Marcelline was growing convinced that the sense of knowing yourself was a delusion. The smackdowns you delivered in the bathroom mirror rarely happened to a foe who wasn’t your own reflection. The scripts you wrote in your head were almost never performed. You knew what was important to you, but you didn’t insist. You knew what was right and still steered around it. You took self-defense classes and could, in theory, stay frosty and flip an attacker over your hip. But in the end you still stood there and got shot in the neck.
The thing that bothered her, though, was wondering which was the real Marcelline. Was it the one who planned, or the one who abandoned plans and principles in the face of life rushing over her?
She wanted to see Jonathan, wanted to lay eyes on him. A plan about what to do would start with getting a second first impression of him. She’d only known him for a few days a long time ago.
There weren’t any photographs, not even of the painting. He wouldn’t send it to her. He wouldn’t give her his number. He never even told her his last name and made a big joke of it, promising it for later when all was said and done. And deposited.
She couldn’t even be sure if what he looked like in her mind would match up to reality. Every time they’d been together, she’d been buzzing with distraction. They’d had sex in the dark after a lot of wine. And in the last moments there was the moon, for all the help it was to see clearly by, and patches of streetlight along the weedy lot. But the darkness had swallowed most of the detail of that night. The last she’d seen of him, she was sure she was dying.
She knew sharply what she’d felt toward him in that moment, but the specific features of his face wavered uncertainly in the memory. Marcelline had this recurring horrible fantasy that she might have walked right past him on the street between then and now and not even noticed. In her ugly daydream, he turned as she went by and smiled at her blindness.
She needed to see him because she needed to know how she’d handle it. She was afraid of what it would do to her to know, to recognize—not just remember and guess—what he looked like. She was desperate to put a face, the right one, on this thing.
Or so she said. So she thought. But instead, here she was in the library with Carly and Ada for the fourth day in a row.
“It seems like cheating,” Carly said. “I’m just copying what these great famous artists did. That’s not very right, is it?”
The table was covered with art books opened to iconic paintings: Starry Night, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Guernica, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Water Lilies. In front of her was Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Carly peered up from her paper every few strokes, checking it against the zoomed-in detail of the famous fresco.
Her sketch pads and pens, two full rainbows of colored pencils, and a set each of oil pastels and charcoals took up the rest of the tabletop. Ada had brought along a mandala coloring book and a big box of crayons that Carly had frequently borrowed from during the lesson. But Ada had left off the coloring and was flipping though an art book that covered most of her lap.
Marcelline looked up from her own book that she’d been hiding behind to think. “I’m not suggesting you sign your name to it and try to pass it off as your own idea. It’s just an exercise. Brain training. You look at it and try to decide what medium and technique you’d use to get something like that effect. You guess at how to duplicate the strokes you see, or think you see. You make the leap and find out how close you were to right. All it costs is paper and time.
“However it goes, it doesn’t matter. You’ll know more about what your hand can do, and your eye, and your materials. And I think, really, trying to understand how they did it makes you feel a little closer to these guys. It’s a time machine.” Marcelline swept her hand over the open books. “Besides, what do you think you’re doing when you’re drawing Peter Pan and Pokémon?”
“Those are just cartoons.”
Marcelline went wide-eyed at Carly. “I am going to pretend you didn’t even say that. Cartoonists aren’t artists?”
Carly blushed. “No. They are. I know that. I mean, it’s just not serious. . . .”
Marcelline smiled to reassure her. “Yeah, it is. And so are you. So don’t forget it. And be careful with your thoughts. They matter.”
Ada held up her open book and showed them Munch’s The Scream. She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve seen this before. I don’t like it.”
“No?” Marcelline said.
“It’s kinda cool, though.” Carly nodded at it.
“It’s creepy,” Ada said.
Marcelline could only agree. “It is. But why do you think it’s famous?”
Ada scoffed. “Because people like creepy stuff. Some people do. Creepy people do.”
They all laughed, but Carly stopped first. Marcelline watched her study the picture. “What are you thinking?”
“About maybe why it’s famous,” Carly said without looking away from it.
Marcelline dropped her gaze to the tabletop to keep the weight of her own stare off Carly. She kept still so as not to cause a ripple of distraction. These things were fragile, and self-consciousness could crush it in a second. She gave it its elbow room, letting the possibilities click together in Carly’s head.
