closer to his brow. The shapes were distinct, and she’d accomplished something very much like a glint of light off each. Had they been her idea, or Ranko’s? Had he worn his crown again that day, as he posed? Had she added them after he died? How odd, how inexplicably devastating: paper clips.
He wanted to laugh, to shout it to the gallery, to explain—but he could only ever tell Fiona. To Esmé he just said, “That one’s my favorite.”
A man beside Yale’s chair said to his wife, “I heard they had to include everything, it was part of the lady’s will.” But here it hung, and it was an artifact of love. Well—of a hopeless, doomed, selfish, ridiculous love, but what other kind had ever existed?
* * *
—
It had been an hour and five minutes, and Cecily ran out to start her car. Esmé wheeled Yale backward to the exit, and he had one last chance to look down the gallery. The people in their beautiful clothes, the edges and corners of paintings and sketches.
Esmé said, “Oh, tar, it’s snowed!”
There was a good half inch on the ground; Cecily’s shoes had made soft prints on their way to her car.
Yale hugged Fiona goodbye, told her to look closely at Ranko’s self-portrait. He said to Allen Sharp, “If her parents come near her, pretend you’re having a seizure or something.”
Allen ran ahead, scraping the snow out of the wheelchair’s path with his dress shoes.
Allen and Esmé lifted him together into the passenger seat, got the oxygen tank between his legs. Cecily said, “It’s a quarter after. Yale, I hate this.”
It was already dark out. Cecily drove up Sheridan Road far too fast, illuminated snowflakes shooting past them. “Slow down,” he said. “It’s not worth a crash.”
“If we crash,” she said, “they’ll take us where we’re going anyway. And faster.”
“We’ll be fine,” Yale said. “It was worth it.”
“Was it? Are you happy?” She checked his face. “I liked Ranko’s stuff. I really did.”
“She loved him,” Yale said instead of contradicting her, instead of saying it was okay if she hadn’t liked it at all. “Even if she shouldn’t have. I think it was one of those things where you can’t let go of how you first saw the person.”
“We never let go of that,” Cecily said. “I mean, even for parents—that’s never not your baby, you know?”
“I think you’re right.” As he got sicker, it was more and more often how he thought of people—of Charlie, certainly, and of everyone else here or gone: not as the sum of all the disappointments, but as every beginning they’d ever represented, every promise.
“I think your clock is fast,” Yale said as they headed south down Lake Shore. 7:49. Eleven minutes left, but he’d be okay for a few more if the oxygen ran out. Everyone was driving cautiously; there was no way for Cecily to get around them.
“That clock is slow,” she said. “And you’re not even wearing a watch.”
He closed his eyes, leaned the seat back a few inches.
It was 7:56, according to the clock, when they pulled up outside Masonic.
Dr. Cheng was standing out on the sidewalk in the snow, freezing in his white coat, with a fresh tank of oxygen.
2015
On Monday, November 23, exactly one week after it was supposed to, Richard’s show Strata finally had its preview at the Pompidou. It would open to the public on Wednesday, a week late, despite the giant canvas sign hanging outside the museum with the original dates positioned on top of a photo of a rather young Richard holding a Kodak Brownie to his eye. The name “CAMPO” stretched across the whole thing.
Fiona had convinced Claire to attend. She’d have loved to believe Claire’s acquiescence was about her, about making amends and spending time together, but on the other hand Claire had known Richard since she was little, and she was still an artist, or still wanted to be one. And she had a sitter: Cecily had insisted she’d rather watch Nicolette than put on heels and try to speak French.
Fiona arrived forty nervous minutes early. She’d cleared out of Richard’s at lunchtime, wanting to give him space to get ready, and had parked herself at a café; and now she wandered the Pompidou gift shop, where she’d told Claire to meet her, looking at bright silicone spatulas and chunky necklaces and art books. She wanted to find something for Nicolette.
She was inspecting a striped water bottle when she felt a chin on