Page 66 of Alone With You in the Ether

“You sure you’re fine?”

“Yes, why wouldn’t I be?”

“You sound,” he began, and then stopped. “Good,” he decided.

The word he’d meant wasbright, perhaps evenblinding, but it didn’t make sense, and she laughed again.

“You sound good, too. I’ll see you soon?”

“Yes. Bye, Regan.”

“Bye, Aldo,” she said, and was gone.

He glanced down at his phone awash in numbness, watching her name disappear from his screen.

Maybe he’d done it, he thought. Maybe some version of him had gone back in time, changed it, fixed it somehow, unlocked the door that she’d never ended up opening and that had somehow brought her back. Maybe he’d solved it, somewhere, and his current self would never even know.

Or maybe it wasn’t done yet. Not yet.

He shivered in the cold, pulling his jacket tighter around him, and picked up his helmet.

That was enough thinking for one day.

Regan stared down atthe storage space she’d rented, which was currently occupied by fifteen canvases of various sizes. One, the painting from her father’s office, sat in the corner solemnly, staring out over the others it had spawned, all replicas of other peoples’ originals. This, she reminded herself with a sigh, was the problem. Ithadbeen the problem, anyway, until yesterday afternoon when she’d been toying with the storage room key, thinking about nothing but the shape of it.

She used to dream like that, in nothing but lines and patterns and textures. Art was a language of both limitless vocabulary and limited syntax; endless concepts to express with boundless opportunities to express them, but only a finite number of ways to do it. Color, line, shape, space, texture, and value, six elements in total, which was newly revelatory to her until she realized why, running her finger along the edge of the key.

Bees.

She looked down at her forgeries, her elfin imitations.

“I’m going to make something today,” she told them. “Something new.”

They stared unsupportively back at her.

Why him?asked the mimicry from her father’s study.

“Because,” she said. Because I know he’ll sit for me. Because I know he won’t mock me, won’t suffocate me, won’t kill this this fragile little thing I’ve found, this fledgling breath I’ve taken. Because he will know what it means, because he asked me to, because he asked. Because he’s the thing I can’t unsee. Because I don’t know if I can get him right without looking, without proof, but also because I need to know, because I’ve already tried. Because either this is how everything changes, or this is how it ends.

She’d already called the museum and told them she needed the day. They weren’t opposed. They told her to feel better soon, though she’d specifically never said she was unwell. That was the one thing she was not.

She’d already called Marc, too, shortly after the museum.

“It’s cute you found a hobby, babe,” he had said the previous evening, kissing her head while she pulled her sketchbook closer, surreptitiously blocking his view of her drawings with her arm. Would he recognize the hand, the shape of the palm, the angle of the fingers? Had he seen them reflected in her eyes the way she’d seen them in her mind? Probably not, but she wasn’t ready for him to know the outlines of her thoughts, to see the geography of them.

That was all art was, wasn’t it? The blatant exposition of the inside of her head.

“I have therapy today,” she had told him. “Might go shopping for a bit afterwards.”

“Didn’t you just see your psychiatrist?”

“Yes. I just have a lot on my mind.”

She didn’t actually know why she had bothered calling Marc to begin with. It wasn’t as if she didn’t do what she wanted most of the time, or rather, all of it. She supposed she’d wanted him to think: That’s odd; maybe she’d wanted him to say: Are you fine? Possibly she’d wanted him to sense that something was systematically failing; to flag the relevant instincts that might suggest this conversation was not like any others they had had.

She dared him to ask: Are you lying?

What he said was: “Well, good that you’re taking care of yourself,” and then he told her he loved her, that he was heading into a meeting with a prospective client’s firm, and then he promised he’d see her tonight before hanging up, the screen going black in her hand.

---