Page 22 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

“Wait a fucking second,” Calla interrupted. “You gave him the letter? Without talking to me about it?”

“I had to. You weren’tthere. Paul wouldn’t have let us look through his research without something in exchange.”

“That letter belonged toDad.”

“Who isn’t here.”

“Well, then it was mine!”

“I’ll remind you that you gave it to me. As a birthday gift. Anyway, why would the sketch have gone to you? I’m his daughter too.”

Calla bit back the words, but she didn’t have to. Vivi knew what she was thinking. Calla andTu?n’s alignment, shaky as it was, had long mystified Vivi, almost to the point of ire. Certainly to the point of resentment. For the first half of their lives, it’d been Vivi and Calla, facing off againstTu?n. Then, somewhere along the way, Calla had allowedTu?nback in; never completely, and never with full trust, but far more than Vivi would ever permit.

She remembered the first and only time whenTu?nvisited Rathmore. He was coming for an art show that displayed recent works from Calla and her cohort. The sisters placed bets on whether he’d actually make the drive—he hated to pass the Wisconsin border—but there he was,standing in a corner of the gallery with his right hand shoved into a coat pocket, tapping his foot as instructors took turns introducing each artist. He seemed sober for a change, but in the room of bustling, proud parents, he also looked small, bereft of his usual power. Or maybe the power had been an illusion all along, a glamour of Deer Creek. Vivi thought, too, of caged animals, how scrawny and desperate they seemed when taken outside their native contexts.

At the show, Calla’s pieces were the most talked about. She’d created large-scale, mixed-media collages of the woods behind their farmhouse. There were origami birds folded fromVi?tnewspapers and embroidery threads coaxed into leafy patterns and iridescent candy wrappers cut into tiny darters that sprang in arcs.Tu?nstood in front of each collage for long, silent moments, only drifting to the next once he’d examined every inch of the canvas. In one, Calla had used a scrap of May’s favorite apron, the one with primroses and a yellowed eyelet trim, to form a pale moon above the landscape. He reached out to touch the fabric, not caring about the glares from the professors, for whom gallery decorum was more sacrosanct than religion.

Afterward, Calla had invitedTu?nto dinner with them, but when he glanced at Vivi, she remained cold, unencouraging.Whatever, come if you want. Finally, he said that he had to get back to Deer Creek. But he was proud. He said it in Vietnamese:Ba t? hào.

Vivi often wondered, afterward, why his pride had pained her so much. Because it wasn’t meant for her? Because it came too late? Because it made Calla so very hopeful, when in the end, he would never be able to give her the consistency of a real father? She remembered howTu?nhad bent his head as he shuffled back to the truck, shoulders hunched. He looked far older than his years. She almost called him back.

Then the vignette faded and Vivi pulled herself back to the present.

Calla relented. “You’re right, you’re his daughter too. Toward the end, he talked about you all the time. He asked about what you were doing. Remembered things about you that even I had forgotten. The way you would only eat blueberries in pancakes, never on their own.”

“Because of the seeds.”

“How scared you were of the owls in the woods. You used to sneak into his and mom’s room, wailing about those owls. He said you’d snuggle right between them with your cold-ass feet.”

“I remember.” Both parents on either side of her, a star-pricked sky through the window. Making wishes until her eyelids drooped. Back then, safety was a promise hung on the cusp of dreaming.

“He said that he’d subscribed to the Forster’s newsletter, did you know that?”

“Good for him.” She forced the ice to wrap around her chest. Freeze the heart, protect the internal organs.

“Whenever they mentioned the art conservation, he’d look for your name.”

Vivi walked away from the installation and sat heavily on the bench, staring at her hands. Calla sat next to her.

“Why are you so unforgiving?” she asked. “Sohard?”

“Dammit, Calla,” Vivi said, so loudly that the student docent by the check-in desk glanced up. She lowered her voice. “Ihadto become hard. I became hard so you could stay soft.”

“Listen to me, Bee. I’m grateful you were there when we were kids. But that was a long time ago. I’m good now. You can just be.”

“What does it mean, that you’regoodnow?”

“I’m not using. I haven’t had a drink since last fall. Well, I mean, I haven’t beendrunksince last fall.”

“And how long will that last?” Vivi knew she should be encouraging. That’s what a good sister would do. But she was afraid to believe it. Love and fear, fisting together, impossible now to pry apart.

“It’ll last this time.” Calla nodded at her. “You’ll see.”

Vivi thought of Calla’s stints in rehab, her long silences, her frequent disappearances. Calla’s addictions were constantly biting at their heels. If it wasn’t alcohol, it was the pills; if it wasn’t the pills, it was some new obsession that wrested her so completely from reality that Vivi would have to spend months pulling her back. A phone thrown into Lake Michigan, ateetering pile of bills that called to mind those gut-turning visits from debt collectors in Deer Creek.What if, what if, the endless refrain. It could have just as easily been Calla in that truck, speeding with booze in her veins, thrown through the windshield into a heap.

Calla handed her the book she’d been holding. It was a bound catalogue raisonné of lesser-known French Surrealists that she’d snuck out of the art history library. Vivi flipped through the book.Lýwasn’t well-regarded or prolific enough to merit his own catalogue, but he had a handful of paintings in this one. Calla stopped her turning at an entry ofMoonbathers, one ofLý’s final paintings.

“This one,” she said. “This one isn’t like the others.”