I find her on the roof, without a coat, just standing there. Thank God. Against the sky, she looks sleek and tall, but there’s something about her shoulders that makes me know she’s not okay. “Auntie,” I say.
She turns. Her face is bare of makeup, and her skin looks practically gray. I notice the brackets around her mouth and the lines in her cheeks and realize that seventy-four might look good on her, but it’s still seventy-four.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“For the moment.”
“What did he want?”
She shakes her head. “Everything.”
“What can I do? Tell me and we’ll fix it.”
“No.” She smooths her hair. “I don’t want you to worry about anything. I don’t want you involved.”
“You can’t expect me to just sit by when you’re in trouble. We need to do some research, get the paintings out of here—”
“Willow.” She takes my arms. “This is not your concern. It’s my mess, and I’ll figure it out.”
I scowl at her. “I’m not twelve, you know. And you don’t have to do this all on your own.” I take her arms. “I’m here for you. I’m your family.”
I see her swallow, feel the taut worry in the tendons of her arms. “Thank you.”
I shake her slightly. “Okay, I’m already dealing with one stubborn Rose female who refuses to let anyone help her. Can you not make me work so hard. Please?”
A welter of tears gives her blue eyes a dazzling aspect. She covers one of my hands with one of hers. “You’re right.” A slight raise of her shoulders. “I don’t know yet. I have an appointment with a lawyer in a little while and should have some more information after that. The painting that was delivered is worth a lot of money, so it gives us some options. I just have to find a buyer.”
“Can I see it?”
She bows her head. “No, I’m sorry. Some things are personal.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“It was a long time ago.”
I nod, letting it go. “Are they going to arrest you?”
“I don’t know.” She guides me over to the bench, and we sit side by side in the warming springlike air, looking toward the skyline to the south. “If he was going to, why didn’t he do it today?”
“What did they arrest the other woman for?”
She glances at me. “You have read up on all of this, haven’t you?”
I nod.
“She was arrested ‘in connection’ to the case against Isaak.” She sighs. “So it could be anything, I suppose.”
My stomach aches. “Which means it could be anything with you too.”
“Maybe.” She looks into the distance, maybe into the past, maybe looking for solutions.
“I saw some of the paintings too. Online. You were his muse.”
She nods. “We were quite in love.” The words are simple, but I hear the depth behind them. I think of the dashingly handsome man being led away in handcuffs.
“He’s handsome now. I can’t imagine what he was like forty years ago.”
“He was—and is—good looking, but it’s much more than that. A magnetism. Have you ever met anyone like that?”
I think of Josiah capturing the crowd with his amazing voice. I think of the way he moves, so easy in his skin. “Maybe.”
We’re silent for a while, and I sense that she needs this. Maybe she needs me to be here, in case she goes to jail. In case it all vaporizes. I imagine her in jail, eating crappy food, and it breaks my heart. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, G.”
She gives me a wry smile. “Wonder Woman, are you?”
“You’d be surprised.” I switch directions. “They’re going to probably let Sam out of the hospital today.”
“That’s wonderful news! And that’s something you can take charge of. Get the bedroom aired and order some groceries. She might want you to go to her apartment and pick up some clean clothes and things like that.”
“You can’t expect me to just ignore everything that’s going on with you!”
“Not at all, my love.” She takes my hand, and I feel her bracelet cold against my inner wrist. “I want you to take charge of everything—your sister, the apartment, everything here, in this realm. That will free me to see what I can do about my problem. Can you do that?”
“Of course.”
“Good girl. Now, let’s get inside. I’m freezing.”
The bedroom is dusty and airless. I strip the bed and toss the sheets and pillowcases in the washing machine, one of the great luxuries of the apartment, then carry the duvet out to the roof to air. Gloria is in the greenhouse, doing something with her plants, and it makes me anxious that she’s doing that rather than addressing the whole mess. But she’s set her boundaries, and I guess I have to respect them.
Except . . . how can she really do all of this on her own? Who do I know who is a lawyer or knows a lawyer? Sam would probably know someone, but she really doesn’t need to be worrying about any of this.
I open the windows to get a cross flow of air, then vacuum and dust. In the back of my mind, I’m planning a handful of meals and snacks with a lot of nutrition, working with Sam’s limitations and preferences. I wonder if she has any new ones, but rather than call and possibly disturb her, I call in the grocery list I’ve made. Easy soups, cheese, a rotisserie chicken to strip for the carcass and easy sandwiches. And junk food, potato chips and ice cream and root beer, which she’s always loved. Maybe we can have banana splits.
I’m bending over, looking at the dates on pickles and chocolate sauce in the fridge (both well over two years expired), when a memory sprouts like a mushroom: A small me taking things out of the nearly empty fridge—a stick of butter, half a loaf of bread. I had to get a chair to turn on the stove, but I knew it had to be lit, so I called Sam to help. She was afraid of the stove, of that fast whoosh, so I exchanged places with her. She turned the knob, and I lit the match to start the flame. It didn’t quite take the first time, and then the second match flared too much. I felt the fire against my face, but it was fine. I shook out the match and stood on the chair to butter the bread on one side, all the slices lined up on a cookie sheet. Sam gave me the sugar and climbed up to get the cinnamon from the spice cabinet. I slid the pan into the broiler, and we watched the butter melt and the sugar start to bubble. “Now,” I said.
