Friday at five, I show up to meet Remy as we’d arranged outside the library. When I arrive, he’s standing next to the right-hand stone lion by the stairs, his face raised toward the building.
“Remy?”
He turns to me, swiping at his eyes. “Hi. Sorry. Just remembering my painting and how much she loved it.”
“I have it now,” I say. “My parents took it from her hospital room and gave it to me last night after the… well, you know. I’ll give it back to you.”
He sighs and doesn’t answer.
I don’t know whether that means I should keep offering him the painting or keep it myself, and I hate my indecision and confusion. “So, um, where are we going?” I say, feeling awkward at changing the subject so abruptly but not wanting to talk about the painting any more since he doesn’t seem to want to.
“I’d rather just take you there. It’s not that long a subway ride. If that’s okay?”
Not really, but it doesn’t begin to compare to any of the horrible things that have happened this week so I say, “Fine.”
We walk in silence along 42nd to Times Square, avoiding the stupid mascot-suited people and the ones selling Empire State Building tickets, then down the subway stairs to the platform for the 1, 2, and 3 trains heading south. If we get on a 2 or 3, we’re probably going to Brooklyn. Too many stops on the 1 for me to guess the plan.
A 2 train arrives, and I step forward but Remy holds me back. As the doors begin to slide closed, a skinny black guy comes flying past us and throws himself at them, prompting a huge white guy on the train to catch the doors and force them open to let him in.
New Yorkers are stereotypically unhelpful, but stuff like this happens every day. Why couldn’t someone have been there to help Gloria?
That train leaves, after a reminder from the conductor not to interfere with the doors makes the two guys laugh and shake hands, and when a 1 arrives Remy guides me onto it and we set off in silence. I hate it. Before I came on to him we were so comfortable chatting together, and I miss that but have no idea how to get back to it.
I don’t think about it for long, though, because as stop after stop go by an awful thought occurs to me, and the further south we go the stronger the thought gets.
When we exit the subway at the South Ferry station and he begins walking toward the ferry terminal, I say, “No. Where are you taking me? What are you doing?”
“You need to trust me,” he says, his voice full of pain.
“I don’t. Are you taking me to… where it happened? Because I’ve been there and I don’t want to go back. Unless…” The awful thought takes on a different, worse, dimension. “Were you there? When she was attacked? Do you know more than you’ve said?”
He steps in front of me and caught hold of my shoulders. “I wasn’t there. I wish to God I had been, but I wasn’t. No, it’s not that. We need to go to Staten Island.”
I pull away. “Why? Tell me.”
“I have to show you.”
I shake my head, but he begins walking again, leaving me behind. I don’t want to go with him, but I can’t help wanting to know what he knows, so after a moment I make myself start walking too.
I catch up easily, since he’s walking slowly and looking back at me, and we’re soon past the security guards and their luggage-sniffing dogs and making our way onto the newly-arrived ferry.
“Inside or out?”
I shrug, then say, “Out,” because there’ll be fewer people outside.
Once the ferry starts moving and we’re watching Staten Island come closer I say, wiping tears from my eyes, “I always forget how windy it gets out here.” I’m freezing too, since even the bright sun can’t warm me in this wind. Not that much can, these days.
Remy turns to me, dealing with his own wind-induced tears. “I know. But it is nicer than inside.” He clears his throat. “And Gloria loved it out here.”
I nod in response, but I feel a shameful annoyance at being told yet again a fact about my sister that I hadn’t known. Annoyance, and then sadness. I’ll never know everything there is to know about her. She’s gone.
When we dock at Staten Island and join the flood of people exiting the ferry my worries over where we’re going overpower my misery. “What now?”
He points toward the entrance to the St. George train station. “A few stops on the train.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Remy, I’m really not in the mood for a scenic tour. What is the deal?”
He places a firm hand on my shoulder. “I promise. A few minutes on the train, a short walk, and we are there.”
We take the train, and the short walk, and then I find myself standing in front of a self-storage facility. “She has stuff here?”
“Sort of,” he says, looking both sad and tense. “Over here.”
I follow him down an outdoor corridor to a large roll-up door. He unlocks and pushes up the door, then says, “After you. Welcome to my studio. Studio slash storage space. But mostly studio. Cheaper than renting space right in the city and access at any hour of the day or night.”
I take a few tentative steps into the dark room, wondering why he’s babbling like he’s trying to sell me the place, then jump as he slaps the light switch by the door with unnecessary force.
“Sorry.” He clears his throat. “Sorry, I’m nervous.” Before I can ask why, he adds, “Anyhow, here we are.”
