Chapter 35
At the door of her studio, Hiromi looked me up and down—my clawed pants, a whiff of anchovies, the long hours of the wrack.
“Tough day?”
“Cousin stuff.”
“The one who’s mad at you?”
“A different one: Gertie. Also somewhat mad.”
Hiromi ushered me in, offering me the metal water bottle in her hand.
I drank—teeth-aching cold. “Thanks. But I could use something stronger.”
“Of course.” Hiromi placed one palm flat on the middle of my back, the other against my chest. The gentle pressure made me aware of my own heartbeat, ragged and fast.
Gradually, it settled.
“I’ll make you something too,” I said.
In her studio’s small kitchen, I turned on the kettle, stirred hot water into pine honey, added a tincture of fennel and horehound.
My own drink was simpler. Half gin, half vermouth, a single olive. Soft and comforting, a solvent for the wrack, Bianca, Gertie, and the defenestration of Uncle Max.
While I mixed, Hiromi went back to work.
Her industrial robot arm occupied one end of the studio. When it was switched on, the arm became a dangerous creature sharing the space with us. The gunmetal paint job flashed as it twitched and spun, throwing Peter’s old knife faster than any human could.
The target was at the studio’s other end—a block of wood clamped to a rotating, tilting stand, ready to be struck from any direction. Hiromi was trying to carve a face into it from thirty feet.
Throws that went wild—most of them—hit a backstop of mattresses we’d found on the street, smelling of bedbug spray. They were gouged and torn, leaking filler that trembled in the breeze from the old factory windows.
A few days ago, an errant throw had hit the mattresses hilt first. Ziggy had bounced halfway back to Hiromi and the arm, its point planting in the floor. The mark was still there, a boundary I hadn’t crossed since, not while the arm was active.
Hiromi was unconcerned. “I need a few more scars to catch up with you.”
As I took my first sip of Martini, smooth and oily, she fired the arm.
Most throws chipped at the wood and bounced away. The sculpture’s current title was Another Victim of Mortality.
I sipped my drink as she pried the knife out.
Hiromi stared at Ziggy’s battered hilt. “Will you be okay if I break this?”
“Peter broke knives all the time. He broke a lot of things.”
“Your family’s heart,” she said softly. “Are you still making sculptures out of Peter’s collection of bones?”
“No,” I said. “Why’s your last name Kennedy?”
Hiromi took her drink from the table. “They were trying to leave their families behind. They wanted to blend in, but a famous Irish name only raised more questions. Do I smell fennel in this?”
“I was going for licorice,” I said. “Like your weird Swedish candies. Isn’t it strange? Having a last name whose history has nothing to do with you?”
“Is it strange having a last name tied to centuries of imperialism?”
“Not really,” I said, though she only meant my family’s Englishness, not our triumphantly blood-drenched past (present, future).
“Keep working with those bones, Jessica. I know a lot of stuff comes easy for you, but art is never easy.”
“Grief has many flavors,” I said. “Gertie’s still wearing black.”
“The other angry cousin—the artist?”
“She just draws what already exists.”
Hiromi carefully placed the knife blade into the robot’s claw. “No such thing. Art always creates another world.”
“Gertie lives in hers.” I recalled her rendering of Sebastian’s Terrace House, the figure peeking from the window. Her picture of Dewitt Hall: the parking lot, the memorial. “Mostly she draws Helshire.”
“Where Peter fell,” Hiromi said. She went back to the block of wood and ran her hand across the latest mark left by Ziggy. She loosened the clamp to rotate the wood a few degrees.
“Shouldn’t you do that before you reload?” I asked.
“I have to put myself in the wood’s position.”
“Fucking artists,” I said, glancing at the fat red button. “What if I fainted and fell on the controls?”
“When did you get safety conscious, knife-thrower?”
“When my Aunt Veronica first put a bow in my hand. Age five.”
“Fucking Mortons.” She returned to me, weaving back and forth across the knife’s flight path. “What about An Outcome of Uncontrolled Processes?”
