Page 2 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Ink now bleeds from the clouds, shadowing the last of the day. Vivi fiddles with the silver antler ring in her pocket, one of the mementos leftbehind by May. She hasn’t told Calla about the ring, but Calla will find out. The secrets never manage to grow between them.

“Calla?” she calls. “You can come out now. This is a stupid game.”

She imagines Calla falling into the creek, bitten-down fingertips slipping beneath the surface. Wiggling a farewell. Vivi races toward that thin vein of the woods. Her feet stir the leaves and shuffling night creatures. But the creek’s surface is glass, reflecting a swarm of midges, the black cathedral of trees.

Vivi wants her mother, even as she feels her anger leaping out in unexpected places, then disappearing just as quickly. What would May do in this situation? Vivi doesn’t know anymore. With each passing year, the memory of her mother frays into another woodland story, draped from the boughs like moss. How to hate something that no longer exists?

Vivi makes her decision. She will go back to the farmhouse and findTu?n. She’ll pull him into their hidden world, allow him to slice it open with his impotent rage, his unceasing blame. She has no choice. She is the protector and she has failed.

But then she hears a muffled giggle. She looks up and there Calla sits on a low branch, feet dangling in hand-me-down sneakers. She’d drawn a series of hearts on the outer sole and colored them in with a red Sharpie. Each as precise as a stamp.

Vivi blinks into this version of reality, one where Calla is not in danger at all, where they can be kids playing in a safe pocket of nature. How close the two realities were, how much slippage between their borders.

“Why didn’t you come out when I called?”

“That’s not how you play Seekers.” Calla hops down nimbly, spits a hunk of black hair out of her mouth.

“When did you learn to climb?”

Calla gives her a secretive smile. “Let’s play again.”

Later, it would come to Vivi, the way a sudden thunderstorm descends on a body, all white-hot flashes and skin-sluicing chill, that she had been the one to teach Calla to run. Before their minds and imaginations were fully formed, they’d learned together all the ways to hide from the world, and each other.

Chapter 1

September 2022

Vivi and Samuel sat in the dark, except for the flicker of birthday candle at the center of the dining room table. The candle illuminated a painted wooden box with a latch, inside which nestled an antique Frenchchatelaine, a belt clip once used by ladies of the manor.

The clip was an ornate crest of silver filagree, inset with a square sapphire. Delicate chains hung from the clasp. One held a tiny pair of scissors; another, a thimble. All the necessary accoutrements for a woman of consequence, meticulously restored. Samuel’s chatelaine was one of those gifts that comes around once in a lifetime; so considered and original that Vivi could only wonder how he had known what she wanted when she could never articulate such a thing for herself.

“The setting is from the eighteenth century, but the jewel was likely plundered long before that,” he said, fiddling with the button on his cuff. He was nervous, trying to hide it. “The chatelaine made its way across Europe after the Reign of Terror and during the Napoleonic Wars. Can you imagine what it might have seen?”

Samuel Noi, art historian and curator, could not help but be attuned to the echoes of the past. Vivi, in her role as a conservator, was no stranger to a beautiful artifact either. But where he saw romance, she ferried hermind toward the materiality of the object, cataloguing details of construction and provenance. She wanted to know the what; he, the why. They were suited in that way, two levers of the same passion.

She lifted the chatelaine and studied the sapphire, refracted in oceanic reservoirs that pulled the eye downward, into its shadowed heart.

“This is exquisite, Sam. I’ve never owned anything like it.”

His glasses were falling down his nose and his curls—dark, lush, still damp from his shower—stroked against his forehead like crooked fingers. Those curls were the only part of him that he ever permitted to become unruly. She wanted to reach over and wind one around her finger.

“But did you see the key?” he asked, pointing.

It was not an antique, only a standard house key hung like an afterthought from this centuries-old piece of jewelry. The key’s head was inscribed with her initials.VN. No one, she reflected, could execute a gesture like this man.

“I’d like you to move in with us,” Samuel said.

She held the key in her hand, turning it this way and that, as if it held an answer within the glints of light.

She’d turned thirty-four that morning. Around her, the eclectic order of Samuel’s Hyde Park brownstone. Paintings by local artists, a Japanese woodblock print that Vivi had given him upon his promotion to lead curator, an air-dry clay sculpture that his five-year-old daughter, Phoebe, had abandoned. The plaid loveseat looked as if it could have come straight from a 1990s sitcom. It was worn-in, slumped in welcoming divots, but spotlessly clean, like the rest of his home. Each book had its place on the shelf; each shoe, its designated rack. Through the sliding sash window, she could see the blinking of the Chicago skyline, a reminder of how far she’d come.

By contrast, Vivi’s Lakeview studio had the appearance of a temporary lodging. Her furnishings had been purchased for utility rather than beauty. A jar of olives sat lonely in the fridge. Hidden in her nightstand,the cigarettes Samuel hated. After her childhood, she’d become pathologically frugal, ever fearful that the financial rug would be pulled out from under her. Consequently, most of her wages lay unspent in a savings account. Her studio remained coldly spare.

The chatelaine, so treasured a moment before, now summoned panic in her. Its chains turned metaphorical.

After a pause, he asked, “Do you remember how we first met?”

“I was restoring the umbilicus on a handscroll. Song dynasty, silk, with an ivory toggle shaped like a trout.” She could still see the dirt that’d gathered in the depressions of the carved gills. Clay and sweat and skin cells, all the living and dead matter of the world collected inside the minutiae of art.