We took out the pan carefully and carried it to the tiny table in the corner. Dinner.
Sam caught sight of my face and started laughing. “You burned off your eyebrows, stupid!”
“What?” I reached up and felt the singed rows of hair, the tiny balls of hair left behind. My eyes stung with tears, but I just shrugged. “I don’t care. I’m hungry!”
The memory swamps me with emotion. She’s four years older than me. Why wasn’t she the one operating the stove?
Except that I was taking care of her. Then as now.
I pour out the expired pickles and rinse the jar, feeling unnerved. I try not to think about those times. Before Asher. Before Gloria. When my mother was so sick, all the time. Sick, or missing, or nodded out on the couch. We must have had babysitters, but I don’t remember them. Gloria stayed with us when my mom was actually out on the road, but when Billie wasn’t touring, who took care of us? Mostly, it was just the two of us, me and Sam, making do.
I’m staring out the window, watching the river shift light streams, gray, silver, a dull gunmetal, and I want to go back in time and tell that little girl that it’s okay. I want someone to do it. Someone to tell her that her eyebrows will grow back.
Sam didn’t. I don’t remember where my mom was. Or Gloria. I do remember that the burns, on the tip of my nose and my forehead, woke me up in the middle of the night. It felt like every nerve was wide open to the air, and I cried, careful not to turn my face to my pillow. I remember going to school the next day, and Ricky Rivera took one look at me and snorted. He called me Piglet for the rest of the year.
My left eyebrow never
was quite the same, with a block right through the center that doesn’t grow. I learned to color it in and eventually had a Ren Faire friend tattoo it back in place.
A long time ago, I think. Nothing to do with now. I rinse off the shelves of the fridge in preparation for the groceries.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Gloria
After Willow goes back inside, I breathe in the cool morning air and try to order my priorities.
Protect Sam and Willow and, as much as possible, the apartment, from anything that might transpire.
Protect the art, which is a legacy I do not want to disturb.
Avoid arrest and thus stay out of prison. Obviously. Like the woman in Amsterdam, I trafficked in stolen works of art, carried contraband across borders, aided and abetted a felon.
More than one count of each.
I will talk to the lawyer, but I can feel the urgency of the need to flee. I stand in the rooftop garden I have created and look south to the beautiful skyline I have loved for so long, and it feels like something is being torn from my body. I can’t bear it. Not having coffee with Sam and Willow, or having lunch with my friends, or waking up to my cats slumped over my belly. Can’t bear not having the greenhouse and all my plants, the apartment I vowed to die in.
My beautiful, beautiful Instagram account. It’s very small in comparison to the loss of the girls and the apartment and my beloved greenhouse, but it still grieves me deeply. All my hard work, all my connections. It has given me so much joy.
But I would rather leave it all behind than go to prison.
The lawyer calls me again as I’m heading inside. “Look, let’s just do this over the phone. My girl has gone to surgery, and I can’t leave her.”
“I understand.”
“It appears that the FBI has not yet found enough actual evidence to arrest you—yet—but I’m betting the next move is a search warrant. Do you understand?”
My throat goes dry, but I scratch out, “Yes.” I tell him about the visit this morning, and he swears under his breath. “All right, then. You might need bail.”
I blanch. “Bail?”
“What sort of assets do you have that you can use as collateral?”
My mind whirls. “An apartment, I suppose, though it’s not in my name. Art.”
“If you flee, you’ll lose whatever assets you’ve posted; do you understand?”
The box around me closes in, tighter and tighter. “I do, thank you.”
“Call me if they come back. In the meantime, get your affairs in order in case.”
“In case,” I repeat.
“Yes.”
I hang up, my hands shaking, and look around the garden. I can’t use the apartment or the collection for bail because I might very well need to flee.
Which means I need to act before they come back with a search warrant or, even worse, a warrant for my arrest.
The noose around my neck cinches, and I run through the possibilities. There’s only one that makes sense. I need to run, and soon.
I gather up the letters and the nude painting, now in a much less substantial tube, and head for Miriam’s place. She’s calling the others too. I’m also going to have to tell them the truth, which I’m not at all looking forward to.
It’s a nice day, the sun burning off the fog, offering hints of what spring might look like. The expressions of people on the street reflect that, a certain lack of tightness, a chipper step, a jacket shed and tossed over a shoulder. In a couple of months, the cherry trees will start to bloom, and spring breezes will blow away the harsh gloom of winter. It is one of the very best times in the city, spring. Full of hope and possibility.
When I first came to the city at eighteen, it terrified me and thrilled me in equal parts, but within days I’d fallen entirely in love, and unlike Joan Didion, I never wanted to leave the party. I have visited cities all over the world and spent substantial time in many of them. I love Hong Kong and Vienna and Paris at certain times of year, but none of them have ever held a candle to New York. Even now, when billionaires are trying to buy up everything for themselves, it remains a beacon for the world, for the families who scrape and save to make the journey from the only country they’ve ever known to look for a dream and then work three jobs to afford a tiny place on the outskirts, a place they share with five or six others. It’s a beacon for the oddballs, for the passionately creative, for the intellectual.
