Chapter 5
It rained that night, hard.
I held my mother's portrait against my chest the whole way and got soaked through. It didn't take a drop.
Whatever else went wrong that night, her face was going to come out of it the way it went in.
By the time I got back to the apartment I was burning up.
The place was full of graduation stuff — programs, place cards, the little bags of favors I'd filled myself — and something in me just laughed.
I put all of it in one box and taped it shut and left it by the door.
My phone went off in my pocket. Once. Then again.
Vivian had posted.
A photo of her in front of my wall, and Ethan in the corner of the frame, watching her. Him behind her, her in front, both of them looking at my work.
[He says he sees something in me. I'm so lucky.]
Forty comments. All from people I knew.
I hit like anyway.
Then, with whatever was left in me, I packed a bag and set it by the door.
Edinburgh could take me in two weeks. That was two weeks too many, but it was what I had.
I took two fever pills and went under.
Some time in the night I thought someone came in. A shape at the end of the bed. A voice. Then nothing.
In the morning the painting was gone.
The place had been turned over. Drawers open, closet gone through, my desk chair pushed into the middle of the room.
The offer from Edinburgh was gone too.
I called a car and went to the gallery.
I hadn't cancelled the show. I'd only taken my name off it. It turns out the name on the wall was never the one that paid for it.
Ethan and Vivian were under the lights. He was introducing her to the room, and she was looking up at him like he'd built the building.
"Thank you for the chance," she said into the microphone. "I won't waste it."
A guard stopped me at the door.
"I'm in the show."
"Name?"
"Joanna Reyes."
He ran a finger down the list twice. "You're not on it."
"Check it again."
"I've checked it."
"I'm the artist. Those are my paintings on that wall."
"Ma'am, I don't know what to tell you. If you're not on the list—"
"Then go get Ethan. Get Ethan Whitmore and ask him whose paintings those are."
He didn't move. He didn't look sorry about it either. He just looked at me the way you look at weather you can't do anything about.
I stood out there three hours. I could have left. The painting was the only reason I didn't.
"Ethan. You promised me you wouldn't touch my mother's painting."
"A wall with a hole in it reads wrong. Vivian needed today to go right."
Vivian put a hand over her mouth. "Joanna. I spilled some paint. You're not mad, are you?"
I looked at the canvas. Her face was gone under the paint.
I was shaking so hard I could hear my teeth. "You did it on purpose."
She stepped back into Ethan's chest and he put his arm around her. He turned her away from me.
"Jo. It's paint on canvas. Get a grip."
"You're fine," he said to her. "Nobody's going to touch you."
I knew that stance. He'd stood like that for me once.
The week my mother died, he sat with me on the porch until three in the morning and never tried to make it mean anything, and every time somebody came up the walk with "everything happens for a reason," he got between them and me and they went away.
I thought then that I'd found the one person in the world who would stand in a doorway for me.
Something in me went out. Not broke. Went out.
A ring. A bracelet. A painting. None of it mattered to him as much as she did.
"Give me my offer letter."
He took it out of his jacket and tore it in half. Then again.
"If you were really leaving, you wouldn't be standing here making a scene."
"Go home. We'll do it Saturday. Three days."
He said it the way you'd send a kid to her room.
He was wrong.
The guard walked me out. I changed my flight on the sidewalk — earlier, the soonest one there was.
Not because I was running from him. Because I was done waiting for permission to leave.
Half an hour after the show ended, my phone lit up.
[I'll take you to get a new ring tonight. Happy?]
I read it twice. Then I turned the phone off and put it in my bag.
By then I was already in the air, asleep with my head against the window.
I didn't look back. Nothing down there was mine anymore.
