Write My Name Across the Sky

by O'Neal, Barbara

  It’s a very formal room, with wood-paneled walls and parquet floors covered in properly faded arabian rugs. An enormous table, left by the former owners, is carved of dark wood and surrounded by twelve matching chairs. It dominates the center beneath a rather plain chandelier. I moved the ornate crystal beauty that used to hang here into my bedroom, where it would be enjoyed rather than hidden away.

  On the walls, all the walls, are dozens of paintings, which Billie collected on her travels with a casual fanaticism that always surprised me. Few of them are better than average, but she made a couple of brilliant purchases over the years—an early Lee Krasner, a surrealist drawing that turned out to be an Escher, a remarkable sketch by David Hockney that’s probably worth a small fortune. She had wide-ranging tastes in art, just as she had wide-ranging tastes in everything. Music, sex, food, drugs. Most drugs she could manage, but heroin brought her down, just as alcohol brought down our mother.

  I wander into the parlor, also filled with art. Hanging in plain sight among all the others, the abstracts and landscapes and sketches, is a small square painting in need of cleaning, but I daren’t take it in to have it done. Even beneath all the grime of decades of New York City soot, it’s a bright landscape, wheat and trees and a row of poppies very much in the style of Renoir.

  Because it is.

  An actual Renoir.

  I cannot sell it, of course. No one has ever noticed it on the wall among all the other paintings and imitations, and I hope it will remain this way.

  But there is much to connect me to Isaak. Will Interpol come after me too? Our love affair was quite well known in our group, and Interpol will certainly pay attention to the fact that I was a flight attendant, flying internationally for nearly two decades, so could easily have carried contraband.

  I am also the subject of many of his own paintings, a fact that will come to light sooner rather than later. If I know anything about the inflammable nature of the internet, Isaak’s work is about to be splashed everywhere.

  Perhaps it will become valuable. That would be a bittersweet angle to his story.

  Or maybe I’m just being paranoid and dramatic. Honestly, it’s been decades—why would they bother?

  Except—here is the Renoir. Should I move it, or would that make it look more suspicious? I can’t very well claim I had no idea it was real if I hide it.

  If I do hide it, where will it be safe? I’ve always planned to leave instructions about it in my will so that the world will have it again after its long loan to me. It was a gift from Isaak, late in our shared caper.

  Where shall I hide it?

  A certain tension begins to fill my throat, a sense of urgency and the very real fear that I must take steps to secure my freedom. The emotions freeze me for a moment, and then I straighten my spine. I will not indulge panic. Instead, I march myself smartly into the shower. One never accomplishes anything without a clear mind.

  I need to decide on a plan. The last thing in the world I want to do is flee—leave my home, the girls, my life—but worse would be prison. A vision of Isaak locked behind bars in some grim jail makes my stomach hurt.

  I have to figure this out. Probably the first thing I need is a lawyer, a criminal lawyer who knows something about international law and art forgery. My regular guy probably won’t know much about that, but I know somebody who will, or will know who to recommend.

  Chapter Five

  Willow

  Light trickles into my bedroom early, filtering through the curtains and onto the dusty Turkish carpet. For a moment, I lie there, grateful for my bed and my room. I’m lucky to have a place to land and I know it, but that doesn’t really help the bottomless sense of failure that also arrives, right on time, five seconds after I open my eyes.

  I roll over onto my back, hands on my ribs, and let it come all the way in. Go ahead, get it out, I think to the voice that so harangues me.

  She dives right in with the same litany I’ve been hearing on repeat for months now. You’re too old for this. Your music is too offbeat for the masses. You should have known you’d never really make it. And the worst: You’ve let everybody down. Some prodigy.

  I wait, but the harridan seems to be finished.

  With a sigh, I roll out of bed, shake it all off, and slip into a pair of yoga pants and an old 3 Doors Down sweatshirt. My violin sits by the door, and I pick it up and carry it with me into the kitchen. Gloria is an early riser, but there’s no sign of her as I make a cup of tea. Maybe she’s in the greenhouse.

