Chapter 2
When the Uber arrived outside of Samuel’s apartment, driven by a man with a crew cut, bored efficiency sunk into his features,
Vivi asked if he could take her to another address, instead of the home location she’d selected from the app.
Minutes later, they pulled up next to the Forster. Ivy fell over the sides of the building like the locks of a Pre-Raphaelite
muse. Swept, dove-gray steps led to a double set of doors. Off to the side, there was a neat placard announcing the building,
as if it were a historical site. The museum’s reserved exterior gave it an air of secrecy. Few people knew it was a museum
at first glance. One stumbled into the Forster with no expectations and emerged with a sense of having glimpsed a hidden world.
Vivi had been drawn to it from the start, with a fervor she found both surprising and heartening. When her emotions became
too much for her, she found her way back there. In her lab, fussing over objects that had withstood the onslaught of time,
she could convince herself that she was part of the vast river of human accomplishment. What were her problems, compared to
the varnish obscuring a Madonna’s smile or a nick in the limestone bust of an ancient Egyptian queen?
As Vivi got out of the car, she glimpsed a shadow on the step. For a moment, she saw her mother with her nervous gait, the
flopping bun at her nape. She quickened her pace. Twenty-seven years and she’d never stopped looking for May.
Then the shadow turned and it was Calla, standing in a red cardigan, her sleek bob cupping her jawline.
Each of her sister’s features came to Vivi in pieces, a beautiful yet disjointed assemblage that eventually whisked into the her-ness that Vivi could identify a mile off.
Amid her surprise, Vivi felt a deep softening inside of her, like the ease of sinking
into a broken-in chair. There you are, she thought.
“Finally,” Calla cried. She clutched a manila folder under her arm. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Why are you here?” Trepidation tightened Vivi’s question so it sounded like an accusation she didn’t intend. Calla’s brows
drew together. Vivi tried again, “I mean, how did you know I’d be here?”
Calla moved toward Vivi, not touching her, but looking as if she wanted to. “You’re always at the museum, if you’re not at
your apartment. A slave to the art. I’ve been here for hours, you know. Feel my fingers.”
They were whitened, puckered at the tips. Calla was gaunter than Vivi had ever seen her, even during the week in junior year
of college that she had strep and refused to consume anything other than broth. Her cheekbones were sculpted, eyes huge and
glittering, almost feline in their intensity. She wore an ivory slip dress under her cardigan. On her feet, ankle-high boots
without socks or tights.
Vivi rubbed Calla’s fingers in her own hands. “You look like an urchin.”
“You’re the only person in the twenty-first century who still uses the word ‘urchin’ as an insult.”
“Why are you dressed like that? It’s forty degrees out.”
“You’re getting soft. We used to snowshoe in our pajamas.”
“With parkas over them and thermals underneath.” Correcting one another’s memories had become a cherished pastime, their spiky
yet earnest way of saying: You were not alone. I was there too.
“Come on, let’s go inside. You’ll freeze in that weird getup.”
Vivi unlocked the door with her key card, knowing that she shouldn’t allow Calla inside the Forster after hours.
But who would know? Ewan, the lone security guard, wouldn’t care.
And it’d been nearly a year since the sisters had talked about anything meaningful.
Since last September, the night of Calla’s disastrous solo art opening, Enmeshment.
They’d seen each other in June, at their father’s funeral, but Vivi didn’t count that as conversation. She feared Calla
would slip through her fingers again if she didn’t hold fast.
Inside, the Forster was a mausoleum. Spectral shadows danced on the walls, profiles of forgotten heroes gazed with apathy
from plinths of stone. The marble halls echoed and shone from the cleaners’ painstaking efforts.
“Is that a Sanyu?” Calla gasped. She rushed into a gallery, pushing so close to the painting that her nose nearly touched
its surface.
Calla was a profoundly talented artist, one who excelled in whatever medium she attempted. Collage, painting, charcoals. She’d
been the star of her program at Rathmore College, before she dropped out to marry Wayland Howard, their Deer Creek neighbor
and Vivi’s former best friend. Since she became a Howard, she’d never had to work again. Wayland’s trust fund, along with
his innumerable successes as a filmmaker, made the question of money immaterial. The newlyweds traveled the world at breakneck
speed, yet no matter how much distance she crossed, Calla would find a way to pause for the art.
