Previously…

Marabelle recounted her mother’s growing obsession with Gaines’s technology, and the five years her parents spent building Kelly’s labyrinth out of materials the world had discarded on the concrete acre. At its center, Kelly told her the work would be finished only when people started showing up, and that Marabelle couldn’t see the magic because she was the magic. The two of them walked out together by starlight.

“You know this thing you want is a fantasy, right? He’ll never in a million years do it.”

Greta sat across from my father. In her account to me, it was late afternoon and they were sitting in a hippie-chic café in Mill Valley, waiting for Trevor Gaines.

“Maybe not. But it doesn’t really matter to me at this point,” he said. He stirred some more cream into his coffee and didn’t look up. “She’s dying, Greta. What Gaines decides to do or not do doesn’t make any difference now.”

“That’s bullshit. It matters now more than ever.”

“Look, I just want to finish this so I can get back to her. Where the hell is he? He was supposed to be here thirty minutes ago.”

“He likes to make people wait,” she said.

“I used to do that.”

“I know. I’m the one who taught you. He’ll be here.”

“Or he won’t because he’s moved on to another hobby. How did he sound on the phone?”

“Like a boy who’s getting his first bicycle.” Greta smiled and nodded out the window. “Speak of the devil and the devil appears.”

Gaines was crossing the parking lot, the sun glinting off of his smart glasses and freshly shaven head. She fingered the edges of the crisp stack of pages poking out of a leather folio. She had brokered deals for ten times the amount printed on page six, section 4, bullet B of this contract, but she was never more unsure of herself walking into a negotiation. She had expected to have weeks of back and forth with Gaines’s attorneys, but the man had just wanted to meet. He hadn’t even inquired about the price. But that was not surprising. She met Lefty’s gaze and held it, then rose to her feet and turned up the wattage of her nervous smile as Gaines walked through the door.

She had barely slept the night before. Maybe it was just that she was getting too old for this game, or maybe it was because there was so much riding on the deal. In the time she had been allowed inside the Daedalia circle of trust, she had come to love Kelly as much as she loved Lefty. The woman was a force, and it was so painful to watch that strength diminish with the illness. The commission, her last great work, was unconventional, unwieldy, and definitely both more and less than Gaines had bargained for. It was a fucking acre of land in the middle of the desert. It couldn’t be hung on a wall. It couldn’t be preserved. To erect a shelter around it would completely destroy the piece because it was part of the land and the sky. How Gaines would react to it was anyone’s guess. Upon first walking through it, Greta had felt nothing but rising anxiety and irritation. By the time she reached the center, she was furious, drenched in sweat, and out of breath. Then a calm settled into her, a coolness. For a moment she was inside the memory of waking in the morning, covered in dew after sleeping on the ground under the stars with her best friend in high school. Greta had sat on the long stone bench and wept for an hour, unsure of whether she was coming apart or being made whole. She would tell others that it was the most profoundly spiritual moment of her life.

So there was the Daedalia magic in the installation, but it was a different kind of magic. Unlike her paintings, this was a living monument to the contradiction of human existence. It was a walled, symmetrical structure set upon a grid, but the walls were almost a living, organic structure, a chaotic composition of trash, debris, and found objects that allowed the wind and filtered light to pass through. It was not built to last. It would not be the statue of David. It would erode and crumble back into the earth just as the artist herself was.

She kissed Gaines on the cheek when he reached their table. He shook Lefty’s hand then sat in the chair next to Greta, facing him.

“So…” he said, leaning in. “It’s finished now? I can finally see it?”

“Yeah, it’s done,” Lefty said.

“Well, what are we waiting for? Don’t you think I’ve waited long enough?”

“It’s worth the wait. This is like no other work of hers. She’s only ever done one other installation.”

The instant change in Gaines’s demeanor was almost comical to Greta. He looked like a child who was just told there would be ice cream but that it was kale-flavored.

“Look, I have money, but I can’t buy Times Square or a city block in downtown Chicago.”

“It’s nothing like that,” Lefty said. “It’s on a piece of land that you’ll own.”

Gaines relaxed and leaned back in his chair. He fidgeted with the key fob for what was surely one of his ridiculous sports cars. Greta was ready to be done with him.

“All the details are here.”

She pushed the folio across to him. He glanced down at it but didn’t move to open it.

“Why don’t you just tell me the terms. My lawyers can review all the details. Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s fine. I want to know about the piece.”

“There’s no way to describe it,” Lefty said.

His voice had changed. There was a thinness to it that caused Greta concern. He couldn’t break down here. Under the table, she placed her fingertips on his knee.

“It’s true,” she said. “It’s a full-body experience. Like nothing else that’s come before or ever will again.”

She regretted this last statement and almost winced. She had to remember the stakes, but her instinct to close was not something she was even conscious of anymore. Gaines pulled the folio to him and flipped open the cover. He began to read. He flipped through the preamble clauses, nibbling around the edges until he reached the meat where he began to chew. Sitting beside him, Greta could see the muscle in his clenched jaw working. After a couple of minutes, he flipped ahead to the final pages.

The contract was a work of art. She and Lefty had spent two years crafting it, though much of it had fallen to her in the back half as Lefty’s attention was all on his dying wife. The deal was unlike any Greta had ever brokered. Those contracts were always a mere formality — a boring box to be checked. But this one was the beginning of a grand reveal, and she could see in Gaines’s face that he was beginning to see the shape of what lay beneath the silken cloth.

“This was never on the table,” he said, looking up to meet Lefty’s gaze. “I’m not giving them up. You can name your price, but the panels are not part of the deal.”

Greta’s stomach tightened and her face flushed. It was falling apart. She couldn’t read Lefty’s expression. He was not himself. He would not break into his easy smile and open the negotiation. She was about to jump in when he spoke.

“That’s fine. It’s a decision you’ll have to live with. But everything else is non-negotiable.”

Gaines looked back down at the pages and flipped back through them.

“So, ten million in cash for the property, which is…” He flipped back a page. “…somewhere in New Mexico. And the piece cannot be moved, reconfigured, or changed in any way. And I have to buy this thing sight unseen. Oh, and no take backsies.”

Gaines chuckled and closed the folio.

“Did your artist write this fucking thing because it’s filled with magical thinking? Who accepts a deal like this? Do you know how valuable my time is?”

“Look, we can work something out…” Greta said.

“No, Greta. It’s fine. He was never meant to own this. We can go.”

I imagine my father rising to his full height and extending his hand and Gaines just deflating there like a gassy balloon. But I can’t say. I only have Greta’s account of the event. What is true is that no contract was signed that day in the café. Lefty did walk away, and Greta chased after him.

The next day Lefty got a call from Gaines’s lead counsel, who said he would be sending over a marked-up draft. The key changes to the contract were:

• The “panels” were the property of Trevor Gaines and what he would or would not do with them was at his sole discretion.

• Any attempt by the broker to make this public knowledge would be seen as an act of aggression and be met with a swift and overwhelmingly punitive defense.

• Mr. Gaines would pay 50% above the asking price for the property in New Mexico, which presumably housed Daedalia’s final work.

• Mr. Gaines would take possession of the property immediately.

• These terms would expire in 24 hours.

Greta shared this document with me on a bright morning in another café, this time in New York City.

“I was so proud of your father for walking away from that prick. But I was even more proud when he let the twenty-four-hour period expire without so much as a word. Of course, this pride is in hindsight. I had pleaded with him to take the deal.”

“He knew what he was doing, I guess,” I said.

“Perhaps he did. But I also think he was at a point where he really didn’t care. Trevor Gaines did not loom large in his mind.”

“And Trevor Gaines did not like this. I’m sure.”

“No, he didn’t. But eventually, he came back with his tail between his legs. It took a week, and we had given up. I was so pissed at your dad that I almost didn’t pick up the phone when he called to tell me that the contract was signed and Gaines would be arriving the next day.”

“So he signed the original contract?” I asked.

“No, he signed a revised version. But this one with a clause stating that the panels would be donated in the event of his death.”

“So he spent $20 million on a property with a house he’d never be able to live in because it was deeded to Maria and her family. That seems crazy.”

“That was your mother’s condition and your father wouldn’t budge on it. I’m sure Gaines didn’t like that counter, but by that point he was desperate.”

“Maybe, but it’s more likely he saw it as a minor pothole that money could easily fix in the future.”

We talked for another hour. She told me about her restless retirement in Florida, and her quiet mortification about becoming a cliché. She said she never imagined getting old and advised me not to do it. I promised I would try. The subtext of every question she asked was about my father, though she never actually asked about him. I volunteered that he was in good health, but had become a recluse. He had his routine back in Black Mountain.

She said she understood. How could anyone recover from the loss of a great love, especially one who created art that had changed the world? On the sidewalk outside, after she hugged me, I could see her eyes were welling with tears. Maybe it was the biting cold of late November, but I sensed it was more.

“Can I ask why you’re interested in all of this now?”

I shrugged in response. She stared at me for a long time, holding my hands. I think she wanted to add a thousand more escape clauses to our conversation. I was nearing the end of the research I hadn’t been doing for the book I was never going to write, and maybe she sensed that. She smiled, but it was the version where the corners of her mouth turned down slightly.

“Please be kind to us,” she said, finally. “Whatever you decide to do with all this will outlive us all. Just like your mother’s work.”

I thought about this on the walk back to my apartment. There was a long-delayed lunch with my publisher on the calendar for the next day. If I told him the subject of the mysterious book that had been living in my head for more than a year, there would be no turning back. My publisher would have one of two reactions, and neither offered the safe, quiet path my other books had taken. As the broker of the deal, Greta stood to lose everything, and my father was right next to her, standing at the center of the blast radius of a public confrontation with Trevor Gaines. There was no doubt that my book would leave a crater. The question was whether that crater would be a mere divot compared to the revealing of Daedalia’s identity to the world.

How had I backed myself into writing this story? I was a novelist, not a biographer. How would it even work? The fear sharpened both my focus and my resolve. It was a high-wire act of Daedalia proportions, and maybe that’s why I decided I would do it.

The prose was starting to queue up outside my door like an angry mob wanting to be let in. I’d never thought so much about a story without committing a single word to the page. I had to open up and start writing, or I might have lost my mind.

That day I understood that if I published this book, I wouldn’t just be taking away the fantasy of Daedalia for millions of people, I would be having to share my mother once again. I’d had to share her my entire life. Would her work endure the revelation that it wasn’t some mystical witch who conjured it, but a reclusive woman who sometimes binged reality TV and made lopsided birthday cakes?

The exhibition that opened the year before at MoMA would have to be completely reconsidered. Would Kelly Mudd just be added as a footnote at the end of the hall on a small placard? Was the queue of tourists waiting each day to walk through the museum more important than the queue of words in my head waiting to be written — more important than my mother finally being seen?

There were more questions than answers. And that’s always the best time to start writing a book.

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Previously…

Trevor Gaines prepared a dinner at his Montana house, expecting an easy evening and a background report on a boring folk-artist housewife. Kelly disarmed him from the handshake on, pressing him on the panels' authenticity and on what a man who owns everything still wants, which drew out his admission that seeing the panels had changed him and he'd never shaken the feeling.

By the end of the weekend, after the snow had melted enough for my parents to fly back home, I think my father was more than ready to be free of Gaines’s company.

I’ve improvised the night of the dinner because I couldn’t help myself. The more I read about Trevor Gaines’s eccentricities, the more irresistible I found him as a subject. But I will return to observable facts for what followed that weekend.

