Chapter 4
It didn’t take nearly as long as she thought it would. First came the dusting, the swabbing of grime, rolling cotton over
pockets of accumulated dirt. Then she removed the yellowed varnish with a bespoke mixture of solvents, halting the process
through a precise application of neutralizer. This was a delicate moment: too much solvent and the paint might warp and swell;
too little, and the cleaning must be repeated, time wasted.
But her expert body took over, as it always did, and she was rewarded for her efforts. Already, the painting was brighter
and more luminous, as if lit from within.
She knew from the scant record of provenance that Blue Mirror originated from a German collector who later sold the painting to an automotive heiress, who then auctioned it off at Christie’s
to Maxine Ph?m in the 1990s. All previous owners were now deceased. Maxine had kept the painting in temperature-controlled
storage, so its condition was better than that of most that came into Vivi’s lab. But even the efforts of the most conscientious
art collector could never quite stall time’s unsympathetic progress.
Her phone buzzed with messages, but she didn’t stop to check them. Blue Mirror was coming back to life under her hand.
She thought of the resurrective quality of her work.
Each moment of revival had been deliberately chosen by the conservators and artists who came before.
Conservation was the collaborative result of a series of minute decisions—what was a permissible level of degradation?
Should one treat for natural resin or polymers?
Was gel suspension an appropriate tool? In the end, one must walk the tightrope between restoration and revision.
There were horror stories of iconic works mutilated by the brush of an overeager and unskilled retoucher. So much art lost
to time, but even more lost to individual hubris.
Hours later, after she completed the preliminary work, Vivi turned to the most time-consuming and critical part of her task,
the lifting of the dense paint over the women’s faces and hair. Gradually, she decreased the dilution of the solvents until
the flat layers of pigment began to release their cling from the canvas fibers. There was a moment of doubt. What if she was
overstripping the paint? What if the only thing she’d find was more blankness? With the Hebbar, she’d known enough to stop
before she destroyed the painting. But here—she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to exercise her usual caution. Sweat pooled
on the inner rim of her eyewear.
Suddenly, she saw a shaving of black emerging from the field of blue. There was something there. She dropped her swab. She’d hoped, but had she really believed? But here it was: evidence, justification.
There’d be no backtracking now.
By nightfall, the painting had been restored. Vivi stood back and met the eyes of a pair of strangers that had hidden beneath
the surface of the painting for nearly a century.
The subjects of Blue Mirror were not twins, as the overpainted version had declared, but two distinct women. The one on the right was white, with curls
of lapis lazuli cascading over a narrow face. Her features were fine: thickly lashed eyes and bow-shaped lips. She wasn’t
exactly beautiful, yet her playful expression had been rendered with loving attention.
It was the woman on the left who drew Vivi’s gaze.
This one was sterner in appearance, with closely cropped hair and winged brows that furrowed ever so slightly.
There was a freckle under her eye, crowing like the brightest star of a constellation.
She was Asian—Vietnamese, from the look of it, with her broad mouth, a rounding of her nostrils, a distinctive shape of the monolidded eyes.
Vivi touched her own cheek, where her own freckle sat.
She felt as if she’d entered some glitch of reality.
She studied the signature on the painting. It matched every other Ly. From what she could tell of the materials, Blue Mirror was authentic. So why, she wondered, had Ly chosen to paint over the women in the end? What was it he needed to bury?
She took high-resolution photos of the restored painting from all angles, both from a distance, and up close, so the women’s
faces filled the frame. For a moment, she thought of taking Blue Mirror with her. She weighed it in her hands. It would fit neatly under her coat. Who could stop her?
But in the end, she set the painting back on the easel. In another draft of reality, she could have been an art thief, but
not this one. Now that the restoration was done, irreversible, she was awash in shame, as if she’d broken some silent oath
to herself—and to Samuel.
She texted a photo of the painting to him, along with one word, the only one she could give him.
But what was she apologizing for? Stripping the painting? Missing Phoebe’s recital? It was all the same. She was sorry she
couldn’t be a partner that Samuel could count on, sorry that she had to chase this mystery, no matter the cost. And she was
in it now. The letter, the sketch, this painting. Too much coincidence for dismissal. Too much intrigue to ignore.
