“What did you do?” Ronan snarled.
“Correlation is not causation, Ronan Lynch,” Bryde said. Adam appeared briefly at the end of the hall and, just as quick, was gone.
“What did you do?”
Bryde said, “Wake up.”
Ronan woke with a start.
He was in the top bunk in the room he was sharing with Bryde. It was still dark.
He rolled over quietly to see if Bryde was sleeping.
Bryde was already standing by the bunk, eye to eye with Ronan, somehow less like himself, frighteningly close.
He didn’t smile, but he was all teeth. He said, “Whose dream is this?”
Ronan woke with a start.
He was in the top bunk in the room he was sharing with Bryde. Full white winter daylight streamed in the window. It was quiet, but nonetheless Ronan had that feeling one sometimes has on waking, the feeling of having been woken by a sound. In this case, a scream.
He lay there in bed for a few seconds, listening, waiting, and now it sounded instead like a very intense conversation was happening deeper in the house. He listened to it long enough to feel he was awake, or at the very least, that this dream was going to be different from the previous ones. He got dressed and headed out.
There was no one on the first floor, where school supplies spread across the dining room table, so Ronan descended to the basement.
It took him a moment to absorb the full picture.
There was a painting of a woman in a swirling blue dress completely covering twelve of the stacked boxes. Not dreamt. Done with real paint, some of it still a little dark and damp. The desk tucked beside the boxes held bottles of cheap school paints and paper plates with childish smiley faces drawn on them—Hennessy must have been painting with the children. The cheap school colors didn’t seem like they should combine to the sophisticated work on the boxes, but this wasn’t magic, this was Hennessy. This was what she was good at. What she was great at.
Hennessy stood in front of her cardboard mosaic, one hand pressed up against the roses tattooed round her throat, looking at the ground. There was vomit on the ground in front of her.
Bryde was there, blood all up and down one arm with no sign of where it was coming from. He stood silent as Angelica screamed in his face.
The children were all crying.
Katie was curled up small, her arms linked around her leg braces, whimpering. Yesenia was sobbing and occasionally babbling, hoarse when she did. Stephen was trying to look stoic as he watched Angelica let Bryde have it, but his mouth was crumpled and his chin dimpling in a way that reminded Ronan uncomfortably of when Matthew was upset. Wilson and Ana clung to Angelica, faces buried in their mother’s shirt. There was blood on her clothing, too.
“What the hell,” Ronan said, but his words were lost in the cacophony.
“Accidents happen,” Bryde said. “And surely you can tell by looking at her she didn’t mean to do it.”
“It doesn’t matter that it is an accident,” Angelica barked back. “Traffic collisions are accidents—that doesn’t mean I send my children to play in the street!”
“I was only a minute behind her in the dream,” Bryde pointed out. “They were never in danger.”
Angelica swept her arm over the children. “You and I have a very different definition of danger! I saw those things—that thing. I saw it. It …” Her anger had to disappear for a moment as she choked down a horrified half sob.
Hennessy looked up at Ronan, her expression quite calm. But when she blinked, two tears immediately broke free and raced down her cheeks.
Then Ronan got it.
She’d taken out the Lace.
Bryde had dispatched it somehow, but Ronan knew that didn’t really matter in the relative scheme of things. The injury of the Lace wasn’t whatever sparring had caused that blood. It was the mere existence of the Lace. It was that before you saw the Lace, you didn’t know something like the Lace could exist. Especially if you hadn’t known, before that minute, that anything could hate you that much. Especially if you hadn’t known, before that minute, that you could hate yourself that much.
Katie had stopped whimpering and was staring off at nothing, her eyes lost.
Hennessy looked at Ronan and shook her head as another tear escaped.
“I’m so sorry,” she told Angelica. “I’m so sorry. I’m so—”
“Who are you to have that in your head?” Angelica said. Then her eyebrows sort of got themselves together and her entire expression got harder. Ronan could tell that whatever she said next was going to be absolutely true and would absolutely destroy Hennessy. Before she could say it, Bryde held up a hand.
He turned to Ronan and Hennessy. “Get your things. Then get in the car.”
“Why?” Hennessy asked in a hollow voice.
“Actually, forget your things. I’ll get them. Just get in the car,” Bryde ordered. He turned back to Angelica, and as they left, Ronan heard him say, “You might remember that dreamer was a child once, too, not very long ago.”
Outside the car, Hennessy stopped dead and simply stared at it and through it. It was not because it was invisible. She was staring at and through everything in front of her; her eyes were so bleak and her shoulders so defeated that Ronan wrapped his arms around her.
“I’m not a doll, Ronan Lynch,” she said, her voice muffled. “Take your hands off me.”
He just hugged her tighter, though, as she cried into his chest.
A few minutes later, Bryde came out, looking worn and blank, Ronan’s and Hennessy’s bags over his shoulders.
“Call your brother,” he told Ronan. “Tell him we can see them for a few hours.”