My mother, despite her best efforts, succumbed to the billionaire’s attention. She denied the extent to which Gaines had won her over. She told herself it was research, that she was a spy courting a mark to better find his soft underbelly, so she could properly set the hook. Certainly, there was truth to this, but when a man like Gaines, with so much power and influence, trains his beam on you, it’s enough to make anyone blind for a time.

On my visits home, there was accumulating evidence of Gaines’s influence. The Windows laptop covered in paint-splatter that she had used for a decade to check her email once or twice a week had been replaced by a sleek aluminum laptop she fiddled with daily. Gaines was teaching her, giving her an informal apprenticeship with access to what she came to think of as his magic book of spells. With the right combination of words, she could cast a spell to do almost anything she could imagine. For someone with her expansive mind and contracting physical range of motion, it’s easy to see how she was seduced by Gaines and his technology.

My father was increasingly more worried every time we spoke. After decades together, he had mostly acclimated to her mercurial nature, but this new metamorphosis was a whole world apart. She had retreated deeper inside herself. All the energy she had thrown into the act of conjuring her visions to life had turned inward. Lying next to her at night, he could feel it, whirring like the hum of an industrial-size refrigerator. He feared she would give up their secret or that Gaines had already figured it out. He feared another Fiodor entering their lives, but one infinitely more powerful and dangerous. But mostly, I think he understood he was losing her. Her health was deteriorating, but she absolutely refused to go to doctors, so it would be another couple of years before there was an official diagnosis.

He stayed close to home and tried not to hover, tried to give her the space she needed to work, but she wasn’t working, at least not in the way she always had. To fill up his days, he began tinkering on the landscaping project she had mostly abandoned in the backyard. At first, he was just tidying up, stabilizing the structures my mother had begun to arrange. He studied and began to intuit the pattern. He was old and had to move slowly, but there was something driving him, compelling him.

When I was home for a long weekend, I looked out my bedroom window and saw him out there early one morning. The Walk From Me to You, the most ambitious and final work of Daedalia’s career, looked nothing like what it would become. That morning, it appeared as something between a life-size topographic map and a labyrinth if the walls were only a couple of inches high and constructed of small sandstone pebbles, twigs, and scrubby clumps of juniper and piñon pine. Much like the spidery under-drawings my mother did in pencil when working on a canvas, she had sketched out the structure of the entire acre of concrete using available material.

I dressed, made a cup of coffee for myself and one for my father before walking down the slope behind our house to join him.

“Well, you’re up early, sunshine,” he said. “That for me?”

I handed him the mug and he took a sip.

“So, what are we doing here, Mr. Lefty?” I tried doing my best impression of Enrique.

“I’m not exactly sure, but I feel like I’ve got to do something.”

“You could have taken up golf.” I surveyed the expansive plane before returning my gaze to him. “You look tired but also… inspired.”

“Yeah, it’s weird.”

“Is Mom subcontracting you, or is this now your baby?”

“I’m really not sure what our arrangement is at this point.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the work or their marriage, and I didn’t ask for him to clarify. It didn’t matter anyway. The line between the two had always been fuzzy at best.

“So, what exactly are you doing out here today?”

“I’m uh… not exactly sure. Pushing rocks around. You want to help me? Put your education to work?”

“I’m not sure my MFA qualifies me for landscape engineering.”

“Spoken like a real genuine lazy ass. Here, you can use this shovel, professor.”

I worked alongside him for a couple of hours, maybe three, before making up an excuse about needing to get some pages to my editor before the afternoon. I followed his lead and we walked the labyrinth, sometimes following the path, other times ignoring it and tacking a vector to a point clear in my father’s mind where he would stop and begin to build up a section of wall then send me off with the wheelbarrow to collect more rocks and dirt. It seemed like the most futile thing to do, constructing this thing, this crumbling maze of debris, but it didn’t intimidate him. He paused only to drink some water or stretch his back. He worked all day, and my mother said that had become his routine. My parents were as weird as ever.

Over the next five years, in my own haphazard time-lapse movie of visits home, I would see the labyrinth evolve into what it eventually became. It was a magic trick devised and executed in broad daylight. The walls, once an organized pile of sticks and rubble, rose into ten-foot barricades built from whatever the world had already thrown away. Reclaimed lumber. Salvaged doors and window frames. Brick and cinder block pulled from demolition piles. Rusted, corrugated tin and bent chain-link. Burlap feed sacks and canvas stretched taut like sailcloth, stitched and patched and re-stitched when the wind tore it.

And stone, so much stone. Smooth river rock from dry creek beds in the mountains. Jagged shale and slate, the detritus from strip-mining operations. Chunks of limestone and granite scavenged from old quarry tailings and roadside dumps, the kind of heavy leftovers nobody wants to haul. Some came from nearby arroyos and dry washes. Others arrived in the beds of pickup trucks and borrowed trailers, traded for favors, delivered by friends who had heard, vaguely, that Lefty and Kelly were “building something.”

My mother planted the seeds and communicated the vision, but, in her steadily weakening state, couldn’t participate in much of the construction. Lefty took up the role of general contractor. There was much less concern over secrecy and security. They were both getting too old to care, and the phenomenon of Daedalia had diminished in the public psyche. My father blamed the internet and social media. He claimed that short videos tuned to tickle the amygdala had eroded any motivation for people to leave the couch, much less be enchanted by real art made by an actual person. These people would never see Daedalia talking about her process as she mugged for the camera through an AI filter that made her ten years younger. Daedalia would never make content.

These were the things my parents talked about over dinner — the machines devouring the world. But later, in the shed where she used to stand before huge canvases, urging a brush thick with paint, she would sit on the old couch, hunched over a glowing screen, tinkering late into the night.

She retreated further into herself, but when I could get her to talk to me, the conversation almost always found its way back to artificial intelligence. Depending on the day, she would either spiral into a swirling diatribe of conspiracy theories about how we were already living in a simulation, or she would tell me with great excitement about how Ona had finally been given a voice — they could actually talk — and as a result, were making untold breakthroughs. I tried to be patient with her, but the moment she drifted in either direction, I found myself getting angry, not at her exactly, but at how easily she was able to float away or disappear through a wall I couldn’t follow. The best I could muster was to distract myself, let her ramble, and offer the occasional interesting or uh-huh to keep from hurting her feelings.

One of the last times I visited the ranch before the big project was complete and Daedalia was officially retired, I sat with my mother at the center of the labyrinth. The stones still held the day’s heat, and the late light slanted low across the walls, catching on the uneven surfaces and throwing long shadows.

“How does it feel to be finished?” I asked.

“Is that what you think—that I’m finished?”

“I meant with this project for Gaines.”

“I know what you meant, sweetheart. But it’s not finished. Nothing is ever finished.”

I braced myself for another rambling metaphysical conversation but promised myself I would try to be present. This might be the last time I would be here with her, at my childhood home.

“You don’t like it, do you?” she asked.

“That’s not true, Mom. I just don’t understand it. You operate on a level I can’t access, and it makes me feel like I’m missing something—standing outside, looking in. What is it? Why are you smiling?”

“Because you are more my daughter than you have any idea.”

“So if the project isn’t complete, what will complete it?”

“When people start showing up. But you already know this, right? When you finish writing one of your books, does it really feel complete until a reader has cracked the spine and taken the journey you imagined for them?”

We sat in silence for a few minutes. As I turned her words over in my mind, my thoughts drifted instead to my latest writing project and a character who still refused to prove they had any real dimension. My mother spoke again.

“Does it make you sad that we’re giving up this place, your home?”

“Honestly, I’m not very sentimental about it.”

“I’m sorry, honey. We never made it a proper home for you. You deserved normal parents. But you got me and Lefty.”

From a different parent, these words would have been a serve that required a return, which would lead to a simpering volley of self-flagellation and reassurances until the ball lost the will to keep crossing the net and it just rolled off the court. But neither of us had the stomach or stamina for such sport. We both knew what she said was true, and I could hear in the tone of her voice that she was sorry. We let the wind teasing a loose flap of canvas on a wall somewhere in the labyrinth behind us fill the space.

“What did you mean when you said people will come?” I asked. “Is there some kind of launch event planned?”

“Hell, I wouldn’t know. That’s not my department,” she said. “But people will come. You’ll see.”

“Because Ona has made it so, I’m guessing.”

“It’s okay that you think I’m delusional. After all, it’s my natural state. But sooner or later, my love, you’ll have to recognize the truth that there’s a whole universe of things we can’t see or touch, and that unknowable universe is just as real—maybe more real than the one we’re so convinced by.”

That probably wasn’t her last entreaty to me on this subject, but it’s the one anchored in my memory, probably because of the place where we had the conversation. In the moment, I knew I was recording. It’s a necessary but annoying habit for writers. I understood the significance of us sitting at the center of her last great work, the terminus of her spiraling journey inward.

We sat until a fiery afterglow was all that remained of the day, the blood red-orange of a ripe peach fading into a pitch sky salted with stars.

“Should we go inside?” I asked.

“Yes, let’s.”

We stood and she took my hand in hers. For a moment I felt a swell of emotion so deep, I couldn’t touch the bottom. It was the absolute, unyielding terror all children know.

“Do we have to walk out separately, like we came in?”

“No, not if you don’t want to. Mare, are you okay, honey?”

“I’m scared, Mom.”

She didn’t ask why. She pulled me to her and I buried my face in the hollow of her collarbone. I breathed her in and clung to her, trying to somehow find a hold I’d never been able to secure. At close range, able to hide my face, I bled out all my hurts, anxieties, and fears, too numerous and ambiguous to catalog here. She absorbed them all into her little body. Her calloused hands, so small and sturdy, kneaded and smoothed the knotted ropes in my back as she whispered affirmations and rocked me gently back and forth. For however long we stood this way, I felt the full radiance of her attention. After I’d stopped crying, she pulled away so she could see my face.

“What is it you’re most afraid of, sweetheart?”

“I’m afraid of losing you before I ever really got to know you.”

“You know me better than anyone.”

“But I don’t, Mom. I don’t see what everyone else sees in your art, and I want to so badly. I want to be part of that world. I want to feel what they feel. I want to know you in that way. Why can’t I? What’s wrong with me?”

“Marabelle, you can’t see the magic because you are the magic.”

It was a tender and loving thing to say, and I knew it wasn’t true. There was a wall between me and the magic she spoke of. Maybe it was for my protection. Maybe I manifested it, or maybe she had. Regardless of how or why, I was immune to the spell Daedalia cast.

In a few months’ time, one of the wealthiest men in the world would wind his way through this labyrinth. He would be chased by jackals and confronted by demons of his own making. He would claim he saw the face of God and spoke with his dead father. He would enter many times, and each time emerge as a different man. A man transforming. Shedding layers.

But that night my mother and I walked hand in hand along the twisting path she’d fashioned on the foundation my father had poured. There were no jackals or demons. We got lost a couple of times. I jumped at my own reflection in the fragment of a mirror, and we both giggled like girls.

In time, we found our way out, guided by the light of the stars so still, bright, and steady.

Enjoying Daedalia? Why not order a copy of my latest novel from your local bookstore or grab it direct from my publisher, Tiny Worlds! It’s also available anywhere you buy books online. Please consider leaving a review at Goodreads. It’s the best way to help other people find my work.

