Chapter 33
During her tearful goodbye with her relatives in Long Xuyên, Vivi asked them to keep an eye out for Calla. No one had seen her after the flood. She simply disappeared, her luggage still
intact, her borrowed house slippers flung to opposite corners of the room, as if shed in haste. Her wallet and passport were
the only things missing.
But as Vivi packed her own suitcase, she paused, struck by a thought. She went to the bureau. And she saw that the silver
antler ring was also gone.
Fair was fair.
The Nguy?ns all agreed that Calla would return before long. No person could wander the world alone indefinitely, and certainly not Calla,
who thrived on the admiration and challenge of those she loved. Vivi only shrugged. Her worry for her sister still trotted
alongside her, the way it had all her life, but now she knew that she didn’t have to stop for it.
Ki`êu wrapped her father’s painting of the Deer Creek farmhouse in a yard of navy twill. “Take it. So you know that he loved you.”
Vivi would try to believe it. Because that was what was on the other end of this search. Not the journal and not the folding
screen, or not just those things. Without ever admitting it, she’d spent these weeks searching for a piece of Tu?n that she could look on without pain. Her relatives had given it to her, this unlikely crystal secreted in a hollow of cracked
rock, and she would try to carry it for as long as she could bear.
In return, she handed Tam’s journal to her uncle, though her fingers tingled to pull it back. “Will you keep this? Your grandmother deserves to be
remembered by the people she belonged to.”
What did it mean to belong to another person? For most of her life, with the exception of Calla, she’d evaded this sense of
obligation, afraid that she’d squander what she’d been given. But you didn’t always get to choose who you belonged to. You
only made yourself worthy of it. Tam had taught her this.
As she and Ki`êu hugged, she imagined it was her father’s arms around her. It seemed right, this surrogate affection.
Before she left Long Xuyên, she went one last time to the house by the ravine, carrying an Altoids tin that’d traveled around the world and back again.
Her fingers skated in the grit of ashes as she threw them in a protective circle around her.
“Rest easy, Dad.” One day, she would find her mother’s grave too. There’d be time for more goodbyes. Greetings and farewells,
the only constants of life.
Two months after she arrived back in Chicago, Vivi stood in Gallery C, meeting the eyes of her great-grandmother on the canvas
on the wall. It was a Saturday afternoon. The Forster was full of patrons; there was barely room to stand in the galleries
that held Sea to Earth. But she could easily dissolve the other presences, leaving an unfettered pathway between her and the painting.
When a piece of art belonged to you—or when you belonged to a piece of art—nothing could break that connection.
In Vivi’s periphery, a woman in a baseball cap was explaining the painting of the women in the mirror to her bored teenage son. “This is the artist who defied all gender expectations. Imagine. Living that lie. Her story was
so tragic, a cautionary tale.”
“It was a triumph. It was hers,” Vivi said softly. The mother and son glanced at her, then moved on to the next painting, the blue lovers forgotten.
Vivi thought with a pang about the panels on the folding screen, Tam’s last works, floating away in the flood. They should have been in the museums with the rest of her art. Instead, those panels
sat at the end of the trailing ellipsis of her life. But of course, the screen was never meant for the public. It was an offering
from a mother to her son.
Maybe it was only her imagination, but she saw a glimmer pass across her great-grandmother’s painted face, briefly animating
her expression. Unlike the solemn visage she’d first glimpsed, Vivi now caught a wry twist of Tam’s lips, a lively kindling in her eye. Tam’s was the confidence of a woman in the throes of love. It was then that Vivi noticed what she’d missed in her rush to leave
the Forster that night, weeks ago.
There was a crucial difference in the irises of the overpainted version and her restored version of the painting. In the restored
version, the women weren’t staring at their own reflections or at the viewers, as everyone had thought for nearly a century.
The women were looking at each other.
There, in the most intimate lands of longing, they’d at last found loving witness in one another. No matter what history decreed,
that would be the immortalized conclusion to their painted story.