A special kind of relationship happened between an artist and a piece of art, on account of the investment. Sometimes it was an emotional investment. The subject matter meant something to the artist, making every stroke of the brush weightier than it looked. It might be a technical investment. It was a new method, a hard angle, an artistic challenge that meant no success on the canvas could be taken for granted. And sometimes it was simply the sheer investment of time. Art took hours, days, weeks, years, of single-minded focus. This investment meant that everything that touched the art-making experience got absorbed. Music, conversations, or television shows experienced during the making became part of the piece, too. Hours, days, weeks, years later, the memory of one could instantly invoke the memory of the other, because they had been inextricably joined.
Copying and recopying Sargent’s Madame X would always be associated with Hennessy, because of how intensely the two of them had worked on making it, the process so intensely tangled that it was as if a single entity, Jordan Hennessy, had done it.
Copying Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit would forever be associated with June and the other girls, because of how it was the first time Jordan had truly imagined doing something original, thinking of how a portrait of all of Hennessy’s girls could be posed with a similar chaotic but structured array for good effect, their faces strikingly and eerily and poignantly the same.
Copying Niall Lynch’s The Dark Lady would forever be associated with the Fairy Market and the creeping desperation of those last days with Hennessy before the murders.
And copying Sargent’s El Jaleo would forever be grief and hope twined together. It was knotted tightly with the song that was leading the charts the first week she got to Boston, the bright new knowledge that sweetmetals existed, the sound of that little boy’s voice when he woke up at the Boudicca party, the quality of the light coming into the Blick’s as she bought new brushes to replace the ones she’d lost, the heart-pattering chance that artists just might be able to keep themselves awake if they were original enough.
Jordan was beginning to understand how it might be possible for ley energy to be tangled into the art-making process, too.
“Of course Ronan can’t tell me exactly when he’ll be here,” Declan said.
The sentence came quite ou
t of the blue, as before that he had, in his singsong soothing patter, been telling her about Quantum Blue, a new blue pigment invented with nanotechnology, designed to replicate the exact color of the idyllic “blue hour” of a Greek dusk. He was still seated in his chair the way he always sat when he came over, one leg crossed over the other, his tie loosened, his jacket removed and laid over his knee as if he had just come in from work, because usually he had. She hadn’t told him the portrait was done, so he still posed. “It is not the Ronan Lynch way to provide enough information to prepare.”
“What’s it, exactly, that you’re hoping to prepare for?” Jordan asked. She herself had mixed feelings about the news that Ronan, Bryde, and Hennessy were paying a visit to Boston, because of one harsh fact: Hennessy still hadn’t called. Ten years of complete codependence, and suddenly Hennessy had gone radio silent. At first she’d put it down to Hennessy being unable to find Jordan once she’d moved to Boston and gotten a burner phone. But now Declan had gotten two calls from Ronan and Jordan still didn’t have even a message from Hennessy. Jordan went from worry to annoyance to zen and back again. Truthfully, what truly kept her up nights was the realization that Hennessy hadn’t given Jordan all of her memories when she made her.
She had been waiting weeks to demand an answer for that, and the call never came.
Declan said, “I’ve never been good at Ronan, and there’s no handbook for the conversation we need to have now.”
“Sure there is. It’s a snap, a quick group read. The handbook’s called Your Boyfriend Called, He Thinks You’ve Joined a Cult, Please Advise.”
“Ronan’s not much of a reader,” Declan said darkly. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You brought it up.”
“Did I? What was I talking about before?”
“Quantum Blue. Alexopoulou. Blue hour.”
Jordan knew, without having to think too hard about it, that this conversation would also be coded into the painting currently in front of her, Portrait of a Nameless Man. She would forever after see the words Quantum Blue and think of this canvas, these long cold nights at the borrowed Fenway studio, Declan Lynch posed in the leather chair, the lights of the city murmuring outside the tall windows behind him. It would forever be tied to her experimentation on the colorful edges in the piece, her decision-making for the palette, her favorite brush getting scrubbed down to nothing and being replaced with a second favorite, and with her attempt to make people feel about her subject the way she felt about her subject, no matter how many decades passed.
Her first original.
Had she made a sweetmetal? She didn’t know.
Declan observed, “You can put that brush down, although it’s very good theater. I know the painting’s done.”
“Who’s the artist here, Mr. Pozzi? Perhaps I’m still studying your mannerisms.”
“That brush hasn’t had paint on it for three days.”
“It’s not your place to question my process. Muses are notoriously ill-used.” She put the brush down. “Matthew said you might be able to get one of your father’s dreams to test it.”
“You can’t tell?”
“Whatever Bryde and them are doing means I can’t feel the sweetmetals like I used to. I don’t need them, not just walking around. I won’t know unless the worst happens.”
“Did it feel different to make it?”
Of course it had. It was her first original, and for the first several sessions, the weight of that had slowed her brush to a crawl. She couldn’t decide how many of her artistic decisions in the piece were being cleverly informed by the artists she’d painted before and how many were simply straight up copied. This was decidedly Turner’s palette, she argued with herself. This was Sargent’s composition. This was still forgery, just good forgery.
