A/N: Hot off the press . . . so you pay your money and you take your chances with this one. I couldn't crank out chapters for both Burned and Journey's End this weekend, but I'm going to shoot for getting out a new chapter of JE next weekend. For those of you who are interested, I've finally figured out what to do with my profile page. I'm putting story ideas on it, B&W stuff, non-B&W stuff. Reset readers - I'm trying to keep to my schedule for it (I think), which would mean the week after next? Yeesh . . . . oh, and there's sex in this chapter.
Pete hadn't asked her how the meeting with Bobby Olson had gone, but Myka felt compelled to volunteer the briefest of summaries, if only because, temporarily allowing herself to be visited by Helena's paranoia, she wanted it on record with someone in authority that she and Helena had questioned Bobby about the stolen jewels, just in case anyone asked. They were sitting at the conference table in Pete's office, well past working hours, and he had his hand in a family-size bag of M&Ms, pretending to listen to her. "Okay," he said, tipping his head back and throwing some M&Ms into the air, his mouth not quite big enough or fast enough to catch all of them. As a few dropped onto the table, Myka attributed the misses to speed (or lack thereof) rather than size because she was comfortable in her assessment that he could gulp down the bag itself were someone to toss it up for him. "Stress eating," he said, picking up the ones he had missed and popping them into his mouth. "Amanda and I are expecting number three."
"Do you want my congratulations?"
He cocked his eyes at the ceiling before rolling them back to look at her. "Get back to me about that in a week, after I've stopped peeing my pants at the thought." He drove his hand into the bag again. "Nothing like a baby on the way to make you decide whether you're serious about someone. Just saying, if you're on the fence about Sam. . . ."
"I'm not going to shoot craps with a fetus, Pete," she said it more irritably than she had intended. She knew he was only joking.
"I'm sure you have all of Sam's little soldiers wearing protective gear. No unintended consequences for you." She could have sworn he said "Or fun" under his breath, but he was too busy trying to catch the shower of M&Ms raining down on them. His jaw was opening and snapping shut so fast as he chased the M&Ms that he reminded her of a fish scouring the surface of a fish tank for food.
What was it about her and kids suddenly? Or, more accurately, what was it with other people talking about her and kids? On Sunday it had been Helena and Jemma; on Tuesday, when she had snagged Steve for five minutes to ask him to take over for her on the following Sunday, he had squinted at her curiously and said, "I thought you and Christina were best buddies, you know, as much as a four-year-old and someone who's 30 years older can be." Now it was Pete. She had never seriously thought about having children. It was a conversation that, when she and Sam were married, they had mutually agreed to put off having for five years and, of course, by the time the five years were up, they were already divorced.
Maybe she was a little sensitive about the subject because she felt, absurdly, that she was letting Christina down. She had been telling herself since Sunday that Christina wouldn't care which agent accompanied Helena on her visits, but she feared her self-assurances weren't entirely true. While she didn't seriously entertain Jemma's suggestion that she and Helena and Christina were becoming a "unit" - for one thing, it would require that she and Helena express more than their distrust and resentment of each other - she knew how important routines could be for kids, especially if they had already experienced a major disruption in their lives. At least she had always been able to count on Warren Bering's disapproval; in fact, it was those rare moments when he seemed to suspend his criticism that had unnerved her the most as a child.
She didn't like the thought that she was the one introducing a change to Helena's Sunday visits; predictable, reliable, responsible Myka didn't not show up just because someone said or did something that got under her skin. Wasn't she proving Jemma right by not picking up Helena and driving out to the island on Sunday? Christ, she was acting just like her father, making a child pay for her fit of pique. Then Pete, with his impeccable sense of timing, decided to play the boss, the clown only half-successfully catching, and eating, the candy he tossed at his mouth becoming the team leader decisively assigning cases - and other tasks.
"It's about time for an unscheduled visit to Foxy Mama's lair. Why don't you and Steve plan to do that tomorrow night?"
"I thought Steve and I were surveilling DeWitt."
"And he's done nothing for a week, right? Maybe he got spooked or maybe he's catching up on his favorite shows on Netflix." Pete folded down the bag of M&Ms. "I don't want her getting comfortable, Mykes. I'm getting pushed by Justice. She needs to tell us how she's going to deliver Burdette."
"We're working on something, I promise," she said, trying to keep the impatience out of her voice. It was one thing to be noticeably irritable with Pete when he was being her friend, it was another when he was being her boss. While she didn't like the humid discomfort of sitting in a parked car with the AC off for hours at a stretch, she didn't like the feeling of giving up on DeWitt either. She knew that Pete wasn't jettisoning the case just as she knew that Christina's disappointment at not seeing her on Sunday would be fleeting at best, but she felt that both, the unproductive surveilling of DeWitt and her decision to have Steve pull watchdog duty on Sunday, pointed to some flaw in her. She also knew there was no connection between those two things and Pete's assigning her to search Helena's apartment, but it felt like punishment all the same. Grouchily she complained, "Isn't there someone else you can send?"
"Not when the point we want to make is that we're not her friends."
"I think she's pretty clear on that."
"Then she shouldn't have a problem with you going through her undies drawer. She may not like it, but she'll know it's your job." His look was cool. "Unless you have a problem with it, and if you do, I'd like to know that now."
