Epilogue
Three months later...
“This is bullshit!”
My painting teacher, Professor Jimenez, traced a circle over her temple. “Please calm yourself, Stefan, or I’m going to have to insist that you leave us.”
“Fuck this critique.” Stefan pointed an accusatory finger in the face of the guy seated next to him. “My painting isn’t derivative. Your ugly face is derivative. And the rest of you are all a bunch of mindless hack drones who wouldn’t know real art if it took a dump on your chests.”
Stefan grabbed his painting from the easel and hurled it across the room. A few people gasped, others laughed. I rolled my eyes. He wiped his shoes on his “real art” and stormed out of the studio.
“There’s one every semester.” Professor Jimenez shook her head and then gestured to the next painting, a grayscale portrait of a sleeping couple entwined on a bed. “And now, what do we think of Paige’s piece?”
The seconds piled like sand at the bottom of an hourglass. I gripped my elbows, wishing my stool had a back panel I could lean against. I had lost track of the number of times I’d started, stopped, and scrapped the painting, much to my roommate and her boyfriend’s exasperation. They’d been good sports about it, willing to strip down and cuddle up whenever I needed a visual reference, their enthusiasm waxing and waning in direct correlation to my offers of free burritos.
“It’s intimate,” said a girl with magenta hair, “and yet, there’s resistance, too. You can see the desperation on their faces, like they’re trying to hold onto each other.”
“The way she plays with light and shadow is really effective,” said a wiry guy whose name I could never remember. “It makes the bedding and the people’s skin look three-dimensional.”
“Does anyone recall the term for that?” Professor Jimenez scanned the group. No takers. ”Chiaroscuro. Modeling in light and dark to make objects appear solid.”
“I think she could’ve done more with the background,” said the first girl. “The walls are totally bare. It feels unfinished.”
“But I think that’s the point,” said a student with thick-rimmed glasses. “It keeps our focus on the couple.”
Professor Jimenez moved on to the next piece, and I let my shoulders relax. I studied my painting a moment longer, noting the tweaks I would’ve made if only I’d had more time.
Let it go, Professor Jimenez would say, and she’d be right. The critique was over. There was nothing else for me to do.
We finished class with minimal tears shed, after which, Professor Jimenez wished us all a good weekend and cut us loose. “Paige,” she called just as I was leaving. “May I speak with you for a moment?”
Hopefully this wouldn’t take long. I joined Professor Jimenez in front of my painting and tried not to make it obvious that I was itching to go.
“This is a beautiful piece,” she said. “I know I told you at the start of the semester that I wasn’t going to go easy on you just because your father is Henry Monroe. But I’m pleased to say, you’ve impressed me all on your own.”
I smiled. “Thank you, Professor.”
“Your father has an opening in the East Village tonight, doesn’t he?”
I nodded. The longer we stood chatting, the less time I had to get ready for the show.
“Maybe I’ll see you there,” she said.
A little trill of anxiety skittered up my spine. I had no idea what to expect from my father’s show tonight. He’d insisted on keeping this collection a surprise. For all I knew, he was planning to debut the watercolor close-up of my vagina he’d painted last fall.
That would be awkward.
I hustled back to my dorm. As much as I preferred staying in my father’s apartment, I had to admit, it was nice having a place to crash on campus before early-morning classes. He and I had even managed to christen the twin bed one evening when my roommate was out. We fucked on our sides with my back to his front and his hand over my mouth to muffle the moans.
It didn’t matter how many times my father fucked me; his love had a way of making me feel brand new.
With my hair straightened and my lips stained candy-apple red, I squeezed into a white lace dress and red heels and then headed out.
The gallery, a hip, modern space with walls that didn’t quite reach the vaulted ceilings, was already teeming with people when I arrived. I recognized most of the pieces from my father’s collection, still life paintings of antique children’s toys and sketches of my body—throat, earlobe, the arch of my foot. Lines clean and crisp, yet impossible to distinguish unless you knew my body as well as he did.
I said hello to our artist friends, then went to stand with his agent, Michelle, and her husband, whose hand lingered at the small of my back a little longer than was necessary.
“You must be really pleased with how it all turned out,” he said.
I nodded. “I was with him when he bought all those old toys.”
“Wait,” said Michelle, “have you seen the main exhibit?”
“There’s another exhibit?” I asked.
Michelle smiled warmly and captured my arm. “Come with me.”
She steered me through the crowd, toward a wide archway leading to an interior space I hadn’t realized was there.
“This has to be some of his finest and most personal work yet,” Michelle said.
I steeled myself for the reveal.
We waited for the mob to dissipate, then stepped inside. The walls were covered in drawings of children.
No, not children. One child. Me.
My heart expanded to fit my ribcage. They were the drawings from my father’s sketchbooks—the ones my mother had returned—blown up, sharpened, splashed with color and arranged with care.
“They’re remarkable,” said Michelle, squeezing my hand. “You can really feel how much he loves you.”
I nodded, unable to speak.
Suspended from the ceiling were three full-length pieces that had been mapped out and elaborated to make them appear three-dimensional. At the center of the room lay another 3D rendering of a very small, sleeping me curled around a stuffed rabbit that was almost as big as I was.
My eyes stung with tears. My father had given me that rabbit. I was pretty sure my mom still had it somewhere, packed alongside other keepsakes from my childhood.
“Where’s my dad now?” I dabbed my eyes with the napkin Michelle handed me.
“Upstairs being interviewed by a journalist from The Times. I’ll let him know you’re here as soon as they’re finished.”
“Thank you.”
She squeezed my hand again, then left me to take in the exhibit on my own. I circled the room slowly, floored by how my father had succeeded in taking something my mother had deemed criminal, and turning it into the most beautiful display of filial tenderness I’d ever seen.