Carly leaned back in her chair. “It’s famous because it’s really good.”
Ada was indignant. “What? No, it’s not. It’s weird. And it’s ugly. Sorry. Just being honest. I don’t know why it’s even a thing. I mean, who even let him? It’s creepy.”
Carly kept staring at the picture on the page. “Yeah, but it’s good because that’s not what creepy looks like.” She wiggled her fingers at the image. “Nothing really looks like that.” She leaned back again and pointed to punctuate her conclusion. “But that’s exactly what creepy feels like.”
Ada was shaking her head.
“No, no,” Carly said. “No. See? If it actually looked real, like something real-life creepy, it would be less creepy, because creepy is a feeling, not a look.” She turned to Marcelline. “Right?”
Marcelline sucked in her cheeks to keep from beaming. “I’m not sure it’s ever been explained better.”
Carly beamed for the both of them.
Ada shrugged and went back to her book. Carly took up her pencil.
Marcelline tapped the photo of the Michelangelo. “Try just the hands. Clean sheet. Use . . .” She hummed over the tray of charcoals and drew out a slim vine stick. “Try this one.”
Carly went straight back to being lost in her work, and Marcelline into her thoughts. The room faded to vague around her, Carly’s scratching charcoal and the library murmur receding to nothing. Marcelline ran her tongue over her teeth and drew her fingers along the track of her scar.
She knew so little about Jonathan. She was acting as if everything hinged on the moment she saw him, as if as soon as that was confirmed, she’d know what to do. But that was a bit of wishful thinking. Sure, she’d probably rattle the bejesus out of him. As fun as that sounded, she hadn’t survived and come all this way to raise his blood pressure for a few minutes.
She took inventory of what she actually knew. With as much power as she’d given him to launch her into an entirely different life, it was embarrassing how little she could say for sure about Jonathan. She didn’t even know how he’d come by the Flinck. He’d been as cagey about that as he’d been about everything else.
The painting they’d been dealing with was only one small part of the haul from the Gardner Museum theft.
He couldn’t have all of it. What-if tugged for attention.
Marcelline’s heartbeat skipped wild in her chest. She pulled over one of the largest collection volumes and checked the index and found her page. She stuck in a pencil as a bookmark and went back to the index. She held the second place with her finger.
“Hey, Carly.”
Carly looked up. She’d managed to rub charcoal under one eye. She looked like a boxer two days after a bad round.
Marcelline wet a napkin from her water bottle. “Here, you’ve got . . .” She motioned for Carly to wipe her face.
“Oh, thanks.”
“Hey, so I liked what you saw in the Munch, in The Scream, and the way you figured out your reaction to it. I want to see what you think of this one.”
Carly lit up with an eagerness to collect more pride, to win the gold star of Marcelline’s approval. That it was just a ploy for information made the smiling back at her hurt a little. Marcelline winced, but stretched it into, hopefully, a more convincing expression.
She opened the book to Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, one of the missing treasures from the Gardner Museum. She watched Carly’s face for a jolt of recognition.
There wasn’t one. “It’s nice. Good. It looks big. Like it should be big.” Carly’s expression was tight in concentration. “Is it big?”
“It is, yeah.”
“It’s pretty. But is it weird that I like the other one better, even though it’s not as pretty?”
“No.” Marcelline covered her disappointment with more conversation. “But it’s interesting to know why. Can you tell me why?”
Carly shrugged. “I just don’t feel like I need to look at it for more than five seconds. Like after just a quick peek, I’m all done with it.”
Marcelline nodded. “What about this one?” She flipped to the other saved page and held her breath.
The biggest prize from the robbery of the Gardner Museum was a rare Vermeer, The Concert. When it was stolen, its value was marked at around $200 million. As a black-market trophy, it was almost hard to imagine what it could go for.
Carly bobbed her head, eyebrows up, alert. Marcelline’s heart slammed against her breastbone.
“Same. Yeah. It’s nice, but not as interesting as that other one.”
Marcelline pulled a breath down over the pressure in her throat.
Carly’s back went rigid. She pinched the fingertips of her right hand, massaging them unconsciously. “I’m sorry. Was that lame? Are these special and I missed something? Can I look again?”