Here was her out. It would be graceless, she would look like someone who couldn't do what was asked of her, but would it be any worse than the humiliation she had gone through after the Marston Gallery heist? Helena had a plan, and if she could convince Justice that it would work, she would be assigned another agent, that was all that would happen. Myka needed only to say the words. I can't do it. She's too much for me, she always was. I have feelings, I don't know what all of them are, but they're too many. It didn't happen nine years ago or eight years ago, it happened yesterday, it's happening now -
"No problem," she heard herself say.
"Good." Pete slapped the table. "Let's blow this popsicle stand." He grinned at her, friend again, partner again, the boss and team leader put away for the day, but she couldn't be any more truthful with this Pete than with the other one. "Gotta stop by a store on the way home. Flowers, 'cause I want to show her that I'm happy about this, and maybe I'll start stocking up on the Cheerios, just in case she has morning sickness with this one too. Only thing she could ever keep down."
Tracy's brush with morning sickness had been so slight as to have been nonexistent, and she hadn't had the cravings either, but she had had the back problems and the hemorrhoids. Pregnancy, captured in monthly phone calls and experienced more than half a continent away, had always seemed to Myka a strangely lengthy irruption marked mainly by complaints and urgings for the baby to "just get here already." It came, it lasted, it went away, she had no sense of it as a process, of one phase leading into the next. She might feel differently about it if she had had to live with it. But Pete had talked about Amanda's pregnancies only when they had negatively impinged on his work; he wouldn't be in the office until later in the morning because Amanda had a doctor's appointment, he hadn't slept the night before for Amanda's tossing and turning, he was eating Myka's Twizzlers because all there was to eat in the house was Cheerios and while he liked cereal as much as the next man, he could eat only so much of it. Unbidden images of Helena eating endless bowls of pistachio pudding or holding her hand over her mouth at the smell of popcorn or adjusting a heating pad behind her back flitted through Myka's mind. Had anyone been there to make the pudding for her or to throw the popcorn into the garbage or had Helena, like the cat Christina sometimes pretended she was, scratched out a sanctuary where she could hunker down, alone, and given birth there?
Myka rolled the beer bottle across her forehead. The headache had started before she finished locking her desk drawers for the night and continued through a workout during which she hadn't so much listened to the music blaring through her ear buds as she had used it as a soundtrack for that stupid weekend that she and Helena had spent in the Berkshires. She hadn't thought about it for years, but ever since Helena had shown her the warehouse where she had worked on her forgeries, Myka hadn't been able to stop thinking about it, not entirely. Crossing her feet on a coffee table that held no magazines, no books, no coffee, only a coaster to absorb the condensation from the bottle and a take-out container of partially eaten noodles, she lectured herself that it was these breaks in her self-control and in the discipline of her thought that had had her almost asking to be taken off the assignment. Obsessing about how Christina would take her no-show on Sunday, thinking about the trip to the Berkshires, and now having images of a pregnant Helena lodged in her mind, she was letting herself be consumed by the case but not in the way she wanted to be or should be. Her phone, almost swallowed by the gap between the sofa cushions, began to buzz; it was Sam, asking her if she wanted company. Not really, but she was in need of a distraction.
He had tried his best, but as it had been between them lately, he rolled away in sleepy satisfaction while she stared at the ceiling half the night. Looking at Sam in the gray light of the early morning, the drapes, partially drawn across the balcony doors, succeeding only in filtering the sunlight, not blocking it, Myka realized she was thinking of Helena and thinking that the only thing she and Sam seemed to share was how deeply they slept. Those secure in their place in the fight against injustice and those secure in their indifference to it, they slept well and easily. The others, Myka smiled wryly to herself, they were the ones who watched their clocks and stared at the ceilings. She had twenty minutes before her alarm went off and she had already been watching it for twenty minutes. They had set no alarm in that bedroom in the Berkshires, certainly not that first night and not the next one, their last one. Their flight back to New York wasn't until 4:00, and Helena had been anxious that Myka rested as much as she could.
She had been clumsy, which was never surprising but even less so that day since she had been wearing hiking shoes that she hadn't yet had a chance to break in, because she had bought them only that morning, along with her trail pants, pullover, and a factory-distressed broad-brimmed hat that Helena had talked her into with the impish observation that it gave her a dash of Indiana Jones. They had been walking a trail, exclaiming over the views when they came upon breaks in the growth that showed them the surrounding hills, burning red and gold and orange. It must have been a rock or a twig under the sole of her shoe, and the shoe had been too stiff, too new for her to move in it as she would a shoe that had molded itself to the shape of her foot, and she had fallen, twisting her ankle as she went down. It didn't feel like a bad sprain initially, but she hadn't been able to walk it off, and Helena had to help her back down the trail when the pain grew too intense, bearing Myka's weight as Myka hopped on one leg beside her, arm slung around the back of Helena's shoulders. With patient good-humor and a concern calibrated to sound sufficiently unconcerned, Helena had shepherded her into their car and then, once back at the bed and breakfast, up the stairs to their room. Elevating Myka's foot on a stack of pillows, she had gotten ice and extra hand towels from the bed and breakfast's owner and prepared to examine the ankle.
