Page 3 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Samuel’s lips twitched. “Of course that’s what you would remember. Here’s what I remember. You were bent over that scroll with the tiniest paintbrush I’d ever seen, wearing a white lab coat, these clunky orthopedic shoes. Abel was trying to introduce us, but you waved him off, you said you were too busy for him.”

“It was a hard restoration. I’d been at it for six hours already.”

“He apologized for you afterward, but there was no need. I thought of you all day. I wondered what sort of mind—what sort of heart—gave itself so fully to art.”

They were nothing more than colleagues for the first year of Samuel’s employment at the Forster Institute of Art and Antiquity. Vivi ignored the rumblings of the new curatorial wunderkind and stuck to her work. But when she looked up, she saw him reading late into the night at the archives. Gazing at the art as if it were about to speak back to him. He was unlike Smith and Dylan, the two other Forster curators, who saw art as a rung on the ladder of prestige. He stirred her curiosity.

Samuel was a highly respected scholar who could have gone to the Met, LACMA, or any number of museums, but instead chose to bury himself in a tiny institution lodged like a wayward pebble within the brownstones of the Gold Coast. Chicago would always be home, he’donce told her, and she’d nodded as ifhomewas a word that meant something to her.

Then they worked together on a nineteenth-century photography exhibition, where she discovered that Samuel saw art as possibility. He did not use art to shield himself in an ivory tower, but to connect him to others. This boundless idealism required a sense of courage that fascinated Vivi. Soon after, like petals closing in on themselves, their friendship turned inward, cocooning a deeper and more enticing burrow of emotion. A late-night discussion over one of Julia Margaret Cameron’s portraits turned into dinner, drinks, a midnight walk on the lakeshore. They first consummated their relationship on the floor of her lab, a transgression that still made her shiver, unfamiliar with her own recklessness.

Then the pandemic, its escalation of the relationship and their reliance on one another. Samuel was the first man Vivi allowed herself to love. Now he wanted more. But how much more did she have to give?

Buying herself time, she clipped the chatelaine to her belt loop. “It fits.”

“Like you, in our life.”

Because it would not just be him she was saying yes to. It was him and Phoebe with her own wild curls, her captivating yet exhausting prattle about gemstones and glitter slime; his parents living on the floor above, playing their Thai pop at deafening levels; and his ex-wife, a chef in Lincoln Park who dropped in without warning, always bearing tubs of their favorite dishes, including Vivi’s.

He was asking her to rejoin a unit, to tie her heart and fate with a network of others. To become a family.

Familywas, perhaps, the only word she understood less thanhome.

She took off the chatelaine and laid it onto the table. “I love you.”

“You’re saying no.” The hope on his face schismed into hurt, then confusion, but he mastered both emotions, as he always did, with a small intake of breath.

“I’m not.” She grabbed his hand. “I’mnot. Could I think about it?”

He pressed his lips into her hair with a tenderness so bald that it nearly felt like a burden. “Take all the time you need.”

She’d chosen him because his love did not demand. He accepted her prolonged hours in the conservation lab, her propensity to coil into her own interiority. He understood that she’d lived alone for so long that she’d become almost feral in her need for solitude. With Phoebe, she was able to pretend, but only for short periods. She often left their bustling family gatherings weary, ready to hibernate for days.

“Should I have waited?” Samuel’s voice was soft.

She knew he was thinking of her father’s death, wondering if it’d been too soon after the funeral to propose. Three months, after all, was a blip of time after the decades spent putting Deer Creek behind her.

She’d tried, once or twice, to describe her childhood to him, but stopped each time, wanting to avoid his pity. Or wanting to protect him.

Samuel saw the world as it should be, not as it was. Perhaps his sanguinity came from being a parent; he needed to believe in the best, so as not to be crushed under the weight of all that could go wrong on his watch. Maybe that idealism also came from being so completely adored by his parents, who still attended his every exhibition opening, grinning from the sidelines as they did at his first soccer match, his kindergarten graduation. All his life, he’d known nothing but the consistency of affection. He couldn’t help but take it for granted.

No, he would not understand a mother like May or father likeTu?n. Or a daughter like Vivi. Those who came from happy families would never fully stand in the same reality as a person like her. After all, wasn’t that initially what made her maintain her distance, this dissonance between their comprehensions of goodness? For Samuel, goodness was a given, an abundance. For Vivi, goodness arrived in brief, glimmering bursts, always snatched away at the last moment.

And yet, eager to reassure Samuel of her love, no matter how she answered his question in the end, she pressed herself close and lifted her lips to his.

In his bedroom, it was too simple for their bodies to find each other. For him to slide off her shirt and count vertebrae up her spine with his long fingers, ticking each with the concentration of a scholar at his abacus. She traced the tributaries of his veins with her tongue, let him in the only way she knew how. He cupped her lower, harder, his grip so fierce that it scraped a cry from her.

“I want,” she said, not knowing how to finish the sentence. “I want—”

He kissed her eyelids, her clavicle, the dip beneath her navel. He filled her desire without words.

Then he was asleep and she was slipping out, soundlessly making her way back out into the night, the chatelaine heavy in her coat pocket. It was her rule: she would spend the night with Samuel, but she would not confuse Phoebe by waking in their condo. Not until she could be sure she could stay.

Vivi called for a car and waited on a bench under the bright sear of a full moon. The streets were empty, save one or two drunks ambling from the bars, singing nonsense songs. She thought of grabbing them, telling them,It’s my birthday.I’ve just been offered a new life.

There was only one person she wanted to tell. But she and Calla hadn’t spoken since their father’s funeral.

A brilliant day in June, ecstatic warblers outside the crematorium, the open casket that held the last glimpse they’d ever have of Tu?n. She and Calla had avoided eye contact. They spoke in one-word declarations, as if they’d been given a quota for intimacies.