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Previously…

Kelly's journals from 2022 recount the beginning of her illness and its impact on her ability to keep up with the speed of Ona's visions. Walking Lefty's weathered concrete acre, she felt the work coming and knew it would be too big for a canvas and would somehow involve technology. She agreed to meet tech billionaire, Trevor Gaines out of curiosity about scale, and by September she was on her hands and knees on the slab, out of time and reaching for something she couldn't yet name.

The chickens’ blood spilled in crimson quarters on the gleaming white quartz of the kitchen floor.

“Rosa, come and get these!”

A sturdy woman with a severe bun emerged from the depths of a pantry, clutching the skirt of her apron bulging with root vegetables.

“Yes, Mr. Gaines.”

She moved quickly and dumped the load of produce into the industrial-sized sink before rushing over to take the birds.

“Make sure you clean this up before it stains the tile, yeah? And no bleach, no harsh chemicals. I don’t want this place to smell like a hospital cafeteria when our guests arrive.”

He had to be stern and explicit with her, otherwise she would completely ignore his instruction. But Trevor Gaines had achieved his success by knowing how to be the right manager in every situation. For some people, it was the carrot, for others, the stick, and then there were a few who required the iron fist in the velvet glove. Rosa was the latter.

“I know your chicken will be to die for.”

Her face softened and she took the three bloody, headless birds into her apron.

“Do you need help?” he asked.

“No thank you. I’m fine. No problem.”

Gaines washed his hands of the blood in the smaller sink on the side counter and dusted the feathers from his workout clothes. Leaving the kitchen, he pulled the device from his pocket and took a habitual scroll through his dashboard. More north-trending green arrows than yesterday.

“Mina, read my messages, just the critical ones about the acquisition. I have three minutes.”

The delicate whispery voice, modeled from an English actress he was obsessed with, obeyed his command and delivered what was necessary in the allotted time. He brought her into the shower stall with him and perched her in the purpose-built nook, inset into the azure-tiled wall. The nook illuminated with soft golden light, warm water began to rain down in fine droplets from the grid of pinholes above, and music faded in, a flute floating atop a burbling tabla drumbeat. He shucked off his clothes, leaving them outside the stall.

“Mina, undress for me.”

A screen, large enough to cover most of the far wall at the opposite end of the shower, illuminated behind glass, and the famous actress appeared. She smiled and began to tug her t-shirt over her head. Her AI-enhanced breasts bounced free. He marveled at the precision of the new physics engine before stepping into the stall and giving her further instruction. But his mind was distracted, and soon he dismissed her for a livestream of the ocean from a webcam mounted on the beach of his island.

The guests tonight had been carefully selected. He loved good discourse and found it only happened under the right conditions—good food, plenty of time, and smart people who violently disagreed on important issues. His favorite sparring partner, Marco, would be coming with whoever his latest boyfriend was. He had also invited the fiery young senator from North Carolina who had been instrumental in the push to roll back Roe v. Wade. Certainly he would be bringing his church-mouse wife. But the real wild card was Lefty, the art guy who managed Daedalia. He was good for a laugh. They were both straight white men of a certain age and they shared a love of baseball. But he knew nothing about the wife. Because he abhorred the absence of data, Gaines had tasked one of his assistants to do a background check. He read through the report this morning.

The woman, Kelly, had never worked as far as he could tell, never held a job. Hadn’t gone to college. Wasn’t on any social media, though his company’s facial-recognition software had surfaced a handful of images taken by others. A few gallery openings on Lefty’s arm, a shot of them at their daughter’s graduation. There were a couple of articles on New Mexico regional news sites about her kitschy folk art and the community. It was yawn-worthy stuff, typical of a bored housewife. What had struck him was the story about their child being abducted by some lunatic in 2006. There was a story there he wanted to know more about.

Gaines spent the next couple of hours getting the Montana house ready for his guests. He set the table on the porch himself and started a fire in the stacked-stone hearth at one end. It was cold, so he put out some heat lamps and made sure the propane tanks were full. Doing things below his paygrade kept him grounded. He took pride in it, though he had to admit, killing the chickens was not a practice he wanted to keep up even if it was the ethical thing to do. No matter—there were countless ways he tended to his conscience, sandbags he routinely added to the moat around his privilege. Some of his peers had it worse. At least he came from nothing for the most part, and had earned his billions.

At five, he sent his driver to the small airstrip to pick up his guests, all of whom would be arriving via one of his private jets. An hour later he was out front in one of his famous black turtlenecks waiting to greet them when they arrived. Nothing was going to plan. The senator had sent word last minute that they wouldn’t be coming. Something about an ice storm in Raleigh. Marco texted to say he was coming solo, which meant there would be no one to rein in his ADD and no buffer between him and the gin. And of course he was running late. Soft snowflakes, like soap shavings, began to fall, catch in his hair, and dot his shirt. The black SUV pulled into the drive. The back door opened and the tall art dealer stepped out. He looked like an aging character actor who might have starred in westerns with his strong jaw, lanky build, and relaxed posture. He was handsome, charming, and magnetic. Gaines was anxious to see the woman who commanded the loyalty of such a man. When she rounded the back of the vehicle, Gaines’s first thought was that perhaps the wife couldn’t make it and this was an assistant.

The woman was slight, a sliver of a person, and standing next to her husband, seemed like a twelve-year-old. Her hair was dishwater gray-brown and cut in a blunt bob. She wore old, ill-fitting jeans and a black puffy winter coat that only made her look smaller as she shivered in her Vans sneakers next to her husband.

“Trevor, thanks for having us. This is my wife, Kelly.”

When Gaines took her small, sturdy hand, she looked up and met his eyes, and everything he had recorded about her physical appearance was wiped clean and reset. This was no assistant. Her large eyes were luminous and green, the green of oxidized copper. They were framed with black eyeliner and the stroke was so precise and thin, he couldn’t imagine the hand that might have drawn it. All the studied patter he peddled when meeting someone new escaped him. He cleared his throat.

“Welcome… welcome. Please come inside.”

After a glass of wine, Gaines gradually recovered his ability to engage, though he found Kelly’s quiet intensity disarming, and it put him off his game. This night wouldn’t be the swirl of socio-political, techno-optimism discourse he favored. He found himself leaning in across the table most of the evening as he tried to summon words from his mysterious guest.

“So… you’re an artist too, I hear?”

“Not really. I make little things,” Kelly said. “Mostly for my own amusement.”

“Have you met your husband’s infamous client?”

“No, I haven’t. She doesn’t see anyone except Lefty. But you must’ve known that already. I imagine you’ve done some research.”

He nodded but didn’t respond. He studied Lefty, who had been nursing the same beer for over an hour. The man behaved differently in his wife’s presence. He seemed to dial back his charm or maybe he was just being careful. Gaines had seen this before among his married friends. It’s why he had refused to enter into the contract of monogamy.

Marco finally arrived halfway through dinner, flinging the door open to the porch and shaking snow out of his dark curls.

“Bonjour, amigos! So sorry I’m late.”

He introduced himself to Lefty and Kelly, shaking their hands enthusiastically. He grabbed a bottle of Tanqueray from the sideboard and pulled out the chair at the end of the table in one fluid motion.

“I would have been on time, but there was a problem with the new release—an all-hands-on-deck situation.”

“You know you could trust one of the many talented engineering leads you spend a fortune on to manage things.”

“It’s my baby, Trev. You know this.”

“What are you releasing?” Kelly asked.

“It’s the new version of our LLM. Big release, lots of new features…”

“What’s an LLM?” Kelly asked.

“Marco, not everyone here lives in Silicon Valley. LLM stands for large language model, Kelly, which is the new frontier of AI.”

“What can you do with these LLMs?” she asked.

For the next hour, as snow piled up outside and the fire amassed a glowing bed of embers, Marco and Trevor talked excitedly about all the things they were building that would make the Industrial Revolution look like quaint little innovation. At one point, Trevor pulled out his phone and demonstrated his personal prototype. Mina entertained them by answering even the most esoteric questions, including a comprehensive summary of Daedalia lore, prompted by Gaines who beamed like a proud parent at a piano recital. After he was satisfied that his guests were duly impressed, he pocketed his phone and suggested they move to the soft seating around the hearth where he had fed enough wood to fuel a crackling blaze.

“We’ve nerded out enough. Lefty, Kelly, you must rescue us from ourselves. You know Marco and I are both huge fans of Daedalia. Marco’s just beginning to invest in art.”

“It’s true, but I’m just learning what I like,” Marco said. “Much of it doesn’t make sense to me and my engineering brain, but Daedalia, her work I get. It’s just impossible to find. If only we had a guy…”

“Sure, let me just call her up,” Lefty said. “See if I can get her to crank something out next week for you.”

“Tell me,” Kelly said. “What is it you like about her work?”

Marco stared at her for a beat, furrowed his brow, then turned to Lefty.

“So, you could do that, just call her?”

“No,” Kelly said, “he can’t just do that. She’s not a trained seal. Besides, she doesn’t have a phone.”

Marco looked chastened. He opened his mouth to respond but instead, settled back into his chair and took a sip of gin. Kelly wasn’t ready to let it go.

“Have you actually seen her work in person or just photos online?”

“He’s seen my collection,” Gaines said. “The 9/11 panels. I’m not sure if you knew I had them. It’s not public knowledge, but I assume your husband told you.”

“He did. But how can you be sure they’re real? It’s estimated that 1.5 million tons of rubble fell that day and…”

Lefty squeezed his wife’s thigh where his hand had been resting. “I told you he’s had them verified by several experts.”

“Of course,” Kelly said, “it just seems fantastical that all twelve panels could have survived.”

“But isn’t everything about Daedalia fantastical?” Gaines was sitting in the chair closest to Kelly and he leaned in. “You must be more of an expert on this than just about anyone. What does her work mean to you?”

“I don’t pretend to understand her or her work. Daedalia is Lefty’s domain. Always has been.”

“Why do I find that hard to believe?” Gaines said. “I mean, the two of you have been together as long as he’s represented Daedalia, no? Surely you’ve got an opinion on someone’s work who has basically been your golden goose.”

“I only like her old stuff,” Kelly said. She tossed back the remaining half a glass of wine she had been sipping. “Can you point me to the restroom?”

“Come on, I’ll show you,” Gaines said, standing up. “I need to grab another bottle of wine anyway.”

When she exited the bathroom just off the kitchen, he was waiting for her with two bottles of wine. “I wasn’t sure which you’d prefer.”

“Oh, I’m not an expert on wine. Either is fine with me.”

“I sense there’s a lot more to you than you’re letting on, folk artist. Why are you so determined to go unnoticed?”

“Does everyone have to be noticed? Is it so important?”

Gaines shrugged. “You don’t like me very much, do you?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I don’t really know you. This commission Lefty is brokering for you, what are you hoping it will be? What more could a man like you want that he doesn’t already have?”

“You don’t fuck around, do you? Just straight to the point. I like that.”

He set one of the bottles down on the counter and was beginning to turn to walk back to the others, but she caught his arm. “If you like it, why don’t you answer the question?”

“Love, happiness, salvation, eternal life—same as everyone else.”

“You think everyone wants to live forever?”

“Don’t you?”

“No. Besides, I know for a fact I won’t. So, you think whatever she manages to create will get you closer to any of those things?”

“I’m not sure, but nothing else has worked. I never even considered the idea that there was anything more, anything beyond what I could see, taste, touch, smell, or fuck.”

