What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

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  For Marghi Barone Fauss

  and

  in memory of my parents, Jacquie and Paul

  Wherever I am

  I am what is missing.

  —MARK STRAND, “KEEPING THINGS WHOLE”

  Bad seven times, good seven times.

  —THAI PROVERB

  PART 1

  2019

  Chapter One

  “CAUGHT IN the act,” said Sullivan, appearing at the top of the studio stairs. He stood there for a moment, slightly out of breath from the four-story climb.

  “Not quite,” said Laura. She was in the little kitchen area, working the color from her hands using a rag dipped in mineral spirits; her cleaned brushes lay in an exhausted regiment across the counter.

  Sullivan’s nose wrinkled. “All this technology and you can’t open a window?” he said. “I’m going to find you dead in here one of these days.”

  “Where’s your business sense?” she said dryly as he crossed to the glass panel set into the wall. “My untimely demise would definitely drive prices up.” Although how untimely would it be, really? Fifty-four was young enough for people to murmur so young but not mean it, old enough for youthful sins to have caught up.

  He tapped at the controls. A muted growl came from the back wall as motorized shades began to descend over the windows there. They stopped and reversed. The side lights blinked on and then off again, then the overhead lights on and off. Finally, a click overhead and a whir, and two of the high slanted skylights began to move. Sullivan stood with his head back, watching them lift away from the ceiling. A damp spring air blew in.

  “It is a good smell, though,” he said, taking his hand down from the control panel. “Means you’ve been working.” He crossed the room to stand in front of the easel. “Another ghost, I see.” His voice maddeningly neutral.

  Sullivan had been excited about the Ghost Pictures at the beginning. He’d given them a prime-time autumn opening in the New York space, had written lyrical catalog copy: scraped canvases intrigue the viewer with muted, suggestive images, like the residue of a dream. That had been four years ago.

  “Why are you here?” It came out more abruptly than she’d intended.

  “Because you don’t answer your phone,” he said. “Or email. Or texts.” He bent close to scrutinize a section of the painting. “Someone called the gallery trying to reach you.”

  “I think my phone is downstairs.” Finding a clean place on the solvent-wet rag, working it into the webbed crotch between two fingers, she nodded to the landline squatting on the counter. “You could have called me on that.”

  He shrugged. “It gave me an excuse to check on you.”

  That was what it had come to. Sullivan was six years younger than she was; at one point, he’d wanted to sleep with her and she’d considered it—he was funny and smart and good-looking, and she’d been feeling raggedy after Adam and wanting a boost—but had decided against it on principles of don’t shit where you eat. Since then, apparently, Laura had edged over an invisible hill: now Sullivan was checking on her as though she were his elderly aunt.

  “Also I promised Kelsey,” he added. “She’s the one who took the telephone calls.”

  “Oho,” Laura said. Kelsey, the Washington gallery’s new front-desk girl. Mid-twenties, very pretty, her manner toward Laura infused with that millennial you-go-girl faux heartiness reserved for the elderly or otherwise pathetic. It’s been a world wind in here, Kelsey had told Laura when they met. Laura, indulging an evil impulse, had gotten the girl to repeat herself and Kelsey had obliged, speaking more slowly. There again was the space between the syllables, the unmistakable thud of the extra D: Kelsey was saying world wind—or possibly whirled wind. She was at least twenty years younger than Sullivan, but no one would blink if the two of them began an affair. Perhaps they already had.

  “Apparently you’ve ignored three emails,” said Sullivan. He had his phone out now, was tapping and swiping through screens. “The caller was very upset.” Laura imagined Kelsey’s whimper: He yelled at me, he was awful. “Here.” He held out the phone. “Something about your brother. You don’t have a brother, right?”

  Laura stared at him, then put down the rag and reached to take the phone, ignoring his wince at her still-painty hand. She read the brief message through once, twice; then holding it up before her, eyes on the screen, she walked over to the landline, took up the receiver, and dialed.

  “Listen to this email,” she said when Beatrice answered. She cradled the receiver between ear and neck and read aloud.

  I believe I have found your brother Philip. Are you Laura Preston born on 25 March 1965 to Robert and Genevieve Preston? If so, please reply. If you are not the correct Laura Preston, I am sorry for deranging you.

  Thank you. Claude Bossert

  When she finished, Bea was silent.

  “It has my birthday in it,” said Laura in an arguing voice. Across the room, Sullivan was looking at her, eyebrows raised. She turned her back on him. “Did Mum ever give out that information?”

  “Who knows,” said Bea, her words surfing down through the phone on a sigh. “Probably.” Her voice held the weary reflexive accommodation of the elder sibling, always an aggrieved shadow of They left me alone to look after you when I was ten years old in it. As if the servants hadn’t been there too. “Just delete it.”

  “But why would it come now,” said Laura.

  The squeak of the terrace door latch, the rattle as it shut: she turned to see that Sullivan had gone outside and was standing at the railing looking down over Woodley Park.

  “Did you mention him in the Post profile?” said Bea.

  “No,” Laura said.

