The Painter's Daughter

Chapter 1

I remember holding my mother’s hand in front of an immense portrait of George Washington the first time I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was four years old. My toes pinched in my Velcro sneakers after hours of wandering through galleries, and I couldn’t stop squirming in my itchy corduroy overalls.

Exasperated, my mother turned to my father and said, “You take her.”

He hoisted me up and carried me off to the Egyptian wing, past the reflecting pool and into the Temple of Dendur.

“Look, Paige,” he’d said, pointing to the remains of a small statue encased in glass. “That’s the priestess Tagerem, Ra’s God’s Wife. Ra is the Egyptian sun god. He rides a chariot across the sky during the day, making the world bright.”

At the time, it had made perfect sense to me, because I knew men could be gods. My father was surely a god, for he was the star around which my entire world revolved. I beheld his kingdom from atop his strong, fatherly shoulders. Up there, it was possible to witness things that would’ve otherwise gone unnoticed by one so small.

Fourteen years later, I would’ve traded every inch I’d gained through puberty for a similar perch. Rising to my toes, I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of the wall of hieroglyphics over the blockade of onlookers, to no avail.

My father had warned me that weekends at the Met could be crowded. Crowded was an understatement. My bus had arrived at Grand Central Terminal a few minutes after I was supposed to meet him in the lobby. By the time I joined a ticket line, I was already twenty minutes late. I looked for him at the information kiosk, where we’d planned to meet. When I didn’t see him, I sent a text. Ten minutes and zero responses later, I headed into the Egyptian wing in the hopes that he’d gotten bored and gone inside without me.

That was half an hour ago.

Abandoning the packed temple, I took a seat on the stone lip beside the reflecting pool and pulled out my phone. No new messages. My knee bounced under my opposite ankle. I was starting to freak out. Maybe my dad had left his phone at home or forgotten to charge it. He probably thought I’d stood him up.

Or, perhaps, he hadn’t shown up at all.

With no other way to contact him and nowhere else to go, I was in trouble. His address was unlisted. I didn’t know anyone else in New York, and the money in my bag wasn’t enough to cover another bus ticket, plus food. There had to be an ATM somewhere in the museum. I’d hoped to save the bulk of my graduation money, but if push came to shove, I could always use some of it to rent a cheap hotel room or a bed at a hostel.

I was about to send my dad another text when I heard a breathy, “Oh my God,” coming from a small group of well-dressed women idling nearby. “Is that really him?” they whispered. I could almost smell their arousal.

The throng parted, and there he stood, daylight bursting through the clouds. My father was the sort of handsome that made people’s necks snap as he passed, the kind you had to rub your eyes to believe. My mother used to say he didn’t just make art, he was art. A walking, talking, living, breathing work of art.

He was the sun. It hurt to look at him.

“Hey,” he said.

Smoothing my lychee-scented lip balm, I curtailed my grin into a modest smile. “Hey.”

He sat on the stone bench beside me. I was at a loss for additional words, but it didn’t seem to matter. His smile was as warm as midsummer, his hazel eyes tinged gold. Not a hint of pretense or a tinge of disenchantment to be found. Just wonder, pure and refreshing, like a mouthful of spring water.

I swallowed, forcing the feelings down. It was far too soon and six years too late to be thinking such thoughts about a man who had abandoned me when I was twelve. I’d agreed to visit him in the city, but I didn’t want him to think this would be easy.

“Have you been here long?” I asked matter-of-factly.

“Only an hour.”

I winced. “Sorry. My bus was late. Did you get my text?”

“I did.” He scratched at the stubble along his jaw, having folded his shirtsleeves up to reveal the network of veins that snaked his forearms like tributaries. I used to trace those veins with magic marker, all the way up to his shoulders, transforming his skin into a map of the Nile River.

“I waited for you in the lobby,” I said. “Then I decided to walk around in case you’d already come inside.”

“I know. I watched you buy your ticket.”

“Really?” I leaned back to look at his face. “That was like, half an hour ago.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “I wanted to look at you.”

Warmth flooded my cheeks. As a renowned portrait artist, my father had turned people-watching into a vocation. He used to draw me all the time when I was little, but just then, I found his gaze unnerving, like the phantom sensation of having to pee before a performance. His scrutiny pared at my composure, and I was afraid he’d scrape away the layers only to be disappointed by what he saw underneath.

“See anything interesting?” I asked, keeping my tone light.

My father cocked his head. He seemed to be weighing his words. “Your hair is darker than I remember, and you’re taller. Of course, that makes sense, considering how long it’s been.”

I wanted to ask him why it had been so long since we saw each other, but he looked so pleased to see me; I didn’t want to ruin the moment. My parents had only been married a few years before my father moved out. For a while, I continued to see him every weekend, until he stopped visiting altogether. If I hadn’t stumbled across a phone number in my mom’s address book, marked only with the letter H, and sent a hastily typed “What’s up?” text after one-too-many tequila shots, we’d still be estranged.

“Your hair’s shorter,” I said. “It used to cover your ears. But it looks good now.”

He raked his fingers through the light-brown strands, his mouth quirking at the corners. “So do you.”

He nudged my arm, then waited to see if I’d nudge him back. If I did, it would mean he could touch me.

I nudged him. He pulled me into a side hug, gently squeezing my shoulder. I leaned into him, comforted by his sturdiness and the familiar, long-lost scent of his clothes.

We took a stroll through the American galleries, my father stealing glances at me when he thought I wasn’t looking. I stayed close, pulled by an invisible thread, lured by the thrill of simply being in his presence. We circled each other, like a dance, with him pausing now and then to point out something about composition or technique, or to shake the hand of yet another fan who recognized him as the Henry Monroe.

Four years ago, Art in America had dubbed him the modern-day Egon Schiele for his contour line drawings of sex workers with their children. But the work that had made him famous was a series of frankly intimate paintings titled The Family in Repose. A father, mother, and their twin sons. Cooking breakfast, clipping toenails, checking email, changing their socks.

He lived with the family for two years, quietly observing. Two years invested in a family that wasn’t his own.

The paintings were exhibited at top galleries around the world. There had been some controversy concerning a few of the pieces and whether they were truly drawn from life, specifically the pieces involving sex and masturbation. Critics accused him of exploiting the family and even fabricating them altogether.

I followed his career with the zeal of a fangirl lusting after her favorite boy-band member. But instead of headshots and posters on my walls, I had prints of Henry Monroe’s work. It wasn’t all about reverence and longing to reconnect, though that was part of it. I was an artist, too. I’d been accepted into New York University’s undergraduate painting program.

It was my acceptance into a top art program that emboldened me to reach out to him through his website’s contact page, managed by his agent who made me verify my identity before forwarding the email. I asked her if Henry’s fans often claimed to be his long-lost relatives, to which she said, “You’d be surprised.” After a few weeks of emailing back and forth, he invited me to spend the summer before college painting in his private studio, an opportunity of a lifetime for any would-be professional artist, but an even more monumental break for me.

It was a chance to reconnect with the man who had helped make me, a man whose talents and mystique had rooted themselves in me from the moment I was conceived.

But, most importantly, it was a chance to finally get answers to the questions that had haunted me since the day he disappeared from my life.