  The kitchen is where the age of the apartment shows most vividly. A window over the sink is framed in faded yellow curtains, and the cupboards have so many layers of paint you can see the decades in chips showing through the slippery white top layer. The linoleum floor is from some era I can’t even name and is so battered that Gloria keeps it covered with an area rug.

  And yet the counters are plentiful, a butler’s pantry provides a generous amount of storage, and the view through the window is of the Hudson, eternally moving slowly to the sea.

  The best of the room is the back door that leads to the rooftop garden and the old-school greenhouse built out there. When I was a child, I played in the mostly neglected greenhouse, dancing my dolls along the shelves, enjoying the dappled light coming through the mossy, dirty windows. My mother was flush through the eighties and early nineties and paid a gardener to come in twice a week to tend the trees and the flowerpots, so they sometimes overwintered a few things in the greenhouse. Mostly, I had both the garden and the greenhouse to myself, a magical place in the mornings, no parties or grumpy sister to ruin my pleasure.

  Carrying my cup of tea and my violin, I step out that back door into the misty morning and the splendor of what Gloria has created from the wreckage of my mother’s life. The potted trees of my childhood have grown tall and leafy, though of course they’re bare limbed in February. Pathways lined with pots lead to a cozy nook furnished with a table and chairs, and then to a semicircle overlooking the city to the south. In the distance, I spy the Empire State Building to the left, the pin in the map of my world.

  Last, the path leads toward the door of the greenhouse, a wrought iron structure leaning against the wall of the house. I duck inside, breathing in the scents of earth and moisture, letting them work their miracle of release along my neck.

  It’s a huge space, but every inch of it is filled with a fecund outpouring of flowers and greenery. Bougainvillea winds in splashy magenta over the ceiling, and orchids bloom in pockets, along with a multicolored selection of begonias with showy leaves. Lettuce, spinach, and radishes fill a raised bed against the cold wall, and on the warm end over a radiator is a cherry tomato plant covered with fruit. After Gloria came to live with us, tomatoes were the first thing she planted out here, and my childhood was dotted with the harvesting of cherry tomatoes. I pluck a ripe one and pop it in my mouth, covering my tongue with explosions of flavor, and I close my eyes for a moment. Store tomatoes do not taste like this at all.

  I thought Gloria might be puttering out here, but it’s empty. I settle my tea between a blooming red-and-white gloxinia and a sturdy Martha Washington geranium, then pick up my violin and tuck it under my chin. The harridan slinks away to her cave, silenced by devotion.

  Because I am devoted. Devoted to music, and violin, and the part of me that burns to create. For a single moment, I allow myself to be just there, ready to begin, on this lovely morning back in my childhood home.

  Then I tune my beautiful instrument, face the audience of plants, and let music rise in my body, allowing whatever wants life to tickle my fingers. It’s both practice and pleasure, discipline and joy, a daily habit I’ve rarely skipped. In a little while, I’ll work on the piece I’ve been composing, but for now there is just this. Morning practice, and then again in the evening if I don’t have a gig. Twice a day, every day.

  This morning, the first to emerge is an easy Mozart sonata that allows my body to warm up. The acoustics are fairly good, and mu
sic swirls around the plants in soft lavender notes, spreads along the glass panes of the ceiling in pale clouds. I can sense the plants turning their heads and leaves toward the sound, drinking it in and offering me back the gift of oxygen. I fill my lungs with it, fill my body, and close my eyes.

  And as so often happens in various places in the apartment, I sense my mother, a presence that’s just beyond my physical senses, memory or imprinting on the space or a ghost. I don’t know; I just know I like it. I keep my eyes closed and play for her, imagine her faint smile, the pride she took in my abilities, abilities she nurtured deeply.

  The sense of her fades slightly as I finish, and I open my eyes to the plants and soft green air. My skin feels softer already. A rex begonia, with a spiral swirl of red on her ruffled leaves, moves slightly as a waft of air touches her. I move my finger along the edge, pick up the violin again. “What would you like to hear, my beauty?”

