Page 92 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Samuel said, “So I’m asking. Did you mean what you wrote?”

She wanted to tell him what she’d learned from Calla. That love could be uncomfortably thorny sometimes, that it could also feel like the beginning of a dive, all lift and flung-out arms. A draught of bravado to spite the fear. That love was, really, just a choice to stay until the end, knowing that there would always be an end.

She wanted to tell him about her father standing behind her mother in the kitchen of the farmhouse, braiding May’s shower-wet hair with the calloused fingers that’d housed a hundred splinters. Fingers that could be as gentle as they were battered. Or maybe she’d tell him about Wayland, warbling Bob Dylan lyrics under Calla’s dorm window as Calla leaned over, singing along.

Vivi could also describe her favorite fiction: an image of an older, more hesitant Justine Allard returning to the bench in Arles. Sweeping her fingers across the dusted-over words inscribed in stone, licking the gritof the years off her skin as she thought about the only woman she’d ever loved. These stories were printed onto the surface of Vivi’s heart.

Love lost, but never forgotten, and in its remembrance, never completely dead. Pulsing like a collapsing star that clings to its last torrents of brilliance.

Samuel crooked his head, trying to read her thoughts. She’d tell him all this, and more, someday soon.

For now, she only pressed her cheek into his hand and said, in a voice ringing with conviction, “Yes, Sam, that’s right. I love you just like that.”

Chapter 34

Three Years Later

The afternoon was breezy when there came a knocking on the shed door. It was so timid Vivi almost missed it. But she’d have known that knock anywhere.

Months before, Samuel and Vivi had convertedTu?n’s shed into a studio. The first thing Vivi did was expand the windows so she could watch the world around her. As she worked, she could see into the office where Sam did most of his writing. In the room beside it, the pompom hem of Phoebe’s curtains bounced against the glass. Once, her bedroom had belonged to Vivi and Calla; now, it was home to a wide array of fantasy maps, Narnia and Middle Earth, each more complex and lovely than the last.

“Come in,” Vivi said. On her wall, she’d hung the chatelaine that Samuel had given her. Its inset sapphire threw off a shower of blue when the light hit it.

Phoebe poked her head in. “Daddy says I’m not supposed to bother you while you’re working.”

“I’m not, honey, just thinking.” She patted her knee and Phoebe bounded over, hopping right on top. She was eight now, small but sturdy, with muscular legs made for running. The same age as Calla when the sisters had first begun their game.

“What’s that?” Phoebe pointed a stubby finger toward the pages in front of Vivi.

“A project. A daydream.”

She never wrote the book that Paul wanted. Vivi felt it would be a betrayal to reveal all ofTâm’s secrets. But she wanted to leave something of her own behind. In between her freelance conservation work, she carved time to paint her memories. The impression of them, at least.

May’s ghostly last kiss before she disappeared. Floating in the creek with Calla.Tu?nwith his hair blowing behind him as he hopped from the truck. She didn’t know what the result of all this work would be, if there was even a cohesive narrative to be found. But it felt to her like an act of conservation too, this breathing of life into the discarded past.

Phoebe held up the topmost sketch, one of two male figures walking on a bridge, neither touching nor completely divided from one another. “What’s your project about?”

Vivi gave a helpless shrug. “Family, maybe? Love, definitely.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Okay, I will. Let’s take a walk.”

Spring had just begun sidling its way into the woods. There were green buds along the tips of the branches, yet the human inhabitants still wore sweaters and huddled together on a giant bed at night. The pines had grown taller and statelier, as they do.

Even though most of Samuel and Vivi’s work was still in Chicago, they spent long weekends and holidays out at the farmhouse. Summers too. They watched the seasons drift across the landscape, brushing it with new colors, then snuffing those same colors back to gray. Pentimento.

Everything had changed and, still, nothing had.

The farmhouse was no longer yellow. They sold the remaining furniture and refinished everything in a French country style. They painted the shutters blue. Wallpapered every nook and cranny with arcane prints that Phoebe couldn’t stop examining.

When it came time to sort throughTu?n’s papers, Vivi hesitated, then stored everything without reading it. Maybe someday, she told herself. Maybe never.

Under their wresting, the old farmhouse finally released its pain but managed to retain the echoes of laughter and whispered secrets and midnight sprees of inspiration. If Vivi looked across the way, she could see her neighbor Robin in the yard of the blue colonial, scolding Baxter the dog. Robin had begun raising chickens, and Baxter terrorized them with an unholy glee that was glorious to behold. Samuel bemoaned the extra noise but softened when Robin left a basket of eggs, still warm from the coop, on their doorstep.

No more than a handful of steps from the shed, there stood a birdbath on a pedestal encircled with intricate stone roses. It was a sort of housewarming—or homecoming—gift from Wayland. His last text message to Vivi had come from Beijing. He’d moved from cults to corporate espionage. There were whispers about an Oscar nomination. He’d begun dating someone, but it was nothing serious, he said.

Vivi once asked him whatever happened to Los Brillantes. He’d sent back a shrugging emoji.