And then I suddenly worry that the guy will start exploring on his own and see something more. I dash back in, and sure enough, he’s wandering down the hallway, his head cocked as he looks at the paintings. “Gloria’s not home,” I announce, blocking his way.
I touch his elbow, gesture him back toward the foyer, spilling its brightness into the hall. To my relief, he responds to the directive and amiably moves back toward the foyer.
“It’s a remarkable collection.” He stops again, seemingly entranced. “I’m envious,” he says, with disarming honesty.
I smile and see him as the nerd he is. A guy in love with art who has to work for an investigative team.
And then I realize that he’s turned the tables on me. He’s creating sympathy with me. The sweat on my body kicks into high gear, and I have to lift my hair off my neck. I can’t even think of what to say, and I swallow the dryness in my throat again, wanting him just to go so I can call Gloria.
“Do you think I could have a drink of water?”
He’s looking for a way to see the rest of the paintings, and I’m not going to leave him on his own again. Luckily, the place is set up for servants. “Right this way.” I head for a door just to the right of the front door. We enter a narrow, plain hallway that ends in the butler’s pantry, which also goes into the dining room, but I stand in front of the exit and, like a game show girl, direct him into the kitchen.
Nothing to see here. The small television. The old linoleum, the ancient countertops. I open the cupboard, feeling the twenty million layers of paint under my fingers. “Ice?” I ask politely.
“No, thank you.” He stands right where I directed him and waits for me to fill the glass from a Brita in the fridge. Maybe he’s just thirsty.
“What made your mom and aunt do all the collecting?”
I shrug. “For my mom, I think she started because she knew a lot of artists, and she was always on the road.” I lean on the counter. “My aunt . . . no idea.”
“This is your aunt?” He points to a photo on the shelf of Gloria winning an award for a begonia with a vivid yellow-and-green leaf a few years ago.
“Yes. She came up with a new hybrid.” Again, I feel that sense of being played. “Is there anything I might be able to help you with, since Gloria isn’t here?”
He sips his water. “No, not really.”
“Can I tell her what it’s in regard to?”
His bland brown eyes go entirely blank. “No, I’ll just stop back another time.” He drains the glass and gives it back to me. “Thanks. You’ve been very kind.”
Hmm. “Sure.”
I walk him back to the front door, braced for one last zinger of a question: So, when you found the knife . . .
But he doesn’t. He walks out the door, and I close it behind him, leaning on the wood with my forehead until I hear the elevator doors open.
Immediately, I dash back into the living room, scanning all the framed paintings for the one I thought I recognized. It’s not here, and I move to the parlor, where paintings hang in masses up to the ceiling.
These are some of the best. The light is good but indirect. An impressionistic landscape drenched in light, another of the mystery painter’s works, Marwhoever, of a castle rampart or something, maybe in Spain, with a white bird and a peacock.
And there, framed without fanfare, is the one I saw in the cab. I’ve seen it a thousand times, a million, a small landscape with trees and a light-drenched sky.
Is it really a Renoir?
Heart pounding, I move toward it, trying to decide how I would know if it was real. The paint seems real, but wouldn’t it seem so if it was a copy? I touch a swirl of paint with a fingertip, feeling the swoop. I remember something about brushstrokes and shift my position so that the pale, revealing light lends depth to the paint. It’s not all one way or another, not up and down, but what does that mean?
Whatever is going on, it seems like one thing I can do is move it out of sight. I take it down, surprised at the heaviness, and carry it into my bedroom. It’s nearly impossible to move my bed, but I can pull the mattress back a little and slide the painting, which is not much larger than my shoulder span, behind it. It won’t do much good if there is a search warrant, but for the moment, it will keep unexpected eyes off it.
In the back of my brain, where music grows, I hear the bar of a melody, tinged with the faraway, the . . . something. I stare sightlessly out the window for a moment, not paying the notes attention but creating space for them. A pigeon lands, flutters his wings, and flies off. I think of the painting in the foyer that caught Agent Balakrishna’s attention.