He leaned in very close, whispering the last word in her ear. Kelly took a step back and scowled, ever so slightly. “And… seeing her work up close changed something. So what, you believe in God now? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, God is for fools. But I did feel changed the first time I saw the panels, and I’ve never been able to shake that feeling. It’s unsettling, like being given a glimpse, seeing through a split in the curtain, knowing something’s back there moving, pulling all the levers, but I can’t know what it is.”

“What if you spend all this money and there’s nothing more than what you’ve already been given?”

“I’ve made worse investments. Besides, I have a good feeling about this one. Especially after meeting you.”

“Lefty and I should think about getting back home.”

“You won’t get out in this weather. I’ve had Rosa make up the guest bedrooms.”

Kelly stiffened. He smiled the same smile she’d seen on the cover of Time magazine two years prior.

“Come on, someone has to help me drink this three-thousand-dollar bottle of wine. I can see you’re interested in the AI stuff. Wait till Marco’s fully lubricated. He’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

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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…

Lefty hired Enrique's crew to pour an acre of concrete behind the house, five hundred thousand pebble shapes as a scale model for Gaines's wealth. When Kelly returned from her walkabout, she was confused, touched, and ultimately inspired by Lefty’s monument. They reconciled and there was an understanding that Daedalia would come back for one more spectacle.

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.

May 1, 2022

I feel like I’m melting away. It’s such a weird sensation. I wake up in the morning and there’s just less of me. How is that possible? I really don’t understand. It’s not like I feel sick exactly, just thinner somehow, like the cells in my body are a little further apart than they used to be. Maybe this is just what getting older feels like.

The same thing that’s happening to me is happening with my work. What used to take me a day or a week now takes months. I still have the torrent of ideas spilling out of Ona. She’s still with me, but it’s taking me a lot longer to interpret what she’s saying. The ideas are so small and far apart, so distributed across a vast horizon that I can’t make sense of how they fit together or if they do. I can’t see the edges of the canvas yet. And that’s scary.

Lefty tries to be gentle and patient, but I feel his constant, persistent push. He’s made promises. It’s not helping that he’s gotten cozier with Trevor Gaines. I know Lefty despises him and that this is just a chess maneuver, but I also think he can’t help but be a little bit seduced by the guy. This tech bro elder whose ideas brought massive changes to the world, many good and many disastrous.

As for the panels, I’m not sure if he really has them. Maybe some survived. On 9/11, the spectacular pain and terror I felt watching those poor people leap to their deaths completely annihilated any intuition I usually have about my work and where it is in the world. Those twelve panels I poured my soul into died that day, even if some survived. I’ve tried to close my eyes and invite Ona to reach out, to look for them. I get flickers and flashes that make no sense. It’s like looking through a shattered window. The images are a kaleidoscope of geometry and color, shards of feeling but no picture. I know anything close to tangible is manufactured, corrupted by my imagination, tainted by what Greta has told us about seeing them in that bunker on a private island. I don’t tell Lefty any of this. It’s never been useful for me to talk about what happens in my head to anyone.

More and more, I want to go back home. I never thought I would miss home, but I do. I miss the mountains. This high desert landscape is still beautiful, but the wide-open sky feels like it will swallow me these days. I miss the humidity and the lush green of trees that make you feel embraced and protected. Lefty has promised he will look for a little place for us back in Black Mountain, a place where I can work. But I know our finances aren’t what they used to be. And I know he feels an immense amount of guilt about that. We don’t talk about his art project in the backyard. As I stare at it from our bedroom window, there are weeds peeking out between the seams, and almost half the acre of concrete is covered in sand. The landscape is reclaiming it, and I kind of like that.

Marabelle is thriving in NYC, and I’m happy for that, but honestly a little jealous. I never got to experience that extended adolescence. She can’t get enough school, it seems. So different from me. She’s always been a very serious person, no-nonsense. She tries to hide the fact that she’s having a little fun, and it’s cute. Sometimes I’ll catch her on a Saturday, and I can hear friends laughing in the background. It takes a few words for her to mask the smile I can hear in her voice.

July 21, 2022

A week ago I pulled a leaf blower out of the shed and worked all morning trying to clear the surface of Lefty’s acre. He heard me and came out to help. I think he was touched to see my sudden interest in it. I wasn’t doing it for him, but I’m happy anytime by accident I do something to please him. We left the weeds. The concrete has weathered in a beautiful way, blending in with the landscape and yet still kind of alien. The texture looks like the scales of some massive creature surfacing from beneath the scrubby earth around it.

I’ve been coming out at sunrise while it’s still cool to walk its dimensions or just to sit in different places and watch how the light transforms everything it touches. I’m having trouble restricting my work to the smallness of a canvas. No matter how big the canvas, it feels confining and one-dimensional. I’m reaching for something deeper and more universal, more connected.

I can’t read for shit, but I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts by scientists, philosophers, and people that might just be kooks who push the conventional bounds of what we accept as reality. I’m searching for something. Itching to understand something I’ve always known but never been able to articulate. It’s about the idea of a mind. Not a brain or anything obviously physical that we can touch, examine, or dissect, but a universal mind. A wisdom that is the wireframe beneath everything. We only see glimpses of it when it peeks through our reality, our rational plane. Smarter people than me—doctors, biologists, chemists, and physicists call these anomalies “emerging properties.” But I think it’s a lazy explanation, like cartographers once writing: “beyond here lie monsters” at the edge of a map. The point is, there’s far more we don’t see than what we do see in this world. It’s dizzying, and I get why we humans want to just tape off little boundaries to feel safe and keep our heads from exploding. But I don’t. I want to blow the top off of it.

I don’t know what any of this “research” means for the project I’m supposed to be doing, but I know I can’t just draw a picture and capture what I want to capture anymore. There’s also this feeling of urgency too, which makes it doubly frustrating because I can’t seem to start anything right now.

September 8, 2022

I’ve agreed to meet Trevor, maybe against my better judgment, especially now that I’ve started working on what is basically a commission for him. It’s not a big deal, at least for him because he’s got no idea I’m the artist. It’s just a private dinner he’s hosting with a few “close friends.” I told Lefty it’s a stupid idea for a few reasons. If I really end up fucking hating him, there’s no way I’ll be able to make anything. Also, I’m shit at social things even when there are no big stakes involved, and the stakes are pretty high for this. I’ll have to pretend to be the little wifey who paints roosters on salvaged doors and rusty watering cans. What could possibly go wrong?!

But the reason I agreed is because I’m curious. What interests me about Trevor is the scale of his life. Not the scale of his finances, that’s Lefty’s thing, but the scale of his technology—the reach of it. I don’t really understand the most fundamental things about the software his companies have created, but I do understand the impact. I understand that he’s been in the business of making the impossible possible—the unseen seen. In that way, I think we’re kindred spirits.

I’ve been going down a wormhole lately on AI. There’s been some breakthrough that they’re still trying to understand—another “emergent property” that got me interested. Anytime weird things happen that the smartest people in the world can’t explain, I perk up. Apparently they’d all but given up on the original theory of how AI would work because no matter how many modifications they made to their approach, it just hit this invisible ceiling. Then some guys just said, fuck it, make it bigger and throw more processors at it and see what happens. When they did that, just increased the scale, everything changed. I want to know more about that, what that pushing beyond the point of reasonable does—see what emerges. I think that’s where the magic is, out beyond the boundaries of the rules we’ve arbitrarily created to impose order.

Anyway, the thing I’m working on is hard to describe. It will be kind of an installation when it’s done, but I can’t imagine a space that will be able to hold it. It’s not going to be a series of objects that can be framed or mounted and put on display in a gallery. I’ve not broken this to Lefty yet. I think it’s my unpredictable shit that keeps him young. But he would argue otherwise.

I know I’m getting close to something because I have that uncomfortable feeling I get when the work is going to begin. What makes this so different is I’m not drawn to go to the easel. It feels bigger. I also think it will involve technology somehow. I’ve resisted this for a few months because I really don’t want to have to use a fucking computer. I’ve always been confounded by them, but I’ve become more and more curious as I study these makers who are pushing boundaries in code. They’re summoning something from nothing just like me. Just like me, they don’t really understand the thing that’s emerging, how it works or where it will lead.

September 11, 2022

I woke up in the middle of the night. I’ve not done that for a while. I’ve been more grounded lately. Lefty and I sleep together, and his nearness is a comfort even if he does snore. So when I woke up with my heart racing, it was unfamiliar. I looked over at my phone and saw the date and understood my dreams. A sky choked with smoke and ash, everywhere the rumbling roar of destruction—twisting metal, crushing concrete. It’s a dream I lived inside for a time—hearing all those screaming voices—but it’s been a while. I can’t go back to sleep. I’ve made some tea and I’m going to sit here on the couch in the living room to wait for the sun to rise so I can go outside and work. Try to exorcise this.

Every part of me hurts. Two days ago as I was walking the acre, I began to see what the work would be, or at least the first part of it. I got down on my hands and knees and started tracing my fingers across the bumpy pattern on the concrete. I felt something vibrating just below the surface. It’s very cold in the early morning now, but I felt a warmth radiating up through it. I’ve felt this tingling sensation before, and usually I grab a pen or a brush. But these tools won’t do the job.

I’ve made countless trips to the hardware store. My canvas is much bigger and much harder to work with. I’ve sometimes wished I was a man at different points in my life—had the big body and strong hands to command more from the work. I especially do now, but I’m making it work. Eventually, I’ll need to employ help, though. I need an apprentice or apprentices. Lefty’s not going to be a fan of that idea.

What I want to do may be beyond my physical ability, but I have to try. I see it unfolding out there on that big beautiful slab of a canvas my love created for me. He really is a wonder to me. I think of how unlikely we are, we’ve always been, and it feels less like a random act of chance that brought us together. I’m beginning to accept what I’ve always felt—there’s something that connects us, something vast, almost infinite that we can’t see or touch or even feel most of the time, but it’s there moving us toward each other. Not just me and Lefty, but all of us. Mostly it feels hopeless like things are just getting worse—more violence, more starvation, more greed, and destruction. But that’s only when you stand and observe from the middle distance. When you zoom in, put your face to the ground and observe a line of ants moving as one mind or watch a tiny drop of dew slip from the petal into the bell of a desert flower, you see the order. When you zoom out to ten thousand feet above it all, you don’t see walls and boundaries, property—you see one single, connected organism.

I want to show that. I don’t know how, but I want to show that. I must. I can’t explain the urgency, but I know I don’t have time like I did when I was a girl. I’ve been so afraid of losing my ability to do what I once did. The truth is, I have. My hands cramp horribly and I shake. Maybe this bigger canvas is just an aging woman trying to compensate for the fact that she can’t draw a straight line anymore. But Ona does what she’s always done. She shows me a new way to see things. She’s like a river. There’s no more perfect way to describe what she is. She’s always moving, transforming herself and everything she touches. Sometimes she slows to a trickle or disappears underground. Sometimes she’s roaring in flood, knocking down trees. Why is it I always fight her flow? I resist, and she goes underground for a while and then one day, without knowing, I’m floating on her back and we’re moving and I wonder what I was afraid of.

The sun’s up now. It’s so gorgeous. I’m going to bundle up and go outside to work. To work!

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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.

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…

In a 2036 interview, Lefty named his real addiction as greatness and admitted he first saw Kelly as an opportunity rather than a love. He described the alliance with Greta and the plan to force Gaines to surrender the panels, the long game of staying beyond his reach. Kelly refused the pitch, so Lefty went home alone to a project he couldn't yet explain.

