Read Online Feast of Saints by Zoe Wildau - Free Book Online Page B

and her chest. Although drenched with sweat, she was unharmed. Not on fire. Not on fire.
    On her second cup of tea, Lilly finally screwed up enough courage to go into the studio to stare down the face of her nightmare. With trembling fingers she reached out and touched the furrowed brow, the straight nose and the full lips. Tracing her hand down his torso, she thought of the tough as nails, scaly skin of the Jake of her dream with his razor sharp features. Lilly picked up a pad of artists’ paper and sketched him several times, scattering the nightmare drawings on the floor as she worked. She drew him in the barnyard. She drew him hovering over her father’s cornfield. She drew him blasting his surroundings with flames. It was a technique she had learned in her teenage years. The more familiar she could make her waking mind with her nightmare, the quicker she could recognize what was happening in her sleep and make herself wake up.
    By mid-morning, Lilly was ankle deep in paper. Uncovering her block of clay, she began sculpting the third Jake statue. By dinnertime, dragon Jake stared out at her, placidly immobile. No threat now. Little of what she had done would work for Allegrezza, but she felt better. When she dreamed of him again that night, she was prepared. It was the same dream as the night before. But this time, before she turned to look at him, before he could set her on fire, she willed herself awake.
    The following day, she began again on the second bust, going in a much different direction than either the Jake of her nightmares or the first, whimsical, elfin Jake statue. She continued to work with the same statue for the next week. When she wasn’t working on the design, she watched all of Jake’s movies.
    He never played a good guy. Two of his early gangster movies were so disturbing that she was forced to turn them off and couldn’t turn them back on until Becky came over, promising to watch them with her in the light of day. They had still scared her half to death.
    As she constructed Allegrezza’s features, she could see Jake’s brutal movie characters in the furrowed brow and aggressive chin. She saw promise in the design, but struggled to connect with Allegrezza the brute villain, feeling an odd discordance with it. Three times she found herself recreating the much more angularly vicious dragon Jake features and had to take them off and start over. After the third time, she threw a sheet over the dragon Jake so she wouldn’t be influenced by it while she worked, although he still came to her nearly every night to interrupt her sleep, intent on setting her on fire.
    On Wednesday, she was a week and a half into the project and feeling desperate. When her doorbell rang, she was happy for the reprieve. It was Jake’s driver, Wil, bearing two tickets to Tyler’s guest performance at the Geffen Playhouse on Saturday night.
    “Tyler was at the house for dinner last night, and asked that I bring these to you, Ms. Rose,” Wil said. “He suggested you might like to bring your niece, Anna.” Lilly had brought Anna to meet Tyler several times during her work on Fox and Cats .
    Lilly picked up the phone to call her brother as soon as Wil left to arrange the date, offering that Anna come over in the afternoon and spend the night. Lionel and Julie were thrilled to have a rare whole night alone.
    Saturday afternoon, Lilly shut the door on the disturbing figures in her studio before Anna arrived. The girls spent two hours getting ready, complete with home pedicures. It was a refreshing break having Anna take her mind off of the work on Feast . She hadn’t realized how dark her spirits had become.
    Lilly and Anna arrived at the playhouse early and found their seats, which were right up front in the orchestra section. As the production began, it was clear that the director knew what he had in Tyler and had dramatically increased Kurt Von Trapp’s role in the production. Ty eclipsed the other players. His