so primally, so loudly, that if she’d been anywhere other than a maternity ward, everyone would have come running.
It was early this morning, Dr. Cheng said. Debbie the charge nurse had been with him.
But that wasn’t enough.
And if Fiona hadn’t sent his mother away, he might have heard her voice through the haze. He might have been comforted on the deepest childhood level.
Nicolette had come to the bench and was opening her little bag of crackers. Cecily patted the bench and she climbed up, sat with her legs swinging off the edge.
Fiona touched the blonde curls, unimaginably soft.
She said, “It was the biggest mistake of my life, Cecily. I think I’m being punished for it now. I shut my own mother out and I sent Yale’s mother away, and it all boomeranged and hit me in the face.”
Nicolette said, “Do you live in America?”
Fiona dried her eyes on her sleeve. “Yes. Did you know that I’m your mama’s mama? And Cecily is your daddy’s mama.”
Nicolette looked back and forth between them as if a great joke were being played, as if they’d told her one was the Easter Bunny and the other was the Tooth Fairy.
“Your mama came out of my tummy, and your daddy came out of Cecily’s tummy.”
“Show me,” Nicolette said, and Fiona lifted up her sweater and pointed at the pale line of scar.
“Right there,” she said, and Nicolette nodded.
“But it didn’t ouch?” Nicolette asked.
“Not a bit.”
Nicolette chewed her cracker, and Cecily said to Fiona, “I don’t know if this is helpful, but whenever I felt guilty about something when I was young, my mother would say, “How do you make up for it? What’s a thing you could do that would make you feel better?” It sounds like Mr. Rogers, I know, but it’s always grounded me when I’m upset.”
“I could move to Paris,” Fiona said, and she was joking until she heard it and realized she wasn’t.
Nicolette wanted her books now. Cecily pulled her onto her lap and read to her about Pénélope, about the game she and her animal friends played with their trunk of colored clothes.
1991
Fiona was waiting for them right inside the Brigg’s front door. She said, “Rescue me from my family!”
“Help us first,” Cecily said. There was a ramp, but the rubber strip right in the doorway was catching Yale’s wheels, and so Cecily had to rock him back while Fiona grabbed the armrests and pulled forward, and Yale held tight and tried to lean back so he wouldn’t fall forward when they put him down again.
The landing jarred him, knocked the oxygen tank into his spine. But they were in. Fiona helped him pull his coat off.
Cecily said, “We have exactly one hour.”
“I actually have two hours of oxygen,” Yale said. “She’s being conservative.”
“Well she’s right!” Fiona said. “What if there’s a traffic jam on the way back? I can’t believe they let you out.”
“For the record,” Yale said as they wheeled him down the hall toward the gallery, “if you’re ever questioned in a court of law, they did not let me out, and Dr. Cheng definitely did not help us steal the oxygen or the chair.”
“Of course not.”
“He says hi.”
* * *
—
The gallery was already full. Yale was vastly underdressed—every other man wore a tie, and he wore an old sweater that used to fit snugly and now hung like a tent—but his clothes weren’t what anyone would be looking at, anyway.
There was Warner Bates from ARTnews, waving, pointing him out to someone else. Warner had come to interview him last fall right after Gloria’s initial Trib feature appeared. He’d brought along a photographer who’d shot Yale sitting on his own couch, laughing with Fiona. Yale was embarrassed by the attention, by the focus on his role. Gloria’s story had been about the collection itself. “After Seventy Years,” the headline read, “an Artist Claims His Prize.” It included plenty of helpful quotes from an unwitting Bill Lindsey, who didn’t realize the focus would be Ranko Novak. The article wasn’t dishonest; it never stated directly that Novak’s pieces would be in the show. But in talking at length about Novak’s pieces, as well as his life and death, it implied as much. “She wanted him to have his due,” it quoted Yale as saying. “She wanted him hanging next to Modigliani.” That article itself might not have been enough to force Bill’s hand, but the half-dozen more pieces it spawned in the art press were. And suddenly Ranko’s name