The Truth About Delilah Blue Read online

  Brilliant. Lila was no longer capable of leaving.

  Some students were poised, ready with sharpened graphite pressed to paper. Others were still taping paper to mason board, or digging supplies out from backpacks or small art boxes. Lila glanced at Lichty, whose expression immediately changed. He looked back at her with something nearing a smile, lifted his brows, and cocked his head, eyes blinking shut as he did. It was the sign she’d dreaded. Time to drop the robe.

  It isn’t porn.

  Art modeling was a noble profession. So said Fiona the model. Gone were the days when the only females willing to shed their vestments in the name of art were prostitutes and masked Victorians. It was the twenty-first century now. Women could shed their vestments in the name of just about anything. Or nothing at all.

  As long as their medical supplies salesman fathers didn’t find out.

  After sucking in a deep breath, Lila unbelted, let the robe slip off her shoulders, and clamped her eyes shut. She moved into her pose.

  Air rushed at her skin from every direction. So much so, she felt weightless again, hovering about a foot off the floor. She felt her nipples harden and closed her eyes, mortified. They say being blind makes your other senses sharpen. It may have been true, but so did stripping off your clothes in front of a roomful of strangers. Lila was first hit by scents so strong she could taste them. The fresh rubber of new erasers. The bitter snap of unused graphite. The stale robe at her feet.

  Every sound clawed at her eardrums with ragged nails. Excited whispers from the jock types in the far corner. The rustling of denim. From the right, a bored sigh. Closer, across from her left kneecap, a muffled cell phone.

  To dull her senses, she focused on her pose. It was one she wished she were drawing. A pose she’d try to recreate at home later with a vinyl skeleton swiped from her father’s supplies closet. Hands clasped behind her head to widen the upper back, a slight twist to the right to bend the spine, one leg leaning inward to hide parts she was not yet brave enough to expose.

  Lucky for her, the skeleton had no such modesty.

  A few giggles erupted from close by. Then soft footsteps drew near and stopped. She opened her eyes to see Lichty’s menacing stinger—nostrils barbed and cavernous and amplified to the point of absurdity by its nearness to her own—staring back at her.

  A smile unfurled beneath his nose, his mouth tightened with amusement, giving him the expression of someone hard at work on a candy, trying to crack away the peppermint shell before the chocolate center melted away. “Is this your first time modeling, Miss Mack?”

  “No.”

  “I see. While enthusiasm is a quality I prize in my studio, I ask that my models refrain from disrobing while I’m still explaining the day’s lesson. A naked body can be somewhat distracting. In the future—should there be a future for the two of us—you’ll keep your more clandestine bits under wraps until I’ve instructed you to do otherwise.”

  The roving chuckles erupted into a collective bark of laughter. Lichty shot the class a disapproving look, silencing the room in an instant.

  “Sorry.” She snatched up the robe and wrapped it around her torso, never more humiliated in her life. “I thought when you nodded—”

  “You’ll find, as far as human evolution goes, I’m fairly sophisticated. I don’t tend to communicate my desires in bobs and grunts. When I want you to drop robe and pose, I’ll simply ask for it. Are we clear?”

  “Yes.” A hot flush spread from Lila’s forehead down to her abdomen.

  “Resume your pose.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Drop the robe and pose, Miss Mack.”

  And so she did. Mercifully, the room filled with the chorus of graphite stroking plump white paper.

  “Begin with light, airy strokes, people. Stay away from strong lines. We want to build up our drawing. Be selective in your notice. A man with a pencil takes all that is in front of him no matter the result, but an artist takes only what he needs.” Lichty wound his way between the students and scrutinized Lila’s body as if it were a vase filled with wilting flowers. “Pay careful attention to model’s rib cage,” he boomed. “Prominent, near masculine in its musculature, its implied athleticism. Now look to model’s shoulders and biceps. In relation to the ribs, you might expect the upper arms to be robust and sturdy. Don’t let your mind fool you. The comparative scantiness of her arms may be disappointing to future lovers, but offers the artist a delicious lack of balance.”

