Due Diligence #5
Jane bought her paints and let her read whatever she wanted.
She smiled at Lili’s report cards and usually remembered her birthday.
Robert, her husband who was rarely home but kind enough, taught Lili how to drive, and she helped him set up deer netting around the vegetable garden each spring.
In Jane’s yellow house near the Dipsea trailhead, the different faces around the dining table changed frequently; other foster children moved on when things didn’t work out, or they were adopted, or they got to return to their families, or went to new placements.
Lili was never able to fully relax, to settle into some sense of trust that this was home, now.
In San Francisco, she’d felt at home. Warm, easy, safe. Everywhere she glanced, people looked like her and looked wildly different
to her, and no one looked twice at anyone else. There were children at the playgrounds who resembled her, caught between different
cultures. Lili would see women on the bus; having dinner with friends at restaurants; getting groceries after work; laughing,
smiling, like sunshine. Women who could have been her when she grew up.
In this fog-swept, shaded enclave in the headlands, no one looked like her. No one gave her a glimpse of the future. Instead,
she felt like an outsider, a small child isolated on the other side of unyielding glass. Dropped into the middle of this new
town, barely a half hour from home, yet feeling like she didn’t even speak the same language as everyone else around her.
The sense of her balance robbed; new gravity to adjust to, forced upon her. Like the geography she had traversed rendered
her a different species.
She tried so hard. Grades, behavior, friends. Never complained, rarely faltered in her smile. She got very good, very young,
at presenting a polished surface and keeping any depths—darkness, want, need, the ugliness of aching to be cared for—hidden.
Parents, the parents of her friends, adored her. Just not her parents. If someone at school made a comment—What type of last name is Marwan?—she kept her head down, or turned away. If she ignored her aches, they might disappear.
It was constant, that striving. Exhausting, reaching for the tense safety of perfection, always braced for change to sweep
in again, another car crash. If she just fit in enough, if she just excelled enough, she’d be enough to be wanted. For fostering
to become adopting, for stability to finally fall into place around her. For Jane to knock on her bedroom door, and say, We’re making it official, it’s just a formality at this point, but we’d like to adopt you, we want you to be ours—
When Lili had gotten full rides to both Columbia and Stanford, hands shaking as she’d taken the thick packets from the mailbox,
she’d asked Jane for her opinion.
Jane had shrugged. She was washing dishes, attention on their newly fostered toddlers who’d started crying.
Whichever you’d like, they’re both great schools, she’d said. Noah, please—
Lili mailed her acceptance to Columbia the next day.
Jane and Robert had dropped her off at the airport. They told her to come visit—visit, not come home—sometime, but she already
knew her room wasn’t hers anymore.
Lili clears her throat. She looks away from the Bocklin.
“Anyway,” Lili says, glancing over the rest of the gallery. “I came here, first week of undergrad, determined to find my painting.” She forces a self-deprecating laugh. “I was sort of disappointed, at first, that I kept coming back to this one.
It’s not like there’s a lot going on in it.”
Beside her, Aleksandr doesn’t say anything.
After a few beats—her gaze skittering over the Rodin bronzes, the stretch of the empty gallery—Lili lets herself glance at
him.
He’s looking at her, a bit too closely. With attention that’s too perceptive, interest that’s unashamed. Like there are questions
he wants to ask, and he’s considering the phrasing. It makes her tense, uncomfortable.
She realizes she’s still holding his hand in hers. She lets go, and steps away.
“What’s your favorite painting?” she asks.
She thinks he’ll press, catching her deflection. He does catch it—a slight narrowing of his gaze—but he doesn’t press. “You
tell me,” he says.
Lili tilts her head, considering. She breathes in art and controlled air, pushing back on the scent of redwoods, falafel,
and salt air.
“I’d say Bosch, or Goya,” she says. “Honestly, maybe you’re really into Vermeer?”
Aleksandr smiles. “When I was younger, yes, I had an affinity for Bosch. But not quite.”
He guides them to the earlier European galleries. Just out of the medieval period, into the incoming tides of the Renaissance.
Lili suppresses the urge to roll her eyes, thinking he’s heading to one of the absurdly large canvases: eighteen towering
feet of Tiepolo, something Baroque caught between naturalism and theatricality. Art executed for churches and palaces, a scale
meant to incur fear and worship.
Instead, he leads her into one of the smaller rooms. Religious iconography gleams on the walls.
“This,” he says, in front of a freestanding display case in the corner.
Lili frowns. “There are literally hundreds of these iterations,” she says, looking around. “Madonna and Child, it’s probably the most replicated image in Western art.”
“There’s more to this one, though.”
His hand comes to her hip. Gently but firmly, he guides her to stand in front of him and to look at the painting. Lili concentrates,
trying to ignore his presence behind her, the heat of his hand on her.
Sealed away in its display case, the painting is smaller than a piece of paper. The more she looks, the more it invites her
in. “It’s an intimate, devotional image.” He leans down to speak against her ear. A conversational tone, but her breath still
hitches. “Likely wasn’t kept in a church, but rather a home. A personal altar, the type of thing the household passed by daily.
Away from public eyes. There’s a tenderness to that quotidian intimacy, a carelessness that speaks to affection rather than
a lack of it. You can see, in the bottom edge of the frame, burn marks where candles were placed too close. Some small, sacred
world that was treasured.”
It is soft and subtle, but there is magnetism to the painting that’s hidden until Lili lets her gaze relax. Once she lets
it absorb her, it’s steadily immersive. Hypnotic and sinking, more so than the bright Giottos and Lorenzettis around them.
The delicate tracing of Mary’s halo, laced like filigree in gold; the draping of her veil; the worn shine of the frame, splintered
wood. A blink and she’d miss it.