More Than a Kiss

Blue Amy

Jordan sat cross-legged on the floor in her drawing studio, in the middle of plastic tarps, paint buckets and half-painted walls, drinking Pinot Gris out of a coffee mug and contemplating her own conversion. There were three distinct stages of her conversion.

Before she fell out the window: Jordan did not believe in true love. She did not believe in romance and happily-ever-afters. She thought all that malarkey about love was brainwashing doled out by men to keep women barefoot and pregnant. It was so ingrained in the female mind that even lesbians had contracted it like it was a pandemic flu.

During the fall: The moment she slipped, the exact moment she reached for something to grab hold of and there was nothing there and she realized she was hurtling toward earth and imminent death, Jordan thought of how she was dying too young. She thought of all the things she hadn't done yet. She hadn't traveled to New Zealand. She hadn't been to the top of the Empire State building. She hadn't written the novel that would be her seminal masterpiece. She hadn't experienced true love. That was her last thought and it was the clencher. True love. She was going to die a virgin, metaphorically speaking, of the heart.

After the fall: Jordan saw Amy in the emergency room. Maybe it was too many endorphins caused by the fear coursing through her veins, maybe it was the loss of blood, maybe it was the full moon, maybe it was the chili peppers she ate for dinner last night, but whatever it was, Jordan was now pretty damn sure she was in love.

She shook her head, gulped her wine, and reminded herself sternly that she did not believe in true love. She did, however, believe in a second glass of wine. She lifted the bottle from between her legs and sloshed more into her cup.

She looked at the half-painted walls and wondered when Edison would ever get around to finishing them. It seemed like the whole house was always only halfway done. Edison had steadily worked on projects but was always sidetracked by her brainchildren – the inventions that she was forever tinkering with. As a result, the new dishwasher sat in the middle of the kitchen floor, the guest room toilet was in the hallway, sheets of drywall were stacked in the living room and not a single wall in the whole place was fully painted.

Jordan decided to be proactive. She jimmied open a can of paint with a screwdriver, stirred the paint, grabbed a brush, and dipped it into the blue paint. It was cerulean blue and her favorite color. Edison stored most of the paint up here in her studio so that when it came time to paint a room she’d know where, in the mess of remodeling, she had stored the paint.

Jordan slapped the paint on the wall with one hand and sipped her wine with the other. Well, she tried to sip her wine. She couldn't hold the mug in her left hand because of the stitches and bandages. And pain. She located a roll of duct tape, which wasn't too hard because Edison bought the stuff by the case and left it lying all over the house. Using her teeth, her knees and her good right hand, Jordan taped the mug of wine to her left hand. She gave it a trial run by raising it to her lips and drinking. It worked beautifully. Jordan thought that Edison should invent something like this - a paint holder that had a sippy cup attached to it. She could market it to the depressed artist. And weren’t all artists depressed?

Jordan picked up the brush and smeared some of the blue paint on the wall. She drank. She painted. She let her mind wander.

Jordan thought about Amy. She thought about Amy's face. She was beautiful in an unassuming, unpretentious way. Jordan thought about using Amy's face in one of her illustrations. She might be perfect for her book-in-progress. Jordan had been working on her children's book for the past year. She drew picture after picture but was never satisfied with the end result. Using Amy's face might give her the inspiration she needed.

Jordan had a photographic memory. She could recall in startling detail every face she'd ever seen. That talent came in quite handy in art school when she never finished a drawing class by the time the bell rang. She'd simply go home, finish from memory and hand it in the next day. This talent would also come in handy if she were ever mugged or kidnapped or a victim of a senseless crime. Which hadn't happened, thank God, but if it did she'd be able to draw her own police sketch.

While she painted the wall, she thought about Amy's eyes. They were beautiful, sure, but so were a million other eyes Jordan had seen. The thing that made Amy's eyes different was that what was behind them leaked out. Okay, leaking wasn't the best word choice. What she meant was Amy had eyes with a depth past the ordinary blue. They were a blue so deep that they seemed to get darker near the center and swallow her up.

