Chapter 11
In her sleep, Vivi heard the door open. The sound was so faint that she could convince herself it came from another hotel
room. The sisters had taken to locking all the windows and doors as a cautionary measure against Vivi’s sleepwalking. No one
would come in or out. It’d given her a cocoon-like sensation that recalled the evenings inside their childhood bedroom. Toads
croaking, wind agitating, the soft ruckus of Calla flopping on the sheets. What Vivi felt, then and now, wasn’t exactly safety,
never safety, but some sense of fortitude. If Calla were nearby, dreaming her nonsense little-kid dreams, Vivi could relax
her guard. But that night in Arles, in the depths of sleep, she tensed. The air in the room had changed, emptied somehow.
By the time she jolted awake, Calla was already gone. Vivi fumbled to pull on a pair of boots. She tucked her phone into her
back pocket and made her way downstairs, awash in the contrarian thrill of alertness when the rest of the world was asleep.
At this hour of the night, the hotel was almost silent. The concierge stand empty. She could hear cooks in the kitchen dredging
their knives through sinks brimming with dishwater. The painters and dancers had taken to their Egyptian cotton sheets, sated
on boar pasta that wound in butterscotch knolls on spotless plates.
From the glimpse of the estate they’d gotten on the drive in, Vivi knew roughly where to find the servants’ cottage.
She set out in that direction, using her phone’s flashlight to guide her.
In the dark, she stepped onto the tines of a rake, like some slapstick cartoon character.
She ignored the pain, then took a breath as she scaled the low fence separating the properties.
For a moment, she hung awkwardly between the two places.
When her feet landed, she half expected a siren to blare or a dog to begin barking, but there was only the distant burble of a pond.
“Calla,” she hissed. “Butt-on.”
Nothing but the dim rustle of the night.
The cottage was no larger than a one-room schoolhouse; certainly no larger than Vivi’s apartment. For whatever reason, she
thought of Tu?n’s shed. Tight little places that could hold entire worlds. Sites that drew her, even if she resisted them.
On the exterior, uneven sandstone toothed together into a dubious facade. There was an arched door with heavy metal hinges,
open a few inches. Once, bushes had flowered on either side of the cottage, but now they had shriveled into thorny corpses.
She called for her sister again.
“In here!” Calla’s muffled voice came from the cottage.
When Vivi placed her foot on the steps to the front door, a sense of vertigo overtook her.
Her vision blurred and she saw—or hallucinated, or dreamed—a slight figure in black, reaching for the handle with his long
fingers. Buds of lavender clinging to his trouser hem and sweat beading at the nape of his neck.
She followed him inside the cottage. Watched as his gaze swept the narrow bed made up neatly under an open window, the cast
iron tea kettle squatting on the stovetop, the crates full of his art supplies, bearing stamps from Paris, a place that felt
as far away as Viet Nam at that moment. The cottage was small, so small, but it was everything. He thanked whatever gods he still prayed to for
the mercy of a corner where he could be nobody at all. Acedia, his native state, might finally loosen its hold.
“Ly,” Vivi said. She wasn’t in the cottage, but above him, or beyond him, in the brace of wind that dragged against his sunburnt
cheeks.
He turned, surprised, toward the sound of her voice. “It’s you.”
She wanted to take his shoulders and shake the secrets from him. Or maybe she wanted to lay herself at his feet, to ask for—what, forgiveness? Wisdom? Her impulses did not seem to come from her, but from another force, one more urgent and knowing than any she could summon.
Then it was gone, the vision, and Vivi returned with a thud of reality to the interior of the servants’ cottage.
Calla was stooped next to a bed, swooping a flashlight under it. “What did you say?”
Vivi blinked hard. “Nothing. Where’d you get the flashlight?”
“Stole it from Jean’s desk. She won’t miss it.”
“You promised you’d wait.”
“I did not,” Calla said indignantly. “You said we should wait. I took a bite of crème br?lée.”
“What if the owner comes around? Have you thought of that?”
“Look at this place, would you? No one’s been here in decades.”
Stained floors, peeling paint. A dented spade against the corner. A length of ivy curled in through the broken panes and lifted
itself into a shrug. On a windowsill, an ashtray had sprouted a shrub of cigarette butts. That was the only sign that humans
had passed through this space.
“What if—”
“Tick-tock, sis.”
Vivi gave in. She was just as curious as Calla. She rotated her phone around the room, following its faint nimbus to investigate.