Myka had glared at her foot, rapidly swelling in tandem with her ankle now that it had been released from its shoe, and, with equal frustration, had sworn at her talent for ruining, by one means or another, an occasion that was supposed to be fun and spending more money than she could afford on a spur-of-the-moment trip that was clearly turning out to be a waste of the money. She had cringed when Helena had carefully rolled down her sock. Exposing your feet wasn't quite as intimate an act as undressing in front of someone, but Myka believed that it came in a close second. If given a choice, she might choose to show her breasts instead of her feet. Her breasts were nicely shaped and of equal size, not that she was seeking a lot of outside confirmation that she had a pretty good set, but her feet . . . . It wasn't that she didn't try to take care of them, but she wasn't someone who went in for pedicures. She didn't paint her toenails with nail polish and she didn't use a pumice stone on every callus. Her feet were big too, long and with long toes. All she needed was a big shiny corn on one of her toes to complete the picture. But Helena was indifferent to the state of Myka's foot, gently probing her ankle and reassuring the both of them that the injury appeared to be nothing more than a sprain.
That night, her foot throbbing on its pillows, Myka had watched and listened to Helena sleep on the love seat. She squirmed more and she muttered more, and she snored - it wasn't very loud and, frankly, to be expected, given that the only halfway comfortable position on the love seat seemed to be one in which Helena was flat on her back with her legs hooked over the love seat's arm. But when Myka softly called out to her, during prolonged bouts of squirming or muttering, to come to the bed, Helena never responded, her restlessness no dependable indicator, it turned out, of how well she was sleeping.
Sam snuffled, as though he sensed the alarm was about to go off, and inched a tentative hand toward Myka. She sometimes wondered if he did it from a buried instinct to make sure that he knew who was in the bed beside him before he said the wrong name. She didn't think he was sleeping with anyone else but part of this . . . thing . . . they had was not to ask questions like that. Risky and stupid, true, and unlike her in some respects, but it was safer than forcing their feelings, whatever they were, out into the open. So, damn right, Sam's little soldiers, as Pete had called them, could march no farther than the end of a condom and, in the event that one or two somehow made their way out, they would meet a barrage of chemical agents, courtesy of whatever super-strength spermicide she had picked up at the drugstore. There would be no miniature Sams or Mykas; this "thing" couldn't encompass that "thing."
"Hey," Sam said, slowly, sleepily blinking one eye at her.
"Hey," she returned, smiling as Helena pushed herself up from the love seat, sleek, smooth black hair rumpled and bent at odd angles. She shook herself free of the blankets she had slept in and unself-consciously stretched, abdomen rising from low-slung panties and breasts nippling under the camisole as the cooler air of the room worked through the fabric. It was sexy and strangely comforting at the same time to see Helena padding about the room, the cheeks of her butt flexing and unflexing as she stooped to pick up the clothes she had bought yesterday, a decidedly not trail-worthy cashmere v-neck sweater complementing a pair of jeans so tight-fitting that had she worn a shirt underneath her sweater she wouldn't have had room to tuck it in.
Sexy, comforting, nice, the package Helena seemed to offer hadn't been enough to make Myka fall for her then; it would be months before they became lovers. But Helena had begun to inhabit Myka's space in a way that other co-workers and colleagues didn't. Daily proximity to those she worked with required that she redefine her personal boundaries. People she didn't know or like, or liked but didn't want to know any better, they crowded her space, sat next to her at meetings, hung out in her cubicle, handed her files and took the files that she handed to them. It was like walking through crowds; people touched her yet they didn't, not really. An intimacy that carried no significance, had no meaning, so that it didn't matter to her whether Linda was virtually breathing down her neck as she completed her portion of a report that was overdue to Bates or another agent. Pete had managed to cross those boundaries and create a Pete-shaped space so well-defined that she frequently knew when he was navigating the cube farm to get to her cubicle before he arrived. But the space that Helena was creating for herself . . . no, that wasn't the difference. Pete, with his horrible jokes and utter lack of discretion, he had barreled his way in once they were assigned as partners. Since they were going to be depending on each other, he was going to ensure that the back she was going to protect was a back she loved. Helena wasn't banging and thumping her way in; Myka was creating the space for her and all but putting out the welcome mat, Helena had only to step over the threshold.
As Sam gathered his clothes and took them into the bathroom with him, Myka had no difficulty visualizing his routine. He would pee and wash himself down quickly, the wet washcloth sometimes landing on the edge of the tub when he threw it, sometimes not. He would find his toothbrush and brush his teeth, frown at his receding hairline as he finger-combed his hair. He would have an internal ten second debate about using her antiperspirant and then decide he could wait until he got home and use his own. He would shrug on his clothes and -
"Left plenty of time for you to hop in and shower." He always said that or a variant of it as he kissed her, and she accepted his kiss but didn't kiss him back, which was also typical. She waited until she heard the apartment door click shut before she got up. This was Sam's space in her life, this third time around for them. Closer to her than the first one, farther away than the second, but it, like the others, no nearer to invading that dead man's zone of scorched earth and objects once familiar burned beyond recognition, which marked the space Helena had once inhabited. That weekend in the Berkshires had been the last time that Helena would remain a stranger, a possibility unexplored, had Myka only realized it then. It was the moment she could have still said "No, not her" and dismissed all the might have beens without a second thought. Instead she had hobbled to their car later that morning, ankle wrapped in an elastic bandage and wedged into the hiking shoe, thinking that there was more to Helena Wells than smugness, an undeniable prowess in certain fields, and a cavalier attitude toward all those courtesies that made teams work (such as not calling Pete a trained monkey in front of his partner). She just needed to give Helena the opportunities to let her other qualities shine.
