Chapter 3
Vivi smelled fear as she ran through the woods of her youth, her ankles tattooed red and wispy from brambles, the leaves mouth-wet
under her feet. She didn’t know what she was chasing, only that it was close, so close, and if she could only find her footing,
she’d be upon it.
Was the fear coming from her, or was it outside of her? She was of the woods, coursing through its tunnels like a skein of
electricity, inseparable from that buzz of nocturnal life. She could run forever.
But there, in the dirt. A paper boat, like the leaky one Tu?n had piled onto during his heart-stopping journey across the ocean. The boat was a clue, an invitation. It began to drift
through the leaves, winding a sinuous path through the elms. As the boat parted the grass, it grew and grew, until it was
the size of a real ship looming in the trees. The giant boat stopped at a clearing bathed in the most exquisite shade of cornflower.
At its center, a shadow stood waiting.
The shadow flickered, vanishing in spots, deepening in others. Dancing in and out of consciousness, indecisive about whether
it wanted to stay or go.
The shadow crept closer. It mirrored her father’s jawline, his uncut tousle of hair. It pressed its cold finger onto Vivi’s
cheek, against the star-shaped freckle below her left eye.
Back to the beginning.
Then she saw that it wasn’t her father after all.
Vivi was staring into her own face, streaked with mud and the patina of dead foliage.
But where her eyes should have been, where her pupils should have zeroed in, there was a void of such unimaginable darkness that she felt herself sinking into the cool sponge of the earth, wanting nothing more than to escape the primal terror of being unseen.
Morning light burned against her eyelids. Her neck hurt in four different places. Calla’s manila folder was still in front
of her, shut now, even though she’d sworn she’d left it open before she fell asleep. Reality and dreams were twining together,
as they used to when she had night terrors as a child. She hadn’t experienced them in years, but the aftermath was the same.
Adrenaline and nausea, a wave of psychic dislocation.
The door to the lab opened.
“I keep telling you to get a futon in here if you’re going to stay up all night working,” Samuel said. He was holding a coffee
carrier and a ziplock bag with three misshapen pancakes inside.
She swept aside the residue from her dreams. “What’s in the bag?”
“Allegedly, dinosaur pancakes. Phoebe and her Yaa made them. Pheebs insisted I bring you some. They’re edible, if unbeautiful.”
Vivi bit into one. “Yum, brontosaurus. Tell her thank you.”
“Hurry up, then. We’re going to be late.”
She swallowed. “For what?”
“Delivery day! Blue Mirror is arriving in fifteen minutes on the dock.”
Vivi dusted herself off and raced to the door. Laughing, Samuel followed.
A few hours later, she was back in the lab, Blue Mirror set on an easel near the window.
The painting had been examined, logged, photographed, and admired within an inch of its life.
A new acquisition, especially a century-old one, brought with it an institution-wide fanfare.
The archivist, a rainbow-haired recent graduate, hurried to pack the papers of provenance in their acid-free boxes, as avid as a hen clucking over her young.
Even Dylan and Smith deigned to drop by the unloading dock to watch the activity.
Then, finally, the crowd subsided and Vivi was left alone with Blue Mirror. The painting’s smallness elicited an inner vigilance in her. But now she couldn’t separate her professional interest in
Blue Mirror from the contents of the manila folder. She tried to see the painting the way Tu?n would have. Was he compelled by the portrait because its artist was Vietnamese? Had he ever seen it in person? She couldn’t
imagine her father traveling in the same circles as Blue Mirror. And yet—Van Gogh’s Elimar had allegedly resurfaced at a garage sale in Minnetonka. Art had a habit of hitching along enigmatic highways.
Up close, the blues in the painting were astoundingly varied. There were umbras of lapis, the joyous powder of a spring sky,
a skate of ice, all colliding with verve on the canvas. Ly’s paint had a tactile, almost gluttonous quality. The brushstrokes stacked like clay, each layer casting another shadow of
meaning onto the one before.
But it was the tapering red streak down the middle of the painting that drew her eye. Its tail ended at the exact center point,
dividing the women neatly apart. That streak snagged at her mind. There was a destructive quality to it, like lava cutting
through rocks.
When my body is gone, the art is all that is left. What had the author of the letter meant? Was it K. P. Ly who’d written such an inscrutable message? Vivi thought of the spot-the-difference spreads she and Calla used to pore over
at the public library in Deer Creek. There was an anomaly in this painting, she was sure of it, but that difference hovered
somewhere just out of reach.
