Working with him again would be like the sun shining after months of rain. I downplay it with a wry smile. “We both know how much better it will be if you do the coding.”
“We’re a good team.”
“Yeah. We are.”
He smiles. “Feel up to some brainstorming?”
I smile back. “Yes.”
He settles on the end of the bed, but that’s kind of awkward, so eventually, I move over, and he sits next to me so we can see what we’re each doing. Our arms are close together, our hips touching even if the sheet is between us, and it feels so normal, so good, that I have to force myself to just be chill.
He smells of himself, of the notes of childhood that comfort me, the endless nights we spent writing the game, changing it, and rewriting it, and at some point, I simply fall asleep slumped against his familiar shoulder. At peace.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Gloria
What am I going to do?
Willow has gone to the hospital to take my place, and I’m ostensibly getting some rest, but I can’t stop pacing. What am I going to do? What am I going to do?
The thought is a chant running through my mind over and over. I can’t sleep, and I wander the apartment from room to room to room before finally going out to the greenhouse, where I stand barefoot in my pajamas and transfer seedlings from a long tray into small clay pots. I’ve strung fairy lights throughout to give a beautiful background to the night photos, and the soft white lights now ease me.
The baby plants, vigorous and yet so vulnerable, already have the imprint of their species on their tiny leaves, and I wonder about that—nature versus nurture, seeing the line between my mother and Billie and Willow, the music running through each of them like a powerful river, whereas I have never had a single note pop up in my head ever. Can’t even imagine it. Music is born into you.
And whatever it is that makes it possible for Sam to create the complicated coding and visual work of making games must be inborn too. Where did that come from, I wonder? My father was a kind man, a good man, but he was never brilliant. I never knew my mother’s grandparents, of course. They were lost during the war, but my mother spoke of them as intellectuals, bohemians.
I suddenly think of Sam’s dad, Robert. He might have had a hand in that brain of hers too. He has a little boy who’s just as strange and smart as Sam was.
Unlike the rest of them, I didn’t get any big gifts. I’m pretty good at a lot of things—the photos and my plants. I can sing passably well and dance well enough to get compliments, but mostly I am friendly. My gift has always been an ability to be happy.
It sounds small until you live in the world for a while.
Despite my worry and the scythe hanging over my head, I am even happy in this moment. The lights make a bokeh background for the newly potted baby iron cross begonias with their amethyst swirl leaves. I first discovered the species when I was flying between Shanghai and New York. Unlike so many plants, the most beautiful parts of many begonias are their leaves, which can be ruffled, textured, colored, spotted, pointed, swirling. I brought them home for my sister the first time I saw them, because she’d just bought the apartment with its greenhouse and I thought she’d be as captured by their beauty as I was.
Billie, however, had no knack or desire for growing things. I took the begonias home to my own apartment when I saw that she wasn’t taking care of them. I started collecting them, gathering the most beautiful forms I could find.
So many dazzling shapes and colors. I bend close to the iron cross and shoot the geometric texture running beneath the dramatic cross. As I bend, my back protests and I catch my breath, stand up. It eases, and I bend down again, this time more gently.
What am I going to do what am I going to do what am I going to do?
The story is all over the news now, not just the cable channels. Turns out some very famous people bought paintings from Isaak, thinking they were rare, undiscovered pieces, and although most of them are trying to distance themselves from their connection to Isaak, a few are outraged and stupid enough not to recognize that they look like idiots for buying fakes of paintings that never existed.
My incessant scrolling through the various stories revealed that the case broke, finally, because the offspring of a famous French actor discovered that the “lost” masterpiece they’d imagined would bring them a fortune turned out to be a forgery.
Tenderly, I transfer a tray of babies into a spot where they’ll get indirect light for most of the day, and remember when he told me about his scheme. We were sitting on a dock over a lake in the mountains of Italy, eating strawberries from a bowl.
“What if,” he said, “a cache of lost masterpieces had been hidden by the Nazis?”
I laughed. “How convenient.”
He raised his eyebrows and laid out his plan. He would study various artists who meshed with his personal style and then create new paintings in their style and go through a meticulous aging process to give them the right patina.
And sell them.
I thought it was utterly brilliant. And honestly, it didn’t seem like anything illegal, only slick. I agreed to carry the paintings he created in order to get them over international borders.
Such a lark!
And the paintings themselves made Isaak happy. He found some creativity in the work of copies by imagining what artists might have painted: a lost Picasso from the Blue Period, a Matisse window, a Van Gogh from the early days.
Now that the story has made international news, some of Isaak’s own paintings are surfacing too. His Moroccan markets, especially, have caught the attention of the art world, and one sold for a rather startling sum out of a gallery in France.
I take a photo of the begonias for a future post, wondering if I can use the stamps and letter fronts in a series. The idea calls to me, and I head back inside to fetch a few of them.
It’s only as I set up the shots that I realize how idiotic it is. Once Sam is better, I have to get out of here. Or if the FBI close in before that, I won’t be here anyway.
But I’m here now. I have nothing else to do. It’s calming my blood pressure. If I have to flee, I can line them up to post.