The unscheduled inspection of Helena's apartment went like Myka thought it would, especially when she and Steve arrived only to find Claudia and her boyfriend, Todd, intertwined on the sofa. After a hard look at Helena, who glared back at her defiantly before she busied herself with a frozen pizza in the oven, Myka said, "Todd, what's your last name?"
"Don't answer that," Claudia immediately cut in, putting her fingers over his mouth. "He's not going to become part of whatever Bill of Rights-trampling database you have."
Todd looked anxiously from Claudia to Myka, scratching at his chin, on which an uncertain goatee was doing battle, poorly, with a particularly inflamed-looking patch of acne. He squirmed out from underneath Claudia's legs and began to edge his way toward the door. "I'm not trying to cause problems. I can just go."
"Not without giving us your last name and showing me your ID." Myka sent another hard look in Helena's direction. "You know you have to run your social contacts past us first, Helena. This is a violation of the terms of your release."
"Todd is not one of my social contacts. He's one of Claudia's, and when she stopped over tonight, I had no idea he would be with her." She pulled out the rack on which the pizza was baking and inspected its doneness. "If you want to be a hardass, fine. Report me to your idiot boss or your idiot boyfriend."
"The rules are meant to protect you as well, Helena," Myka said. "If you clear people with us first, it's fine if they visit you." Ignoring her derisive laugh, Myka turned toward Todd. "If you pass the check, we're not going to have problems with you dropping by with Claudia. Just give us the information we're asking for, and we'll run you through the system."
"No." Claudia rocketed up from the sofa, reaching for Todd's hand. Angling her face up at Myka, as if she might start leaping and snapping at Myka's nose, much like an enraged toy poodle, she said, "He's not giving you anything, Agent Fuckface. We're leaving."
"Claudia," Myka said warningly, leaning into her.
"Go," Steve interjected quietly, throwing open the apartment door. "We're not going to push matters this time, but if you want to bring your boyfriend with you to see Helena, he's going to have to be screened. Got that?"
"Fine," Claudia muttered, flicking her fingers at Myka and giving her shoulder a push. Taking a firmer grip of Todd's hand, she led him into the hallway, leaving Steve to shut the door behind them.
Helena was resetting the timer, but she allowed herself a sideways glance at Steve. "Her constant rule-following is wearing, isn't it? I feel for you." She squatted to peer at the pizza through the glass in the oven door. "Do what you have to do, agents." Her voice became ragged with anger. "Then get the hell out of here so I can save what I can of the evening."
They pulled out the sofa cushions and zipped open the coverings. They took the books from the bookshelves and riffled through them. Begrudgingly moving out of their way, Helena allowed them access to the refrigerator, and they opened containers stored in the freezer and went through the crisper drawers. They banged open cupboard doors and dumped the contents of the flour and sugar canisters. Steve called the duty on Helena's bedroom, and Myka could hear him opening and shutting the dresser drawers. Passing the bedroom on her way to search the bathroom, she saw him sitting on the side of the bed, painstakingly examining the lining of a suit jacket. Myka took off the lid to the toilet tank and shone a flashlight down the drains of the sink and tub. If she turned the water off, she could take apart the pipes, but she recognized that she and Steve weren't expected to find anything; the purpose of the search was mainly to keep Helena off-balance.
She was chewing a piece of pizza when they returned to the living room, her mouth slowing and her swallowing of the bite loud in the room when Myka asked her for her laptop and phone for an obligatory data dump. "You'll get them back tomorrow," she said.
"I haven't had a chance to call Christina yet. Can you give me ten minutes?" Helena put her pizza down on the counter.
Before Myka could respond, Steve was saying calmly and firmly, "Now."
Shaking her head in disbelief, Helena lifted her satchel from one of the chairs at the kitchen table and dropped it at Steve's feet. "I guess you can call my daughter for me. She likes a rousing rendition of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" right before we say goodnight."
Steve sighed, slinging the bag over his shoulder. He nodded toward the door, but Myka said wearily, "Give me a moment or two."
"What infraction of the rules are you going to cite to me now, Myka?" Helena spun into the kitchen and flung open a cupboard. She slammed a mug onto the counter and roughly turned on the faucet to fill a tea kettle with water.
"The rule where we, you, deliver Burdette to Justice as soon as possible. You need to get that Phillips to him." Myka rubbed her neck. She wouldn't be settling for tea to drink when she got home.
With more care, Helena set the kettle on a burner. "I need to see pictures of the real Study in Gray No. 5, and it would be helpful to have them when I'm actually retouching the Phillips." Her voice was under better control, but the anger was still visible in the jut of her jaw and her noisy rummaging of the silverware drawer.
"You'll have it."
Helena's smile was thin in response to Myka's promise. "If I have something to work from, I could get most, if not all, of the retouching done, say, Saturday afternoon." With a brittle officiousness, Helena added, "That is, if I'm not taking up too much of your free time. I imagine you could always just ask Agent Sunshine to fill in if it's getting to be too much for you."