And her lips. Perfect bow-shaped lips. Teeth that showed when she smiled. She had one tooth in the front that was a tiny bit crooked. Just enough to not be perfect. Cheeks with just a hint of color. A dimple in her right cheek. Not in her left. Just her right. Her hair wasn't long, wasn't short, wasn't straight, wasn't curly. It defied description. It was perfect.

Jordan's thoughts were interrupted by a whirring noise. She turned and saw the little remote control car roll into the room, travel across the floor and stop about a foot from her feet. There was a manila envelope duct-taped to the top of the car. Written on the envelope in Edison's scrawl were the words Dossier of Dr. Amy Stewart.

Jordan peeled the envelope off the car and opened it. Inside were several pages of paper.

"What's all this?" Jordan called out. She knew Edison had to be somewhere close by.

Edison leaned in the doorway with the monitor sunglasses perched on top of her head. She froze when she looked at the wall. "A better question is, what is that?" she said, jabbing a finger at the wall.

Jordan followed Edison's stare and gasped. She had painted Amy. A large blue portrait of Amy on the wall. She hadn't even realized what she'd been doing. She raised her left hand and took a gulp of wine. She choked. “It’s an illustration I’m working on.”

“Uh huh,” Edison said. “It looks like a blue Amy if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you.” Jordan waved the papers in the air. “You Googled her?”

“I found out a bunch of stuff."

"Oh?" Jordan tried to act only mildly interested while her heart pounded.

Edison looked at Jordan's mug taped to her hand. "Ingenious."

"I know, right?"

Edison took another coffee cup off Jordan's drawing table, poured the dregs of Jordan’s early morning coffee into an old paint can and filled it to the brim with wine.

Unable to look at the dossier, Jordan put the envelope on her desk. "Are you going to tell me what you found out? She’s a murderer? A black widow? An angel of death? A Lorena Bobbit?"

Edison took a drink then said, "About what you'd expect really. She's thirty years old – you were right on the nose. Grew up here. Got her medical degree in San Diego, interned in Phoenix, practiced two years back in San Diego and then came here. She graduated at the top of her class, has some awards of excellence – I couldn't understand what they were for, medical mumbo-jumbo of some sort. Get this - she volunteers at the free clinic downtown. She works for free. That’s like sick and wrong.”

"Wow."

"Yeah, wow. She sounds too good to be true, huh?"

Jordan drank. "What do you mean?"

Edison eyed the painting on the wall, walking from one side of the room to the other. "Spooky. It's like her eyes are following me everywhere I walk."

Jordan drank, nervously waiting for Edison to drop the bomb.

Edison took another drink. "A person can't be that good, you know. There has to be a skeleton or two in the closet."

"I suppose you've found out what these skeletons are?

"I did find out that she's living with another doctor."

"Living with?"

"It's a guy. A damn good-looking guy, too." Edison extracted a printed photo from the dossier and showed it to Jordan, saying, "Here's a picture of them together. They went to some formal gala together a couple of months ago. His name is Dr. Jeremy Blevins."

Jordan recognized him right away. "I ran into him."

"When?"

"At the hospital as I was walking out the door. I literally ran into him as he was coming in."

"Well, I'm afraid your romance with the doc was short-lived. She's already taken." Edison did not look sorry or afraid. She looked gloating.

Jordan picked the brush back up. She had her back to Edison, but she could hear the smile in her voice as she said, "You'll have to Kilz that first or it'll bleed through."

Too bad I can't Kilz her face from my mind, Jordan thought. She took a drink and stared at Amy's blue face and didn't hear when Edison left the room. Jordan decided not to take Edison’s advice about the Kilz to paint out Amy’s face. Instead, she kilzed the bottle of wine and left the portrait on the wall. Blue Amy staring down at her would serve as a reminder. A reminder to never again allow herself to fall for the true love myth.