  “Maybe someone did a deep dive on Google,” said Bea. “Everything lives forever on the internet.” Voice taut: “You’re not thinking of responding to it.”

  “It didn’t ask for money,” said Laura.

  “The next one will,” said Bea.

  “Well, they could ask, but that doesn’t mean I would give. One reply email, asking for details—what could that hurt?” Laura heard the bargaining tone in her own voice with irritation. How did an older sister keep the power to shrink you back to childhood? One minute on the phone with Beatrice reduced Laura to the tagalong little sister she had once been, whining Play with me.

  “I thought we were done with all this,” said Bea. “It was the only silver lining about Mum.”

  “I’m not an idiot.” That truculent baby sister again, lower lip stuck out. Laura strove to make her voice neutral. “The first demand for money, and I’d be out.”

  “Why engage at all?” said Bea. “What would be the point?”

  She was so much like their mother, swift and breathtakingly confident in her assessments, dismissing whatever she deemed unworthy of her attention, capably taking charge of the rest. Like their mother had been, Laura corrected herself.

  A long pause. Morning was leavening the sky outside the windows of her aerie, the knotted spires of the Gothic cathedral pushing up from the skyline. She’d been smart or lucky or both, to add this level to the narrow brick town house back when this was a modest middle-class neighborhood. No way she’d be able to get a permit to do it now.

  “Are you going to se
e Mum today?” asked Bea, her voice turned brisk, as if moving to the next item on a checklist. “I can’t get over there. There’s a thing at the boys’ school.” A thing. A tennis tournament, or diving championship, or academic awards ceremony: it could be any of those. Beatrice’s twins were multiply, almost preternaturally gifted. You’d never know it from Beatrice, though: trophies stayed out of sight in the boys’ bedrooms, and she didn’t boast about their accomplishments. It seemed like humility, but Laura knew it was actually the most rarefied form of pride. Of course Bea’s children were extraordinary; proof wasn’t necessary.

  “I was planning to have lunch over there—” said Laura. What day was it? She looked at Sullivan’s phone, which by now had flicked to the lock screen: Tuesday. “Tomorrow.” Thank goodness; she hadn’t missed Tuesday dinner. Edward hated when she missed.

  “If you do, make sure to check on the garden. Noi says the gardener’s been slacking off.”

  “I will,” said Laura. Wondering, what would she look for? Weeds? “But Bea, if it is him,” she said. “What if it is.”

  “It isn’t,” said her sister. “It never is.”

  * * *

  “You hungry?” said Sullivan, coming back inside and finding Laura cleaning his phone off with the mineral-spirit rag. “Come on. I’ll treat you to breakfast.”

  “I was going to take a walk,” said Laura. “I haven’t been out of this house in three days.”

  She held his phone out; he took it between two fingers, waving it gingerly in the air to speed the evaporation of solvent.

  “Do you want to talk about that whole thing?” He inclined his head toward the landline.

  “Nope,” Laura said.

  He followed her down the stairs, through the kitchen to the back door she held open for him, stood below her on the long exterior flight of concrete steps while she locked up.

  “I’ll send the guys for the painting in—” he said.

  “Two weeks,” she said. It would be varnished by then and dry, ready for transport. At the moment of completion it had been vital, almost like a living part of her; now it was a husk, inanimate, taking up space in her studio. Wampum, to trade for groceries.

  Sullivan’s car waited in the parking space beside the weedy oblong that was far too small to be called a backyard. He hesitated beside it, keys in hand.

  “The new painting,” he said. “It’s not really new, is it.”

  His eyes were manganese blue well-diluted, maybe a little viridian mixed in, a rim of indigo. During the last twenty years she had looked into these eyes as often as any others, even Edward’s, even her sister’s or mother’s. A sad statement: her gallery owner might be her closest friend.

  “I’m not done with the series,” she said. “Or it’s not done with me.”

  “It’s just—” he said, and stopped himself.

  “What?” she said.

  “It’s starting to feel like a gimmick.” In a jokey tone to soften that, he added, “Not to mention a waste of a lot of perfectly good paint.”

  “Kawara’s Today series went on for decades.”

  “Time was part of that concept,” he said. He did not add, And you are not Kawara. He pressed the fob in his hand and the car double-chirped; he opened the driver’s door. “Come on. Let’s talk over breakfast. This new place in Tenley does great avocado toast. Also French toast. All the toasts.”

  “They sell, right?” she said, not moving. “So why do you care?”

  He sighed, looked away from her, down the alley. Then back. “I’m going to have to put someone else into the slot I was holding for you in New York.”

  “Fine,” she said, turning away.

  “Laura,” he called as she took long strides up the one-way alley, past the garbage and recycling bins paired tidily behind each house. As she came out of the alley onto Cathedral Avenue, she heard his car start up behind her and drive away.