Vivi pulled her back. “Stop that. It’s on loan from China. We bartered Abel’s first grandchild for it.”
“How much?”
“Thirty.”
Calla whistled. “A step up from those drawings we used to sell in grade school. Remember those? Your unicorns looked like
limping dogs that should’ve been put out of their misery. But you were good with portraits.”
“Not as good as you.”
“No,” Calla agreed. “No one was. Can we find someplace to sit? I need to show you something.”
“Now?”
“It’s important.”
“Fine, keep up.” Vivi walked them to her lab, continuing all the while, “Where have you been? You stopped answering my texts and calls.”
After Enmeshment, the only way Vivi could make sure Calla was still alive was through Wayland. He’d wryly pointed Vivi toward the mounting credit
card bills as proof of life. She’s fine, V, see? Just doing her Calla thing. Why he continued paying the bills was another question altogether. But guilt makes people do peculiar things.
“I threw my phone in Lake Michigan.” Catching Vivi’s incredulous look, Calla waved her hand. “It’s fine. Some people get divorce
haircuts. I decided to unshackle myself from modern life.”
“It’s final then? The divorce?”
“Hallelujah, your girl’s free again.”
A bubble of sadness sat in Vivi’s throat, but she swallowed it. What right did she have to comment on their marriage? She
thought of the last time she saw Wayland, also a year ago, after Enmeshment. How his jaw had twitched, pulling at the serpent tattoo running up the side of his neck.
In the lab, the sisters sat at a long wooden table. Vivi studied Calla under the lights. Same slash of crimson lipstick. No
flush, no palpitations. She did fidget more than usual, stroking a strand of her hair, drumming her elbow as she studied the
works in progress lining the walls. But wasn’t Calla always a bit frenetic? That was the problem with someone as dynamic as
her; even the most finely tuned memories could never capture the shifting hues of reality.
Vivi sniffed past the citrus perfume, trying to detect the rotting decadence of pinot noir or, worse yet, the sulfuric burn
of Calla’s preferred uppers. Loving an addict meant that their vices would eventually become your permanent bedfellows. You
brushed against them everywhere.
Calla scowled at Vivi’s obvious scrutiny. “Can you not?”
With effort, she shelved her concern. “I’m sorry. You’re sure nothing is wrong? You’re okay?”
“Better than okay.” Calla took Vivi’s hand and slid off the silver antler ring, placing it onto her own finger. “It’s my turn
to wear the ring. You’ve hung onto it for too long.”
Over the decades, May’s ring had migrated from sororal hand to sororal hand, sometimes lifted under protest, sometimes given up in important moments, such as the day of Calla’s wedding, when her nerves made her want to leap out the window and only Vivi’s soothing assurances—and the familiar press of the antler ring—could keep her in place.
Now Vivi felt the bareness of her finger but admitted that Calla was right. It was her time.
“Don’t lose it,” Vivi said.
Calla scoffed. “I’m not the one who mislaid her sister’s favorite pair of cowboy boots at a frat party. Who loses their shoes in the middle of a party anyway?”
“They were— Never mind. What did you want to show me?”
Calla pulled out the manila folder and set two items down. Each was protected in a plastic pocket. One was a small, eight-by-ten
sketch on fine cotton paper. The other, a letter creased neatly into eighths.
Vivi examined the sketch first. The subject was a pair of women, staring from the surface of a mirror. A thin fissure of charcoal
separated them. The strange part was that the faces were blank, as if the artist had paused amid the work, but even without
those details, Vivi recognized the composition immediately. The sketch-in-progress was a replica of Vietnamese French Surrealist
painter K. P. Ly’s Blue Mirror, a painting due to arrive at the Forster the very next day. The coincidence made Vivi quaver with inner prescience.
Blue Mirror was the first and only work of portraiture by Ly, named by historians for the tactile streaks of blue dominating the painting. The blues were broken by an ominous trail of
red dividing the women’s faces. Scholars guessed that Blue Mirror was painted sometime in the 1930s, before Ly’s final disappearance in 1943, making it one of his last—and most inscrutable—works.
