Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

Kelly, restored by Lefty's visit, threw herself into a new and darker series over a grueling seven-month stretch at the studio, while Lefty wrestled with whether the uncommercial direction would serve or threaten their ascent. The chapter closed on Marabelle finally asking her mother, point blank, why she'd had her and why her art mattered more, drawing out an honest answer that revealed Kelly feared losing herself as much as she feared losing Marabelle.

Lefty was up before sunrise every morning, and when he wasn’t away for work, there was always a hot breakfast. Many days it was oatmeal but some days he would make French toast, pancakes, or eggs and bacon.

As I underwent the metamorphosis in my tweens that would transform me into what he fondly called the Moody Monster, he began having to drag me out of bed to go to school. Kelly was unpredictable, of course. Some mornings she was his sous chef, the two of them listening to music as they worked at the kitchen island, but if she had worked all night, I wouldn’t see her until I came home from school.

For the next four years, we would feel more like a family than we ever had before or ever would after. We got a dog and raised chickens. We had movie nights and epic Parcheesi games. It was the kind of thing most teenagers would groan about, but I was there for it, soaking up the normalcy.

What I remember most vividly from this period was the revival of K.A. Mudd’s folk art project. It became a weird kind of unifying force, not just for our family, but for the little community of people around us in Santa Fe. I’m not sure the masquerade was necessary anymore given that the intense public scrutiny of Daedalia had all but disappeared. The world was concerned with bigger things in light of the financial crisis and so many people losing homes they never should have been able to afford in the first place. You didn’t have to look far to see people struggling. My nanny, Maria, had not been affected, but both her brothers had lost their family homes and her little house was overrun with nieces and nephews sleeping on palettes in the living room.

“I don’t want to be a problem Mr. Lefty,” I overheard her saying one afternoon when she was talking with my father on the patio.

“It’s no problem at all, Maria. You’re family. What do you need?”

After that conversation, Maria began sleeping in the guest quarters and her brothers took on a variety of unnecessary construction projects around our property, working in the evenings and on weekends to build a pergola, a meditation hut, and a walled garden with a koi pond. It felt good to have so many people around. They played their music on an old boom box covered in paint splatter and sheetrock dust. The Latin pop music was so romantic, sugary, and earnest, it tickled me that these macho brothers chose it as the backdrop for their quiet teasing conversations and occasional bursts of laughter while they dug footers and poured concrete. Their presence brought a warmth and ease to our home that I never understood had been missing. Two or three evenings a week, Maria and her sisters-in-law would make a big family dinner and we would all eat out in the courtyard at a long table her brothers had improvised from a couple of saw horses and sheets of plywood.

At the end of one of these dinners, during a lull in the conversation, Kelly addressed the whole table. I think she had a couple of glasses of wine by then because this move was completely out of character. She was sitting at the midline of the table that divided the adults from the kids and she was talking to us.

“I’d like you all to help me with an art project. I think it would be fun. What do you think?”

No one really knew how to respond, certainly not these kids. With the exception of Maria, no one else at the table had really interacted much with the reclusive, eccentric woman who spent so much time in the shed with the doors closed. Maria’s brothers and their wives exchanged looks, unsure if maybe they missed something in translation though they understood her perfectly well. Enrique, the more confident brother with the enormous mustache raised his beer and spoke up.

“Yes, of course! Art. Why not? Ninos, you want to help Ms. Kelly with some art?”

I remember the look on my father’s face and being unable to read it. When it came to my mother, his feelings were always conflicted, and that conflict dug trenches in his face that would make him look much older than he already was.

The next day, after school, five children between the ages of four and twelve gathered in the courtyard outside Kelly’s shed. They fidgeted nervously and poked each other, whispering in Spanish. Unbeknownst to me, Kelly had been busy for a week preparing for this project. I had assumed she was doing her Daedalia work in the shed but when she rolled back the doors and brought out a large tray full of potato halves I was confused. Equally curious, the children huddled around her. She encouraged them to pick up the potatoes. On the cut side of each, she had carved an elaborate stamp, each one depicting a different creature or plant and all of them rendered in a primitive style somewhere between Aztec art and characters from a comic strip.

“Pick two that you like,” she said, setting the tray down on the ground. “There’s all kinds. Find the ones that speak to you— makes you feel good.”

After each of the children had picked their favorites, they followed her into the studio where she had mounted three large canvases on the far wall and spread drop cloths beneath them. On the floor, she had placed trays of paint, one with red, one with yellow, and one with blue. What followed was an art lesson delivered in the only way my mother could, which was to demonstrate. She encouraged the youngest child to step forward with her two potato stamps and asked her to pick the color she liked the most. I felt a tension in my shoulders, knowing how meticulous Kelly was, and how exacting her standards were. But she was patient and forgiving and had obviously prepared. She guided the child over to a long strip of butcher’s paper she had stretched across the floor a safe distance away from the canvases. She guided the little girl’s tiny hands to stamp her potato cut-outs onto the paper. “Hold it… press for 1, 2, 3. Now lift up carefully so you don’t drip… that’s it.” The light in the little girl’s face when she lifted up her stamps to reveal a bright red chicken and a blue raccoon was contagious.

As the other children took their turns, Kelly would demonstrate something new like how the stamps could be placed close together, some connecting like puzzle pieces to make completely new, larger animals, cactuses, or trees. She showed them how to rinse off their stamps so they could use a different color. She showed them how to carefully stamp over a previous impression with a new color to create secondary colors. She never once told the children or me what we were making, what her larger vision was for the canvases. After a half an hour of experimenting on the paper, she stood up from her crouch. She wiped her hands on a towel, walked over to the canvases, and said, “Okay, you’re ready. Who’s going to be my brave soul to go first?”

No one raised their hand or stepped forward. The children fidgeted and studied their hands. “Marabelle, how about you? Will you be the first?”

I wasn’t expecting this. I hadn’t participated at all up to that point. I remember being jealous of those kids, getting a version of my mother I rarely if ever saw. I got up from the saggy couch where I had been pretending to pay no attention. I picked up a couple of potatoes from the tray without even looking at the designs. I was equally indiscriminate about choosing colors to dip them in. She motioned for me to come to the canvas in the middle.

“Take us on an adventure now,” she said. “Make your mark. The first one is always the hardest.”

I do not possess my mother’s natural talent, and even as a child I had a little interest in making art. What I knew that the other children didn’t, was how exacting my mother could be so when I pressed the stamps into the canvas, I tried to center them perfectly and press them neatly to avoid any splatter or drips. I stepped back to assess my work. On the left center of the canvas there was a bright red crow mid flight. The larger potato I had dipped in the green paint produced a crooked, barren tree on the right center of the canvas. Together, they looked like a pair of deranged eyes.

“How did that feel Marabelle?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“What would make it better? There’s no wrong answer, sweetheart. Do anything that feels good to you.”

A sharp anger arose in me. I was used to this type of tutelage from Coach Lefty, but it was another thing entirely coming from my mother. I turned to the paint trays and without dipping my potatoes in water to wash off the paint I purposely dipped them into different colors, leaving behind bloody tendrils in the egg-yolk yellow tray and strings of seaweed in the ocean blue one. I turned, stepped quickly to the canvas, and smacked the two potatoes against it with a satisfying wet thud. I then proceeded to smear muddy blue and yellow trails in a crude spiral pattern radiating from the eyes. Maybe it’s just my dramatic remembering of the moment, but I believe the children gasped.

My mother did something she rarely did. She laughed. It started as a low, bubbling tremor and then swelled into a full belly-laugh. It was foreign and offputting. I hadn’t heard her laugh much in my life so I felt sure she was laughing at me, her ugly, untalented daughter. Something in me broke and I started to cry. Because I wasn’t facing her, she thought my tears were laughter, and it was only when I put my hands to my face that she realized. She rushed over to me and pulled me to her. My body was rigid, unyielding, but she wouldn’t let go and then I really started sobbing.

“It’s perfect Maribel. You’re perfect whatever you feel is perfect.”

She turned around to look at the canvas, not letting go of me. I was humiliated and wanted to run but she held me.

“You see, it’s perfect,” she whispered into my hair. “Please show me what else you feel.” Then louder, for the benefit of our audience, she said, “Here, use my hands. I will be your painting machine. I’m awaiting your instruction.”

She said this last part in a playful robot voice that put the children at ease. She took the potato cuts from my hands and then offered her hands to me as tools. I’m sure I protested and said it was dumb, but she persisted until I took her by the wrists and pulled her back to the paint trays. Once the potatoes were loaded with more paint, I pulled her back to the canvas, and for the first time, really stared at it. I’m not sure what she saw, but I saw only the primitive smearing of a child. When I raised her hands to the canvas, I was expecting a kind of reverse ventriloquism, like the dummy would actually be doing the performance, but her hands were relaxed, inert, and waiting to be guided. I positioned her right hand above and centered between the eyes I had initially made and pressed the back of her hand into the canvas. I moved her left hand into position, centered below the two eyes and pressed.

We made many trips between the paint trays and the canvas for what could have been a couple of minutes or a couple of hours. I remember being into it, having the ability to control her, to move her as I wanted. Then we stopped and stepped back to survey the result. If you are imagining I somehow channeled my mother’s mystical powers and we created a transcendent piece of art, I hate to disappoint you but there was no magic trick. It was no better than a toddler’s random finger painting. But as we stood there, both of our hands sticky with paint, I felt connected to her, and that was kind of a magic trick.

She encouraged the other children to approach our canvas and make their mark anyway they wanted to. They were tentative at first, but it didn’t take long for the whole crew to embody the spirit of Jackson Pollock. They carried on until there was no whitespace left and only then did they lose interest.

“Was that fun?”

The children nodded without much enthusiasm.

“That was great! Now that you guys are pros, you wanna help me make some real art?” my mother asked. There was a little less enthusiasm. I’m sure it was beginning to feel like school to them– a white woman giving instruction on a subject that had no practical application in their lives. “Mare, will you go and help Maria bring some snacks out for everyone?”

When I returned with Maria fifteen minutes later, the mood was different. The kids were all gathered around my mother who was standing in front of the right canvas where she had begun to work. There was a pattern of blue shapes on the canvas she made from one of the potato stamps that had bold, primitive lines to represent water or waves. She was demonstrating, but also teaching as she went. Each child got a turn to contribute to the emerging piece of art. Unlike the chaotic mess we had made on the first canvas, this piece had focus and direction and the kids could feel it being shaped beneath their hands. The overlapping blue-green potato stamps became scales on an enormous fish that was breaking the surface of what would become a starry sky.

I watched the rest of the afternoon as my mother slipped between her interior world of maniacal focus and the world of these children. She was exploring, reaching, but why? It was like watching someone trying to walk five puppies, all running in different directions. Later that night after I had been tucked in and the lights were off, I could hear my parents talking in the other room. I strained to hear what they were saying but it was impossible. Like most kids who grow up in the orbit of parents with a complicated relationship, I had developed an ability to read tone, timbre, and cadence when six inches of plaster made words indecipherable.

He was upset, concerned. I gathered it was from the way she had spent the afternoon. Maybe he was annoyed that she was distracted from the real work she should have been doing. Maybe he feared she was giving Daedalia too much exercise in the yard. Whatever it was, that night Kelly didn’t take the bait. She didn’t yell or cry or throw anything at the wall. After a few minutes, I heard the television.

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Did this chapter take you in? Leave a ❤️ below to help fellow travelers find it. Speaking of fellow travelers, a lot of friendships have started in the comments of my serials.

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Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

In his office, Harry Hasselblad finally told Marabelle his story: after his wife Gina died, the homeless portraits she'd bought undid him, and he tracked down all fourteen subjects to build a quiet found family, now run by Sadie, the daughter of one of the painted women. Marabelle left humbled and ashamed—still guarding the secret that the artist who "saved" these people was her own mother.

Kelly woke up the morning after Lefty returned home to take care of me, and she felt restored. Lefty infused her with a confidence and sense of purpose that she couldn’t manufacture on her own. He understood her like no one else did. For her, the art was like heroin: too much would kill her, and not enough would make her a twitchy tangle of live wires. Lefty’s primary role in managing her was to calibrate the dosage.

He loved the new series she had begun and they talked excitedly about it for the three days he was with her. The calculus for him was always complicated, muddled by his own ambition. How could he be her partner and protector, keeping her alive and happy, while continuing to lay the next course of stones in the staircase of their ascension to greatness? His success in the art world is nothing short of a miracle given how little he actually understood or knew about art. He is masterful at observing people and adapting to most any situation. The skill works well enough in selling stereos or real estate but art is different. Art must activate something deep inside us and stir us in sometimes uncomfortable ways. These new paintings my mother was doing were not the kind people would want staring back at them in a formal dining room or above the mantel at their Swiss ski chalet, so he was filled with reservations as he boarded the plane. But ultimately, he was an expert in reading his wife, and he knew when she was stepping into her flow that it was best to trust it. There was no other way.

Kelly checked out of the Palace hotel and bought a cot, sleeping bag, microwave, and hot plate for the small studio space which became her home for the next seven months. Every Monday, a new delivery of supplies would come—tubes of oil paint, fresh canvases stretched to the dimensions she requested, and an assortment of frozen dinners along with bags of junk food that was my mother’s fuel during these long campaigns. Lefty paid a woman handsomely to be on call 24/7 to respond to anything Kelly needed. He programmed the woman’s number into the new cell phone he bought Kelly before leaving the city. The condition of this cushy job was that the woman could never go into the studio or ask any questions. Lefty paid a premium for privacy throughout our lives.

In the weeks that followed, Kelly established a routine that would only have made sense to her or someone equally possessed. The routine, regardless of the time of day, was: begin work and work to the point of exhaustion, then binge like a ravenous animal, crash for a few hours, then wake up and take a brisk walk before returning to the studio to start all over again. The most important part of this routine was the walk, because it was during these walks that she encountered the people that would animate her canvases.

At first, she observed them from afar, pushing their overloaded shopping carts through the park or huddled under a filthy blanket as they sat shivering to keep warm over a grated vent in the sidewalk, but eventually she began to engage them. Unlike Lefty, who had a compulsion to talk with any stranger, Kelly had trouble ordering in restaurants, so for her to strike up a conversation with a hulking man who smelled of urine and was muttering and shouting to himself was an extraordinary act. She came to learn the man’s name was Jerome and he had been living on the street for nearly twenty years. The first time she spoke with him, he had been struggling to stand up his shopping cart, which had tipped over and spilled everything he owned in the world across the sidewalk on 8th Street. There were hundreds of aluminum cans, plastic grocery bags ghostly thin and stuffed with wadded-up clothes, and a collection of random totems like a scuffed pink tennis ball, a cracked snow globe, a small fish net for an aquarium, and a stack of McDonald’s french fry boxes, flattened and bound in a rubber band like a deck of cards.

She asked if he needed help three times before he understood she was talking to him. He looked up, angry and frightened, but mostly confused, like a ghost who had suddenly been seen. She helped him stand up the cart and began picking up the cans, tentatively at first, then in armloads. He didn’t say anything in that first encounter, even when she pressed a twenty-dollar bill into his hand. But she would talk with him in the days and weeks that followed, learning about his life in exchange for a cup of coffee, a bagel, or a hamburger. Jerome loved french fries, but only McDonald’s french fries, Kelly would learn. They were more to him than sustenance. They represented comfort and normalcy. He told her that his mother used to take him there as a treat on Sundays before she overdosed. Jerome was just ten years old when he went into the system. Despite his winning smile and uncanny talent for numbers, he was never adopted and only fostered a couple of times. No one was willing to take on a black boy whose mother died a junkie. The system spit him out at eighteen and for a couple of years, it looked as if he might be one of those stories that comfortable white people slurp up in the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. He attended a community college in New Jersey studying mathematics and, because of his size, worked nights as a bouncer at a club in Jersey City.

There was no single immovable force he met that blocked his path to a promising future. It was a thousand small obstacles that stole his momentum, and the dark leviathan of an undiagnosed schizoaffective disorder that surfaced and made even the most pedestrian of situations harrowing and chaotic. The threadbare net of kindness from his small circle of friends, teachers, and co-workers gave way, and he ended up in a state facility for a few months before eventually being placed in a halfway house. He preferred the half that didn’t require him to share a room with a man who chronically masturbated and occasionally screamed out for his mother, so Jerome learned to live on the street.

All this Kelly learned, and all this she captured in his portrait, as she did with the thirteen other subjects she painted during this period. I knew their stories from her journals and I had high hopes when I went to see them at Hasselblad’s penthouse, but as I stood before “Jerome,” I only saw paint on canvas, blended and scraped into the shape of a tormented man. When I studied each of the canvases, I saw my mother’s attention, the many thousands of hours she spent away from me absorbed in these strangers, and it made me angry and sad—feelings for which I immediately felt foolish. What she had given of herself and taken from me, she had applied to these paintings, these paintings that had moved a man to meaningfully change the lives of two generations of people who would have been invisible to him otherwise.

She could have easily given them some of the wealth our family had amassed and made that change herself, but I don’t think she understood the world on those terms. Her choices were always intuitive to her but utterly confounding to me. I will never be the kind of artist she was because I’m too caught up in the expectations of the world and the role I play in it. In the same situation, I would have felt equally heartbroken for these abandoned and forgotten people, but I wouldn’t have engaged with them. Maybe one of them would’ve become a character in a book I was writing, and maybe I would’ve donated to a local soup kitchen, but I wouldn’t have taken them so completely into my heart and stayed up for days trying to pour the essence of them into a canvas.

In one of our conversations near the end of her life, when I was interrogating her, desperate to extract the magic I didn’t really believe in but knew would die with her, I asked about these portraits. I didn’t know then what I do now about Hasselblad and his mission. Here’s what she said.

“Don’t do this, Marabelle. Please, I beg you. I don’t want to be preserved, gilded, or vilified. I’ll tell you anything you want to know but I don’t think you’ll understand because it’s not even something I can understand. When I would take those walks, comfortable in my goose-down coat, warmed by my hot cup of coffee and the fresh pastry in my tummy, I wasn’t really thinking about anything. I had no plan. I was just walking and then I would feel something familiar, this tugging sensation I’ve learned to pay attention to.”

“It was always wildly uncomfortable and if I’m being honest, my acting on these impulses was a compulsion. I didn’t want to do many of the things I did, but I feared what would happen if I didn’t. The time I spent with those people—it’s not anything like you might be imagining. I didn’t have some deep, empathic ability. I was scared to death most of the time. More than once I was shouted at and spit on. I was propositioned more than once and ran away frequently. But when I persisted, or when I returned on another day and I stayed and listened, something would shift. I would see a person not unlike myself. They heard voices, but fuck, I hear voices. It was as if all the other people in our heads, the voices we had to keep secret, had to lock away, could be heard finally, and no one thought we were crazy.”

Though I’d always known my mother wasn’t normal, I’d never thought of her as mentally ill like so many of the people in those portraits. But they were strangers; Kelly was my mother. She painted them so well because she understood their estrangement and recognized the everyday terror of their daily existence.

“They were so isolated, Marabelle. They lived, they survived without really ever being seen by anyone. I got lost in their sorrow and I wasn’t able to break free of it. If your father hadn’t come, hadn’t forced me to stop, I wouldn’t have been able to leave them.”

I remember the day when my mother came home. Lefty had been preparing me for weeks. I had spoken to her on the phone a dozen times during her absence and it was always awkward and one-sided, her trying to fill all the empty space.

“Your mom’s not like a normal person,” Lefty had told me the night before she was to return. We were in the kitchen and he was making dinner. “I know that’s hard to understand and it’s not fair that she can’t just be a normal mom, but it will be easier if you can understand she’s different and it’s got nothing to do with you. The way she is—she can’t help it. She loves you more than anyone, even if it doesn’t seem that way.”

“I know,” I told him.

I think he wanted to have a long conversation about it, to do everything he could to prepare me for us becoming our weird little family unit again, but I wasn’t having it. Of course I knew she wasn’t a normal mom. Nothing would make me stop wanting that, though. I saw how anxious Lefty was and it made me anxious, so I tried to do what he wanted me to do. I made a pathetic welcome home sign on some printer paper with a magic marker and then I went into my room and played Nintendo.

That’s what I was doing when she came home the next day. I heard the car door slam and then the front door open and then her walking across the wooden floors of the front room and then down the hallway to my door. It took a long time for her to open the door, and when she did, I didn’t look up—just kept staring at the small television, nudging Mario along.