Myka didn't bother to respond. The staircase leading to the first floor was dark as always, the dim lights in the hallways as she descended seeming to enhance the gloom more than dispel it. While she expected Mrs. Frederic to quietly materialize as she thundered down the last steps, there was only Steve waiting for her at the bottom of them. He was unaffected by the darkness or the silence, saying with a studied off-handedness, "Did you smooth her ruffled feathers?" Myka shrugged in answer, hoping he would understand her evasion as a desire not to talk about Helena, which was no lie. "You can level with me, you know, about why you want me to take over this Sunday."
His sincerity felt warm, solid, like a hug, although she and Steve weren't huggers. They had no cause to be, despite having survived some scrapes that would have justified one; she imagined him hugging her like he shook hands, a quick, strong squeeze. "You don't have a backlog you need to catch up on," he teased. "Myka Bering doesn't have backlogs."
Only when it comes to work, she silently countered. Otherwise I'm happy to stay buried.
In the last fifteen minutes that the bookstore was open, Myka found a slim volume on Martin Phillips, and she hoped that the two photos of Study in Gray No. 5 were good enough for Helena to work with. As the clerk at the cash register eyed its cover, which displayed a painting consisting of vertical bars in gray against a gray background, he observed unhelpfully, "Hardly anyone knows who he is anymore. You must be a fan."
"Recent convert." The last thing she would have imagined herself doing eight years ago was colluding with Helena to con someone, even if their victim was another criminal. The sense of having an entered an alternate reality, not a parallel reality of the kind Jemma had promoted in which she was still recognizably herself only much happier, but an opposite one, the Star Trek one, in which she became an evil version of herself was strong as she and Helena drove back to the warehouse in Hoboken on Saturday. According to her new reality's logic, Helena should be the angelic version of herself, but her grim expression as she had gotten into the car and her subsequent silence didn't forcefully argue for the conversion. Accompanying the book on Martin Phillips was a bag of new paints and paintbrushes. The rest of what she needed, Helena had curtly assured Myka, she could find in the warehouse.
Myka wasn't expecting that the warehouse would be open for business on a Saturday, but its doors were unlocked and men, albeit a smaller number of them, were again busily moving pallets. At the back, trucks were parked at a loading platform and crates were being forklifted from the pallets and stowed in the trucks' trailers. She considered the possibility that all the activity represented a legitimate business concern and then immediately dismissed it, not when a Wells was involved. Again, Helena stopped in her cousin's office, and again he showed no surprise at her appearance or interest in why she was there. The freight elevator that took them up to the second floor sounded no better than the first time Myka had ridden it but the alarming sounds of metal shearing and snapping off was just as much an empty promise now as it had been earlier in the week.
Once inside the studio, Helena dragged two easels toward the center of the room, where the light was the strongest. Unceremoniously she ripped a page from the Phillis art book that had a photograph of Study in Gray No. 5 and attached it to one of the easels. Removing what looked like a utility knife from the pocket of her pants, a pair of faded jeans that boasted several smears of brown, gold, and white paint, souvenirs most likely of her kite-painting adventure, she waggled it over her shoulder at Myka, saying "Aren't you afraid I'll come to my senses and use it on you?", before walking over to where she had left the Phillips painting from their last visit. Taking it back with her to the easels, she placed it on the unoccupied one and began to carefully score areas of the canvas.
Myka had intended to remain observant, watching how Helena transformed a study into the Study, but although this room and their occasion for being in it bore little relation to Helena's old studio and Myka's visits to it more than eight years ago, Helena's air of absorption and her periodic circling away from the easel holding the Phillips painting were familiar, and Myka's attention began to drift. She sat on a corner of one of the tables in the room and took out her phone. She didn't need an intimate acquaintance with Helena's methods; they wouldn't tell her anything about Helena that she didn't already know. So while a crime, namely forgery, was being committed, she would catch up on her reading.
Helena told her it was an open invitation; anytime that Myka wanted to drop by her studio, she should. She shouldn't worry about being a distraction, learning how not to lose focus when the world insisted on intruding was a necessity. Helena had given Myka one of her infamous smiles then, the sly curve to her lips seeming to hint that the secret she was about to share was really no secret at all, only a ruse to draw Myka in, to capture her attention. Distractions had their uses, Helena said softly. She was in town this weekend for a change, and she was going to spend the majority of it at her studio, trying to complete a few projects. So, if Myka found that time was hanging heavy on her hands . . . .
Myka had found the studio easily enough, a rented space in an old brownstone that had been converted to a mixed-use building. A law office and a hedge fund occupied the first floor; flats were on the second and third floors. Helena's studio was on the third floor, at the back of the house. Helena hadn't been surprised to see her when she opened the door, although Myka had said nothing about dropping in. Other than the easel and a work table, on which were scattered brushes, tubes of paint, and rags smelling of solvents, there was only a sagging leather sofa. Myka, finally feeling the nervousness that had been completely absent on her subway trip over, fluttered in front of the sofa until Helena, with a fondly chiding laugh, told her to sit down.