I sweep clean one of the photo work spaces I’ve set up and angle a ring light over the grouping of plants and letters, arranging and rearranging until I find one that suggests a story. I’m careful not to let any of the return addresses show, but the stamps are a rich tale on their own, and I let them tell it. A packet of letters from a long-ago lover, who wrote to me from Casablanca and Paris and Florence. The light is soft, and I’ll enhance the aging with filters before I post. A little ripple of excitement breathes air through my worry, and again I imagine Isaak seeing my feed, seeing his letters.
It’s hard to imagine him in prisoner clothing. He dressed with sartorial splendor, in the best fabrics—linen trousers and silk shirts, always with a handkerchief tucked into a top pocket. He liked hats, despite the fact that they were falling out of favor by then, and I can see him in a white fedora, standing on a cliff outside some mansion where we’d been invited to stay. It happened often—houses in southern France, in the Alps, in northern Italy, a place he loved.
We’d been together for six or eight months by then, and I was beyond smitten—he was unlike any man I’d ever met, polished, urbane, sophisticated, passionate. I loved his skin, the color of rich earth from his long days outside painting, and his snapping eyes, and his thick hair. I loved the way he kissed, long and slow and thorough, and the way he made love with hands and mouth and body, bringing me to such pleasure I would sometimes fall stunned and dizzy to his side after.
We had made love in a big four-poster bed, with winds blowing hard in the Swiss night and the fire snapping in a hearth so enormous as to be medieval. He propped himself on his arm and looked down at me, touching my nose, the round of my lower lip, the edge of a nipple. “I think of nothing but you,” he said in his accented voice. “I’ve never had such a thing ha
ppen.”
I swallowed. “It’s the same for me.”
“Is it, ma bichette? I can’t think how you love a man like me when there are pilots and kings of industry seeking your attentions all the time.”
“They’re all like small boys,” I said, touching his cheekbone. “You’re the only man I’ve ever met.”
“I am in love with you, my glorious Gloria. I have nothing to offer you, but I want you to know it.”
I rose and pushed him back on the pillows, pressing my lips against his. “I don’t want anything.”
“No diamonds or promises?”
“No,” I said and meant it. “Marriage is not for me.”
For a long moment, he was silent. “But what of children?”
I shook my head, very sure. “No.”
“You and I, we would have lovely children.”
I smiled. “No doubt, but then we wouldn’t have this.” I reached over and placed my hand gently on his stubbled cheek. “This is enough.”
“Do you love me?” he whispered.
“Yes,” I said fiercely. “I have never loved like this in my life.” I kissed him, lingering. “I never will again.”
He kissed me back, and we touched each other’s faces, eyelids and brows, noses and chins. “I love you,” he whispered. “I love you. I will love you forever.”
In my greenhouse, far, far away from that time and that place, I feel tears on my cheeks. How did I not realize that I would never stop missing him?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sam
Sometime in the middle of the night, I wake up disoriented in my hospital bed. For a long moment I lie there blinking, trying to remember why I’m here. I feel lost and overheated, and my mouth is very dry, the headache and stiff neck suddenly back.
My mom is standing beside the bed. It scares me. “Am I going to die?”
Her hand is light and soft as she brushes my hair off my face. Just like Asher does, or did. Like Willow did. “No,” she says quietly. “You’re going to be fine.”
I close my eyes, and I can smell her, cigarettes and Jean Nate, which she liked for its fresh, lemony splash. It transports me to a time when I was small, before Willow arrived and ruined it all. I’m sitting in her bathtub, with bubbles boiling up around me. It must be summertime, because the glass bricks are aflame with sunset, which I always used as evidence that I should not be going to bed yet. It’s still light!
And then I’m in a towel, and she’s singing to me as she combs my hair, then weaves the wet mass of it into a braid that will make my fine hair look much fuller the next day. “Your hair is just like my mother’s.”
“She died,” I supply.
“Yes.”
“And you miss her a lot.”
“Yes, I do. Every single day. She would be so proud of me for the music.”
A sense of love and quiet moves through time from the heart of that child into me. As if there is a soundtrack that accompanies every scene and every moment, the ghost in my hospital room—or the figment of my imagination—starts to sing a ballad that was on her fifth album, North Star, about a girl who went to the city and succeeded, but war came and took it all away. She loved to sing to us, one on each side of her. I can feel her body, the spareness of her breasts, her slim arms.
The song has always been one of my favorites, too quiet for most of her crowd. “Willow sings this song,” I say into the room and realize it’s empty, except for that very sister, curled up like a little cat in the chair, covered by a coat. When did she get here?
I don’t remember. Gloria was here at dinner, and then Asher, but then it’s all dark. They must have given me drugs, which have now worn off. My head is pounding, not the way it has been, but enough that I wouldn’t mind more meds. If I ring for a nurse, it will wake Willow. She’s sleeping hard, her mouth slightly open. She looks about seventeen, and I feel a swell of tenderness.
When my mother first brought her home from the hospital, I thought she was like a kitten and would grow fast enough for me to have an actual playmate, but day after day, she stayed small, her voice wailing in the middle of the night. Wailing and wailing and wailing, as if she knew something terrible had happened.
