I Think We Missed Our Turn - L.A. Witt Page 0,21

a rustic cabin in the backwoods of Vermont, and that when he wasn’t painting, he could be found hunting, fishing, and hiking.

Or like Misty Wells, the minimalist abstract painter and sculptor whose sleek designs clearly came from someone who lived in an all-glass ultramodern house or a luxury condo somewhere, ate in Michelin-starred restaurants, and only drank the finest wines. Nope—she was a giggly, pig-tailed stay-at-home mom of five who retreated to her garage to do art in the evenings while her husband took over with the kids. Nicest lady I’d ever met.

Zoe Neelan? I’d seen exactly one photo of her. She was a white lady in her sixties with a tight smile and black hair that had mostly turned gray. I’d heard critics describe her work as “profoundly meaningful,” and someone had once told me he could have stared at one of her pieces for days on end and still be finding layers of meaning.

And they didn’t all mean the same thing to each person. There’d been a heated debate for the past five years about her piece called Water. It was a sculpture of a woman filling a jug of water in a stream while another was carrying away a full jug. Some people insisted it was a metaphor for women being the life-bringers, since water is life. Others argued that it was about the endless drudgery of womanhood (or motherhood, depending on who you asked), and how the women carrying water represented the tiring, thankless tasks associated with being a woman or a mother. Some even said the stream was the metaphor for a mother, and that the women just kept taking and taking and taking to give to their families without ever asking for anything for themselves or giving anything back to the stream.

People literally wrote academic papers about this artist’s work, but Zoe Neelan herself was something of a mystery. No one in the art world really knew her outside of her very limited phone or email correspondence, and she didn’t come to events. She sold pieces to private collectors, and a number of museums had pieces on loan from those collectors or from Zoe herself, but it was almost impossible to convince her to place her work in a gallery.

Now Omar was going to have some of her work in his gallery, and Armin and I were going to join the very, very tiny club of people who’d actually met her. We’d even get to see where she lived and worked.

Excited? Me? Fuck yeah, I was excited. I get to meet Zoe Neelan.

So who was the woman behind all the work and where did she live? Armin and I were about to find out.

“Your destination is on the right,” the GPS announced.

I put on the turn signal (not that there was anyone around) and glanced at Armin. He grinned. So did I.

“Is it weird to be this excited about meeting her?” I asked.

“No way. If my dad were here, he’d be like a kid when the car starts pulling into Disneyland.”

I laughed, imagining Omar turning into a giddy little kid as we headed down the tree-covered gravel driveway. I could totally see him like that too. Shame he couldn’t come on this trip.

The branches overhead sheltered us from some of the pounding rain, though a few leaves landed on the windshield with dull splats. The driveway wound for a while, taking us deep in the woods, before curving around and taking us to…

Zoe Neelan’s place.

“Wow.” Armin leaned forward, squinting through the rain. “That is not what I expected her place to look like.”

I chuckled. Guess I wasn’t the only one.

And if I’d made any kind of bet on what waited for us at the end of this driveway, I’d have lost.

The house was a white Cape Cod with a weathervane on top. It was hard to see in the weather, but I was pretty sure the vane had a lobster instead of a horse. Maine. Go figure.

There was a two-car garage next to the house with one door open to reveal a dirty gray Subaru covered in old Bernie Sanders stickers, the “Coexist” sticker with different religious symbols on it, a rainbow flag on the back window, and various awareness ribbons.

Okay, so the car pointed at someone who was politically outspoken, but nothing about the house and car would’ve given away that this was the home of a celebrated modern artist.

I parked in front of the closed garage door, and as we were pulling