Page 33 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

In her sleep, Vivi heard the door open. The sound was so faint that she could convince herself it came from another hotel room. The sisters had taken to locking all the windows and doors as a cautionary measure against Vivi’s sleepwalking. No one would come in or out. It’d given her a cocoon-like sensation that recalled the evenings inside their childhood bedroom. Toads croaking, wind agitating, the soft ruckus of Calla flopping on the sheets. What Vivi felt, then and now, wasn’t exactly safety, never safety, but some sense of fortitude. If Calla were nearby, dreaming her nonsense little-kid dreams, Vivi could relax her guard. But that night in Arles, in the depths of sleep, she tensed. The air in the room had changed, emptied somehow.

By the time she jolted awake, Calla was already gone. Vivi fumbled to pull on a pair of boots. She tucked her phone into her back pocket and made her way downstairs, awash in the contrarian thrill of alertness when the rest of the world was asleep.

At this hour of the night, the hotel was almost silent. The concierge stand empty. She could hear cooks in the kitchen dredging their knives through sinks brimming with dishwater. The painters and dancers had taken to their Egyptian cotton sheets, sated on boar pasta that wound in butterscotch knolls on spotless plates.

From the glimpse of the estate they’d gotten on the drive in, Vivi knew roughly where to find the servants’ cottage. She set out in that direction, using her phone’s flashlight to guide her. In the dark, she steppedonto the tines of a rake, like some slapstick cartoon character. She ignored the pain, then took a breath as she scaled the low fence separating the properties. For a moment, she hung awkwardly between the two places. When her feet landed, she half expected a siren to blare or a dog to begin barking, but there was only the distant burble of a pond.

“Calla,” she hissed. “Butt-on.”

Nothing but the dim rustle of the night.

The cottage was no larger than a one-room schoolhouse; certainly no larger than Vivi’s apartment. For whatever reason, she thought ofTu?n’s shed. Tight little places that could hold entire worlds. Sites that drew her, even if she resisted them.

On the exterior, uneven sandstone toothed together into a dubious façade. There was an arched door with heavy metal hinges, open a few inches. Once, bushes had flowered on either side of the cottage, but now they had shriveled into thorny corpses. She called for her sister again.

“In here!” Calla’s muffled voice came from the cottage.

When Vivi placed her foot on the steps to the front door, a sense of vertigo overtook her.

Her vision blurred and she saw—or hallucinated, or dreamed—a slight figure in black, reaching for the handle with his long fingers. Buds of lavender clinging to his trouser hem and sweat beading at the nape of his neck.

She followed him inside the cottage. Watched as his gaze swept the narrow bed made up neatly under an open window, the cast iron tea kettle squatting on the stovetop, the crates full of his art supplies, bearing stamps from Paris, a place that felt as far away asVi?tNam at that moment. The cottage was small, so small, but it was everything. He thanked whatever gods he still prayed to for the mercy of a corner where he could be nobody at all. Acedia, his native state, might finally loosen its hold.

“Lý,” Vivi said. She wasn’t in the cottage, but above him, or beyond him, in the brace of wind that dragged against his sunburnt cheeks.

He turned, surprised, toward the sound of her voice. “It’s you.”

She wanted to take his shoulders and shake the secrets from him. Or maybe she wanted to lay herself at his feet, to ask for—what, forgiveness?Wisdom? Her impulses did not seem to come from her, but from another force, one more urgent and knowing than any she could summon.

Then it was gone, the vision, and Vivi returned with a thud of reality to the interior of the servants’ cottage.

Calla was stooped next to a bed, swooping a flashlight under it. “What did you say?”

Vivi blinked hard. “Nothing. Where’d you get the flashlight?”

“Stole it from Jean’s desk. She won’t miss it.”

“You promised you’d wait.”

“I did not,” Calla said indignantly. “Yousaid we should wait. I took a bite of crème brûlée.”

“What if the owner comes around? Have you thought of that?”

“Look at this place, would you? No one’s been here in decades.”

Stained floors, peeling paint. A dented spade against the corner. A length of ivy curled in through the broken panes and lifted itself into a shrug. On a windowsill, an ashtray had sprouted a shrub of cigarette butts. That was the only sign that humans had passed through this space.

“What if—”

“Tick-tock, sis.”

Vivi gave in. She was just as curious as Calla. She rotated her phone around the room, following its faint nimbus to investigate. The cabinets were empty of everything except an occasional mouse dropping, hardened by time. The drawers held a confusing array of silverware, instruction manuals, dirty francs, ink-dry pens. She placed her hands on the walls, as if she could hear their silent histories, but nothing came back to her except cool stucco.

“I wish we knew what we were looking for,” Vivi said.

“What’d you expect, some neon arrow pointing to a broken floorboard?”

“Shh. Keep your voice down.”