“So what are we building today, Mr. Lefty?”

Enrique had brought along a couple of workers as requested. They hung back at the truck, blowing warmth into their hands, their faces obscured by hoodies. The sun was just breaking the horizon line.

“Something grand, my friend. Come on.”

Enrique followed Lefty around to the back of the house and out beyond the landscaped area. What he saw was a massive square cut and leveled into the desert landscape. The border of the square was defined by staked boards, and the area was already filled with gravel.

“The first trucks with concrete will be arriving on Thursday morning, so that gives us five days to stake out the first section,” Lefty said, gesturing to the area right in front of them.

Enrique had only seen something like this at a commercial job site. The scale implied a complex of tennis courts. It had to be at least an acre of land. Lefty pulled out a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket. It had a sketch on it and a lot of calculations scribbled in the margins.

“What is it?” Enrique asked.

“It’s a symbol. A statement… it’s for my wife.”

Enrique was not a man to ask too many questions. He knew these people were crazy, but they were also generous and had been very good to his family.

“Okay, boss,” he said, taking the piece of paper. “We’re going to need a lot more wood to make the forms and also some wire mesh… a lot of it. Not going to be cheap.”

Lefty handed him a credit card.

“We’re also going to need more guys.”

“I’m going to help. Let’s see what we can do, just the four of us.”

I can’t imagine Enrique was thrilled about my father helping, but he would never have said as much. He did what was requested of him and they worked every day until dark, framing a grid within the square acre, a form to hold the tons of concrete that a parade of trucks, fifty-four to be exact, would deliver in the weeks that followed.

It was slow going at first. Lefty was more of a liability, his mistakes causing Enrique extra work, but eventually he learned how to use a level properly and to ask for help or to just get out of the way. He was not a man in his prime. Though his left arm had healed, it was not what it used to be. His back and shoulders were as stiff as the acre of concrete drying atop the cold Santa Fe dirt when he got up in the dark every morning. But he was driven to see this project through before my mother returned from her walkabout. The fact that he had no idea when she would return created a manic sense of urgency.

Lefty was incapable of doing anything small and this little landscaping project hemorrhaged more money he didn’t have. I learned much later that he had found a website where he was able to auction off a handful of early sketches Kelly had done in preparation for a project she had abandoned in 2003. He also sold the rights to use one of her most iconic pieces to a company that screenprinted art on everything from T-shirts to lunchboxes. The few times I talked with him during these months, he never told me what he was doing, only that he was working on some improvements around the house for my mother. I had come to pity him and I knew he hated that. He sounded so small and lonely and far away when he would call.

I imagine him sitting alone in the house at night, his face and arms sunburned, his hands blistered and scarred from the day’s work. He wanted to drink, I’m sure. He wanted companionship but he wouldn’t be with Greta in that way again and he wouldn’t allow himself to take another lover. He was coming out of his dark night of the soul, or trying to. This shrine, or whatever it was he was building for my mother, was a contradiction, like most things he had ever done. It was a self-flagellating act of atonement as much as it was just another stunt to try to show that he mattered, that he was capable of greatness. My father could have benefited from a meditation practice, but he couldn’t be still, ever.

This project was as close as he would ever come to meditating. He was obsessed with scale and trying to comprehend, to literally ground the vastness of a number like 500 billion. He wanted to be able to visualize it. He wanted Kelly to be able to see it. To see just how much potential was in a number like that.

In his primitive sketches, he designed a pattern for a form that could be stamped into the grids of the drying concrete. His stamp was a three-foot-square pattern of irregular shapes, each shape roughly three inches in diameter, one hundred of them to a mat. He would have to do this ritual five thousand times to cover the acre behind our house. Each of these shapes represented one million dollars of wealth. His original aspiration had been to show the full 500 billion, but he quickly realized that the size of each shape in his stamp would have needed to be smaller than a grain of sand, and that would have made the whole thing look like a big dumb slab of concrete.

The crew developed a rhythm. The steel dinosaurs would roar up the driveway of our ranch at sunrise, the massive rotating drums of their bellies sloshing with twenty tons of cold slurry. Lefty would direct them to the next open grid where Enrique would aim the swinging steel chute and the concrete, like gray porridge, would slop down into the square. The workers would use shovels to stir it like cake batter, then rakes to evenly distribute it, removing any clumps, and finally a long metal straightedge to smooth the surface to a glassy sheen. When the last of the trucks pulled away mid-morning and the new squares were set to dry in the sun, they would all move to build out the wooden forms for more squares. After a couple of hours, when the newly poured concrete had cured just enough, Lefty would begin the meticulous and anxiety-provoking process of stamping out his patterns with trembling hands. No one else was allowed to do this part. The first few times, he had done it wrong—pushed too hard or not hard enough. Waited too long or not long enough to begin—it was a narrow window. Sometimes it wasn’t until the next day when he inspected his work that he saw a flaw. He would curse and throw his hat and walk off, only to return a few minutes later with the jackhammer. He would then commence breaking up the slab and hauling the shards and rubble out. He insisted on doing this himself too.

Enrique told me that at first he was just going along with my father, didn’t see or understand the point, but after they had completed nearly half of the area, he began to see the effect. It was mesmerizing, the repetition of shapes, the texture of the concrete creating the illusion of something incomprehensibly large and yet contained.

It was some time after that when Kelly returned home without warning. She had been traveling around the country in a van, staying in campgrounds and RV parks mostly. She had been more in her head than usual and had barely remembered giving Lefty permission to be at the house. She certainly hadn’t expected to see a line of pickup trucks and heavy equipment crowding the driveway.

When she walked around the back of the house and saw the nearly completed mothership landing pad, she started laughing. It was a strange response, but she never responded to things in an expected way. When her laugh tipped over into a cackle, it was enough to make the workers turn around.

Lefty hadn’t heard her approach. He was in his zone, stamping out another section at the far end of the grid. He didn’t notice her until her shadow stretched tall across the latest imprint he was on his knees inspecting.

“Are we expecting visitors from another planet?”

Her voice startled him so badly that he lost his balance and fell forward, his hands plunging into the damp concrete.

“Goddamnit.”

He freed each of his hands from the concrete, leaving what looked like a botched attempt at a movie star making their immortal mark on the sidewalk outside the Chinese Theatre. He rocked back onto his butt.

“Hello, Kel. You weren’t supposed to get back until it was finished.”

“Do you mind telling me exactly what it is? I mean, what the fuck, Lefty? You’re not allowed to be the crazy one.”

“I know, I know.”

He stood and rubbed the concrete residue from his hands onto his pants.

“I have a lot to explain. Please give me a chance,” he said, looking for something to do with his hands. He wanted to embrace her but didn’t. “It’s good to see you. You look good.”

To her, he looked weather-beaten, but strong, and the sparkle had returned to his eyes. She had missed it but she wasn’t ready to admit it.

“Just pretend it’s not here for now,” he continued, wanting to fill the space between them. “Give me a week until it’s finished and then I can explain.”

My mother crouched down, cocked her head, and squinted her eyes as she surveyed the massive pad of concrete that sprawled out behind them. She reached out and traced her fingers over the contours of the rounded pebble impressions, uniform in size but not shape. She knew it wasn’t a tennis court. As crude as it was, she recognized the attempt at an artistic statement, but had no idea what it meant, especially coming from Lefty. She stood and walked slowly toward the middle. He watched her. Every step she took ratcheted his level of anxiety up a notch. It was the dumbest idea he’d ever had, not to mention the expense and waste. What had he been thinking? He felt completely vulnerable, naked. It never occurred to him that this feeling was what Kelly had most of the time. When she called back to him, he didn’t hear her until she turned and gestured for him to come to her.

“What do these mean?” she asked, toeing the pebble shapes that dimpled the immediate horizon in all directions. “I can see you put some thought into this. You’re trying to say something.”

“It’s stupid. You’ll laugh.”

“I already laughed. Now I want to understand. What is this? What are you doing?”

“I miss you terribly, Kel. Without you, I’m out of whack, spinning in a circle. I don’t know why I had the urge to do this big stupid thing, but I haven’t had you in my life, and I missed the way your art makes me feel—the dangerous leaps you take with it.”

“You could have bought some clay or a paint-by-numbers set.”

“You know me. Go big or go home.”

“You are home.”

My father began to cry. The tears tracked down his dirty, sunburned cheeks and his shoulders quaked. My mother stepped to him and put her palm to his face. She pulled him to her and he wept into her shoulder. The late-afternoon sunlight gilded the textured plane of my father’s creation, making it look like the scales of an enormous dragon or a rain shower on the surface of a golden pool.

“I’m not sure what this is,” she said. “But I love it.”

He didn’t know if she was talking about his project or the state of their union and he didn’t want to ask. It was enough just to hear her say the words. When his emotion subsided, she pulled back from him but held onto his hands.

“So, what am I seeing? What did you want me to see? I know what I feel, but I want to know what it means.”

My father pulled her down to a sitting position, and he pointed to one of the pebble shapes.

“It’s about potential and scale and possibility. I wanted to see what 500 billion of something looked like.”

She looked around again, confused. “There’s no way there’s that many here, right?”

“No, I had to scale back my vision. There will be 500,000, though. If each one of these pebbles represents one million, you would be looking at 500 billion.”

She nodded. “So why that number? It seems arbitrary.”

“According to the Internet, it’s what Trevor Gaines is worth.”

“Jesus. So I’m standing on eight million dollars right here?”

“Yeah. Imagine what this much money could do in the world. Imagine what half of it could do.”

“And you want me to make my next series for this man.”

“No, I want you to make your next series whatever it’s supposed to be and I want him to buy it and I want him to be changed forever by it.”

“You’ve thought a lot about this, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, I’ve not thought about much else.”

“Why?”

“I’ve had lots of time on my hands. Also, he took something that didn’t belong to him. Bodies were trapped down there… people that might have been saved while he was pulling your panels from the wreckage. And he did it for what, so he could hide them away for himself on a private island?”

That afternoon, my parents came back together. It was a quiet renewal of their vows, their undying love for each other, but it was also the resurrection of Daedalia. Neither of them knew they were bringing her back for what would be her last great series.

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Previously…

Greta flew to New York on Lefty's call and found him unconscious in the studio, then nursed him through a fever in a hotel room. When he demanded her price for the secret, she said money wasn't it — she wanted Daedalia resurrected, and she wanted to know how Kelly did it. By evening they had struck a bargain neither admitted was a negotiation.

The following transcript is an interview with Lefty Moody recorded on July 5, 2036.

MM: I get why you kept everything from me back then, but why did you keep it from Mom?

LM: I was ashamed. It’s no mystery. I let my own ego drive us into the ditch. You know how much money I lost, right?

MM: Yeah, but you had a problem, Dad. And you were alone with that. Did you ever ask for help?

LM: Your mother helped me.

MM: I don’t remember it that way. I remember her screaming at you and calling you horrible names. I think she would’ve hit you if your arm hadn’t been in that cast.

LM: She was angry, and she had a right to be. I betrayed her trust in so many ways. She counted on me, and I let her down.

MM: But you didn’t do those things on purpose, did you? They were symptoms of something deeper.

LM: Do we really need to psychoanalyze me? I’m not that interesting.

MM: You know I want this book to be good, right? I want it to be real. Can you please open up just a little? Give me something to work with.