  I fancy I hear the answer, though of course it’s only my own mind. Lindsey Stirling! Of course! So much energy!

  The weaving of Celtic and electronica is one of my favorites. Some have compared my compositions to hers, and that’s fair, but I’m very much my own artist and a composer working on my own ideas. Her music now pulses a sense of energy and passion into my body, pushing away the past, the struggles I’m facing with my career, the choices I have to make sooner rather than later.

  There is only now. This. Music and plants and potential.

  When I’m finished with that, I shake out my shoulders and allow the new composition to fill me. It’s not quite a concerto, not quite a sonata, not quite a single song. It’s layered and wild and rich, and if I can get it right within the next few days, I can enter it into a music competition that carries a substantial prize, $10,000, and a lot of great exposure within the industry. The piece isn’t finished, and I can feel holes in it as I work. Something in the middle lacks some essential magic, the fairy dust that takes a composition from good to fantastic, and I can’t figure out what’s missing.

  From the corner of my eye, I see Gloria slip in, her short white hair gelled into a sharp, ultramodern style, sleek on the sides, swirling longer on top. It sets off her cheekbones and jeweled eyes, always her best features. This morning, she wears a simple turquoise cashmere sweater and silk trousers that I could not get away with. She waits for me to finish, her head swaying along, and shoots a series of photos with her phone. This is something I’ve grown used to. She’ll post to Instagram, but I never mind. Sam hates it.

  When I finish with a flourish, Gloria claps. “Fabulous!” she cries. “And look at the plants! They’re so happy.”

  “It does seem as if they like it.” I pick up my tea. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “In a little while. I’m meeting the girls for a special lunch.”

  The “girls” are a gang of septuagenarians who met in flight school for TWA back in the sixties.

  “A birthday?”

  For a moment, she looks confused. “A birthday? Oh, no. We just felt like it. Not getting any younger, you know.”

  I nod. “So when are you leaving?”

  “Not for a couple of hours.” She pats her wrist, which gleams with a rose-gold smart watch on a mesh band.

  “I mean for your trip.”

  “Trip?”

  I raise my eyebrows. “I’m here to house-sit?”

  “Oh, that.” Her hands fly around. “Not sure. I have some things to work out. Are you in a hurry?”

  “Not at all.” There’s something about her face or her posture that makes me cross the small space between us and envelop her in a hug. She’s taller than me by several inches, and my head falls exactly into the hollow of her shoulder, the place of safety I most needed as an orphaned child. Now her body feels taut, and I wonder what’s going on. Her arms eventually come around me, but not in the usual way. “Are you okay, G?”

  She pets my head, but in a sort of distracted fashion, like she needs to get moving. “Fine, sweetheart.”

  I think not, but I release her and step back to examine her face carefully. Slight blue circles that can’t be fully hidden beneath meticulous makeup reinforce my sense of unease. “You know the ‘lean on me’ thing goes both ways, right?”

  She barely seems to hear me, looking at her phone. “I’ll leave you to it,” she says and bustles away, already opening an app.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  Chapter Six

  Sam

  It’s raining lightly as I start my morning run. My joints are a little achy, and I feel like I might be catching a cold, so for the space of a few minutes, I consider not going.

  But I’m already in my running clothes, and I have the right gear for the weather, a lighter-than-air raincoat that can fold as small as the palm of my hand, performance layers underneath, and what my aunt Gloria calls my foreign legion hat, with long tails to cover my neck.

  I’ve also arranged to meet my father at a coffee shop near his apartment as a last-ditch effort to find the funding I might otherwise have to get from Jared. I could skip the run and just take a cab, but truly, running is the only thing that keeps my anxiety in check, and I have a lot of it this morning. I toss back a couple of Advil and head out into the day.

