The Wave by Kristen Crusoe (ebook reader online txt) 📗

equal equation. And it was enough. Before that day, that party, an invitation to hell, when my order dissembled into disorder, all my carefully constructed equations tumbled, unequal and insolvable.’

She began pacing the room, circling the narrow oval table in the center. Finally, abandoning resistance, she folded into the chair. Her gaze drifted back up to the painting, fixed on a scene drawn by her mind’s eye; a recollection she had resisted for so long. Clair remembered.

Chapter 2

Clair five years earlier

The invitation sat on the kitchen counter, propped against a bowl of green apples. Looking at it she remembered a still life painting from the Dutch Renaissance she had seen in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam several years ago. Apples, wine bottle, blue ceramic vase with yellow dahlias. The promise of a quiet, simple, orderly life; day blending into week, into month, without disruption appealed to her. But this scene was different. Here was that note that had been crumpled up then smoothed out again, beckoning her attention. She stared hard at it while she poured another glass of the deep red.

It had been a long day. Overwrought graduate students, faculty with too much time on their hands and not enough imagination, constantly bombarded her quiet office space with questions and complaints. She didn’t want to go to the dinner party at the dean’s. As a member of the search committee for the new college president, it was an expectation, a duty. Still, she resented it. Why she had agreed to be on the search committee, she didn’t know. A moment of weakness? She was tenured so they couldn’t hold it against her. She had never engaged in social niceties. So why now? No time to speculate, she chided herself, upending her glass, swallowing the last of the wine. The phone chimed an incoming call.

‘Hello,’ she said, her annoyance audible. It was so seldom her phone rang.

‘Clair, are you coming tonight? This is Claudia, by the way. In case, you know, you don’t recognize my voice.’

Standing at the kitchen sink, looking out at the late fall garden, the last of the roses tilted upwards, straining for remnants of fading sunlight, she grimaced. She turned away, resisting the urge to go out there, stand still in the light, repelling the coming dark and inevitable evening that lay ahead.

‘Yes, I’m coming. Why? I mean, why do you want to know?’

‘Just seeing if you would like to walk to the dean’s with me. I’m just a few blocks over. I can be at your place in fifteen minutes?’

Clair thought at once that this was a plan to make sure she went. Phillip must have put Claudia up to it. Fight, flight, or freeze battled for primacy. Freeze won. More than anything she wanted a way out of this evening. Looking longingly at the half-empty bottle of Burgundy, at her couch and the book lying on the table, a paperweight holding it open to the last page she’d been reading, she sighed heavily, shoulders drawing back in an effort to steel herself.

‘All right then. I’ll meet you in front.’

She didn’t want Claudia, or anyone from the faculty, coming into her home, this sanctuary she had created for herself. When she closed the door, she could breathe. Be herself without artifice. No one visited or called, from work. The few people closest to her were fellow members of the string quartet she played cello with. But even they didn’t visit her at home, or socialize outside of practice and performances. And that was how she wanted it.

Clair poured another glass of wine, and carried it with her upstairs, to her bedroom. Throwing open the closet door, she scanned her meager options. Black pant suit, or navy? Long black dress, or gray? Clothes had never been important to her. She wore what she considered her uniform: dark suits with a white or pastel-colored button-down shirt. When she was lecturing in front of students she wanted them to focus only on what she was saying, not what she was wearing, or not wearing in the case of some of her female colleagues. Hair pulled back into a severe knot at the bottom of her crown, glasses, and only a blush of lip gloss, she was the picture of serious. Even her car, an older model dark blue Volvo wagon, spoke of her staidness.

There was one dress pushed to the back of the closet, a long emerald green slender sheath, with a deep, square neckline. Jodie, her sister-in-law, the one family member who refused to accept her efforts to estrange them, who consistently emailed, sent funny cards, odd gifts from around the world, wherever she and Ben – Clair’s older brother – happened to be working, had sent it to her from Thailand last Christmas. Both were members of Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders: he a pediatric trauma surgeon, she an obstetrician. Jodie had said the green would bring out the sparkle in her hazel eyes and the gold highlights in her brown hair. Eyes and hair that she had always considered dull brown. As she slipped on the green dress, enjoying the feel of the silky fabric against her skin, she ruminated on this invitation and the event ahead.

She couldn’t believe that the dean would be so certain she wouldn’t come as to send an escort. Was her presence so important? She was a well-known author, scholar, and yes, even to her own eyes, brilliant mathematician. Maybe she was needed to show off this side of Dalton College. Previously known mainly for its arts and letters, the science and math departments had become the biggest draw in the last few years, bringing in more money in tuition and grants than all the other departments combined.

Eyeing herself in the mirror over her dresser, she added a floral silk scarf, lightly draping it across her chest, leaving a hint of pale, smooth skin between the scarf’s edge and the crêpe neckline of the dress. Placing a pair of gold