  Lila dropped her arms and stared at him in disbelief. “What?”

  “Model does not speak!” Lichty’s voice echoed off bare walls. “Return to your pose.” When she did, he addressed the class. “Look for the unusual and play off it, people. Don’t be tempted to skip over the birthmark on her right hip. Draw it in all its geometric vulgarity.”

  This she could not argue. Doctors back in Toronto had said it would shrink. Or, rather, she would grow and the espresso-colored stain on her hip would not—the old optical illusion thing. But this particular birthmark—this nevus, this ambitious vascular lesion—had kept pace, galloping alongside her growth spurts like a determined Labrador chasing a Buick. These vigilant blood vessels never slept, not even through the excruciating summer between seventh and eighth grades when Lila sprouted three inches in sixty-one days and woke up each morning with bones that drummed and moaned from another California night spent growing.

  The Arabic called birthmarks wiham. “Wishes.” According to folklore, these wiham represented a desire the mother had while pregnant—one that went unfulfilled. Which made some sort of sense, as her mother was an artist and the birthmark was shaped like a jagged eraser. Not much of a wish, Lila supposed. Not unless you needed to make something vanish.

  Then again, other more ominous legends said a birthmark was the physical embodiment of a mother’s greatest fear.

  Another forty-five minutes of being dissected in the name of art and the naked was over. Lichty dismissed the class and sauntered over to Lila, she was dead sure, to inform her she was not to show foul mouth nor malformed body in his studio again. As she swathed her invisible bruises in the robe—never had a piece of unwashed clothing been more adored—the man looked at her and blinked. “There’s a quiet sadness, an ethereal sort of sufferance, to you I find appealing. The challenge you offer to these students is to not only recognize the pain that pulses just beneath the surface of your skin, but to capture it in a way that makes the observer wince.”

  He might as well have kicked her in the gut. Her wind was gone, her chest hurt, and she gulped for whatever oxygen she could swallow. How dare he presume to know her like this? It was one thing to criticize her frame, another thing entirely to x-ray her soul and assess what he saw.

  He continued, “I have a multimedia class at ten tomorrow morning in the music building, north wing. Studio three-F. An usual place for a studio, so plan to get lost your first time.”

  Lila’s shout came out as a whisper. “No.”

  “You can’t?”

  “I won’t.”

  He was clearly a man unaccustomed to hearing the word no. His eyebrows arched skyward. “Am I to understand you are refusing to do my class?”

  “No. I’m refusing you.” She spun on her soon-to-be-booted heel, feeling Adam’s eyes on her as she snapped the changing-room curtain shut.

  Two

  Victor Mack leaned over his desk, swiped silver hair from his eyes, and stared down at the half dozen powdered jellies. Straight from the oven, the girl at the store had assured him through her cottony lisp.

  He poked at one and watched the dough submit and spring back again. No longer warm, but seemed fresh enough. He’d never liked powdered jellies himself—messy creatures with a tendency to relieve themselves atop one’s trousers if one wasn’t nimble with a napkin. Other than being propped in two neat rows of three, the arrangement of pastries was less than aesthetically pleasing with holes pointed every which way to Tuesday. Victor reached into the box and
shuffled the donuts around until the vulgar little assholes were hidden from view.

  Seemed the gentlemanly thing to do.

  The treats weren’t for him. Genevieve was her name. Not insanely young, somewhere about the tail end of her forties—an energetic, capable type with a tidy brown haircut, lips shaped like tulips, and melon-colored hospital scrubs to match the lips. She was the kind of woman who knew how to make a man feel as if he mattered. Always remembered his coffee. Always stocked his cream.

  Gen managed the front desk of the Fairfax Institute, a psychiatric facility in Santa Monica he’d been calling on for years. She’d celebrated her birthday a few weeks back, and he’d walked in just as her coworkers presented her with a powdered jelly—her favorite, she announced just before she blew out the candle.

