Interstitial
Most beloved,
I died so you could live. This is dramatic. And it is true. You will someday understand that art comes not only from life
but from its absence.
Has it all been worth it? You will answer that question for yourself. I hope there will be forgiveness in your answer. But
even if there isn’t, know that my love for you can—and does—exist in the silence between us. I ask, undeserving, for your
faith.
You may wonder: Where do I find the audacity? The same way any of us do—from desperation.
I am on the verge of a second, perhaps more immutable, death. I won’t offend you with scrambled last words or portentous tidings.
Only an offering that may finally illuminate. When my body is gone, the art is all that is left.
Go to the place where time peels from light—you’ll know it when you see it. Then you will understand that everything that
is mine has only ever belonged to you.
Vivi set the letter on the table.
“Dad wrote this?”
“Don’t be slow. It was written in 1945. He was five years old then.”
“But what does it mean? What can he possibly have to do with Blue Mirror or K. P. Ly?”
“I’m going to tell you something. And save your judgment; I don’t want to hear it.”
Vivi pressed her lips together as Calla recalled how Tu?n had reached out to her in the weeks before Enmeshment. He’d asked her to come see him in Deer Creek. He’d entered a program, had begun making amends. At first she resisted, but
then they talked on the phone. Minutes at a time; then longer conversations. In the months before his death, she’d returned
to Wisconsin a few times, stayed the weekend in the sisters’ old bedroom as he shared the stories he’d withheld in their childhood.
They became close. Or closer, at least, than they’d ever been.
On their last call, he said he was working on something spectacular, a discovery he needed his daughters’ help with. He was
more excited than she’d ever heard, Calla said. Like a kid before a birthday. Soon, he’d said, he would tell them everything
he knew.
But then, his sudden death. His maroon truck hurtling at high speed down the country roads, swerving in the dark until it
crashed into a tree less than a mile from the highway. Everyone assumed alcohol, pills, the usual. Calla insisted it couldn’t
have been. He’d promised her he was sober.
Vivi snorted.
After the funeral, Calla broke into his shed. It had been barred to them as children, but now, everything that was his belonged
to them. Everything material, at least. Tu?n’s desk had been stacked with printouts of every Ly painting, including Blue Mirror. Curious enough, but then, amid all the bills and correspondence, the cinnamon gum wrappers and Vietnamese newspapers from
the grocery in Madison, she found a manila folder. Inside were the sketch and the letter from 1945, along with the business
card of a Dr. Paul Quan, a professor of art history at Rathmore College, the sisters’ alma mater.
Calla recognized the sketch right away. It couldn’t be only a coincidence that Tu?n had been obsessed with Blue Mirror just as it was due to arrive at Vivi’s workplace. It had to be the thread of fate, connecting all of them.
Calla hurried to say, “I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d be pissy about it. Me and him, talking again.”
“Because I remember the slaps, the way the belt felt on my shins—”
“That was once. He apologized afterward—he was drinking—”
“He was always drinking. Remember how we had to eat at Wayland’s house nearly every night because there was nothing in the fridge at home
but beer? How I had to lie about my age and start washing dishes at fourteen because every cent he made went to his booze
or his pill habit?”
“It was the accident at the mill and Mom and—well, he was sorry for all of it, Bee, he really was.”
“Sorry.” The word tasted like dirty water in her mouth. “Why didn’t he ever ‘make amends’ with me, then?”
Calla twitched her lips, gumming around the words she wanted to say versus the ones she should say. Emotions played across
her face, each easily tracked by Vivi, who once lived by their unreliable flux. Pride, that their father had felt closest
to her. Dismay that Vivi should be hurt by her actions. Annoyance that she should have to keep apologizing for Tu?n. That
one, Vivi could empathize with. All their lives, the sisters had been trying to find ways to smooth out the edges of the truth,
tumbling it over and over again like a rock in the creek bed, until it came out polished. Unrecognizable.
“But would you have forgiven him?” she finally asked. “Would you have even picked up the phone if he’d called?”
Vivi didn’t answer. Outside, a slat of lightning fell across a bruised sky. Rain pounded on the rooftop, its tinny cadence
poking holes through her thoughts. Her eyes returned again and again to the sketch.
How could her father have learned about Blue Mirror?
It wasn’t one of Ly’s better-known works.
Furthermore, to most, Ly would be considered an obscure painter, especially within the shiny halls of the Surrealist greats.