Unsure where to look - the studio was smaller than she had anticipated, servants' quarters in another lifetime, two small bedrooms whose dividing wall had been removed - Myka felt that she was gawking at the painting Helena was working on or gawking at Helena, each of them revelatory in a way she hadn't expected. The painting was an unironic representational portrait of an older couple in a style that reminded Myka of a Sargent painting, although she couldn't have said why. Perhaps the attention given to the woman's evening gown, a shimmering, midnight blue sheath that pooled onto the floor like water or the couple's cool self-regard, which dared you to look away from them. Myka might have dared to look away if Helena didn't present a more dangerous object of fascination. She wasn't sloppily dressed in contrast to the husband and wife in their going-to-the-Met attire, she was barely dressed, smooth, pale skin showing in abundance in the gaps, openings, and rips of a shirt left unbuttoned or having precious few buttons to push through the buttonholes. The shirt was practically hanging open over a pair of chinos, only partially zipped because the zipper was broken. No panties were peeking through the fly, and Myka swallowed hard at the realization. It was winter, and who painted half-naked in a Victorian-era studio? She was cold and she was wearing a sweater.
But Helena seemed oblivious to the cold. In fact, she twitched her shoulders under the shirt as if it was too warm for her . . . Myka intently studied her hands. She needed to attend to her cuticles. Maybe if she said something, anything, even if it only resulted in Helena telling her that she didn't talk while she painted she would feel less like she was interrupting the kind of absorption that would eventually have Helena dreamily digging her hand beneath the waistband of her pants. "You accept commissions?"
Helena nodded, then shot a rueful glance at her. "While I wish more people wanted a Helena Wells because it's a Helena Wells, a lot want something 'in the style of,' and for better or worse, that's what separates me from the others . . . who are better," she finished quietly. She pointed with her brush at the painting. "I can do what's 'reminiscent' or 'suggestive' of a Sargent or a . . . a Pollock without it becoming a second-rate or third-rate Sargent or Pollock. At least that's what I think."
Still nerdy enough to be pleased that she had been right, Myka didn't miss the sardonic emphasis Helena had given "I." Standing up and joining her in front of the painting, Myka cocked her head, pretending to give it a studied assessment. "Don't you have to be rediscovered in order to be truly discovered? Otherwise you're a flash in the pan, a comet streaking across the sky, destined to die early and tragically. Thwart all the critics by living a long and happy life that's capped off by your work taking the world by storm when you're 80."
"Sweet thought, but I'm not a believer in delayed gratification." Helena's voice held a smile, but she wasn't smiling. "I want everything now because it may not come around again."
Myka felt like she was standing on tip-toe, although she wasn't. Her feet were flat in her shoe sneakers, but she clutched at Helena's shirt as if she were about to lose her balance. Against the brush of her palm she felt Helena's nipple harden, and as Myka's hand curved around her breast, Helena arched into the caress. Their mouths met, and Myka thought they would slow down now, kiss a little, and let the kissing help make the decision for them because she liked to have the time to decide if this was something she wanted to do, if this was the person she wanted to do it with. She always wanted it to slow down, she never liked being so caught up in an experience that she might lose control. But the kissing wasn't slowing them, her, down, her hands were already tearing at Helena's pants, and she was pushing Helena backward, and Helena was letting her, until she heard the slight thud of Helena's back hitting the wall. It was awkward, standing up like this, except they really weren't so much standing as Helena was kind of crouching and she was half-supporting her while her hand tore at the chinos until she found what she wanted, what she couldn't wait for, she who could wait for everything, and she was groaning just as much as Helena and saying things she had never said to anyone, because there was so much in her that wanted out, so she found another release in words, and then Helena was coming so loudly that everyone in the building had to have heard her. They laughed a little as Myka relaxed her hold and Helena steadied herself on the floor. She hadn't been wearing underwear, and Myka had only to look at the hair, damp with sweat on her abdomen but wet farther down, and if she had had any hopes that they might slow down, they were gone in the twisting of her gut and the need to have Helena to touch her, enter her now. She was tearing just as frantically at her jeans and trying to kick off her shoes at the same time. She was starting to say things again, and Helena was echoing them and adding new ones of her own. Helena was the one who did the pushing this time, but to the sofa. "I can't do you against the wall . . . yet," Helena said, and it was the only complete sentence that she said in the next several minutes. The leather was cool, but the air felt even colder as Myka finally freed herself from her jeans and underwear and then, a little before she was ready because she hadn't had time to turn around, reposition herself, Helena was behind her, in her, and she realized as a crescending moan rose in her throat that she had been ready, had wanted it like this, and as Helena worked her, claiming her both in the words she hissed somewhere above and behind her ears and in how she touched her, Myka could gasp only yes, yes, yes.
Helena must have asked her . . . something . . . because otherwise Myka wouldn't be standing so close to her now and she wouldn't be turning away from the easel, on which the Phillips painting looked remarkably the same despite the scoring that Helena had done to it earlier and the frequent darting of a paintbrush toward it that Myka had caught out of the corner of her eye. Helena wouldn't be looking at her so expectantly unless she was waiting for a response to her question. There must have been a question since the other explanation, that Helena had been remembering the same moment was not possible. Myka had made the mistake before of thinking that Helena had divined where her thoughts had led her, and Helena had been nowhere near the conference room in which the Marstons had smirked their way through an interview or the corridors down which Myka had learned to walk without seeing her colleagues' suspicious and, ultimately, pitying glances and without hearing the murmurs that died away as soon as she drew near. Even when Helena had been with her in the studio she hadn't been with her, always being two, three, a million jumps ahead.
