Chapter 18
Vivi turned off the exit for Deer Creek. The same scraggly branch jangled against the welcome sign, as if it hadn’t been clipped
once in the years since she’d lived there. The sign was a faded landscape undertaken by a Kinkade enthusiast whose brief sojourn
in the town was characterized by florid public works projects and bad checks. The overlaid white script read: Deer Creek: A Home for the Generations. Behind the lettering, the artist had painted a lush village with stone houses and a wide, sunlit creek. It didn’t bear any
resemblance to the town Vivi had known.
There were few creeks left in their hometown; forty years ago the land had become parched as a piece of stale toast. Some
told urban legends of a Satanist cult that had sucked the land dry in a ritual sacrifice. More practical speculators said
that an unexpected drought had wreaked havoc on all the local bodies of water in the late eighties. In either case, only a
handful of rivulets ran through now.
One, sunken into the woods behind the yellow farmhouse, remained a secret between three old friends.
As Vivi drove, she traced the crumbling public library with its frequently stuck sliding doors, four blocks down from the rows of unclaimed spots in the high school lot, empty during the summer, save the skateboarders doing wheelies up and down the front entrance.
There was the DrugMart where Calla once stole a sleeve of rainbow-colored fruit Mentos.
(Vivi went back and paid for it by slipping a dollar bill under the register when the boy behind the counter wasn’t looking.) The movie theater where Vivi and Wayland snuck in to see Rocky Horror Picture Show and shyly touched knees between the worn-down seat cushions.
The past perched next to her in the passenger’s seat, whispering its many confessions.
Back in June, Samuel had asked to come with her to her father’s funeral. He wanted to help and he wanted to see where she
grew up. She’d said so little about Deer Creek. As they lay in bed, legs spliced together like cards in a deck, he tilted
her face up so he could look into her eyes. I can take it, Viv. Anything you need to feel, I can be there to feel it with you. A part of her wanted nothing more than to hold his hand as she reentered that dark fairy tale she’d outgrown. But the larger,
louder part wanted to warn him away.
Soon she came upon the fanned-out branches of the redbud tree by the country road. She turned onto their old street and slowed
the car to a creep. The Howards’ blue colonial rose before her first, a bit faded and worse for wear, but still showy. Puffed
up like an overdressed guest at a summer barbecue. Way’s parents were long gone, back in Baltimore, shuddering over that time
they had spent in the sticks of the Midwest. Now there was a Volvo in the drive, one she didn’t recognize. A sprinkler rattled
its neck over an overgrown lawn, drenching a chew toy left in the grass.
She pulled her gaze over to the yellow farmhouse. In the drive, a nondescript car bearing Illinois plates was parked at a
hasty angle. The house had a crestfallen air, as if suffering from a recent disappointment. All the shades were drawn, except
for one up front that revealed a wedge of a dark interior. Not much had changed, aside from the height of the scaly-barked
red pines, which now blocked out much of the late afternoon sun.
A superstitious fear detained Vivi from going inside, convincing her that if she stepped into the house again, she’d shrink down into the ten-year-old child with her back against a door.
For so long, she told herself she didn’t belong in this small town, in this predictable life.
She and Calla both did. They’d skirted their childhoods, disavowed their pasts.
And maybe it had finally come true: they’d traveled so far that it might be impossible to find the old versions of themselves again.
The front door of the farmhouse was unlocked. It gave easily when Vivi pushed, as if relieved to have the chance to release.
Inside, the furniture was dusty yet undisturbed from its familiar arrangement. Even Tu?n’s oxblood recliner still swiveled toward the television set, like he’d just gotten up to grab a beer from the fridge. On
the shrine, the ancestors looked out dispassionately. Vivi rummaged in her purse for the stolen photo of Tam at the party in Arles and stuck it next to the one of her grandfather Huy. The resemblance between mother and son was glancing
at best, but it didn’t matter. Like called to like.
