Page 28 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

“Make a wish and mean it,” Vivi now said, echoing May’s words from so many years ago.

She could almost sense Calla’s smile in the dark. Mischievous, cajoling. Impossible to refuse. “I wish to go to Arles and find K. P.Lý’s offering. And I wish that my sleepwalking killjoy of a sister would come along with me.”

When does love, like the protean night sky, shift into something unrecognizable?

After May left, Vivi often asked herself this question. She stored a cache of good memories in her heart, like a line of jars awaiting the brutal dearth of winter, and revisited them in her private moments, examiningeach for signs of falsehood.Tu?ndriving her to school with the windows down, letting her belt out Mariah Carey as they sped along the country roads. May taking the sisters to the art museum in Madison, buying each a souvenir they couldn’t afford from the gift shop. Could Vivi trust any of those memories? It’d been better if they’d been mirages; then, at least, there would be a logical arc to follow. But no matter how much she prodded, she found that the memories were pure, they were true. Yet—like that—the good moments were gone, smashed to bits, as if they’d never existed. It would never make sense to her, this seismic shift in her reality.

The only constant had been Calla. Over and over again, Vivi pledged that she would never leave her sister. Where Calla went, Vivi would follow, like Pollux bargaining eternity to resurrect his brother. She saw that Calla would go to France; she’d already set her mind on it. If Vivi didn’t go with her, Calla would be on her own, vulnerable to any manner of temptations. And maybe, against all odds, Calla might succeed. Vivi hated the thought of not being there to uncover the offering. It’d become her mystery too.

“I’ll take your silence as agreement,” Calla said sleepily.

“Yes,” Vivi told her finally. “Yes, okay. You win. We’ll go to France.”

“Oh, good. Because I booked the tickets while you were sleeping.”

“You didn’t.” The laugh was already blooming in Vivi’s chest.

“Happy birthday.”

“You already gave me my present.”

“Yeah and then you handed it over to fucking Paul. Do you think we’ll find the offering in Arles?”

“No. But we’ll look.”

“I wish Dad were going with us.”

Vivi pretended to be asleep. But on her side, she listened to the hum of the radiator kicking on and off, unsure of whether to warm or cool the room, until daybreak crept in, extinguishing every last bit of starlight.

Chapter 10

Mist draped onto the Citroën as they drove up to the entrance of Maison de Notre Rêve. The estate emerged through a haze, little resembling the vibrancy Vivi had memorized in Van Gogh’s sun-drenched paintings. Aside fromMoonbathers,Lýhad never painted Arles. Or Europe, for that matter. Yet it was easy to imagine what he saw when he walked from the train station, past the cobblestone streets and out onto the dusty paths that traced the Rhône.

Vivi didn’t glimpse the lauded Provençal light that day, but she could imagine it. Van Gogh had a vision for a utopian Arles that would welcome the most innovative artists. He’d seen flourishing salons, painters dangling cigarettes as they loped along the streets, uninhibited color and romance, a display of unleashed, instinctive force. PerhapsLýmight have found himself reflected in the other artist’s vision.

After the last letter from Justine in 1936, there was no other mention ofLý—L—in Blanc’s correspondence. To the siblings, it was as if he’d never existed beyond that summer. EvenLý’s disappearance, seven years later, didn’t elicit any missives to or from Justine. The silence around L didn’t feel incidental to Vivi.

Maison de Notre Rêve lay at the center of the property past a fence with blocky posts. A drive curved around a stone fountain from which a statue of Diana of the Hunt emerged, her palm bent toward the sky inoffering. A bird sat on her sculpted fingertips, tail erect as the vertical bar of an exclamation mark. They’d left Rathmore three days ago, but already, the time on campus felt like a moment from another life.

Beyond the gardens, along the farthest boundary, Vivi made out a small building thumbed from a clearing. It was camouflaged and inconsequential, a rattling coin inside an oversized purse.

“Do you think the cottage is open to the public?” Calla asked, pointing.

“That’s it?” Vivi was distracted, unaccustomed to driving, much less driving in the rain in another country. But she’d be damned if she let Calla, with her lead foot, get behind the wheel. “Doesn’t look like much.”

“I’d build it in painted straw,” Calla said dreamily. “With dried clovers for grass. And then I’d drape everything in organza.”

“You could. Paint it, I mean. Or collage it, whatever. Did you bring your sketchbooks?”

“I haven’t worked since—” Calla picked a piece of lint off her knee, flicked it out the window where it looped into the wind.

“SinceEnmeshment?”

Calla pressed her lips together, refusing to be caught by her sister’s conversational hook. It was as if there was a hole where the memory should have been. But wasn’t Vivi masking herself in amnesia too? If she could have, Vivi would have chosen to erase two moments from her life: the night her mother disappeared and that wretched night of Calla’s opening. Both cleaved the sisters in opposite and irreversible ways.

Calla cut her eyes away from Vivi. “There’s the lot. Park as close as you can, will you? I don’t want my hair getting wet.”

Inside the Maison de Notre Rêve, a tinkling melody came from the lobby speakers. Near the baseboards, a cleaning person stooped with a rag, working at the scuffs with weary patience. All the obvious signs of a hotel were there—signage in teal and cream, a scalloped logo embossed on linen stationery, chairs arranged in tête-à-tête formations—and theirsedate order irritated Vivi. She wanted to feel like she was inLý’s home, but any connection had been neatly severed by the deliberate ahistoricity of the inn.