"It was different then," Helena almost whispered, "but it doesn't have to be like it is now between us." She lifted her hand, as if to touch Myka's face, but Myka grabbed it and squeezed, not gently.
"I won't let you in."
Helena worked her hand free from Myka's grip only to place it in the valley between Myka's breasts, fingers close together, not fanned out, not seeking more than to rest demurely, innocently, as if she wanted only to count the beats of Myka's heart. It steadily thumped away, and Myka was thankful that it was slower than the rest of her to go on alert. Her skin burned where Helena touched her, and it was all she could do not to flinch.
"But I haven't ever left, have I?" There was no playfulness to Helena's tone, and her next words revealed no triumph or satisfaction. "I have so much to say to you, but you're not ready to listen." A faint smile hovered on her lips. "You're doing your best not to listen to me now, but I need you to hear this. These past eight years? They've been a wasteland. That's the truth, and if it hadn't been for Christina, I'm not sure what would have become of me."
"You would have found some way of surviving." Myka stepped backward until Helena's hand fell away. "You need to finish the painting."
The smile flickered but didn't disappear, and Helena's eyes continued to search Myka's. "So much rage. Have you ever wondered what's on the other side of it?"
"Just more anger, Helena."
It had been a spur of the moment call; Myka hadn't expected her to answer. It was before 9:00 on a Sunday morning, too early for most people, but Myka had long since finished her workout and showered, and as she watched her Keurig labor to fill her coffee mug, she thought she ought to savor the day, her first Sunday off in weeks. Had the preceding Saturday been a different kind of Saturday, she might have spent the night with Sam and made plans with him, but Saturday hadn't been a different kind of Saturday, and after dropping Helena off at Irene Frederic's brownstone, the Phillips done and drying on its easel in the warehouse, Myka went downtown to the office, unable to bear the thought of going home because it had never been more than an address and a bed and she was in need of a burrow, something small and filled only with the comforting smell of her own scent and virtually impossible for her to be forced from, and she had settled in her cubicle and accessed every electronic file she could on Jim Wells and his daughter. There she had stayed until late in the evening, eating Twizzlers and Cheez-Its from the vending machine.
But today was not Saturday, so she made the call and was gratified, some 45 minutes later, to see Leena walking toward her and then slipping into a chair across from her. They were sitting outside the café on a tiny faux patio carved out from the sidewalk by virtue of a few stanchions chained together. Myka was sipping coffee that was not from a K-cup, and she was enjoying the heat of the sun on her bare arms and legs. Leena was wearing a sundress, an orange burst of summer that enhanced the liveliness of her expression, transforming the mild flirtatiousness with which she greeted their waiter into something altogether more seductive, or so Myka enviously concluded with a glare at the waiter. Why wasn't she dating Leena, she asked herself again. Because she's straight, because I'm with Sam, sort of, because -
"How are things going with Helena?"
Oh, and because of that, too. "About as well as can be expected." Myka gazed down into her coffee cup. She needed a refill. She didn't want to stare into her cup too long, no need to give Leena the idea she was brooding, that she was bothered, that she still felt Helena's hand on her chest, still heard the ache in Helena's voice, because she wasn't sure which Leena was sitting across from her, the friend, the agent, or the therapist. The first was the one she had called, the third she probably needed, but she feared that the second was what Leena was first and foremost.
"Which is why Steve's babysitting Helena today?" Leena beamed another flirtatious smile at the waiter, who eagerly bounded to their table, promising Myka he would come back with a carafe of coffee, while his eyes never left Leena.
Myka sighed. "How do you know these things? It's nothing we had to clear with anyone."
"I could be all mysterious-sounding and just say 'I know," but Steve thought you were wired and stressed-out when you asked him." As Myka groaned and sagged back in her chair, letting her head hang over the top of its frame, Leena said, "He knows how hard this is on you, so he worries. We all do."
"Why do I feel that anything I say about her, you're going to run back to Pete with it?" The table's umbrella blocked Myka's view of the sky. What she had was a good view of some rust stains on the fabric.
"Only if I think you might be in danger of compromising the assignment."
She was very good, Leena, so calm, so accepting, how could anyone not want to confide in her? She was her friend, Myka knew that. But would Leena consider that she was in danger of compromising her assignment if she told Leena that she wanted to believe what Helena had said about living in a wasteland or that she feared Jemma was right? She wanted to believe that Leena would trust her if she said, "Despite what it may look like sometimes, I have a handle on things," but the problem was she wasn't sure she could trust herself as she said it. The waiter was approaching their table, promised carafe in hand, and she waited until he had filled her cup before she spoke. It was much easier to casually meet Leena's eyes over the cup as she sipped from it and say equally as casually, "Trust me, the Helena situation is going about as well as anyone can expect with a felon who wants nothing more than to be rid of her jailers."