My heart is racing with adrenaline, and I snatch my phone off the table. The screen shows two missed calls from Gloria, and I punch one of them to call her back without listening to her messages.
“Willow! Thank goodness.”
“Gloria, where are you? There’s been an investigator here.”
A single hushed moment of pause. “What kind of investigator?”
“FBI. And he was very interested in the paintings.”
“I see.” Her voice is calm, reveals nothing. “You can tell me about it when you get here. I’m at the hospital with your sister.”
My heart drops. “What? Is she okay?”
“Not exactly. She has meningitis.”
“Meningitis?”
“She’s in intensive care.”
I imagine Sam lying beneath white sheets, and it makes me feel hollowed out. I press my hand to my belly. “Is she going to be okay?”
“I don’t know. Did you stop by her apartment last night as I asked you to?”
“Yes! She didn’t answer. I didn’t think I should get the super and barge in.” Guilt thuds in my heart. I should have. I squeeze my eyes tight. I really, really should have.
“You’re right.” Her voice is thin. Sad. Kind of . . . old sounding. “It’s not your fault.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can, G. Do you need anything?”
“No. Just come. I need you.”
I throw on some jeans and a sweater and, on impulse, stop at Bloom’s for some food. Not sure what Sam will be able to eat, but Gloria sounded so wan I know she probably hasn’t had anything but tea today, and I can’t even remember the last thing I had to eat. Waiting for my order, I wonder how long Gloria’s been there, when and how Sam got to the hospital.
Meningitis. The word scares me, especially in relation to Sam, who has the best brain of anyone I know. I think my mom was probably really smart, too, but then she mated with a really smart guy and produced Sam, magnifying her genius. She mated with a musician for me, and that produced a lot of music in my mind, but I don’t think being creative is as hard as it is to be really smart. I mean, I know how much the ordinary dumb people of the world annoy me, so it’s hard to imagine how much worse it would be if you thought at the speed of light and everyone else thought at the speed of a tricycle.
She skipped two grades in school and still had fights with teachers all the time. She wanted to prove to her dad that she was worth something, so she doubled down on achievements, and it worked . . . for about five minutes at a time.
He’s a total dick, that guy.
And yes, I’m using mated deliberately. My mother was not a faithful woman. Her only real love was for music, for the stage, and unfortunately, her twenty-year affair with bad boy heroin killed that by killing her. A story that’s been told too many times.
I shift from foot to foot, anxious to get to the hospital. My heart beats out a tattoo: Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam.
Please be okay.
A guy behind the counter calls my number and hands me two paper bags of bagels, cheese, and boiled eggs, and I snatch them out of his hands and dash outside to hail a cab. “Columbia Presbyterian,” I tell the driver. He’s talking on the phone to a woman in a language I don’t know. It sounds like Arabic, and I think about where he might be from, a landscape like the backdrop of the other painting this morning.
> The cadence of the language weaves itself into the bar of music I heard earlier, and I think of the dove and the orange sky and hear in the distance a call to prayer in the early dawn. Gooseflesh rises on the backs of my arms.
Something is really building here.
I deliberately ignore it, bending my nose into the bags to smell the bagels, and I see a flash of the agent bending in to look at the painting of the dove.
What is he after? Is Gloria in trouble?
Does she know she’s in trouble?
Chapter Twenty
Gloria
As I enter Sam’s hospital room, I’m feeling shaky, which I tell myself is too much coffee and worry over my niece, but it’s coming mostly from Willow’s comment that an investigator was at the house. Was he going to arrest me?
But right now, there’s room for nothing but my Sam. She lies much too still in the hospital bed, looking pale as mushrooms under the greenish hospital fluorescents. Her eyes are closed and the lids are pale blue. Her lips are chapped. I don’t want to bother her if she’s sleeping, so I place my purse and sweater on a chair, prepared to just sit as long as she sleeps.
My girl, my girl.