It’s always that beacon. For me, it was flight school and the possibility that a girl from a farming town with two traffic lights and five churches and not even a cinema could see the world. The whole world.
For Billie, it was the city of music, where she found her people in the rock and punk scenes, where she discovered she loved singing and heroin, and women as well as men, and living on the edge. We scattered her ashes from the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the only possible choice.
My mother would have been so much happier if she’d married a man from the city instead of the rangy farm boy, kind but unimaginative. I’ve wondered so many times why she didn’t leave him and seek her fortune. Perhaps if she’d not given birth to us, she could have.
The cab pulls up in front of Miriam’s building. I pay and gather my things. For a moment, I stand on the sidewalk, watching people hurry on their way, more of them on the sunny side of the street. A work crew has set up cones around a hole in the road, and a man in an orange vest directs traffic around it. It pierces me, all of it.
My city. My home. Leaving it will shatter my heart completely.
I head upstairs to Miriam’s, and she opens the door the minute I knock, swinging it open to show our dwindling little group arranged on her midcentury turquoise couch. Sunlight cascades in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, splashing on the bamboo floor. We’re old now, all of us, with our spindly fingers and thin hair, but each one of them is so dear I nearly fall to pieces right there. I want to take a picture, and on impulse, I drop my burdens on the floor and pull out my phone. “Miriam, go sit on the arm.”
“Not for Instagram. Not anymore,” Angie says.
“No.” I raise the camera and shoot sideways to get the whole picture. Miriam leans in, her long legs as graceful as ever. Dani’s hair flames against the light, and her ice-blue eyes capture the center of the frame. Next to her, Fran looks 101, but she still mugs for the camera, and Angie wears a purple-and-green knit only she could pull off, her feet crossed at the ankles. I shoot three in a row to get a few options, all on Live mode.
“Turn off your phones,” I say.
Dani rolls her eyes, but they all do as I ask.
“I think I should post it,” I say. “I’ve posted us all dozens of times, and it will be weird if I suddenly stop.” Admiring the photo, I’m mentally composing the caption. What fifty years of friendship looks like.
“Don’t,” Angie says. “Wyatt is losing his mind over all of this. He follows you.”
“He does?” I’m pleased before I realize how exhausted she looks, and that brings me back into the present moment in a way nothing else could have. I pick up the letters and painting and sit down in the circular yellow chair.
“I got something in the mail.” I pop the end from the cardboard tube and gently pull out the painting. Looking at it again makes my heart ache.
“Jesus,” Dani says. “I know I saw it when he painted it, but I was young then too. You’re so gorgeous.”
“I was so jealous,” Fran says. “He worshipped the ground you walk on.”
“Maybe,” I say, struggling to hold up the massive canvas. Miriam comes over and helps me carry it to an easel fitted with binder clips, then rolls the easel over where we can see it.
We all stare, Miriam and I standing, the others sitting, and look at my nude self in the bright light of the apartment. I feel airless and lost, thinking about all the time that has gone by, but also about how near those days feel, as if I could just step through a curtain and be there, my young self, looking both modest and terribly sexy.
>
“He’s an exquisite painter,” Miriam says and walks closer. “Look at these flesh tones, how many colors he used.” She stays there, looking intently with the eyes of an artist. “It’s terrible that he couldn’t find his audience then.”
“He’s finding it now,” Dani says. “Did you hear that Sotheby’s sold one of his paintings of the market for eight hundred thousand dollars?”
I nod.
“Why did he send it to you?” Angie asks in her raspy ex-smoker’s voice.
“To sell,” Dani says. “She’s going to need some serious money for lawyers and defense.”
I swallow. Bail was bad enough, but imagining a trial, the jury staring at me, makes me feel sick.
“I’m not going to sit here and wait to be carted off to jail,” I say, and I sit on the chair again, folding my hands. “That’s why I’m here. I need help. And you all need to make sure the paintings are . . . um . . . nowhere to be seen.”
“Already done,” Dani says.
“Good.”
“What do we do with them?” Fran asks. “They’re bulky.”
“Take them off the frames,” Miriam says dryly. “Then you can roll them up just like that.”
“Oh. I see.” She shifts her lower jaw back and forth, a side effect of a medication she takes, I think, but it’s distracting. “What about the other one?”
I can’t remember who has what. “Which one is it?”
“The Pissarro.”
I take a breath. “It’s a fake, so just treat it the way you treat the others.”
“What? It’s not a fake.”
“It is, actually.” I lift my chin, spill the truth. “They’re all fakes.”
A hushed silence greets this information, and I feel the soft purple wall coming up. “I hope you’re kidding,” Angie says. “We paid half a million for the Gauguin.”
The supposed Gauguin. The story was that someone had discovered a Paris apartment, a Nazi headquarters, and inside had found a stash of paintings, most of them from the pointillist or impressionist periods.
Write My Name Across the Sky Page 20