But then something had happened on the third sitting. Declan had been telling her a story of John White Alexander’s Study in Black and Green, telling her how sensational it was at the time it was painted, given that the subject of the painting was a woman whose husband murdered her former lover in the middle of Madison Square Garden and got away with it under a plea of temporary insanity. As a footnote, he’d added that John White Alexander was married to Elizabeth Alexander Alexander, a woman who friends had introduced him to at a party because they had the same last name.
Jordan had laughed and her brush, loaded with titanium white, had slipped.
Disaster.
Before she could stop it, she’d darted a glaring line along the edge of Declan’s neck on the canvas. With annoyance, she’d gone in with a rag, but the paint beneath was still too wet to let her completely wipe away her mistake. The edge had been left glowing. But as she turned her head to the side, trying to imagine the fewest steps required to restore the edge, she realized the glow actually looked good. It did not look like reality. It felt like reality. The way the light played against the dark tricked her eye in the same way a real object’s edges did. The dissonance was right.
Instead of repairing it, she emphasized it as much as she dared.
The next sitting, she was even braver. She pushed the effect further, past the point of comfort. Until it was more real than reality. She didn’t know if the effect would work, because she was no longer copying. This was unknown road.
Had it felt different to make it? Of course it had felt different. It felt terrifying. It felt thrilling. She wanted people to admire it. She was afraid they’d hate it.
A Jordan Hennessy original.
“It’s bonkers, really,” Jordan remarked. “The whole thing. A sweetmetal. Everyone’s going mad trying to get one, they’re so rare, it’s impossible. And here I am, thinking, oh, right, well, I’ll just make one, then. I never thought of myself as an egotist, but I really must have quite a pair on me.”
Declan smiled at this, turning his face away as he did, as always. “I’m just surprised you’ve never considered yourself an egotist.”
“That’s very sweet.”
He asked, “Can I see it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re the biggest art snob I know, which is saying a lot, and you’re a capital-L Liar and I don’t think I could take it if you didn’t like it and I also don’t think I could take you lying to me about it if you didn’t.”
With some curiosity, Declan asked, “Do you think I could still lie convincingly to you?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Do you think I would?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“After all this?”
“After all what?” she said, but in a mocking tone. “Just because I stole your car.”
They were quiet then for a space. Declan looked out the window at the dark, more pensive than his portrait. Both Real Declan and Portrait Declan held their hands the same way, fingers unevenly laced, something about them suggesting power at rest, but Portrait Declan depicted the Declan of just a few minutes before, his head turned quickly to hide that secret smile, that private self. Portrait Declan’s eyes were half-lidded, looking away, his expression one of intimate, mannered amusement. Real Declan’s were wide open, mirthless.
“My mother took days to fall asleep after my father died,” Declan said. It took Jordan a moment to realize that he was referring to the dreamt Aurora, not his biological mother, Mór Ó Corra. It was the first time she remembered him doing so. “He was dead right away, of course. Brains bashed in. They had to take some of the gravel driveway with him to clean up the scene, if you can imagine, that’s your job, the shovel, make sure you get all the pieces, don’t want the kids tripping over gray matter. They didn’t take my mother, though, because she didn’t look dead yet. She looked fine. Fine as you could expect under the circumstances. No, it took her days. She ran down, like a battery. The further she got away from him, the longer it had been since he was alive, the less she became, until she was just … asleep.”
It was not his ordinary storytelling voic
e. There was no theater. He was looking at nothing.
“Ronan and Matthew wanted her awake again, of course—Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t you? Truly, why wouldn’t you, I see that now. I see it from their point of view. But Ronan and I fought. I said it wouldn’t matter, she was nothing without Dad. Always an accessory to him, a reaction to him. Why wake her? You couldn’t wake the dead along with her, so she’d always be a frame for a destroyed painting. We were orphans the moment Dad died because she was just organ death. What was she except for what Dad made her to be? What could she do except what he had made her to do? She had to love us. She was always just an external hard drive for his feelings. She—”
“Just stop,” Jordan said. “You have to know now. Saying she wasn’t real doesn’t make it any easier. Just different. Anger doesn’t mess up mascara as much.”
His eyes were bright but he blinked and they were ordinary again.
“Ronan’s trying to wake up the world. I’m trying to think of how to talk him out of it, but what he’s talking about is a world where she never fell asleep. A world where Matthew’s just a kid. A world where it doesn’t matter what Hennessy does, if something happens to her. A level playing field. I don’t think it’s a good idea, but it’s not like I can’t see the appeal, because now I’m biased, I’m too biased to be clear.” Declan shook his head a little. “I said I would never become my father, anything like him. And now look at me. At us.”
Ah, there it was.
It took no effort to remember the way he’d looked at her the first moment he realized she was a dream.
“I’m a dream,” Jordan said. “I’m not your dream.”
Declan put his chin in his hand and looked back out the window; that, too, would be a good portrait. Perhaps it was just because she liked looking at him that she thought each pose would make a good one. A series. What a future that idea promised, nights upon nights like this, him sitting there, her standing here.
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