Vivi went to the kitchen. The stovetop still exuded the worn-in pungency of scorched cheese and coffee grounds spilling over
from the phin their parents used. On the counter, a cookbook lay open. A worm-eaten tomato sat on the sill, sunken in on itself
like an organ on an operating tray, abuzz with growth. Vivi slung it into the trash can and scrubbed her hands.
Had Calla carried the tomato home from the farmer’s market after the funeral, preparing to make a sandwich? Or had it been
rotting for even longer, since when Tu?n was still alive?
Sometimes Vivi let herself think of his last days. Even in his most turbulent of times, her father had loved the rhythms of
living among the livestock farms and cherry orchards of Wisconsin. He believed there was dignity to such a life, even if he
didn’t farm himself. He’d stand by the fence and rock as he smoked, watching the unwinding of a peaceful world. But it wasn’t
enough, this beauty, this hidden solace. Why had he made the decision to get in the truck and drive to his death that early
summer morning? It could have been an accident. But his instinct toward self-destruction usually proved stronger than all
others. With that choice, he left them, just as surely as May did. If not deliberately, then through negligence.
In an unexpected show of competency and selflessness, Calla had volunteered to handle the postmortem arrangements after their father’s death: putting the house up for sale, paying the last of the bills with Tu?n’s modest savings, driving the unwanted belongings to Goodwill.
Vivi had let her take over because she was tired of the memories
of him rearing up toward her at every turn. She wanted to be done with him. Looking around, Vivi saw that her sister hadn’t undertaken
any of the things she’d promised.
Maybe it’d been too much for her. Vivi couldn’t shake the thought that Calla’s preoccupation with Blue Mirror began in those early moments of rootless mourning, among the ghosts in that abandoned farmhouse who would never, could never,
give Calla what she needed. Yet they were back here, both sisters. The woods were calling to them again.
As if she were following an invisible rescue rope, Vivi made her way into their old bedroom. Between the twin beds sat the
nightstand with the rickety top drawer that never closed completely. She didn’t have to open it to know exactly what she would
find inside: gum wrappers folded into paper stars and dried tubes of Bonne Bell chapstick and lovesick notes never sent. An
archive of teenage life, imperfectly preserved but still robust with meaning.
She could have drawn the entire room by memory. On the wall, indie band posters and cheap art-print reproductions tacked up
with yellowed tape; on the shelves, dog-eared paperbacks. A corkboard, pinned with photos of their friends, sat above a row
of Calla’s track medals. Gold and silver, only lightly tarnished by time.
Vivi had once loved watching her sister run. Despite Calla’s slight stature, she had such an effortless command of her body.
Her limbs seemed to defy gravitational pull. Other runners underestimated her, and she’d lope past them with an easy smile
on her face, as agile as the deer who vaulted through the woods.
The closet door was ajar. Vivi pushed aside the hangers to reveal the mural she knew would be hidden along the northwest corner.
The mural was faded now, peeling in scabby clumps of acrylic, but it was just as she remembered it.
When Calla was in fourth grade, she had gotten it in her head to paint an underwater scene on the wall. She’d just seen Free Willy and wanted to portray the ocean that the orca had longed for. Vivi warned her against it, but once Calla stumbled on an impulse,
she couldn’t rest until the urge was sated. She took stiff-haired brushes and pots of paints from the art room at school,
then set to work.
On her mural, filaments of light flirted with the shifting blues in the water. Sand-submerged creatures shook up puffs of
ocean floor. The strokes were imperfect, of course; back then, Calla had been a novice at technique and nursed that child’s
tendency toward exaggerated form and flattened colors. But it was the first time Vivi had understood her sister’s potential
so clearly. She did not know what to make of the despair that trickled inside of her like a bathtub leak.
The day after Calla finished painting, Tu?n found her mural. Calla had grabbed Vivi’s hand, petrified. They thought he would yell. Possibly destroy the mural. The worst
thing he could have done was laugh at Calla. But he only stared at the ocean scene with some odd wistfulness, as if looking
upon a place he’d seen once before.