  * * *

  This part of Washington was beautifully walkable; Laura hadn’t owned a car in years. The neighborhood had evolved since she’d moved there, the teachers and midlevel professionals dying or downsizing, the rich young moving in. The old sidewalks that had been humped and broken over the roots of midcentury maples were jackhammered up and the trees themselves replaced; now concrete flowed in smooth pram-friendly ribbons beside compact and fruitless ginkgoes. Laura reached Connecticut Avenue and turned left, toward what had once been a strip of secondhand shops and bars and a battered Safeway. It was now a decorous array of pastel-painted boutiques, a vegan bakery, a gourmet supermarket. Tucked in the middle was a tiny ultra-hip coffee shop, where Laura joined the line that snaked patiently away from the counter.

  She carried her shade-grown, fair-trade decaf latte past a rank of gleaming smartbikes toward the zoo. On a weekday morning with school still in session, crowds would be thin and she’d be able to walk for nearly two miles, taking the long outside loop all the way to the end, swinging around the Kids’ Farm and coming back through Amazonia. She paused for a don’t walk light beside the corner kiosk that was, as always, neatly color-blocked with notices for local events, items for sale, music lessons. She admired the dedication of the invisible someone who managed this small piece of the world, taking down the past-date advertisements and stapling new ones into place.

  A mild misting rain had started by the time she reached the zoo. She discarded the coffee cup into a bin and set off, hands balled in her pockets. The long walk after finishing a painting was usually something she enjoyed: it drove the fumes from her sinuses and stretched out her tight muscles. It also allowed her to savor a curious and temporary aftereffect that made her vision sharper and colors almost surreal, her brain still painting after her body had stopped. But today she found herself brooding, annoyed. By Beatrice’s dismissiveness, by Sullivan’s bland intrusion, his gimmick. With that word he had turned Laura to face what she’d been resolutely trying to ignore.

  Down the years, she had known other artists who were suffering from block; she had sympathized, of course, but not really understood. Her mental knock on wood, an internal There but for the grace of God had been reflexive and insincere. How smug she’d been, how certain that her own engine of inspiration would never fail.

  Yet it had. Or at least, it had downshifted. Laura still turned out paintings regularly—too regularly. Too comfortably. Making art had once felt exhilarating and terrifying, like combustion or freefall, like peeling herself open. It had felt dangerous and important. Had youth been the necessary ingredient there, or naiveté?

  She passed a zoo worker, huddled into his windbreaker. He shot Laura a concerned look and she saw herself through his eyes: a middle-aged woman in jeans and T-shirt and scrubby ponytail, rambling alone past the Small Mammal House in the rain, without an umbrella or even a jacket. She had to laugh: this was what counted as iconoclasm now.

  Gimmick. She rolled the word around like a bitter pill. With trepidation, and not a little panic. But also, she realized, gratitude. No one else would have said it. Sullivan’s investment in her work wasn’t solely financial. He’d been the one to discover her, back when he was a gallery assistant, had stuck by her through the long, slow rise; he was willing to say the hard thing to her now. It was part of the reason why Laura had also stuck with him all these years, spurning the lures dangled by fancier venues. She knew better than most: truth was hard to come by.

  * * *

  When she let herself into Edward’s house that evening, the air smelled heavenly. She followed the scent back to the kitchen and found Edward there, at the stove.

  “We’re at T minus seven minutes,” he said with a smile, replacing a lid on a saucepan. When she went to the cutlery drawer, he said, “Table’s already set. Just relax.”

  He poured a glass of wine, nudged it across the counter toward her. The first sip spread across her palate and rolled a rich vapor up into her nasal passages. She watched him plate: a fish fillet laid onto a pallet of ivory grains, a clutch of brussels sprouts nest
led beside, a sauce drizzled over the lot.

  In the dining room, there were fresh flowers on the table; silverware winked under the chandelier.

  “It’s a new recipe,” said Edward as they sat down. “The sauce has a secret ingredient.”

  A fancy table for no occasion. A new recipe with a secret ingredient. The conclusion was inescapable: something was bothering Edward. The nature of his work was often confidential, and sometimes when wrestling with a dilemma he could not discuss he’d become terse and preoccupied, a tortoise with his head pulled into his shell. A very productive tortoise: a lot of house projects got accomplished during these periods.

  No amount of coaxing would draw Tortoise Edward out before he was ready, so without resentment Laura carried on a largely one-sided dinner conversation, commenting on the fish (quite good), trying and failing to guess the secret ingredient (white pepper).

  “Oh,” she remembered when they were nearly done eating. “Sully brought over the weirdest email this morning.” She told Edward about it, and also what Bea had said.

  “How did Sullivan get the email if it was sent to you?” asked Edward, forking up a bite of fish.

  “It was sent to my gallery email,” she said. “It’s set up so that if my inbox reaches one hundred unread items, he gets an alert. He’s like an overflow valve.” To Edward’s amused headshake, she added, “Bea was in fine form. Totally dismissive.”

  “She’s right, though, isn’t she?” he said. “After all this time. It’s not really possible.”

  “It’s not impossible,” she said. “He was never found.”

  The words opened up a well inside her. That was what it was like—like having a well inside you with no bottom. Things dropped in and fell forever.

  Edward was looking at her closely.

  “Was there something in particular about this email?” he asked.