Vivi leaned until her breath touched the surface of the painting. For a moment, the women’s faces seemed to shift, as if they
were moving in water.
“Oh.”
It was then that she saw what her mind had been circling around.
The craquelure on the faces was less pronounced than that of the rest of the painting.
Where the varnish in the background contained deep breakages, the varnish atop the faces was smoother and lighter in color.
Vivi used an air blower to remove the dust from the surface.
Then, when she stepped back and squinted, she noticed that the paint atop the women’s faces was ever so slightly thicker too.
It was the difference of a micrometer, thinner than a baby’s eyelash.
But to a conservator, that difference was enough to open a new pathway.
For an hour, more, she sat on a stool in front of Blue Mirror, running her loupe across every inch. The accumulation of brushstrokes became ridges and valleys, endless and obfuscating
terrain. Her study felt nearly erotic; how long had it been since she stared so intently at anything? If looking was an act
of love, she was already in deep with Blue Mirror. As each second ticked by, she became more convinced that something hid under this painting.
Calla was right: the tie between their father and Blue Mirror had to be more than coincidence. For all her caprice and meandering habits, Calla had instincts like no other.
Vivi texted Samuel. Soon, he was striding back into the lab, tapping a Visconti against his chin. His tall frame sometimes reminded her of a Giacometti
statue, that striking attenuation, the whip-like efficiency of limbs.
“What’s another word for ‘artistic hubris’?” he was asking. “And why am I always talking about hubris in these catalogues?”
“Pentimento.”
“No, that’s not right. ‘Ego’ feels too strong; ‘confidence’ doesn’t hit the right note—”
“Samuel.” She pulled him to the easel. “I’m saying that I see pentimento here. On the painting.”
He blinked for a moment. She could see him fighting to erase a quirk of a smile. It’d become a sort of good-natured drinking
game at the Forster: How many times would Vivi say pentimento in one week?
She pronounced it in a slightly exaggerated manner, with a balletic elongation of the first syllable and a jaunty uplift at the last, declaring herself in on the joke.
But she was not the only conservator obsessed with the idea of pentimento.
When artists wanted to change an aspect of an existing painting—a gesture of the hand, the color of a hat—they would simply
paint over the canvas again. Oil paint, opaque and slow-drying, was the matrix that made this transposition possible. Overpainting
was a common practice, especially with Old Masters, who worked at a time when materials were precious. In one of the more
prominent examples, da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi reveals clear signs of an altered thumb.
Over time, the overlaying paint would become slightly transparent and the faint impression of the original would appear. Traces
of pentimento, the ghost of the painting, often became an indication of the painting’s authenticity. Copyists’ work rarely
showed signs of pentimenti; they only needed to replicate what already existed, so there was no need for multiple drafts on
a canvas. Those ghost marks became evidence of the artist’s deliberation, an example of showing one’s work, the way a child
might scribble over problem sets in her homework.
In pentimento lay the prospect of groundbreaking discoveries in the field. Some art historians tailed pentimento the way storm
chasers scour the country for meteorological disturbances. Hoping, hoping.
“I’m not making it up, Sam.” She jerked her head toward Blue Mirror. “Just look.”
He complied in silence. His forehead wrinkled, then smoothed. He pushed his glasses up his nose and began to circle the painting,
examining the surface from different angles. Finally, he turned back to Vivi. The pitying expression on his face shattered
her completely.
“You don’t see it?”
“Maybe,” he said slowly. “But it’s such a slight difference. You’re the expert, of course, but I can’t say this feels especially
compelling.”
“It is, though. Look at how flat the faces are. How nondescript.” She pulled up images on her laptop of other Ly paintings, Midnight Feast and Jungle Escape, landscapes patterned with mythological monsters. “For an artist whose beasts ripple with so much agency, isn’t it strange
that his humans would not have been portrayed with a similarly vivid brush?”
“Not everyone does portraits well.”
She shoved herself away from the desk. He didn’t understand, and why would he, when he only had half the information? But
she was loath to share what Calla had left for her. To draw him into the mess of it all—her father’s obsessions, her sister’s
misguided hope. Their family suddenly seemed pathetic, wobbly and unsustainable, like a table missing half its legs.
