Chapter 31
Over the next few weeks, Hiromi and I saw a lot of each other.
We rowed a boat together on a lake in Central Park. She marveled at my strength, our pulsing speed. But when we ate lunch by the reservoir afterward, my palms were blistered. Hiromi’s, callused from working metal and stone, weren’t even pink.
Her art, written on her hands.
In conversation with her friends, I was still out of my depth. Not about art history, which I studied diligently, but in general cluelessness—thinking that Lucille Ball was a sculptor, Oscar Wilde a murderer.
Hiromi just smiled when I talked like an alien. As Garrett had said, inscrutability was part of the Morton mystique.
She taught me the city’s museums and galleries. Gravitating toward the darkest, emptiest rooms, we touched each other in silence, every breath echoing from marble floors.
“When you were little,” she asked one day in the Met, ancient weapons all around us, “did you ever see art in person?”
“No museums in Upper Falls.”
“What about trips to the city?”
My eyes followed the curved blade of a sixteenth-century yataghan. “I came down twice, with cousins. We walked around.”
“Jessica. Your family owns a gallery.”
“It’s mostly a tax write-off.”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” she sighed. “Especially since it’s my gallery.”
Whenever I was open about my family, it brought us closer. Hiromi saw me as a refugee from a cult, in need of saving.
“Growing up on the estate, we had a lot of chores,” I said. “Art was optional.”
She shook her head. “Art hasn’t been optional for forty thousand years.”
I had to search later to find out what she meant. Staring at the ochre cave paintings of Sulawesi, something unsettling occurred to me.
Art was older than the Mortons.
Eventually Hiromi asked to see my work. She went through the photos slowly, giving each piece a long, expressionless look.
“You always use the same bones,” she said.
“They’re all I have.”
“They’re beautiful. The variations in the wings, from small to large, crooked to straight. Like a cabinet of curiosities.” She looked up from my phone. “Maybe the collection itself is the work, more than how you put them together.”
“Peter collected them.” His art, not mine.
Like Uncle Orrin’s scrapbook of magazine photos—ordinaries with big smiles: politicians, eager salesmen, astronauts’ wives.
Or Aunt Beatrice’s collection of broken peelers and hand-cranked mixers she refused to repair.
Grandpa Dwight’s DNA samples from serial killers.
My family’s art was strange collections.
“Ah,” Hiromi said. “How does working with them make you feel?”
I’d been reading about what people wanted from art: to make themselves uncomfortable, uncertain. The opposite of being a Morton.
“At home,” I said. “Bones were everywhere on the estate. Maybe I should work with something less familiar.”
“Discomfort is a mode of knowledge.” She kissed my cheek, running a single finger down my side. “But so is pleasure.”
“Art never hits me like that,” I said, shivering. Not like sex, or like the sight of Halcyon Hall, the windows aglow from the splendid, infernal device that raged inside. Also Peter’s work.
Hiromi’s finger lifted from my skin, came to curl the ends of my hair.
“What about music?”
“I like the math of it.”
She sighed, her breath soft against my neck. “Your family made you to certain specifications, Jessica. You’re still stuck inside them.”
“You think I’ll ever get out?”
“Oh, you definitely will.” A laugh bubbled up. “And when you do…yikes.”
I taught Hiromi too.
Morton things—knife combat for her robots, capoeira to limber up after a long day.
When the other occupants left at night, and we explored the old industrial building that housed her studio, I shared my skills in climbing, lock picks, alarms. In the other artists’ darkened studios, in Hiromi’s arms, my body still humming from sex, I took in her thoughts on their half-finished work.
She showed me more of the city. Her favorite street art: murals of dinosaurs fighting forklifts; slogans (Break Your Own Heart!) stenciled on the sidewalk; temporary sculptures cobbled together from bicycle remains.
Her favorite food venders, who sold us laksa, croissants, okonomiyaki, knishes, crepes, biryani, and bungeoppang—most of which I’d never eaten before.
She delighted in startling my senses while plying me with questions. Once while we were eating olive oil ice cream, she asked:
“Do you not hear catcalls? You never react.”
“Like that guy two blocks ago—who inquired about our tits?”
“You didn’t blink. You never blink.”
“He wasn’t a threat.”
“What if he was?”
“I’d assess, then retreat or neutralize him.”
Her eyes lit up. She loved it when I talked like a Morton. “I kind of want to see you neutralize someone. You also don’t notice people asking for money.”
“Why would I notice them?” I had more important things to watch out for.
Arabella had tailed us for two weeks, but the photographer at Mixed never reappeared. Maybe he’d been replaced by someone new and more skilled at surveillance.
The only person of interest Arabella had spotted was Bianca Lindqvist, halfway down the block from us. Either a coincidence, or Halcyon Hall was still smoldering.
Eating at a sidewalk table one cool summer evening, Hiromi caught me looking over my shoulder.
“Is your family a secret society?”
“You’re thinking of artists,” I said.
