Chapter 34
BIRDIE
THREE WEEKS LATER
“Everything okay?” Bell’s warm voice comes over the phone. At the sound of it, something eases in my chest. Unclenches at the base of my throat.
“It is now.” There’s a small smile on my face as I walk to the studio, Lilith stalking behind me and waiting for a chance to attack my heels.
I leave the studio door propped open so she can flit between the studio and the house, even though she generally only wants to be where I am—or where Bell is, particularly if she’s ready for a nap.
When we first adopted Lilith—or she adopted us—she slept in a cat bed atop our bed, on my side so I could pet her as she fell asleep.
That lasted for three or four nights, until she started slinking out of the cat bed while we were unconscious and curling up next to Bell’s head on the pillow.
And now every morning we wake to her in a new spot—behind his knees, loafed on his hip, decanted into the wedge between his chest and my back.
She’s been fussy the last two nights while he’s been gone for work, meowing and chirruping and prancing around his pillow until finally giving up and sleeping in the crook of my arm instead.
I’ve felt the same. Maybe worse. I’ve slept alone for years and years, and after a small handful of weeks in Bell’s bed, I’m completely ruined.
Typical of him.
“I’m switching to a video call,” he says. “One second.”
I pull the phone away from my ear in time to see his face appear on my screen.
Handsome, sunny, in a good mood. The beauty mark above his mouth drawing attention to how wide his smile is, how straight and even his teeth are, how sharp the edges of his lips.
He’s in a linen suit today, pressed but still summery, and his eyes are such an aching shade of blue in the sunlight that they almost make me wish I worked with paint instead of wood.
“There’s my girl,” he says, smile tilting up on one side.
The smile of a born charmer, but the eyes, as beautiful as they are, betray that eerie greed he only reveals to me.
It’s still disturbing, but I’ve started to accept that something in me likes being disturbed—that I crave him looking at me like that.
That sometimes I wonder what he sees when I look at him.
“Are you busy?” I ask as Lilith bounds up to a workbench and starts hunting for something to slaughter. “I don’t want to bother you if you’re busy.”
“I’m not,” he reassures me. He’s walking outside, sun glinting on the platinum in his hair. “We just finished the site visit, and now we’re going back to the hotel until dinner to work in our rooms. God, I’ve missed your face.”
I duck my head a little, even though he’s not even here. But it makes me happy.
I’ve grown far, far too used to the way he makes me happy.
“I miss you too,” I murmur. “Even though we talked this morning.” And last night, and the night before that, Bell skipping drinks with his firm’s clients both nights so he could hole up in his hotel room and make me do unchaste things on video calls while he watched.
“It’s not enough,” he says, a thread of unhappiness entering his voice.
It’s not the playful pout he gets sometimes before I’m pounced on nor the grouchiness he gets before I leave for a shift at Buddy’s but something different.
Something almost wounded, like he’s personally betrayed by every minute we have to spend apart.
But before I can pin that unhappiness down in my mind, he’s tilting that grin at me again, the light changing over his face as he walks through his hotel lobby. “Show me what you’re working on today. Have you finished the sketch?”
“Yes.” I flip the camera around so he can see the paper I’ve tacked to a new basswood block.
The penitent criminal. I finished the impenitent criminal a week ago, all the refining work, sanding, etching, and oiling, and immediately flung myself into sketching the penitent criminal, his face already clear in my mind.
I’ve never finished a statue as fast as I did this last one; I’ve never jumped into another piece so quickly.
I haven’t been able to truly make anything for seven years, and a weary, frightened part of me was worried the first day in my new studio.
That I would set the chisel to the wood and then nothing would happen, that I would forget how to see the form trapped inside, how to listen to the burning voice only I could hear.
But something did happen.
And I didn’t forget.
It was like creation itself had been dammed up in my fingers, a surging and rolling fire of will, and now that it’s been unpent, I’m helpless in its tide.
I haven’t even needed models for the criminals because their faces were as clear in my mind as if they were in front of me, their contorted bodies already speaking to me from the grain of the wood.
God is speaking to me from the grain of the wood.