“Hi sweetheart,” she said. “Can I play too?”

She picked up the other controller and we played for a couple of hours. She didn’t try to hug me or ask me any questions. We just played. She was actually surprisingly good and seemed genuinely into it, so I forgot I was mad at her for going away.

Later that night we went into town to get dinner, just the two of us. She thought it would be a treat to go to McDonald’s, but I said that was for little kids. I wanted quesadillas from my favorite Mexican restaurant just off the square in town. It wasn’t tourist season so the place was quiet, and we sat at a table by the window. I remember everything about that conversation. I had been rehearsing it for a year.

“Why did you have me?” That’s how I opened things.

She looked like I had struck her but she nodded, put her napkin in her lap, and said, “Because I couldn’t not have you.”

“What do you mean? I know how babies work, Mom. I’m not like Jesus or something. You and Daddy made me. Why did you make me?”

“We don’t always choose things that happen to us, but we do get to choose what to do next—what to do about them. I was too young to really know what I was doing, so even though I didn’t exactly choose to make you, I did choose to keep you. I couldn’t imagine anything else.”

I remember not really understanding this at all, but I did understand that she was being honest with me. “Why is your art more important than me?” I asked, following my script.

She looked away, focusing her attention on the people passing on the sidewalk outside. When she answered, her voice was quavering. “It’s not as simple as that. It’s not right and it’s not fair to you and I could lie to you, but you’re just too smart and too precious to me.”

She could tell this answer wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Her eyes filled with tears and when she looked back at me, I could see how scared she was. She looked like someone held hostage. She looked like I felt when I was trapped in that hotel room. Maybe it was just guilt, but I don’t think so. I think she was afraid of so many things—of losing me, of disappointing Lefty, but mostly of losing herself.

« Previous | Table of Contents | Next »

Did this chapter take you in? Leave a ❤️ below to help fellow travelers find it. Speaking of fellow travelers, a lot of friendships have started in the comments of my serials.

Leave a comment

Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

Marabelle traced Kelly’s New York portrait series to Harry Hasselblad, whose late wife had bought most of the paintings despite their poor critical reception. When Marabelle visited Harry’s penthouse to see the collection, she found not a sterile billionaire’s vault but a private outreach operation built around the people connected to the paintings.

“I didn’t come here today to learn about your secret operation, much less write about it. I didn’t even know it existed. My interest is purely in your art collection.”

We were sitting in Harry Hasselblad’s office and the old man was cradling a cup of black coffee. In the photographs I had seen of him as a young man, he struck me as completely unremarkable. His narrow eyes, thin lips, and the set of his jaw made him look irritatingly sensible. But that was not the man sitting in front of me. There was a softness in his face and a smile in his eyes that defeated the gruff facade he was projecting for me.

“Why are you interested in it? The paintings in this series are considered to be her worst and if you don’t believe me, you can look at the appraisals I had done a few years back.”

“That’s a big reason why I wanted to see them for myself.”

“So you’re writing a book about the artist, I suppose.”

“I haven’t decided yet, but I’m considering it.”

“Can I be frank? Why on earth do you think the world needs another book about her?”

“I don’t write books for the world.”

This wasn’t entirely a true statement, but it was one I wanted to believe about myself, if for no other reason than it would make me feel closer to my mother. Harry nodded and took another sip of coffee. He hadn’t offered me anything to drink and had only agreed to hear me out until the physical therapist showed up for his daily appointment.

“I understand your late wife purchased most of the paintings. How did you feel about her buying them?”

“I was displeased. I thought they were an awful, no, a ridiculous waste of money. I’ve spent my life making useful things.”

“But later you spent a lot of money to acquire the rest of the series. Did you begin to see some value in them?”

“No, not at first. I was grieving the loss of my wife and really trying to understand her, understand what it was she loved about the paintings.”

Because I like to do so much research for my books, I’ve become a skilled interviewer out of necessity. I need people to talk and the best way to do that is to not help them, so I just stared at Harry expectantly. After a few beats, he broke eye contact and set his cup down.

“I suppose you’re looking for the mystical part of all this, something to substantiate all the claims others have made about Daedalia’s paintings.”

I didn’t respond. I leaned back in my chair and smiled patiently. He didn’t look up. In the silence, I could hear the children playing down the hall. Did these people live with him? On the way to his office, we had passed at least three bedrooms that appeared to be lived in. After a moment, he looked up and continued.

“I didn’t spend any time with the paintings until Gina was gone. The ten pieces she’d acquired were in our Aspen house.” He paused and narrowed his eyes, studying me. “Look, I don’t know who you are, but Sadie seems impressed with you, so I’m going to tell you the story against my better judgment. I’m an old man and I guess I’ve done more foolish things. You can do with it what you will.”

“I’d love to hear your story,” I said, and leaned forward.

“I traveled out to Colorado with the intention of selling off the place and everything in it. The night before the estate sale people were supposed to show up, I walked through the empty rooms and felt nothing. I had been avoiding the large, windowless gallery in the basement. You see, the paintings had caused the worst fight Gina and I ever had. They made this rift we never recovered from. I said horrible things to her and she responded by retreating to that place in the mountains. She tore out the movie theater downstairs and made this gallery dedicated to these dumb paintings that were objectively worthless. I felt like she was doubling down, creating a monument to the rift between us.”

“But then she died and everything changed. I was left with the houses, the things, the paintings, and no idea what any of it meant. I’d never gotten a chance to actually see the paintings in person. That night, I looked at them for the first time. It’s hard to accurately describe what I felt at first because things changed so quickly after, but I remember being physically ill. The dark, muddy colors in the paintings of these sad people and the fact that my wife had basically lit tens of millions of dollars on fire to get them was hard to swallow, but mostly I think I felt ashamed of how cruel I had been to her about the whole thing. I forced myself to stand in front of each one of the paintings. Maybe I was trying to get some small return on my investment or maybe I was just trying to make amends with Gina.”

Harry paused. I could see he was trying to hold back a well of emotion. He took another sip of the coffee that looked so black it could be a solid. Sadie came to the door. Our time was up. But seeing her, Harry waved her off and shook his head. She lingered for a moment, looked at me, and then left. When Harry continued, his voice was thick and low.

“Those pieces are more than just paint on canvas. There’s blood and sweat and pain in them. The goddamn critics who wrote what they did, I can assure you, never actually stood in front of one of these paintings for any period of time.”

“What is it you saw in them that night?”

“It’s not so much what I saw, but what I felt. It was the worst kind of feeling. Empty, heartbroken, alone, and beyond redemption. These people survived by their fingernails, just clinging to the edge of society. Looking into their portraits, I felt their insanity and longing and despair. And worst of all, I could see myself as they saw me, a man sleeping alone in a five-million-dollar house, a man who had more wealth than he could spend in a thousand lifetimes.”

He paused there for a long time, lost in thought. I wanted to ask him to continue, but I was afraid nudging him would cause him to shut down and send me away. I didn’t want to believe the story and I was looking for reasons not to. Here was a man who was lonely and grief-stricken without any real purpose. He saw what he wanted to see and it gave him a reason to go on living.

Finally, he cleared his throat and took another sip of coffee before he looked over, his eyes asking for a question that would give him permission to continue.

“So, after that you decided to sell everything and do… what?” I asked.

“I didn’t decide anything right away. I did get physically ill and was in bed for a week. There was a massive snowstorm that shut down all the roads so I was basically isolated for days eating chicken noodle soup out of a can. When I was strong enough to get out of bed, I wandered back downstairs and sat for hours studying those paintings. Every person she painted had their own miserable, heartbreaking story and I knew them all. They lived in me and the only thing that felt right to do was to try to find them and do something, anything. That’s when I really started this last chapter of my life, the best chapter.”

“How many of the people were you able to find?”

“I managed to track down all fourteen of them, but sadly, two of them hadn’t survived the previous winter, Ronald Falstaff and Geraldine Jones.”

“You know their names.”

“Yes.” He said this so matter-of-factly, the expression on his face pained. “I managed to find their families at least, so that was something.”

“But how? These were all homeless people and the names of the pieces didn’t give you anything to go on.”

“It took a while and I hired help, but it wasn’t as hard as you think. You see, you’re like I was, like most people who haven’t fallen through the cracks. You look at them and you don’t see people but they are still people. They have friends. They are known to one another. They can be found and they can be given a chance.”

“It sounds like you were converted or found a calling,” I said.

“It’s nothing so noble. I found a family. They became my family. You’ve met a few of them. Well, their children and grandchildren anyway.”

“You mean, all those people out there stuffing kits, they’re the descendants of the people in those paintings?”

“No, not all of them. Some are nieces or nephews, brothers or sisters. The thing is, once you decide to let people in, to stop hoarding it all, your money, your time, your love, something changes.”

“What’s that?”

“You find you stop thinking about it the same way, stop keeping track, stop keeping score. I didn’t do anything special. I just had something to give and I gave it and it began to give back to me in ways I never imagined possible.”

I was getting visibly uncomfortable and I couldn’t help myself from trying to tear down this beautiful thing he was constructing, find the loose thread and pull it.

“That’s an amazing story, but were you really surprised? I mean, these people were desperate and you gave them money. Surely some of them just took it and ran.”

Harry sighed and looked at me with a weary patience I will never forget.

“Yes, some of them did just take what I offered and ran. A couple overdosed. But most of them? Most of them just wanted to be a part of something, just wanted to be seen, and once they had that, they wanted to give it to others. This whole thing we do now, it was Sadie’s idea. She’s the engine that runs the whole operation.”

The conversation ended shortly after that. I felt ashamed of myself and apologized. Sadie appeared and showed me to the door. On the way out, she said how much she couldn’t wait to read my book. She said Daedalia, whoever she was, saved her life. My face flushed and I felt like a child, a spoiled child with a secret.

I wanted to stay, to tell her everything. I wanted to have what she had, to feel how she felt. I also wanted to tell her that Daedalia wasn’t some saint, that she was just an obsessed, distant, eccentric woman who often forgot to eat or sleep.

Instead, I thanked her and said I’d be sure to send her the first copy of the book if I ever finished it.

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Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

Kelly returned to work in New York after a fight with Lefty over Greta, trying sex, drugs, and dancing before admitting that art was the only thing that steadied her. She reconciled with Lefty, began a new series of painted portraits, and, after reading about Hildegard of Bingen, started to wonder whether her work carried a responsibility she could no longer outrun.

My mother produced fourteen canvases in the eight months she was away from us in New York City. I received eight postcards from her, each one with her ghostly fingerprint smudges in ink or paint at the edges that created an accidental frame for her near-perfect, comic book style script.

Dear Maribear,

This week I was a wizard’s apprentice. He had a long white beard and could conjure spells with just his voice. I’m making a picture of him and I can’t wait for you to see it. How is school? I heard you won the spelling bee. What?! You are a genius.

Love,
Mommy

The others were similar. They weren’t traditional postcards with a glossy photo of the Empire State Building on the front. They were blank and she drew elaborate pictures for me. As much as I pretended not to care about these postcards when they appeared on my desk in my bedroom, I would stay up for hours studying them and reading them over and over. She had passed along her love of puzzles to me, and each drawing was part maze, part story, like her earliest work. I’ve kept them all these years in a little wooden box, my own private Daedalia collection.

The series she produced during this period was not a critical success. If there’s one thing critics of any stripe relish more than discovering a new talent, it’s tearing down an established one.

“Daedalia fingerpaints the homeless exploiting their plight for profit,” the critic from the New York Times wrote.

“A miserable mess of sentiment and excrement smeared across the canvas,” said the L.A. Times.

Lefty still managed to sell all the pieces, but it had taken some extra maneuvering. When I read Kelly’s journal entries about this time, the way she described the work and her connection to the people she painted made me want to see the paintings for myself.

Ten of the fourteen were bought by Regina Hasselblad, the wife of a self-made billionaire who had made his money from patents on invisible, necessary things that make the heating and air conditioning in all automobiles work. They weren’t a high society couple, didn’t attend galas or donate huge amounts of cash to hospitals and universities. It wasn’t easy to track them down twenty years after Regina had made the staggering purchase at auction. They weren’t collectors. They had never bought art before. I learned that Regina had done it out of spite, angry at her stodgy husband, who was twenty years older and kept her like an exotic bird.

Regina died from a brain aneurysm a couple of years after buying the paintings. Her husband, Harry, never recovered from her death. At sixty-two, he liquidated all four of his private residences in Miami, Aspen, Houston, and Cape Cod. He sold off his patents. I could find no record of him selling the paintings. He disappeared from the reach of Google at that point.

It took me a year to track him down, and I had to hire an investigator to do it. When the investigator gave me his address, I was stunned to find out he lived just five blocks away from me in a historic old building off Washington Square.

It took me a couple of days to work up the courage to knock on his door. On a late October afternoon, I entered the lobby and told the doorman I was there to see Harry Hasselblad. I expected to have to perform the story I had rehearsed about being his niece visiting from out of town. To my surprise, the doorman didn’t ask any questions. He simply led me to the elevator, swiped his card, and punched the button for the thirtieth floor.

The elevator doors opened on a high-ceilinged marble foyer and I was staring at one of my mother’s paintings on the opposite wall. It was my favorite of the series, featuring a black woman’s face so close that her wrinkles appeared as deep furrows or hedgerows. The enormous eyes captured a light and emotion that made it hard to look away. The painting was flanked on either side by two smaller canvases from the series. The hallway was cluttered with stacks of cardboard boxes that looked like recent deliveries. While the penthouse was easily worth ten million dollars, it didn’t look or smell like money. It smelled lived-in, like someone cooked daily.

I heard several voices in the rooms beyond the foyer. A small brown-skinned child who couldn’t have been more than four peeked around the wall. She called out, “Mama, come!”

A striking woman in her mid-thirties appeared and placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I was looking for Harry Hasselblad. I’m sorry to just show up, but I couldn’t find a number to call first.”

“Are you a reporter? Because if you are, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“No, I’m a writer, but not a reporter. I wanted to see Mr. Hasselblad’s Daedalia collection.”

The woman narrowed her eyes and didn’t say anything. She knelt and whispered something to the little girl, who ran off into the rooms on the other side of the wall.

“This is a private residence, not a museum. You can’t just show up and expect a tour.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t do this. I’m not a reporter, I don’t want anything from Mr. Hasselblad.”

“Well, you must want something or you wouldn’t be here.” The woman squinted her eyes again and tilted her head slightly. “Why do you look familiar?”

“My name’s Marabelle Moody.”

The expression on her face transitioned from suspicion to delight and I felt an immediate warmth from her.

“Oh my God, of course you are! I loved The Town Where We Used to Live. So good. Please come in. I’m Sadie,” she said, offering her hand.

She turned and gestured to the paintings along the wall as she walked. “Some of the pieces are here but the rest of the collection is upstairs.”

The foyer opened up onto a great room with a stunning view of the city across two walls of glass. There were four people seated on a low sectional sofa talking. The little girl who greeted me was playing trucks on the floor with a boy who appeared to be a couple of years older. The adults ranged in age from late twenties to early fifties. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t this. I knew Hasselblad didn’t have any kids or surviving family.

The majority of the floor space in the expansive room was crowded with medium-sized canvas duffels, all uniform in size and shape. It looked like the supply room for a platoon about to deploy. But then I noticed the group on the sofa had an assembly line going. At their feet were cardboard boxes filled with travel shampoos, energy bars, blankets, ponchos, and other essentials. The four of them looked up at me.

“Everyone, this is Marabelle. Marabelle, this is Peter, Janelle, Patrice, and that’s Mongo on the end who keeps eating the Snickers.”

“Great, another pair of hands,” the woman she called Patrice said.

“No, she’s not here to help. She’s here to see the paintings. Marabelle’s a famous novelist.”

Patrice didn’t respond, except to nod warily.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“It’s Thursday so we’re stuffing kits for Brooklyn,” Sadie said. “We do this four days a week.”

I nodded as if I understood. If I was a reporter I would have figured it out or asked a few questions, but I was too busy trying to reconcile this scene with what I had expected to find in the penthouse of an eighty-three-year-old billionaire recluse. The people on the couch resumed their conversation and restarted the assembly line. My books had obviously never made an impression. The children continued to play on the floor. I thought of my Transformers.

“Come on, I can take you to see the paintings,” Sadie said.

I followed her across the great room, through a dining room and a library with beautiful wall-to-wall built-in bookcases filled with books I would have loved to have spent some time with, but she was moving quickly to a spiral staircase. As she ascended, she looked back over her shoulder.

“Careful on the stairs, it’s easy to trip.”

In contrast to the rooms below that were echoey and filled with natural light, the room we climbed into was dimly lit and hushed, like a gallery but much smaller, intimate, and cave-like. The gallery was circular and when we exited the spiral staircase, we were standing at its center. Spaced evenly around the room and perfectly lit were the eleven remaining paintings of my mother’s series. Hasselblad must have acquired the rest of the collection at some point.

I was suddenly overcome with emotion and struggled to keep from sobbing and making a complete fool of myself. I moved quickly to one of the paintings and stood before it as if I meant to study it intently. I felt Sadie behind me. I stared into the portrait of a ragged-looking man missing a leg. He had an enormous dog by his side sitting on its haunches like a regal tiger protecting his king. But I wasn’t really looking at the painting. I could barely make out any detail through the prism of tears in my eyes. I was feeling my mother, her presence in the swirls and eddies of living paint that once moved beneath her hand but were now fixed in time like a slate of trilobite fossils.

“Are you okay?” Sadie asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Thank you.”

“They have that effect on some people when they see them for the first time.”

“Really? Do you get many visitors?”

“No, just the volunteers.”

“You guys run some kind of outreach program?”

“Something like that. We provide support for the unhoused community of the greater metro area.”

“So Mr. Hasselblad started this program? Why haven’t I heard about it?”

“We’re not a formal nonprofit or anything like that. It’s a completely private thing, off the books. That’s how Harry prefers it. No press, no stress, no vultures, he likes to say.”

I began to walk slowly, moving along the wall to study each piece in turn. I had seen them all before in photographs but in person, they communicated so much more. Unlike my mother’s other work, this series was wild and visceral, even muscular. She had shape-shifted in this period, a trick she would do throughout her career.

“Have you known Harry for a long time?”

“Oh yes. He’s like a father to me.”

“How did that happen, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“The painting you saw getting off the elevator, that was my mother.”

I turned to look at her. I could see it then, in the shape of her face, the warmth in her eyes. We were both quiet, studying each other and then she smiled. Her eyes narrowed with curiosity.

“Can I ask why you’re here? Are you researching a book or something?”

“Yes, kind of. I’m not sure yet.”

It wasn’t yet public knowledge that my mother, Kelly Mudd, was the wizard pulling the levers behind the curtain. I had kept her secret my whole life, never once telling the handful of lovers I’d had.

“Are you writing about Harry or Daedalia? Sorry, I’m just a fan. You don’t have to answer…”

“No, it’s fine. It’s Daedalia I’m interested in mostly, but this,” I gestured around the room, “you, and how all this came to be seems like quite a story.”

I was startled when someone cleared their throat behind us. I turned around to see a very old man in a wheelchair.

“It is,” he said, “and it’s not one you’re going to hear. Sadie, who is this woman and why is she in my home?”

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Harmony House, a book I serialized right here in 2024 is being published this month by TinyWorlds and I couldn’t be more excited. Check out the gorgeous cover art by the brilliant below. You’ll be able to pre-order your very own copy, but we’ll get to all that later in the post. First, let’s go back in time a bit. Thank you for being here to celebrate this milestone with me. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Six years ago we all woke up to a world that was nothing like the one we knew the day before. But that was just the beginning of adjusting to a new reality for me.

I was newly divorced after twenty-seven years and I was quarantining in a small, mostly unfurnished apartment with my younger daughter who had just come out to me as trans. A life I thought I understood had to be completely reexamined at 50.

I’ve always gone inward during times of uncertainty. I’ve always turned to making things. For the better part of my life, those things were songs, but increasingly, they have become novels. Both of these ventures require a healthy dose of daydreaming. Like a lot of people during the pandemic, I started fantasizing about buying a piece of land, escaping the city and returning to the rural place where I’d grown up. I had this picture of a few small sustainable homes in the North Georgia mountains, friends and family close by, a place where people could be safe together. It was sincere. I wanted a community more than ever. I needed one. But I was barely making rent and covering college loans for my kids. So I put that energy into starting a new book.