Add green into the waves, he’d said. It’ll give them more depth.
Calla was stunned. Vivi, sinking against the wall, found herself beset by a bewildered envy that only grew as, after that
day, a set of watercolors or a cheap sketchbook would sometimes appear on Calla’s pillow, never with an explanation. They
were not extravagant offerings, but offerings all the same.
Calla did end up adding a streak of green into the shadows of the waves. Their father had been right. That contrast made the
mural leap off the wall.
Now, Vivi pinched an edge of the peeling paint and tore it off in a slow and satisfying strip. She let the paint fall like
a ribbon of flayed skin.
From the gable window, Vivi could see into the backyard, where Tu?n's shed sat. He’d built it himself a few years before the accident, nailing mismatched planks into a rectangular exterior with two small, irregular windows set a touch too high.
A rusted roof lay like an open book on the top of the structure.
Over time, the surrounding foliage had begun to drag the shed back into the earth, so what remained was a tired sag of tin and plywood clinging to its last semblance of utility.
Vivi went down the stairs and out the back door, picking through the clusters of cockleburs and the pigweeds that scratched
against her shins. The rusted padlock on the shed was broken, its shackle dangling from the looped closure. Even then, she
hesitated. She could hear the pitiless incursion of her father’s anger.
You’ll take this from me too?
She pushed the door open and stood in the dim exterior, letting her gaze adjust. Unlike the rest of the house, the shed was
neatly tended, belying its ill-kempt exterior. Along one wall stretched a wooden board with filing cabinets shoved beneath
to form a makeshift table. Sealed boxes had been stacked in the corners, casting columnar shadows on the floor. Vivi was disappointed
and relieved. All that subterfuge for what was, essentially, a storage space.
But after she got on her tiptoes and shoved the drapes of the windows aside, letting in the rush of light, she saw that each
wall was plastered in shades of blue. Ultramarine and cobalt; peacock and C?te d’Azur; boundless and vivid.
Heavyweight cotton pages had been taped haphazardly together to form a strange and arresting wallpaper of K. P. Ly landscapes. They were all paintings, Calla’s copies, Vivi was sure. A sudden gust of wind from the open door swept in and
dislodged a handful of the paintings, agitating them around her like a tempest. The edge of one brushed against her lip and
gave her an invisible paper cut that smarted for days afterward when she spoke.
Vivi stooped to pick up the fallen paintings, studying them up close.
There were the better-known ones: Moonbathers and Terrible Feast and Azure Sails.
Their familiarity soothed her eye, even as they unnerved her.
Ly’s whole oeuvre, replicated in exquisite detail in a tiny shed in the Wisconsin woods. What would the artist have made of
this transposition of his work? Like a repeating motif, copies of Blue Mirror appeared in the midst of the other paintings, the lone portrait, the instigator of their madcap journey.
Calla may have thought she was leaving the mystery behind, but it was clear that the mystery would never leave her.
Beyond the shed, a fence lay in disrepair, its post scattered at an oblique angle. Once, that fence had hemmed the border
of their imagination. Tu?n never went into the woods, and so, it had become a boundary like so many other boundaries of transgression—liminal yet potent,
able to delineate between permissibility and its wilder, less known sister, possibility. Leaping that fence had always felt
like breaking an invisible barrier. On one side, worry and smallness; on the other, a luminous continent sprawling to meet
their eager feet.
There was a movement in the woods. Just a twitch of shadow. A deer, a swooping kestrel, wind stirring a loose tree limb. Vivi
told herself it was nothing.
But she ran to the fence, jumping over its fallen post, letting her feet retrace the paths through the clearing of the past.
And in the running, she felt an unrestrained glee that managed to overtake every hesitation burrowed in her chest. A crackle
of leaves underfoot, the stink of mulch returning to earth, her legs pushing her into the jack pines with the effortless instinct
of a body doing what it was trained to do.