Page 53 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Calla hadn’t told her anything aboutEnmeshment. In fact, she’d been downright cagey when Vivi asked about it. A surprise, Calla said. Earlier that summer, the sisters hadn’t been talking as much as they usually did.Will catch up after the show, Calla had texted, adding a custom button emoji, her preferred signature. When they did speak, it was in snatches, always over the phone and never in person. Calla was, by turns, shaky with nerves and overconfident in her work.Enmeshmentwould be either a disaster or the greatest thing Dominic had ever shown in his gallery. Mediocrity had never been an option for her.

Vivi was so glad to see Calla producing at all that she pocketed her worries and gave her sister space. It’d all be over after the opening anyway, and Calla would come racing back on the fumes of success, more ideas crowding that voracious brain of hers.

At the gallery, Vivi pulled the door open and brought with her a strong gust of wind that nearly knocked her into the crowd gathered by the door. Her expectant expression faltered, then slid off altogether.

Calla, wearing a sleek black sheath, looked drawn as she stood next to Wayland and Dominic. The three of them formed a beautifully lit diorama in front of one of Calla’s pieces,Clio,named after the goddess of history.Cliowas priced so much more expensively than the rest of the pieces in the show that patrons speculated that the artist hadn’t really wanted to sell it at all. In predictable fashion, that speculation led thosesame patrons to determineClioto be the most valuable, even if the reasoning behind that valuation was opaque to them. It had been the first painting to sell.

Vivi herself was the subject. The underlying photograph was one that Wayland had taken of her when they were teenagers. That first photograph, snapped in his childhood bedroom when she’d visited him after he sprained his ankle in the woods, was both earnest and imperfect, a frozen sample from an epoch she’d rather forget. Her hair from her homegrown cut was matted at the temples and a spot of acne budded on her chin. Her mouth was slightly agape, as if she were on the verge of speaking. Way had displayed the photograph on his bookshelf, an act that filled Vivi with such embarrassed joy that she could hardly look at it without flushing.

InClio,there was no such nascent tenderness, no unhurried nostalgia. Calla had blacked out Vivi’s eyes and inside of them, she’d painted a scene of a wedding, supplanting Vivi’s face for the bride’s. Inside the narrow opening of her mouth, a woodland tableau, dimly articulated yet striking, ghostly. Vivi hardly had time to considerCliobefore the argument pulled her attention away.

“You stole them,” Wayland said. He was staring with dumbfounded fury at Calla. “My photographs.”

Dominic glanced at Calla. “They’re his?”

“I was reimagining them.” No trace of apology marred her words.

“You didn’task,” Wayland said.

“You would have said no.”

A murmur traveled through the crowd. It wasn’t plagiarism, not quite, but what Calla had done was certainly an unlawful appropriation. All the more scandalous because the work belonged to the artist’s husband. In the back, near the bar, a journalist scribbled in her pad, her tongue jiggling against the corner of her mouth in gleeful schadenfreude. Someone was muttering,Is this performance art?But Vivi immediately saw that they were serious, all three of them.

“Hold on,” she began.

“This is an unforgivable theft,” Wayland said, as if Vivi hadn’t spoken.

“What’s mine is yours,” Calla said, still placid.

Wayland sneered. “No wonder this is your first show, after all those years. Tortured CallaNguy?n, who could never bear not to be the center of attention. And for what? You can’t create; you can only steal. What else have you taken for your art?”

Vivi pulled on his arm. The accusation, if he let it stand, would never leave Calla. “Way, that’s enough.”

He shrugged her off. Calla seemed callous in her distance. Eyes at half-mast, as if she were appraising a stretched canvas that wasn’t quite up to par.

“Why?” he asked through a stiff jaw. “Just tell me why.”

“For the same reason you keep fucking other people. Because I could.”

Vivi wanted to curl in on herself. Their rage hurt her, physically hurt her. She said, faintly, “Stop it, you two, stop it.”

She remembered wailing the same thing at her parents as they shouted above her head in the farmhouse kitchen. As a child, she’d always been afraid someone would discover their family’s dysfunction, then barge in to separate her and Calla. The memory summoned the old fear, tinged with crippling humiliation. She began to shudder as she took in the shocked faces around her, the sly photographs and texting fingers, eagerly sending out tentacles of gossip that would reach all corners of the city before long.You’ll never guess what happened with the Nguy?n sisters tonight.

As if finally attuned to her pain, Wayland and Calla turned to her, equally beseeching. Part of her wanted to go to Calla; the other part longed to reach out to Wayland. If she could be their bridge, maybe she could mend this rift. All she knew was that she wanted to erase their confrontation, even if it meant turning from the truth and asking her sister to hide from it with her.

Vivi said, “Tell him, Calla, tell him you didn’t do it. This was a misunderstanding. You would never.”

Pain flashed in Calla’s eyes, like lightning caught in a bottle. Vivicould see her sister’s thoughts, as clearly as if they’d been written in the air. Vivi was choosing Wayland over her, leaving her behind. She’d broken their ironclad alliance. Deeper than the force of that betrayal, Vivi sensed Calla’s puzzlement. All their lives, each sister had served as the other’s witness, affirming what was real and what was fantasy.

Yes, he really slapped you, and it was wrong.

Yes, she really left us, and it was wrong.

Yes, yes, yes, it all really happened and it was wrong.

What happened when the witness began to lie? When it turned out that the story of one’s life had been written not with ink, but with water that, under the press of time, dries to nothing?

Seeing all this in her sister’s expression, Vivi immediately regretted her words. She reached for Calla, an apology on her lips, but it was too late. Calla had begun to flinch away.