More than the draw of the mystery, though, Vivi was afraid Calla would fumble and flop if left on her own, driven to confusion
or distracted by some unnamed temptation. This offering, whatever it was, was the sort of thing that disrupted lives. It was
the sort of discovery that might lead an addict down a wrong path.
Vivi could still recall Calla’s dead weight in her arms as she dragged her from a bar, wrestling keys from her grasp.
The sobbing phone calls, the reek of excess that permeated her dreams. How Calla had once almost hurtled into speeding traffic, had Vivi not been there to pull her back.
It didn’t matter that these moments were in the past. The threat of them would never leave Vivi.
She was the protector. That role, thrust upon her at an age when she could not offer consent, had demanded everything of her.
This new round of sacrifice—her job, her love, the life she knew—was the price to pay. And God knows, Vivi owed her sister.
Vivi placed the chatelaine that Sam had given her in the drawer below the easel. He’d want it, and his key, back now.
With one last, regretful glance, Vivi left the lab and the painting behind, feeling as if perhaps it was her last time seeing
either. Each step away from the Forster now held a drum of finality. If she chose to walk away from the consequences of her
actions tonight, then she would not be welcomed back. There might be legal ramifications. There would almost certainly be
a loss of her position, an abrupt plummeting of her prospects.
And yet she did not stop walking. Once she got to the end of the street, her gait quickened, and she ran toward the only place
she wanted to be and the only person who would understand her reasons for running. The wind coaxed her on, tunnelling a purposeful
passageway into the night.
“What took you so long?” Calla leaned her head against the doorjamb, yawning. A sleep mask was pushed up into her hair.
“I thought you would have left for Rathmore already.” Vivi kicked off her shoes at the entryway, as she did every time, hurling
her loafers into the pile of Calla’s colorful slingbacks. When Wayland had lived there, he’d insisted on a shoe rack, but
his civilizing influence was long gone. The Pilsen apartment resembled a rodent’s den now, all heaped textures and remnants
of life, but Calla seemed impervious to the disorder.
“I wasn’t going to go without you, stupid.”
“You literally said: with or without you.”
Calla shrugged. “Figure of speech. Want some wine?”
“You’re drinking again?”
“A glass here and there.” An edge of defensiveness crept into her voice. “I have tea too. Let me get a kettle on.”
The loft smelled like stale takeout and linseed oil. It was a strange thing to stand in Calla and Wayland’s home without the
rush of activity. Usually, there was a dissolute artist lounging on the daybed, or an agitated cook flinging vegetable peelings
in the kitchen. One time, a potbellied pig greeted Vivi at the door, its wet little snout covered in what looked to be frosting
or titanium white paint. Its owner, a recently divorced gallerist, stayed at the loft for nearly a month before she and the
pig left for “the unriven West” with great and unexplained urgency. Calla and Wayland liked to surround themselves with people,
all sorts of people, like a thermal layer that might protect them from the elements. Or from themselves.
As Calla thumped around in the galley kitchen, Vivi took in their mid-century modern furniture, the brick walls, and the set
of three tall windows through which she could see the lights of the rooftop bars.
Traces of Wayland were still there: a photograph he’d taken on a gallery wall, a mug with his filmmaker’s union logo on the
windowsill. Vivi picked up the mug, imagining his hands wrapped around it as he swigged his coffee, editing footage late into
the night. When she’d first met him as a teenager, they’d talked about how they’d someday escape Deer Creek, move to New York,
become the darlings of the art scene. Back then, he was tall and gawky, often too brash in his ambition. But she believed
that he would arrive wherever he wanted: fame, fortune, all of it. And now, he was an award-winning documentarian, an affluent
and admired man of the world. Too big to ever return home. But Vivi would still see him as the fourteen-year-old boy slouched
against the rotted post of the farmhouse, whistling up for her at dawn.
Aside from brief texts, Vivi hadn’t spoken to Wayland since the night of Calla’s gallery opening. He’d left messages, sometimes
with apologies, sometimes with recrimination, always with need. She felt a barb in her gut every time she deleted his messages.
It hurt her to hurt him.