Chapter 73: Coming Home

New York received us the way New York always received returning travelers.

Without sentiment.

The city was simply there when the plane descended through the clouds, grey and enormous and entirely occupied with its own business, and the skyline through the window was the same skyline that had always been there and would always be there and did not adjust its presentation for anyone arriving or leaving.

Noah pressed his face against the glass.

“We are back,” he announced.

“Yes,” Damien said.

“Gerald knows,” Noah said. “He can feel it.”

“What does New York feel like to Gerald,” Eleanor said from the seat behind them.

Noah consulted the rabbit with his eyes closed for a moment.

“Like home,” he said simply. “But louder than Paris.”

The airport was everything airports always were. Long corridors and bright light and the particular exhausted efficiency of people moving through a space that was designed for transit rather than arrival. Noah walked the entire length with the focused determination of someone completing a challenge, then announced his legs were finished at the final corridor and allowed himself to be carried by Damien with the dignified acceptance of someone granting a significant concession.

Thomas was at the arrivals exit.

He looked at the assembled group, larger now than when we had left, with Daniel among us having decided to extend his visit by two weeks, and he simply opened the car doors and began organizing the luggage with the particular wordless competence that made him irreplaceable.

The drive into the city felt different from the drive out.

Not the city. The city was exactly itself. Something in the looking at it that had been adjusted in Paris, calibrated by two weeks of a different scale of beauty, and was now readjusting to this one, finding it again for what it was which was not lesser than Paris or greater than Paris but simply itself, which was considerable.

We dropped Eleanor and Catherine at the brownstone first.

Eleanor stood on the pavement and looked at the group of us in a way that was entirely unlike the Eleanor of months ago. That Eleanor had been watching from careful distances. This one was simply here.

“Wednesday,” she said. “Dinner. All of you.”

It was not an invitation.

It was a scheduling announcement.

“Wednesday,” everyone confirmed.

We dropped Daniel at the hotel he had booked near the West Village, which he had chosen with the particular deliberateness of someone wanting to be close to Rosa’s apartment without being presumptuous about it.

He stood on the pavement and looked at me.

“The apartment,” he said carefully. “I would like to see it again. Before the paintings go back, if they come back.”

“They are coming back,” I said. “After the exhibition. They belong there.”

He nodded.

“Sunday,” I said. “Come Sunday.”

“Sunday,” he agreed.

He went in and we drove to the building with the north facing windows and took the elevator up and the apartment received us the way it always did, with warmth and the particular quality of a space that had people in it who belonged there.

Noah went immediately to check on his dinosaurs.

We heard him from the hallway, conducting an inventory, reporting findings to Gerald with the thoroughness of a returning supervisor confirming that operations had continued correctly in his absence.

“Everyone is here,” he reported. “The Brachiosaurus is still in the center.”

“Good,” Damien called back.

I stood in the living room for a moment.

Looking at the space.

The tree was gone, taken down the week after Christmas by Grace. The apartment had returned to its ordinary self, which was warm and book filled and slightly imperfect in the specific ways that made it feel lived in rather than arranged.

Damien came to stand beside me.

“Home,” he said.

“Home,” I confirmed.

He put his arm around me and I leaned into him and we stood there for a moment in the quiet before the ordinary noise of the apartment resuming its life gathered around us again.

The next morning I went to the studio.

The north facing windows were doing their January thing which was honest and pale and exactly right for starting something new. I stood in front of the empty canvas I had been circling since before Paris and understood that the circling was finished.

I knew what it was now.

I picked up a brush.

I painted for four hours without stopping.

What came out was Paris. Not a painting of Paris, not the tower or the river or the streets of Montmartre. The feeling of Paris. The particular quality of two weeks in which everything that had been building for months arrived at its proper arrangement and sat there, complete, visible, understood.

It was the most complex thing I had attempted.

Multiple figures, interior lit, each one casting their own specific warmth, the composite light of all of them together making something that was not any individual brightness but a collective one.

The family.

Not their faces.

The feeling of them.

All in the same light.

I was still working at noon when Diana called.

“I need you at the gallery,” she said. “Today if possible.”

“What happened,” I said.

“Nothing bad,” she said. “The opposite.” A pause. “The journalist filed her piece early. The magazine moved the cover forward.”

I set down my brush.

“How far forward,” I said.

“Two weeks,” Diana said. “They want to run it on the first of February. Which is eleven days away.”

I looked at the north facing windows.

Eleven days.

“Are we ready,” I said.

“The documentation is registered,” Diana said. “The estate is formally established. Isabelle has confirmed the Paris exhibition is on schedule. Elise Moreau’s connections to the fourth jurisdiction have been forwarded to the magazine’s legal team and they are satisfied with the protections in place.” She paused. “The only remaining question is whether you are ready.”