I went down the research hole — tiny homes, prefab, the whole bright promise of sustainable living. And a darker question kept surfacing. Can a genuinely good idea survive contact with the world we actually live in? Or does every beautiful thing eventually get turned into a product, a driver of infinite growth?

That was the collision. And somewhere in it, six people started talking in my head and wouldn’t stop. They took the shape of Freudian archetypes: the scientist, the entertainer, the agitator, the giver, the narcissist, and the believer.

A young PhD candidate struggling to be seen. A musician running from a transgression that cost him. A cranky old man who can’t let a single injustice pass without naming it. A nanny who has spent her life taking care of other people’s kids. A young immigrant tech bro with an outfit for every occasion. And a believer, certain God’s plan doesn’t include people who don’t look like her. Put them in a reality TV show, competing to win the 500-square-foot home they must live in together. The concept was enough to propel me for a few months and then it fizzled out. I set the handful of chapters aside and resumed, climbing out of the crater that was my life at the time.

In 2024 I picked it up again. The landscape of my life had improved dramatically. This was, in no small part, a result of my partner Paradis’s loving support. She had read everything I’d written up to that point and needed a new story. I’d also found a community of writers here on Substack who both inspired and challenged me. I needed to produce a new post every week. That was the price of admission. So I began serializing Harmony House while it was still only half complete. A daring and foolish feat to be sure.

Now this road-tested and reader-approved story is just waiting for you to discover it and go on the same journey I did with a band of friends two years ago.

Your Invitation to Enter the House

The paperback and e-book editions will be officially available July 31st at TinyWorlds. But you can pre-order a copy today! Catch & Release paid subscribers get a 20% discount on the paperback (you’ll receive the code this week via a special email). The audiobook will follow in the fall after I’ve had a chance to re-record the many edits that went into this published edition.

Buy the Book

Ready for your audition?

I thought it would be fun for you to experience what the six contestants in Harmony House did. It’s an audition. A chance to win a spot in the luxurious, sustainable home of the future. If you’re picked and you can outlast the others, in the 500 square feet of design and engineering perfection, it’s yours!1

1. Go to houze.live

2. Record your answer to one of five possible questions

3. Find out if you’re in!

What happens is kind of a magic trick I think you’ll love. Give it try. You can share your response from Houze with others and view the gallery of other responses too. Everyone who enters gets an invitation to the Live Online Launch Event, date to be announced! You’ll also be eligible to win a signed copy of the book. Winners will be announced at the live event.

Audition for Houze

I’ve got a lot more planned in the weeks to come— special interviews, and behind-the-scenes looks at the making of the novel. It’s going to be a fun ride. Thanks for taking it with me!

Previously…

Kelly wandered into a college campus and, after overhearing students debate Daedalia, unconsciously drew a portrait-like sketch of one young man and left it with him. Later in New York, she spoke with Lefty about the monster they had created, visited the World Trade Center site, and admitted she needed something new to believe in before she could move forward.

The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.

November 8, 2005

I’ve started working again. I need it. Without it, I’m a horrible, miserable, despicable person. I fooled myself into thinking that by abstaining from art, I would become a better person and be worthy of going back home. But nothing could be further from the truth.

All I am is more sad and more lonely. New York is not the place to be these things because it offers plenty of ways to treat the symptoms but not the disease.

A few days ago, Lefty and I got into a horrible fight. He’s fucking that Greta woman, which I kind of knew but didn’t want to know. What did I expect, is what he asked. I expected you to be a decent human being is what I said. From there things devolved rapidly. I hung up and haven’t talked to him in four days. In that time, I turned all my energy to doing whatever the fuck I wanted.

I’ve learned a few things. One, I’m not good at sex with people I don’t know. Two, drugs don’t help with that. Three, dancing is better than sex and drugs. The problem is it’s hard to separate these activities.

I was never really with anyone but Lefty. Being groped once or twice in high school doesn’t count. I’ve always felt like sex was this weird club I was never a part of. I get the appeal but also, I don’t and I want to.

It’s a part of the human experience so I went to seek it out. It wasn’t hard to find. You go to a place where the music’s really loud and people are moving close together, lubricated with alcohol, cocaine, or ecstasy.

After a few hours, I ended up at this guy Ricardo’s apartment. I was pretty out of it, but not so much that I didn’t know what I was doing and not so much that I couldn’t sit outside myself watching and judging the whole thing. I tried to see my body the way he was. I tried to go into that place I go when I work because I imagine that’s what sex is like for normal people, but I just couldn’t.

I let him do what he wanted with me and that seemed to be enough. He fell asleep after and I walked back to my hotel feeling empty and dumb and guilty, not because of Lefty but because of M. What if she saw me? I’m a lot of things, but mostly I’m her mother, or that’s what I should be. That should be enough. That should be everything but the truth is that it’s not. This other thing consumes me and the more I try to pretend it doesn’t, the worse I am at everything else.

So I’m going back to work. Right here, for now at least.

November 14, 2005

Lefty found a little private studio space for me in the Village where I’ve been working. We made up. I didn’t make any confessions and he didn’t ask. I don’t think he would really believe me anyway and it doesn’t matter. I missed the sound of his voice and his steadiness. We work as a unit and my art is the bridge between us. I understand that now. He asked if he could come see me and I said we could talk about it.

It seems the minute I made the decision to start working again, the door opened up inside me and I stepped through it. I’m not sure where I’m going yet, but that’s nothing new. My job is to show up and start paying attention again.

It’s a process of letting go for me, letting go of all the expectations I can’t meet. The more I accept that this is the weird animal I am and I can’t be something different, the freer I become and the better the art gets.

I have a new interest in faces lately. I’ve never been one for eye contact so the thought of staring at someone long enough to create a portrait is a little terrifying. The drawing I did of the college kid was a surprise. It’s not like I’m unconscious of what I’m doing when it’s happening, but it’s more of a collaboration than just me thinking, “I’m going to draw an eye shaped like this,” and then making my hand execute it. It’s like I know how to make the pen apply the pressure to create the trick of shadow and light, but the figure that emerges isn’t a part of my plan or if it is, I’m not aware of it.

I worked nonstop for the past few days, breaking only to sleep on the floor or to go out for a walk or to get some food. What I love about the city is it doesn’t matter what time of day it is, there’s always life happening.

Two days ago I woke up at four in the morning after only sleeping a couple of hours and I was starving. I found a little bakery and convinced the surly baker to open the door and sell me a couple of fresh croissants, which I devoured on the walk back.

I passed a woman huddled over a steam grate under a filthy sleeping bag. She was singing. Her voice was gravel and sand but she could soar into these high, flute-like notes. Her hair was thick and matted. I stood to listen to her for a while but she never opened her eyes. I felt her sadness like a deep cavern, and she was in there somewhere, singing from the bottom of it.

I swayed on my feet, freezing but unable to move away. I wanted to save her but then I thought, who am I to think she needs saving? I left her all the money I had in my pocket, which was maybe fifty bucks and some change. When I got back into the studio, she was still with me and I worked on transferring her to the canvas for the rest of the day.

I’ve been working with paint and it’s so much faster but so much harder to get right. It flows thick and viscous and you just keep smearing and pushing and scraping to try to make something emerge. I kind of hate it, but I’m embracing that feeling, the chaos of it. After a full day, I stood back and was stunned to find I had made a swirling, steaming pile of shit. It was just complete trash and I was so tired that I just collapsed on the floor and wept. I was too exhausted to do something dramatic like take a knife to it.

I’m glad I didn’t because this afternoon, when I went back to the studio after taking the night to sleep and the morning to just walk in the park, I found there was something to the piece I had not seen. It was hidden there between the thick slabs of paint that were still wet because the studio is so damp. I got a palette knife and started cutting through the paint, kind of etching out negative space, and discovered the woman I’d seen singing on the street was there, just below the surface.

It took all afternoon and into the evening to excavate her, but when I did, it was glorious. All that goddamned paint was still there but carved up in a million little strokes that are my jam. I cried again, but this time they were tears of relief. I felt like I had tunneled out of a collapsed mineshaft. I looked like it too! You should have seen the look I got from the concierge when I walked through the lobby of the hotel with bright blue and orange smears of paint on my face and in my hair.

November 18, 2005

Lefty is here in the bed next to me sleeping. His flight was delayed and he got in really late last night. There was apparently some bogus threat that kept the plane grounded for hours while they combed through all the baggage. I was really nervous about seeing him again and I tried to wait up, but fell asleep and woke to the smell of him, his lips on my neck.

We didn’t speak, but made love in the darkness with only the light from the city coming through the window. Our bodies reclaimed each other, which I think would’ve been a lot harder if we sat down to talk face-to-face first.

Love doesn’t make any sense. As I watch him sleeping with the late morning sun slanting in across his face, I’m struck by the mystery of it all, how we found one another. I don’t think anyone would have picked us out for each other and we certainly didn’t see it in the beginning. But it’s that strangeness that makes it so special.

He looks older to me this morning and that’s scary. I never gave too much thought to our age difference but it’s obvious to me now that I will lose him one day. I will be alone without my guide, my protector, my champion. I don’t want to think about it.

Today I’ll take him down to the studio space to show him the new paintings. It’s funny they don’t seem real until he’s seen them. I’m convinced they’re just in my head until he tells me what he thinks. I’ll savor the feeling of him absorbing them for the first time when it’s just us and no Daedalia, no talk of where they might best be shown or who’s in line to buy them.

It always hurts to give them up, every single time. I pretend to get used to it, mostly for Lefty’s sake, but it’s really fucking hard. It’s like this hollowness, this vacuum they leave behind.

I’ve tried different things to make it sting less, like having Lefty take them out of the studio immediately when I’m done. I even tried to do this mindful thing like a ceremony where I sat alone with the piece and made an intention to let it go. It’s always the same the day after they’re gone though. I ache for a while and act bitchy and mopey and then one morning I decide to work again and the minute I touch a new canvas, the ache is gone. I don’t think anyone can really understand it and the shitty thing is, I can’t really even talk to other artists about it because, you know.

I’ve decided since I can’t commune with other living artists, I’ll study the dead ones. I’m reading a book about this woman, Hildegard of Bingen. I had no idea there were even women artists in the Middle Ages. She was a German Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath who created these mystical paintings. She had visions and believed God worked through her. She wasn’t just an artist but a writer and a healer, and she tried with her paintings to quell the rampant fear at the time that the world was coming to an end. People were terrified that they were living in the end of days. She was a saint, literally.

Reading about her life makes me feel strange. There’s a comfort in knowing there have been other people, women in history who are possessed like I am, but I also feel this tremendous weight now, like a responsibility. After what happened with Fiodor, I was running from it, but I don’t think I can run anymore. My work must be about more than what it will fetch at auction. There must be some reason for why it consumes me and keeps me apart from my daughter and Lefty and really everyone else. This all sounds crazy, delusional. But what if it’s not?

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Previously…

Kelly fled to the North Carolina mountains, resisting Ona and the pull of her work while circling guilt over Marabelle, Fiodor, and the damage Daedalia had caused. After seeing her mother and stepfather from a distance, she anonymously arranged repairs to their house, listened to Marabelle over the phone, and decided to start driving west.

The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.

October 21, 2005

I ate lunch on the campus of the University of Virginia today. It was such a strange experience. College is one of those normal things I never did and I think I’ve always felt a little insecure about it. It was funny to realize all the kids I watched wandering around in packs were closer to M’s age than mine. I still feel like an uncool teenager.

There was a group of boys at a table adjacent to mine and they were talking excitedly about philosophy, probably very basic stuff you would learn in an intro class, but the ideas were exotic to me. I’m not sure I even know what philosophy is. I was eating a sandwich and only half listening, mostly enjoying the general bravado as they argued their various existential points, jockeying for position. The talk turned to the meaning of life: truth, beauty, art. My ears pricked up when one of the boys mentioned Daedalia.

“It’s bullshit,” one of them said. “All the hype around the artist. It’s totally a hoax somebody’s been able to cash in on.”

My face flushed. Another boy mounted a defense.

“Maybe, but have you ever seen one of her pieces in person? I have, and that shit’s trippy.”

And there you have it, the summation of my life in an exchange between a couple of stoner college kids. They went on to argue about whether or not the artist was actually a woman or even one person. There were no new theories I hadn’t already heard but I had nowhere to be so I sat and listened, pretending to write in my notebook and quietly observing the bloated, bruised girth of my ego.

Of course I had fantasies about sitting down with them and revealing all. This mousy nothing of a middle-aged mom nibbling on a pastrami sandwich was the artist that dominated their lunch conversation. But that’s not how it would go. They would listen politely and side-eye each other until one of them cleared their throat and said they had to get to class. Why does it even matter to me?

After an hour, I realized I had been drawing in my notebook. I wasn’t consciously aware I had been doing it. The page was full edge to edge. I tore it out and left it on the table before I got up to dump what remained of my lunch in the trash. It was part vanity but also akin to an alcoholic discreetly disposing of an empty bottle.

I had totally forgotten about it by the time I was out in the sunshine crossing the large grassy quad when someone came up behind me and touched me on the shoulder.

I turned around to find one of the young men who had been at the table. He had the drawing I’d left behind. There was no way to know which one of the boys he was because I hadn’t been looking at their faces. I told him I didn’t want it and that he could keep it or throw it away if he wanted. He just looked at me, blinking with an utterly confused expression on his face. He looked back down at the page for a long time and then looked back up at me. He asked me why. I told him it was just a doodle.

He wouldn’t turn away or allow me to go, but he wasn’t pushy either. We stood there in silence for a few more seconds as a frisbee whirred by our heads and the grass continued to move under our feet. He extended the drawing out to me again, wanting me to look at it as if I hadn’t just drawn it. To appease him, I looked at the sketch and saw very clearly that I had drawn him, this young man. It wasn’t a portrait exactly. It was dense and full of swirly abstract elements, but it’s as close to a portrait as I’ve ever done.

I didn’t have an answer for him. I really couldn’t even speak. I think I said I was sorry though I’m not sure why, then I turned and started walking away, but he followed me.

“How did you do this?” he asked.

I gave him the honest answer, which was that I didn’t know. I could tell he really wanted to keep talking. I recognized him then. He was the earnest one in the argument with his friends, the one who believed there was order to the universe, an answer for everything if you looked hard enough, if you believed. It was sweet.

I was lonely and against my better judgment, lingered. We found a bench in the shade overlooking the mall and we talked. His curiosity about the drawing hit a dead end and he started asking questions about me. What was I doing on campus? Where was I from? Was I a professional artist? I was vague with my answers but he didn’t seem to mind.

The whole time, I studied him, trying to remember drawing the curve of his jaw, the flesh of his bottom lip, the almond shape of his eyes. But I couldn’t. He was young, so young it was intoxicating. I felt a twinge of guilt at being stirred by his attention and wanting more of it. Then I felt gross about our difference in age. For all his talk, he knew nothing of the real world. He was just a bundle of hormones in ripped jeans and a shirt his mom probably picked out for him. He was more boy than man. Is this how Lefty felt with me? Would it have been the same if I were his age? Was it me he loved or the thrill of my youth or was it just my ability?

I didn’t sleep with the boy though it was clear that would have been easy to do. A part of me wanted the reckless thrill of it, to be like a vampire invited into his dorm room where I would drain him of his innocence, his youth. I think I stopped myself because I realized all I was trying to do was be somebody else besides me. I wanted to pretend to be a normal girl who had attended a normal college and had normal sex in a normal college dorm room. To this boy I was exotic, and to me, he was the opposite.

He was heartbroken when I got up to leave after an hour. I kissed him chastely on the cheek and walked back to my van. I left the drawing with him. He never asked me directly if I was Daedalia. Maybe he had never seen my work before so he didn’t know. Either way, it was reckless and Lefty would not have approved.

I’ve been lying here fantasizing about the kid and imagining there was some deeper connection. There must have been, otherwise how could I have drawn him so perfectly? For selfish reasons, I wish I had kept the drawing, but leaving it with him was just the amount of transgression I needed.

October 30, 2005

Marabelle is dressing up as a robot girl for Halloween. Lefty emailed pictures of her in her costume and she looks so much older it made my heart hurt. He said she’s been reading like crazy lately, mostly science fiction. I fully intended to be home by now, but I’m not. Instead of going west, I went north like an asshole.

I needed a break from the van and the smell of me so I’m staying in a nice hotel on the Upper East Side of NYC. It’s dizzying to swing from one extreme to the other, like tripping. Yesterday morning an 18-wheeler thundered by the van and shook it like a toy, rattling everything including my teeth, and I woke up to the smell of my stale breath and french fry grease. Tonight I’m overlooking Central Park from a cloud of perfumed white linens eating a Waldorf salad and drinking a bottle of red wine that cost more than I’m willing to say. I don’t really know what the fuck I’m doing but for now I’m going to do it in comfort.

I’ve not made any more art since the college boy. Lefty barely asked about me when I called this afternoon after checking in. He’s beyond pissed now and just sounds distracted. Mostly he wanted to talk about business. Was I working on anything new? What did I think about staging a show somewhere in Europe in late spring? Could I be ready by then? He said I should go walk through some galleries while I’m here in the city, “check out the competition” as he put it. It’s all a game to him I think. Life is just one never-ending series.

At the end of the call there was this long pause and I could hear the distance between us over the line. Then he asked, “Is it me? Am I the reason you’re not coming home?” He said if it was, then he would leave so I could come home because Marabelle needed me. I told him it was me which it is, but that never sounds like the truth. I think you reach a point in a relationship where you’re too close to know the difference between whether it’s you you’re sick of or your partner.

I think I’m sick of all of it, the whole thing. I feel like we’ve created this monster now and it has to be fed. We’re both slaves to it. I told him this and he was quiet for a minute before answering.

“So you want to quit?” he asked.

I know how invested he is in all of it now and I try to remind myself that this thing is his too, maybe more than it is mine. So I said no, I don’t want to quit. I think that’s true, but more I fear I can’t quit even if I want to. I said I just needed a little bit of time. The relief in his voice was palpable. I told him I loved him and to send pictures of Marabelle trick-or-treating. He was taking her into town to the same Halloween carnival we have been taking her to since she was six.

After I hung up with him, I took a long walk and without fully intending to, ended up in the financial district, staring through the chain-link fence at the gaping wound where the towers fell. If you didn’t know better, you would think it was just another large construction project in the city. I remembered that afternoon when I walked through the plaza more than five years ago and collapsed, overwhelmed by the stream of images that flooded my consciousness. I was afraid that feeling would come back as I stood there at the fence, but it didn’t.

Whoever I was in those moments, whatever possessed me for the months that followed, was gone. I was just like the other tourists, only I knew I wasn’t. I had made some deeper connection to that place and the people who moved through it and then the people who would later die in the attack.

As I sit here tonight, I close my eyes and try to recall even one of the images I painted on the panels but I can’t without looking them up on the internet and I won’t go there again. If I hadn’t joined that message board, Fiodor never would have met me, he never would have taken Marabelle, and he wouldn’t have died in a jail cell. Also, I don’t think I would be in this self-imposed exile, afraid to do anything but keep moving.

I hope the panels were destroyed in the wreckage. It makes me sick to my stomach to believe they’re out there somewhere. One of Lefty’s obsessions has been to recover them. He put up a $250,000 reward for anyone who can help him find even one of the panels. I’m sure he still reads the emails that come in from all kinds of kooks and grifters.

I don’t feel them out there anywhere the way I can sometimes feel the other pieces of mine that have sold. Maybe I don’t want to feel them so I’m just lying to myself in hopes of moving forward. I need to move forward. I need something new to believe in, to consume me. That’s when I’m happiest.

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Previously…

Marabelle pressed Lefty about Greta and the period when Kelly disappeared again, and he admitted Greta became an escape while refusing to give details about the affair. He then revealed he’d been holding all of Kelly’s journals and offered Marabelle the trunk, insisting she can’t tell the story honestly without reading what Kelly wrote.

The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.

September 28, 2005

Grass is a remarkable thing. I’ve missed it, the way it’s alive beneath you when you lie down. This afternoon, I lay down in a high meadow and studied a patch of it until it got too dark to see anything. I admire the sprawl of grass and the way it’s all interconnected, like it’s all one organism, not a trillion tiny, individual blades. Grass is defined by its plurality. It’s everywhere and virtually invisible. I guess that’s a good way to describe me.

I didn’t bring my sketchpad on purpose. When I have it, I miss everything that falls outside its dimensions. I’ve missed so much, too much already. I say that’s the reason. It sounds nice. It’s what a thoughtful person would say.