“Unfathomable customs, a love of mystic symbols.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “But seriously. Do you ever think someone’s following you?”
“If they are, let them come.”
Hiromi was fascinated by the scale and sprawl of the Mortons, by our durability, so unlike her own family’s.
One afternoon, on the sweltering black tar roof of her studio, she told me about her parents’ car accident: the furniture repossessed, the house foreclosed. Too young to be alone, too old for new parents, she started taking apart her old toys and making new ones.
I found myself grateful to Garrett for telling me so little about her. He’d let me discover her on my own, the way an ordinary would.
I taught Hiromi to throw Peter’s knife, rubbing down her muscles after each session, learning everything about her body. But the machines were always her focus. She wiped out her savings to buy a factory-built arm, fast enough to propel Ziggy into a block of wood at thirty feet.
We spent long, exquisite afternoons tuning it, finding the right distance-to-target for each of fifteen speed settings—the whirr of its joints, the taste of her skin, the thock of the knife striking home.
But perfect summers always end.
I came down from my room one morning to find Garrett and Arabella at the dining table.
At one end sat Grandmother Elizabeth. Her knitting bag lay in the chair beside her. She was at work on a child’s cap, her metal needles sliding carefully along the rows, removing the stitches one by one.
When I bowed to her, she didn’t respond.
“Coffee?” Arabella asked me.
“Yes, thank you.”
Arabella turned away to contemplate the knobs and switches of Garrett’s gleaming coffee maker. He sat uncomfortably as she poked and prodded the machine.
She never made her own coffee.
I wondered if I’d done something wrong, but then saw Grandmother’s battered leather suitcase in the corner—she was just passing through.
Her needles kept moving, the little cap disappearing row by row. I tried to see the flaw she was trying to reach, but every stitch looked perfect.
As Arabella set a cup in front of me, the surface of the coffee was trembling.
“It’s time for a progress report, Jessica.”
“Yes.” I took a sip—too bitter, even for me. “Since I quit working at the gallery, Hiromi and I spend most days together. Most nights too.”
“Congratulations,” Arabella said. “Has she told you anything useful about Lyon?”
“She speaks of him as little as possible.”
Arabella looked at Garrett, her nerves spilling over. “I told you!”
“Let it unfold. He’ll make the first move.”
She shook her head. “The first move? We’ve bugged him, hacked his financials, threatened him with blackmail. None of it worked. And this is supposed to make him talk to us?”
Garrett smiled. “Jealousy is slow but certain.”
“It’s time to be direct. I’ll make an appointment and explain things from his couch. Tell him exactly who and what we are.”
“Cult leaders,” Garrett said with a laugh. “Famously inclined to share power.”
“It’s worked before.”
“The Morton glamour won’t impress this one, Arabella. He already has a large, strange family—patients, acolytes, broken people who hang on his every word.”
Arabella threw up her hands. “If we can’t incorporate him, we should just kill him! Then take his clients.”
“We only need to put a crack in his ego,” Garrett said, turning to the end of the table. “We have what he doesn’t.”
But Grandmother was looking at me. “Is this Hiromi Kennedy really so special?”
I hesitated—the simplest solution was to kill Lyon, which would keep him away from Hiromi forever. But with him dead, my summer here would be over. I’d be sent home, away from her.
“She’s exactly what we need,” I said.
Grandmother nodded, and folded her needles. “Well, then, I have a flight to catch. London is lovely this time of year.”
The rest of us exchanged glances—the Seths weren’t having a wedding, a funeral, or a kabaddi tournament, but our matriarch was visiting.
“How much longer?” she asked Garrett.
“Dr. Lyon’s summer party is in two weeks,” he said. “The whole cult will be there, prospective members too.”
Arabella turned to me. “Are you set?”
“Hiromi threw away the invitation. I pulled it out of the trash and RSVP’d for us.”
“So you haven’t talked her into going?”
“Don’t worry, Aunt Arabella. I will.”
“Two weeks,” she said, and the room fell silent.
I wondered if the meeting that had ended Peter’s life was like this—the other four arguing pros and cons, Grandmother only listening, smiling now and then to show her inclinations. I’d never found out who the fifth vote had been. My mother, Elizabeth, Veronica, Cyrus…
Arabella was so ready to kill Lyon; maybe it had been her. Or maybe this aggression was just nerves. She didn’t like things moving slowly.
This was the right time to bring up Faraday’s problem. “There’s also the issue of the Wilbert-Lees’ former business partner.”
Garrett waved a hand. “He stared at Faraday on a train.”
“There’s more.” She had texted me last night. “She ran into him again in Boston, in a bar. He left, but then stood at the window—in the rain, no umbrella, staring back inside.”
As Arabella considered this, her shoulders relaxed, the edginess fading.
“Tell me this man comes to New York soon.”
I nodded—he hadn’t changed his passwords since the court case. “He has a reservation in Midtown, three days from now.”
Arabella sighed with relief. At last, she had something concrete to do.
“Uncle Orrin will be pleased,” Grandmother said with a smile.