by Laura Tucker
Leaving Richard’s house had been awkward. Usually, my dad would come to pick me up and we’d drop Alex off on the way, but since my dad wasn’t around, Dr. C wanted Alex to walk me home. Linda doesn’t like Alex to walk around at night by himself; a kid went missing down here a couple of years ago. But Alex’s dad wasn’t around, either, and Maggie’s too chicken to be left by herself. So Linda had to settle for a call when we left Richard’s to let her know we were on our way.
Alex was taking his responsibility seriously, swiveling his head back and forth like ninjas were going to swarm out of the shadows to attack us. I wasn’t scared, exactly, but I didn’t mind him being there until we crossed Prince and he opened his big dumb mouth.
“So how does she pee?”
At first, I had no idea what he was talking about, and then I did. Of course Richard had told him.
Shame bloomed on my cheeks.
“She probably goes when I’m out, like now. Or when I’m sleeping.”
“She’s not making you dinner?” I shook my head and felt a pang thinking about spicy chicken in peanut sauce on a table set with three different, beautifully colored cloths. Alex didn’t even bother to check my response. We both knew that making dinner had mostly been my dad’s job.
Alex had already forgotten to look for robbers and was picking his way over the cobblestones like he was on a tightrope, putting the toe of one sneaker right behind the heel of the other. We had the same shoes, from May’s on Fourteenth Street, only his were red and mine were blue.
He was probably trying to imagine what it would be like if Linda stopped all her rushing around and worrying and real estate showing and community board organizing to stay in bed. It was impossible. In fact, if you hadn’t seen her in her fancy navy pajamas with white piping, all smeary with face cream under a silk sleeping mask—as I unfortunately had, on a number of occasions—it was difficult to imagine Linda slowing down long enough to go to bed at all.
Then he surprised me. “I think my dad’s been staying at a hotel some nights. Not just when he’s out of town, but when he’s in New York, too.”
I knew he’d stop talking if I said anything, so I made a little growl instead that meant: That really stinks; I’m sorry.
I thought, too, about the neat pile of blankets stored under the couch in the studio upstairs, and the quiet snick of the front door closing, right before my dad came in to wake me up with a glass of orange juice.
“You think your mom isn’t getting up because of your dad and Vouley Voo?” Alex asked, and I wondered if he was wondering if his dad had his own Vouley Voo.
“Yeah?” I said. But I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think that what was going on with my mom had all that much to do with my dad. And I wasn’t a hundred percent sure how much any of it had to do with Clothilde.
My mom had said it was her work, and that seemed right. Although maybe it was that everything had happened all at the same time.
Still intent on his tightrope, Alex said, “Richard thinks we should tell someone. About your mom. In case it’s like last time.”
Panic grabbed at me, making it hard for me to breathe, and I stopped right in front of Alex so that he had to stop, too. My voice bounced, unnaturally loud, off the walls of the dark canyon of buildings around us.
“Alex, you can’t. If you tell Linda, I’ll kill you. I mean it.”
A siren wailed in the distance. Alex pushed past me to start walking again, worried about getting home before Linda called in the National Guard.
“Not Linda. Someone else. What about Apollo?”
“I don’t think they’ve talked since my dad left.” I was thinking about this for the first time. “He’s been busy.” And he seems kind of mad at my dad, I thought but did not say. “Apollo introduced them, Vouley Voo and my dad. She might be mad about that?” Except that my mom hadn’t seemed mad about Vouley Voo at all. She’d seemed relieved.
“We could tell Richard’s mom.”
I almost had told her, sitting at her table with the cinnamon tea; now I was glad I hadn’t. My mom would hate for someone outside of our family to see her the way she was. And Dr. Charles is the kind of person who always does things the right way, the way they should be done, and I wasn’t sure my mom could deal with that kind of person right now.
Besides, she was going to get up soon. She had to.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “I just have to figure out how to get my dad to come home.”
“Right,” Alex said. “Sure.”
I was getting tired of his attitude. “What’s your problem?”
But Alex just shook his head slowly like I was too dumb to even talk to.
“What?” I snapped. I was going to make him say it.
He huffed out an impatient breath. “You don’t think it’s kind of suspicious? Your dad disappears into thin air without telling anyone where he is, or what he’s doing, or why he had to leave?”
I felt like he’d slapped me. “He’s in France,” I said, tears stinging my eyes. “With Clothilde.”
“Fine,” Alex said, exasperated. “Whatever you say, Ollie. Your dad fled the country in the middle of the night to be with his girlfriend.” He shook his head again. “Who was already here.”
We were at my door. Too upset to speak, I used the key around my neck to open the steel front door, jiggling the handle the way you have to. A business card, jammed into the crack, fell onto the pitted cement step at my feet.
There was writing on the back, in urgent up-and-down script.
Restorers: please call!
V IMPORTANT.
In NYC until Thursday. 555-4670
I flipped the card over. The printing on the front read:
Antonin Grandjean
Forgery Investigation & Art Authentication
Rue de la Madeleine 3, Brussels
“Later,” Alex said, startling me.
