Chapter 30
The rain was descending in starts and stops. Wearing borrowed ponchos, Vivi and Calla made their way through the forest, slowed
by the sporadic downpours that drenched them to the bone. Each time one of the sisters slipped in the mud, the other would
reach out with a steadying hand. They ignored their soaked hair and the bite of branches on their skin, intent on finding
their way to the house by the ravine.
Each carried a hammer in one hand. It was a slightly ridiculous image, the two of them striding with militaristic concentration,
only to stumble a moment later into the wet grass. But Vivi pressed on, seeing in her mind’s eye the hollow behind the tapestry.
She berated herself for not investigating it more closely the previous day. But now that she knew what hid there, she couldn’t
be dissuaded. Neither of them could. The Long Xuyên Nguy?ns hadn’t managed to convince them to wait; nor did they wish to accompany the sisters on a day such as this.
“Come home quickly,” Ki`êu had said. The lines were deeper around his eyes, gravity dragging his mouth into a gully of worry.
Vivi squeezed his shoulder as they left, but she didn’t promise anything. It would take as long as it took.
Even without speaking, she knew Calla felt the same need for completion. If Vivi squinted, she could make out the specter of their father blurred in the trees. Hand against bark, shadow long and unwavering, nodding them along. Whatever the offering was, they had earned it together, all of them.
The wind began to still as they approached the house. Vivi saw anew how perilously it balanced on the edge of the ravine.
Below, the terrain wrinkled into a trench that filled with more rain each passing moment. From a distance, the rising water
looked to be about ankle-high, tumbling in a loud rush around the rocks. A wasp of anxiety circled her mind but never managed
to land.
“This is it?” Calla eyed the house, then the water. “Why do I feel like it’s going to collapse at any moment?”
“It won’t. Let’s go.”
In moments that frightened her, Vivi became curt. She saw herself as a general girding for battle, armored against stray darts
of emotion. In reality, she was little more than a turtle, withdrawing into the dented carapace of its shell.
Calla saw through her sister’s detachment and placed her hand on Vivi’s back, as if calming a spooked creature. “It’s alright.
We’ll go in together.”
Inside the house, they paused and took stock. Their eyes ran past the moth-eaten upholstery, the cracked windowpanes. Vivi
could see now how she’d overlooked the tapestry. Without the shield of curtains—long shredded by vermin and natural decay—sunlight
had worn away at the tapestry’s fabric, reducing the figures to knots of frayed thread.
If Vivi had found the tapestry decades ago, she might have salvaged something in it. Stitched the tears in the fabric, mended
the loose wefts. But now it was worth nothing at all. The conservator in her clenched in helplessness.
“Help me with this,” Vivi said, gripping the edges.
They tore down the tapestry. It slumped to the ground, releasing a thick cloud of buff-tinted dust. The wall behind it bore
a square of paler wood where the sun and dust hadn’t touched. Vivi knocked on the hollow spot.
“Ready?” Calla asked.
Her father had been so close to his grandmother’s offering. Only a few more steps, a little more reach, and he could have
been knocking on the wall in their place. And Tam had been so close to being known. The dissonance between desire and fate struck a rough chord in Vivi’s ear.
Here, on the cusp of revelation, she found herself hesitating. A part of her was afraid that finding the offering would erase
all the echoes in her mind. Once, she’d have exulted at the prospect of freedom from her past. Now she found that she didn’t
want to lose those voices that had become as familiar as her own.
“It’s okay,” Calla said. She smiled, but unconvincingly. “Whatever we find. Even if there’s nothing there. We’ve made it this
far.”
With twin nods, the sisters drew their arms back and released their hammers into the hollow square, into what would have been
the core of the sundial. Again and again, like a cathartic dance. Calla, then Vivi. Vivi, then Calla. Wood splintered and
crackled in on itself. Outside, thunder groaned. It only took a dozen swings before they revealed the gaping hole.
Inside was a single ledge that held a long, flat object. The sisters dropped their hammers.
Vivi paused to meet Calla’s gaze at the same time that Calla sought hers. Vivi never thought they looked alike, but at that
moment, she felt the inevitable homecoming of meeting her own reflection. In this case, it was a homecoming mixed with alienation
and a searing sadness she couldn’t yet understand.
Later, she’d come to see that it had been this very search that had held them together. Now, that search was at an end. Who
knew how long it might have taken for them to come back together without Calla’s discovery in their father’s shed? Vivi might
never have found the courage to be honest; Calla might not have learned how to hold her sister’s pain. Once the engine of
the mystery died, they would have to decide what they would be to each other.
This time, Vivi asked the question. “Ready?”
Calla nodded firmly. “Yes.”
Together, they lifted the object out of its hole and blew off the dust.
It was a folding screen, roughly the size of a small shelf. Vivi recognized it as a quarter-sized version of the famed Japanese
screens she’d studied back at Rathmore. This particular screen’s smallness meant that its purpose was decorative rather than
functional. Calla made a small oomphing noise, like a child startled from a dream. Vivi touched one of the metal hinges, now
corroded into rough nubs. It was a miracle that time hadn’t done more damage to their great-grandmother’s offering.