The truth is I’m angry at Ona and afraid, and I don’t think I will ever forgive her. I can feel her pushing, nudging me to engage, but I refuse. Better to have the headaches.

I flew into Charlotte two days ago and rented a car. I drove until I reached the Blue Ridge Parkway, and then just kept driving. I found a little motel right off one of the overlooks, which is crazy. There’s literally nothing along the parkway for miles. The place is ancient, built in the fifties, I think, and I might be the only person staying here. The sheets are starched and scratchy and there’s no air-conditioning. My small, cedar-paneled room smells like a dry old attic, or like the smell of a box of puzzle pieces, a box that hasn’t been opened in a decade. It’s perfect.

I missed dinner at the little restaurant, but the old woman who sat behind the register was kind enough to bring me a plate of cold fried chicken, a biscuit, and some slaw. I devoured it sitting in a little folding chair I put outside my room so I could look at the stars above the dark, bear-like silhouette of the mountains.

I called Lefty to tell him I was safe and that I was back in North Carolina. He didn’t speak much, didn’t ask any questions. I know he’s sick of my shit and thinks I’m a terrible mom. I am objectively a terrible mom.

The thing about being a terrible mom is that you don’t get better by being around your kid because their presence just reminds you you’re a terrible mom and then you feel like shit and that just makes you a more terrible mom. I do miss her though. I don’t deserve to miss her. I don’t deserve her.

I can’t stop thinking about Fiodor. He was never going to hurt Marabelle, he was just trying to get my attention. He didn’t deserve to die. The way he wrote about my art, the things he saw in it, amazed me. It was like someone reading thoughts in my mind that I didn’t even realize I had. How could he possibly see me so clearly just from looking at my work? He saw me the way Lefty did before Daedalia.

I missed being seen. But that’s no excuse. I should never have started talking with him. Did I flirt with him? Maybe, but it wasn’t like that. I entertained his theories and teased him with glimpses of the thing he obsessed over. He was a lonely man who had no one, no connection to anything but my work. I was his whole identity and then I just cut him off. Even the kindest, most harmless person can become dangerous when they’re drowning. I’m not sure I can ever forgive myself for what I’ve done.

It’s late and I need to sleep, I guess, but I don’t know why. There’s nothing I have to do tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. I have more than anyone could ever ask for and it doesn’t make any difference.

October 2, 2005

I called home to try to talk to Marabelle but she wouldn’t get on the phone. I don’t blame her. Lefty asked if I would come home, but I can’t. Not yet.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks mostly outside, hiking or just sitting. I need to work. It’s like a terrible itch, an itch inside my brain, inside my gut. There has to be something more to me apart from my art and I’m determined to find it. I’m not sure that I will, but maybe I can at least get some peace away from Ona’s persistent nagging.

I bought a used VW bus. I’ve never bought a car before. It was a practical purchase, I think. I can sleep in it. It’s comfortable and I like driving it even if it does putter up hills. I like waking up and deciding whether I want to stay or go.

I’m really just circling these mountains, though, trying to work up the courage to go and visit my mother. I don’t know why it’s suddenly important. Maybe I need to see her up close to be reminded that there’s a reason why I’m so fucked up. Or maybe now I’m beginning to understand her better. What if she’s not even alive?

My dreams these days are so vivid. I can’t just turn it off, the little Daedalia factory in my mind. Just because I shut down the production line doesn’t mean the idea machine stops. I confess that I look forward to sleeping and I do a lot more of it, sometimes pulling off to the side of the road, drawing the curtains, and taking a nap. Can someone be addicted to sleep?

When I wake up, I lie there for a while in that halfway space, dancing with the ideas, pushing them around on the temporary canvas. It’s as close as I’ll allow myself to get to making art.

These journals have lined pages for a reason, but still my pen drifts to the margins, always looking for the white space. The most recent series of dreams feature vines, a vast network of them twisted together at points like nodes, then separating out into a thousand different directions only to converge again. I was moving along one of the vines, following it slowly at first from some distance, and then I was inside it, moving so fast it’s just a blur of light and color until I explode into the next node.

The nodes are orbs, each like tiny worlds with their own atmosphere, their own life forms, strange, scary, and sometimes beautiful. Writing about them is impossible. Words are inferior, like trying to draw the fine hairs of a downy feather with the fat end of a charred stick.

Besides, it’s not the image anyway, even if I could describe it perfectly. Even if I could draw it exactly. It isn’t what’s on the page, but what’s inside it, beneath it. There’s a thousand pulsing hearts pumping away invisibly behind any great work of art.

I will go see my mother tomorrow. Maybe that’s what will knock me out of this fucking loop I’m stuck in.

October 3, 2005

I debated calling first or just showing up. I didn’t want to do either so I chose the middle ground. I parked on the street at the end of the driveway like some creepy person in the van and watched the place for an hour or two.

The house looked worse for the wear, peeling paint and broken shutters. The only active improvement to the property was a ramp up to the front door. I wondered if they even lived there anymore and was about to leave when the front door opened.

An old woman, roughly the size of my mother, appeared in the doorframe but her shape was all wrong, like a collection of sticks wired together inside a lavender jogging suit. This woman’s hair was limp, lifeless, and muddled with gray. I was convinced it wasn’t her until she turned in profile to shout into the house. A moment later, a crumpled old man appeared in a wheelchair behind her and my heart frosted over.

The comb-over was gone. His head looked like a translucent bird egg. The ruddy, bloated face I remember was replaced by hollow cheeks, pulled into a permanent frown. As she maneuvered him down the ramp, she looked up and saw my van. Her face scrunched up and she paused midway. Her eyes locked on mine, or I imagined they did. I didn’t wait to find out.

I drove back into town, my heart racing. I’m not sure what I’m afraid of. Neither of them have any hold over me and they haven’t since I moved out at sixteen, but I felt that old feeling of being trapped like a small animal. He must’ve had a stroke or something. I feel no pity for him.

For my mother, it’s more complicated. I realize I have no desire to talk to her or tell her about my life, even to gloat and punish her. Still, there’s a stitch of guilt I can feel pinching my gut. She looks so helpless and sad and old, like that house with the shutters hanging off their hinges.

That’s something I can fix at least. I’ll find a contractor in town tomorrow and give them money to repair the house. I’ll do it anonymously. It’s all the “good daughter” she deserves.

I think I’m stunned that she has stayed with him, that she could love him when he was a monster and love him now that he’s a vegetable. She never had that kind of love for me. It’s horrible to admit, but I see myself in her.

I’ve done no better as a mother and as much as I want to, I can’t right now. Better for M to miss me and be angry at my absence than to see the shell of me every day and wonder why she’s not deserving of my attention. I miss her terribly. But going back now would be selfish. She doesn’t need me fucking her up.

October 5, 2005

Tomorrow I’ve decided to leave the mountains. As beautiful as they are right now with the leaves changing, it’s time to go. I need to keep moving. It’s really all I know to do right now.

I kind of did what I came here to do. I didn’t speak to them, but I saw my mom and my stepfather. I made some effort to atone for my neglecting her all these years. It’s okay if she doesn’t know the help with their house came from me. I know it did and that makes me feel a little better.

Marabelle still won’t talk to me, but Lefty put the phone on speaker for half an hour while he was helping her with her homework so I could hear her voice. She sounded so grown up and confident, I couldn’t stop crying and had to put the phone on mute so she wouldn’t hear me.

He was helping her with a book report she was having to write and I was reminded what a patient teacher he is. I was really just a girl the first time I met him and his voice had this effect on me, like a calming, settling feeling. He asked her to read what she wrote aloud and I could just picture them there at the kitchen table, him nodding and humming his approval at specific points.

I’m not ready to face them, but tomorrow morning I will at least start driving west.

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Previously…

Marabelle returned from North Carolina to find Kelly frayed and overcompensating. Lefty shouted little Marabelle out of the shed before she could see what was on a new canvas Kelly had painted. A brief pocket of closeness followed at Disneyland, but it ended abruptly when Kelly learned that Fiodor had died in his cell. Marabelle never learned what was on the canvas.

The following transcript is an excerpt from an interview with Lefty Moody on August 4, 2034.

LM: Are you recording all these?

MM: Yeah, because I want to get it right. What, why are you smiling?

LM: Nothing, sweetheart. I think it’s a noble pursuit to get things right, but you’re interviewing the wrong person for that.

MM: Maybe, but you’re all I’ve got now.

LM: You’ll get it right because whatever goes into the story will have to go through your beautiful brain first.

MM: Do you think I’m like her?

LM: No, thank God. Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I mean to say your mom was haunted most every day of her life. That’s why she had to run away sometimes. I don’t think you have that.

MM: What did you do when she disappeared the second time?

LM: I don’t know exactly. She was always disappearing and I never got used to it.

MM: I think there’s a reason for that. It was kind of in the contract the two of you made for her to be gone. I’m sorry. That sounded harsh, but isn’t it a little bit true?

LM: I suppose it is, but you’re kind of an asshole for stating it so plainly.

MM: I can accept that, but you agreed to all this. What was it she said just before she died? “No more secrets.”

LM: That’s right. Why do I get the feeling this is going to be an interrogation? I can see there’s something you want to ask me, so just spit it out.

MM: Greta. She started showing up a lot when I was ten. You were with her, weren’t you? She wasn’t just a business associate.

LM: Why do you need to ask a question you already know the answer to?

MM: I need to hear you say it. I need to understand.

LM: It didn’t start out that way. In the beginning Greta was just someone who showed me the ropes of the art world. But when your mom left that second time, something kind of broke. I really wasn’t sure she would come back. I was pissed at her and I was lonely. You remember it was just me and you for months, right?

MM: Yeah, I remember. Did Kelly not say where she was going?

LM: No, she didn’t say. These things were never debates or even conversations. When she reached that point, I understood she was drowning and there was nothing I could do except give her space.

MM: It was more than a year, right? She missed my tenth birthday. I remember her gift showing up in the mail and I didn’t want to open it.

LM: I’m not sure it was that long, but you’re right about your birthday. The gift sat on the floor of your room for months. You wanted me to give it to Maria’s niece.

MM: So, Greta?

LM: Greta was my escape. Your mom had hers and I had mine. Jesus, this is kind of horrible to dredge up. Were you really just ten? You always seemed so much older. You just took everything in stride. I’m sorry.

MM: It’s fine. Ancient history now. Please tell me about that time period. I want to understand what you were both going through.

LM: I can tell you the facts, but I’m not going to go into details about my affair with Greta. You’re a grown person. Use your imagination. I’ve read your books. I’m sure whatever you write will end up better than what it really was.

MM: What was it really?

LM: A poor substitute for what I really wanted. When you make a life with someone who’s always having a conversation in her head with someone else, you get tired of being a third wheel. Heh, I guess that’s not really a thing, is it?

MM: No, a third wheel keeps things from tipping over.

LM: Well, I guess that’s a good way to describe me then. But I did get tired of being the support.

MM: What did she get tired of?

LM: You should read that for yourself.

MM: What do you mean?

LM: I’ve been holding onto something for a while out of respect for your mother because I’m not sure what she would have wanted. I know the two of you talked a lot in her final days. Did she ever mention her journals?

MM: She never offered them. I know she kept them secret, like so much else.

LM: I have them all and I think she would have wanted you to see them. It’s a lot, but you’ve taken on this project and you’ve said you want to get it right. I’m worried you can’t do that unless you read them.

MM: Okay. I’m a little scared. Just thinking about what’s in there scares me.

LM: What scares you more, that you will learn that she was human or that she was more than that?

MM: Both. She really believed she had some magical power. That’s crazy. You know that, right? After all these years, you know that. She didn’t kill Fiodor Barkowski because she made a painting in her shed.

LM: I’m old enough now to accept there’s a lot I don’t understand, and will never be able to see because my eyes aren’t equipped. Octopuses have a brain in each tentacle. This crazy little shrimp, the mantis shrimp, can see millions of colors or something crazy. Birds and butterflies know how to migrate to places on the other side of the world. We call things crazy that we don’t understand.

MM: Okay, it’s clear you’ve been watching too much National Geographic. But I know what you mean. Did some part of you envy her ability?

LM: Of course. The only thing I ever did in my life that came close to what she could do was throw a ball really fast. But that’s not really the same, is it?

MM: Did you ever study her when she was working, try to figure out what she was doing?

LM: Sure I did. There was even a time when she tried to teach me.

MM: How did that work?

LM: How do you think? She was a terrible teacher, but I didn’t give her much to work with. Looking back, I wish that I had filmed her, you know like these kids do today with time-lapse photography. I can see her in my mind, the way she held her pen. There were times when I would sit in the studio and just watch her work. She would forget I was there. Her hand would be moving so fast with such purpose and certainty, making tens of thousands of choices in an hour with each tiny stroke of her pen. It’s like she was that octopus I talked about earlier with a separate brain in her hand. You realize she started to draw with her left hand because her right would cramp too much? You know how hard that is?

I saw a video the other day at one of those machines. What are they called? They have a little nib that shoots out plastic and they can make these incredibly complex objects.

MM: You mean a 3D printer.

LM: Yeah, that’s it. That’s what it was like watching her work. Most artists work for a while and then step back from the canvas to get the full perspective. I’m sure she must have too, but I don’t remember that being part of her process. How do you explain that? How do you explain what she was able to create without at least stepping back to see the whole thing once in a while?

MM: I don’t know. It’s one of many things I want to understand about her. When I read about all these people who are scholars of her work, I get jealous, like they knew her better than me. Isn’t that ridiculous?

LM: They didn’t know your mother, sweetie. They study her work and see what they want to see. She was hard to know. I’m not sure if she really even knew herself. I know how much she loved you, even if she didn’t always know how to show it. I’m gonna give you the trunk of her journals. Maybe they’ll help.

MM: Have you read them?

LM: I’ve tried, but it’s just too painful for me now.

MM: You don’t think she would mind me having them?

LM: I don’t think so. I think she wanted to be known, don’t you? It’s what we all want, to be known, especially by the people we love.

MM: It’s funny, the whole thing. I mean, there’s probably very few people on the planet who haven’t seen her work at this point and literally none of them knew who she was even though they think they did. You created this placeholder for her and people could just fill in the blank.

LM: Yeah, I guess that’s something people need more than I ever anticipated they would.

MM: Why do you think that is?

LM: I don’t know. Maybe the same reason we need God or Santa Claus.

MM: You’re talking about belief, about faith. You believed in her.

LM: I did, but I also knew the real person, just like you did. She wasn’t an idea. She wasn’t a witch. She was my partner, my wife, your mother. What? What did I say?

MM: Nothing, Dad. I just… I don’t know. I’m just so sad because I feel like I always missed her, like she was more an idea than anything else to me. I wanted more. I know that’s not fair. But I wanted more time. And now… now she’s really gone and I’ll never get that time.

LM: I know sweetie. I’m sorry. But you were always there with her. She carried you with her, wherever she went. Read her journals.

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Previously…

In her journals, Kelly described the aftermath of Marabelle’s abduction as sleepless isolation, guilt, and rage, while Lefty grew cold and distrustful after learning Kelly had been messaging Barkowski online. Marabelle’s trauma surfaced in small ways, and Kelly began to fear both her work and her own capacity for harm, swearing she would stop being Daedalia and try to become a real mother.

The trip to visit my grandparents in North Carolina, after everything I had been through, felt enchanted. Sitting on their back porch, I saw fireflies for the first time and heard cicadas. Lefty and I played Parcheesi with my grandpa and I ate two bowls of my grandma’s blackberry cobbler. There was a neighbor boy I played with for hours who had bright red hair and a lazy Southern drawl that made me laugh when he said things like “warter.” Let’s get some warter, I’m thirsty.

I don’t remember thinking about Kelly while we were away and I didn’t even feel bad until we got home. She had decorated the whole living room with streamers and balloons like it was a birthday party. There were bowls of chips and candy on the table and an enormous box, gift-wrapped, that turned out to be a bicycle. She had baked a cake too, and though it was lopsided, it was exquisitely decorated with a Transformer that looked like it must have taken her all day to create.

She hugged me for a long time and I hugged her back but she smelled terrible, like she hadn’t bathed in a couple of days. Her hair was greasy and hadn’t been brushed and she had dark circles under her eyes.

Lefty was concerned. I remember the way he looked around the room, and at her, when she was hugging me and saying over and over again how much she had missed us. Later, when I was in my room playing, I could hear them talking. They weren’t shouting, so I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but from the rhythm and flow of their voices, it was clear there was an argument. I wished I was back in North Carolina.

The next morning, I woke up early and went into the living room to turn on the TV. Out the window, I could see the door to the shed was open. I called out for my parents, but there was no answer. I went into their bedroom but they weren’t there. I put on my flip-flops by the door and went outside. I crossed the courtyard and went down the path to the shed where the door was ajar. I stepped to the threshold and looked inside.

Lefty was standing in front of a medium-sized canvas on one of Kelly’s easels. I couldn’t see what was on it because his body blocked my view. Kelly was curled up on the floor in the corner of the room. She was covered in an old quilt and all I could see was the nest of her hair and one of her hands, dirty with ink and paint, poking out from beneath.

I called out to Lefty but he didn’t seem to hear me.

I remember this terrible, uneasy feeling that is hard to describe. It was a physical sensation that made my stomach turn over, like when you take the express elevator to the top floor of a skyscraper.

I called out to Lefty again. He startled from his trance and yelled, “No. Get out of here, Marabelle. Now.”

I jumped at the sound of his voice. He never yelled at me, so this was scary. I turned and ran back to the house without ever seeing what was on the canvas. A few minutes later he found me in my bedroom, hiding in the back of my closet.

“Come here, sweetheart. It’s okay. Daddy’s sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Is Mommy okay?” I asked.

“She’s fine, she’s just tired. She was up late working last night.”

“Why did you scream at me?”

“I didn’t want you to see that picture. Some things are only for grown-ups. I didn’t want it to upset you.”

I don’t remember any more discussion after that. If there was, I didn’t sway him, probably because I didn’t really want to know what was on the canvas.

Later that day, when I went out to the shed to see her, the canvas was gone. She seemed better, less frayed around the edges, and that feeling I had walking into the shed earlier that morning didn’t come back.

“Are you okay, Mommy?” I asked.

“Yes, pumpkin, I’m great. Just a little tired. I didn’t sleep so well. Come here.”

I sat in her lap. Her hair was damp and smelled like shampoo. Her hands were scrubbed clean. I let her hold me for a while. I could feel her trying so hard and I didn’t want to disappoint her. I wanted to match her intensity but I never could. Mostly I just felt uncomfortable.

I felt this way long before I was taken and it only intensified after. It wasn’t Kelly’s fault she couldn’t make me feel safe. I’m not sure she ever felt safe or comfortable in her body unless she was working.

As I read back what I’ve written about my childhood, I realize I’m not being entirely fair. It’s true that the memories that stick in our reptile brains are typically the bad ones, the cautionary tales, so I’ve made an effort to go back and look through Lefty’s photo albums to try to remember the events of my childhood with more accuracy.

There were moments, pockets where we felt like a family and did family things. We went to Disneyland a couple of weeks later because Lefty had business in L.A. We stayed in a suite at the Disneyland Hotel with a view of Sleeping Beauty Castle, had pancakes with Mickey and Goofy, and spent the day riding rides. It was Kelly’s first time at Disney too and she loved it as much as I did.

Even though I was an inch shy of the minimum height to ride, she helped me get on Space Mountain and we rode it three times in a row. Lefty chickened out after the first time and feigned a sore neck. We teased him mercilessly for the rest of the trip. At the teacup ride or in the queue for “It’s a Small World,” Kelly would say, “Are you sure your neck’s gonna be okay with this one, Grandpa?”

They didn’t argue or have intense whispered conversations. My mother didn’t once pick up a pen unless it was to circle the next thing on the map we were going to visit. No one asked me how I was doing or if I needed anything. I didn’t have to talk to the lady in the office with all the bookshelves about my feelings.

For the last two days of that trip, it was just me and my mother because Lefty had meetings. The sharp focus my mother had always given to her work, she gave to me and I bathed in her attention. She was less of a mother and more of a friend with endless resources who wouldn’t deny me anything.

If I expressed the smallest interest in a toy in one of the hundreds of gift shops, strategically placed throughout the park, she got it for me. Halfway through the second day we had to return to the hotel because we couldn’t carry all the things she had bought for me. Rather than return to the park, we went down to the hotel swimming pool, which was basically a mini waterpark, and she swam and splashed and got sunburned right beside me for the remainder of the afternoon.