Marcelline sagged. “No, honey. Not at all. I mean, yes, they’re special in that they’re works by famous artists, but you never need to apologize for your opinions. There’s no question that if you studied them, you could give a clever analysis. You’re a natural. I only wanted your basic reaction.” She swallowed a hard lump of guilt. It felt shitty to make Carly doubt herself, yanking on her budding confidence. “Please don’t worry. It wasn’t a trick que—” Marcelline shook her head and forced a smile. “There was no right answer. You’re fine. You did exactly what I asked of you.”
The three of them worked and read in companionable silence for nearly another hour. Marcelline stewed in feeling lousy and in doubt of everything she’d done since she’d left. She was sitting here manipulating a sweet kid because she was too chickenshit to figure out how to do what she’d claimed to want more than anything else in the world.
Carly clearly had never seen the other paintings. That didn’t mean anything. The Flinck was definitely in the footage of Carly’s house. A phantom itch skittered over Marcelline’s neck. She drew out her phone and angled it away from the girls and watched the video again. Just to touch base, to make sure she wasn’t crazy. Or not crazy like that, at least.
Later, in the stacks, Marcelline put back the art books they had taken out, but she withdrew, again, a single volume.
“Hey, Carly. One more. What do you think of this one?”
Carly came to stand with her. Her eyes swept over the page Marcelline held open. She had only known Carly a handful of days, but would swear the kid was taller than when she’d first found her. Growth spurt, in both height and art appreciation. Expanding in every dimension. Concentration was cute on her face, but also formidable. Carly could turn off the kid in her like a tap. Then she ran just pure can-do.
“Oh, wow! Yeah. We have that one at home—wait. Ha! No. It’s not the same. Wow, that’s weird. It looks so much like it. What is it?”
“Landscape with the Good Samaritan, by Rembrandt.”
“Huh. I wonder if he did the one we have at home? I mean, not the one, of course. It’s not fancy. It’s just something my mom likes. It was John’s, I think. But that’s funny. It looks a lot like that one.”
“Do you like it?”
Carly grinned and shrugged. “I still like the screaming one better.”
“Fair enough.” Marcelline smiled back, false and genuine both. Carly was adorable, and the Flinck had been mistaken for a Rembrandt landscape for centuries. It was the reason Isabella Stewart Gardner bought it in the first place, and possibly the reason the thieves had bothered with it at all.
The painting was at Carly’s house.
But Carly could not, would not, get hurt in this.
In the parking lot, as Marcelline unlocked her car, the girls moved past her, cheerfully lugging all the art supplies the few blocks back home. Each day after their time in the library, Marcelline had wanted to offer them a ride, wondered if they thought it was strange that she didn’t. They’d never mentioned it or looked put out. They didn’t again today.
But the risk. Marcelline couldn’t run into Jonathan by accident. She was too close already. The town wasn’t a tight knot, but it was still only a few miles in all directions. The chance of just bumping into him wasn’t zero. She’d played the scenario through, rehearsed what she might do if he’d shown up for some reason at the library. A big public place had its advantages. But getting caught on his street or idling in his driveway while his stepdaughter collected her things—no.
Ada was pulled off course by a woman walking a dog in front of the book drop.
Carly lingered and asked, “Is everything okay?”
This throwaway line was something people said more as filler than real inquiry. Like How are you?, your response was supposed to be Everything’s great. But not this time. Carly was asking the actual question.
“Absolutely,” Marcelline said.
“I just wanted to say thanks, in case we didn’t get to do this again.”
“We’ll get to do this again.”
“Okay. It’s just most grown-ups can’t do this kind of thing all the time. And your out-of-state plates . . .” Carly shifted the art case in her arms and put a toe up toward the bumper of Marcelline’s car. “I just don’t know what you do. You know, for a job or anything. I didn’t know if you can keep doing this with us, if this is something that can just keep going.”
The back of Marcelline’s neck went cold in the breeze. “I’ll be around. I’m enjoying the nonstop art party.”
“Me, too. Us, too. It’s been weird lately, you know, with the . . . Did you watch the video?”
A spike of alarm straightened Marcelline’s spine. She didn’t think Carly could have seen her at the table.
“I mean, it’s okay. Everybody has. And the first time you saw me, Dylan was making such a big deal about it, so I figured you had seen it at some point.”
“Yes, I saw it.”