Once they told me what she had, I immediately googled meningitis, and it terrified me that she’d been alone and out of her head until Asher had checked on her. He said she’d been very, very sick when he found her, but the IV antibiotics are doing the trick.
“Hi, G,” she says in a craggy voice. “How long have you been in here?”
I leap to my feet, take her hand. “Only a minute.” I smooth her dark hair away from her face, feeling her fever against my hand. “You’re still so hot, my darling. How do you feel?”
Her eyes open a crack. “Like the coyote after he dropped an anvil on his head.”
Even sick as she is, so clever. Tears of relief spring to my eyes. “Willow is on the way.”
Her eyes close again, then pop open. She squeezes my hand. “G, I’m so sorry about the other day . . . yesterday?”
“Shh, no worries.”
“No, that was mean. It is your apartment. I know that.”
I lift her hand to my cheek. “Don’t worry about it. I’m pretty good at taking care of myself, you know.”
Her smile is wan. “I wish I were.”
I touch her face, her temple. “I do too.”
“I have to keep my eyes closed,” she says. “The light is killing me.”
“Let me turn them off, then.” I have to search awhile to find all of them, and I can’t seem to find the switch that will turn off the one at the head of the bed, but it’s much darker.
“Thank you,” she says, blinking. “I don’t know why my eyes hurt so much.”
I make a cold compress from a washcloth and gently lay it across her closed lids. “How’s that?”
“So good.” She touches her fingertips to the cloth. “Asher rescued me; did he tell you?”
“He called me.”
“I dreamed we were married, and then I guess I thought he should be the one I called.” The sound of tears is in her voice. “I completely humiliated myself.”
“Honey,” I say as gently as I can, “you’re very sick. Maybe let everything go for a couple of days. Let us take care of you. Me and Willow, and Asher too. We all love you. You don’t have to hold up the tent.”
She pulls the cloth off her eyes to look at me, and there are so many tears rising. “My dad didn’t come. I called him, and he didn’t come.”
Because he’s an asshole, I want to say. Over and over, he’s disappointed her. Left her, chased after some woman or dream interview or whatever was in his selfish head, never seeing the little girl who adored him, who needed him. I brush my hand lightly over her hair. “Shh. Let’s listen to a podcast or something, shall we? Or maybe I can read to you. Daughter of the Forest?”
Her body visibly softens. “How did you know that was my favorite?”
“Maybe because you carried it around with you for an entire year?”
She gives me a thin smile. “I did.” She raises her hand, drops it on her chest. There’s something so vulnerable in the gesture that it half rips my heart out. “Would you? Read it, that is?”
“I absolutely would.” I settle on a chair and pull up my digital account and order the book. On the screen of my phone is a news alert about the art world reeling, and I know exactly why. My chest squeezes again, warning me this is all coming to an end.
But for now, I’m here. With Sam, who needs me.
By the time Willow arrives, texting me from the waiting room, Sam is in a deep, restorative sleep. I nag the nurse to turn off the light over her head, and the room turns into a pale-gray cocoon. I use her phone to turn on a soft classical playlist to block some of the hospital sounds and tiptoe out.
Willow looks frazzled, her curly hair springing out wildly, overshadowing her small shoulders and boyish figure. “How is she?”
I sit down next to her and accept the bag of bagels she offers. “Very sick, but they caught it in time, and she’s on IV antibiotics, so she should be okay.”
“How long does she have to stay in the hospital?”
“Could be up to a week, they said, less if she responds well. We should get the guest room ready for her.” I spread the bagel with cream cheese, half an inch thick, to hell with the calories. The first bite is 100 percent comfort, like arms around me, and I’m suddenly seven, with my mother in Syracuse, a town not far from our little upstate village, sitting at a storefront bakery with bagels and cream cheese and cups of tea. My mother was French, and she didn’t think anyone in America could make proper croissants, but she’d grown up with bagels in her neighborhood in Paris, and they gave her happiness.
One of the few things that did.