But she couldn’t ignore the faces in the mirror, that line of red, a flaw that begged investigation. The vortex of the mystery
was pulling her in. And this was Samuel, the most trustworthy person she knew. He would handle her questions with care and
discretion.
Finally, decision reached, Vivi handed him the manila folder. She explained everything Calla had told her. He nodded slowly
as she pointed out the similarities between the handwriting in the letter to Ly’s signature on Blue Mirror. The sure lines of the sketch. Afterward, he set both down and ran his hand up his nape.
“So you think that this sketch is somehow related to the painting? That Ly did it?”
“Yes. And he likely wrote the letter, too. I think the faces on the sketch are blank because the painting is hiding something.
I need to know why my father had this sketch. Why this one?”
“I understand, Viv.” His sympathy was honey on her skin, too thick, too cloying. She wanted to scrub it away.
Bitingly, she said, “I should think you’d want to know too, as a historian. ”
“Okay. So you’re saying you want to strip it?”
“Yes.”
He blew air from his mouth. “We need to discuss this. You, me, and Abel.”
“Fine.”
“After Sea to Earth. Then we can do this together. The right way, with all the permissions we need.”
Three weeks. Could she wait? But it wouldn’t be just three weeks. She understood how bureaucracy worked. A month, at least,
to pin Abel down for a meeting. He’d dawdle and sigh about paperwork. The board would have to be involved, another month or
two. They’d swish about, talking about wasted resources and bad press if it didn’t pan out, and they’d drag their heels into
oblivion until Vivi gave up. None of it would be worth a thing if she didn’t have the support of the head curator. Of Samuel.
“But do you believe me?” Her voice was small.
He swallowed. “I believe that you believe it.”
“Fuck your psychotherapy talk.” The words tumbled out before she could stop them.
He drew back. It was a point of contention between them, his firm belief in therapy and her firmer belief in just getting
through it all without looking backward. Navel-gazing, she called it. Raised in a family that valued communication and emotional
balance, Sam had the luxury of talking about his experiences. As a child fighting to survive, Vivi simply didn’t have the
time for self-reflection. She still didn’t.
She knew that her cynicism was rooted not in conviction, but in fear, like so many of her other choices. But the careful way
he spoke around her, as one would a wounded animal, stoked her anger. She thought she detected, under his gentleness, a hint
of condescension.
“Please don’t talk to me like that,” he said, wounded.
“Don’t talk to me like that.” She was being an asshole, but she couldn’t stop herself.
He sighed. “Do you know that the word ‘curator’ comes from the Latin root cūrāre, to watch over? To guard. This painting is my responsibility. I love you, Vivi, and I think you’re brilliant. But I can’t
let you strip it on a hunch. Especially since—”
He stopped abruptly. Red flooded Vivi’s vision. He’d promised, they’d all promised, that it was in the past. Her one mistake. The one that had nearly cost her her career.
Two years ago, before Smith’s last exhibition opening, Vivi had insisted she saw a faint outline of a figure in a shadowed
corner of a K. K. Hebbar oil painting. She convinced Smith that a discovery of that magnitude would garner media attention
for the exhibition. Lured by the promise of scholarly acclaim, Smith had agreed to delay the opening so Vivi could examine
the painting closer. And then, after a week of painstaking effort, Vivi had found nothing at all, only a chemical mutilation
of the paint from natural degradation. Smith had been furious; Abel, dolorous. And Vivi had never quite lived down the humiliation
of that mistake.
“Right.” She snatched the envelope from Samuel. “I see.”
“Please, can I take you to coffee? We can talk about your father, if you want. I know it’s complicated, finding all this after
his death.”
Her laugh was brittle. “I’m good. Thanks. I just need to get to work.”
“V—”
“This frame is filthy.”
“And tonight? I’ll see you for Phoebe’s recital?”
She ran her tongue below her canines, feeling their sharp press. The beast was gnashing inside of her, clawing at her rib
cage, demanding release. She wanted him out of her space. If he stayed, she would scream, she would throw something at him,
she would become her father’s double. And she’d spent their whole relationship hiding her wildness from Samuel.
When he came in for a kiss, she turned her head, so it fell against her cheek. He lingered, as if to say something else, but
she’d turned to pick up a steel spatula from her tray. She bit her lip so hard it began to bleed and she tasted metal and
mud and a deeper betrayal of the body. As soon as he was gone, she locked the door to the lab. She drew the blinds. And she
got to work.