Chapter 65: Twenty Three Years

Daniel stayed.

Eleanor had insisted, the way Eleanor insisted on things, which was to simply make a decision and act on it before anyone had the chance to object. By the time anyone thought to discuss logistics, the spare room in the brownstone had been made up and Daniel’s single bag was sitting beside the bed and the matter was settled.

The day after Christmas was quiet.

Snow had continued through the night and Brooklyn woke up white and hushed, the particular muffled quiet of a city that had been told to slow down and had, for once, listened. Noah was at the window by seven, pressing his hands against the glass and reporting on conditions to Gerald with the gravity of a meteorologist.

“It is very deep,” he announced. “We need boots.”

By nine the household had organized itself into its post Christmas rhythm. Eleanor and Catherine in the kitchen working through leftovers with the unhurried efficiency of people who had decided that the day required nothing more strenuous than good food and conversation. Marcus on the phone with Victoria, his voice carrying through the wall in the low warm register of someone checking in rather than managing. Damien and Noah outside in the small garden building something Noah described as a snow dinosaur, which from the kitchen window looked like a snow lump with two sticks, but which Noah clearly saw something else in entirely.

I found my father in the sitting room.

He was standing by the window looking out at the snow with a cup of coffee he had not yet drunk, and he turned when I came in with the particular alertness of someone who had been hoping I would come and had not wanted to seem like he was waiting.

“Walk with me,” I said. “If you are up for the cold.”

He looked relieved to be asked.

We bundled up. Eleanor produced a scarf for him from somewhere with the efficiency of a woman who kept a small store of everything anyone might need, and we went out into the white quiet of the Brooklyn morning.

We walked without direction for a while.

The snow muffled everything. Our footsteps. The occasional car. The particular sounds of a city slowed down to something gentler than its usual self.

“I have so many questions,” I said eventually. “I do not know which ones matter most.”

“Ask whichever ones come,” he said. “I will answer all of them. Eventually. We have time now.”

We have time now.

I held onto that for a moment.

“Tell me about Rosa,” I said. “Not the paintings. Her. What was she like.”

Daniel was quiet for a moment, the particular quiet of someone gathering a memory carefully before setting it down.

“She laughed easily,” he said. “That surprised people, I think, because she also saw things very clearly, and people sometimes assume that seeing clearly means being serious all the time. She was serious about the things that mattered and easy about everything else.” He paused. “She used to say that the world gave you enough difficult things without you adding more of your own.”

I thought about the eleven paintings.

The interior light. The truth of things.

“She sounds like someone I would have loved,” I said.

“She would have loved you,” Daniel said. “Immediately. She loved easily too.” He was quiet for a moment. “When she came to Paris, I was twenty four. I had just moved there myself, for work, and I barely knew her. We had met perhaps twice as children. But she arrived with almost nothing and she found me through a cousin and she simply moved into my life like she belonged there.” He smiled slightly. “She did belong there. I just had not known I needed her until she arrived.”

“And she painted,” I said.

“Constantly,” he said. “In the evenings, after her job. She worked in a bookshop. She painted on the weekends, sometimes all weekend, and she would show me what she made and ask what I thought, and I.” He stopped.

I waited.

“I did not always understand what I was looking at,” he said honestly. “I was twenty four and focused on my own life and I would say things like that is good Rosa, and move on, and I did not give her the kind of attention the work deserved. I regret that more than almost anything.”

“But you kept the paintings,” I said. “For thirty years.”

“After she died,” he said quietly, “I went to her apartment to collect her things. There was almost nothing. A few clothes. Some books. And the paintings, all twenty three of them, stacked against the wall.” He paused. “I could not look at them properly that day. I packed them and I told myself I would deal with them later, when I could look properly. Later became years. Then decades.” He looked at the snow. “Every time I moved, I moved them too. I never opened the crates again until three years ago, when Jonathan asked me to.”

“Jonathan asked you,” I said.

“He had heard about your work,” Daniel said. “Through the diner connection, through whatever network of information he maintained. He called me and asked if Rosa had left anything behind.” He paused. “I opened the crates that night. I sat on the floor of my apartment until four in the morning looking at them properly for the first time in thirty years.” His voice was quiet. “I understood, finally, what I had been carrying.”

We walked in silence for a moment.

“I am sorry,” he said. “For all of it. For leaving when you were small. For not being someone you could call. For not finding a way back sooner, even after I understood I had been wrong.” He stopped walking and looked at me. “I do not expect twenty three years to be undone by an apology. I know that is not how it works. But I needed to say it properly, in person, not through a phone.”

I looked at this man.

His careful hands. His careful eyes. The particular quality of someone who had spent a long time being careful because carelessness, once, had cost him everything that mattered.

“I am not going to pretend the twenty three years were nothing,” I said. “They were not nothing. I grew up without you and that shaped things in me that I am still discovering.” I paused. “But I am also not interested in spending the time we have left measuring what was lost. Serena told me that. What is still available matters more than what is gone.”

Daniel looked at me.

“Serena,” he said.

“Noah’s mother,” I said. “She came back too. Differently, but the same kind of coming back.”

He nodded slowly.

“What is still available,” he said, testing the words.

“Paris in January,” I said. “The spare room. Christmas. Whatever comes after that.” I looked at him. “That is what is available. I would like to use it well.”

Something moved across his face that was too large for the quiet street to hold.

“I would like that,” he said. His voice was not entirely steady. “Very much.”

We walked on for a while in the snow, not talking, simply walking, two people with the same hands moving through a white Brooklyn morning.

“There is one more thing,” I said eventually.

“Tell me,” he said.

“The baby,” I said. “In April. She is going to need to know about Rosa. About the seeing, and where it comes from, and the paintings, and all of it.” I paused. “I would like you to be part of telling her that story. Not just me. You knew Rosa. You were there.”

Daniel stopped walking.

He looked at me with an expression that contained twenty three years of absence and the particular specific gift of being asked, finally, to be present for something that mattered.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I would like that more than almost anything.”

We turned back toward the brownstone.

Smoke was rising from the chimney, warm against the white sky, and through the window I could see Noah pressing his snow dinosaur’s stick arms into a more dignified position with Damien crouched beside him offering what appeared to be expert consultation.

“They look happy,” Daniel said, watching them.

“They are happy,” I said.

He looked at me.

“And you,” he said. “Are you happy, Mia?”

I thought about the question.

About a rainy street and a cream colored card and a studio with north facing windows and eleven paintings finally facing outward and a man who had come because his mother sent him and stayed because he chose to, every day, in all the small ways that choosing happened.

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

My father looked at me for a long moment.

Then he smiled, and it was a real one, and we walked the rest of the way home through the snow together.