LM: Okay. You want me to talk about my addiction? It’s not gambling or alcohol. My addiction is greatness. I don’t know why it matters. I used to blame my dad, but I don’t think it’s his fault. I think it was baked into me, some kind of Viking gene—this need to conquer. I wanted to produce something legendary that would leave my mark, that would inspire people for generations. It’s okay, you can laugh. It’s pretty fucking absurd. Are you done? I hope you don’t laugh at everyone you interview.

MM: No, just the ridiculous ones. Sorry, please go on.

LM: I grew up with this thing—I thought I was special. Things came easy for me, so it just confirmed my theory. I always had a girlfriend, never made a C in school unless I really just didn’t care. And I could throw a baseball pretty damn good. Sure, I practiced and my dad pushed me, but no more than I could handle. I knew I was the coach’s son and he had to set an example. For years, the equation worked. Potential plus opportunity plus practice equals success equals greatness.

MM: Until it didn’t.

LM: Yeah. I didn’t expect to hit a wall at twenty-five years old. I remember waking up in a shitty motel room the day after I was sent back down. I remember feeling so fucking sorry for myself and also, I remember that voice—that hard voice all of us have that said: what did you expect, you fuckin’ idiot? You put all your hopes and dreams into an arm that’s supposed to throw a ball at seventy-five miles an hour about a hundred times a day into a box that’s seventeen inches wide by twenty-four inches high for the rest of your life and hope you get it past the guy standing there with a stick more times than you don’t. It’s ridiculous. But I did it for more years than most anyone could and it still wasn’t enough.

MM: So you felt like a failure.

LM: I felt like a fool, like the overconfident guy in all those comedies that doesn’t get what a stupid asshole he is. I had invested my youth in something that didn’t matter. Even if I’d been the greatest pitcher in the world, what did it matter? I had this genetic predisposition to aspire to greatness, and I’d bet on the wrong fucking thing. What? You’re making that face.

MM: It’s just funny to hear you talk about greatness like it’s something you can hold in your hand. Like it’s a currency that can be exchanged.

LM: I think it kind of is.

MM: So, when you met Mom, you thought you’d found a winning bet.

LM: Yeah, I did. Anyone could have seen what she had. I just saw it first.

MM: Did you love her? I mean when you first met her.

LM: No. I saw an opportunity. I saw something I could use like I used my arm.

MM: That’s harsh, Dad. I don’t think that’s how you are.

LM: Maybe, maybe not, but I’m trying to be honest here. You know what’ll be on my tombstone one day? He did all the right things for all the wrong reasons.

MM: What would have been the right reasons?

LM: I don’t know, but I made it all about me and all the while I was pretending it was about her and her art.

MM: Is that why she left you after I went away to school, because she figured that out?

LM: I don’t know, maybe. Did you get a chance to ask her?

MM: We talked about it. I think she knew you a lot better than you think she did, and she loved you anyway. She told me she just needed time to figure out who she was, independent of you. And then you completely bottomed out. I think that shocked her, seeing you fall like that. She… we just thought you were invincible.

LM: I think I used to believe I was. I don’t anymore. After that week, then seeing the horrified look on your face when you and your mom came to see me.

MM: I remember I was cruel to you. I’m sorry.

LM: You could never be cruel, sweetheart. You had a right to be disgusted. I was pathetic. I wanted to crawl under a rock.

MM: You kind of did, didn’t you?

LM: That’s not a very generous description of Greta, but I did go into hiding for a while.

MM: It’s so strange. She hardly seems like the caretaker type.

LM: No, she’s not. But we were alike in many ways, and we saw eye-to-eye on one very important thing.

MM: Mom’s work.

LM: Yes, that was a big part of our connection.

MM: And you had your mission…

LM: Yeah, we did. It made us both equally sick to have those panels sitting in a climate-controlled basement on a private island when their whole purpose was to live in the open air, where everyone could see them any time of day or night.

MM: You kept that plan to yourself, didn’t you?

LM: Yeah, I did. You don’t tell someone you love and let down your plans for redemption. What if it fails?

MM: I guess not. And it took you a long time. I really missed you during that time, and Mom was a lot.

LM: You missed me? You never let on. If I had the skills of an interrogator at Guantánamo, I don’t think I would’ve been able to get more out of you on those phone calls.

MM: Fair. So tell me about the mission.

LM: We had some power and influence, Greta especially, but only in the art world. Not the kind of money and power Trevor Gaines possessed at the time. He basically owned the fucking internet. $500 billion in net worth. There was no way we were going to buy the panels back from him, so we had to find some way to force his hand and make him give them up.

But this was impossible too because he was a shameless man. You have to have some notion of honor to care about protecting it. We weren’t going to unearth some sordid affair or corruption that most of the world wasn’t already aware of and didn’t seem to care about.

MM: Greta must have been friendly with him, right? I mean he had invited her to see them. He didn’t do that for anyone. Had she told him she knew the identity of Daedalia?

LM: No. Greta is a masterful tease. She didn’t just give up her leverage out of the gate. Plus, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure yet. I mean she was, but she hadn’t confronted me yet so she couldn’t take it to the bank. She strung him along, didn’t give him anything. After that weekend when she saw the panels, he wanted to know what she thought, wanted his return on investment. She said they were great, but not Daedalia’s best work and, besides, she said she wasn’t convinced they weren’t forgeries.

MM: But she believed they were the real thing.

LM: Yes, she did.

MM: When did you meet Gaines?

LM: It was a long time, maybe a year after that. He asked Greta plenty of times for an introduction. He had his people reach out to me directly, but I ignored their calls. We were playing the long game. There’s nothing more arousing to someone who can have everything than something that’s beyond their reach. I stayed beyond his reach.

MM: What was the long game for you, I mean besides winning Mom back?

LM: That was really it. But your mom’s complicated. It wasn’t going to be two dozen roses or a European vacation or even a six-figure commission that would bring her back to me. She wanted something I couldn’t really give her. Something she couldn’t even articulate. But that was always the case. She operated on a different plane with different stakes. I always wanted to make my mark, but your mother, she wanted to change the world. She’d never have admitted as much, but that’s exactly what drove her.

My role in her life had always been to focus all that energy into something, but she wouldn’t allow me back in her life to do that, so I had to find a way to give her what she needed from a distance.

MM: I’ve heard her version of your pitch to her, but I’d like to hear you tell it.

LM: What if you could make the wealthiest man in the world give everything away? That was it. That was the pitch. I had no idea if such a thing was possible, and it really didn’t matter.

MM: And what did she say?

LM: She said she didn’t care. She said she was done with all of it. She wanted to reinvent herself and wanted nothing to do with our enterprise anymore.

MM: You think she was still punishing you?

LM: One hundred percent, but there was something else. Maybe somehow she knew her time was running out. She didn’t want to repeat herself. I think she was tired of all of it. I don’t pretend to understand artists, but I did know your mother, so I knew nothing would happen until something moved her. I couldn’t manufacture that for her. I could only help her channel it if it came.

MM: But you didn’t just sit idle. You were on your own kind of manic quest. I remember. Mom allowed you to go back and live at the house while she was away and you started your little landscaping project.

LM: Yeah, I went a little around the bend. I had nowhere else to go, and I was trying to stay sober. Trying to find some meaning again. This project, this mission, as you call it, was all I had, and it wouldn’t work without her, so I got a crazy idea about how I might get her to come around.

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Previously…

Daedalia’s slow fade from popularity, eight years of bad bets and financial free fall, and Kelly’s separation request the week Marabelle left for college ended with Lefty putting his pitching hand through a SoHo gallery window. Discharged from the ER with nowhere to go, he holed up alone in Kelly’s old Village studio for five days, before disappearing and leaving behind his coat, wallet, and phone.

Greta was enjoying an espresso and an empanada at a small café in South Beach when her phone buzzed, and she saw Lefty’s name on the caller ID. She dusted some crumbs from her smiling lips and let the phone ring three times before picking it up.

“I thought you might call,” she said.

“What do you want?”

He was unrecognizable, and for a second she wondered if someone had stolen his phone. The voice she heard was a raspy, thin, defeated thing.

“Lefty, is that you? Are you okay?”

Before lunch, she was on a plane bound for JFK.

After she landed and was in the back of a black car crossing the Triborough Bridge into the city, she tried to call him repeatedly, but it went directly to voicemail. She had the address of the building in the Village, but nothing more. The driver let her out and she stood in the cold by the door of the building for half an hour trying to call him until finally someone exiting deemed her an unlikely thief and allowed her inside. She knocked on five doors before she was able to piece together enough information to deduce which door Lefty was behind. She knocked for a full minute with increasing urgency before she finally tried the doorknob. It was unlocked and she pushed inside.

Greta has described the state she found my father in, though it took three interviews to get an accurate picture. I think she had been trying to spare me her trademark directness, but eventually, I got the full story. He was sprawled on the floor, unconscious. The place was freezing and dark because she had been unable to find the lights. Her foot slipped in a pool of his vomit when she crossed the room to get to him. She feared he was dead and had been afraid to touch him until he coughed and shook her from her daze. She immediately tried to call an ambulance, but as she was talking with the dispatcher, Lefty stirred and pleaded with her to hang up the phone. He didn’t want to go back to the hospital.

She was able to help him to the couch where she made him drink two glasses of water. She offered several times to call me or my mother, but he refused and she understood. Eventually, Greta got him into a taxi. She checked them into a boutique hotel nearby. He was filthy and shivering, so she drew a hot bath and stripped him of the clothes he had been wearing for almost a week. She had to tear the shirt sleeve off the arm with the cast. It’s a testament to how much Greta must have loved my father that she demonstrated such uncharacteristic tenderness. He ran a high fever for the next twenty-four hours. She applied cold compresses, dosed him with Tylenol, and let him sleep. He wouldn’t meet her eyes and barely spoke. When the fever broke, she fed him chicken noodle soup from the deli recommended by the desk clerk. Still they didn’t really speak about any of it. Her plans, whatever they had been, were trumped by Lefty’s pathetic state.

When he slept, she raided the minibar, propped herself up next to him, and surrounded herself with the most expensive empty calories she had ever consumed, washing them down with little, frosted bottles of Grey Goose. The alcohol dulled the sharp point of her need, which had remained nameless her whole life until she met Lefty. Before Greta knew my mother was Daedalia, I don’t think she saw her as anything more or less than a minor antagonist standing between her and what she wanted, but after, my mother became the main character occupying all her waking thoughts and often her dreams.

She didn’t remember falling asleep, but when she woke up the next morning, Lefty was sitting in the chair by the window.

“I ordered some coffee. It’s on the cart.”

“You’re feeling better,” she said.

“Well, I’m not dead, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Greta, what is it you want?”

She had no idea how to answer this question, but that was nothing new. What was new was that she was deeply invested in these two people—my parents.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better, darling. Will you please tell me what’s going on with you?”

“I asked you a question. What do you want to keep our secret? How much?”

“Oh, Lefty, you really think this is about money? You couldn’t name a price high enough.”

“Then what? I’ve got nothing left to give here if that wasn’t obvious already. I’ve lost everything I care about. Kelly left me, my daughter won’t talk to me, no one’s interested in Daedalia anymore—I’m fucking broke.”

All of this was a revelation for Greta, and it took her time to absorb the information and would take even longer for her to understand how she felt about it. The thing she had found irresistible about Lefty was his unshakeable confidence and ease. He was not this pathetic creature with thinning hair and bags under his eyes sitting across from her.

“You kept this from me all these years. How could you do that? How could you take everything I’ve given you over the years? How could you be in my bed so many times and never tell me something so important?”

