Chapter 79 The Morning After

Chapter 79 The Morning After
I woke at five.

Not because anything woke me. Because my body had decided that sleep was finished and the day was beginning whether I was ready for it or not, and I lay in the dark listening to Damien's steady breathing beside me and thought about the letter in my bag and the thirty five paintings on the walls of a gallery on West 24th Street and Rosa Santos writing keep going in a rented room in Paris in nineteen ninety three.

I got up quietly.

Made water. Went to the studio.

The north facing windows were dark at five in the morning but the city outside provided its own ambient light, the particular amber burning of New York at night that never fully went dark, and I stood in it and felt the particular quality of the morning after something significant.

Not deflation exactly.

The opposite of deflation.

The feeling of something having arrived completely and now existing permanently in the world in a way it had not existed before yesterday evening, and the understanding that permanently was not a small word and deserved to be stood in quietly for a moment before the day began.

My phone buzzed on the worktable.

Daniel.

I answered immediately.

"You are awake," he said.

"Yes," I said. "You too."

"I have not slept," he said. Not with distress. Simply as a fact. "I have been sitting in the apartment. Rosa's apartment. I came here after the opening. I needed to be somewhere that was hers."

I sat on the studio floor beneath the north facing windows.

"Tell me," I said.

He was quiet for a moment.

"I have been thinking about nineteen ninety three," he said. "The café in the Marais. Sitting across from her and not knowing what I was looking at." He paused. "I have spent thirty years not forgiving myself for that. For being twenty four and distracted and not seeing her properly."

"Daniel," I said.

"Let me finish," he said gently.

I waited.

"Last night," he said, "I watched people stand in front of her work and see her completely. Strangers who had never met her, who had only read a magazine article and come to a gallery on a Tuesday night, standing in front of her paintings and understanding immediately what I did not understand in thirty years of knowing her." He paused. "And I realized something."

"Tell me," I said.

"She did not need me to see her," he said quietly. "Not then. She was already seeing herself, that is what the self portrait is, that is what she was doing in that café when I was not paying attention. She was already completely herself. She did not require my understanding to be that." He stopped. "I have been grieving my failure to see her for thirty years as though my seeing was the thing she needed. It was not. She needed a canvas and a brush and somewhere to put the seeing. She had all of those things."

I sat with that.

The particular specific truth of it settling into the quiet of the studio.

"You kept the paintings," I said softly.

"Yes," he said.

"For thirty years," I said. "You moved them every time you moved. You could not let them go. You did not know why." I paused. "You were keeping them for this. For last night. For the moment they found the room they were always supposed to fill."

He was quiet for a long time.

"Yes," he said finally. "I think that is right."

"You did see her," I said. "Just not in the way you thought seeing was supposed to look."

Another long silence.

"Mia," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"I want to ask you something," he said. "And I want you to answer honestly without worrying about my feelings because I am sixty one years old and I can manage my own feelings."

"Ask," I said.

"Is it too late," he said. "For us. For whatever this is. A father and a daughter who did not know each other for twenty three years and are now trying to work out what to be." He paused. "Is it too late for it to be something real."

I looked at the dark windows.

At the city outside doing its five in the morning thing.

I thought about Serena who had flown back and sat at a kitchen table and handed Felix to her son and built something slow and real from nothing. I thought about Eleanor and Damien and four years of distance becoming Wednesday dinners and windswept flowers. I thought about Marcus and thirty years of a wound becoming a logistics company in eleven countries and a book about dinosaurs chosen carefully for a nephew.

Nothing in this story had been too late.

Everything had simply arrived when it arrived.

"No," I said. "It is not too late."

He exhaled.

"I want to be there," he said. "In April. When she comes."

I had not asked him. I had been thinking about asking him and not knowing how to do it without it feeling like more than he had been offered and I was not yet certain what he had been offered.

"Yes," I said. "I want you there."

"And the spare room," he said. "In the Paris apartment. When you bring her to see the exhibition in Paris. If you bring her."

"We are bringing everyone to Paris," I said. "That has been established."

"Gerald too," he said.

I almost smiled.

"Gerald is family," I said.

"Yes," Daniel said. "He is."

We were quiet together on the phone for a moment.

"I am going to try to sleep," he said. "A few hours before the day starts."

"Good," I said.

"Mia," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"Thank you," he said. "For calling me that Sunday from Eleanor's brownstone. For saying not yet to the idea that there was a version of this that was too complicated to attempt." He paused. "For attempting it anyway."

I looked at the north facing windows beginning to lighten, the city outside surrendering to dawn, the first pale edge of a March morning arriving whether anyone was ready for it or not.

"Keep going," I said softly.

A beat.

Then he laughed. Quiet and warm and entirely real.

"Keep going," he agreed.

He hung up.

I sat under the north facing windows as the morning arrived and thought about Rosa Santos in her rented room in Paris writing a letter to someone she would never meet and being completely certain they would come.

She had been right.

They had come.

We had all come.

And the light was coming through the windows now, pale and honest and exactly right.

The day was beginning.