"'The Helena situation,'" Leena said with a lightly skeptical laugh. "That's some bureaucratese I didn't expect from you. But it's Sunday, so I'll roll with it." She never seemed visited by bashfulness or embarrassment, and while she might have thought 'the Helena situation' as clumsily dismissed it as it was phrased, she moved on gracefully to other subjects, a gallery opening she had gone to recently, a new restaurant she wanted to try, an exasperating telephone conversation she had had with her mother, a retired therapist living in North Carolina who regularly harangued her daughter about not plying her skills in communities "'where you can actually make a difference,'" Leema mimicked her mother's disapproving tone. "'Low income communities are desperate for quality, affordable mental health care' . . . ." She trailed off as she caught Myka checking her phone. "Are you expecting a call?"
"No." Myka flushed. She had been paying attention, but she was almost as familiar with Leena's mother's professional disappointment in her daughter as Leena was, and she had grown increasingly aware of how late in the morning it was. Steve lived farther away from Helena's apartment than she did. He would need to leave soon to ensure that he and Helena would be on time for her visit because Helena never failed to express her displeasure if she lost even a few minutes with Christina. When it wasn't irritating, it was cute how Helena would lean forward in the seat the closer they got, straining against her seatbelt as if she wanted nothing more than to flatten her face against the windshield to spot Christina all the sooner. Now that it was warmer, Christina would fly from the back porch as soon as Myka stopped the car, and she would hop like a demented bunny, holding her arms up for Helena to lift her. Myka put her phone away and concentrated on the remains of her egg-white omelet, wishing she had ordered the Belgian waffles Leena was eating without guilt.
She was dutifully recounting news about her own family, Tracy's desire to have a second child, her father's increasing indecisiveness about the smallest things (and the old Warren Bering had never been indecisive about anything), when she felt her phone vibrate. It was Steve, and Myka wasn't sure whether the sudden lurching of her heart was a good thing or a bad thing. Actually it was Paul, Steve's husband, profusely apologizing that Steve wouldn't be able to get Helena. "I took him to a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant last night, and I guess it was really just a hole. He ate the shellfish, and that was the end of the story. He hoped he would be better in time to pick her up, but . . . ."
"Don't worry. I've got it. You tell him to concentrate on getting better." She heard a weak "Hey, Mykes" in the background before the call ended.
"So because Steve's sick you're going to do it. You're not going to ask anyone else?" Leena was looking at her, much too innocently, over her coffee cup.
"There's no time," Myka said. "We're going to be late as it is, which means Helena will be in rare form."
"What about me? I could do it. I like kids, and I'd like an opportunity to see Helena in a different environment." Leena squinted at her. "I thought you needed a break."
Myka had been digging for cash in the small leather knapsack that she used as a purse. She felt that she was too old for it, that it was something a student would use, but purses had always made her feel ungainly. She never knew how to carry them. Leena did. She had her purse open, a smart-looking clutch with a shoulder strap. It matched her dress. "My treat." As Myka hesitated, she said, "Go on." Myka still hesitated, feeling that Leena was . . . disappointed in her? But the smile Leena gave her was warm, although there was worry in her eyes. "You know, the whole getting over somebody thing? You have to let go of them first."
"So I've been told," Myka said wryly. She pushed her chair in and stepped over the chain hanging slack between two stanchions. A subway station was at the end of the street. Increasing her pace, she called and then texted Helena, never having to break stride; it had only taken years of practice.
Helena must have gotten one of the messages because she was sitting on the brownstone's stoop when Myka double-parked. They would be a half-hour late, and that would be with Myka speeding all the way, but Helena wasn't storming and raining invective. She seemed . . . shy . . . which wasn't a quality that Myka would normally associate with her. She was quiet getting into the car, and she stayed quiet on the ride, but unlike their silent drive to Hoboken, when anger had radiated from her she practically blushed when she looked at Myka. There had been countless opportunities for Helena, if she wasn't going to berate Steve for his inconvenient bout of food poisoning to berate her for their being late, to preen and declare her victory. Myka couldn't stay from her - that was what Myka expected to hear in a thousand cutting, sneering variations. Instead Myka resorted to turning on the radio just so there would be some noise in the car.
It wasn't until Christina began her mad bunny dance in the driveway that Helena smiled, a broad, delighted grin that seemed only to brighten the more when she exchanged glances with Myka. She didn't say anything, opening her door after a long pregnant moment that had had Myka unable to look away even though she was telling herself that the grin wasn't directed at her, Helena would have grinned just the same way at whoever was sitting beside her. She was still talking to herself, only in her mind of course, and not talking so much as shouting and screaming when Helena bent to pick Christina up and said, "Now it's our Sunday, pumpkin. We've gotten her back."
But Christina had no more wrapped her legs around Helena's waist and rested her chin on Helena's shoulder than she was squirming and reaching for Myka. "I want you to carry me, My-ka."
Helena released her, another smile, not as broad as her earlier one though decidedly more devilish, overtook her face. She watched as Myka, not smoothly, swung Christina onto her hip. "You're going to have to work on that."
Myka followed her to the back porch, Christina wiggling until she found a more comfortable position. She might look small, but she was solid, like her mother, and her inadvertent kicks against Myka's legs were sharp. She was chattering about pygmy goats, her friends at preschool, and the boy, also in her preschool, who picked his nose when Myka heard her say, "Nonni said you weren't coming, then Mommy said you were." Christina drew back, suddenly pensive. "Are you here with us the whole day?"
"Yes."
"And next Sunday too?"
"Yes."