It was now Lefty who could find no easy way to respond. He had used Greta, and she had made it an easy transaction because she was an operator too, a person who knew how to make things happen in the world.

“What if I had told you? What would you have done with that information? Would you trust you? I don’t think so.”

There it was, the saber behind the cloak.

“Fuck you, Lefty.”

“You’re mad because you know I’m right. So now, I’m asking you again. What do you want? Kelly’s not like me and you and whatever it is you’re thinking, whatever scheme you’re hatching, I promise you, it will only hurt her.”

“Maybe you don’t know her like you think you do. Have you ever thought maybe you don’t know what’s best for her?”

“You don’t even know her. You never even gave her a thought until you realized she was Daedalia and now what, you think you’re an expert in what’s good for my wife?”

“But she’s not your wife anymore, is she?”

The blood drained from Lefty’s face. He fell back into the chair and cried out when his broken wrist bumped into the arm. Greta got out of the bed and crossed the room, where she knelt on the floor in front of him. She took his right hand in hers and he began to cry, silently at first, and then big heaving sobs. He cried for everything he’d done, all the things he’d not done, and everything he’d lost.

“I’m sorry, darling. I’m sorry,” she said over and over.

Lefty and Greta were two chess masters who found themselves in an endgame that couldn’t be ended. Neither player had enough pieces left to maneuver. She tried to console him. Eventually he stopped crying. She rose and went to the bathroom to wash her face. She returned with fresh cups of coffee for them and sat in the chair opposite him. She looked out the window and watched the cars crawling down Seventh Avenue, leaving tracks in the fresh blanket of early morning snow.

“I’ve seen them, you know,” she said.

“Seen what?”

“The 9/11 Panels. All twelve of them. I found them.”

My father had never talked about the panels after the towers fell. Anytime someone would ask him to respond to the rumors that the pieces had somehow survived, he refused to entertain the question. There was a limit to what he would exploit to advance Daedalia’s career.

“They’re forgeries,” he said. “And if they’re not, that man is even more despicable than I thought. While people were risking their lives, climbing into the wreckage to rescue trapped human beings, he was looting.”

“Yeah, he’s not gonna win a Nobel Prize. And, they’re not forgeries, by the way. You think I’m an amateur? I spent two days with them, Lefty. They’re… exquisite and fucking heartbreaking—even more so now. How does she do it? How is it possible? That’s what I want. I want to know how. I want to be in on the magic trick. I’ve spent my life thinking about art and artists, and Kelly, she’s not like any artist I’ve ever seen, living or dead. Those pieces, they’re living, breathing, changing. I felt myself disappear into them. I read what people claimed they saw, but I didn’t really believe it at the time. Lefty, I could swear they’re different than the photographs—but how could they be? How can they possibly change?”

“They changed because you changed. Because the world changed. There’s no magic trick. There’s just Kelly and her beautiful, complicated brain. Whatever you’re thinking you’ll find, it’s not there. When I first witnessed what you’re talking about and asked her how it was possible, you know what she said? I don’t see what you see. I only see what I see when I make something. You bring the rest.“

A silence fell between them. They sipped their coffee. A television switched on next door and murmured through the wall. After a time, Greta set her coffee down and looked over at Lefty.

“What happened to the two of you?”

“She finally saw me, I think. It took her long enough, but she finally did.”

“I don’t think that’s true. People grow apart. It happens.”

“Maybe, but God, I miss her.”

“She and Marabelle are probably worried sick about you. When’s the last time you spoke to them?”

“I don’t know, a couple of weeks.”

“Where’s your phone? You should call them.”

“No idea where it is. It’s just as well. What would I even say? Sorry, I lost everything. You’re on your own now.”

Greta had little patience for this pathetic version of him. I imagine her scowling, even as her mind bent to the calculus of saving him. She was still thinking when he spoke again.

“So, I’m going to ask you again. What is it you want? What are we doing here?”

“What I want is for you to be yourself again. Also what I want is for Daedalia to come back. I don’t want to see her work dismissed by history like it was just some fad and not a true work of genius.”

“Why do you really care? You want to be cut in? You want credit for saving her? You want to unmask her to the world?”

“You know, you’re really an asshole.”

“What? You’re the one who’s been blowing up my phone for months, holding this secret over me. Why?”

She couldn’t bring herself to speak the words. She couldn’t admit she was in love with him, that all those texts had been her twisted love language, a way to get his attention and, if nothing else, make him hurt like she hurt.

“Aren’t you even a little bit curious about the panels? It was no fucking picnic to find them. I’ve spent years.”

“Did you take pictures?” he asked.

“No, I wasn’t allowed to have my phone the entire time I was there, but I’m telling you, they’re real.”

“How? How could they have survived? How could twelve six-by-six panels weighing a hundred and fifty pounds each just walk out of that?”

“I don’t know exactly. I know Gaines was obsessed for more than a decade with recovering all of them. You know he had a brother who was in one of the towers.”

“That’s horrible. Why keep the panels a secret? He doesn’t seem like a subtle man. Wouldn’t he enjoy even more attention?”

“It’s a good question, but I think he’s a little afraid. He believes the pieces have some personal hold over him. Gaines has bought into all kinds of woo-woo horseshit over the years. But also, I don’t think he would love the world to know how the first few were recovered from the site.”

They talked the rest of the day. I don’t know exactly what was discussed. I don’t know the extent of the deal they made, and I’m not even sure they understood they were negotiating. I think that’s how it probably is for people who negotiate as automatically as breathing. What I do know is that things began to change after that day.

It wasn’t until early evening that my phone began buzzing in my pocket. My mother and I were sitting on the bed of my dorm room, and she was close to going to the police.

“Hello?”

“Hi, sweetie, it’s Dad.”

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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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My new novel Harmony House is out in the world now and you can grab a copy anywhere you buy books. Order it from your local bookstore or grab it direct from my publisher, Tiny Worlds! If you’ve read it and enjoyed, please leave a review at Goodreads.

Previously…

Greta was ferried alone to Gaines's private island, stripped of her devices, and left overnight before being allowed into the hidden gallery beneath his house. There she found the twelve panels, damaged but restored, and understood she was one of only a handful of people alive who had seen them. Her recognition of Daedalia's hand in the Santa Fe community show gave her leverage over Lefty, who had stopped taking her calls.

“Mr. Moody, you’re lucky there’s no serious nerve damage. You could’ve lost the use of your left hand.”

The ER doctor looked fifteen to Lefty, but he had the scolding, judgmental bedside manner of a seventy-year-old who had seen it all.

“Is there someone we can call to take you home?”

Lefty blinked through the fog of the pain medication and stared down at the cast that wrapped his wrist and hand and extended up over his elbow.

“I can’t stay here until morning?”

“No, sir, I’m sorry, but we don’t have any available beds. One of the nurses can bring your phone and call someone for you.”

“What if there’s no one I can call?”

“Well, they can help you order a car to take you wherever you need to go.”

The doctor bounced on the balls of his feet and checked his watch.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s fine, I’ll figure it out,” Lefty said.

The doctor disappeared behind the glorified shower curtain that served as a wall between Lefty and the disembodied female voice that was moaning and retching. He lay back on the crackly paper stretched over the exam table, closed his eyes, and waited. The Hydrocodone did nothing to prevent the throbbing pain from his broken fingers and fractured wrist that occasionally shot tendrils of lightning up through his arm and into his neck. He was still drunk and laughed bitterly at the thought that surfaced—guess my pitching days are officially over.

The same golden arm that had thrown a dozen no-hitters in his career and been the prize of Buncombe County had thrown a punch strong enough to shatter a plate glass window at a gallery in SoHo a few hours earlier. There would be a lawsuit that would be almost as painful as the tiny shards of glass he had pulled out of his wasted hand in the back of a taxi on the way to Beth Israel. Let them come, the smug, tight-assed fucks. He had put their gallery on the map.

A battle-worn nurse showed up with a wheelchair. Twenty minutes later he was in the back of a black car. A few minutes after that, he was standing on the sidewalk in front of the same building he had been at that morning with the real estate agent who was there to appraise the studio space where Kelly had worked on the series of portraits for the unhoused a decade earlier while she was in exile. Shivering in the bitter cold, he needed three tries to enter the door code with his right hand. He rode the medieval elevator that made its rickety, shuddering ascent, taking so long to climb five floors that he dozed off as he slumped against the back wall of the car.

The narrow hallway to the studio smelled like some combination of a musty, old doctor’s office and a pungent green curry. He shuffled to the end and fumbled to put the key in the lock. Once inside, he didn’t bother with the lights. There was enough light coming through the windows to make his way over to the day bed where his wife had slept like a monk for more than a year. He sat down too hard and cried out from the pain that jolted up through his left arm. When it finally subsided, he slipped his shoes off without bending over and lay down on his right side without removing his coat.

He slept like a man tranquilized, like a man who hadn’t slept in a week, like a man who had conquered the world and lost it all. On November 2, 2016, that’s the man he was.

When he woke, it was late morning, and the studio space was filled with pale yellow light. Somewhere on his person, his phone hummed incessantly. The pain in his hand was screaming, a full-throated aria, accompanied by the mashing, dissonant chords pounding at the base of his skull. He sat up and searched his coat pockets for the prescription bottle, a nearly impossible task with only one hand. When he found it in his breast pocket, he spent five minutes trying to open the childproof cap. The cap mercifully relented, and the white tablets scattered across the bed like hail. Dry choking one down, he nearly vomited.

He rose and made his way over to the sink in the kitchenette and turned on the tap. It groaned before sputtering and spitting out intermittent blasts of gray-brown water. When the stream was steady and clear enough, he bent to the faucet and drank like a man who had been in the desert. The phone in his pants pocket continued to pulse, but he ignored it. No one who cared about him would be calling. If he checked his phone, he would only see a list of numbers, no names. Behind each of the numbers would be someone demanding their pound of flesh. He made his way back to the daybed and before he lay back down, he pulled the phone from his pocket and glanced at the recent calls.

He was right. It was a scrolling list of numbers with area codes from places he’d never been and had no connection to with the exception of one. Greta Krieger. There was no voicemail, only an ambiguous text message.

You’ve had three months to consider my offer. If you don’t return my call, you leave me no choice.

He tossed the phone and it clattered across the hardwoods before coming to rest in a square of sunlight.

He would stay in that abandoned studio for almost five days alone before anyone knew he was missing.

No one understood the depth of the hole my father had been digging to bury himself for almost a decade. I don’t think he even realized he was holding the shovel until it was too late. In that cold studio where the astringent smell of turpentine still lingered, he found the bottom.

I was three city blocks and ten thousand miles away in my dorm room at NYU sleeping through my alarm while he was struggling and failing to get his pants off so he could use the bathroom. He was alone in this struggle as he was in all his struggles. Lefty Moody was not a man who needed help. He was the one who offered it. He was the solution, not the problem. He was the closer you brought in when the bases were loaded at the bottom of the ninth. For me, just a month shy of twenty years old, he was annoying text messages I put off responding to and an obligatory phone call on the weekend I had to take for “proof of life” as he put it.

The week he hit bottom, there were no text messages or phone calls. I didn’t even know he was in the city. But I should back up so you can understand how we got to this place in the story.