By the time I turned around, he was gone—running, as fast as he could, down the center of the empty cobblestoned street.
FAKE
I let myself in and made my way slowly up the stairs to our apartment, holding the forgery expert’s card gingerly by the edges between my thumb and forefinger like it was coated with poison.
Except the poison wasn’t on the card. It was in my head.
Inside, I dropped the business card onto the steamer trunk we use as a coffee table. Without turning on any lights, I sat down on the couch to think, but as soon as my butt hit the cushions, I popped up like a jack-in-the-box.
Sitting wasn’t going to work.
I rode a wave of uneasy energy all the way across the dark apartment, opened the fridge, and stared at the leftovers inside without seeing them. I crossed over to the windows, but Alex was long gone and Greene Street was deserted again. So I surfed that twitchy wave all the way back to the couch, where the forgery expert’s card sat on the trunk, pulsing and radioactive.
This was almost certainly the big guy Richard had seen asking questions outside my building. He was also possibly—probably—Apollo’s mysterious caller, the one looking for a missing piece of art.
A memory pushed itself to the front of my mind, raising its hand and begging to be called on like Rowan Merody when Ms. Colantonio needs a volunteer.
Ignoring it, I rubbed my sweaty palms against the seam of my jeans and said out loud into the empty loft: “I do not want to be thinking what I am thinking.”
So stop thinking it, I told myself.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.
In September, right after we’d gone back to school, I had discovered that I could not draw a horse.
Carla Perrucci, who is totally obsessed with them, had whipped out a pretty good one in the first session of Art Club. I thought I’d give it a try, even though the only horse I’d ever seen in real life had a cop on it. B
ut horse legs, especially the back ones, didn’t work the way I thought they should.
Lady Day wouldn’t even try. “Animals with sideways-facing eyes are prey,” she told me, a little snottily, I thought. “A cat doesn’t have to worry about what’s behind her.” Prey or not, I didn’t like that Carla Perrucci could draw a horse and I couldn’t, so I went down to the studio after school to ask my dad for help.
He’d happily hauled a big book filled with old photos of racehorses off the shelf for me, and I’d settled in with my notebook and a couple of sharpened pencils to copy some of them while he unwrapped a new job—a minor work by a well-known artist I’d never heard of.
Nudging the painting free of its bubble wrap, my dad looked at it closely, running his white cotton gloves gently over the surface. It was a small canvas, stretched on boards but with no frame. It was ugly, I thought—crude, hard lines surrounding a curvy guitar.
He flipped the canvas over to check the back, tilting it to inspect the rusty nails fastening the canvas to its wooden mount. He hit the switch on the most powerful task light in the studio and studied the painted surface under its harsh beam before carrying it back—again—to the natural light coming through the window.
I put my pencil down to watch. Something was bothering him.
Then he did something I’d never seen him do: He picked the picture up and sniffed it.
“C’mere,” he said. “What does this smell like?”
I inhaled and shook my head, confused. The painting didn’t smell like anything to me.
“Exactly!” he said. “What about that one?” He pointed to an easel nearby, holding a choppily painted seascape that Apollo had been complaining about all week. Not expecting much, I went over and took an obedient whiff, then looked up at my dad in surprise.
The seascape did smell: basement stale with a deep sweetness underneath, like Christmas Eve at Richard’s grandma’s church.
“Exactly,” my dad said again. “A painting smells like the room it’s been hung in.” He lifted the new job to his face again. “And this one doesn’t smell like anything at all.”
He’d leaned over his little black magnifier, an inch away from the painting’s surface. “It’s usually the whites that get them,” he said, more to himself than to me. “They get lazy, fall back on a time bomb from a tube, a formula invented long after the picture was supposed to be painted. . . .” I knew all this already from Apollo, who made his paints by hand from pigments, the way they’d been made for centuries.
Horse legs forgotten, I watched my dad’s intelligent hands run over the front edge of the painting at the bottom, hunting for something that wasn’t there.
“No dust,” he whispered, and I understood.
How many times had I watched him and Apollo ease a painting off its stretcher, then reach for the German wood-handled brushes they’d use to lovingly sweep away the dust that had collected at the bottom? My dad would hold up the clot of grey fuzz and hair like an auctioneer: “Behold, ladies and germs, a genu-wine, authentic, one-hundred-year-old dust bunny! Going once, going twice, to the lady with the butter-yellow parasol!” And then he’d chase me around the studio with it, trying to put it into my ear.
A painting doesn’t kick around for the better part of a century without some dust falling into the crack at the back of the stretcher. But the guitar painting had no lumps at all in the front—no dust.
It was a forgery. A good one, maybe, but not good enough to fool my dad.
I blew air out through my lips with a loud sound, as if I could scare the memory off. Unlike my dad, though, it wasn’t going anywhere. Which left me on the couch in the dark loft, sitting very, very still in front of Antonin Grandjean’s card. I felt like my brain had shrunk to the size of a pea, leaving nothing but room for bad thoughts to zoom around the cavern of my skull.
Specifically, the words from my dad’s note: Not everyone thinks it’s the right thing to do.
