He nodded.
“The idea would be to replace the original with a copy so good, they would never notice anything different—ever. The painting would be on no lists, no stolen art databases. But we still shouldn’t sell it here. In America.” She held his knees in her hands. “We’d go to Europe together, and after that, we could go anywhere. We could have any kind of life.”
“We could come back,” he said. “After we sold it.”
“Riley, I have to get out of here. I’m suffocating. I came back because I can’t stand to be without you, but there’s nothing for me here. At least, not now. I feel like we might as well be thirty already, and I don’t want to feel like that. I mean, are you happy?”
“What about the other stuff? The plan, Greg—”
“Greg is going to fuck it up. I’m positive.”
“I can’t just cut him out,” Riley said.
“If we both pull out, what’s he going to do? Go in there alone?”
“Alls.”
“He’s not going to do it,” she said, growing frustrated. “But if you think they can pull it off without you, then what’s the worry? They get to split the proceeds fifty-fifty. They’re happy. But if we stay here, something is going to happen to us. I know it. I can feel it.”
He took her hands in his. “What do you want, Gracie? I just want to give you what you want. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, for you to be happy with just me—”
She looked at the piece of paper in his lap. “You can paint this, Riley. I know you can.”
The next day, Riley made his first visit to the Wynne House since his own school field trips. When he came home, he disappeared into the basement, and Grace collapsed on the couch with relief.
? ? ?
The painting was not difficult for him. The first day he stretched the linen canvas, nailing it onto its temporary frame instead of stapling it. They discussed aging the fabric with tea, coffee, or dirt, but decided that aging didn’t matter. The goal was for the painting to look good enough in its frame to never be noticed. They called it “Still Life with Money and Tulips.” He applied the sizing and began the underpainting. Every night, he hid the canvas behind the courthouse painting.
Riley had asked her to let him tell Greg that he—they—were out, but he was slow to do so. The next week, Greg sold the sound system from his car to buy getaway cars. He had decided they needed two. Riley continued to nod in agreement when Greg debated the best place to steal license plates. Grace had been so careful lately, not wanting to create any doubt or disturbance, but finally, she pressed him.
He knew Greg was going to be disappointed, he said.
“Disappointed.”
“Yeah,” Riley said. “Disappointed.”
He was a coward, she thought, too addicted to positive attention to risk any other kind. His parents had loved him too much. The accusations coiled up inside her, rearing back to strike, but she felt the change in pressure and fled. She ran upstairs and yanked on her sports bra and laced up her running shoes. She was out the door and sprinting down the block before she had time to answer him.
He was a good person, she chanted in time with her stride. A good person. She was a very lucky girl to have him. She was a very lucky girl. A very lucky girl. A very lucky girl.
She hadn’t brought any water, so when she got too thirsty to go on, she went into the drugstore to use the fountain. Alls had been home when she left. She never went there when he was working. Gasping for breath, Grace went down the makeup aisle toward the pharmacy, eyes down at her knees, pink from the cold, and almost walked into the two women standing at the end of the aisle, waiting to pick up their prescriptions and quietly talking with each other.
“Gracie,” Mrs. Graham said, smiling apprehensively.
The other woman turned toward her. It was her mother.
Grace stumbled back. They didn’t look a thing alike, but at that moment, their two faces appeared as a nightmarish replication. “Excuse me,” she said.
She turned around and ran home.
? ? ?
Riley’s father lent him the money to pay his taxes, and Riley used it to buy Grace an open-ended plane ticket and admission to an eight-week summer study abroad program in Prague. He didn’t want them leaving Garland at the same time, he said. He wanted it to look like he was going to visit his girlfriend during her summer study abroad, and when the program was over, they would travel around together for a while. She was wholly relieved to see him focusing, cautiously, on these details of presentation. He was thinking like her, finally. To account for the windfall that would later allow him to go to Europe, he told his parents he had sold three dog portraits on commission, payment upon delivery, to an out-of-towner who had seen his work at Anne Findlay when she passed through over the holidays visiting family. Grace regretted only that he’d lied so self-deprecatingly. He needed to hang on to some of his arrogance to get them through this.
He was just as cautious about the forgery taking shape in the basement. She wished he would pick up the pace a little bit. It was almost May—she was leaving in just six weeks, and she didn’t want them to rush the switch. They needed to choose their day carefully. Riley would take the Wynne tour alone, as Grace had, and once he was upstairs with the docent, Grace would come in behind him with her big purse containing Riley’s painting, stretched around a thin frame; the quiet pneumatic staple gun she would use to secure the canvas; and a knife to cut out the Bosschaert.
At night, she and Riley lay in bed facing each other, talking quietly about the secret life that awaited them. “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” they said again and again, as if they were having an affair. The dull pink roses and rust-tipped tulips blooming in the basement had begun to look very sweet and beautiful to her, and Grace felt a greater potential for happiness, or for the relief she had decided was happiness, than she had in a very long time.
22
Three weeks before she was supposed to leave Garland forever, Grace was spending the day in the public library looking at back issues of Architectural Digest, compiling a list of European dealers from the advertisements. Riley had gone to his parents’ for dinner.
His mother had called him to arrange it, after leaving a tentative message on Grace’s phone and receiving no response. When Riley called her, Grace said she had too much of a headache from reading to talk to anyone tonight, but to please give everyone a hug for her.
“You haven’t been over there in months,” Riley had realized then.
“I know,” Grace had said. “I don’t know how it happened.”
“We should go next week. In case it’s a while before we see them again.”
Now she worried what they were saying at the Grahams’ house without her there.
Riley texted her at eight. “You need to be gone when I get home,” the message said. “I’ll meet you at the arboretum as soon as I can, but please wait for me there. Will explain.”
Her fears leapt: Something had gone horrifically wrong. The Grahams were having her arrested. Her mother had told them that Grace was not to be trusted and now—what? Riley had let something slip. Lana’s video of her sobbing meltdown had gone viral.
She sat shivering in the arboretum. She and Riley used to sneak in at night for fun and debauchery. Her thighs were cold and wet from the deep damp of the concrete benches. She stared at the outlines of the bushes against the sky until it was too dark to make anything out.
Riley came at ten. He kissed her, and she was relieved. Whatever the catastrophe was, it was not that.
“Your lips are freezing,” he said.
“I’ve been here since the library closed. What is it?”
“So, this afternoon, I told Greg I was out of the plan. Really out, totally out. The plan is nuts, he’s nuts to do it, too much risk for not enough money, all that. And, you know, he wasn’t pleased.”