3. Tony
TONY
The blue was wrong.
I'd mixed it four times. Cerulean and white, a touch of phthalo to cool it down. Four times, and every attempt landed somewhere I didn't recognize.
Not the blue I needed. Not the blue I remembered.
I set the palette knife down. Wiped my hands on my jeans. Stood back from the canvas and let my eyes do what they'd been doing for weeks now. Lying.
The painting in front of me was one I'd finished in December. A lake at dawn. Cool blues, sharp greens, a ribbon of pink along the horizon. At least that's what I'd painted.
What I saw now was a faded photograph left in the sun.
The pink was gone. Not dimmed. Gone. A smear of something between gray and tan where the sunrise should have been. The greens looked flat. The blues had lost their teeth.
I stepped closer. Studied the brushwork. The strokes were mine. Confident, clean, loaded with pigment. I could see the texture. I could see the composition. I could see everything except the thing that mattered.
Color.
The thing that had made me famous. The thing every gallery, every critic, every collector pointed to when they said my name. The natural successor to Rothko. That's what they called me. A man who sees color the way most people hear music.
I couldn't hear the music anymore.
Jamie had called it cone dystrophy. He'd sat across from me in his office, his kind hazel eyes doing that thing they did when he had bad news. The way he rubbed the back of his neck. The way he leaned forward like getting closer would make the words hurt less.
It didn't.
"The cones in your retina are deteriorating," he'd said. "The cells responsible for color vision. It's progressive, Tony."
I'd asked what that meant. He told me. Reds and oranges would go first. Then greens. Then everything else, draining out like water from a bathtub until the world was a photograph in shades of gray.
"How fast?"
That was the question that broke him. He'd looked at his hands. Clasped, unclasped. Pressed two fingers between his eyebrows into that crease that never relaxed.
"Faster than I expected."
No cure. Tinted lenses. Experimental gene therapy. Maybe.
I'd walked out of his office and driven home in silence. That was weeks ago.
Now I stood barefoot in my studio at two in the morning, staring at a painting I no longer trusted. The concrete floor was cold under my feet. Good. The cold kept me here. Kept me sharp.
I picked up a tube of alizarin crimson. Squeezed a line onto the palette. The label said crimson. What I saw was brown.
The crimson bled into the blue under my brush. Whatever I was creating, it wasn't what my hands intended. My eyes translated one thing. The canvas received another. And I stood in the gap between them, useless.
A knock on the studio door.
"Go away, Sophia."
The door opened anyway. Jamie walked in.
He was still wearing his coat. Snow on his shoulders. His face was tired, the kind of tired that said he'd been thinking about me when he should have been sleeping.
"Sophia called me."
"Of course she did."
He pulled a stool up to the workbench and sat down. Didn't say anything for a while. Just watched me not paint.
Jamie was the one person in the world who understood what this studio meant. He'd been coming here since we were teenagers. Back when Dad was alive and the house was full of noise and Italian cooking and arguments about Caravaggio versus Vermeer.
Now the house was full of glass and silence.
"I ran your latest scans again," he said.
I didn't turn around.
"And?"
"The progression is consistent with what we discussed. The reds are going. Greens are following."
I squeezed more paint onto the palette. Cadmium yellow this time. It looked like mustard.
"I'm looking into a trial in Boston," he said. "Gene therapy. Early results are promising."
"Promising."
"Tony."
I put the brush down. Turned to face him. He looked small sitting on that stool, which was ridiculous. Jamie was not a small man. But in this room, in the dead of night, with the mountains pressing against the windows and the lake black beyond them, everything shrank.
"Art isn't all you are," he said.
The words were gentle. They hit like a fist.
"Then why am I so terrified that it is?"
Jamie didn't answer. He held my gaze and I watched him search for something to say. Some clinical response, some friend response, some combination that would make this okay.
There wasn't one.
"You should eat," he said.
"I'm not hungry."
"Sophia left lamb curry in the fridge."
"I know."
He stood. Put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. His grip was solid. Warm. It was more than I deserved and I wanted to shake it off.
I didn't.
"Get some sleep." He headed for the door. Stopped. "I'll call you about the Boston trial."
