As Tiffany stormed out, Simone thought: Her left shoulder’s just a fraction lower than her right. Then went into the stall and threw up the fancy salad and Kir Royale.
When she got back to the table, her mother and sister had their heads together, laughing.
“I’m sorry. I need to go.”
“Oh, Simone, we just ordered dessert.” Natalie reached up for her hand.
“I’m sorry.” How many times would she say that today? she wondered.
“Just because we disagree doesn’t—” Tulip’s quiet tirade stopped in midstream. “Simone, you’re white as a sheet.”
“I’m not feeling well. I—”
Tulip got up quickly, rounded the table. “You sit. Sit a minute. I’ll get you some fresh water.”
“This is fine.” Water, she thought. Yes, some water. But her hand trembled a little. “Honestly, I need to go. A little air.”
“Yes. Some air. Natalie, stay here. I’m going to walk your sister outside.” She slid her arm around Simone’s waist. “We’ll get our coats. I have the check.”
Smooth, efficient Tulip retrieved their coats, helped Simone into hers. “Take my beret. You should have worn a hat.” She steered Simone out to a patio festively decorated for the holidays.
“Now tell me what happened.”
“It’s nothing. Just a headache.”
“Don’t lie to me. Give me some credit for knowing my own child. Give me some respect.”
“I’m sorry.” There it was again. “You’re right. I need to walk. I need to breathe.”
“We’ll walk. You’ll breathe. And you’ll tell me what happened.”
“In the restroom. Tiffany Bryce.”
“Do we know her?”
“I went to school with her. She was in the theater that night.”
“Of course. I know her stepmother a little. She—they—have had a very difficult time.”
“Yes. She told me.”
“I know it’s hard for you to be reminded, but—”
“She blames me.”
“What?” Absently, Tulip brushed at her hair as the wind disturbed it. “Of course she doesn’t.”
“She does, and she made that clear. She got shot in the face. I didn’t. Nothing happened to me.”
“It happened to all of us, whether or not we were physically injured. All of us.” Now she gripped Simone’s hand. “What did she say to you, sweetie?”
“She gave me a recount of her injuries, harangued me for not having any. And told me I should’ve died. That she wished I had.”
“I don’t care what happened to her, she had no right to say that. It’s very likely she would have died without what you did that night.”
“Don’t say that. Please, don’t say that. I don’t want to be thought of that way.”
“You were brave and you were smart, and don’t you ever, ever forget it.” She took Simone by the shoulders. “That girl’s bitter and angry, and I can forgive that. But what she said to you is wrong and hateful. You said in there you wouldn’t disappoint or embarrass me. Don’t disappoint me now and take one single thing she said to heart.”
“I hated her. That night, before, when she came in with Trent, so smug and dismissive of me. I hated her. And now…”
“Now you’ve grown up, and she, obviously, hasn’t changed a bit. Not everyone changes, Simone. Not everyone can move through and beyond a tragedy.”
Simone let her head drop to her mother’s shoulder. “Sometimes I’m still stuck there. In that bathroom stall.”
“Then—God, I’m going to sound like my mother—open the door. You have, and you’ll keep opening it. Even if I don’t like where it takes you. I love you, Simone. Maybe that’s why you constantly exasperate me. I mean, honestly, why do you do that to your hair?”
Simone managed a watery laugh. “You’re bringing up my hair to take my mind off the rest.”
“That may be, but I still can’t understand why you’d chop it off and dye it hellfire red.”
“I must’ve been in a hellfire mood when I did.” She drew back, then kissed her mother’s cheek. “Thank you. I’m better, but I don’t want to go back in. I couldn’t face dessert anyway.”
“Are you well enough to drive?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry.”
“I will, so you’ll text me when you’re at your grandmother’s.”
“Okay. Tell Nat—”
“I intend to tell Natalie exactly what happened so we can gossip about that stupid, ugly woman over dessert and coffee.”
This time the laugh came easier. “I love you, Mom. That must be why you constantly exasperate me.”
“I’ll give you one touché. Your color’s better. Text me—and have CiCi make you one of her crazy teas.”
“I will.”
Rather than go through the club, she walked around the building to her car. She hadn’t wanted to come, she thought, and couldn’t claim she’d had a good time of it.
But she could be glad she’d come. However strange and awful, the fences got mended, and they felt stronger for it now.
Maybe they could keep them that way awhile.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Simone couldn’t forget Tiffany’s face—the before, and the now.
She couldn’t forget the smugness on it then, the anger on it now. They pushed and prodded at her, both sides of the coin: the smugness of the young girl who prized her own beauty, and the anger of the woman who believed she’d lost it.
While she worked, those faces revolved in her head.
She’d never gone back to the DownEast Mall or any other. She’d never sat in a movie theater again. She’d done everything to push that night and all that surrounded it out of her mind. Away from her life.
Now, with that single encounter, those two faces playing through her head, that night and all that surrounded it pushed into her.
Unable to block it out, she made it a project. She sketched Tiffany’s face at sixteen from memory: the well-balanced features, the confident, blossoming beauty, the perfect sweep of hair.
Then she sketched the now, the woman who’d confronted her at the club: the scarring, the slight drooping of the left eye, the drawn-up lip, the reconstructed left ear.
Flawed, she thought, studying the two faces, visibly flawed. But hardly monstrous. In fact, as an artist, she found the second face more interesting.
But … Did the anger come from being reminded, every time she looked in the mirror? Did the horror flood back? Instead of being able to shut it away, move on, the results of that single night lived in the face in the mirror.
Wouldn’t it take a particular kind of strength and resolve to face that and move on?
How could she criticize? How could she dismiss that anger and resentment when she’d refused to face her own? She’d just locked hers away.
Rising, she walked to the window. Outside, snow fell soft out of moody gray skies and piled in soft mounds on the rocks. The water blurred with the sky, and winter closed off everything but that water, that sky.
The quiet and peace, the solitude of winter on the island spread before her. The chaos and ugliness of that long ago summer night waited behind.
She heard Tiffany’s voice in her head.
You walked away without a scratch.
“No. No, I didn’t. So…”
On a deep breath, she turned.
She chose her tools, her clay.
Half-scale, she thought as she spread out some canvas and began to roll clay into a rectangle. She could stop anytime, she assured herself. Or just change directions. But if she wanted the faces out of her head, maybe she needed to make them real.
She trimmed the slab of clay before rolling it, bending it into a cylinder. Once she’d flipped it vertically, she used her hands to smooth the walls. She cut the angles, scored, overlapped, joined, compressing the seams, created the void.
The practical, the technical, came first, laid the foundation.
She sketched the outline of the face with a rounded tip, checked proportions.
With her hands, she began to shape it. Eye sockets, forehead, nose, adding clay, pushing from the inside of the cylinder for cheeks, cheekbones, chin.
She could see it just as her hands could feel it. A female face—still any female face.
Depressions, indentions, mounds.
Thinking of the then, the now, the smug, the bitter, she turned the clay to do the same on the opposing side.
The two sides, she thought, of a life.