Ly’s diminutive oil-on-canvas had been recently bequeathed to the Forster’s permanent collection by the late granddame of Chicago arts, Maxine Ph?m.
To commemorate the acquisition, Samuel built an exhibition of Asian expatriate art around Blue Mirror.
He called it Sea to Earth, a typically evocative name.
The exhibition would be opening in three weeks, hopefully to laurels and glowing reviews.
But because of a labyrinthine series of legal obstacles, Blue Mirror wasn’t due to arrive on the premises until the following day. No one at the Forster, except Samuel, had seen it in person.
Every other assigned work in Sea to Earth sat in Gallery C, duly flashing their best behind the cordoned ropes and plastic sheeting, but at the center of it all, there
was a waiting space, into which Blue Mirror would slide.
Vivi snatched up the sketch. “You did this?”
“No. I found it in Dad’s shed. I recognized the reference because of the Trib article.”
The local papers had posted small pieces about the Forster’s newest acquisition, mostly due to the PR from Samuel’s upcoming
exhibition. But Vivi didn’t understand how their father could have known about Blue Mirror or Sea to Earth. He’d been far away, in Wisconsin. And he’d never mentioned art in any significant way. Certainly never K. P. Ly.
She brought the sketch close. The linework was confident and sophisticated, not the work of an amateur. By now, she’d honed
a sense of presage when it came to art; after years of study, her body could intuit when a piece was worthy of extra attention.
Anticipation began to rise in her, but she tamped it down again.
“So why did Dad have the sketch? Did he draw it?”
“Of course not,” Calla said. “He’s no artist. But it’s something, right? As soon as I saw it, I knew you’d be interested.”
Vivi didn’t dare take the sketch out of the plastic sheeting, but she longed to examine it under her loupe. “I don’t understand.
It’s Blue Mirror exactly, line for line. All except for the faces. Why did the artist leave those off?”
“How should I know? Where is it, anyway? The painting.” Calla glanced around, as if Vivi was keeping Blue Mirror under one of the canvas drapes.
“It’s being reframed. Maxine liked a Baroque treatment. Samuel thought the painting might be best displayed with a simpler
frame.”
Calla’s face shuttered at the mention of Samuel’s name. They’d met once at a rooftop restaurant Vivi carefully selected for
the occasion. Calla and Wayland were inexcusably late, arriving from a film screening across town, already sloshed and belligerent.
Samuel had tried to be pleasant, but his inner metronome had been set off-rhythm by the delay. He came across as stilted and
bland. Vivi had been pained to see her sister’s eyes glaze over when he spoke. Wayland, smirking when Samuel set his card
down for the check.
Then, toward the end of the night, Calla and Wayland erupted in an explosive argument over one of Wayland’s assistant filmmakers,
a pretty, young Columbia graduate, and the two of them left in a clatter of upturned tableware and stained linens. Samuel
quietly put everything back to order. It’s okay, V. We’ll try again another time. But Vivi didn’t have the heart to attempt another meeting.
Now she reached into her pocket and jangled the chatelaine, that placeholder for possibility. Vivi wouldn’t tell Calla about
Samuel’s offer. She couldn’t bear for Samuel’s gesture to be tainted by her sister’s scorn, abrasive enough to scour any fledgling
hope that’d begun to emerge.
“Can you get to it?” Calla asked suddenly. “Blue Mirror?”
Calla’s words spun circles of misgiving around Vivi. Her sister’s desires had layers: What she wanted, then why she wanted
it, and what that want could cost.
“Why do you want the painting?”
“Read the letter.”
Vivi lifted it from the plastic. The paper was thin, as transparent as onion skin. Its edges were tea-stained. The letter
was unsigned and written in Vietnamese, in a hand she didn’t recognize. After the final sentence, there was an ornate sketch
of a sundial. Vivi had never seen anything like it before. It was spiky and artful with minute, decorative notches between
each numeral. Not a utilitarian sundial, then, but an ornamental one.