Page 50 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

She looked out the window, distant. “Maybe I’d paint someplace I haven’t been. I’ve never left Arles.”

“You could.”

“I suppose. But why, when this is home?”

Vivi settled at a café table near the window. Outside, a couple posed next to Justine Allard’s flower gardens. The man wore a pressed pair of slacks the color of a spring sky; the woman, a white sun dress that tied behind her neck. From the way they leaned toward each other, Vivi knew it was an engagement shoot. How awkward and self-conscious love could be once you tried to capture it. The man made a joke and the woman frowned at it, swatting him on the lapel.

You always pull this shit—

The photographer let her camera slump as they bickered, unembarrassed.

Inside the envelope Jean had given her, there was a butcher’s bill for an inordinate amount of chicken livers and a map of the original property, along with some annotations of the estate’s landmarks. Vivi noticed that neither the cottage nor the bench were on the map. There were census reports and records of servants who’d come and gone.

At the bottom of the pile, she found a collection of photographs. She gingerly lifted each. In one, a man leaned on his rifle near a fallen deer, smug and towering, with thick limbs and a mustache that defied gravity. It had to be Marcel. Handsome, in a brutal way. The type of man who, if he lived today, would muscle you out of the way on a narrow sidewalk.

Next was a formal portrait of Marcel and Justine, sitting in front of a draped muslin backdrop. She was elegant, but not as beautiful as Vivi would have imagined fromTâm’s descriptions, nor from her representation inBlue Mirror. Justine was set back from the camera lens just a touchmore than Marcel, as if allowing him to be the focus of attention. Her waves hung a bit limply and her expression had a certain hardness to it. Yet, despite her prosaic appearance, the set of her mouth hinted at a daring that Vivi suspected hid under those layers of studied manners. The Chaton, gliding just out of sight.

Finally, at the very bottom of the pile of photographs, there was a candid of a party. The crepe of night hung above the crowd. Dancing couples in their finest draped against one another, covertly watching one another’s partners. A man with a faint resemblance to Justine appeared to be making a toast. Emil?

But there—in the corner of the photograph—a figure in a light-colored dress, standing at a distance from the others. An island. Her dark hair hung about her shoulders in a severe and chunky bob. Due to the deteriorated quality of the photograph and her face being in profile, Vivi couldn’t identify the woman well. But she could just make out the freckle on her cheek.

Vivi turned the photograph over. In fine, spidery handwriting:September,1936. The last fête.Without a second thought, Vivi slipped the photo into her pocket. She could have made a copy, but she didn’t want a facsimile. She wanted the original. It could go in her tally of petty crimes, those Samuel might condemn if she ever revealed them. But she could hold the guilt. She always did.

Chapter 14

Vivi was pacing near the entrance of the estate. She’d kicked up the gravel and now pieces of it rattled inside her shoes, jamming into her heel. It was evening and the bats were clicking in the trees, the sharp points of their wings slashing against moonlight. In the distance, cathedral bells rang. Nine, ten, eleven. She peered past the edge of the gates to the empty road beyond. The trees were a scribbled mass.

Late that afternoon, the sightseeing bus had returned with its stock of tourists dragging souvenir sacks behind them. Glossy fridge magnets ofLa Moisson,casters of salt from the Rhône, scarves printed with the flowers of Provence. The sight of the tourists, so self-satisfied, so careless, made her tut in judgment. When had art become so consumable? The ineffable, made common. And where the hell was Calla?

The day had begun with revelation. Its tail was riddled with unreasonable irritation and a deeper, lacerating wretchedness.

An email had come through from Abel. He told her that the board had decided to terminate her employment at the Forster. He was curt and professional, citing misconduct and truancy, firm in his declaration that there would be no severance offered. He didn’t state any legal repercussions, though his language betrayed the stiffness of oversight from the museum’s lawyers. There was an underlying threat of what the institutioncould have done, if they chose. Vivi assumed Samuel was responsible for this leniency.

But it was Abel’s tone that struck her. He’d always served as a bit of a paternal crutch for Vivi. Good-natured, mild, gently encouraging. His oblivious placidity, a panacea amid her confusions. But she sensed none of his usual affection in the email, only a cold finality that cut her in unexpected places.

At the close of her Forster interview all those years ago, Abel had asked, simply, “Why art?”

She could have responded with a thousand pat answers. Within a lifetime of pretzeling herself into different roles—steady sister, dependable daughter, supportive best friend—she understood how to give people what they wanted. But Abel’s frankness made her want to root for the truth.

“Art is the only home I’ve ever known.” She hesitated, but he nodded reassuringly, and she found herself spilling the rest in a rush. “I grew up in a fractured house. The adults in my life couldn’t save me. But art could. Every time my heart broke, art filled in the rifts, like kintsugi. Making the cracks meaningful andmine, something I created, rather than a thing that another person did to me.”

Once she began, she couldn’t stop talking. She described the sisters’ stick drawings in the dirt. The way she would carve scenes into fallen logs with her father’s pocketknife. Calla crumbling dead leaves, then arranging the fragments into new images, an autumnal mosaic that blew away with the first stray gust. The woods had become the sisters’ canvas, their color. It was—

Vivi paused abruptly, struggling to catch her breath, but she never had to finish, because Abel filled in the gap by telling her that she was hired. He’d known that it would take a lifetime of words to answer such a question.

Nearly a decade and it was done. One mistake that cost her career. The Chicago art community was small. Word would get around. Within days, other museums would learn what she’d done, if they didn’t know already, and she’d be dubbed a persona non grata. The worst part was that Abel’s dismissal was warranted; she’d made it impossible for him to land on another outcome.

Knowing this, Vivi grieved so many things. The raised woodgrain of a stretcher beneath her fingertips, the back-aching, myopia-inducing,satisfyinglabor of inpainting a canvas with her favorite hairline brush. The hush of the galleries after all the patrons had left, a quiet that sank into her bones and massaged her worn muscles like ointment.

She saw Samuel pacing her lab as she worked, tripping over his words as he explained a new idea for an exhibition. The two of them, leaving together after everyone else had clocked out, speaking a language of beauty, of love, as they dawdled on the tree-lined streets outside the museum.

Losing her job at the Forster was like losing a place in the world. It was losing Samuel. She’d known, abstractly, what her decision to strip the painting would cost her. Then she read Sam’s email, the one that felt like a goodbye, and felt the cost rising. But even after that, there’d been a part of her that thought she could reverse it all and reenter her life as if nothing had changed. Now, without any foothold at the museum, she saw that she couldn’t reclaim anything. What was done was done.

Art would exist without the Forster. She understood that. But she’d been banished to its outer folds, a spectator rather than a participant. That banishment resurfaced all the old fears of being left behind and rendered her small and perplexed again.

Online, she searched for news onSea to Earth. The exhibition opening was just about a fortnight away. She wondered how Samuel would explain the stripped painting, if he’d mention her name or erase her role altogether. Would there be a grand reveal? OnceBlue Mirrorwas unveiled, the rapacious art scholars would revive their interest inLý, scrounging through the archives for any hint of who the blue lovers could be. Maybe Quân would makeLý’s letter public; then everyone would know about the offering. Another scholar was bound to put the clues together more efficiently than Vivi had. They’d inch in on her territory and she’d be powerless to stop them. She’d begun this quest because of Calla,forCalla, but along the way, she imagined she might have gotten something for herself out of it. What she managed to forget was that the world didn’t hand out favors, not to people like her.

What if, after all that, therewasno offering? Was the journal a worthy enough exchange for her entire career? The sinking in her gut told her that it wasn’t. She was still flailing in the dark.