“I almost don’t want to unfold it,” Calla said.
“Yes, you do.” A smile ghosted on Vivi’s lips.
“You’re right, I do.”
Then, gently moving away from each other, the sisters pulled the screen apart, revealing the painted panels that’d been collapsed
for over three-quarters of a century. There were four in all, oil on plywood. Vivi thought she could still smell the faint
residue of turpentine and resin, even as she knew that must be an illusion.
From the window, the glow of lightning broke into the room in startling flashes.
Each panel was small enough to be a miniature painting in its own right. If you glanced at one in passing, you might never
take a second look. All you’d see would be a palette of abstract color. A statement of blue, devoid of meaning.
But Vivi and Calla knew better.
The sisters lifted the panels closer to their faces. Ran their fingertips over the edges of the plywood. Squinted, peered,
and wondered. The artist and the conservator, worshippers at a temple of discovery. The paint on the panels was layered so
thickly it seemed almost edible, like frosting. Tam’s signature impasto, a gift of excess from her overflowing heart.
Vivi examined the hues of squalling oceans, cosmos dimpled with stars, deep-hearted crystals, a macaw’s glossy wing.
Glancing over, she saw that Calla was hypnotized by her own experience of their great-grandmother’s art.
Vivi wished she could see what her sister did.
Feel the art as she did. The tragedy of the human experience is in how avidly we each resist translation, even as we yearn to be understood.
Each of the panels carried a scene.
On one, a mother pushed a hammock strung between two bamboo trees. Within the husk of the hammock, viewers could see the outlines
of a baby’s profile, eyelids frosted over with twilight.
On the next, that same mother trailed her young son in a field of lavender. Their feet were shielded by the tall foliage,
he was turning to call her. The child had been frozen in a euphoric midair leap.
The third panel portrayed the mother—now grayer of hair, stouter of frame—watching from the shore as the son swam at the edge
of a lake, his arms cutting through the water as mountains towered beyond them.
The last used the lightest palette of all, brushed in pale shades that took on a diaphanous quality, like organza placed atop
ice. In this panel, the woman was in her sixties or seventies. She sat on a bench. Next to her, the son—a grown man, his own
face weathered—held her hand. The sun was so brilliant that it bleached the background to near white, flattening the perspective
so that all one could see was the mother and her child. The rest—the context—was incidental.
If they read the panels in order, the sisters would see the timeline of a life unlived. They’d find evidence of wishes long
buried but never forgotten. On these, the last of Tam’s paintings, there were no monstrous creatures, no chasing demons. Only peace. Only sorrow.
Few critics would name this folding screen as a masterwork. It could be read as saccharine domestic art, to be sure, a decorative
piece for the mantle, nothing more. Vivi could hear Dylan and Smith’s damning survey. The panels weren’t especially virtuosic
in technique nor original in subject matter. At best, they were sentimental reproductions of what Mary Cassatt had accomplished
a half century before, made marginally more interesting because of their medium. Devoid of ideological prowess.
But Vivi knew that no matter what Tam had painted, she would have likely been lost to the ivory temples of history.
She wasn’t white or wealthy, stylish or socially adept.
Any true ambition she felt for herself had been killed in a locked shed, when she was little more than a child subjected to the brutality of a man who felt entitled to her humanity.
Hadn’t Vivi’s own sense of destiny and selfhood been destroyed that first day she began to cower from her father? Violence
seeks to tame all our inner wildness, until what’s left is a desperate apology for our existence. Until all that remains is
the dim impression of a dying light.
“We have to show C?u Ki`êu,” Vivi said, coming back to herself. If Tu?n had found this offering, what might it have healed in him? She wondered if art could ever be enough; symptom or cause of
the human condition. “Button, did you hear me?”
Vivi realized that Calla was weeping. The sound of her tears had been drowned by the rain. Her lips moved; her eyes asked
a question of Vivi. The drumming from outside the house had become so loud that Vivi couldn’t tell if Calla was speaking.
If Vivi’s own words had found shape and destination in her sister’s ears.
Lightning struck somewhere very near the house. It was at that moment when Vivi saw that the storm had become an onslaught.
The turn toward disaster had been sudden, as if someone had released a valve on a faucet. Rain pelted from the sky. Squealing
gales ripped branches from the trees and swung them onto the sides of the house. It felt as if some great army had begun an
assault on them.
The sisters jumped when they heard the crack of glass as a massive branch struck the west-facing window. The hairs on Vivi’s
arms stood at attention, each illuminated in white. Electricity tingled against her skin.
When Vivi glanced outside, she saw that the water in the ravine was rising. Too quickly. Dark waves burbled ever closer to
the top, the ravine’s surface pocked so heavily with rain that it seemed like a breathing menace, an angry Cetus prowling
toward them. It was time to run.