door.
But my autonomic responses never had a chance to settle. My nervous system stayed aroused because the person walking through the door wasn’t an administrator or another teacher. It wasn’t Kaitlyn or even Busy.
It was Bell.
Bell in jeans and a white Henley, sleeves pushed up to his elbows, the clip of his pocket watch hooked on a belt loop and the watch tucked into his pocket.
The strap of a leather satchel cut across his wide chest, and his tennis shoes were worn around the soles, like they were old favorites that he couldn’t bear to retire.
The rain—which did evil things to my hair—didn’t affect those curls at all, and they tumbled over each other in a devastating display of platinum and gold that would rival any angel’s. His eyes were such a pale blue that they practically glowed in the stormy light.
Bell pulled the door shut behind him and took a step forward. “So this is the famous studio,” he said cheerfully.
I stared.
He only smiled at me and walked over to the workbench set against the wall to look at the neatly organized chisels and gouges and calipers, the slabs of modeling clay and thick rolls of tracing paper stored like ancient scrolls on a shelf underneath.
He seemed to want to touch everything: his fingertips on the wooden handles of my tools, then tapping lightly on a folded drop cloth, stroking a knuckle over the worn leather of my favorite strop, thumbing the tightly furled rolls of paper.
By the time he turned back to me, my shock had bloomed into hot panic.
Adrenaline had dilated the tiny vessels in my cheeks and neck, and I knew I was scarlet under my freckles.
My pulse wasn’t only racing; it was skipping, like it was stumbling over its own feet, and the erratic lurching of my heart was much the same.
It was like my viscera were trying to escape all while the shell stood fixed and still, the outside of my body as inert as the blocks of wood scattered throughout the studio.
“I’ve been wanting to see it for so long,” he said.
My mind felt like it was underwater, trying to breach the surface.
He was still my student, however technically.
He probably had a question about his grade.
I would help him, and then he’d be on his way, back to whatever things handsome and well-liked boys did, and then my studio would be empty of anyone who wasn’t myself or the Holy Spirit, and I’d be able to think again.
“Is there something I can help you with, Mr. Bell?” My voice shook a little as I spoke, but not as much as it could have, and I remember being proud of that.
He was walking over to the nearly finished Madonna now, and he tossed me a smile over his shoulder. It was strange how good that smile looked against the turbulent sky outside—a smile that seemed like it would be pleased to be the only source of light and warmth in the world.
“I don’t have any questions about my grade.
” He was turned back to the Madonna, his hand over hers where it was perpetually frozen in the act of readjusting the little Christ’s swaddling cloth.
Her other hand was tucked underneath his tiny body, supporting him, and the cloth was bunched and bundled around her fingers and arm and elbow.
Bell followed the folds of fabric to her hand underneath.
“You carved this too,” he said, sounding impressed, ducking to examine her partially hidden hand more closely.
“Knuckles and tendons and even fingernails. Why? No one will ever see it unless they squat down.”
“Children,” I said softly. “Children will see it.”
He straightened and looked at me, a blond brow lifted quizzically.
“We don’t always think of them when we’re sketching and making models, but we should.”
My voice trembled still, but I felt strongly about this.
Statues, stained-glass windows, frescoes—they’d developed to teach the stories of the Bible to a nonreading laity.
And while we had better literacy now than they had in medieval Europe, we also still had a large group of churchgoers who couldn’t read: children.
They would see this statue and be told This is Mary who loves you.
This is the Heavenly Mother, and she will listen to you when you’re lonely and scared.
It mattered to me that they saw how carefully she held her baby and how easily too, that there was a part of their young minds that couldn’t help but imagine what it felt like to be warm and secure and cuddled with such tender attention.
“And you made Jesus a newborn,” Bell said now. The carving was on a temporary platform the same height as the plinth it would be set on in its new home, so he had to rise a little to look down into the baby’s tiny, sleeping face. “Why?”
“It felt right.” That was an artist’s answer—unsatisfying even if it was true. So I started over, trying to explain rationally what had been wordless intuition in the moment: “We are the most mortal at birth and at death. I wanted to show that God was mortal too. Once.”
Bell nodded, already drifting over to the block that would be Joan of Arc and then to Elizabeth Ann Seton, whom I’d carved not looking down at a child or holding a rosary with a serene expression but viciously swiping a tear off her cheek with the heel of her hand.
Her jaw was set with determination, even though her chin was dimpled and her eyes already brimming with water again.
She wasn’t giving up, but she also wasn’t done crying.
Bell looked over at me with an expectant expression.