Was he waiting there all along, I wonder? And all I had to do was have enough faith to pick up a chisel again?
I tell all this to Bell as I walk around the first statue—he hasn’t seen it yet with the oiled finish—and then the new block of basswood.
I show him the clay model I made before I penciled the final to-scale sketch.
Bell is curious about everything, every choice, every line and curve.
His curiosity is electrifying, as is all his attention, but especially so when it’s about something that might as well be the unlocked gate to my soul.
Especially so because I never talk to anyone about my art, ever, not in the visceral way I experience it.
When Catholic magazines and newsletters asked questions, when local papers profiled me, what they really wanted was something that justified their own existence.
Catholic publications wanted me to speak about art in a way that locked in neatly with post-Tridentine doctrine; local papers wanted me to talk about just how local I was—my high school, my own local heroes, why I loved making things here and not some other, better-known place.
Bell wants to know the guts of it. Nothing already decided, no agenda beyond his obsession with knowing my mind. And inside his appetite to know my art, I find new revelations even for myself. New questions to ask. Things I’ve done instinctively that I wonder if I can do on purpose.
Like right now, he asks, “Why don’t you use a chainsaw for the initial paring down of the piece? It takes so much effort to get things trimmed with just a hatchet and a hacksaw, but you never take the easy way out. Why is that?”
My eyes move away from the screen to the finished criminal as I consider this. “It’s the way I’ve always done things,” I say.
I know Bell will want more than that, but he doesn’t rush me; he lets me think.
He lets me think. It seems so small, but it’s so rare, both his patience and his respect.
He doesn’t treat my sketching, chiseling mind as something that can be changed, chivied into quickness.
He waits, his attention never abating but never growing heavy either.
“It’s a form of devotion for me,” I explain, finally ready to shape this into words, no matter how little they might make sense to someone like Ryan Bell.
“All of it is the work of my hands. Each chip, every flake, they come off in the order they’re meant to, they come off with a music that echoes the music of cathedrals being built, altars being carved, even the work of Christ’s own hands when he was alive.
It’s meditative, a kind of prayer, and inside that prayer, I can touch my purpose, at large and also in the moment, with that particular piece of wood.
And every cut, every splinter, every time I wake up with sore arms or shoulders, I’m reminded of what my devotion is for. I thank God for giving it to me.”
Bell, who’s long since reached his hotel room and sat on his bed against the headboard, looks at me with an expression I can’t place. “I don’t think God deserves you, Birdie Cooper,” he tells me. “Any more than I do.”
My own reply is quiet. “Then I’m glad that neither relationship is up to me. I think maybe I’d rather be kept than deserved.”
A muscle twitches in his jaw and he looks away.
And I am as consumed as he is because I want to know everything he’s thinking right now, everything he’s feeling.
Is he feeling grateful that our deal is so carefully bounded?
Relieved that he doesn’t have to deserve me past the money he’s promised for Busy?
Angry maybe that I’d compared him to his divine enemy, God?
“Ry,” I prompt softly, and he looks back at me. And like I’ve seen so many times before, that mystifying expression shimmers into something good-natured and flirtatious. The Bell the rest of the world sees.
“What did you have for breakfast?” he asks, smiling and settling farther back against the headboard. “Something more interesting than a banana, I hope.”
I want to press. I want to ask what he was thinking and why he doesn’t want me to know, why sometimes he looks at me like I haven’t relinquished something that I was supposed to when I’ve already relinquished everything he’s ever asked for.
But I don’t press. I’m a coward…and honestly, who am I to press anyway?
I can understand that he craves more than sex from me, so I know I’m not only a whore, but I’m not much more either.
A paid companion, a mistress. A girlfriend experience, as Busy once put it when describing some time she’d spent in Nashville.
Not someone who has the right to demand emotional transparency.
So I answer his question instead, sitting at the workbench and dangling a strip of tracing paper for the kitten to bat at. “Toaster waffles,” I tell him. “With peanut butter and honey. Although there was no one here to cut them with a pizza cutter for me.”
A slow, knowing grin spreads across his face.