Page 36 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Vivi edged closer, feeling a softening around her baser desire to hoard their find. “Yes. Yes, of course I will.”

At first,Lý’s script was difficult to parse, but with practice, it became easier for Vivi to decipher his sentences. With each moment of translation, the synapse between mind and meaning tightened into a sturdy bridge until Vivi’s shaky words became more certain. Until effort became excitement and trepidation and breathless wonder. Together, the sisters relived the story of an artist who’d managed, until now, to hide a love story under a forgotten bench halfway around the world.

Interstitial

May 11, 1943

There are many places where I could begin. Even now, decades later, I see the sheen of a rushing river and a dark gloss wavering across a child’s head. I grasp for both as if they were in front of me. In my studio, I paint to capture the scales of a gutted fish on a cutting block, glittering like diamond shards. Most of all, I am haunted by the memory of her lips, red rosebuds reflected in the glass as she read to me.

There is logic to all these scattered memories, I know. They will come together into a narrative that transcends my failures of imagination. I only need to write what I know. Who am I writing for? Why am I writing? Here at the end, reasons feel incidental. I simply record because I must.

But I suppose I will start with her, because it was she who brought me back to myself.

I met Justine seven years ago, in the spring of 1936. The flamingos had begun flocking back to the ponds. From a distance, they looked like the dried shrimp floating in my mother’s winter melon soup, the same ones my sister picked out and dumped into my bowl, because I liked them and she did not. LittleNg?c—what an injustice I have done to the only person who’d loved me without motive or expectation. But no, I must stay on task.

Near the shoreline of the Rhône, the birds were larger than expected. They flourished their pink-tipped wings, as if they’d swiped my palette. If I were younger, I’d have run to them with open arms, the way we did as children. As an artist, I studied them, wishing I could capture the jubilance of their flight.

Birds, what have they to do with anything? I’m only trying to capture it all before it fades. My mind goes where it wants, herded by caprice rather than sense.

That May of 1936, I walked from the station in Arles, thinking of Emil, my friend and agent. Before he deposited me at the train in Paris, he’d drunk most of my Cassis and eaten my carefully guarded sardines. “While you are away, I will use your apartment as my personal larder,” he joked. I did not find it funny, and then he poked at my stinginess. He thought I was too serious; I thought he was cavalier about everything that mattered. We bickered like a tired old couple whose allegiances were firm enough to bear the weight of quarrels large and small.

I forgave him everything, of course. His camaraderie, blunt as it was, was one I’d never found elsewhere. Our relationship had always been complex, motivated by commerce as well as our mutual alienation as citizens of a cold world, yet I never doubted that he cared for me for myself too. He alone has kept my secrets with staunch fidelity.

Before he left me at the Gare deLyon, he said, “JuJu will seem worldly to you. She has the trappings of wealth and poise. But she is also fragile.”

“I have no intention of taking advantage of your sister.”

He shook his head. “No, no, I don’t mean that, my friend. Only that—well, she possesses a passion that can be difficult on sensitive beings. It becomes a web, trapping the source of her affections.”

“I don’t plan on burdening her with my presence.”

“You won’t be able to help it. She will sweep you up like a storm. That is the kind of woman she is.”

I wasn’t interested in their sibling tensions. They brought about thoughts of my ownNg?c, who felt more distant from me with each passing year.

Finally, I said, “I’ll take care, Emil. I’m grateful to you both.”

And I was. I knew I would die of a slow and ugly rot if I stayed in that mouse-infested apartment, breathing in the fug and dissolution of that damned city. Chased by my equally damned past. There was poverty of the pocketbook—I could manage that, poverty was habitnow—and then, there was penury of the soul. Truth be told, a part of me itched for the freedom Arles would provide. I was a country child and I would always seek the unattended sovereignty of an open sky.

In the Camargue, it was a windy day for walking. Justine had offered to send a car, but I wanted to survey the town on foot. I saw fishermen casting their nets along the rocks with reckless energy, and the sight reminded me of my father on the banks of the Mekong, reeling as if he were embattled with the delta. These years later, I still pale under the imagined heat of his glare. In me, he’d seen his deepest fears realized: a child who tainted the godliness of the family. I often wonder if the bigger curse is to know one’s forebears completely, with unflinching exactitude, or to never know them at all.

My sister, hopeful little soul, offered panaceas to his fury:We’ll run away together. I’ll sing in the opera house; you’ll exhibit in the museums. Everyone will know our names.

The irony.

By the summer of ’36, I’d lived in France for almost two decades, more than half my life. I could not go back toVi?tNam, nor could I find it in my heart to make a home among foreign tongues and faces that did not know mine. I was more than an island. I was a feather that could only land by the grace of the wind, no more in control of my fate than a child. And it seemed my fate had led me to Arles.

As I pushed open the gate of Maison de Notre Rêve, Justine ran down the drive with unfeminine velocity, gusts stirring her skirts and prying her hair from its pins. Unbidden, I thought of a stream of light flashing into a prison cell, illuminating even the most miserable corners.

I was not, of course, the first to become arrested by her beauty—those auburn curls that brushed her face with the unconscious shapeliness of a fern, the wide, intelligent green eyes, and that laughing mouth. You never felt as if she were laughing at you; a person could be in on the joke with Justine.

I shook the dumbfounded expression from my face and greeted her solemnly. Despite Emil’s descriptions of his sister, I expected her toresemble the society women I’d seen in Paris with their pinched faces and cutting manners.

“Good morning, Madame Allard.”

“Please. Justine.”

I sensed her taking in my hair, the travel-dusted suit that was too large and too formal on me. I’d worn my armor so long that it had welded onto my body, revealing nothing except reflective apathy. There was no judgment in her gaze, only friendly speculation. I wondered how much Emil had told her about me.