  He would swing by after calling on a potential client not far from there, some hotshot new group of chiropractors looking for exam tables, machinery, skeletons—the works. He’d practically sealed the deal over the phone. Stopping by was really just a formality. By two-thirty that afternoon he should be handing in a signed contract worth about $75,000 with a commission of nearly five grand. It was the kind of order he needed to reinstate his position in the company. He glanced at the brass plaques on the wall above the filing cabinet. Top salesman at RoyalCrest Medical Distributors seven years running, a streak that ended only when Blair Austen and his kamikaze closing tactics joined the team two years prior.

  Anyway, Gen. Victor would be in a good mood by the time he arrived, his briefcase fat with the chiropractors’ contract. He’d pull into the driveway, coast past the facility’s ochre stucco facade, with ivy that scrabbled up from the ground and swallowed the entire south side of the building, along the narrow laneway to the best parking spot in Los Angeles: a spacious, almost silky-smooth concrete pad conveniently sprawled out beneath a row of tall, but crowded, queen palms all graceful and green and bushy. If he arrived well after noon, they would shade his pristine and sporty 240Z—circa 1973, before Datsun morphed into Nissan—like a dream.

  He would leave his briefcase and contract in the car. Totter inside with his box. Set the donuts on her reception desk and ask her to eat dinner with him. They still did that, didn’t they? It had been a while for Victor. He didn’t mind admitting he was out of practice. Anyway, it didn’t have to be dinner. Coffee would work just as well. There was just something about the soothing creases at the corners of Genevieve’s smiling eyes he couldn’t get out of his head.

  He was a sucker for a female. It had always been that way. Growing up in north Toronto, the only child of a medical researcher father and librarian mother, with no cousins to speak of, Victor had but the most fleeting contact with girls. He saw them at school and in the playground, but it was as if they were a different species entirely. He could never relate to them with any sense of ease. When a girl plopped down next to him in the school cafeteria and asked if he’d pass the ketchup, an alarm sounded in his head. Danger! You’re talking to a girl!

  How easy life might have been if he’d had a sister to normalize—maybe even taint—the gender. Surely he’d never have married Elisabeth. He’d have been able to keep his thoughts in order the first time she flipped her curls out of the way to get a good look at him that night at the pub. Or giggled the way she did, with the tip of her tongue trapped between perfectly square white teeth.

  How different his life might have turned out.

  And then there was Lila. From the moment she pushed her tiny fingers out of the pink swaddling blanket in the delivery room and gripped his index finger, he’d felt it. His new reality: that he’d spin the world the wrong way on its axis to do what was right for her, no matter what the cost.

  What he hadn’t fully considered, all those years ago, was what his love would cost his daughter. And that his remorse would grow and mature as she did. For some fool reason, he’d expected it to fade.

  He stood up and crossed the room, bent his fifty-three-year-old frame down, and pulled open the bottom drawer of his file cabinet, stared at the rows of ties lining the drawer. Victor kept a log of which tie was worn on which sales call, and once a tie had completed the rounds, it was retired to his bedroom at home for everyday use. Sometimes Lila swiped them and used them to hold back her hair while painting, but Victor didn’t mind. By that time they’d served their purpose.

  Ties were to a salesman what a necklace was to a woman. A finishing touch. An expression of personality, of success. It was Victor’s trademark. Lila teased him about it, laughed and called him a dandy, a glamour boy. He didn’t mind. She was still a child, far too young to see the importance of not letting your clients see you in the same tie twice. It kept his image fresh, and made for easy chitchat before he pulled out the product catalogs and laid his signing pen on the table. Keeping track of the ties wasn’t easy—then again, the important things in life never were.

  Pale gray paisley caught his eye—the silvery shade should complement his graying beard. A birthday gift from his assistant earlier in the year, this one had never been worn. He pulled it out of the drawer and slipped it around his neck. It was a tie he’d been saving for a special day. Today seemed about right.