She got on a first-name basis with one of the poolside waiters and he continued to refill our commemorative Goofy cups with mock piña coladas until we both got brain freezes. It was as if she had taken Lefty’s personality on loan in his absence and was going to ride it until the wheels came off.

I remember we held hands everywhere we walked, and if we were waiting in line somewhere, her hands were on my shoulders or cradling my face, her lips pressed to the top of my head. I don’t remember ever flinching or pushing her away. I soaked up her affection in the way a desert marigold drinks the rain.

The memory I’ve replayed during the worst times of my life, when I’ve felt completely alone and anxious, is one from that evening. It’s a mystery why we record some memories in high fidelity, but I believe it has something to do with the degree to which our bodies are affected in these moments.

I was so sunburned that my face and shoulders were glowing, radiating heat, like embers in a furnace. But the strange thing about being that sunburned is that everything that touches your skin must be interpreted. It’s as though the wires of perception for pleasure and pain are intertwined.

We stood together in a cold shower, both of us cringing and squealing at the tiny needles of water. Afterwards, we couldn’t bear the agony of toweling off so we lay on the soft white sheets of the enormous bed beneath the ceiling fan to air dry. She slathered gobs of cold aloe vera gel on my shoulders and the delicate touch of her fingertips raised goosebumps down my back.

We ordered room service. To be different I ordered something exotic called a Monte Cristo, which turned out to be a deep-fried ham and cheese sandwich. She thought it was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted and ordered two more. We dipped them in syrup and ate until we were so full we couldn’t move. She put what remained back on the silver tray and we left it in the hallway.

In the bed we watched 101 Dalmatians and she promised to get me a puppy when we returned home. I was so tired I don’t remember the movie ending. All I remember is the sensation of her fingers idly combing through my damp hair, the flickering light from the television playing on the wall, and the feeling of not wanting to be anywhere else. Not wanting anything else. And most of all, not being afraid.

The next morning, I awoke to find the person who had made me feel that way was gone. Kelly was on the phone for a long time talking with my father. Something was wrong. I pretended to play with my new toys, but really I was listening for clues in her one-word responses and vague questions.

Before she hung up the phone, I remember her saying, “Oh my God. What did I do?” All the blood had drained from her face, her mouth was slack, and she stared at a point on the wall for a long time after the call ended. I kept asking her what was wrong, but she didn’t respond, except to turn on the television and hand me the remote.

We didn’t go back to the park that day. Instead, we got on an airplane and flew back to Santa Fe. The person who had splashed in the pool with me had vanished as quickly as she had appeared, and I would only ever catch fleeting glimpses of her for what remained of my childhood.

In the days that followed, from the snippets of conversation I could make out between her and Lefty, I learned that Fiodor was dead. I never let on that I knew this nor did I ask any questions about him. The ropes of guilt, sadness, and relief braided into a knot in my gut. I withdrew more and more. I’m not sure either of my parents really noticed. Maybe they did because they continued to take me to the therapist with her shelves full of books, but we never spoke about Fiodor.

When I began doing research for this book a couple of years ago, I learned that my captor was found dead in his cell early on the morning of July 16, 2005, the same morning I was sleeping blissfully next to my mother in the Disneyland Hotel. The police report said he died from a massive heart attack. He was only 36 years old and had no preexisting heart condition. Apparently no one questioned his death. There was no grieving mother or father to challenge the autopsy report.

Two decades later, there was little evidence that Fiodor Barkowski had ever existed beyond some archived web pages from a Daedalia fan site I managed to find in the Wayback Machine. He wrote about her with such reverie, passion, and sensitivity. He seemed like a kind person, earnest even, and I wondered if I had met him as an adult, if he hadn’t kidnapped me as a child, would I have liked him?

I tried to recall the physical dimensions of him as I read his words, but he was nothing but a collection of disjointed parts in my memory. There are no photographs that portray the man who wrote those beautiful words about Daedalia or the man who caused me nightmares for over a decade. There’s only a mug shot taken the day he was arrested. In the two-by-three frame, he appears trapped like a wild animal in a snare, the whites of his eyes enormous, his expression a combination of terror and bewilderment.

At Kelly’s insistence, Lefty burned the canvas I hadn’t been allowed to see that morning in the studio. I’ve asked him many times in the last few years to describe the painting to me, but he’s never been willing to talk about it.

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Previously…

Fiodor held Marabelle for six days, feeding her a private mythology about Daedalia while he spiraled between obsession and instability. On the sixth night Marabelle fled the motel, was found by police, and returned home to parents who were physically there but suddenly unfamiliar.

The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.

June 18, 2005

I don’t really sleep anymore. We haven’t left the house except to shop for groceries in almost three months and when we do, the three of us go together. Maribee has regressed a bit, which the therapist says is to be expected, but otherwise, she seems fine, certainly better than me and Lefty.

He sleeps on the floor in her bedroom and I lay awake in our bed, staring at the ceiling when I can’t stand to look at the TV anymore. We don’t really talk about what happened. I know we should, but talking about it brings the full force of it back and that feeling is like a balloon swelling in my chest that just keeps expanding until I can’t breathe. Lefty is so angry at me and I don’t blame him. That lunatic would never have entered our lives if it wasn’t for me. I can deal with it though. I can deal with Lefty’s coldness and pent-up rage. I can deal with just about anything now that we have Marabelle back. When she was gone, I went into a kind of raving, animal madness where I would have chewed off my own arm if that was the price to get her home.

This morning she was sitting at the breakfast table and I was standing over her when I discovered a bald spot on her scalp where she’s been pulling out her hair. I touched the bare spot and started crying. She swatted my hand away and said to leave her alone, then she ran from the table. Lefty just stared at me so hard I felt his eyes were like spikes and I collapsed on the floor, sobbing. Pathetic. I don’t know how to get back to where we were and then I think that’s wrong because where we were is what caused all this to happen.

June 30, 2005

I don’t know if I ever want to work again but I don’t know what else I’m good for. Lefty took Marabelle to North Carolina to visit his parents. He thought a change of scenery would be good for her. When I told him to go without me, I think he was relieved. So here I am alone, staring at a blank canvas.

Who am I kidding? I have nothing but a cold, burning hatred inside me. All I want to do is see the man who took Marabelle burned alive or fed to alligators. But that’s not going to happen. It doesn’t matter how much money we have. The state moves at a snail’s pace to administer justice. I guess I should be happy that at least he’s in a jail cell and didn’t get away. I badger the Albuquerque DA’s office every day. The latest is that Mr. Barkowski will likely plead insanity, which is most certainly true. This doesn’t help my case for wanting him put to death.

Last night while he was packing, Lefty asked what I planned to do while they were gone. These questions used to be gentle nudges to get me to work but now they feel more like interrogations. He no longer trusts me. The thing I was doing online wasn’t exactly sexual, but this fact doesn’t matter to him. Maybe he would be able to forgive me if it was sexual. At least he would be able to understand it.

We’ve not spoken about it since that massive fight after Marabelle was back home and the investigators came around asking questions about my messaging history with Barkowski. It was all there. Nothing goes away on the fucking internet. What was just anonymous fun, a way to blow off steam, ended up blowing up our lives and doing damage to my sweet girl that can’t be undone.

If he wasn’t being such an asshole, I would almost feel bad for him for the way he had to dance in front of the detective’s questions about this artist, DAY DALLIA. I no longer give a shit, but he insisted on preserving our secret, even under these circumstances. I played along because I always play along. He says he’s afraid of what other nutjobs will come after me if the truth gets out. I want to believe that’s his reason.

After the detective left, Lefty made me log into the message board so he could read everything I had written.

I’ve never seen him so angry. Why was I playing around with these trolls in their parents’ basements with their conspiracy theories? Was it thrilling to titillate them with my expert insights into the great Daedalia? Did I get off on it? I told him no, but it was the closest I would ever get to getting credit for my work. That shut him up.

None of it matters. What matters is that Marabelle is safe, at least for now, as long as that motherfucker is in jail. As for Daedalia, her days are numbered. Even if she’s not completely exposed during the trial, which seems likely, I don’t think I’ll ever want to draw again.

July 4, 2005

Lefty called yesterday and asked if it was okay if they stayed through the 4th. Marabelle is having a good time. She sounded happy and relaxed on the phone. A neighbor has a grandson visiting so she has a playmate, which she’s not used to. I miss her. I should have gone too but I’m afraid of bumping into my mother and Dennis. It happened a few years ago when we were there. She looked so hurt when she saw Marabelle with us and I felt guilty for not even telling her she had a granddaughter. How’s that fair? After everything she put me through. Better to stay here and be lonely.

In the distance I can see the fireworks downtown. I’m sitting on the patio with a glass of whiskey and an empty bag of chips. I used to enjoy time by myself but now I just feel manic. I can’t focus on anything. Tried to read, tried to watch TV, but I can’t get out of my head.

Ona feels like I’m punishing her by not working and maybe I am. I can feel her stronger than ever. But I refuse to go out to the shed. I’m not going to open the door again.

Is it weird that I’m beginning to believe all the crazy shit other people have been saying about my work? It’s made me think a lot about this question: If you were a monster, would you know you were a monster? Does a shark or a scorpion know what it is? Did I cause those men to fly into the towers? Did I invite Barkowski to take my baby?

I’m not that special. I cling to this notion when I feel like my brain is crawling with ants. Crazy people have delusions of grandeur. I’m just an artist. That’s all I know how to be. Nothing more than that.

I’m not even a good wife or mother. I’ve always been a disappointment to him in these roles, but now that I don’t want to be an artist, what good am I to him? What the hell am I going to do?

I gave the two security guys the day off. I would have done that even if it wasn’t a holiday. They make me feel like this place is a prison and honestly, I don’t trust anyone anymore, no matter how much they’re being paid to do a job. I think about Barkowski being in a cell and as much as I want that to feel good, it just makes me sad. He was once a Marabelle to someone.

A couple of weeks ago when I was sitting in her room while she played on the floor with her toys, she asked out of the blue: “Was Fiodor your friend or was he Daedalia’s friend?” I told her he was not my friend and that she knew Daedalia was just a name and not real. She stopped playing and just looked at me. “Why?” she asked. I didn’t have a good answer.

As the therapist recommended we do, I asked her in a non-judgmental way if she was thinking about Fiodor, if she wanted to talk about him. The therapist said it was common for a child to develop feelings for a captor, to even miss them, which is horrible to think about.

“He said he was supposed to save you. How can he save you now that he’s in jail?” she said. I told her I didn’t need saving. I wish to God that was true. I asked if she was afraid he would come back.

She changed the subject by asking me another question. “Why do you make those pictures?”

I don’t think anyone had ever asked me that question, even Lefty. Lefty had answered this very question on Daedalia’s behalf many times in interviews published in magazines across the world, but I have never answered it. And here was my little girl, seeing me, wanting to know. I froze. It’s like the work is the room I’ve always been in and it’s the only room I know. Her asking me implied that I have a choice, that there are other rooms to live in.

I told her I didn’t know because that was the truth and then I asked her if she liked the pictures I made.

I’ll never forget the pained look on her face. She was a child trying to take care of my feelings, trying to shove down a truckload of her own feelings to spare mine. I felt pathetic. She nodded slowly and said, “Can I play now?”

It wasn’t an invitation but I stayed in her room, even got down on the floor with her and tried to be absorbed in her world, to move the figures around on the carpet like she did. But I was distracted as I always am. I looked at her small, beautiful hands pushing trucks in circles on the floor between us and I imagined that man with her in that motel room as though he owned her, as though he was entitled to take whatever he wanted, as if all the beautiful and terrible things I made were made for him.

I was doing a fierce painting in my head, the strokes twitching faster and faster, like a million tiny cuts. My head felt like it was going to split open. I ran into her bathroom where I threw up.

They’ll be home tomorrow but that seems like an eternity from now. I’m going to focus all my energy on being a better mom. I’m going to read books about it. I’m going to study it the way I studied how to draw perspective, proportion, and depth. Maybe Lefty will be okay with the trade. Daedalia has given us far more than we need. Maybe we can be a real family now. I want that more than anything.

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Previously…

Fiodor Barkowski walked through the open gate at the ranch and used the Daedalia secret to manipulate Marabelle into unlocking the shed for him. When he didn’t find what he wanted, he kidnapped her, taking her to a motel room in Albuquerque.

The lore of Daedalia, according to Fiodor, went something like this: she was an ancient spirit who moved between this world and the many we cannot see, and she had many names in many tongues. Every century she chose a new vessel to work through, and these artists, Leonardo da Vinci, Artemisia Gentileschi, and William Blake, to name a few, produced visionary work far ahead of their time.

Fiodor believed Kelly Mudd was Daedalia’s chosen vessel for the twenty-first century and that her foretelling of the events of 9/11 through the twelve panels was evidence of her divinity. The problem was that Kelly had fallen prey to the same exploitative demon as many of her predecessors. The demon in question was my father, Charles Moody, who hid her true identity from the world in order to profit. It was Fiodor’s mission to discover the true identity of Daedalia, which he believed he had done, and to bring her into the light so the world would know her and she could be of service to it.

None of these details were told to me in that La Quinta Inn. I would learn it all by combing through internet archives decades later. What I learned over the course of those six days in that motel room was how to survive alone in the wilderness of one man’s troubled mind.

Fiodor had no plan when he took me. That much was clear after the first day. I can only assume he viewed me as another piece of art created by my mother, a piece like her others that contained a divine message for him to decode and possess.

“On the day you were born, were there crows? Crows outside the window?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does your mother only work during the new moon?”

“What’s a new moon?”

“The man that appears in the seventh panel, the one with sparrows in his beard, did your mother ever talk about him?”

As he would do many times, he showed me an image of one of my mother’s pieces on his laptop. I had seen very little of Daedalia’s work up to that point in my life. I was forever competing with her for my mother’s attention, so what little I had seen, I hadn’t examined with any real interest.

But when he showed me the image, I pretended to study it very carefully. I even asked him to make it bigger. I couldn’t see a bearded man and I didn’t know what sparrows were, but I had learned it was better to play the role he wanted me to play in this game.

“Yes,” I told him. “She said he was a hero, like a Transformer.”

His eyes lit up when I said this. He leaned back in his chair and stroked his beard. Then he turned his attention back to his computer and became completely immersed in typing.

I drifted slowly away to my corner of the room where I played with the alligator Transformer he had given me. They say children can adapt to anything, and it’s true. After a couple of days, I accepted this new reality for however long it would last. He let me eat things I wasn’t allowed to eat, like Froot Loops, gummy worms, and Doritos. He allowed me to watch anything on TV so long as it wasn’t too loud and he didn’t need help with his mission.

He barely slept. In fact, I don’t remember ever seeing him asleep, but he must have. I missed Maria. I missed Lefty reading stories to me and sometimes falling asleep, his long body stretching the length of my bed like a fortress wall, protecting me from whatever monsters I imagined outside my window.

I cried myself to sleep, fighting to loosen the knots in my belly. If Fiodor heard me crying, he would come lay next to me and it was a terrible feeling, wanting that physical comfort and simultaneously being repulsed by it. He smelled of sweat and spearmint gum and his breath was hot on my neck as he spoke in a whisper, telling long, rambling stories about mythical beasts, heroes, and villains. When he spoke of my mother, it was always in the possessive.

“My Kelly, she’s too good for this world. That’s why she was chosen. But Daedalia is an agent of chaos and can’t be trusted. The sales man,” that’s how he referred to my father, “can’t protect her, will not protect her because he only seeks to profit from what he believes is his golden goose.”

He would go on like this as he stroked the length of me with his heavy hand until I stopped crying, not because I was soothed, but because I did the only thing a small animal can do when trapped: become so still that maybe the predator will lose interest. I don’t think he ever touched me in a sexual way, but as I’ve said before, I can’t trust my memories.

As the days progressed, Fiodor became increasingly erratic, swinging from manic states where he would pace the room, cursing the names of demons he believed were coming for him, to long periods of staring into his computer in a near-catatonic state. Toward the end, he had stopped leaving the room. There was no more food. I drank water from the sink. I watched TV with the sound muted because the noise made him more agitated.

On the night of the sixth day, I had a dream so vivid that I recall it with more certainty than anything I’ve recounted so far. I was inside one of my mother’s paintings, being chased through a maze of hedgerows by a lumbering beast that growled like distant thunder rumbling through a dark, fetid cavern that dripped with condensation as it panted after me.

The sun was setting on the horizon, the sky aflame with color, and I was trying to reach it, but the path kept diverting me. I heard her voice singing to me. I don’t remember Kelly ever singing to me, but I knew it was her. I wanted her to stop the stupid singing and help me.

Then I realized she wasn’t singing but screaming, and the screaming became more shrill. I began to run faster, and as I ran, the tiny leaves of the hedges that imprisoned me began to flutter and take wing like millions of small birds, sparrows.

When I looked down at my body, I saw that I had transformed into an armored machine and I felt heat radiating up through me like a rocket gathering energy to take off. As the fluttering birds cleared, I saw that I was in the desert and I understood my home was miles away in the hills that were just bumps on the line of the horizon, quickly being erased.

Her screaming stopped, and everything was quiet. I could no longer hear the beast, but I felt its breath. Then one word, not spoken but transmitted, rang through every bone of my body like a tuning fork.

RUN!

My eyes shot open. The hotel room was dark except for a sliver of light from the parking lot that peeked through the drapes. Fiodor had been in the bed next to me. The depression he left in the mattress and the dampness of his sweat on the sheets and on my skin almost made me vomit. I could see the light from under the bathroom door and I could hear him muttering and grunting in there.

The heavy chair was no longer in front of the motel room door.

Without stopping to find my shorts or my toys, I rushed to the door. On my tiptoes, I was able to just reach the safety bar and flip it over. I paused with my fingers on the handle. I was frozen, no longer an armored robot, but the scared rabbit whose only defense was to be still and cower.

Then my body filled with the single directive my mother’s voice had planted in my dream.

I opened the door, stepped out onto the breezeway where the sun was still hours from breaking the horizon, and I ran.

I ran to the parking lot, to the only light I could see, which was the registration office for the motel. The older Indian woman with heavy bags under her eyes seated behind the desk startled when I burst through the door, this pipe cleaner of a child wearing nothing but a stained T-shirt and underwear.

I’m not sure what I said to her, or if I said anything at all. Maybe my eyes communicated everything she needed to know.

Within minutes, there was a policeman, and then more policemen, and I was wrapped in a blanket in the back of a police cruiser with a woman seated next to me who held my hand and said she was taking me home.

Just as in my dream, I was blasting through the desert landscape in a metal machine with blue lights flashing toward the sun, only the sun was rising, not setting.

When the cruiser slowed in front of the gate to our ranch, there were two figures standing there together, but apart. Lefty and Kelly rushed to open the door. Kelly reached in, pulled me from the car, and lifted me up. I wrapped my arms and legs around her, transforming once again. Lefty’s arms encircled us both. His chest heaved with emotion like a bellows and they both whispered the necessary incantations of assurance and gratitude and love into my unwashed hair.

Lefty insisted on carrying me the whole way back to the house and when we got there, my grandma and grandpa Moody, Maria, and some other people I didn’t know hovered around me. But I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone.

Kelly took me into their bathroom and bathed me like she did when I was small. Her hand holding the washcloth trembled as she squeezed warm water over my shoulders and back. The fingertips of her other hand gently traced every part of me, inspecting me for damage as if what was done to me would have left a wound that could be cleaned and covered by a Little Mermaid band-aid.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t answer any of her questions.

She toweled me off and dressed me in my favorite pajamas. Lefty came in and dried and brushed my hair, then carried me out into their bedroom. They asked if I was hungry. I wasn’t. I only wanted to sleep, so they put me in their bed between them and draped their arms around me.

I lay still with my eyes open for a long time, staring up at the ceiling. I didn’t feel like I was home. The idea of home was lost to me. It had been a couple of years since I slept in their bed and I couldn’t remember ever sleeping between them in that way.

I drifted on the frayed edge of sleep, my mind still racing through the maze, my legs twitching. Soon I heard Lefty snoring softly and Kelly’s hand that had been delicately rubbing circles on my back stilled.

I slipped out from under their arms, crawled off the bed and went to the window where I stared out at the front yard, my eyes fixed on the place where, just six days before, I had been a child playing in the dirt.

