Page 19 of Avalanche
Christmas lights and pale winter sun reflect in her hazel eyes, making the amber flecks glow like gold. The cold has her cheeks brushed pink, her breath clouding in front of her lips. I can’t help but smile back at her.
“It’s like a winter wonderland. Or a movie set,” she whispers excitedly, turning back around to crane her neck at each shop as we pass, at the lights slung like canopies between narrow alleyways and wrapped around naked trees.
She pauses at one of the art galleries—another commercial enterprise selling giclée prints of aspen forests and mountainscapes for exorbitant prices. This particular one also has a bronze cast statuette of a wild horse poised in the front window—a tasteless piece that looks like it galloped from the lobby of some cheap hotel. I lift my lip at it, feeling my disdain morph to a strange sort of vindication when I see the price tag. Ten thousand dollars. Some idiot is going to pay ten thousand dollars to put this rubbish in their home.
Liam comes up beside me, the back of his hand brushing my own as he leans to see what’s caught my attention.
“What are you…” he trails off when he notices the price tag, a stifled laugh catches in his throat. “What in the western kitsch is that?”
He gives my deadpan look a broad smile, those grey eyes tilting mischievously at the corners.
“We can go in, if you want Lily,” Matty says, his attention fixed entirely on the woman clinging to his arm. He’s got that expression on his face that I used to hate, soppy and lovesick, as if he’s ready to drop to his knees in the snowmelt and worship her.
I find it rather endearing now, that look. Especially since this morning, when he’d turned that look on me. It had been fleeting and probably unintentional, but I had felt the effects of it all the same.
“Yes, let’s go in,” Liam says, shooting me a sadistic smile. “This looks like a good one.”
It is not, unsurprisingly, a good one.
Neither are the other three art galleries we visit after. I frown at piece after piece of manufactured art, tasteless copies of paintings and sculptures designed to fill underused winter vacation homes.
“They’re just like the galleries in Honolulu,” Lily muses, lips pressed into a slight frown as she reads the description of yet another mountain landscape. “I thought… I don’t know. I guess they looked different from the outside.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, voice soft as if we are in a true art gallery, and not the artistic equivalent of a McDonalds.
She tilts her chin at the price tag. Giclée print, 25/200, signed. $5,000. “I guess I was hoping to see some originals, you know?” She glances nervously at the shop’s proprietor, a stern looking woman who has been glaring at the four of us since we entered, then lowers her voice. “Not that I have anything against prints. But I just feel like… I’m sure I saw this one already.” Her brow dips, expression growing thoughtful as if searching for why, exactly, this bothers her.
I give her a grim, tight mouthed nod. “You wanted to see real art,” I tell her bluntly, no longer caring if my voice is loud enough to carry across to the glaring shopkeeper. “Pieces made by real artists, unique pieces. You don’t understand why someone would pay this ridiculous sum of money for something hundreds of people already own. When meanwhile, somewhere, probably in this very town, a real artist is struggling to find a gallery that will sell their artwork. Art that is unique, meaningful. Art that is more than shadow and light printed across a canvas, but something that feels.”
Lily nods, lips parted with surprise, hazel eyes wide.
“Yes,” she breathes. “Yes. Exactly. And it’s the same in Hawaii. Not everywhere, of course, but a lot of the galleries in the tourist areas are like this—prints of the same art over and over again. And who would want that, when you can go to a little gallery on the North Shore that no one has ever heard of, and find some hidden gem, some gorgeously unique piece that steals your breath away? Or even better, when you can talk to the artist, see them working away in their workshop, barely half aware of their customers because they’re so absorbed in their work.”
She gives a dreamy sigh, her gaze going distant as if she’s seeing through the jarringly perfect landscape in front of us to some dusty art den tucked in the bend of a road to nowhere.
I can imagine it—a wooden storefront painted bright, colors gleaming against dark shadows of palms and draping vines. Lily rushing up the creaking steps with sandalled feet, the ends of her brown hair lightened with sun, her smile flashing over a bare shoulder. A door swung open to reveal hundreds of unique pieces, some terrible, of course, but some incredible.
And I would buy them for her.
I blink, and the imagining becomes a memory. The cluttered walls of my grandparents’ house. Grand-mère smiling as she hung yet another piece of art in the hallway or living room or dining room or whatever room in the house had a patch of empty wall. Grand-père grumbling but never outwardly complaining about the lack of white space.
Once, she told me, he’d bought her a Picasso. An investment piece, he had called it.
She refused to put it up. Told him he could put it in a vault if it was an investment.
I smile at the memory, then frown. All that art is in storage now. Has been since Grand-mère passed away. I don’t think Grand-père could bear the sight of it once she wasn’t there to admire it.
And now he’s left it all to me.
I blink, bending forward to press a kiss to Lily’s forehead in an effort to hide my face from her look of confused scrutiny. I hold her to me for a long moment, breathing in the clean scent of her shampoo, feeling her skin beneath my lips.
“Can I help you?” The sharp-edged voice of the curator has us pulling apart. I squeeze my eyes shut, take a steadying breath. I know, I just know when I open them, she’ll be glaring at me.
“If you’re looking for some of our more affordable prints,” she pauses, dragging the words out as her eyes rake over me from behind thin-rimmed glasses, “we have some unframed paper prints in those racks at the back.” There’s the faintest hint of confusion when her gaze snags on my clothes, the expensive remnants of a life I’ve left behind, but she smooths it away with a simpering smirk. “We even have some postcards at the counter,” she adds brightly.
“Postcards,” Lily echoes flatly, squaring her shoulders to offer the curator an unsmiling stare.
The curator’s smile falters slightly, a look of uncertainty flitting across her face as she looks between me and Lily. “Well…” her jaw tightens, as if she’s come to some resolution. “You don’t really look… perhaps if you came in with your parents…”
