Chapter 15 #2
glass of Shiraz from a teetering table and flung it at the canvas. The wine soared in a graceful arc until it met its mark,
splattering onto Vivi’s face, soaking into the canvas. Glass shattered on the cement floor.
“Look. Now I’m an artist too,” Wayland said hollowly.
“Get out,” Dominic said.
Wayland spared him no glance. Instead, he took one last look at Clio, then at Calla, and finally at Vivi. The gaping crowd disappeared, and it was just the three of them, caught together.
He said softly, all the fight disappearing from him, “I’m sorry, Vivi. You deserved better from us.”
And he left. As soon as his footsteps faded, Calla began to laugh. Vivi stared before she realized. Calla was sobbing. Tears
matted her cheeks and pooled along the divots in her neck. She wrung her hands like they were small birds to be put out of
their misery.
This was where memory deviated into all the alternate paths she and Calla could have taken.
In one, Vivi didn’t think before she took her sister in her arms and led her out, away from Enmeshment and the stunned spectators, all those people who would never understand the terrible and transcendent love that could usher
Calla to the extremes of feeling.
Calla would stay with Vivi that night. Huddled together in her bed, Vivi would stroke her sister’s hair as they talked about
different options for the future. Vivi, offering to write a statement that Calla could sign. Maybe a newspaper might pick
it up; if not, Dominic could send it out to the guests.
Vivi would say that they’d find a way to withdraw all the pieces from Enmeshment. Calla could paint over them if she wanted. She could put on a new show, if not with Dominic’s gallery, then another, better
one. Or maybe Calla could teach; children loved her, after all. There would be a future after Wayland. She’d tell Calla that
she deserved better from her husband.
When Vivi finished talking, Calla would lean against her. “My annoying little life coach.”
“Miscreant.”
“I love you.” Calla’s cold feet would find hers, rub against them for warmth.
Vivi would answer the way she always did. “Forever and a day.”
The next morning, waking in the nest of each other’s arms, they’d start again.
But that wasn’t what happened.
Vivi waited too long to go to her sister. For a handful of loaded moments, the length of time it takes to latch a door closed,
she let Calla cry alone. Then, with one wounded look around the room, Calla ran out of her own opening, still crying as she
leapt in a cab and headed for the Pilsen loft. She packed her clothes and art supplies. She drove to Deer Creek to lick her
wounds and, soon after, set off the chain of events that would lead Vivi around the world, still chasing her.
After Calla left the gallery, it happened. The memory Vivi fought to bury.
Wine on the floor, the gasps of spectators, the strains of infamy they’d all rehash over hundred-dollar brunches in River
North, twisting Calla’s humiliation into a cautionary tale that they would swallow in gulps, reveling in its clean and satisfying
burn.
This is why you don’t get involved with an artist.
At last, Vivi shook herself from her spell.
She ran out, looking for her sister. Where were all the cabs?
She stood on the sidewalk outside of the gallery, one foot near the entrance, the other on the leaf-mottled pavement, hand outstretched.
If a taxi had arrived a moment sooner, then—well, again, another vanished path.
“Always rescuing the princess.” Wayland’s voice came to her from an alleyway beside the gallery. Smoke rose from an orange-budded
cigarette hung loosely from his fingers. His tone was caustic and unfamiliar. Dangerous.
But it was Wayland, her first true friend outside of Calla. Her family. She knew him, she loved him.
She joined him. “You should go after her.”
“Calla doesn’t want me. She doesn’t want anyone.”
“There has to be a better way.”
“I see what you did there.” His shoulders shook in a shallow huff of laughter.
Sudden anger made her launch herself from the wall. “Just go home. Sober up. Find your wife.”
“Where’s your boyfriend?” There was a barb in his words.
“Far from here, thank God.” She was glad Samuel hadn’t witnessed this scene. It would horrify him, the cruelty the three of
them were capable of. She began to turn away.
Quick as anything, Wayland’s hand wrapped around her wrist. He pulled her back and spun her around so she was facing him.
His cigarette fell among the piles of trash, forgotten. In the dim light, she saw the way his eyes glittered, a quick flame
of possibility.
“Why do you think she did it? Clio?” Wayland’s tone was that of a professor, patiently leading cow-eyed students to the obvious conclusion.
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Do you want to know what I think?”
“Let me go.”
“I think she always understood how it was.” He leaned down toward her. “Don’t you?”
She became too aware of her neck, her jaw, the glitching of her pulse.
Wayland said, “That day by the creek. When we were seventeen. When you let me play Seekers.”
Reluctantly, Vivi filled in the story. “It was the first time we let you come. You begged.”
“I was the seeker. I cheated and followed you. You hid poorly, like you wanted me to find you.”
“I didn’t.” The lie rattled loosely in her mouth.
“Then I kissed you and you kissed me back. But Calla found us.”
“She was upset, she ran away. She fell in the creek, banged her head on the rocks. Four stitches.” Vivi felt dazed, as if
she were writing a story aloud with him. A story with an inevitable end.
“That was when you stopped being my best friend.” The snake tattoo along his neck stretched as he lifted his head, forcing
his gaze on her. “When you gave up on us.”
“She loved you.”
“I know. But I loved you first. I should have told you then. That day. All the days after. You loved me too.”
“Adolescent love. Puppy love.”
“We’ll never know, will we?”
“No.”
Then his mouth was on hers, breath hot and reeking of Scotch. Hands trailing up her waist, a heady continuation of their first
and only kiss in the woods. At that moment, Vivi did not think of her tearful sister or the shocked crowd inside of the gallery.
Samuel, even, occupied a different space in her heart. There was only Wayland, the neighbor boy who’d first seen her.
For a moment, just one moment, she wrapped her hands around his head and pulled him closer. This. This was the air she’d been seeking.
“It should have been us,” he murmured into her lips.
At that, something broke through the fog of her want, and she twisted away, shoving him into the brick. The aftertaste of
the kiss was sour. It was all wrong.
There was a twitch of movement from the front of the alleyway. When she turned, it was gone. A yellow cab whizzed by, its roof sign flickering. Free. Not free.
Wayland gave a hiss of frustration as Vivi ran down the alleyway. He was yelling her name, howling it, with a plea that wrung
her chest dry.
The next day, he texted her. Please don’t tell her. I didn’t mean any of it.
Ashamed, she didn’t call Calla right away. She didn’t confess to Samuel. She didn’t blow any of their lives up. What if she
had? Would it have stopped anything? The longer she went, the harder it was to break the calcifying silence. The less she
wanted to. Even now, she had not yet found a way to voice all her regrets. She only feinted and flinched from Calla and Wayland
in the months after the opening, as if her avoidance might erase her crimes. Still hiding herself, knowing that, this time,
she didn’t want to be found.