Page 90 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Vivi crawled to the side of the roof and jumped down. The air smelled fresh and clean. The house, inconceivably, was still standing. But the next storm would probably sweep it clean away.

As she began walking back into the forest, she took one last glance up into the radiance of the sky, a radiance only achieved through immeasurable travail—through perseverance and heartbreak and the ageless yearning for beauty. And she understood thatTâmwas right.

Itwassuch a wild and glorious blue.

Chapter 33

During her tearful goodbye with her relatives in LongXuyên, Vivi asked them to keep an eye out for Calla. No one had seen her after the flood. She simply disappeared, her luggage still intact, her borrowed house slippers flung to opposite corners of the room, as if shed in haste. Her wallet and passport were the only things missing.

But as Vivi packed her own suitcase, she paused, struck by a thought. She went to the bureau. And she saw that the silver antler ring was also gone.

Fair was fair.

TheNguy?ns all agreed that Calla would return before long. No person could wander the world alone indefinitely, and certainly not Calla, who thrived on the admiration and challenge of those she loved. Vivi only shrugged. Her worry for her sister still trotted alongside her, the way it had all her life, but now she knew that she didn’t have to stop for it.

Ki`êuwrapped her father’s painting of the Deer Creek farmhouse in a yard of navy twill. “Take it. So you know that he loved you.”

Vivi would try to believe it. Because that was what was on the other end of this search. Not the journal and not the folding screen, or notjustthose things. Without ever admitting it, she’d spent these weeks searching for a piece ofTu?nthat she could look on without pain. Her relatives had given it to her, this unlikely crystal secreted in a hollow of cracked rock, and she would try to carry it for as long as she could bear.

In return, she handedTâm’s journal to her uncle, though her fingers tingled to pull it back. “Will you keep this? Your grandmother deserves to be remembered by the people she belonged to.”

What did it mean to belong to another person? For most of her life, with the exception of Calla, she’d evaded this sense of obligation, afraid that she’d squander what she’d been given. But you didn’t always get to choose who you belonged to. You only made yourself worthy of it.Tâmhad taught her this.

As she andKi`êuhugged, she imagined it was her father’s arms around her. It seemed right, this surrogate affection.

Before she left LongXuyên, she went one last time to the house by the ravine, carrying an Altoids tin that’d traveled around the world and back again. Her fingers skated in the grit of ashes as she threw them in a protective circle around her.

“Rest easy, Dad.” One day, she would find her mother’s grave too. There’d be time for more goodbyes. Greetings and farewells, the only constants of life.

Two months after she arrived back in Chicago, Vivi stood in Gallery C, meeting the eyes of her great-grandmother on the canvas on the wall. It was a Saturday afternoon. The Forster was full of patrons; there was barely room to stand in the galleries that heldSea to Earth. But she could easily dissolve the other presences, leaving an unfettered pathway between her and the painting.

When a piece of art belonged to you—or when you belonged to a piece of art—nothing could break that connection.

In Vivi’s periphery, a woman in a baseball cap was explaining the painting of the women in the mirrorto her bored teenage son. “This is the artist who defied all gender expectations. Imagine. Living that lie. Her story was so tragic, a cautionary tale.”

“It was a triumph. It washers,” Vivi said softly. The mother and songlanced at her, then moved on to the next painting, the blue lovers forgotten.

Vivi thought with a pang about the panels on the folding screen,Tâm’s last works, floating away in the flood. They should have been in the museums with the rest of her art. Instead, those panels sat at the end of the trailing ellipsis of her life. But of course, the screen was never meant for the public. It was an offering from a mother to her son.

Maybe it was only her imagination, but she saw a glimmer pass across her great-grandmother’s painted face, briefly animating her expression. Unlike the solemn visage she’d first glimpsed, Vivi now caught a wry twist ofTâm’s lips, a lively kindling in her eye.Tâm’s was the confidence of a woman in the throes of love. It was then that Vivi noticed what she’d missed in her rush to leave the Forster that night, weeks ago.

There was a crucial difference in the irises of the overpainted version and her restored version of the painting. In the restored version, the women weren’t staring at their own reflections or at the viewers, as everyone had thought for nearly a century. The women were looking at each other.

There, in the most intimate lands of longing, they’d at last found loving witness in one another. No matter what history decreed, that would be the immortalized conclusion to their painted story.

“We’re framingLý’s—Tâm’s—sketch,” Samuel said. He came up next to her, all attenuated limbs and solid warmth. She’d been afraid he wouldn’t show. “The one you’ve loaned us.”

“Where will you install it?”

“Next to the painting, of course. Where it belongs. We want to reprint your article about K. P.Lý’s true identity too, if you grant permission.”

She turned to him. They’d only been apart for almost three months, but it felt much longer. She was surprised to find that the usual buzzing under her skin, that frantic need to evade him, had ceased. Instead, she wanted to burrow into his presence.

“Of course I grant permission. I owe the museum that, and more.”

Recently, Vivi’s article was published in a local culture publication, where it’d begun making a minor ripple around the city—and farther afield. Several prestigious arts journals reached out about picking up the piece. ATribuneeditor wanted to commission a larger article onLýfor their Arts section; a contributor to theTimesemailed to ask if she’d be open to a profile about her role in the discovery. She suspected that Paul had something to do with the positive reception and broader dissemination of her piece. ButTâm’s story was strong enough to stand on its own. Its impact on the art community was only just beginning.

Abel and the curators debated about whether they should reviseTâm’s name and gender across placards and papers at the Forster. They settled on using her chosen pronouns and keeping her pseudonym. At Vivi’s suggestion, the title ofBlue Mirrorwas changed toBlue Lovers. She thought her great-grandmother would have liked that. Just one small word to alter an entire story.