  HE DIDN’T MARCH through the doors at Fairfax feeling quite as elated as he’d hoped. One of the Starkman sales reps had beat him to the chiropractors. The rep, Margie Kwinter, serviced them so well, in fact, that all they needed from Victor was the box of free RoyalCrest mugs he’d set on the reception desk when he walked in. Then, after battling the multiheaded, fire-breathing beast that was crosstown traffic in Los Angeles at noon on a Tuesday, he found his favorite Fairfax parking spot occupied by a filthy teal moped with a sticker that read CAUTION: BLIND DRIVER.

  There was no justice.

  After parking on the street—too close to a team of orange-vested city workers jackhammering a hole in the sidewalk for his comfort—and after a final check in the rearview mirror, he gathered Gen’s donuts and made his way past the construction, hoping his daughter had had the good sense to at least consider the glossy program from Connelly School of Business Management he’d left on the kitchen table that morning.

  The combination of velvety silence and cool air that met him as he stepped inside invited him to pause for a moment and collect himself. Best not to appear at Gen’s desk all leaky and swollen with heat before uttering the words, “Eat with me tonight, please.” He followed the curved wall that led to reception and waited patiently as Noreen, the part-time girl who covered Gen’s lunch breaks and sick days, folded an elderly patient into his wheelchair and told the orderly where he should be taken. Once Noreen settled herself back in her chair, she glanced up at Victor and smiled.

  “Well. Mr. Mack. Did you have an appointment with purchasing?” She shuffled through her book. “I don’t have anything written down here.”

  “No, not today.” He peered past Noreen to the rows of colored files, expecting to find Gen kneeling down with a stack of patient records on her lap, but found the area empty. Not unusual. Gen was ambitious. She’d been taking nursing classes at night and had been assuming duties more directly related to patient care. “Will you please page Genevieve for me?”

  Noreen looked surprised. “Genevieve?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But Gen’s gone. Her big trip to Greece, remember? She showed us the brochure for that villa in Santorini. The place with the little blue gate.” She reprimanded Victor with a cluck of her tongue.

  Of course. There’d been a backpack-laden donkey climbing a hill in one of the photos, and he’d teased Gen about donkeys being used as cabs. They’d had the discussion not five days ago. He’d spent the weekend imagining her walking, bikinied and sunburned, along the beach with black sand, and trying not to imagine her falling for one of the local men. It wasn’t possible he’d forgotten. And yet he had.

  “You do remember, don’t you?”

  “Of course. Idiotic of me.” He stepped backward lest she see the hot flush spreading up
from his collar. “You know, I think I was looking at next week in my agenda. My assistant must have left it open to the wrong spot. My fault for not checking first.”

  “Did you want to leave a message for when she’s back?”

  “No. Thanks. No message.”

  He wandered outside and leaned against the stucco facade, blinking into the midday glare and trying for the life of him to fathom where the hole in his memory had come from.

  Three

  Lila marched up the winding road, her cutoffs doing little to shield her legs from the merciless afternoon sun. To make matters of roasted flesh worse, it was possible the sole of her left boot was worn clear through and her kneesock was all that protected her foot from the sizzling griddle that was Rykert Canyon Boulevard.

  The city bus didn’t penetrate this area. It made the one stop at Rykert Canyon and Moreland Street, then chugged off in the opposite direction. Since her first day of high school, Lila had skidded up and down the dust-covered hills to and from 71 Palo Verde Pass in her slippery-soled boots, never once succumbing to mounting paternal pressure that she consider footwear with better traction.

  She turned the corner, relieved to be shaded by a stretch of elegant and towering Eucalyptus trees, with their hairy bark and leathery gray leaves. Vines weighed down the branches and tickled the pavement, and Lila slowed down to weave in and out of them as if they were beaded curtains. The hill, parched from a long summer, sloped straight up on this side of the street, so front doors and peeling wooden gates fronted directly onto the asphalt. Houses across the way—houses like her own—sat so low on the hillside they were mostly unseen, crouched beneath the road as if hiding from view.