I turned and looked back at the empty place on the bed between the sleeping bodies I understood were my parents and I wondered, for the first time, who they really were.

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Previously…

In an interview after Kelly’s death, Lefty explained that after the 9/11 Panels invited unwanted attention, he and Kelly tried to protect the secret by shifting her public image away from Daedalia. For a year she stopped making her serious work and produced deliberately amateur folk-art chickens, which Lefty used to support a new narrative and reduce outside scrutiny.

Fiodor Barkowski was a bad artist by any objective measure, even his own. In truth, he didn’t so much want to be an artist as he wanted to possess what artists had, the ability to create a world more vivid than the small, drab one he commuted through every day.

On the subway he would sketch passengers openly, without their permission, hoping someone might engage with his miserable drawings. He was punched in the face on one occasion. His notebook was torn in half on another. But more often, he was simply ignored in the time-honored way New Yorkers ignore everything when they move through the transit system.

He was a small man in a large man’s body. His blocky hands were cartoonishly large, the fingertips squared off with a fine ring of dirt under the nails. On the sparrow-like frame of my nine-year-old shoulders, those hands felt like the safety bar that crushes you into the seat on a roller coaster that takes you upside down.

He first showed up at Marabelle long after the last of the news vans had moved on to the next story. He just wandered through the open gate on a Sunday morning. Lefty was away. Kelly was in Telluride. Maria was in the house. I was alone.

I didn’t notice him until his shadow darkened the patch of dirt where I was playing with one of my Transformers. I startled from my crouch and fell onto my butt. He dropped to a knee to be at my level with the jaunty ease of one of those collapsible toy figures held together with elastic bands.

“Hi there, I’m Fiodor,” he said, smiling through a tangle of beard that reminded me of Hagrid in the Harry Potter books. I wanted to run. Every cell in my body wanted to run, but he pinned me in place with six words. “I’m a friend of your mother.”

I had never met a friend of my mother, so I didn’t know what such a thing would look like. I looked toward the house and wanted to call out to Maria, but before I could, he produced something from the pocket of his massive coat.

“Your mom tells me you like these things, which means you must be good at puzzles like her. Things that look like one thing, but turn out to be something else.”

The Transformer toy in his hand looked tiny. It didn’t look like the ones I had and I was curious. I took it from him and transformed it right away from the silver-and-green robot soldier into an alligator. The white spikes along the soldier’s back became teeth.

“Do you like it?” I nodded and he said, “You can keep it.”

Then he sat down on his butt like a man with nowhere to go, produced another Transformer from his other pocket and marched it across the dirt between us. He was good at making voices and we played for a long time. Maria never came out to check on me.

“I love playing with you, but your mom asked me to come collect some things for her from the shed, things she needs to do her work. Could you help me with my mission so I don’t get in trouble?”

“Nobody’s supposed to go in there.”

“But that’s only when Mommy’s working, right? Isn’t she working somewhere else right now?” I nodded and he continued. “And to do that work, she needs some supplies.”

“Are you an artist too?”

“I am. A secret artist like your mom, but I’m not as good as her.”

“You know about Daedalia?”

Maybe it’s only in my reconstitution of this story, but I think a look of revelation passed over his face as though he had seen the face of God.

“I do. And that’s why she sent me.”

Without question, I took him to the shed and unlocked the door, punching in the four-digit code. I remember he stepped inside with the trepidation and reverence of a pilgrim.

That reverie quickly evaporated and soon he was moving confidently throughout the space, opening drawers, pawing through the stacks of canvases that leaned against the walls. He wasn’t finding what he was looking for and became impatient.

“This isn’t Daedalia’s work.” When he turned to me, his face was flushed and his bushy eyebrows were pinched into an angry line. “Where is her work?”

“This is her work,” I said.

He tore the canvas that featured a rooster perched atop a tire swing from the easel, causing the easel to clatter to the concrete floor.

“THIS,” he shouted. “Is NOT her work.”

“I’m going to get Maria,” I said.

But before I could make it to the door, he was blocking my way. He might as well have been a cinderblock wall. That’s when those large hands clamped down on my shoulders for the first time.

When something horrific happens to you as a child, if you remember it, it’s different from any normal memory. It has a weight, an impenetrable density to it, like typewritten lines on a page that have been typed over so many times that any hope of reading what was originally struck into the page is lost.

My mother had such lines in the story of her life. I want, more than anything, to know them so I could write them here with absolute clarity. Maybe that would help explain her to me and then I could forgive her. But I don’t think so.

I’ve spent decades working to decipher what happened to me and yet I’m sure, even as I recount it to you, the exact events are no more accurate than the story of my parents before I was born. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Fiodor took me that day. He didn’t have to tie me up or restrain me. He didn’t have to carry me, kicking and screaming. He had something better.

“You’re going to come with me to visit your mother. If you don’t, if you fight, or scream, I’m going to tell your secret and everything’s going to be ruined and it’s all going to be your fault.”

Before we left, he managed to find one of the Daedalia pieces, a small, unfinished and forgotten canvas that had fallen into the gap between the desk and the wall. I remember he peered into it the way I watched cartoons on Saturday mornings.

His car was filled with trash. He made me sit in the front seat, which I never did. We drove for what seemed like hours and he didn’t talk. He played the radio, tuning to any station with a signal when the previous one faded as we crossed the barren landscape of New Mexico. My pants were soaked with pee and I remember shivering and crying silently as we drove farther and farther away and the sun got lower in the sky.

We had driven no farther than Albuquerque when he pulled into the parking lot of a La Quinta Inn by the interstate. I understood this was not a place my mother would be. When I told him as much, he didn’t answer me.

The motel was one of those motor-court kinds so we didn’t have to go through a lobby and there was no kind concierge to offer a lollipop. He marched me up the stairwell to the second floor. I still remember the room number, 212. I’ve gone back and stayed in that room, so I know that much is true. Once inside, he closed the door, flipped over the safety bar, and moved a heavy chair in front of it.

When I sat on the bed, he saw that my shorts were wet. He sighed, shook his head, and rummaged through a lumpy army duffel and pulled out a T-shirt.

“Go change,” he said, handing me the enormous shirt. “Are you hungry? I’m going to order some food.”

“Do you really know my mommy?”

“Yes, and she knows me.”

In the small windowless bathroom with a dim fluorescent light, I remember startling when I saw myself in the mirror. I looked like a flickering ghost.

I was a self-sufficient child, a necessary skill when you have highly distracted parents. I stripped off my wet shorts and panties and washed myself in the bath. I washed the underwear and wrung them out as best I could before putting them back on. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with the big shirt. My shirt was fine, so I wrapped his big gray t-shirt around my waist like a skirt.

When I came out of the bathroom, he was sitting at the small table by the window, peering into a large laptop computer. Many years later, I would learn that he was a programmer by trade and that he did actually know my mother. He had met her on a message board, one of the many devoted to Daedalia. He had made a hobby of hacking the identities of anyone on the boards who said anything remotely interesting about Daedalia.

“Do you have it too, the gift?”

“No, I’m not good at drawing. Can I go home?”

“No, not yet. There are things I want to talk to you about.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“No, not if you do what I ask.”

When he said this, he looked away from the screen and met my eyes. “You look like her.”

“I’m scared.”

“I’m not gonna hurt you. You don’t need to be scared.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to help me with a very important mission. Can you do that?”

I don’t remember what I said in response. It didn’t matter. I would be trapped in that motel room for six days and my life would never be the same when I finally got to go home.

Fiodor’s mission, as he explained it to me, was to set Daedalia free. He had received her cries for help. He had decoded the messages in her work. She was a prisoner and no one knew her suffering but him.

When I tried to tell him Daedalia wasn’t real, that she was just a made-up name my mother used for reasons I didn’t understand, he got angry and his voice boomed with such resonance it made my teeth hurt. I curled up into a ball, whimpering in the corner between the bed and the wall, trying to make myself small enough to disappear.

As became the pattern, he would then fall into whispery apologies and put his hands on me, kneading my shoulders, my back, my thighs until I quieted. In those moments I went still, sunk so deep into myself I have no memory that I can trust.

I quickly learned that if I wanted to ever get home, I had to play his pretend game. The game where he was the hero, and not some delusional, bipolar man desperate to believe his life had a special purpose.

In those six days, in that motel room, I learned more about my mother and her work than I had in nine years of being her daughter. But I never decoded her, not in the way Fiodor did. I’m not sure why I’ve never been able to see what others have seen moving inside her canvases. Maybe I did when I was small, in the time before I was taken, but that hardly counts because to a child, everything in the world is enchanted.

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Previously…

Daedalia’s World Trade Center installation turned her into a pop-culture myth, and after 9/11 the missing panels became a magnet for conspiracy, grief, and fanaticism. The attention followed the myth to the gates of Marabelle, forcing Lefty to escalate security and start playing defense in earnest.

The following transcript is an interview with Lefty Moody recorded on July 1, 2036.

MM: Tell me about the chickens. Why chickens?

LM: I don’t know. I didn’t give it too much thought. Your mom was the artist. I was just trying to think of the dumbest, kitschiest thing I could to get the jackals and lunatics out of our lives. Things were getting crazy.

But the chickens… let’s see. Well, you have to remember your mom and I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains where you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting some crappy folk art. It was usually sold at these roadside stands alongside jars of honey and apple butter and used vacuums, or whatever people back in the holler had that wasn’t nailed down. I’m sure you remember passing a few of those on trips we went to visit your grandparents, right?

MM: Yeah, I guess so.

LM: Well, I convinced your mom that the only way to get these crazy people to give up and leave us alone was if it became clear that she wasn’t Daedalia. The most effective lies are the ones wrapped around a kernel of truth. There were all kinds of pictures of the shed on the internet, and everyone knew it was an artist’s studio because of public records about the former owner.

MM: So you made Kelly into an amateur folk artist with a passion for chickens.

LM: Christ, Mare. She was your mother. You don’t have to refer to her in the third person.

MM: The only way you can refer to anyone who isn’t you is in the third person.

LM: Of course. You’re the expert. Look, the only reason I agreed to help you with this project is because you promised you’d tell the whole story like you’ve done in your other books. The world doesn’t need another vicious takedown of what we did, what our lives were about.

MM: Can you continue the story, please?

LM: You were there. You remember. Your mom put all her serious art away for a year. We stored all her canvases and materials and transformed the shed so she could set to making these hideous chickens. She painted them on old boards, rusty tea kettles, and just about anything else we could find. Surely you remember this period. You would’ve been what, ten?

MM: No, I was seven, and I do remember. I think it was the most time she ever spent with me and the most I ever heard her laugh.

LM: That’s right. You were her assistant. I’ve kept a few of those pieces you helped her with. They were perfectly awful and I think she enjoyed making them. It was a new kind of challenge for her, to just make something the way a bricklayer builds a wall. Just physical. No internal dialogue.

MM: I’d forgotten I helped her. There was a lot of red paint, right?

LM: Yeah, yeah there was indeed, and you’d come out of her studio like you’d been in a fight with one of those chickens, splotches of red on your hands and face.

MM: What were you doing? Did you try to sell them?

LM: I had my role to play. It was no small feat to convince the world that I could marry a woman who made such horrible art, but I did eventually. I paid an exorbitant amount of money to buy the little gallery space in Santa Fe, where we could showcase these chickens. I think we may have sold three or four of the pieces in a year.

I remember actually being nervous that they would take off and be successful when the intent was for them to be an embarrassment, a loving husband’s indulgence of his wife’s hobby.

It took a while to sell the whole story to the most rabid of these lunatics, but we did. We started opening the gate on Saturdays to invite people into the studio to meet the artist. I managed to get the local news channel to come out and interview us.

MM: Yeah, I watched that last week on YouTube. You’re a convincing liar. That feisty journalist had done her research. I think she asked you more questions about Daedalia than the chickens, though.

LM: Yeah. I had to pretend to be even more of an idiot than I am.

MM: You told her Daedalia was a “fragile soul, not made for this world,” and that you’d never betray your promise to protect her from it. You had tears in your eyes when you said that. I watched that over and over again.

LM: Why?

MM: Because I wanted to see if it was real.

LM: And?

MM: I think you believe that story, so that much is real. She was a lot of things, but fragile wasn’t one of them.

LM: You know, you can be pretty damned judgmental. It’s what makes you a great writer, I guess, but it’s no fun to be on the stand in your courtroom. You’ll paint whatever version of this story serves you, like everyone else does. I just hope you’ll remember it’s your story too, whether you like it or not.

MM: Let’s be real. I was never really part of the story.

LM: You really believe that, sweetheart? You really feel that mistreated. You’re a grown person now. I’ll be gone soon enough and then you won’t have anyone to blame for your life.

MM: I don’t blame you, or her. Really. I’ve spent enough time in therapy to understand it wasn’t personal. You guys already had a story, a big story that didn’t have room for much else. She made art that changed the world. It’s okay that she wasn’t a good mom. Oh come on, Dad… don’t cry. I’m not trying to be mean here.

LM: I can’t help it these days. I cry over TV ads. Let’s finish this so you can get whatever version of the truth you need.

MM: We don’t have to keep going right now.

LM: No, I want to. I made a promise to help you. What’s your next question?

MM: Mom stopped working at the ranch after that. Tell me about that time.

LM: Every day, there were fewer and fewer people turning up outside our fence with their cameras and notebooks, but it would take years before people completely forgot about us. For your mom, doing her art was like breathing and she wanted to get back to it, so I rented a place for her in Colorado near Telluride. She would go there by herself and work for a couple of weeks at a time.

MM: I remember her being gone and missing her. Did she ever take me with her?

LM: Not to that place, I don’t think. She didn’t want to disrupt your life.

MM: I don’t think that was the reason.

LM: Yeah, that’s fair. She needed her space, even from me, especially after everything that had happened. The 9/11 thing changed her and it wasn’t just the public attention and criticism. Her relationship to the work shifted. I think it scared her after that, working. But she was still driven to do it.

MM: What do you mean?

LM: You understand your mother wasn’t just an artist, scratching images on a canvas, right? Surely you get that by now, after all these years. It’s like she stood at a portal between two worlds, and she didn’t fully understand either one, which was her great sadness. She was an interpreter between two parties who would never understand each other.

I can see you don’t believe me. It took me a lifetime to understand and accept what I think I knew after looking at those sketches in her notebook when she was sixteen. After what happened to you, I’m sure a part of you shut down any ability to see some things, to really see her. She never forgave herself.

MM: But that wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t even home. It happened while she was away.

LM: Exactly. But it was more than that, more than her absence. She had invited something into our lives.

MM: It’s late, Dad. You’re getting tired. We should wrap up for today.

LM: If you can’t talk about it now, Marabelle, how many more chances will we have?

MM: But I have talked about it with the best therapists money could buy for years. In fact, it’s all that therapy that tells me you’re projecting right now. You’re the one who hasn’t dealt with it.

LM: Are you going to write about it? You’ve come around here asking about the chickens. Is your book going to be a comedy, or a historical account of detached observations? Or is it going to be something real, something you’ve engaged with? You know, you have much more of your mother in you than you think.

MM: I’m not sure what those parts could be. I don’t think we could be more opposite.

LM: That’s because you don’t know yourself or her the way that I do. You want me to count the ways? You’re willful, stubborn, and single-minded to a purpose. You feel things deeply, but you don’t want to acknowledge feelings exist. You’re private and enigmatic to most everyone in your life.

MM: Tell me, Dad, are there any good qualities I share with her?

LM: You still don’t understand. These are all things I love about you both.

MM: Then what’s wrong with you? Why are you here, hiding away in this little place? Why don’t you pick up the phone when I call? Why didn’t you come to the event last year? It was the culmination of your life’s work, the grand reveal of the magic trick you spent your life setting up and you weren’t there.

LM: Because I didn’t want to relive it all again. What I thought was success when I was a young man is not success now when I look back. I failed your mother and I failed you too.

MM: I don’t get you. I think you’re more of a mystery to me than she is.

LM: I don’t know how that’s possible.

MM: How did you see what you saw in her so young? I’ve seen some of those early sketches. They’re not remarkable and it’s not like you were some art aficionado. You were a baseball player.

LM: It wasn’t her art, what I saw on the pages of her notebook. I mean, it was, but it was more than that. I felt this raw connection to her. She was so frail and so fierce all at once and no one had ever really seen her. It wasn’t something I planned. People grow toward one another, I think. People become something more when somebody sees them. I believe that.

MM: I believe that too, Dad. It’s okay. It’s okay. I love you.

LM: Sorry, sweetie. I’m a mess. I just miss her so much.

MM: Me too.

LM: I’m proud of you, you know that? I’m glad you’re writing this book. You have such a gift to see things so clearly. Whatever you’re worried about, whatever’s holding you back, let it go and write our lives the way only you can. If you do that, you’ll get it right. You won’t find the truth, no matter how much research you do.

MM: Why do you say that?

LM: Because the truth isn’t one thing, is it? It’s layers. You don’t know the truth of someone’s life from one conversation or one thing they made. You come to know them because you let them in. You let them become part of you.

MM: That’s what Mom did.

LM: Yes. Yes it is.

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Previously…

Lefty and Kelly moved to Santa Fe, bought an adobe ranch, and named it Marabelle, which is where the narrator finally revealed herself as their daughter. She described growing up inside the Daedalia secret, raised mostly by Maria while Kelly disappeared into the shed and Lefty drilled into her the rule that could never be broken: don’t tell anyone.

By the early 2000s, Daedalia had achieved something few artists, with the exception of Andy Warhol, had ever done. Her notoriety extended far beyond the echoey whispers of the gallery scene into the throbbing backbeat of pop culture. But unlike Warhol, whose fame was fueled by his presence and the daily evidence of his personal eccentricities, Daedalia’s rise was powered by her absence.

She was known only as a symbol, identified by the personal mark she tagged somewhere in all of her pieces. Her mark was an Easter egg, a low-stakes challenge to engage new fans. I use the word fans intentionally, fan being the diminutive of fanatic, which is an accurate way to describe what these people were, especially after the towers fell, burying her most ambitious and controversial series beneath a mountain of concrete, ash, and steel.

The World Trade Center installation was, by far, Lefty’s career-defining accomplishment as a promoter. He spent two years planning it and another year finding the right people to pay enough to look the other way during the three nights it took, between Christmas and New Year’s of 1999, to mount the series. The twelve panels, each a six-foot square laminated in a half-inch of lucite and bound in a steel frame, were bolted into the concrete wall that served as a corridor for commuters at the base of one of the buildings that bordered Tobin Plaza.

In the late summer of 1998, Lefty convinced Kelly to leave me in Maria’s care so she could join him for a couple of days in New York City. He had some meetings with galleries and he really wanted her to see the city because she had never been. Lefty pulled out all the stops. He booked a suite at the Lotte Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue and got them reservations at the finest restaurants. It was meant to be the honeymoon they never had, but it didn’t work out that way.

After their first night in the city, Kelly had an experience that affected her deeply. While Lefty was in one of his meetings, she had taken a walk. She said she began to feel as though she were in one of her own paintings, a rat in a maze. Every few steps she looked up to try and orient herself, which only made her dizzy and nauseous. The car horns, sirens, garbage trucks, and the chaos of so many voices echoing in the trapped heat island of the city overwhelmed her. She kept walking south and ended up in the financial district.

Seeking the comfort of some open sky, she walked into World Trade Center Plaza. She described the experience of walking up the 37 steps and crossing the expanse of marble and granite toward the Koenig Sphere at the center as though she had stepped into another dimension, and her ears filled with an overwhelming roar of silence. She felt a sadness with such intensity it stole the air from her lungs and slowed her heart. She collapsed just a few feet from the Sphere and when she woke up, a policeman with hands the size of hockey mitts was leaning over her. He gave her a half-melted Snickers bar and got her a cup of water. When she was able to talk, she told him she was staying at “a palace,” but that’s all she knew. The cop called the hotel and then escorted her there.

She wasn’t able to convey to Lefty what had happened to her, what she felt in those moments, and when she tried, only tears came. He was used to her sensitivities and eccentricities so he canceled their dinner reservation and ordered room service.

When he woke up the next morning, she had filled a dozen pages of her sketchpad with images. They were strewn across the floor of the suite. She was curled in a chair by the window, asleep. These sketches are part of the archive and you can see them for yourself one day. They are haunting and impossible to describe, but you can see, when you compare them to the finished work, that everything was already there in her head.