A nudging of memory, Isaak and our long talks about our mothers and the things they suffered, pushes at me, but I push it back. There are times to think, and there are times to savor. I choose to savor this perfect bagel and the memory of my very pretty mother enjoying one with jam so many long years ago.
“Are you okay, G?” Willow asks softly.
I realize that a tear has escaped my eye and brush it away. “Just remembering a happy time with my mother.”
“Happy? I had the impression she was the opposite of that.”
I tilt my head in agreement. “Mostly. She didn’t have the life she wanted. It made her bitter.” I turn the bagel in my fingers. “But she was sometimes happy in moments, nonetheless.”
Willow picks the toppings from a poppy seed bagel, narrowing her eyes. With her crazy hair and skinny arms, she looks like an elf from a children’s story. Age has barely touched her. “When I think about her losing her whole music career like that, it makes me want to try harder.”
I nod. “It drove your mother, as well.”
After a long minute, she says, “Auntie.”
Her tone brings my attention to her face. Her eyes are clear and sharp. “Do you think we might need to move some”—she glances at the couple across from us—“things around the apartment?”
A swell of furious emotion burns up through my chest, into my throat. I’m ashamed at my youthful actions, and horrified that she might be in danger, and terrified that I really am on the brink of losing everything I treasure. “Anything in particular?”
“Maybe the landscape in the parlor? The one with poppies?”
The Renoir. I force myself to keep my voice calm, even. “Perhaps.”
“And the dove in the foyer?”
“The dove?” A pang shoots right through my chest. “Why that one?”
“You tell me. The agent was very interested.”
For a long moment, I’m silent. The dove is one of Isaak’s paintings, an original he painted when we were together. There are three others in the apartment, and they are not on their own valuable, but if the dove painting “attracts interest,” I’ll be in more trouble than I thought. I take a breath, discard the remains of my bagel. “Yes. And three others.
Did he say when he would return?”
She shakes her head. “We need to have a serious conversation.”
“We do,” I say and pat her leg. “I promise we will. But first, let’s make Sam our priority. We can’t leave her here alone.”
“Of course not. We can take turns. I’ll hang around until the next round, but we need”—again she glances at the others in the room—“a plan.”
“I’m working on that. You don’t have to worry about it.”
“Seriously?” She scowls at me. “Maybe next time I should just let him walk away with whatever he wants?”
“No! I just—” I feel winded. “I am not sure what to do right this minute. I need to talk to a friend of mine.”
“Fine.” She sighs. “Sam can’t be alone. Will Asher help?”
“I don’t think we should ask him.”
“Why? They’ve been best friends since they were little kids!”
“Something happened a while back. They’re not talking.”
“Then how did he rescue her?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe she sent him a strange message too.”
She presses her lips together. “I feel really awful about that. Why didn’t I keep pounding?” She glances out to the hushed waiting room. “Because I was afraid of making people mad.” Tears wash her eyes, and she blinks them away. “What if she had died because I was too afraid to make a scene?”
“Maybe she wasn’t even there, Willow. I don’t know what time Asher picked her up.”
She nods. “You’re right. No point making more drama here. I’m going to the ladies’ room. Do you need anything?”
“No, thank you.” As she tosses her oversize bag across her body, I say, “Maybe find a comb?”
She laughs and shakes her head. “I’m going feral.”
As I wait for her, I open my phone, as we all do, habitually, to distract me, calm my jumpy nerves. In the back of my mind, I’m running scenarios, wondering who I can ask to help me, running through places I might go, and I click on my Instagram feed automatically, seeking the dopamine rush the comments give me. My latest shot is one of the early-morning Manhattan sky from yesterday, which feels about a million years ago. The back of my neck is tight, and my eyelids are dragging over my irises, as sharp as if they have pebbles under them. I close them tightly and lean my head against the wall, trying to calm my racing heart. I texted the lawyer this morning and haven’t heard back yet, and I texted Miriam to let her know Sam is sick.
Write My Name Across the Sky Page 13