"Fine."
The door closed behind him. His car started in the driveway a minute later. Then the crunch of tires on gravel. Then nothing.
I washed my brushes. One at a time, running the bristles under cold water until the pigment bled out.
The water in the sink turned a color I couldn't name.
It used to be that I could identify a mix down to its base components just by looking.
Sap green and raw sienna. Quinacridone magenta and titanium white.
Now it was just murky.
I dried my hands on a rag and moved through the house.
The Castle. That's what the town called it. Floor-to-ceiling glass, every wall a window. Two stories of steel and timber and transparency overlooking the lake. The mountains rose behind it like a painted backdrop.
Except I was the painter, and I was losing the ability to see the painting.
Dad had loved this land. He'd brought me here as a kid. We'd stood on the ridge where the Castle now sat. He'd told me, in his thick Italian accent, that this was the most beautiful place he'd ever seen outside of Tuscany.
He died before I built it. But I'd built it for him. Every room designed to hold the landscape he'd fallen in love with.
His study was down the hall from my studio. I'd had it replicated from memory. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, leather chair, the reading lamp he never turned off. His journals filled three shelves. His handwriting, small and precise and full of life.
There was a woman starting soon. Some transcriber Sophia had hired to digitize Dad's journals. I hadn't met her. Didn't plan to.
The house was mine. The studio was mine. Dad's study was mine. I didn't need a stranger touching his words, turning his ink into data on a screen.
But she had insisted. And when Sophia insisted, the conversation was over.
I passed the kitchen. The lamb curry sat in a covered dish on the top shelf of the fridge. Sophia always left a light on in the kitchen before she went home.
Home. To her husband. To her own house, her own life, her own warmth.
After she left each evening, the Castle became exactly what it looked like. A glass box on a ridge with one person inside it.
I ate three bites standing at the counter. The curry was perfect. Her cooking always was. But my stomach had been a fist for weeks and food was just another thing I was going through the motions of.
The container went back in the fridge. Fork washed. Done.
In the living room, I stopped at the window. The lake was a sheet of black mirror. The mountains behind it were outlines, darker shapes against a dark sky. Stars. Thousands of them, scattered across the black like flecks of white paint on a canvas.
I leaned my forehead against the window. Cold. The chill spread through my skull and down my neck.
My phone sat on the kitchen counter. I picked it up and opened the photos. The most recent one was Avery. Dark curls. Green eyes so like mine it was like looking into a mirror twenty-five years ago. A smile that could end wars.
She was in Phoenix with Charlotte. Three thousand miles away. Eating pancakes and going to school and asking a thousand questions a day. Living her life in vivid color.
I closed the phone.
The shower was hot. I stayed under the water until my skin turned red. Or what I assumed was red. It could have been pink. It could have been anything.
I dried off. Pulled on clean boxers. Walked past my studio door to the bedroom.
Then stopped.
I went back. Planted myself in front of the December painting one more time. The lake at dawn. The blue that was wrong. The pink that was gone.
Every morning. The same ritual. Stand in front of the canvas. Check if the colors have faded further.
They had.
Or they hadn't, and my eyes couldn't tell the difference anymore. That was the thing that ate me alive. Not the loss itself. The not knowing.
I turned off the studio lights and headed to bed.
The bedroom was glass on three sides. The lake. The mountains. The sky.
I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. The place was quiet in the way only an empty home can be. No hum of another person breathing. No footsteps in the hall. Just the tick of the heating system and the wind pushing against the windows.
Somewhere in this town, people were sleeping. Jamie was home, scrolling through medical journals looking for a miracle. Sophia was next to her husband, warm and safe.
And somewhere on the other side of Rockford, a woman I'd never met was sitting at a window in the dark.
I didn't know her name. I didn't know she existed.
But in a few days, she was going to walk through my door. She was going to sit in Dad's study and touch his journals and exist in my space.
I didn't want her here. Didn't want anyone here.
The ceiling gave me nothing. The silence pressed against my eardrums and I let it.
Sleep didn't come. The Castle held its breath around me, and I lay inside it like a man trapped in a painting he could no longer see.