“What’s the point of confusing titles?”
“To increase the scope for interpretation.” She reached into her pocket for a small, rattling box and poured out a few pastilles. “Open your mouth.”
The tiny candies disintegrated instantly, like perfume lingering in an elevator.
“Absinthe,” I said. “And fancy soap.”
“What happened to your leg, Jess?”
“Gertie’s cat. She takes in strays.”
“You Mortons are such animal lovers. I’ve never seen rabbits at a funeral before.”
“You should see the rabbit funerals. Can I press the red button this time?”
“You may not.”
The next throw skimmed the target, sending out a spray of splinters. Ziggy bounced back from the mattresses and wound up twirling on the floor. We watched it come to a halt. The tip pointed at the large canvas Hiromi kept covered in the corner, a secret work I’d never seen.
We went to inspect the target. Something was emerging from the wooden block—a face looking at a catastrophe.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to carve this yourself?”
“Always funniest when you aren’t trying.” She dipped into her pockets and placed another candy in my mouth—Korean characters on the wrapper, ginseng and mushrooms on my tongue.
“Best one so far,” I said. “Like those wines that taste like wet dirt.”
She nodded. “Earthworms sprouting after a long rain, looking for oxygen.”
“Helpless.” I held her from behind, inhaling the sculpture’s scent of fresh-cut wood. “Exposed.”
“Do you find worms sexy, Jessica Morton?”
“Worms, no. Candy, increasingly so.”
“Flirting,” Hiromi said, and didn’t pull away. Prey.
The breeze through the windows picked up, carrying the smell of the coffee roastery across the street. The afternoon light was perfect; the Martini had soothed my head.
A tiny trembling came from my thigh.
“Family phone?”
“Yes.” My arms dropped from her.
The text was from Grandmother Elizabeth: Push.
The cult’s party was only ten days away.
“Grandma says she mailed us some candies.”
“I love her.”
“She loves giving presents.” Time to push. “So…I did a bad thing. I told Garrett about your secret piece of art.”
We both glanced at the covered canvas leaning in the corner. It was ten feet across, the biggest piece in the room.
Hiromi shrugged. “Garrett only cares about my robots.”
“That’s what he said. But I feel bad about telling him.”
“Don’t stress, Jessica. That piece isn’t a secret; it’s just embarrassing. You didn’t look at it, did you?”
I shook my head.
“Good. It’s a guilty pleasure. But can I ask why you told him?”
I looked everywhere but at her. “This was a big deal for me, getting to work at Garrett’s gallery. But I’m barely there anymore.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“He doesn’t trust me to talk to clients.”
“Oh,” Hiromi said softly. This part was all too believable.
“I’ve been trying to bring him something useful. A new artist or a collector. It just slipped out—that I knew something he didn’t.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It was shitty of me.” I put an edge of tragedy in my voice, like when the girls on my hall talked about Sebastian. “I’m sorry, Hiromi.”
She sighed, giving me a ginger sucker with a softened flavor, like a gnarled old root left too long in the larder.
“Crystal’s right,” I said. “All I’ve got is family connections.”
“She grew up here. She’s been going to galleries since she was three. You were raised by wolves.”
“Wolves are highly intelligent.”
“Which makes them dangerous. When you look at this bust, what do you see?”
I stared at the battered block of wood. “A hint of eyes, a gash of mouth.”
“But under that?”
I looked harder, thought about the lightning movements of the robot arm. Ziggy flying through the air, a large and imprecise missile—hitting, missing, skimming, sticking. “Trajectories.”
“But under that.” Hiromi gazed at me like I was the object on display.
“The randomness of art? The chaos of uncontrolled processes?” I sighed. “See? This is why Garrett doesn’t want me in the gallery. Maybe if we go to more openings, more parties. I might meet some real collectors.”
She turned back toward the target, contemplating the half-formed face. But also wondering how to help me.
My Martini was warm now, the olive’s brine concentrated in the last drops, as salty as Hiromi’s skin.