All afternoon, digging and sweating, I’m thinking about Danny. About Danny, about the clues, about Barcelona, about a daughter who doesn’t show up at a father’s funeral. About varnish and color and disappeared color. About rescue and escape and Miss Martine, who maybe, if she strained hard enough, could see the dig from where she is, inside her house. Her dig. The sun pushes itself between the trees, insists on its own heat, and it feels like we’re working inside a pot of stew. There’s dirt and sticks and bug shells at my feet, and beneath Danny’s cap my hair is ruinous. By the time the shift is done, we’re all too tired to do much more than head for home.
In the kitchen there’s the in-the-oven-smell of pot roast, but everything is strangely quiet. I finally find my father on the living-room couch, no TV on. He seems asleep, but his eyes are open—staring at the ceiling, no glasses on. I used to find him like this every day for weeks after my mother died, until finally he began to work again, began to cook, like someone far away and maybe high above us was forcing him back to life.
“You okay?” I ask him.
He says quietly, “Hey, Katie.”
I tromp over to the couch, sit at one end, near his toes, untie my heavy, old, grunge-ugly work boots, which I will, I promise myself, dump in the trash once this garden gig is over. “What’s happening, Dad?”
“It’s that painting,” he says.
I wait for him to tell me more, to roll his eyeballs back down from the ceiling. It’s way too hot in the house, thanks to that pot roast. I feel drips of sweat running down my neck, down my tee. I get up to shove open a window. “If you wanted to paint regret,” Dad asks at last, “what symbol would you use?”
“Regret?” I’m too confused, tired, hot to fake an answer.
“Things that you wished you could do over. How would you paint that?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a theoretical question, Katie. It’s not like I’m going to hold you to the answer.”
“Regret could be a bird flying away,” I say, thinking out loud, playing this game for his sake, because for all I know he’s been lying here for hours, waiting to ask. “Or it could be the shell you leave on the beach, or maybe the last leaf on a tree.”
“Would you paint a perfect city and give the whole thing a brown-black sky?” Dad asks.
“Is this a trick question?”
“Would you paint all the windows in the city black, except for one light in a single room?”
“I thought you said this painting was Everlast’s idea of the eternal.”
“I thought the darkness was dirt, but it’s not.”
“So this city of Everlast’s is dark?”
“Dark, except for the garden.”
“There’s a garden?”
“Pink, yellow, green, orange, ochre, violet, Tuscan red.”
“You can see that much already, Dad? You’ve already done that much work?”
“I’m starting to see through,” he corrects me. “There’s a difference.”
“Well, is the garden the garden? The one at Miss Martine’s?”
“I’m thinking it might be.”
“Does it have a stream?
“Yes, a finger of a stream.”
“Is Miss Martine herself in the painting?”
“No, or at least I can’t see her yet.”
I take all this in. I try to fit the parts together. I understand, a little more, why Dad’s been lying here staring.
“Dad,” I ask now, keeping my voice still and cool as I can make it, “is there, like, a turtle in the painting?”
“A turtle?”
“A turtle. You know, with a shell?”
“There are many things I still can’t quite make out,” he says after a spell of not moving, not breathing, just lying there thinking, like he does. “One of those things could be a turtle. Why do you ask?”
“At the garden today—at the dig? Owen found a carapace. It was cool and everything, you know—just the shell itself was cool—but then when I was holding it, I found the thing had this mark in the back. An indentation. Had to be put there.”
He smiles.
“I’m serious, Dad.”
He sits there rubbing his chin, working out something, but I am not even going to guess what. There’s never a point to rushing genius.
“Dad,” I ask after some time goes by. “What kind of daughter doesn’t go to her own father’s funeral?”
Abruptly he turns toward me, and the reverie is gone. He gives me a scary, intense stare. “That’s an odd question,” he says. “Why do you ask?”
“Because that’s what happened with Miss Martine. Everlast died, the town came to pay respects, but not Miss Martine. It’s in the record, at the library,” I add. I leave out the part about Danny.
“Strange,” Dad says, and now his face changes again, his eyes go unfocused, and I realize that he still hasn’t chosen a pair of glasses to put on. A thousand thoughts go through his mind—I can see the flutter.
He sits there blinking at them and doesn’t tell me one.
“Do you know when the painting was finished?” I ask.
“From what I can make out so far, 1960.”
