Page 13 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

“He won’t like being cornered like that.”

Quân avoided people at all costs. In her time at Rathmore, he’d refused to hold office hours in rank defiance of university policy. He did not contribute service hours or sit on any academic committees. In his entire career, he’d only supervised three dissertations, and he’d only passed one of the three. But no one dared to challenge him. He published voraciously and his presence alone drew art history scholars to the otherwise unremarkable Midwestern college.

“Who the hell cares. Won’t it be nice to see ol’ Rathy?”

“We need a plan, Button.”

“You know what we need? A cigarette.” Calla rifled in an end table, then emerged with a pack of Hestias.

“I’m trying to quit. Samuel doesn’t like it, especially around Phoebe.”

“A little smoke never hurt anyone. We’re secondhand Sallies, and we’re just fine.”

“Are we?” Vivi asked dryly.

“Besides, everyone needsonevice, even perfect Vivi. And you can tell me all about your boringLýresearch while we smoke.”

Calla’s tone was as cajoling as it was as a child, when she tried to coax the last Little Debbie cake from Vivi. Or all those times she inserted herself when Wayland invited Vivi to a movie, jumping into the back seat before either of them could muster the heart to refuse. She dangled the Hestias back and forth in front of Vivi and, with a sigh, Vivi took them from her.

On the fire escape, they lit the cigarettes and peered up at the smoggy sky over the city. A train on the Pink Line rattled in the distance, an echo of the conductor’s announcement drifting toward them.Last stop. End of the line. Nicotine filled Vivi’s veins.

Calla swung her bare feet lightly over the edge of the rail. The red paint on her nails was chipped, her second toe slightly longer than her first, pinky toes curled inward, like puppies seeking warmth. Vivi knew no one else’s body, except her own, so well. Calla’s smell, her sounds, her movements, the unrest of her emotion; all a part of Vivi’s genetic code.

When Vivi was young, after May had left them, she sometimes pretended that she was Calla’s mother. Wiping her face of Kraft mac and cheese, tying her shoes on the walk to the bus stop. Forging their father’s signature on field trip permission forms. Even now, she had the urge to yank a brush through Calla’s knotted hair.Do you want them to call CPS on us?

Back then, the worst threat would have been for someone to separate them, and even now, decades later, Vivi could never completely shed that fear. In the child-corner of her mind, she felt as if the world were conspiring to separate their family, one by one, as if they were on a firing line being picked off by invisible assailants. Bitterly, she reflected that this fear was her mother’s most meaningful legacy to them.

May’s leaving was so sudden that none of them were prepared for it. (How could one, after all, prepare for such a thing?) They’d filed a missing-persons report, but the detectives were unsympathetic. They pointed to the note that May had left on the kitchen table for her husband.Don’t worry. I need to take care of myself for awhile.There were no floating bodies, no Jane Does that might offer terrible absolution. Only silence and more questions.

Vivi would sometimes hearTu?nin his room, babbling in Vietnamese, words that made no sense, except for the way he repeated their mother’s name. During that time, the sound of May’s name had become synonymous with sadness for Vivi. It wailed so loudly inside of her that she would look around, startled that no one else could hear the keening pitch. It was cruel of the world to keep going, but it did; it never halted once.

Maybe May was his last thought, asTu?nsoared through the windshield, toward the hardened arms of the tree trunk. That love that obliterated him.

“Do you think he meant to do it?” Vivi asked. The idea wouldn’t stop clutching at her.

Calla stopped swinging her feet. She didn’t have to ask what her sister meant. “Do you?”

Tu?ncould have been on another bender, despite his claims of sobriety. Maybe he’d relapsed. Pushing that lead foot until the truck passed sixty, seventy, up to three digits. Headlights swinging with abandon.

What would it change, Vivi wondered, if he had wanted to die? After all, she never truly expected their father to stay. For weeks after May left, Vivi would listen for the door at night, expecting it to creak open, forTu?nto start up his truck and leave. Yet, against all odds, he never did. He drank and threw dishes and got furious and lolled like a shot creature on the recliner, hungover, reeking. But he stayed. And in the end, maybe Vivi wished he hadn’t.

The sisters were silent, watching the city below them, feeling between them that familiar heave of contradictory feeling. Their loyalty to one another, tangled with the resentment of their circumstance, mixed up with an underlying and mistaken notion that the other sister had it easier. What was “easy” anyway? Not life. Not love.

Hundreds of windows twinkled around them, each holding the fulsome weight of grievances and elation, of unpaid bills and charred dinners and unspoken, private beauty that vanished in the swell of morning. Vivi and Calla stubbed their cigarettes, squashing out the light.

Interstitial

The Question of Blue: Shame and Obsession in K. P.Lý’s Landscapes

Paul Quân

On the anniversary of the Surrealist Vietnamese French painter K. P.Lý’s disappearance, we return to the troubled nexus of his work, which has been described by the legendary critic Guy Robart as “a confused mélange of Orientalism and avant-garde imitation.” In a lecture at an Académie salon in 1933, Robart said ofLý: “I weary of his paintings even before my eyes meet the canvas.” André Breton did not nameLýamong his cadre.

Never popular or profitable in his time, the hermeticLýworked on the fringes of the bohemian art movement in Paris. He seldom showed his work. He did not, like so many of his peers, find solace in community. Toward the end of his career,Lýwas often compared unfavorably to LêPh?and Mai TrungTh?, Vietnamese contemporaries whose nostalgic oil paintings spoke in elegant contrast toLý’s horror-filled references to colonial Indochina.

Lýdid not attend openings or deign to publicly speak about his paintings, preferring to let his oneiric landscapes communicate for themselves. This would be a mistake. In a time where the artistic conversation centered on individuation and the powers of the unconscious mind,Lý’s silence became an obdurate obstacle to his material success. He was seen as a determined outsider, before it became fashionable to exist outside of the mainstream of art.

Many even speculated that K. P.Lýwas not one artist, but a studio of scheming, money-hungry charlatans. That theory was later dismissed by the majority of Asian art scholars, but the stain of perfidy remains. WhenLývanished in 1943, during a time of great unrest, few of his peers missed or regarded him. All that remains today is an oeuvre that tells a cryptic story.