Chapter 75: February

The cover ran on a Tuesday.

I woke up that morning before my alarm and lay in the dark beside Damien and knew it was out before I checked my phone because the phone had been buzzing intermittently since four in the morning in a way that suggested the world had seen something and was reacting to it and had decided that reacting could not wait until a reasonable hour.

Damien was already awake.

He had been awake since four.

I could tell by his breathing.

"It is out," I said.

"Yes," he said.

I picked up my phone.

The cover was a photograph of the self portrait painting, the thirty fifth one, the first Rosa had made in Paris, with the woman at the table and the brush in her hands and the light coming from within her. Beside it, smaller, a photograph of me in the studio, not posed, taken by the journalist Sarah on the afternoon we had talked for two hours, standing in front of the woman in the doorway painting with my hands at my sides and the north facing light on my face.

The headline was four words.

The Light Comes Through.

I sat with that for a moment.

Sarah had found the margin note.

I had told her about the color theory book and the four words and she had listened with the complete attention she brought to everything and had not said anything at the time and I had not known she was going to use it this way.

The light comes through.

As a headline.

For the story of a woman who had kept painting regardless of everything and whose niece's niece had found the paintings thirty years later and carried them forward.

I showed Damien.

He looked at the screen for a long moment.

Then he said "Rosa would have approved."

I thought she would have too.

Rosa called at seven.

My Rosa. From the diner. Before I even had the phone fully to my ear she was already saying Mia you are on the cover of the magazine you are actually on the cover and I had to hold the phone slightly away because her voice had reached a register that the early morning did not entirely require.

"I know," I said.

"The painting," she said. "The self portrait. Mia. She looks like she knows everything."

"She knew she was going to keep going," I said.

"She did keep going," Rosa said. "And now the whole world knows it."

She hung up and called back four minutes later to say she had cried in the good way and that her mother had called from Queens having somehow already seen the cover and that her mother sent love and that the diner on Ninth where we had met for coffee on Thursday had the magazine in the window.

I laughed.

I had not expected the diner on Ninth.

But then I had not expected most of this.

By nine the messages were arriving from directions I had not anticipated. Diana called to say the gallery had received forty reservation requests for the March opening in the first two hours after the cover went live. Isabelle called from Paris to say the museum's website had crashed briefly from traffic and that the French press had picked up the story within an hour of the American edition going online.

Catherine called to say the estate registration had been formally acknowledged in three separate legal contexts already that morning by parties referencing the cover story, which was the legal equivalent of the documentation becoming undeniable.

Marcus called to say Victoria had cried and that he was not certain it was only the pregnancy.

Eleanor did not call.

She appeared at the apartment at ten with flowers and a newspaper that had picked up the story in its arts section and she set both on the kitchen table and looked at me with those dark eyes and said simply I am proud of you and I understood that she meant not just the cover but all of it, the whole year, every decision made and every room walked into and every door that had been a wall before someone pushed it.

Noah came out of his room at ten fifteen having been unaware of everything and looked at the magazine that Diana had messengered over and that was now on the kitchen table and examined the cover with his serious assessment.

He pointed at the self portrait.

"That is Rosa," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"She is on the cover," he said.

"Yes," I said.

He looked at the cover for another moment.

"Good," he said. "She should be."

He went back to his room completely satisfied.

Daniel called from the West Village apartment where he had gone that morning before the cover ran, to be near the paintings when it happened.

He did not say much.

He said the apartment feels different today and I understood what he meant without needing it explained further.

The day moved through itself.

I went to the studio in the afternoon.

Not to paint. To sit in the north facing light and let the day be what it was without trying to do anything with it. Some days required doing. This one required sitting.

I sat for two hours.

At four I picked up a brush.

What came out was not planned.

A woman at a table.

Not Rosa's woman. A different one. Older perhaps or younger, the age was not specific, with the same quality of being in the moment before beginning something and understanding that the beginning was the whole point.

Not the product of the beginning.

The beginning itself.

The moment of deciding.

I stepped back and looked at it.

It was not finished. It would not be finished today.

But it was started, which was the thing Rosa Santos had understood better than anyone and which was now hanging on the kitchen wall of the West Village apartment and on the cover of a magazine that had reached people in places I would never go and had made them look at a woman with a brush in her hands and interior light and understand something about the act of beginning that they had not understood before.

Damien appeared in the studio doorway at six.

He looked at the new canvas.

Then at me.

"Come have dinner," he said quietly.

"What are we having," I said.

"Noah has requested gnocchi," he said.

"Obviously," I said.

I cleaned my brushes.

I turned off the studio lamp.

I took one more look at the new canvas in the dark.

Then I went to have dinner with my family.