Page 86 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

With twin nods, the sisters drew their arms back and released their hammers into the hollow square, into what would have been the core of the sundial. Again and again, like a cathartic dance. Calla, then Vivi. Vivi, then Calla. Wood splintered and crackled in on itself. Outside, thunder groaned. It only took a dozen swings before they revealed the gaping hole.

Inside was a single ledge that held a long, flat object. The sisters dropped their hammers.

Vivi paused to meet Calla’s gaze at the same time that Calla sought hers. Vivi never thought they looked alike, but at that moment, she felt the inevitable homecoming of meeting her own reflection. In this case, it was a homecoming mixed with alienation and a searing sadness she couldn’t yet understand.

Later, she’d come to see that it had been this very search that had held them together. Now, that search was at an end. Who knew how long it might have taken for them to come back together without Calla’s discovery in their father’s shed? Vivi might never have found the courage to be honest; Calla might not have learned how to hold her sister’s pain. Once the engine of the mystery died, they would have to decide what they would be to each other.

This time, Vivi asked the question. “Ready?”

Calla nodded firmly. “Yes.”

Together, they lifted the object out of its hole and blew off the dust.

It was a folding screen, roughly the size of a small shelf. Vivi recognized it as a quarter-sized version of the famed Japanese screens she’d studied back at Rathmore. This particular screen’s smallness meant that its purpose was decorative rather than functional. Calla made a small oomphing noise, like a child startled from a dream. Vivi touched one of the metal hinges, now corroded into rough nubs. It was a miracle that time hadn’t done more damage to their great-grandmother’s offering.

“I almost don’t want to unfold it,” Calla said.

“Yes, you do.” A smile ghosted on Vivi’s lips.

“You’re right, I do.”

Then, gently moving away from each other, the sisters pulled the screen apart, revealing the painted panels that’d been collapsed for over three-quarters of a century. There were four in all, oil on plywood. Vivi thought she could still smell the faint residue of turpentine and resin, even as she knew that must be an illusion.

From the window, the glow of lightning broke into the room in startling flashes.

Each panel was small enough to be a miniature painting in its own right. If you glanced at one in passing, you might never take a second look. All you’d see would be a palette of abstract color. A statement of blue, devoid of meaning.

But Vivi and Calla knew better.

The sisters lifted the panels closer to their faces. Ran their fingertips over the edges of the plywood. Squinted, peered, and wondered. The artist and the conservator, worshippers at a temple of discovery. The paint on the panels was layered so thickly it seemed almost edible, like frosting.Tâm’s signature impasto, a gift of excess from her overflowing heart.

Vivi examined the hues of squalling oceans, cosmos dimpled with stars, deep-hearted crystals, a macaw’s glossy wing. Glancing over, she saw that Calla was hypnotized by her own experience of their great-grandmother’s art. Vivi wished she could see what her sister did. Feel the art as she did. The tragedy of the human experience is in how avidly we each resist translation, even as we yearn to be understood.

Each of the panels carried a scene.

On one, a mother pushed a hammock strung between two bamboo trees. Within the husk of the hammock, viewers could see the outlines of a baby’s profile, eyelids frosted over with twilight.

On the next, that same mother trailed her young son in a field of lavender. Their feet were shielded by the tall foliage, he was turning to call her. The child had been frozen in a euphoric midair leap.

The third panel portrayed the mother—now grayer of hair, stouter of frame—watching from the shore as the son swam at the edge of a lake, his arms cutting through the water as mountains towered beyond them.

The last used the lightest palette of all, brushed in pale shades that took on a diaphanous quality, like organza placed atop ice. In this panel, the woman was in her sixties or seventies. She sat on a bench. Next to her, the son—a grown man, his own face weathered—held her hand. The sun was so brilliant that it bleached the background to near white, flattening the perspective so that all one could see was the mother and her child. The rest—the context—was incidental.

If they read the panels in order, the sisters would see the timeline of a life unlived. They’d find evidence of wishes long buried but never forgotten. On these, the last ofTâm’s paintings, there were no monstrous creatures, no chasing demons. Only peace. Only sorrow.

Few critics would name this folding screen as a masterwork. It could be read as saccharine domestic art, to be sure, a decorative piece for the mantle, nothing more. Vivi could hear Dylan and Smith’s damning survey. The panels weren’t especially virtuosic in technique nor original in subject matter. At best, they were sentimental reproductions of what Mary Cassatt had accomplished a half century before, made marginally more interesting because of their medium. Devoid of ideological prowess.

But Vivi knew that no matter whatTâmhad painted, she would havelikely been lost to the ivory temples of history. She wasn’t white or wealthy, stylish or socially adept. Any true ambition she felt for herself had been killed in a locked shed, when she was little more than a child subjected to the brutality of a man who felt entitled to her humanity.

Hadn’t Vivi’s own sense of destiny and selfhood been destroyed that first day she began to cower from her father? Violence seeks to tame all our inner wildness, until what’s left is a desperate apology for our existence. Until all that remains is the dim impression of a dying light.

“We have to showC?uKi`êu,” Vivi said, coming back to herself. IfTu?nhad found this offering, what might it have healed in him? She wondered if art could ever be enough; symptom or cause of the human condition. “Button, did you hear me?”

Vivi realized that Calla was weeping. The sound of her tears had been drowned by the rain. Her lips moved; her eyes asked a question of Vivi. The drumming from outside the house had become so loud that Vivi couldn’t tell if Calla was speaking. If Vivi’s own words had found shape and destination in her sister’s ears.

Lightning struck somewhere very near the house. It was at that moment when Vivi saw that the storm had become an onslaught. The turn toward disaster had been sudden, as if someone had released a valve on a faucet. Rain pelted from the sky. Squealing gales ripped branches from the trees and swung them onto the sides of the house. It felt as if some great army had begun an assault on them.

The sisters jumped when they heard the crack of glass as a massive branch struck the west-facing window. The hairs on Vivi’s arms stood at attention, each illuminated in white. Electricity tingled against her skin.