“We’re framing Ly’s—Tam’s—sketch,” Samuel said. He came up next to her, all attenuated limbs and solid warmth. She’d been afraid he wouldn’t show.
“The one you’ve loaned us.”
“Where will you install it?”
“Next to the painting, of course. Where it belongs. We want to reprint your article about K. P. Ly’s true identity too, if you grant permission.”
She turned to him. They’d only been apart for almost three months, but it felt much longer. She was surprised to find that
the usual buzzing under her skin, that frantic need to evade him, had ceased. Instead, she wanted to burrow into his presence.
“Of course I grant permission. I owe the museum that, and more.”
Recently, Vivi’s article was published in a local culture publication, where it’d begun making a minor ripple around the city—and farther afield.
Several prestigious arts journals reached out about picking up the piece.
A Tribune editor wanted to commission a larger article on Ly for their Arts section; a contributor to the Times emailed to ask if she’d be open to a profile about her role in the discovery.
She suspected that Paul had something to do
with the positive reception and broader dissemination of her piece. But Tam’s story was strong enough to stand on its own. Its impact on the art community was only just beginning.
Abel and the curators debated about whether they should revise Tam’s name and gender across placards and papers at the Forster. They settled on using her chosen pronouns and keeping her pseudonym.
At Vivi’s suggestion, the title of Blue Mirror was changed to Blue Lovers. She thought her great-grandmother would have liked that. Just one small word to alter an entire story.
After hearing of her skills as a conservator—from Samuel, no doubt—a collector in Evanston had sought her out for his own
acquisitions, privately hoping that she would strike gold again with a hidden artwork. She didn’t say it, but she knew that
such discoveries only came around once in a lifetime. Vivi took the job anyway, guessing that between freelance conservation
work and the museum catalogue essays she hoped to undertake, she might manage to stay afloat for some time. And if she didn’t?
Well, these days, she could hold on to uncertainty. Her life stacked with questions and, for once, those questions had begun
to excite rather than petrify her.
Samuel tucked his head self-effacingly. “It’s gracious of you, letting us display the sketch too. Abel can’t believe his luck.
He’s saying they were too hasty in letting you go.”
“He wasn’t. I deserved to be let go.”
“But I didn’t.”
“I know that, Sam.”
They walked out of the gallery, into the open-air pavilion scattered with wrought-iron tables and chairs that reminded Vivi of Arles.
After she landed at Midway, she had a message waiting for her from Samuel.
They talked for hours. She answered every question he had.
She told him all she could about the offering, knowing that he might not believe her—after all, where was the evidence?
Where was the sole witness to her discovery?
—but he did, unreservedly. Their conversation wasn’t forgiveness, but it illuminated the dark spaces between them, if only for the moment.
After she hung up, she slept for what felt like days. Without the offering or the journal in hand but imbued with a consuming
sense of tranquility, she no longer felt the urge to waltz into Samuel’s opening and salvage her reputation. She let him have
the space to come to her. Since that first conversation after she returned to Chicago, aside from professional emails about
the loan of the sketch, he had remained remote. She wondered, in a quiet corner of her mind, where the eighteenth-century
chatelaine was now. She wished she could have held it once more.
Then, last night, Samuel asked her to meet him in person. Vivi threw cold water on the hope that blazed in her chest.
In the courtyard, they settled under the shade of a tree, feet crossed in front of them. Samuel wiped his glasses lenses.
Without them, he seemed younger and more open. There were sallow circles under his eyes, a faint scruff along his jaw. Vivi’s
thumb itched to run along the perimeter of his features, those deeply known landmarks of her heart.
Instead, she took out a small canvas from her messenger bag and handed it to him. “I’ve started painting. This is for Phoebe.”
The painting was a dance of watercolors. Pink helixes sprang against a lustrous yellow background, strokes flung in a riotous
jubilee. For Vivi, the painting evoked a sense of release. It was carefree and unrestrained. It made her think of Calla, running
toward her sunlight.
Vivi’s style, unlike her father’s classical streak and her sister’s unflinching verisimilitude, leaned toward the emotive and abstract.