For the next year, bringing them to life became her obsession. She lost weight and barely slept. All her waking hours were spent in the shed, bending, folding, cutting, and stapling materials across the primed plywood canvases she had filled with her intricate drawings. The layered, mixed-media pieces were organized as four triptychs that unfolded in the imagination as you moved from Spring, with its delicate promise of eternal life, through Summer and Fall and into the final three panels that depicted harrowing destruction: burned-out buildings, rubble, and twisted steel beneath a fiery sky.

As Lefty watched the twelve pieces emerge, he felt an urgency unlike anything he’d felt before. These pieces belonged to the city and couldn’t be confined to a gallery or a museum. They needed to be seen by accountants and fry cooks, brokers and clerks, hotel maids, hoodlums, homeless vets, and anyone who ever felt outside and alone.

He hit nothing but a wall of resistance as tall as the towers themselves when he tried to strike a deal to get permission to install the pieces in the plaza. So finding a way became his obsession. He would end up spending nearly two million dollars to stage a fake construction project to get the installation done under the cover of darkness during the longest nights of the year, when everyone was home with their families celebrating the holidays.

On January 1, 2000, the city was quiet. The plaza was even more empty than usual. None of the clocks had stopped. The power grid was unaffected. The world had continued to turn on its axis despite all the hype. The slate sky was spitting dry flecks of snow that swirled through the frigid urban canyon between the buildings.

By noon, a crowd had gathered along the corridor, pausing to stare into the series of twelve portals, seemingly carved into the side of the building overnight. By sunset, the plaza was full of people waiting their turn to see what my mother had seen that afternoon when she crossed over into the world she could never fully explain.

The story made the evening news and of course there was controversy. It was, perhaps, the most expensive act of vandalism on record. The police were going to conduct an investigation and the city was going to have the pieces forcibly removed within the week.

But the cable news cycle took hold of the story and soon there were interviews with fine art experts claiming that the pieces were the work of Daedalia and it would be an act of vandalism to remove them. So the twelve pieces remained, and became another spectacle in a city of spectacles, until the morning of September 11, 2001, when the wreckage and devastation my mother had depicted in those last three panels transcended art and became prophecy.

In the harrowing days, weeks, and months that followed, as the last of the bodies that could be recovered had been laid to rest by the weary and heartbroken who remained, the conspiracy theories began to swirl, fueled by fear, rage, and despair.

Unlike the bronze Sphere that had been salvaged from the wreckage, its top crumpled in like a crushed ping-pong ball, Daedalia’s pieces were never found. There were crackpots who believed the installation had weakened the foundation of the building, chewing away at the concrete like some alien termites. Others believed Daedalia had prophesied the tragedy or even caused it, saying the imagery in the panels transmitted a dark, secret message that compelled the terrorists. Few recalled the joy and wonder they had felt when they passed the series of panels on their way to work.

What happened after that proved the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Daedalia and the 9/11 Panels, as they came to be known, were an exotic spice stirred into the bubbling cauldron of America’s damaged psyche, enhancing the principal ingredients of grief, paranoia, fear, and rage.

A Muslim man would set himself on fire on the steps of the UN. A teenage boy from Kentucky would walk into a mosque in Cincinnati with an assault rifle and massacre 16 people. A couple in Jersey City, whose only son was killed when the towers collapsed, would be dredged from the Hudson River, the pockets of their winter coats loaded with stones. All these people and more would credit their actions to what they had seen in the 9/11 Panels, whether they had actually stood before them or not.

The stories that got less attention, of course, were the stories of young soldiers who prevented the deaths of entire families in Fallujah when their units stormed into homes during nighttime raids, or a hedge-fund broker who walked away from Wall Street and used all his wealth to start a foundation dedicated to rehabilitating the violent, incarcerated masses by teaching art and meditation.

All these people would claim they saw something in those panels that instructed them to fulfill their destiny. A cult of personality formed around the absence of a personality.

It wasn’t long before people started showing up at the gate of Marabelle. The recent innovation of the internet had made it easy for rabid fans, critics, journalists, and investigators alike to quickly amass an entire library of knowledge about Daedalia, most of it completely fabricated. The message boards were filled with theories about who she was and what her art meant.

There were rumors that the 9/11 Panels had survived the collapse and had been stolen from the wreckage during all the confusion. A firefighter who was one of the first responders and never showed up for work the next day was rumored to have taken three of the panels. The federal government had excavated all twelve panels, prioritizing them over rescuing trapped victims. Rumor became conspiracy, became fact.

I have vivid memories of this time, but like all memories, I’m certain they’ve been warped and filtered over the course of my life, especially in the last five years I’ve been researching this book. Still, there are some immutable facts that can be corroborated by reputable sources. For a full six months in 2002, there was an encampment of news vans outside the gates of Marabelle. I wasn’t allowed to go outside unaccompanied, much less play.

My seventh birthday party was interrupted when a bearded man with wild eyes jumped the back fence and appeared outside our living room window like a ghost. I had nightmares for weeks. Little did I know those nightmares would soon jump the fence into my waking hours.

After that incident, Lefty hired a security company that installed a state-of-the-art monitoring system and posted two armed men on the property at all times. But it would take more than that to make everyone go away and leave us alone. My father’s powers of invention and misdirection would truly be tested.

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Previously…

Kelly wrote in her journal about kissing Lefty and feeling unsettled by desire, her own dissociation, and the pressure of what their relationship had become. Over the next weeks they fumbled toward sex, boundaries, and cohabitation while Kelly feared Ona might be gone and worried that her ability to do the work would suffer.

In the fall of 1995, Lefty and Kelly bought a house in Santa Fe, New Mexico. While they would own several homes in different parts of the world in the years that followed, this four-bedroom adobe-style home on three acres in the foothills, with a separate shed for Kelly to work in, would always be the place they called home.

They named the ranch Marabelle, after me, their only daughter.

Knowing what you know of my parents so far, it won’t come as any surprise to you that I wasn’t exactly part of their plan. If my math is right, I was likely conceived around the time my mother wrote those journal entries in the spring of 1995 about the decided shift in their relationship. I’ve waited until this part of their story to reveal myself to you because it only seems fair. As much as I’d prefer to remain outside the story, it’s important you know who your unreliable narrator is going forward.

I’m not sure if I factored into their decision to settle in Santa Fe or if they had already decided before they knew I was coming and made the choice to keep me. There’s a strong case to be made that the allure of the landscape and the community of artists who live in the area influenced their decision because Kelly’s work through this period drastically changed.

I was born in Kelly’s shed on a frigid afternoon in December of 1996. I came a week early and so fast that Kelly barely had time to put her brushes down. I imagine her standing in front of the large canvas she was working on, her belly brushing the muslin as she leaned forward to work on the detail she’s famous for. I’m not sure what they would have done if the new housekeeper, Maria, hadn’t been there. She wasn’t a proper midwife, but she had helped bring many babies into the world and apparently knew exactly what to do. After her heroic assistance that day, she got promoted to full-time nanny, and in the daily, practical ways, she would be my mother for the first ten years of my life.

The house, when they bought it, had been a wreck. It had belonged to a well-known local artist who had done very well in the seventies but eventually lost everything and had to abandon the place. Lefty says when they first visited the house it was well on its way to being reclaimed by the landscape, with all the windows broken out, coyote scat in many of the rooms, bird nests in the eaves, and spider webs spanning the doorframes. They both fell in love with the three-sixty view of the desert and the mountains, and the artist’s shed was perfect, already fitted with big windows and skylights.

It took nearly two years to completely renovate the main house, so I slept in a bassinet at the foot of my parents’ temporary bed near the woodstove in the large one-room shed. I try to imagine the three of us in that space sleeping together, but I can’t picture it, the intimacy of it. We weren’t that kind of family.

Daedalia’s next big series was well underway the minute they moved in, and my mother’s growing belly didn’t seem to slow her down. Lefty said it had the opposite effect. She was working like someone with a deadline. She forgot to eat and barely slept, despite Lefty’s hovering and hand-wringing. He had two babies to fuss over now, the work and me.

The ten pieces she created for that series all sold within a week of the show’s debut in Paris the following summer. I have yet to see them in person. I’ve studied photographs, of course, but by now I’m sure you understand how that wouldn’t be the same.

It’s strange to think of those paintings my mother worked on at all hours in that drafty shed for months with me inside her, sharing her breath, her blood. Without a doubt, those pieces are hanging in the marble halls of some billionaire’s estate now where a select few dinner guests will stand before them a couple of times a year and contemplate the genius of their mysterious creator.

The artist was definitely mysterious, but not in the ways they imagined. There were stories of her being some blind savant or an austere witch-like figure who worked in the crumbling tower of an old New England estate. My mother looked very normal, maybe even a little plain. There’s a photograph of her and Lefty taken just a few weeks before I was born and she’s wearing this awful floral dress and leggings. They’re sitting at a restaurant in Santa Fe. Kelly’s nose is sunburned and her hair is a mousy brown. She could be anybody’s mom. But she wasn’t. She was barely my mom.

Kelly was mysterious in that, even though she was my mother, I never really knew her and I’m not sure Lefty did either. There was a large part of her that was unknowable.

My earliest memories are of playing on the floor of that shed with sunlight filtering through from above and my mother working on a stepladder. The cavernous room was silent except for the scratching of her pencil, the graphite sharpened to the length of a hummingbird’s beak on the board in front of her. There was a steady, unrelenting, almost mechanical rhythm to the sound. It would continue for what seemed like hours without a single pause.

When I looked up from my little play kitchen to the vast white monolith of the canvas she was working on, I remember being frightened. My mother was standing at the center of this void and summoning from it a world so flawless and intricate that it made the room and everything in it, including me, seem like a primitive sketch, unfinished and inconsequential. I remember crying really hard for what seemed like hours and she never turned around. I’m sure it was probably no more than a few minutes before Maria came in and scooped me up into the warm softness of her bosom and the smell of cornmeal.

I believe Maria was the only other person besides Lefty and me who knew the true identity of Daedalia. I don’t recall us ever having regular guests at Marabelle. It wasn’t until I was almost twelve that they told me the first version I understood of their secret. It was around that time that they started putting a padlock on the shed door so if I happened to have a curious friend come over, we wouldn’t go exploring out there.

I remember sitting at the breakfast table in the kitchen on a summer morning after my mother had gone out to start working and Lefty was preparing to go away on another business trip. I was eating a bowl of cereal and he was making coffee. Maria was busy in some other part of the house.

I asked Lefty why it was such a big secret who Mommy was.

His back was to me and he was stirring cream into his coffee. He paused mid-stir and the kitchen was so quiet I could hear the faintest sound of music coming from the shed, which was probably thirty yards away from the house.

“That’s a good question, pumpkin.” He finished preparing his coffee and then came over to sit at the table. “Your mom’s a private person and she has an amazing magical gift. We keep the secret to protect her.”

“Protect her from what?” I asked.

“You know, from people who would be too curious and would want something more from her, more than she can give.”

That spawned about a hundred more questions, and I could tell from the look on his face that he had no good answers to any of them. Why? What would happen if people knew? Didn’t Mom want to be famous? Wasn’t it kind of like cheating?

Finally, he had had enough and pulled the trump card every parent deploys at some point.

“Marabelle, don’t ever tell anyone, even your closest friends, that your mother is Daedalia. If you do, it will ruin the life we’ve built here. Is that what you want?”

For the record, I never did tell anyone, even in high school when I was completely miserable and hated both of them and their secret world.

I remember in English class in ninth grade, there was a girl, Heather Mendoza, who made Daedalia the subject of her research paper so every week for two months I had to hear her talk obsessively about this mysterious artist, her brilliance, and all the crackpot theories of who she really was.

I learned a lot of things I never knew, like the fact that one of her recent paintings sold for ten million dollars at auction. I knew we had money, but even with the constant building projects happening at Marabelle, I didn’t understand how much until Heather read her paper to the class.

Over the course of my childhood, our property would grow into a sprawling compound with tennis courts, gardens, a pool, a guest house, and a private movie theater, all protected by the boundary of a ten-foot privacy fence and a wrought-iron gate.

I had a compulsive urge to shout to the class that this brilliant artist watched about a million hours of television, never went anywhere, and preferred a bag of Doritos to about any other food.

I wanted to say that she would go days without saying a word to me and then, out of the blue, barge into my room and want to talk to me for hours, leaving me feeling completely hollowed out and exhausted after she finally left, always disappointed that I didn’t live up to whatever it was she expected from those sessions.

I’ve spent my life studying my mother, the way many people have studied her art. The interviews I recorded with her in the months before she died weren’t much different from the conversations we had when I was little. When you have an artist for a parent, you’re always competing for their attention. I thought if I could understand where she went when she made art then I could go there with her. But of course, that wasn’t possible.

I never had any desire to be an artist. I didn’t enjoy coloring or drawing and I don’t remember Kelly ever trying to teach me or encourage me to be creative. Of course Lefty did for a time and then he just stopped.

Maybe he was conflicted about pushing me the way he had been pushed by his father or maybe he decided he couldn’t manage two artists. It’s possible he didn’t see the same return on investment that he had in Kelly. That sounds horrible. I’m not being fair to him. I can hear Kelly saying this in my head. Lefty has always been there. Steady.

I didn’t intend to reveal myself so early in the story. This book isn’t about me. This book is their story in which I play a supporting role. In the coming chapters, I’ll do my best to disappear back into the telling.

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Previously…

Kelly explained that after she disappeared she first hid in a cheap motel, then fled to Italy, where the light and solitude helped her recover while she remained oblivious to Daedalia’s sudden explosion back home. She admitted she regretted not contacting Lefty, and described returning transformed, only to realize the work had begun opening doorways for other people too.

The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.

March 30, 1995

I don’t know how to describe what I’m feeling. I guess that’s why I’m writing. At this point I’ve gotten everything I wanted and I’m not sure how to feel about it. I never expected anything, really.

Last night I kissed Lefty, mostly because I knew he would never do it. He kissed me back and it was both strange and wonderful. I’ve only been kissed a couple of times in my life, and one of them was in sixth grade, the result of a dare at Kristi McDaniels’s birthday party.

Being with him in that way is something I’ve thought about for so long but now that it’s happened, I feel really strange. The longer we kissed and the more he touched me, the more disconnected I felt from my body. It was messed up, like I was standing on the outside watching it all happen.

I kept reminding myself that this was Lefty, the guy who had taken me in when I needed it and supported my work when no one else did, but there was this other part of him that frightened me. No, that’s too strong a word. I wasn’t afraid of him exactly. He was gentle and loving, but I could feel this hunger coming off him, like he wanted to devour me or something.

I felt really dumb, like I asked for this thing and then didn’t know what to do with it. This is what sex feels like, I guess. How it feels to be desired. I imagined it would feel different, magical somehow. Not exactly like when I’m really into my drawing, but something close to that.

All I could think about was all the women he’d been with, the smell of them that used to linger in that little studio apartment, and the way his cheeks were flushed when I’d see him after.

I should back up. We didn’t actually do it last night. I know he really wanted to, but he figured out that something was wrong even though I tried to hide it. I feel terrible, like I’ve ruined everything. Maybe I can learn to like it. Maybe I can want him in that way eventually. He told me he loved me and that it was okay, but I know it’s not. How could it be? I feel like I’ve totally fucked it all up and maybe I shouldn’t have come back at all.

I’m going to try to work again today, for real. It’s been almost a month since I’ve been back and I’ve not found a way to start up again. I’m too distracted. This Daedalia thing is like a real business now and it’s so weird. There’s pressure to do the next thing and I don’t know what that even is.

Lefty’s been patient but I can feel him getting antsy, and he’s always dropping hints about some major gallery somewhere sending inquiries about hosting the next show. Also, he’s starting to get a little paranoid. He’s worried someone will find out that it’s me and then everything will fall apart. I don’t want that to happen either. I’m not sure I could handle all those fancy people being disappointed when whoever they imagined Daedalia was is just me.

April 3, 1995

It’s two in the morning and as I’m writing this, Lefty is snoring on my bed in the other room.

After a few days of awkwardly walking around that first aborted attempt, I told him I wanted to have sex. It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Not the sex exactly, but the weirdness of not knowing how to talk about it and then finally talking about it.

He totally freaked out two days ago after I told him I was a virgin. I was like, duh, do you know me at all? He disappeared for a day and I know he was weighing everything in his mind. It’s complicated. Our fifteen-year age difference has always been a thing and then this thing about me being a virgin just freaked him out more.

When he came over this afternoon, he brought a huge bouquet of flowers, not roses but all these weird, exotic types that I’ve never seen before. He really knows me and that’s kind of amazing.

I was in a funk and really frustrated. I’ve not been able to work at all and Ona is just gone, or that’s how it seems. But when he showed up at the door with those and looked at me in that way no one’s ever looked at me before, I just kind of melted and started crying.

When he hugged me, I kissed him. This time he was tentative and it was even more awkward (if that’s possible!), but I got him over that. I pushed him onto the couch and sat in his lap. I pretended I was someone else, someone who could be with him the way he wanted.

I kind of went into my head like I do when I’m drawing and I fall into this other world. I imagined I was this sexual, fairy-like person with translucent skin and wherever he touched me left behind this phosphorescent glow.

It worked. Even during the painful part, I just imagined I was this fierce fairy creature and I moved against him until the pain melted into this warm feeling and I felt like we were this one being, moving together like some kind of mythological mating of a centaur and a griffin or something. Wow, it sounds totally insane now that I’ve written it down.

I’m not sure where we go from here, that’s why I can’t sleep. There’s so much more to lose now. I’ve never been in love. I’ve never had people counting on me.

What if I fuck it all up? I’ll fuck it up for both of us and Lefty really needs this to work. He’s put his whole life into me and my art. I’m afraid it won’t keep working.

Maybe Ona has left me for good and I’m on my own. What if the trick I did tonight doesn’t always work and Lefty finds out how weird I am with sex and my real body. What does that even mean, my “real” body. I just wrote that and I’m not sure why but it feels true.

April 20, 1995

Today we had a tough conversation. I knew it was coming, like that feeling of knowing that you’ve got to vomit but you keep trying to hold it down.

We were sitting on the beach (I still can’t get used to just going to the beach anytime I want) and he kept asking me if I was okay. I finally said, no I’m not and I’m freaking out a little bit.

He’s just been so weird since we started being more than friends, or whatever we were before. He’s always hovered, but now it’s different. He’s too attentive and trying too hard. It kind of pisses me off and I just want to say, enough. I need some space, dude. But I was afraid to say that because I didn’t want to hurt him.

Then I’m like, he’s a grown man. Why do I need to worry about hurting him? I guess that’s what love is though, always having to think about the other person. It’s kind of exhausting and it’s only been a couple of weeks.

But he surprised me. He’s done that a lot so you’d think I could give him more credit by now.

He said he’s been reading this book by some psychologist lady and it was all about setting boundaries. Defining what you need and what you don’t. He said maybe we could try that.

I said I didn’t want anything to change. I wanted him to still be funny and to tease me a little too hard and to keep pushing me like he used to. He said he would try but that things were different now, that there’s no way it could not be different.

I told him I missed living together like we used to but I wasn’t sure I wanted us to be like a married couple living together. He made this weird face and I’m not sure what he felt because he really couldn’t say anything but okay.

So we’re going to try it out for a little while here at my house before we buy some place together. I’m nervous because I’m not sure I can sleep with him every night. I like him close by, but not that close and then there’s the whole sex thing. He needs a lot of it and if we’re in bed together it’s like this whole thing.

Shit, the more I write about this the more I feel like I’m making a mess and none of this is inspiring me to work and that’s really not good. I guess we’ll just have to take it day by day.

May 14, 1995

A lot has happened in a few weeks. Our little experiment of living together again has been bumpy. I kind of blew up at him on Sunday. It had just been building up for a long time and I lost it.

He looked so wounded and pathetic I felt bad but a part of me didn’t. This is hard. We walked around in silence for a couple of days and that totally sucked but eventually we talked and I brought up the whole boundaries thing again and he was like, this was your idea, and I said yeah it was, but how am I supposed to know everything.

He said I was behaving like such a woman and that hurt in a weird way, and not just because it was a caveman thing to say. It felt personal. My immediate reaction was, I’m not just a woman, but that would have been a totally fucked up thing to say so I just kept quiet.

We made up and went out for a nice dinner at this Greek restaurant. Over dessert he said he had a proposal and let me just say that freaked my shit for a few seconds until he clarified.