That drove me off the couch again, but no matter how many laps I did around the big room, I couldn’t get ahead of the conclusions that my busy brain kept jumping to.
The fights about money. Apollo’s tight jaw as he hung up the phone. A missing piece of art.
Nobody knew better than me that my dad could draw or paint anything. He’d done a perfect Starry Night in icing on my eighth birthday cake, and he’d try to make me laugh by drawing Cubist and Impressionist versions of Garfield the Cat on the placemats at the coffee shop while we waited for our pancakes.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for my dad to save one of those genu-wine one-hundred-year-old dust bunnies. I even knew exactly which spatula he’d use to cram it down the back of a painting. A painting he’d made.
A painting he’d forged.
With paints mixed from Apollo’s pigments, so no time-bomb titanium white could trip him up.
The thought of Alex’s told-you-so face made me want to punch the couch.
What had my dad done?
BUTTERFLIES
Sunday was not great.
It had taken me a long time to fall asleep, but I hadn’t slept in. And when I woke up, the scared, scary ache at the base of my belly was still there.
I lay in bed for a while, lost in the color study across the room, trying to figure out what there was to get up for. It was cold and rainy out. Alex had to go up to Gimbels with his Auntie Em to buy summer clothes, and I wasn’t sure I could face him anyway. Apollo doesn’t usually work on Sundays, and I’m not allowed in the studio when there’s no grown-up. Mr. G’s store is open, but it’s his nephew Babak’s day, and he doesn’t really like it when I hang out in the store.
I could have gone up to the Met, but it’s crowded on weekends and you can’t be alone with anything or get far enough away from the paintings to see them without a million people getting in the way. Richard goes to church in Brooklyn on Sundays, and then his family has lunch with his dad-side grandparents. Sometimes I go with them, but Haitian church is all in French and I didn’t have anything to wear and I was still feeling shy around his mom.
So I got up and watched TV instead. Most kids would love a whole day watching TV, but I was bored and wished that someone would yell at me to clean my room.
I did try to clean up, a little. The big room had an unloved feeling about it that bothered me. I thought about how carefully Dr. Charles had rinsed and dried the giant wooden salad bowl after dinner the night before, about the tiny dot of oil she’d rubbed in with a soft cloth until the insides of the bowl were glossy with care. So I got up and pushed some of the clutter in the big room around, but I didn’t make much progress.
There were two more hang-ups on the machine, and another message from my mom’s gallery. Nothing for me.
I wondered what Lady Day was doing.
I lay down on the couch with my head hanging off the edge until all the blood in my body was in my head. And then I fell asleep.
It’s absolutely exhausting, doing nothing all day.
* * *
When I woke up, it was four o’clock. The whole day was almost gone, and I was glad. I went to my mother’s door and made myself turn the knob.
The room scared me, filled with long shadows and lumps I couldn’t identify.
“Mom,” I whispered, sitting down on the edge of the bed. Her long red hair spilled out over the pillow, more witch than mermaid, and her skin looked scarily pale. She didn’t move.
“Mom,” I whispered again, a little louder. Nothing.
I pushed at her shoulder. “Mom, wake up and talk to me.” The way she looked scared me. “Mom?”
My mother opened her eyes slowly, more like she was coming up to the surface than waking up. She shifted around in the bed, her eyes fuzzy and unfocused. “Shhh, Ollie. No noise, okay? I need to sleep.”
All you do is sleep! I thought. And it’s freaking me out.
My mom rolled over so that her back was to me. “Are you hungry or something? Why don’t you make yourself a grilled cheese?”
“I’m not hungry,” I said. Which was true, or maybe not. I couldn’t always tell what I was feeling anymore.
Even when my mother was up and about, she wasn’t exactly a dinner-on-the-table-at-six kind of mom, but more like a “two o’clock in the morning is a fine time to smash a mirror into tiny pieces so that I can make an empowerment mosaic of a woman’s fist in the bathroom” kind of person. My dad was better at what he called the care-and-feeding stuff, but he worked a lot when he was here.
I did know how to make grilled cheese, though. I knew how to make scrambled eggs, too, but I didn’t like cleaning the pans afterward; the way the egg clogged up the scrubby sponge grossed me out. So I was eating a lot of apples and buying an extra can of peanuts for myself from Mr. G’s.
After another minute, my mom started to close her eyes again. She’s not like Linda. She doesn’t have thirty-six different questions to ask about protein.
I spoke up, louder than I meant to.
“Mom. What’s going on?”
She rubbed a hand across her eyes. “I just can’t, Ollie.”
Can’t what? I thought. Get up? Or explain why you can’t?
“Try,” I said, and my voice sounded like Ms. Colantonio’s when she means it. But my mom closed her eyes again.
I wasn’t sure what to do, so I lay down next to her. Like a lot of lofts, our ceiling is covered in stamped tin, painted white. Mostly, it’s an egg and dart pattern, but there was a leak in my mom and dad’s room, and the hole was fixed with a different pattern. The patch has pineapples stamped into it, which my dad told me used to be a symbol of hospitality and friendship. It’s impossible to make the joins between the ceiling and the repair line up, of course, but I always close one eye and try.