She knew the paintings weren’t good enough to display publicly.
Maybe they never would be. That wasn’t the point.
Vivi could give herself to the work without expecting anything in return. Art for its own sake.
But still. She held her breath for Samuel’s opinion.
Samuel was examining her painting, turning it to the light and back toward himself. His face relayed the focus of an admirer,
not just a critic or a curator. She respected how he could inhabit two consciousnesses at once.
He said, “These are Phoebe’s favorite colors. She has a pair of boots in exactly that shade of yellow.”
“I remembered. I thought she could be the one to name the painting, if she wants.”
“She’s going to want to thank you in person. Along with the jewelry box you sent her.”
“Even after everything I’ve done?”
“She asks about you all the time. She never gave up hope that you’d come back.”
“And you?” It came out as a whisper.
His eyes clouded. She could almost hear the tightening of his jaw, the anger splashing its way back to the surface. “I need
time.”
Vivi nodded. What else was there to say? She began gathering herself up to leave, smiling awkwardly at him, trying to express
that it was okay, she understood, she wouldn’t expect any other outcome. He watched her flounder. Then, all at once, his mouth
released its tension, as if an internal debate had been settled.
He reached across the table, stopping her with a press of his hand. “But we have plenty of time, don’t we?”
She could only nod again, overcome.
“Did you mean what you said in the email?” he asked. “About the way you love me?”
“I can’t remember what I wrote.” Vivi blushed; she did remember, of course. Only, she hadn’t intended him to read that email.
If not for Calla, it would be buried in some digital graveyard.
Samuel reached over and, with his free hand, touched the freckle on her cheek with the pad of his thumb.
“‘I love you the way I love a painting, a tapestry, a perfect ivory sculpture. Not because they are simply beautiful. But because they change the lens of the world. They—you—have expanded the contours of my soul.’ Did I get that right? I’ve only read it a thousand times since you sent it. ”
Her eyes filled. A leaf fell from a tree into the fountain, where it squiggled in the water like a dancer’s wobbly turn.
He went on, as if his words had been biding their time. “And I realized: that’s why you stripped Blue Lovers. You can see beyond beauty, to whatever truth lies out of reach. You might evade, Vivi—God, can you run from a person—but
you never lie. Not when it matters. And you won’t tolerate art that lies either. That’s why I love you. Because, despite everything that has happened to you, you ache for what is good and true.”
For the first time in her life, Vivi stood without balking in the light of another person’s gaze and let herself believe the
vision reflected there. She was not a perfect human, but she deserved goodness. The knowledge washed over her until she shook
down to her toes.
Samuel said, “So I’m asking. Did you mean what you wrote?”
She wanted to tell him what she’d learned from Calla. That love could be uncomfortably thorny sometimes, that it could also
feel like the beginning of a dive, all lift and flung-out arms. A draught of bravado to spite the fear. That love was, really,
just a choice to stay until the end, knowing that there would always be an end.
She wanted to tell him about her father standing behind her mother in the kitchen of the farmhouse, braiding May’s shower-wet
hair with the calloused fingers that’d housed a hundred splinters. Fingers that could be as gentle as they were battered.
Or maybe she’d tell him about Wayland, warbling Bob Dylan lyrics under Calla’s dorm window as Calla leaned over, singing along.
Vivi could also describe her favorite fiction: an image of an older, more hesitant Justine Allard returning to the bench in Arles.
Sweeping her fingers across the dusted-over words inscribed in stone, licking the grit of the years off her skin as she thought about the only woman she’d ever loved.
These stories were printed onto the surface of Vivi’s heart.
Love lost, but never forgotten, and in its remembrance, never completely dead. Pulsing like a collapsing star that clings
to its last torrents of brilliance.
Samuel crooked his head, trying to read her thoughts. She’d tell him all this, and more, someday soon.
For now, she only pressed her cheek into his hand and said, in a voice ringing with conviction, “Yes, Sam, that’s right. I
love you just like that.”