I look around. Paintings. Lots of them. Supported by easels and hanging from huge hooks in the ceiling and sitting atop storage bins and resting on the floor propped against the walls. Several of them incorporate the little piece of plastic cheese I’d given back to him. “Are these… she did these? I didn’t know she—”
“No, these ones are mine.”
I turn to him, annoyed that he’s brought me here to see his artwork, in time to see him pointing down to the back corner. “But she did paint, yes. She started about two months before she got hurt. You didn’t know?”
I shake my head, not bothering to tell him she and I had barely been in contact back then.
“So then you don’t know— anyhow. Hers are in the back corner.”
He changed his direction in that sentence, but when I glance at him his set jaw tells me he’s not going to explain himself. Not yet. But he brought me here and there has to be a reason.
My heart racing though I don’t know why, I make my way to the corner Remy indicated with him right behind me.
“These are her earliest ones,” he says, waving at about half a dozen small canvases attached to a folding divider. I look, afraid to and afraid not to, but seeing them calms my fears. A view of the Central Park Reservoir at sunset, complete with three little ducks. The Empire State Building lit up at night. A sun-splashed beach I can’t identify with the words ‘Catch joy in every day’ in black marker in Gloria’s handwriting across the sky. They’re not fine art, more like the kind of thing people sell to tourists on the sidewalks around Central Park, but they’re pretty enough. Nothing big, nothing important. Nothing for Remy to be nervous about.
I turn to Remy, not understanding why he was so insistent I see these when there’s nothing special about them, and he says, “They’re nice, right? Want to take one? Or more?”
“I’ve got a perfect spot for the Reservoir one,” I say, thinking of the blank wall above my kitchen sink, and he lifts it off the wall and tucks it into a long-handled canvas bag he’s had waiting near the paintings.
I thank him as I put the bag’s straps over my shoulder, but he doesn’t acknowledge that. Instead, he swallows hard and says, “This is how she started. Just typical stuff. She did these for a few weeks, until she got a bit of a handle on the whole painting thing. Then she got an idea. Well, actually, now I think she started painting in the first place because of that idea.”
I blink, even more confused now, and he says, “Two-sided canvases. The back side has a thing she didn’t like, and the front has… well, let me show you.”
He takes hold of my hand and draws me to the lone canvas on the back of the divider. It’s hanging with its back showing, and there’s a painting done on another canvas set into its frame. Done in small brushstrokes, almost tentative somehow, it shows a dimly lit New York street with a woman, clearly Gloria, walking with her eyes averted past a homeless person slumped in a doorway.
“Turn it around,” Remy says softly, releasing my hand.
I carefully lift it off its hook and do what he says, my fingers shaking. On the front side I see the same homeless person, but with Gloria crouched down nearby offering money with one hand and a sandwich with the other. The colors are brighter and done with confident strokes, the street is cleaner, and Gloria’s face is alight with happiness instead of wearing the embarrassed awkwardness of the first side.
“See? She hid the bad stuff on the back and fixed it on the front. I think it’s brilliant. Repairing her life through her art.”
“Beautiful,” I say softly, staring at the joy on my painted sister’s face.
“It is, yeah. But it’s not the only one. At least, I don’t think so.”
I look at him, startled to hear the nervousness back in his voice, to see him pointing at a piece under a black cloth in the very back corner.
“I helped her set up another two-sided canvas, but she wouldn’t let me look at it as she worked on it. She said nobody should see it until it was done. In the hospital, once she could talk a bit I asked if she’d changed her mind about keeping it secret, if I should tell you or your parents and have you look, and she got so upset I didn’t ask again. She died not wanting anyone to see it, I think, because she couldn’t finish it.”
My eyes flick from the covered painting back to his face. “Then why am I—”
“I don’t know what to do with it,” he says quietly. “I don’t know whether I should look at it, or you should, or we should burn it without uncovering it, or—”
Horrified at the suggestion of destroying Gloria’s work unseen, I push past him to expose the painting.
Then I’m horrified in a whole different way.
The front portrays what I know immediately is Anthony’s third birthday party. The party he never had because he died right before it. The whole family sits around our old dining room table, with Anthony, his face glowing so brightly he might have been an angel, about to blow out his candles. Everywhere around the table are red balloons, the kind on which he’d—
“What’s on the other side?”
My voice comes out like I’m the one choking, and Remy says, “It’s your family, right? But it means more than that. Right?”
I nod. “Turn it.” I can hardly breathe, but I have to know what’s on the other side, what she painted about the day I killed Anthony.
He murmurs something that sounds like, “Forgive me, Glorious,” then turns the painting around.
I stare, taking the whole thing in.
Then I punch Remy in the stomach as hard as I can.