Cooper pulled her keys from her pocket and opened the door to her studio, careful to keep her right hand in her parka. “And one glove. Do you want to see them?”
Inside, Calhoun was taken by the mittens. He loved the mittens: he wanted to own them. After Cooper gave him the spiel—It’s a study of both the humility of the simple garment and the hubris of our belief that it protects us from this savage continent—he offered to buy all four of them, including the triptych, on the spot. “I don’t know much about art, but these—they speak to me.” He wandered over to the canvas on the easel, the one covered by a dropcloth. “What else you got?” He pinched the fabric between his fingers. “May I?”
“Sure, but I warn you—that one’s not a mitten,” Cooper said. Calhoun pulled the cloth from the canvas, revealing her portrait of Bozer. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, his shining face seemed to take on a Wizard of Oz quality, hovering over them like a strange apparition. The bandanna was gone, revealing a long-ago-receded hairline and a broad, veiny forehead; a pair of untidy eyebrows held court over 7Up-clear eyes that looked beyond the viewer. The mustache and beard had been shorn clean, and left behind pink skin in their place. While the underlying structure of his face was built of clean, strong lines—having been painted before Cooper’s injury—the rest of the portrait had a soft, almost tremulous feel to it.
“That looks like the fella from the bar,” he said. “Except I believe he had a beard.”
Cooper pulled her right hand from her parka pocket to drape the cloth back over the portrait. “It’s not finished; I didn’t have time to get to some of the details, and I—”
“So it’s you,” he said. Cooper realized he was staring at her bandaged hand. “You’re the girl from the Divide.” He looked from her face, to her hand, back to her face. “They told us you were a painter.” He furrowed his brow. “Why the hell haven’t you left this place? Don’t you have people?”
“I have people. My people are here.”
“You didn’t want to go home?”
Calhoun’s question took Cooper aback. “Home?”
“Home,” Calhoun said. “The place where you live? Where you’ve got roots? You got people waiting on you, don’t you?”
Cooper had not thought of home for weeks. Not of her father, her mother, not even, aside from their e-mails, of Billie. They belonged to another world now—a parallel universe, one of Sal’s branes. And while at some point that world would collide with this one, the long rebound pulling them apart was welcome.
“I am home,” Cooper said quietly.
Calhoun shook his head, and moved on to the nearly finished portrait of Pearl, which Cooper had set against the back wall—she had only to strengthen the background and shadow tones. Calhoun snuck another glance at Cooper’s hand. “Did the accident affect your ability to, ah, to do this kind of work?”
“I lost a finger on my dominant hand,” Cooper said. “So, yeah, it changed things. I’m not able to be as precise as I used to be.” She surveyed Pearl. “But now I know that precision rarely tells the whole story.”
“Aren’t you angry? I’d be as mad as hell.” When Cooper didn’t respond, he added, “Proverbs says, ‘Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.’”
“I know a better one.”
“What is it?”
“‘If you are fearful, you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery.’”
Calhoun seemed deeply moved. “Ecclesiastes?”
“Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Of the Scott party. He’s sort of my spirit animal.”
“Scott. They told us about him on the ride down here. Poor bastard. All that, just to come in second place. Never heard of this Cherry character, though. With that kind of name, he had to be a little—hey, you okay?”
To Cooper’s surprise, the static of a developing sob was filling her chest; she tried, unsuccessfully, to cough it away.
“I’m sorry,” Cooper said when she’d recovered. “It’s just that talking about Cherry—” She glanced up at Calhoun and saw incomprehension on his face. “That talking about Scott makes me think of my twin brother. He was big into polar exploration. He died last year.”
Calhoun’s mouth quivered slightly. “I’m sorry.”
There it was again—that thing in Calhoun’s face that she had seen in the bar. Cooper had no idea what it was, only that she felt compelled to tell him about David, even if there was nothing that indicated Calhoun would even be interested. “We used to pretend we were members of the Scott party, back when we were kids. He was always Titus, I was always Cherry. Never made sense, because Cherry wasn’t on the final slog—all he did was stand around waiting—but we never cared. Titus was the injured guy who walked into the blizzard in order to save the others—he was the hero.”
“A true act of selflessness,” Calhoun said. He clasped his hands in front of him and dropped his head, as if preparing to pray. “A true act of selflessness.” Suddenly, he began fumbling with the zipper on his parka. He seemed to have no clue how it worked. “I want to show you something,” he said earnestly. When he saw Cooper’s skeptical face, he guffawed. “Nothing like that.” So Cooper reached over and helped him unzip his parka. He pointed to the lapel of his new North Face thermal. A glittering brooch in masculine red, white, and blue rhinestones had been pinned on the left breast. Cooper noted that it spelled out the words Let’s Roll.
“Bayless makes me wear this damn pin wherever we go,” he said.
“United Flight Ninety-three,” Cooper murmured.
Calhoun nodded. “He says it buys political and social capital. I was nowhere near when it happened. I was in Scottsdale, for god’s sake.”
By simply listening to him, Cooper had unleashed something in Calhoun. It was as if no one had ever listened to him before. He told her he was a widower, that his wife’s death from ovarian cancer had helped his last reelection campaign, even though it had destroyed him and his kids. His campaign manager had felt it necessary to use his bereavement to his benefit, and it had worked. Still, he told Cooper he was a failure as a legislator. His bills went nowhere, his committee assignments were unimportant. He despised his constituents, didn’t even really believe in his politics anymore, didn’t understand why they cared more about teaching evolution in the schools than the fact that they couldn’t find good-paying jobs. But what else did he have? He was a sixty-three-year-old man with nothing—no job offers from lobbying firms, no universities eager to get him behind a lectern. Then one day, his campaign manager had called him at his home, saying a large donor was interested in making a substantial contribution to the campaign. “And he says ‘when I say “substantial,” I’m talking seven-figs substantial.’ I get these guys on the phone—they don’t tell me who they are right away—and I say, ‘What’s the catch?’ They tell me they need help protecting the integrity of science. Why would I say no to that?”