  It’s Sunday, still early, and I warm up with an easy jog from my Harlem apartment down to the Hudson River Greenway. Not many people are out, and most of them are like me, runners. When I hit the path, I pick up the pace until I hit my natural stride, pretty solid eight-minute miles. In my ears is a playlist of the hip-hop I grew up with, Tupac and N.W.A. with a mix of others. I had a major crush on Tupac as a teen and had a poster of him on my bedroom wall. He and my mother died within a couple of years of each other. I cried much harder over him than I did over her.

  The rain is more of a mist down here. The river is a restless dark gray between me and the buildings lined up in New Jersey on the other side. It’s not long before I feel the click, that moment a mile or two into every run, where I feel all the tension in my body slide out and I’m suddenly looser, moving easily. I forget about the aches and pains and find the place where I can think about whatever problem I’m trying to work out.

  This morning, it’s Boudicca and the cash flow issues. My last two games have not done well at all, and if I don’t come up with something spectacular, the company will sink like the Titanic. When I saw the acquisitive hunger in Jared’s eyes last night, it underlined the urgency. If he knows, everyone knows. I have to find a way to fix this.

  The problem is that Asher and I worked very well together as a team. I’m great at story conception and design, and I can code as well as the next person, but Asher’s the Michelangelo of coding. No one can touch him.

  And without him, I’m struggling to get my concepts—which are still strong; I feel that in my gut—into the shape I need them to be. If we were a music duo, he’d be Lennon and I’d be McCartney, a good writer but not the genius.

  Of course, he always said it was the other way around—my stories gave his tech wings. Whichever way it was, we were an amazing team, and I completely wrecked it.

  A rise of tension builds through my chest, and I pick up the pace until it subsides again. Boudicca is my baby, founded when both Asher and I were nineteen years old. We created one of the first video games aimed directly at girls when we were kids ourselves, funded with the money my mother left me, and became literal millionaires overnight.

  But that was more than twenty years ago. The game didn’t translate well to new platforms, and what seemed cutting edge in the late nineties seems lame by today’s standards.

  Maybe I’ve lost touch. Or lost my touch. Maybe the reason the business is in trouble has less to do with bad investments and more to do with my slipping grasp on the industry, where the players seem younger by the minute and 40 feels like 102.

  Tupac sings “When Thugz Cry” in my ear, and I wish I could cry myself over the mess my life has become. I swing around a young mom jogging with a vinyl-draped
stroller and give her a wave as I pass, then wipe water off my face with a bandana.

  I really don’t want to sell. I’m angry with Asher for taking our personal rift into the business realm. We’d been struggling for three or four years about the direction of the company too—he is wildly interested in open-ended building games, while I’ve been trying to drill down to what girl gamers want now.

  I’m also enchanted by the great leaps in AI and have been working a lot on an app featuring a robotic sort of best friend. Which I haven’t been able to perfect yet. It’s either too needy or too robotic, and there’s a problem with shared memories—memories shared between the AI and the user—that is more important than I expected. To feel real, a robot needs to know and understand the time and history of the user.

  The trouble is, I’ve been spending far too much time on that and not enough on developing ideas for new games. My last release was a dud, and I need to get something new out there sooner rather than later. I need resources, and at the moment, I just don’t have the cash for them.

  I might give the young woman from last night a call, see if she’s serious. I’ve had an idea for a new game swirling around in the back of my imagination, and with an extra pair of hands and a brainstorming partner, maybe I could get something together.

  Time. I just need to buy myself some time. Long enough to develop the idea into something concrete. Thus the meeting with my dad to see if I can get a short-term loan to pay the bills until I can get another game to market.

  Without an influx of cash from somewhere, I’m going to have to close my doors.

  I try to leap over a puddle and instead land right in it, my entire foot getting soaked in cold, probably disgusting water. But it’s nearly mile four, and I don’t care.

  By the time I reach the coffee shop, I’m soaking wet, and I duck into the ladies’ room to dry off a little. My hair has been protected by the hat, so I shake it out and comb it with my fingers, dry my face with paper towels, and shake the water off my gear. Not perfect, but it will do.