Jane falls asleep before she can hear Kiran’s reflections on heroes.
Her dreams are deep and wild. Ivy is running through a forest dressed in black. She’s in danger. She’s running away from Jane, vanishing behind tall, dark, slender trees. No. She’s turned. She’s running back toward Jane. As Ivy nears Jane, she slows, reaches out, hands Jane something. It’s an umbrella, and Jane realizes she’s not Ivy. She’s Aunt Magnolia, in the purple coat with the silver-and-gold lining.
The umbrella Aunt Magnolia hands Jane is the one she’s been working on, the one that looks lopsided and uneven, like the blue splotch in Aunt Magnolia’s eye. “It’s broken, darling,” she says, pressing it into Jane’s hands. “But it can still keep you safe.”
Jane wakes with a fuzzy-feeling mouth from not brushing her teeth the night before, and pins and needles in her legs from sleeping in jeans. The dream feels very near. She tries to hold on to it.
She emerges from her bedroom to find Kiran staring over Central Park through the glass walls of the penthouse, a coffee cup in her hands. When Jane joins her, the two of them witness a rare New York frogstorm. More of a drizzle, really, but enough to muck up the traffic and give the surface of the park the appearance of water, moving with hopping specks and waves of blue.
“How did you sleep?” asks Kiran.
“I had a wonderful dream,” says Jane.
*
It’s strange to step back into the receiving hall of Tu Reviens having missed the gala. It’s empty, stale; no musicians, caterers, or cleaners. No buzz of activity. The lilacs in the vases look, and smell, bruised somehow.
Kiran goes off to find Ravi and give him the news that the Vermeer is still well and truly gone.
Upstairs, Jasper lies outside Jane’s door with his nose to the crack. Seeing her, he leaps to his feet and comes running at her, lopsided and bandaged. As Jane kneels to receive his ecstatic, slobbery greetings, she has a startling sense of coming home. “Ow!” she cries as he scrambles into her lap, his claws digging into her thighs. “Jasper! You’re not small!”
In her rooms, she waits for a few moments, looking around, not sure what she’s waiting for. Then she sets off to find Ivy.
But when she encounters Mrs. Vanders in the kitchen, Mrs. Vanders tells her that Ivy’s gone away.
“Gone away!” says Jane. “Where? Is she coming back?”
Mrs. Vanders is tapping the keys on a laptop at one of the kitchen tables. Patrick stands at the stove sautéing garlic. “Of course she’s coming back!” says Mrs. Vanders. “Good god, girl. Don’t look so forlorn.”
“She didn’t tell me she was going.”
“Nor should she have,” says Mrs. Vanders crisply. “I strictly forbade it.”
“She was sorry to leave without explaining,” Patrick adds, glancing at Jane over his shoulder.
“This reminds me,” says Jane, in increasing annoyance. “I want to know about my aunt Magnolia.”
“Ivy asked me if she could be the one to tell you everything,” says Mrs. Vanders. “I said yes. It seemed important to her. So you’ll just have to wait.”
“Well, when’s she coming back?”
“In a few days,” says Mrs. Vanders.
For a couple of seconds, Patrick goes very still, staring at the wooden spoon in his hands. Then he lays the spoon on the stovetop carefully, switches the burner off, and says to Mrs. Vanders, “I’m done lying to Kiran.” He walks into the back of the kitchen and disappears through a door.
“Oh, god help us,” Mrs. Vanders says in alarm, springing up from the table, rushing off to follow him, then coming back, glaring in Jane’s general direction, slapping her laptop closed, and rushing off again.
“Jasper,” says Jane, focusing on the canine at her feet, who gazes up at her with his tongue hanging out. “I literally give up. None of them will ever make any sense. Well. As long as we’re waiting for Ivy, we should finish up the umbrella, don’t you think?”
*
The Aunt Magnolia umbrella is waiting for Jane, sitting in the middle of Ivy’s worktable, washed in the fading light of the morning room windows.
As her fingers move along its parts, fitting the uneven canopy against the mismatched ribs of the frame, Jane is thinking about broken things. She’s proud of herself, for stumbling and making mistakes but still, in the end, putting together the broken pieces of the mystery.
She wonders if she could fit the pieces of her life back together too.
Aunt Magnolia?
When the canopy is attached to the frame with that particular balance of not-too-loose, not-too-tight, Jane slides the runner up and props the umbrella open, then places it on Ivy’s worktable. She stands back. It’s crooked and inelegant, just as she meant it to be. It looks like one of those umbrellas you see sticking out of trash bins on rainy days. Except that its crookedness, if you look close, has a kind of balance that Jane has achieved with careful deliberateness, and it’s a good umbrella, an unusual umbrella that will protect her from rain. It’s also Jane’s secret, because when she looks at it in her peripheral vision, it becomes the spiky, spoky, foggy blue splotch of Aunt Magnolia’s eye.
I’ll never sell this umbrella, Jane thinks. This one’s for me.
“Jasper?” she says. “Want to go look at Aunt Magnolia’s photo?”
*
There’s some activity in the west wing of the second story. As Jane and Jasper walk down the corridor inspecting the art, Patrick comes out of a bedroom with a pile of sheets and blankets and dumps them on the floor. Mrs. Vanders follows with a vacuum cleaner.
“We’re clearing out the bedrooms that were used for the gala,” Patrick says, in response to Jane’s questioning glance. “This was Lucy St. George’s room, actually.”
Jane only manages a half-interested grunt, because she’s just discovered Aunt Magnolia’s photo on the wall across from Lucy’s room. It’s a big print. Backing away to get a better vantage point, Jane breathes it in.
A tiny yellow fish—that’s a goby—peeks out from inside the cavernous, sharp-toothed maw of some great gray fish with a bulbous nose. Jane remembers this photo; Aunt Magnolia took it in the waters near Japan. It’s always left Jane wondering. Has the big fish captured the small fish as food? Or, is the small, bright fish hiding inside the mouth of the big fish?
Jane is bursting with heartache and pride.
Then her perspective shifts and she notices a problem with the matting behind the photo. Something is creating an uneven bulge, as if the framer carelessly placed a thick rectangle of cardboard behind the print.
A framing mistake like that will ruin the print, and Aunt Magnolia’s photos deserve better care. “Mrs. Vanders?” Jane begins with mild indignation, and then, understanding, goes rigid and electric, like a bolt of lightning.
Jane reaches for the screwdriver in her pocket. Wordlessly, she lifts the frame from the wall. Laying it on the floor with the back facing up, she works at the screws that hold the frame in place.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” says Mrs. Vanders in an outraged voice, appearing beside her. “Just because that’s your aunt’s photo doesn’t give you license to take it apart! That’s an expensive frame!”
With trembling fingers, Jane removes the backing of the frame. Protective tissue-like paper lies under it, and through the tissue, Jane can see the outlines of what she knew she would find. Carefully, she takes hold of the edges of the thin paper and pulls it away.
Jane and Mrs. Vanders are looking down, astonished, at Lady Writing a Letter with Her Frog. Jane studies it. There’s something quieting, even awesome, about the fine web of cracks across the canvas, and its clean, soft light. It’s as if the lady, intent on her writing while sitting in a bath of light, is made of soft marble. As if marble can be a warm, living thing.
“Hold it up to the ceiling lamps!” says Mrs. Vanders.
Ever so carefully, Jane lifts the canvas by the edges and holds it up to the light. The lady’s eye glows like a tiny star.