Chapter 61: Thirty Four

I sat with the number for a long time.

Twenty three paintings in a Paris apartment.

Thirty four total when combined with the eleven in the West Village.

Thirty four pieces of Rosa Santos’s seeing assembled across two cities over thirty years waiting for someone to come looking.

I called Isabelle back immediately.

She answered before the first ring finished which told me she had been holding her phone since we hung up.

“Twenty three more,” I said. “In Paris. My father’s apartment. She painted in Paris and left them with him when she died.”

The silence on Isabelle’s end was the most complete silence I had heard from a woman who was not given to incomplete silences.

Then she said one word.

“When.”

“January,” I said. “When I come.”

“I will arrange conservation assessment immediately,” she said. “Before you arrive. I have a team I trust completely for work of this age and condition.” She paused. “Mia. Thirty four paintings.”

“I know,” I said.

“The exhibition I described to you twenty minutes ago,” she said carefully. “It was already significant. This is something else entirely.”

“Tell me what it is,” I said.

“It is a complete body of work,” she said. “Not fragments. Not the partial record of someone whose output was interrupted. A complete artistic life documented across two cities.” She paused. “The West Village paintings are the beginning. The Paris paintings are the continuation. Together they are the full picture of a woman who never stopped seeing and never stopped making regardless of who told her to stop.”

I pressed my hand flat on the kitchen table.

“She never stopped,” I said.

“No,” Isabelle said. “She simply stopped showing people.”

I thought about Rosa Santos.

Twenty six years old in a Paris café with her nephew. Portfolio of rejections in her bag. Six months of savings becoming something else. A different kind of life being constructed around the painting rather than the painting being abandoned for the life.

She had not faced the canvases to the wall in Paris.

She had given them to someone she trusted.

To my father.

Who had kept them for thirty years because he did not know what to do with them and could not bring himself to let them go.

I called Damien.

He answered on the first ring.

“Twenty three more,” I said. “In Paris. My father has them.”

A silence.

“Thirty four total,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Mia,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“My father,” he said quietly. “He knew about the Paris paintings.”

I had not thought of that.

I sat with it for a moment.

Jonathan Cole who had described Rosa Santos’s work from memory to Isabelle Laurent for forty minutes on one of his last good days.

Who had known Daniel Santos through the Luxembourg connection.

Who had spent his remaining good days making sure the right people found the work.

“He knew,” I said.

“He knew everything,” Damien said. “And he arranged it so that each piece found the next piece in the right order.” He paused. “The man spent sixty seven years building the wrong things and used the last of his clarity to build the one right thing completely.”

I looked at Noah’s drawing on the refrigerator.

Five stick figures in a row.

“Come home early,” I said. “I want to tell Noah together.”

“I am already in the car,” he said.

He came home at two.

Noah was at the kitchen table with his dinosaurs conducting what appeared to be a formal assembly of some kind that required all participants to be facing the same direction and Gerald to be present in an official capacity.

Damien sat down.

I sat down.

Noah looked between us with the alert assessment of someone who recognized the quality of a conversation that was about to include him.

“Is it good news or sad news,” Noah said.

“Good news,” I said.

He relaxed slightly.

“Very good news,” Damien said.

Noah looked at his father.

“Tell me,” he said.

Damien looked at me.

I looked at Noah.

“You know the lady with my hands,” I said.

“Rosa,” Noah said. He had been using her name since the evening in the West Village apartment when he had greeted the paintings. As though they had been properly introduced and formality was now appropriate.

“Rosa painted more paintings,” I said. “In Paris. Twenty three more. They have been in my father’s apartment for thirty years waiting to be found.”

Noah processed this.

“How many is that altogether,” he said.

“Thirty four,” I said.

He looked at Gerald.

“Gerald says that is a lot of paintings,” he said.

“It is,” I said.

“Are they going to Paris too,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “All of them. Together.”

Noah was quiet for a moment.

Then he looked at his father.

“Is it smaller now,” he said.

Damien looked at his son with those dark eyes that were warm and entirely undefended.

“The worry is gone buddy,” he said. “What is left is just good things.”

Noah considered this with his customary seriousness.

Then he picked up the Brachiosaurus and placed it deliberately in the center of the dinosaur assembly.

“For Rosa,” he said simply.

I pressed my lips together very firmly.

Damien looked at the ceiling briefly.

Noah returned to his assembly unconcerned with the effect his gesture had produced in the adults around him.

We called Eleanor at three.

She listened without interrupting which was Eleanor at her most controlled because I could hear in the quality of her silence that she was moved completely and was choosing not to show it.

When I finished she said “Jonathan knew.”

“Yes,” I said.

“He told me once that he had done one genuinely terrible thing in his professional life,” she said. “He never told me what it was. I assumed it was something to do with a business decision or a competitor.” She paused. “It was a woman with a portfolio of paintings and six months of savings.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And he spent his last good days fixing it,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

A long silence.

“Good,” she said simply.

We called Diana next.

Diana’s reaction was the most professionally contained and the most personally revealing of all the calls because Diana Reeves did not permit herself visible excitement as a matter of professional principle and the visible excitement that broke through the professional principle when I told her about the twenty three Paris paintings was therefore the most accurate possible measure of how significant this was.

She said nothing for eleven seconds.

Which for Diana was equivalent to anyone else gasping.

“The cover story,” she said finally. “The journalist. I need to call them back.”

“Tell them thirty four,” I said.

“I will tell them thirty four,” she said. And hung up.

Marcus called at four without knowing about the paintings because the news had not reached him yet and when I told him he was quiet for a moment and then said Gregory is going to want to know about this.

I stared at the phone.

“Why,” I said.

“Because Gregory has been working with the archivist on his mother’s contribution to Cole Enterprises,” Marcus said. “He has been in the building twice this week. He and Damien have been talking.” He paused. “He is not the person he was three months ago Mia. The studio floor did something to him that the preceding ten years did not.”

I thought about Gregory Rearden talking about his mother until he fell asleep.

“Tell him,” I said.

“Yes,” Marcus said.

After the calls Damien and I sat in the studio.

The north facing windows.

The afternoon light doing its honest November thing.

The woman in the doorway painting on the east wall.

“January,” Damien said quietly.

“January,” I confirmed.

“Paris,” he said.

“Paris,” I said.

He looked at me.

“We are all going,” he said. “Noah. Eleanor. All of us.”

I looked at him.

“Noah will want to bring Gerald,” I said.

“Obviously,” he said.

“And the cat,” I said.

He looked at the ceiling.

“The cat is not coming to Paris,” he said.

“Tell that to Noah,” I said.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he pulled me toward him and I went completely and his arms came around me and I leaned into him in the north facing light and felt the particular specific feeling of a life that was larger than anything I had planned and exactly right.

Outside the city went on.

Inside the studio was warm.

And in Paris thirty four paintings were waiting.

Rosa Santos’s seeing.

Thirty years in the dark.

Coming into the light.

Finally.