I stopped in my tracks when I noticed Maddox standing off to the side, watching me. So much of his previous allure had dissipated now that his role in my parents’ life was no longer a mystery. He hailed a server and picked up two glasses of wine, then strode over to me.
“Here she is,” he said. “The muse.”
I made him stand there with his arm extended long enough to let the moment turn awkward, then accepted the glass of red. That’s one thing I appreciated about these events: no one ever asked to see my ID.
“I’m surprised you were invited,” I said.
“The owner’s a friend.”
“You seem to have a lot of those.” I wondered how many of them knew the real Maddox, the wolf behind the suave veneer. “Does my dad know you’re here?”
“He’s been keeping his distance.” Maddox made a show of scanning the room, then leaned in close as if he intended to tell me a secret. “I suspect he still needs a little more time to cool off.”
“Try a lot more time,” I said. “Or forever.”
He sipped his wine. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that your mother was a champion grudge-holder. But Henry? Not so much.” Maddox’s expression turned solemn; it was an odd look for him. “Paige, I want to apologize to you for overstepping my bounds last summer. I never thought I’d get a chance to meet you. When you turned out to be lovelier than I could’ve envisioned, I let myself get carried away. I hope this doesn’t mean you and I can’t be friends someday.”
“It’s going to take more than a glass of wine and an apology to make us anything resembling friends.”
“I’m aware of that,” he said. “But, once upon a time, your folks meant a lot to me. We were a family. As much as we drive each other crazy, we’ll always be family.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it when I remembered that Maddox was in fact related to me in a roundabout way. He was my half-brother’s biological father. If my young parents had been in a position to keep the child, that boy would have been raised as my brother.
“By the way,” he said. “You may be pleased to hear that I convinced a judge to unseal my son’s adoption records.”
That caught my attention. “What, how?”
“Judges make good friends, too.” He pulled a business card from his coat pocket and offered it to me. I took it with trembling fingers. Printed on the front was Maddox’s own information. On the back, written in black ink, was a name, phone number, and email address.
“Have you contacted him?” I asked.
“Not yet. To be honest, I think I’m a little scared to. But it’s nice to know the option exists.”
I reread the stranger’s information, engraving the words onto my memory. I went to hand the card back, but Maddox wouldn’t take it.
“That’s for you, sweetheart. You don’t have to open that door if you’d rather it stayed shut, but I thought you should have it just in case.”
I wrapped my fingers around the piece of cardboard.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” He smirked. I began to wonder if Maddox was even capable of wearing a smile that didn’t double as a threat. “I suppose I’ll take my leave before your daddy decides to break my nose and ruin some more of my Armani.”
Maddox raised his glass to someone behind me and then stepped away. I turned to find my father making his way over to me. My preferred style for him would always be scruffy and paint-splattered, but damn, the man could rock a three-piece suit. He pulled me into a hug that prompted someone close to us to whisper about how precious we looked.
“Sorry, I was upstairs when you got here. I really wanted to be there when you saw the exhibit.”
“That’s okay.” I hugged him tighter. “It’s incredible.”
“Was Maddox bothering you?” He drew back to look at me, his gaze narrow.
“No more than usual. But this time he came bearing gifts.”
I showed him the business card.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“My half-brother’s contact information.”
He turned the card over and swiped his thumb across the man’s name. A sweet sadness watered his eyes enough to make them glint as he handed the card back to me. “What do you think you’ll do with it?”
“I don’t know. Probably just hold on to it for now.” I tucked the card into the front of my dress, next to my heart. That felt like the right place for it.
My father pulled me into a side hug and kept his arm around me as we circled the room. We lingered beside the three-dimensional rendering of me as a very young child. I leaned my head on his shoulder.
“I can’t believe Mom thought these were anything less than beautiful,” I said.
“She saw what she was hardened to see.” He kissed my temple. “You know, I invited your mother to tonight’s show.”
I balked. “You’re kidding.”
“She told me to go fuck myself. I’d say that’s progress, considering she wasn’t even speaking to me a month ago.”
I hadn’t seen or spoken to my mother since the night she’d shown up at his apartment. “Why would you want her here? She’d hate all of this almost as much as you hate each other.”
“I could never hate your mother.”
“Why not? She gave you plenty of reasons to.”
He stroked my arm. “Because she also gave me the greatest gift I could ever ask for. No matter how angry I get when I think about all the years of your life I missed, I’ll always be thankful for that.”
I gazed down at the miniature me on the floor. Round and sleepy and oblivious to all the pain and confusion that would inevitably follow. If my father could forgive my mother for driving him away from this child, maybe I could find it in me to forgive her, too. Because none of this, what we had now, would’ve been possible without my mother’s intervention.
She would never understand us. Most people wouldn’t. Our love wasn’t clear and crisp like a photograph. It was messy and abstract. It belonged on a canvas.
“Henry!” Michelle weaved her way through the throng, trailed by a short, bald man whom she introduced as a writer for ARTnews magazine. My father shook the man’s hand and presented me as his daughter, the inspiration for tonight’s exhibit, and a talented artist in her own right.
“I’d love to see some of your pieces,” the journalist said to me. “I’ve been following your father’s career for some time. I have to say, Henry, I think this might be your best work yet.”
My father thanked him and graciously answered all his questions. The journalist smiled like a little boy gazing up at his hero. As soon as he’d wandered off, my dad leaned in conspiratorially and said, “Don’t tell that guy, but he’s wrong.”
“About what?” I asked.
He kissed the shell of my ear and whispered, “The greatest thing I ever made was you.”
* * *