Ben had returned to his parents’ house over the weekend to search for anything he could find about the painting. If he was caught, he at least wanted to have a case, something to lighten his crime. The results were not pleasant. He had barely entered his parents’ old studio when he saw the murals Sara had made as a child and felt an enormous hole open up in the floor at his feet. After spending all day flipping through piles of papers—his mother’s illustration contracts for future works, his own spinal x-rays, records from a military hospital about his father’s amputation, incoherent stories in Sara’s grade-school handwriting, deeds to his parents’ burial plots—all he had found about the painting was a one-page letter, from an art dealership. The letter was so disturbing that he called Sara immediately, but when he tried to describe it on the phone, he choked. Just come by tonight and I’ll show you, he had told her, and hung up before she could respond.
Afraid to look at it again, he had folded the letter over and over until it became a little arc of hard paper like a block of pulp (pieces of paper, Ben knew, can never be folded in half more than seven times; facts can only be reduced so much), and then stuffed it into his pocket, twiddling it with his fingers again and again on the train and the subway and then as he walked along his darkened street and at last stepped down from the sidewalk into the little sunken entryway to his building. How would he tell Sara? Just thinking about it made him sweat, though the summer night was cool. As he stepped down toward his building, he removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. Without his glasses, the world looked to Ben like an abstract painting, all vague shapes and blotches of color. He sometimes wondered which was real—the world with his glasses, or the one without them. Lately he had stopped believing in what he saw. In the days before she left him, he had too often looked at Nina with his glasses off, imagining that she was smiling.
Now, in the blur before his eyes, he could just make out the shape of a person—a woman, when he squinted—in a dark red skirt (or pants? no, a skirt) and a shirt that left her arms bare, standing between the garbage cans and the door, waiting for someone. The blur of her was lovely in the evening shadows, and for a moment he wished she were waiting for him. Better to ignore her, though. He hated acknowledging the presence of strangers. He put his glasses back on and was reaching for his key, admiring her out of the corner of his eye, when he suddenly recognized her. It was Erica Frank.
“Hello, Mr. Ziskind,” she said. She smiled and stepped back from the door. She was facing him now, along the wall beside the garbage cans. “It’s me, Erica, from the museum.” As though he wouldn’t know who she was. But was she there for him, or was it a coincidence? “Sorry to bother you,” she added. For him.
Haven’t you bothered me enough? Ben demanded in his brain. But her smile was so disarming, so surprisingly real, that he couldn’t find the words. “Hi,” he stuttered, as if she were just a friend bumping into him in the street. He planted his feet on the ground, staking out turf. To his surprise, he enjoyed hearing her voice.
“I called you earlier, but you were out. I knew I’d be in—in the neighborhood this evening, and—well, I brought this,” she said.
Absurd, he thought. What did she mean? He watched as she reached into her bag. The turn of her shoulder made her hair fall away from her neck, revealing a collarbone so delicate that it made Ben think of Sara as a child, poised in front of the murals she had painted on the studio walls. Erica struggled with the zipper on her bag. He wished he could help her open it—to make her leave faster, he told himself. But then she pulled out a book and held it in front of him. It was a children’s book with a snowy landscape on the cover. A woman hovered in the air above a pair of snow-covered tombstones, floating high in a watercolor sky. It was his mother’s last picture book, a ghost story. The title was The World to Come.
“I’m a big fan of your mother’s work,” Erica said. “I was hoping she would be able to sign one of her books for me.” She smiled.
Ben took the book in his hands, astonished. Erica watched him, and in her smile he saw something so honest that he failed to speak. Her eyebrows were raised above her pale green eyes, and as her fingers fidgeted with the strap of her bag, he saw her smooth teeth resting on her perfect lip. He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had looked at him that way, besides Sara. Maybe Nina, right after they were married. But after two months Nina’s smile had reversed into a sneer. He looked at Erica’s smile and felt a lightness in his body, as if a stone had fallen from his heart. He had forgotten that his mother was dead.
He glanced down at the book, noticing how similar the cover was to the Chagall painting. He let his eyes follow the lines of the woman’s body, the elongated curve of her hip and arm as she floated through the sky, released from the ground. As he opened the book, Erica took a step toward him. He drew in his breath, wondering what to expect.
“I know you did it, Mr. Ziskind.”
He slammed the book shut. He stepped backward, edging away from her until his back was pressed against the building’s stone wall. Erica moved in closer. “I saw your mother’s name in the file,” she said. “I know it was hers.”
Ben moved his lips, but no words came out. He stared at the book and remembered how it had felt to be under the studio lights on the “Beat the Wizkind” set, sweating beneath his brace as his heart thumped inside its iron cage and his hands twitched above the buzzer, his brain fighting hard for the right answer. Suddenly he felt something unimaginably soft, cool and gentle, on the back of his hand. Thin fingers rested on his. “I understand if your mother wants it back,” Erica said.
He gulped, then swatted her hand away as if it were a fly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he spat.