“So I can find her,” he says flatly.
“You think your wife is real.”
“I know she is,” he corrects. “And so is my little girl. Sometimes I can hear her laughing, and I turn around, but she’s never there.”
“Have you been to Kentwood?”
“Twice,” Eric says. “And I’ll go back again, when we don’t have to quarantine anymore. Don’t you want to find them? The guy and his daughter?”
My throat tightens. “I don’t know,” I admit. “I’d have to be ready to accept the consequences of that.”
He’s lost a fiancée; he understands. “Before my accident, I was Catholic.”
“I read that.”
“I never even met anyone Muslim. I wasn’t aware there was a mosque in my town. But there are things I just know now, part of me, like my skin or my bones.” He pauses. “Did you know that the Sunni believe in Adam and Eve?”
“No,” I say politely.
“With a few differences. According to the Quran, God already knew before he created Adam that he’d put him and his offspring on earth. It wasn’t a punishment, it was a plan. But when Adam and Eve were banished, they were put on opposite ends of the earth. They had to find each other again. And they did, on Mount Ararat.”
I think I like that version better—it’s less about shame, and more about destiny.
“Don’t you feel guilty?” I ask. “Missing a person everyone else thinks you invented? When all around us, because of the virus, people are losing someone they love? Someone real, someone they’ll never see again?”
Eric is quiet for a moment. “What if that’s what people are saying to him, now, about you?”
Kitomi tells me that someone has made an offer on the penthouse. A Chinese businessman, although neither of us can imagine why someone from China would want to come to a country where the president refers to the virus as the Wuhan flu. “When would you move?” I ask.
She looks at me, her hands resting lightly on the railing that borders the reservoir trail. “Two weeks,” she says.
“That’s fast.”
Kitomi smiles. “Is it? I’ve been waiting thirty-five years, really.” We watch a flock of starlings take flight. “How disappointed would you be if I decided not to auction the Toulouse-Lautrec?” she asks.
I shrug. “I don’t work for Sotheby’s, remember.”
“If I don’t consign it,” she asks, “will you ever work there again?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But you shouldn’t make a decision based on me.”
She nods. “Maybe I will have the only ranch in Montana with a Toulouse-Lautrec.”
“You do you,” I say, grinning.
For a moment I just hold on to this: the wonder that I am walking at dawn with a pop culture icon, as if we are friends. Maybe we are. Stranger things have happened.
Stranger things have happened to me.
Kitomi tilts up her head, so that she is looking at me from under the rims of her purple glasses. “Why do you love art?”
“Well,” I say, “every picture tells a story, and it’s a window into the mind of the—”
“Oh, Diana.” Kitomi sighs. “Once more, minus the bullshit.”
I burst out laughing.
“Why art?” Kitomi asks again. “Why not photography, like your mother?”
My jaw drops. “You know who my mother is?”
She raises an eyebrow. “Diana,” she says, “Hannah O’Toole is the Sam Pride of feature photography.”
“I didn’t know you knew,” I murmur.
“Well, I know why you love art, even if you don’t,” Kitomi continues, as if I haven’t spoken. “Because art isn’t absolute. A photograph, that’s different. You’re seeing exactly what the photographer wanted you to see. A painting, though, is a partnership. The artist begins a dialogue, and you finish it.” She smiles. “And here’s the incredible part—that dialogue is different every time you view the art. Not because anything changes on the canvas—but because of what changes in you.”
I turn back to the water, so that she can’t see the tears in my eyes.
Kitomi reaches across the distance between us and pats my arm. “Your mother may not know how to start the conversation,” she says. “But you do.”
On my way back home through the park, I discover that I have three messages from The Greens.
I stop walking in the middle of the path, forcing joggers to flow around me. “Ms. O’Toole,” a woman says, moments later when I redial. “This is Janice Fleisch, the director here—I’m glad you finally called back.”
“Is my mother all right?”
“We’ve had an outbreak of Covid at our facility, and your mother is ill.”
I have heard these words before; I am caught in a cyclone of déjà vu. I even remember my lines.
“Is she … ?does she need to go to the hospital?”
“Your mother has a DNR,” she says delicately. No matter how sick she gets, she will not get any life-saving measures, because that’s what I deemed best when she moved there a year ago. “We have multiple residents who’ve contracted the virus, but I assure you we’re doing everything we can to keep them comfortable.”
“Can I see her?”