“Let’s find a way that makes this work, whatever it is, no matter how weird and unconventional,” he said.

He told me how much he loved me and I could feel it. I could see in that moment how hard this all probably was for him and how much he was stretching just to make it work for me. He came from two normal parents and probably wanted the whole house in the suburbs and white picket fence thing but he wanted me more than that.

We’ve agreed to find a bigger place where we can live together and I can have a separate space for working and just to be on my own when I need it.

I told him I still wanted him to be close, to come and sit when I work sometimes and to be the first person to see the pieces I finish. He said he wanted me to sleep in a bed with him at least a couple of nights a week and to wake up together. I said I thought I could do that.

He asked if I wanted to move out of Los Angeles and suggested maybe it would be better if we lived out somewhere closer to nature. He didn’t say it, but I also think he’d like us to live somewhere more private because it would be much easier to keep the whole Daedalia thing secret.

I think I’d like a new adventure. I never really chose to be out here exactly.

He said we had enough money to go about any place we want. It’s crazy to have so much freedom. I don’t feel worthy of it, but I said I would think about where I’d like to live.

Last night I felt Ona in my dreams. It’s been so long. I felt like she had abandoned me. I woke up and my cheeks were wet like I’d been crying. I can feel something new coming. I have to stop for now so I can go try to work some.

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Previously…

Kelly chronicled the whiplash of Daedalia’s sudden success, including the money, the secrecy, and the way it left her both proud and invisible. Across a few entries she admitted how lonely she felt without Lefty, how much she wanted him to see her, and how the work was starting to exhaust her even as Daedalia’s myth kept growing.

The following transcript is an excerpt from an interview with Kelly Mudd recorded on January 10, 2033 at her home in Black Mountain, North Carolina six months prior to her death.

MM: Where did you go when you disappeared before that first big show, Daedalia’s New York premiere?

KM: For the first two weeks, I didn’t go anywhere. I stayed in a budget motel on the other side of town. That’s not what you imagined, right? I was still just a kid then. I had lots of imagination when it came to drawing but I had very little in my real life. I’d barely seen anything of the world.

MM: What did you do during those two weeks?

KM: I ate a lot of takeout food and watched a lot of television. I was like a kid on summer break. I just wanted to be a vegetable and catch my breath. I had pushed myself really hard because I didn’t want to disappoint Lefty. Eventually, though, I got bored and I did something very out of character. I bought a one-way ticket to Italy.

I know it seems embarrassingly on the nose for an artist to make their first trip abroad be Florence, but it was a radical thing for me. I came across the movie A Room with a View during that marathon of watching TV and I fell in love with the landscape and the light. You have to understand, I had a rural high school education and no idea that Tuscany was the birthplace of art in the Western world. When I saw a documentary about da Vinci a couple of days later, that sealed the deal for me.

MM: So even though you had said you were done with art, you really weren’t. Did you know that at the time?

KM: Oh, I think so. I could no more stop making art than I could cut off my hand. I was just being dramatic. From the minute I got off the plane and took the train from Rome to Florence, I couldn’t stop sketching. I covered both sides of a stack of cocktail napkins, and cursed myself for not bringing a sketchpad.

The first couple of nights I stayed in a youth hostel like someone who didn’t have a stack of traveler’s checks tucked away in my backpack.

MM: What are traveler’s checks?

KM: Ha, you wouldn’t know that, would you? Your generation does everything on your phone. Traveler’s checks were what you got when you planned to travel abroad as an American. They were safer than carrying cash.

MM: Weird. So what did you do when you got there?

KM: I did what every tourist does when they go to Florence. I visited the Uffizi Gallery, walked through the Duomo, and of course saw the statue of David. All of it was amazing, the food, the smells, and the people. But it wasn’t until I made the pilgrimage to Vinci that I really fell in love. I rode on a bus with a bunch of German tourists and planned for it to just be a day trip, but I ended up missing the bus back to Florence. I was so taken by what I saw in that museum. Da Vinci was such a weirdo, completely out of his time. I spent hours staring at his obscure little sketches and the bizarre and creepy things that came out of his brain. When I finally looked up, they were closing the museum and the bus had left without me.

One of the older women who worked there took pity on me and offered up the spare room in her house for the night. Rosa, her name was. She was so sweet. She fed me homemade pesto and I had never tasted anything so divine. The next day, she connected me with a family friend who rented me a villa when I returned with my stuff. I ended up staying there for three months. It was one of the most magical times in my life.

MM: What made it so special?

KM: You’ve been there, you know. The light has a quality, especially in autumn, that is like nowhere else in the world. I would sit for hours in an olive grove on a blanket just taking in the light, watching how it changed over the course of an afternoon. At the end of the day, all any artist does is pay attention to the light. It was healing for me, I think, to be in such a different place all on my own with no one to answer to.

MM: What was your relationship to your work then? Did you know what was happening back in the states?

KM: Oh no, I had no idea. You have to remember we had no internet at the time and no phones. How would I have known?

MM: So for however long you were away in Europe, you had no idea your work was completely exploding in the art world?

KM: That’s right, and I’m so grateful for that. There are few things worse for an artist than that kind of success. I was completely oblivious and utterly happy.

MM: I don’t think I’ve ever seen any work you did from that period. Did you do any pieces or was it all just sketching?

KM: No, I didn’t want to make anything big. I wanted to go inside, deeper. I needed time to understand what my relationship was to the gift I’d been given, to the collaboration I had stumbled upon.

MM: You’re talking about Ona now, right?

KM: Yes. Yes I am. And I can see in your eyes you believe I’m a lunatic. That’s okay. It’s never mattered much to me that others, even you, understand my relationship with her. She opened doorways for me to walk through and it wasn’t until later when I came home that I understood she was opening doorways for others too. Anyone who saw our work, really took the time to see it, found a door they could pass through or a window they could open to have a different view. What is it? What are you thinking?

MM: It just struck me, the great irony of your life. Commercially, you never got credit for your work, which seems like a crime, but in a way, if what you say about Ona is true, then maybe you don’t deserve credit for it. I mean, if it’s not just you making the art.

KM: It’s true and it’s the reason I was able to accept the arrangement Lefty and I made. I had an intuition about it that I can’t explain and that intuition was right. By letting go of my attachment to it, my ownership of it, the work could become about more than just me.

MM: Did you communicate with Lefty at all during that year and a half?

KM: I didn’t and if I have one regret, it’s that. He was worried sick about me, had no way to know if I was okay, no way to know if he’d ever see me again.

MM: But he had quite the payday from that show. That must have been some consolation. I can’t see him being too grief-stricken.

KM: You’re too hard on him. He’s not what you think. And you know, every penny of my share was waiting for me when I did finally come back. He had receipts for every sale and had put my share into a separate account.

MM: Tell me what that was like, when you saw him after all that time.

KM: Well, I didn’t know if he would even talk to me. I didn’t know if he would still be there at all. I didn’t even know if my little house would still be mine. When I walked out of that life, part of the reason I could was because I didn’t feel I had any claim to it. So I fully expected to come home to nothing and to have to start all over again.

But when the taxi dropped me at my place in the canyon, my key still worked in the door and everything was just like I’d left it. Well, not exactly. The pieces for the New York show were gone, of course.

MM: So he had what, just kept paying the mortgage and the bills while you were gone?

KM: Yeah, that’s Lefty. He had faith I would come back. Even the phone was still hooked up. After I got all my bags inside, I sat down at my desk and I called him. When he picked up, he didn’t say anything at first. There was just this silence and I imagined him seeing the caller ID and thinking I was a ghost calling him. An hour later he was there in my living room, larger than life. I remember he hugged me for a really long time and when he finally let me go, he just looked at me. There was a difference in the way he saw me and I could feel it.

MM: What do you mean?

KM: I don’t know what he saw. I only liked that he saw me, finally.

MM: That pair of photographs in the frame at the end of the mantel, were those taken around that time?

KM: Can you hand them down to me so I can look? You know my eyes are shit now, just like everything else. [Kelly studies photos in small book-matched frame] Yeah, that was me in Rome a month before I flew back home.

MM: What do you see when you look at these pictures? Can you describe yourself, I mean like you would if you were painting someone else?

KM: I see a confident, young woman. Her arms that were once almost translucent and skeletal are now bronzed and muscular. She looks as if she belongs, as if the body she was renting, she finally owns. Look there. You see the hand on her hip, the arch of her spine. It’s playful, unafraid.

MM: So that’s who he saw that afternoon when he came to your house?

KM: I think so. You’d have to ask him.

MM: Do you think that’s when he fell in love with you?

KM: Oh no, he’d always loved me just like I’d always loved him. Love doesn’t happen in a minute. You don’t catch it like some virus. I think it’s always there waiting, the potential for it anyway. But yes, to your point, things changed when I got back. I can’t explain in a way that you can understand what it felt like.

MM: You mean coming back to all that success or being with Lefty again?

KM: All of it. It was as if I had crawled away from L.A. a caterpillar and returned as a butterfly. That sounds dumb, but it’s true. It was a transformation. I stepped into another life.

MM: What was the biggest change? I know you’re getting tired and I’ll let you rest after this last question. Tell me a memory from that time that can help me see it like you did.

KM: Some water, please. I need to think about it. Let’s see, a couple of days after I was home and had settled in, he picked me up and took me to the offices he had set up above a restaurant in Venice. On the walls he had hung a series of framed documents. There were some clippings from reviews in the New Yorker and the Paris Review but what I found astonishing was the handwritten letters, some of them from people who had bought my pieces but the ones that really moved me were from people who had not been able to. They had just seen them at one of the gallery shows or hanging in someone’s home.

The letters were so raw, so personal. They weren’t gushing about the work. They were talking about their lives and what they had seen of themselves in this painting or that one.

I see that look on your face. I know it well. You look like you’re trying to swallow some undercooked chicken I just served you.

MM: I’m sorry. It’s just hard for me to believe. You know I love your work…

KM: But you’ve never experienced it the way these people did, right?

MM: No, I haven’t. I’ve tried for as long as I can remember but I’ve always felt like it’s some club I’m not a part of or maybe I’m just not smart enough or open enough or…

KM: I’m sorry. Marabelle, I’m sorry. I assure you it’s none of those things. Can I tell you a story? Would that be okay?

MM: Yes, of course.

KM: It’s one I heard years and years ago when I was traveling through Poland. It was told to me by this genteel old man. We were sitting outside a coffee shop early one morning. He was the only other customer and he struck up a conversation with me the way older people do who tend to be so lonely. He was a writer who collected stories in a little leatherbound notebook. I asked him to read me one. I’m not sure why he chose this one, but he did and it’s always stuck with me.

It was about a master clockmaker who crafted these intricate timepieces, each one a marvel that could capture the dance of the stars, that’s how he put it. They would take months, even years for him to complete, hunched over his bench. But in perfecting these clocks that brought utility and wonder to those people of a certain class who could afford them, he completely lost track of time, the precious time he could have spent with his wife, their children, their friends.

To them, his clocks, whenever they would see them in some great hall, were nothing but a reminder of his absence. They didn’t capture the dance of the stars. They were just a pair of hands that stole minutes, hours, days, and years from a man they never really got to know.

MM: Jesus, that’s a terrible story.

KM: Yeah, I suppose it is. Most true stories are.

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Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

Kelly chronicled the whiplash of Daedalia’s sudden success, including the money, the secrecy, and the way it left her both proud and invisible. Across a few entries she admitted how lonely she felt without Lefty, how much she wanted him to see her, and how the work was starting to exhaust her even as Daedalia’s myth kept growing.

In September 1993, Kelly disappeared after completing a trio of canvases that would be the centerpiece for Daedalia’s New York City debut at the Wider Still gallery in SoHo the following month.

When Lefty showed up at her place on a Thursday, Kelly was not home. Two days earlier, they’d had another in a long series of arguments about the future of Daedalia. The three canvases were arranged along the wall opposite the front door. Lefty saw them the moment he stepped inside, his hand still on the key.

He gazed into them from where he stood, frozen in the doorway, on the threshold between his best-laid plans and the reality that couldn’t be bent to them. The boundary between the trio of canvases and the room that contained them dissolved. His nose filled with the scent of old timbers baking in the sun, and the acrid tang of coal soot rose in his throat. He was standing in the open, the air ionized by the tumbling rush of whitewater far below.

The experience transcended his visual perception. It was as if the images slipped straight through the ocular nerve, bypassing the silent, unreliable interpreter in his brain that made sense of light, and descended deep into the soft center of him, where they manifested into a hollow foreboding sensation he had all but forgotten from his teenage years. His eyes pricked with tears. He swallowed and took two steps closer. When he did, the canvases emerged again, filled edge to edge with the meticulous result of Kelly’s labor. He felt the floor beneath him again and the stifling stillness of the empty house.

He turned away from the canvases to survey the room. Even before he saw the note on her desk, he knew she was really gone. Dust particles swirled in the shaft of sunlight that beamed down on her desk where he found the note and one of her favorite pens. He sat heavily in her chair and picked up the page torn from one of her notebooks.

Dear Lefty,

I’m sorry, but I can’t do this anymore. The other night you didn’t seem to hear me at all. I know you don’t understand. The work takes something out of me. It’s not like I have a bottomless well. I know you think this thing is just getting started, but it got away from me and I can’t do it anymore. I’m grateful to you for all your help and mostly for believing in me, but I need some time to figure out who I am. I’m sorry.

Kelly

I can only imagine what Lefty felt after reading that note. He was probably angry, but then he would have been disappointed in himself for being angry. Mostly, I think he was worried, and that worry would plague him for the year and a half it would take for him to hear from her again.

He looked in her bedroom and saw that her closet was empty. The chest of drawers was empty. All of her art supplies remained. He wondered if she had even bothered to take one of her favorite sketchpads, or a couple of pens, but he doubted it. He had pushed her too hard and understood too late that he had done to her what his father had done to him every day of his childhood after it was discovered that Lefty had a powerful arm and a level of control that far exceeded his gangly twelve-year-old body.

Lefty’s punishment was to have to carry on the charade of Daedalia by himself. Contracts had been signed and promises made. There was no one he could call to see if Kelly was okay. She had no friends that he knew of and he was certain she would never reach out to her mother.

He tried to think of the positives. She had plenty of money. She was very young and she needed time to be young. He tried to picture her walking on a beach in Bali or sitting on a bench in the Louvre eating a sandwich. He hoped that’s what she was doing. He hoped she would come back to him in a couple of months fully recharged with stories to tell, but he didn’t expect her to.

She had abandoned him in their moment of triumph. He had cracked the fucking code, broken into the bank vault that only one in ten million artists ever would while they were still living, and like a petulant child she just said, “Not for me.”

He traveled to New York to oversee preparations for Daedalia’s opening there. Greta had continued to be a big help as he navigated into deeper waters. It was she who helped him stage a bidding war between the top galleries in New York, ensuring that Daedalia’s opening would secure the highest profile with the most marketing dollars. It was she who had coached him to be as hard, aloof, and obtuse as possible in his dealings.

These things didn’t come easy for a man whose wiring and genteel Southern disposition demanded he do everything in his power to be liked and put others at ease. She helped him understand that he could play a character. So he did, and he convinced himself he was doing it for Kelly. He believed she would come back, and when she did, he wanted to have a worldwide audience clamoring to see her work. He also had bills to pay.

He spent the week before the opening pushing to make sure everything was perfect. In a year, he had learned a lot about staging and theatrics. Being an untrained outsider gave him an unmatched ability to disrupt conventional thinking.

Upon walking into the gallery on Broome Street, he immediately insisted the space wouldn’t do unless they made a lot of changes. The large front windows would have to be papered over. The walls would have to be painted black. The tracks of lights that lit the room like a football stadium would have to be turned off and replaced with tiny, focused spots. The space had to be dark.

What had been a happy accident borne out of necessity in the little warehouse where he staged Daedalia’s first show had become the only way he would stage the work for the first decade of her career. The darkness created a nocturnal, dreamy state for the viewer and threw the small pieces into dramatic focus.

Kelly had disappeared before they could come up with a name for the show, so he had been forced to do it on his own. The afternoon before the pieces had to be packed and shipped, he spread them all out across the living room and kitchen of her little house just as he and Kelly had done that first time in his studio apartment. He drank orange juice out of the half-empty carton she had left in her fridge and wandered from piece to piece, allowing himself to fall into each one.

Unlike her first couple of series, which were mostly a collection of random ideas unified by her technique, these were operating on a different plane. They were in communication with each other. Where one ended, the next began. She had numbered them on the backs, but he could have sequenced them without any help because they told a story. He wasn’t sure he could have articulated it to anyone else, but it was there, etched into his heart with all the precision of her meticulous pen strokes.

On the sidewalk across the street from the gallery, he stood for a while staring at the words he had written on the envelope he shipped with the paintings two weeks prior. Now they were printed in elegant white lettering across the blacked-out glass of the gallery’s front window.

He shivered in the October chill, wishing he had brought a camera. He took a deep breath, crossed the street, and stepped up to the door in front of a line of people queued around the block. The doorman nodded and let him in.

It was not a typical gallery show in the city. He hadn’t allowed it to be. It wasn’t filled with people chatting over champagne flutes and canapés. Only ten guests were admitted at a time and each had been required to make a reservation.

The gallery owners, a skeletal couple with the austere names of Hela and Sherman Kirn, had been more than a little rankled about being told how to run their business by this hick and had gone so far as to have him sign a contract stating that he would cover the loss if they sold less than twenty-five percent of the works on opening night.

He signed it, but not without extracting a promise that the owners would not permit their usual patrons privileged access. They would have to wait in the cold like everyone else. Hela and Sherman were certain the evening would be a disaster.

When he stepped into the space and the door closed behind him, shutting out the chill and the honk and murmur of the city, Lefty had what he has described as a religious experience. From his vantage point, he could see each of the nineteen pieces he had selected for the show. None of them was large enough to comprehend, much less decipher, from a distance.

But standing there by the door, he witnessed the emergence of something much greater as he moved toward the center of the gallery. The pieces weren’t just thematically connected. They were a single, living organism, not unlike a stand of aspen trees or an octopus with its thinking appendages furling and unfurling, flattening, shifting as it changed in dimension, color, and texture.

“You’re here. Why didn’t you tell me?” Her voice broke with emotion. “How did she know so much about our lives? Is this some kind of stunt?”

He hadn’t heard the gallery owner approach. When he turned slowly to face Hela Kirn, the sharp planes of her face had softened and her eyes shimmered with tears. He felt a discomfort, like the wrongness of putting on a well-worn T-shirt backwards. When he tried to speak, words wouldn’t come. Tears streamed down his face as they had that first time he looked at Kelly’s notebook.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, his eyes drifting back to the middle piece of the triptych displayed prominently on the center back wall. “These pieces, they’re not your story.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you see it? This is her story… and mine.”

The gallery owner’s face drained of color and she stared at him blankly before turning to follow his gaze at the triptych. “That’s our child. That’s our Melanie.”

Lefty stared at the figure in the center panel that only just emerged at this distance and experienced an echo of the feeling that had overwhelmed him a few weeks prior when he had first seen the pieces. In the half dozen times he had looked at the collection, handled the pieces in preparation for this show, he had never seen this, had never been far enough away.

Up close, the works were a bending, twisting labyrinth of flora and fauna interrupted by landmarks, crypts, statues, an overgrown garden shed collapsing into decay. The figure he saw was himself at fifteen, standing on the old train trestle that spanned the gorge off Route 9. The angle of his head, the slackness of his posture, the lump of his bat bag and helmet on the track beside him, it was all there.

He brushed past her and moved closer, hoping to see what this woman saw, but the singular subject exploded into a trillion tiny strokes like the dust particles floating in the air of her empty living room a few weeks prior.

“I won’t sell any of these pieces,” he said, barely audible.

“I beg your pardon?” She moved up behind him.

“You can let them in, but no one’s buying anything tonight.”

He turned to face her, ready for a fight.

“I agree,” she said. “They must not be separated. Not yet.”

Many times I have heard this story and I’m still not sure I believe a word of it, though I want to, more than anything. The collection has never been staged in its entirety since that first showing. For the week it lasted, it breathed in that room off Broome Street and then it was sold off in pieces. The elite collectors of the New York scene, and those who had traveled in from London, Paris, and Prague, had to wait in the cold for hours like teenagers queuing to buy concert tickets. The bidding war was unprecedented for a new and unknown artist.

But no one who saw the work could leave without at least trying to take it home, where they were certain it belonged.

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