“Miss Martine hasn’t been seen since 1954.”
“You have the month and day?”
“Reny said something about September 10, the day of a massive storm.”
“Well there’s your answer, Katie D’Amore. Recluses don’t go out, even to the funerals of their fathers.” He plants his feet on the floor, fishes up some eyeglasses from the chains around his neck, puts on a pair, gives me a long, funny look, then winks. “Nineteen fifty-four,” he repeats now, then says nothing else.
“Yeah. Right.”
“You should be learning everything you can about that one particular day, Katie. Seems like there’s something in it.”
“Could be,” I say, though of course he’s right.
“I think I’m killing the pot roast,” he says, pushing himself off the couch. “Better go and take a look.”
“Hey,” I say.
“What?”
“Thanks.”
I can tell that he wants to move on to something new, that whatever he was feeling when I first came home is still floating here, above us. “Where’s Sammy?” I change the subject.
“His mother came and got him, some time around four.”
“Is he still your first-rate assistant?” I follow Dad to the kitchen, which is smoking by now. It feels like he’s far away, and what I want, right now, is to reel him back. “Did he like your breakfast?”
“Ate three and a half pancakes.”
“That all?”
“Almost ran me out of syrup.”
“He’s crazy, you know.”
“He’s just a kid, Katie.”
“You’re like his second father, Dad.”
Dad gives me another one of his looks, gets a little red around the ears. “Nothing of the sort,” he says. “Just an old mad scientist with a funky day job.” He pulls the tumblers out of the cabinet. I go and get the lemonade. I set the table for the two of us. There’s just one rose in the vase tonight.
Later the steam that has been rising all day long has made a sticky clump in the green bowl of my room. Nothing sweet blows through the window. No breeze bumps up the stairs. “Nineteen fifty-four,” I repeat, whirling the year around in my head. I think of all the research to do, the codes to break, the hours between now and tomorrow, between knowing and not knowing, between me and me seeing Danny.
I try to cool myself down by thinking of Niagara Falls and the Pacific Ocean, of buckets of ice and frosted soda, of the day Jessie and Ellen and I climbed over the fence of the Henrys’ house down the street and swam late at night in their pool; they never noticed, they were gone, living for the summer in their Aruba getaway. Jessie did a mean Henrys imitation. Ellen climbed back over the fence the very next day and left them a pot of thank-you flowers.
I never liked the Henrys, but that night I loved their pool, and now I’m thinking of that park with the pools in Barcelona, which was past the Gothic quarter, up near the arch and the bocce pits, where some guy with a hat took my dad aside and said something about the thievery of the Moors. “That can’t be right,” my mother said, but Dad stood by his translation, Dad said he knew what he’d been told but that didn’t mean that he believed it, and then we were still walking, or maybe we had turned and were headed back, but suddenly there we were in this park of a million water fountains and a million kids running and splashing in their underwear. There was this bald guy wearing bright feathers for hair. There was this other guy with a pink scarf who was making music with a horn so long that it hit the ground and turned up and kept rising.
Deeper in on the path that wound up and down by all those millions of pools was a gazebo, maybe the size of Miss Martine’s, but higher off the ground, and right there was dancing. It was like the dancers used their feet to dust the floor, like their only words were the words of the song that played from the boom box some kid had brought along. I watched them for a long time.
I was watching the dancers when my parents drifted away. I turned and didn’t see them and walked under some trees, and up a pile of steps, and through this sculpture where dragons carved of stone sat spraying water high, and then I went down the stones, and under some flowered trees and over past some cats. I finally found them down where a wedding was going on, or had already happened, my mother sitting on a bench, my dad beside her, both of them watching this bride and her groom at the edge of a pond where the water was so still I could have sworn it was a mirror. I saw my mom pull a flower straight out of a tree. I saw her stand, take the flower to the bride, and bow her head. I saw her go back to the bench and sit down with my dad and ask him, “Would you marry me again, Jimmy? Would you?”
“In a heartbeat,” he said, “and you know it.”
“I wouldn’t take any of it back,” Mom said, and maybe I don’t know how you put regret inside a painting, maybe I can’t figure out Miss Martine, maybe I can’t really save my dad from sadness, but maybe so much time goes by that you start to understand how beauty and sadness can both live in one place. My eyes are heavy and the air is still hot. I may already be dreaming.