Each question spawned another, until Vivi felt herself losing grip on what was fact and what was speculation.
Calla tapped the edge of the sketch. “Look at it. It’s not a copy. It’s an artist’s study. K. P. Ly sketched it, he must have.”
Vivi pored over the grain of the paper. She wanted to put it under a microscope to examine the fiber, the light frottage within
the charcoal. She’d handled archival documents before, many much older than this, but there was something about this sketch
that arrested her attention. She felt Calla was wrong in one thing. It didn’t seem like a study, one with ghost marks and
revisions, signs of a generative work. There was no hesitation in the strokes, which were sure and determined, as if the artist
were working from memory. But if that was the case, why would Ly leave the faces bare? What was it about them that haunted him?
“Why did Dad have the sketch?” Vivi asked. “And the letter, for that matter?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? I think he was going to tell me. Us. Before—”
“What is it you want from me, exactly?”
“I want you to find this offering with me. Whatever it is. Wherever it’s hidden.”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“Let’s go see Dr. Quan and figure out what Blue Mirror meant to Dad. Maybe they corresponded. Maybe they knew each other. Aren’t you dying to find out?”
Vivi had hoped that her father’s death would serve as a padlock to the past, barring the things she didn’t want to remember.
But now Calla wanted to bring the trouble back to light. The irony was that if the sketch and letter hadn’t been found in
Tu?n’s shed, Vivi wouldn’t have hesitated to dive into the mystery. It would have energized her. But knowing that Blue Mirror was connected to her father made it impossible for her to examine the clues as an impartial scholar. She would have to involve
herself and, since the day she’d left Deer Creek, she’d vowed that she would never again let herself be pulled back into Tu?n’s miseries.
“Why not just hire an investigator or go see Quan yourself? You don’t need me for this.”
“No one I know understands art history like you. And you understand our family, all the shit. No one will care as much as we will. And Dad said he wanted both of us to help him. You and me, Bee.”
Cute as a button, busy as a bee, idioms that May had ascribed to each. Now the sisters’ pet nicknames, sacred and private, evoked images of children on the
run. Dark woods stiff with frost, want sailing through their veins, a nameless threat nipping at their heels. Not so different,
then, from their reality. The nickname did its job; it softened Vivi, if only marginally.
Yet a wave of resentment kept the curiosity at bay. Calla and Tu?n, allies. And her, outside of it all, the spectator brought in at the last moment, even though she’d spent her life keeping
Calla safe from him. That was thanks for you.
“No, Calla,” she said finally. “I don’t want any part of this.”
“Why not?”
“We buried Dad. We left Deer Creek and said we’d never return. I kept that promise, even if you didn’t. Now I have a life
here, with Samuel and Phoebe, my work.”
“Your work.” Calla gestured around the lab. “Sitting here with your cotton swabs, scrubbing away at some old varnish. Cleaning up after
people when you should be the one on the walls of this stupid museum.”
“Not everyone wants to be you.”
“But you couldn’t take the risk then, and you can’t take it now.” The anger went out of Calla’s words. “I wish you could see
yourself the way I see you. You’re meant for bigger things than this. Than him.”
“Don’t. I’ve never once said anything cruel about Wayland.”
“No,” Calla said knowingly, “you wouldn’t, would you?”
They sat at an impasse. Then Calla got up. “I’m driving to Rathmore this weekend. Come with me. Or don’t. I’ll be there, with
or without you.”
“You’re leaving? Again?” Vivi winced at the note of plaintiveness in her question.
Calla looked as if she wouldn’t reply. She was at the door, her hand on the pull, the silver band gleaming from her finger. Vivi had an urge to pull her back, to tie her to a chair.
But then Calla returned to the table. She put her arms around Vivi from behind and squeezed her tightly, chin digging into
Vivi’s shoulder. Vivi caught the scent of citrus, mixed with turpentine, and something more animalic, a yawn of milky breath.
No one in the world could ever smell like Calla.
“Happy birthday,” Calla said in her ear. “You look fucking amazing for a crone.”
“Don’t forget your folder.”
“Consider it my gift to you, Bee.”
Vivi sat in the lab long after Calla had left, staring at both items in front of her. A sketch in charcoal. An enigma of a
letter, promising mystery and revelation in equal measure. Both leading her into a place that she’d fought to forget. As she
fell asleep, head cradled by her arms, the rain shushing quietly around her, she saw only blue, as wide and capacious as a
sea.