That something terrible was my father leaving. He left when my mother was pregnant, when it came out that the baby wasn’t his. I’ve never quite understood why she didn’t have an abortion. The father was a passing interest, a musician she’d met on the road, and getting pregnant meant she had to skip touring for a year, more when Willow was an infant, and my father left her.
Maybe, I think now, in a disconnected way, maybe she was trying to stay clean. The idea slips into my mind like a little bird, fluttering around for a moment, then settling on a branch to look at me.
I was not the only thing in her life. Only one of them.
Willow makes a sound in her sleep, almost as if she is singing, and I have to smile. It sweeps aside some of those old, old feelings, that sense of fury at Willow that grew as I realized that she was the reason my father left me.
I suddenly remember that they wouldn’t let me stay alone in the room with her. I hated her screwed-up, screaming face. Her little red fists. Her thrashing legs.
A sense of horror rises in my throat. What if I’d actually hurt her?
Without her, what would my life be like? How much lonelier would I have been?
Gloria came to stay with us for the first time when Willow roared into the world. She swooped in wearing her stewardess uniform and pinned wings to my dress. She took me out every day to eat somewhere—a local diner we both loved, down to Midtown for hamburgers at a fancy steak house, ice cream, her beloved Russian Tea Room. I loved being with her, loved the attention she drew wherever we went with her red hair and friendly personality. So different from my small, punk rock mom.
In the hospital room, my head aches, and I’m worried that my brain is being eaten by meningitis, which I mistakenly googled.
Great.
I watch my sister sleep, thinking of that baby, then the little girl who followed me everywhere, all the time, exasperating, but also fun to play with sometimes. We built elaborate forts out of blankets in the dining room, the space beneath the table a faraway country. Willow was good at taking on whatever role I assigned her—cat or witch or mean sorcerer—and didn’t need to be the star.
She just needed to be with me. She was the moon to my earth, circling me whenever I gave her space.
In return, I was mean. Often. It shames me now to think of the things I did, the ways I hurt her, deliberately.
In the soft light, her wild curls shine around her fox-shaped face and pink mouth. So pretty. Everyone always exclaimed over her when we were out: What a pretty girl! What lovely hair! Such big blue eyes!
People struggled to give me compliments, and it infuriated me, embarrassed me. It wasn’t until later, when I grew to my treelike height, that people started asking if I was a model.
Gloria always believed in me, saw me. She told me I had the heart of a queen, and it was she who first told me about Boudicca, the British queen who staved off the Romans. Gloria praised my intelligence and my clear thinking, and she was the one who finally said, when I was twelve and in tears over my ugliness, that my hair needed to be short, which first of all freed me of all the fussing I hated but also made the most of my long neck and big eyes.
But I still didn’t make room for my sister. There was always a wall, built of my resentment and pain. I had no idea how to dismantle it. Then or now.
Chapter Thirty
Willow
Sam is sleeping hard when I wake up. It’s still mostly dark, but through the window I can see the first glimmers of dawn shining on the glass across the street. I need coffee and food, but I don’t want her to think she’s alone when she wakes up. Taking a sheet of paper from her notebook, I write HUNTING FOR COFFEE, BRB and fold it into a tent I place on her belly. The words are facing her.
In the cafeteria, I pick up some yogurt and
fruit for both of us and start to grab some granola before I remember that it will crunch and the sound will drive Sam crazy. No popcorn in the movies, no slurping through straws, no mouth noises, period. Someone chewing gum can make her homicidal, and she wears earphones on public transportation or shopping. She hates it, and it embarrasses her, but she can’t help it. It’s the same thing some people feel when Styrofoam squeaks or nails scratch a chalkboard. Imagine if that sound happened every single time you heard another person eating.
Evidently, my grandmother was the same. Gloria said they always thought she was just a fussy Parisian, but turns out she probably suffered this same genetic thing.
Sam is still asleep when I return. I wish I could talk to her about everything that’s going on with Gloria. We could use her brain.
But how unfair would that be? To weigh her down with something so dire when she’s barely escaped death?
I leave the note propped up on her tummy and settle in with my phone and my yogurt to scroll through my email—nothing much—and Instagram. I haven’t checked Gloria’s feed for a couple of days, and it’s as evocative and rewarding as ever. She has posted a beautiful series of begonia leaves, one of the fern in her bathroom, the one of me from the other day (I really need to do something with my insane hair), and some thoughtful shots of old letters.
They’re hers, and I bet they came from that man, Isaak, although there’s nothing to overtly link them on the letters. It pierces me somehow, and I nudge the emotion to see if I can discover why.
That she loved him, clearly, and left him behind. Was it for us, after my mother died?
A news alert pops up from the Huffington Post. Authorities Trace Tentacles of Art Ring to New York.
My entire body freezes. Shit! I open the story, leaning forward as if to see more than the text. There’s a link to a video, but when I search my purse for earphones, I can’t find them. I watch it without the sound. Some of it is the same video I’ve already seen, Margolis being arrested, the woman in Amsterdam.
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