Carly looked over at Ada, who had the dog on its back, leg pedaling from a belly scratch. “You know what the weird thing about movies and books is? You get all into it and it seems real, even though everything that happens is crazy different than regular life—but then it just ends. They never explain how anybody just does their usual stuff again after the aliens leave or the monster gets killed, or . . .” Carly stared past Marcelline’s shoulder. “Or the bad guy gets stopped. They never show how it goes back to normal.”
“I guess that’s not the part everyone finds interesting.”
“Unless you’re one of those people in real life. I’d think it was interesting.” Carly looked at Marcelline’s scar with open curiosity.
“You’ll get back to normal,” Marcelline said.
“Did you?”
The question crackled in the air. Carly couldn’t possibly know what she was asking, but Marcelline had the uncanny feeling that, on some level, somehow she did.
Carly didn’t yet understand how far from normal that video had taken her, or that it had brought the two of them together on this sidewalk outside the library. Her stepfather’s shadow covered both the video that had turned Carly’s life upside down and the scar that had spurred her to ask that incredibly intimate question.
Carly didn’t know that the turn back to everyone’s normal was still well ahead of them.
But what Marcelline knew about Carly’s circumstances and near future made sense. What Carly understood about Marcelline’s was pure dialed-in attention.
“Normal? I don’t know,” she said, and thought of years’ worth of nights spent sketching and drinking and clicking through the internet. Carly had been just as unreal to her, just as out of reach on the screen as her own family was. But Carly was here now, right in front of her. Carly was real. So was she. The sun warmed the space between her shoulder blades. “It’s there if I want it enough.”
Carly opened her mouth to ask more. She was about to go full geyser with questions, but Marcelline shook her head. “Not now.” They left it at a shared smile.
“Carly! Let’s go!” Ada called.
In the car, Marcelline typed fast into her phone, hitting send before she could talk herself out of it. S, I’m going to get it. This is going to work.
The car was too hot. Marcelline started the engine. Her phone finally lit up.
I don’t know what to wish for you. Maybe just that there was another way. But no matter what, just get back to one of your lives alive, please. And call me when you can.
A tear splashed the glass of Marcelline’s phone. She wiped it against the leg of her jeans. She put the car into drive and pulled out of the library parking lot.
• • •
She’d wanted a swim, to cool down to the temperature of the water and let it block her ears and turn everything a shimmering blue for a while. She wanted to exhaust herself with laps so there would be no fighting sleep afterward.
She checked the clock.
It wasn’t too late in the day to do something. Confront him. Or don’t. Blow up Carly’s life. Or don’t. She’d already made the vow to get on with it to Samantha. But S would only cheer if she broke it.
Tomorrow. She would swim, sleep, then do something tomorrow.
Her YMCA membership was good for a dozen guest passes to the facilities here. She’d walked over from her hotel on her first night in town and had been back every night since. The gym was nothing special, but the pool was brand-new and glorious.
Memory is a weird thing. Marcelline had been preoccupied with the nagging uncertainty that the picture of Jonathan in her mind wasn’t accurate. The placeholder for his face in her plans was fuzzy and generic.
The mechanisms of recall are mysterious, even to science.
In the parking lot of the Y, a skinny man with his hair rucked up at the back of his head, as if he’d slept on it wet, was crouching in front of a red sedan. It was a strange thing to do. He reached out, set something on the curb, then straightened up quickly. He swept the parking lot with an exaggerated swivel of his head and shoulders. Everything about him was begging not to be seen.
Marcelline froze behind the wheel to keep from drawing his notice. Then froze again from the inside out.
Some things were completely clear in her memory from that night. If she cast back for it, she could still feel the sickening hot tickle of blood sliding backward over her scalp, not like liquid but like a feverish finger tracing the base of her skull, a thin snake parting her hair like grass. She’d felt herself weakening. As if she’d been pinned to the earth. Heavy. Then heavier. Then pulled motionless against the ground, metal to magnet.
The one thing she remembered without a doubt was amazement—Jonathan, kneeling beside her, then looking over his shoulder, calling back to the shooter in an angry whisper:
For fuck’s sake, Roy! Get the hell out of here!
For all the worry that she would not recognize the man she’d seen in broad daylight, the man whom she’d vaulted her good reputation for, whom she’d slept with and stood next to at the most ill-advised betrayal of her common sense in her entire life, it was with all the wrenching brilliance of being struck by lightning that she instantly recognized the man who shot her.