The cabinets were empty of everything except an occasional mouse dropping, hardened by time. The drawers held a confusing
array of silverware, instruction manuals, dirty francs, ink-dry pens. She placed her hands on the walls, as if she could hear
their silent histories, but nothing came back to her except cool stucco.
“I wish we knew what we were looking for,” Vivi said.
“What’d you expect, some neon arrow pointing to a broken floorboard?”
“Shh. Keep your voice down.”
“It’s not here, whatever it is. We’ve combed every inch.”
“Did you search for the bench? It might be around here somewhere.”
“Right. I knew I kept you around for a reason.”
They let themselves out the back door. Clouds moved over the moon, so that all they saw was a hunched shadow near the southwestern edge of the property, just before it fell into a sloped dell that cradled rocks and rainwater. They raced toward it, footsteps tamping the overgrown weeds in rhythm.
A herd of sisters, Vivi thought to herself.
Layers of grime and weather had rendered the carving on the bench illegible, but Calla dug a stick into the grooves and scraped
away what she could.
“‘Après tout ce temps,’” she read aloud. She touched the carving of the sun. “This is it.”
Perhaps over the years, lovers had stolen to this bench to offer their tremulous confessions and proposals, then gone away
thinking about the quaint hiding spot that no one knew about but them. But Ly had known, Vivi was sure of it.
They examined the bench all over, sagging in disappointment over what they couldn’t find. No messages, no trap doors. Of course
there wouldn’t be anything. Eighty years had passed. Whatever the artist had hidden would have undoubtedly been unrooted or
destroyed before then.
They sat in silence. Calla bit at a corner of her thumb. A storm was brewing in her expression; irate winds crossing her delicate
features.
“Now what?” she demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“You always know.”
“But I don’t, not this time.”
“We came all this way. What if there’s nothing here? We just give up?” Panic squeezed around Calla’s words, pitching her voice
an octave higher than usual.
“Hold on, I’m thinking.”
And she was, but not just about the offering. Vivi was thinking about the ghostly presence she’d felt in the cottage. The
way this place seemed to call for her. Her inner knowing was buzzing at her. Telling her to pay attention. But to what?
Calla was kicking at the dirt with her gladiator sandal, silly bits of leather tied around her foot.
She kept nudging at the ground with the toe of her shoe, swirling it like a drill, boring a quarter-sized hole.
With a painful clutch, Vivi recalled Samuel writing about Phoebe burying gems around their Hyde Park brownstone, like a one-person treasure hunt.
To the email, he’d attached Phoebe’s drawing of two figural blobs, Vivi and Dr. Dirt respectively, both clutching shovels.
Bright gems, rendered in saturated markers, fell around them like technicolor rain.
Dirt. Hidden treasure. Buried under the endless sun.
Suddenly, Vivi shot up.
“What is it?” Calla asked.
“Stay here. I know what to do.”
She went into the cottage and retrieved the rusted spade. Back at the bench, she pressed the metal tip into the ground and
began to dig.
“You think it’s here?” Calla asked. She knelt next to Vivi, shining the flashlight into the hole. Her pout was giving way
to a nascent fascination.
“Probably not. But we should check.”
Her digging yielded nothing but more dirt. Vivi’s shoulders began to hurt. She thought of how it would only take a few minutes
to find her way back to her soft bed, to allow the fingers of sleep to draw her close. It was a stupid idea, this rambling
excavation.
Miffed at herself, she began to stand, but as she did, the cloud cover shifted, and she saw a glint of something in the hole.
Just a small flick of silver, but enough to revive her curiosity. Calla knelt closer with the flashlight.
“You see it?” she asked, grasping Vivi’s forearm so hard she left half-moon prints.
“I see it. We should keep going.”
“Let me take a turn.”
Calla took the shovel from Vivi. She began to dig again.
Minutes later, the spade hit metal with a triumphant clang.
Together, the sisters pried the rectangular object from the dirt and pulled it up onto the bench.
It was a box, rusted at the edges, but otherwise smooth and undisturbed.
There was no lock, only a latch that gave easily when Calla flicked at it.
Vivi’s fingers trembled as she lifted the lid.
Tightly wedged inside was a thick, leather-bound book with uneven pages, scribbled over and half torn, as if the author couldn’t
decide what to keep and what to discard. The first page revealed words written in French. It was dated May of 1943, the year
of K. P. Ly’s disappearance. She recognized the handwriting immediately.
There are many places where I could begin.
It was a journal. His journal.