I thought about Rosa Santos and thirty four paintings and thirty two years of a wall and Jonathan Cole’s nineteen ninety seven filing and four words in a book margin.

The light comes through.

“Yes,” I said. “I am ready.”

“Come at three,” Diana said. “The journalist wants to meet you before the piece goes to print. A final conversation.”

I cleaned my brushes and went.

The gallery was quiet in its Monday afternoon way when I arrived. Diana met me at the door with the focused expression she wore when she was managing something important and was satisfied with how the management was proceeding.

The journalist was already there.

She was younger than I had imagined from her writing, somewhere in her early forties, with the particular quality of someone who had been paying close attention to the world for long enough that the attention had become visible in her face.

Her name was Sarah.

She stood when I came in and looked at me with the frank assessment of someone confirming that the person she had been writing about for six weeks matched the person she had been writing about.

“Mia Santos,” she said.

“Sarah,” I said.

We sat.

Diana brought tea and disappeared with the discretion of someone who understood her role in this particular moment was to be invisible.

Sarah looked at me for a moment.

“I want to ask you one thing,” she said. “Before we talk about the exhibition and the paintings and all of it.”

“Ask,” I said.

“Rosa Santos,” she said. “If she had known. If she had been able to see this, everything that has happened, the registration, the exhibition, the cover. What do you think she would have said.”

I looked at the gallery walls.

At the space where her paintings were going to hang in March.

I thought about a woman who had written four words in a book margin.

About a woman who had laughed easily and seen clearly and kept painting regardless of who told her to stop.

About a woman who had given her work to a nephew and trusted him with it and had been right to trust him because thirty years later the nephew had given it to the world.

“I think,” I said quietly, “she would have said it took long enough.”

Sarah looked at me.

Then she smiled.

A real one.

“Yes,” she said. “I think she would have.”

We talked for two hours.

About Rosa and about Paris and about the seeing that traveled through blood and time and about a four year old who had greeted eleven paintings and a man with eighteen months of good days who had spent them well.

About a family that had been broken in more ways than it had been whole and had become something else through the particular combination of honesty and proximity and the willingness to keep showing up.

About a rainy street.

About getting in the car.

When I left the gallery the afternoon was already going dark and the city was doing its January evening thing which was cold and lit and moving with the particular energy of a city that had decided winter was simply a condition to be operated in rather than endured.

I walked for a while before calling Thomas.

Past the gallery on West 24th where in six weeks Rosa Santos’s paintings were going to hang for the first time in New York and my paintings were going to hang beside them and the people who came through the door were going to encounter thirty four years of interior honesty in a single space.

Past a coffee shop that smelled like the coffee I could no longer drink and that I missed with the specific targeted grief of someone who had lost a small specific pleasure to a large specific joy.

Past a street that was just a street and that reminded me of no street in particular except all streets, the whole collected specific ordinary texture of a city that had been mine before any of this and was more mine now.

I stopped.

I looked at the city around me.

Then I took out my phone.

Not to call Damien or Diana or Catherine or anyone connected to the exhibition or the investigation or any of the architecture of the past year.

I called Rosa.

Not Rosa Santos.

My best friend Rosa.

Who had been there since the beginning.

Who had told me I deserved this for twelve years.

Who had lent me a red dress and told me to go.

She answered on the second ring.

“Mia,” she said.

“Can you meet me,” I said. “Now. Coffee. Wherever you are.”

A pause.

“The place on Ninth,” she said. “Twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes,” I said.

I put my phone away.

And then something happened that I had not expected and had not planned and that arrived with the particular quality of unexpected things that were not random but simply ready.

My phone buzzed.

A New York number I did not recognize.

I looked at it for a moment.

Then I answered.

“Miss Santos,” said a voice. Female. Professional. The particular tone of someone making a call they had been asked to make by someone else. “My name is Patricia Kim. I am calling on behalf of Senator Halliwell’s office.”

I stopped walking.

“Senator Halliwell is no longer in office,” I said carefully.

“No,” she said. “He is not. But he has asked me to reach out to you regarding something he discovered during the cooperation process.” She paused. “Something he believes belongs to you.”

I stood on the pavement in the January dark.

“What is it,” I said.

A pause.

“It is a painting,” she said. “Acquired approximately eight years ago through the Lichtenstein entity. A work on canvas, unsigned, authenticated as Rosa Santos.” She paused. “The documentation suggests it was created in nineteen ninety three. In Paris.”

I stared at the pavement.

“There is a thirty fifth painting,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Senator Halliwell wanted you to have it returned.”

The January city moved around me.

Cold and lit and entirely indifferent.

And somewhere a thirty fifth painting existed.

Rosa Santos.

Nineteen ninety three.

The year she arrived in Paris.

The first one.

Coming home.