Vivi bit her lip so hard she tasted the rush of iron in her mouth. There was a creeping sense that the trees were closing
in; branches clattering, roots lifting, eyelids of bark scraping slowly open. The world unseen turning its gaze on them, the
interlopers.
She bent over the pages, mouthing the words to herself.
Even now, decades later, I see the sheen of a rushing river—
“Well? What does it say?” Calla cried. She pulled the journal closer to her.
“Be gentle!” The binding was falling apart, spine caked in grime. Vivi longed to be back in her lab, where she could slide
the pages under glass and examine the ink, the fibers. Samuel would have been the first person she called. You’ll never believe what I found. And he’d have come running, dropping whatever he was doing, because that’s what Sam did for her, for everyone he loved—
“Is it from Ly? You know I can’t read French.”
“Yes. Probably. Let me think, Button!”
“Alors!” The shout, gruff and unyielding, came from a short distance beyond them.
The sisters stilled. They heard the tromping of boots on grass.
A grunt of exertion. Something heavy dragged on the ground, thumping as it hit against stones.
Vivi flashed to another time in Deer Creek, where the scraping of their father’s boots would announce his arrival, fear darting into the farmhouse like a skittish animal.
“Qui est-ce?” The voice came nearer, now rich in threat.
Vivi and Calla stood quickly, the journal tucked under Vivi’s arm, Calla’s flashlight pointed toward their shoes. They backed
away from the bench, trying to fade into the shadows. Vivi’s foot caught on the edge of the metal box, and it made a loud,
clanging noise. The dragging sound stopped.
“Fuck,” she breathed.
Then there was a pop in the air. A rifle fired through the night, a warning shot that scattered the creatures who hid in the
trees with them. At that moment, Calla dropped the flashlight and everything became dark. The sisters ran.
Near the front of the servants’ cottage, Calla’s ankle snagged one of the fence posts. She fell to her knees, chin clattering
on the wood. By now, they could hear the snapping of dogs somewhere behind them. Vivi caught up to her and tugged her sister
upright, pushing her the last few inches over the fence. She leapt after her, then dragged Calla the rest of the way, impervious
to her whimpers of pain.
They did not stop until they were back on the terrace of Maison de Notre Rêve, lungs swollen with adrenaline. Vivi stopped
to look behind her, but no man came through the woods. Was there anyone out there with them, after all, or had she conjured
him, as she had summoned Ly in the servants’ cottage? Her mind, always her most trusted asset, had become a thicket of unreliable impressions.
“Just breathe,” Calla said. Blood was pooled in the curve under her knee, but she reached out to clasp Vivi’s shoulder. “You’re
okay.”
“You heard it too? The shot?”
Calla gave her an odd look. “Of course I did. Americans aren’t the only maniacs chasing each other with guns, I guess.”
“Your chin. You’ll bruise.”
Calla winced, touching the tender spot where it’d hit the fence. “It doesn’t matter. We got what we came for.”
They locked the door to the suite. In the dim room, the roses on the wallpaper took on an amorphous quality, organic blobs
of red and pink. The open window admitted a breeze scented with mist and wild oleander, along with a meaty funk, the terrestrial
mingled with the sublime.
Vivi and Calla sat on the sofa, heads bent over the journal.
“Read it to me,” Calla demanded.
Back at the farmhouse, Calla used to scoot next to Vivi as she read a chapter book, using her pudgy fingers to sound out the
words on the pages. Boxcar. Twins. Salted limes. Trying, as always, to catch up to her older sister. At first, Vivi had been pleased to be the only reader of the two—she
finally had access to a space that Calla couldn’t commandeer—but then she saw how every adventure was somehow better with
Calla. Fuller, more vividly experienced. So Vivi taught Calla to read and, in the process, opened the world to both of them.
But French was another story. Calla had no knack for languages and quickly forgot what little she’d absorbed in her cursory
years of it in high school.
“Please?” Calla’s voice shook, as if she was afraid Vivi would refuse.
Vivi edged closer, feeling a softening around her baser desire to hoard their find. “Yes. Yes, of course I will.”
At first, Ly’s script was difficult to parse, but with practice, it became easier for Vivi to decipher his sentences. With each moment
of translation, the synapse between mind and meaning tightened into a sturdy bridge until Vivi’s shaky words became more certain.
Until effort became excitement and trepidation and breathless wonder. Together, the sisters relived the story of an artist
who’d managed, until now, to hide a love story under a forgotten bench halfway around the world.