When an internationally celebrated artist is no longer celebrated and the world has no interest in her work, the person who brought her work to the world is no longer celebrated. Kelly didn’t experience this as a loss. The work was what she needed, and the work was still there. If anything, she came more into her own and created according to her natural rhythms and not to the cadence Lefty had always insisted upon to maintain their ascent. Within a couple of years, he struggled to get meetings with people he used to put off. He wasn’t yet sixty, but he was getting close—too old to hustle like he used to and too restless to retire. For an intense year or so he made me his project, pushing me academically and signing me up for all kinds of extracurricular experiences to broaden me. It was exhausting for both of us, and it took me imploding into a supernova of anxiety at thirteen for him to back off.

I think that’s when he started gambling. He didn’t do it in the traditional way. There were no extravagant benders in Vegas. Lefty had a moral code that would never allow such things. His gambling was more speculative investing. There was a revolving door of guys with start-up ideas that were going to change the world. There was a dalliance with cryptocurrency that took a huge bite, not just out of his net worth, but also his ego. He was becoming an embarrassment to himself. There were a few bad real estate investments and overly generous donations to causes he believed in. My father wanted more than anything to believe in something. Through all this, he never entirely quit his day job, but there was little he could do there. Daedalia had become a dated, overly sentimental figure from a bygone time like grunge anthems—too big, too much for a population that was increasingly focused on a two-by-five-inch screen that fed them a steady drip of snarky memes, cat videos, and thirst traps.

The financial loss over eight years is breathtaking. At the height of Daedalia’s popularity, my parents were worth nearly fifty million dollars. The week Lefty put his fist through a gallery window, there was only a couple million dollars left and most of that was tied up in our family home and the studio in New York City that Lefty had all but forgotten about. To maintain our lifestyle and hide his shame, Lefty had been amassing hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. All of this, he carried and I think he could have continued to carry, but when Kelly announced she wanted a separation the week after I left for college, something elastic and unbreakable in Lefty snapped.

I was enjoying my independence, living my best New York City life when my mother called me. I had to step outside of the noisy restaurant to take the call.

“Mare, have you heard from your dad?”

No hello or how are you doing. Her voice sounded tight and small.

“Hey, Mom, no. Why?”

“A woman who’s looked after our studio space there in the city for years just called me. She thinks your dad’s been staying there.”

“So? What’s wrong with that?”

“Mare, she thinks something might have happened to him. The place was a mess. She found a coat with his wallet in it and he left his phone behind.”

“Wait, what are you saying?”

“I’m worried. I’m going to try to get a flight, but can you go over to the studio to meet the woman? Maybe you can get into his phone. I’ll text you the address.”

An hour later I met Janet, the woman who had kept my mother stocked with art supplies and Doritos when she had encamped herself in the Village years before. She met me on the street and then led me up to the studio space which I’d only been to once before. It was mostly empty except for an old couch, a coffee table splayed with magazines over five years old, and the daybed. The place reeked of body odor and urine. The bedding was filthy, and I felt sick to my stomach. Had my father been living here? There was no food or evidence of food. His black overcoat was draped over the arm of the couch.

“This is how I found things,” Janet said. “Your dad’s wallet is in the coat pocket. I didn’t know he was staying here. I was just coming by to do my weekly check-in and to water the plant over there.”

She gestured to a peace lily by the window with a pair of wilted blooms, their heads bowed as if in mourning. There were a few business cards from a realtor on the kitchen counter. Janet asked me a series of questions about my dad. She was trying to be helpful, but all her questions did was make me realize how little I really knew about his mental state, how little I had been paying attention to him.

I was finding it hard to breathe, so I sat on the couch next to his coat and pulled it to me. It had his smell, which was something between cedar and Big Red gum. It was the smell of safety and comfort to me, and I never realized it until that moment. In the front pocket, I found some crumpled pages, the release forms and prescriptions from his visit to the ER five days prior.

He was hurt. He was alone, and I had no way to get in touch with him.

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My new novel Harmony House is out in the world now and you can grab a copy anywhere you buy books. Order it from your local bookstore or grab it direct from my publisher, Tiny Worlds! If you’ve read it and enjoyed, please leave a review at Goodreads.

I did a short reading and miraculously managed not to choke on all the * spicy * language I had somehow forgotten was in there. My children might have been a little embarrassed. My parents were proud. You can see some pictures from the event below.

The book is out in the world now and you can grab a copy anywhere you buy books. Order it from your local bookstore or grab it direct from my publisher, Tiny Worlds! If you’ve read it and enjoyed, please leave a review at Goodreads.

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’s push to sell the community paintings triggered a brutal fight with Lefty over who owned her work and who got credit for it, which Marabelle overheard through her bedroom door. The show went up anyway at the family’s small gallery, drawing no critics and little money, all of which went to Maria’s family.

The white crescent of beach was barely visible in the small cove. If there hadn’t been a mostly full moon, Greta wouldn’t have been able to see it from the skiff as they made their way over the dark, rolling water.

She had no idea what body of water this was or what island they were approaching. It had been a surreal day, even by her standards.

“You’ll have to stay until Sunday night. I wasn’t kidding about that. I’ve got a boat full of people expecting a fun weekend. We can swing back and pick you up, but Sunday’s the earliest.”

That’s what her insufferable host had said a few minutes earlier as she was stepping off his yacht down into the skiff. She turned back to the open water and saw the lights of the massive vessel like a floating city, retreating. While she had astonishing reserves for suffering the wealthy and petulant to sell them expensive art, she was glad she didn’t have to spend the weekend with the aging tech bro.

As they neared the shore, a figure appeared with a flashlight and waved. A few minutes later, the man piloting the boat maneuvered them to shore, and she was instructed to “jump out” into the surf. At sixty, Greta was in good shape, but jumping from a rocking boat wasn’t on the menu of options. The figure with the flashlight, a man, waded into the water and helped her. With only a few words of introduction, he hefted her bag and helped her to the beach and then just kept walking toward the trees. She hurried to keep up, wringing the water from the hem of her cover-up as she went.

Greta was relieved to see there were some footlights along a path once they were in the trees. She asked him to wait while she put on her sandals, and then they were walking again. Eventually, the path ended at some wooden stairs that led to a boardwalk that led to more stairs, and so on for what felt like an hour. Finally, they came to what she assumed was the tech billionaire’s eco-friendly retreat. It kept a low profile, but the dim, indirect lighting behind the ten-foot panes of glass that fronted the place revealed an expansive lair.

They entered through a side entrance, the man punching in a security code to unlock the door. Greta hadn’t realized how loud the noise of the jungle and distant surf was until the door closed behind them.

“Mr. Gaines said you should make yourself at home,” the man said. “You’re the only guest this weekend, but I will be around if you need anything. I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

Greta had money, and she had spent enough time among the ultra-wealthy to understand the flex of allowing a virtual stranger to stay in one of your homes without you there. She had been maneuvering for the better part of a year to make it into Gaines’s inner circle. Her persistence had paid off, and after pulling the right combination of levers, she had gotten an audience with him. He had been collecting art for a decade and, like most collectors, was motivated by the obsession to possess what others could not. His appetite for impossible acquisitions meant he wasn’t troubled with the provenance of a piece, mostly because in art, unlike his business dealings, he didn’t expect a return on his investment. Greta had heard rumors for years about what might be in his collection, but she wasn’t interested in stolen Renoirs.

When she told him she had been instrumental in launching Daedalia’s career, he had sent the buzzing swarm of assistants and hangers-on who were always hovering around him away. She had his full attention for an hour, and then she was dismissed and hadn’t heard from him for a month. Then she got the call in the middle of the night and an invitation to join him on his private yacht in Miami. She wasn’t told where they were bound, but spent two days at sea among his entourage eating extravagantly, all of which was fine, but eventually she pressed him on wanting to see what she had come for. Soon was all he had said. Why hadn’t he come with her? This was truly a confusing turn. Surely he wasn’t immune to the thrill of showing off a collection the world could never know he possessed.

When they reached the room where she would be staying, the man set her bag inside the door and turned to her.

“I’ll need to take your phone, Ms. Krieger. Also, I’ll need to search your things to make sure you don’t have any other devices.”

She knew it would be pointless to protest. She was completely vulnerable here in the middle of nowhere, and this man was humorless. She handed over her phone and pulled the tablet from her bag. He thanked her but insisted on dumping the contents of the bag on the bed to look through it. He also insisted on checking the earrings and necklace she was wearing and groping around her torso, which she secretly found thrilling.

“Okay, you can do anything you like while you’re here. I’ll return your devices to you on Sunday when you leave. I can prepare most anything you’d like to eat, just ask. Otherwise, the kitchen is fully stocked. You’ll find a pool and spa out front off the deck.”

“Yes, yes. Do you have a name?”

“Sorry, I’m Roberto.”

“Roberto, I don’t really care about all these things. If I’d wanted a weekend getaway, I could have done that anywhere and with better company. Where’s the art?”

“You will get a chance to see it tomorrow. Tonight you should rest.”

That was all. End of discussion. After he left her, she cursed herself for not bringing a book or something to keep her mind busy. She had no idea what time it was, but she wasn’t tired. She pulled on a light sweater and went exploring. The house was gorgeous, modern, minimalist, and beautifully lit. There were some pieces hanging throughout the space, and they were impressive, but none of them was what she was looking for. But then, she hadn’t expected Gaines to just have them out for any of his swimsuit-clad sycophants to stumble upon. She enjoyed the titillating foreplay, but she was old and tired, and she’d been searching for a long time for the prize that was promised to be somewhere very close to her now.

I suspect she was lonely and probably tired of all the cloak-and-dagger. I don’t know. She would never have admitted such a thing to me, but it’s clear she loved my father even though it’s also clear that she was only ever a means to him. They had been a thing for a while– I suspect longer than Lefty ever acknowledged. I’ll never really know the extent of their relationship, but Greta was a ghost, always hovering at the periphery of our lives. In some ways my parents owed everything to her.

Early the next morning, she found Roberto in the kitchen making an espresso. She asked for a couple of hard-boiled eggs and some juice and then asked to see the collection immediately after. She took her breakfast on the upper veranda, a perch just above the canopy of trees that afforded a view of the turquoise water that surrounded this private island in the middle of nowhere. When Roberto returned for the dishes, she demanded he take her to see what she had come for. He nodded dispassionately, left the dishes, and told her to follow him. He led her through the house and stopped before a small painting by an artist she didn’t recognize. He pushed on the wall to the left of the frame, and the wall opened up onto a dark, narrow stairwell.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” she said. “No iris scan? No trap door?”

“Mr. Gaines enjoys his security. There’s a light here.”

Roberto flicked a switch just inside the door and footlights illuminated the stairs. He stepped back and gestured for her to enter.

“You’re not coming?” she asked.

“Whatever you’re going to see is above my paygrade.”

“You’ve never been down here before? Seems like you’re probably alone here a lot.”

“Oh, I’m never alone,” he said, and pointed to a little red light winking in the corner above the stairwell. “I keep my job because I can keep a secret, and I get paid enough not to be curious.”

“You’re not going to lock me up in this dungeon, are you, Roberto?”

“No, ma’am. I’ll leave the door open. Knock yourself out.”

Greta descended the stairs and found herself at the end of a dark corridor, the walls trimmed with a strip of amber light that made her feel like she was queuing for a ride at Tomorrowland. As she made her way down the hallway, the light seemed to brighten slightly. From speakers hidden somewhere in the walls or ceiling, the ambient sounds of a city faded up — foot traffic, car horns, people talking. Gaines had really gone all out, and she couldn’t help but think of Lefty. At the end of the hallway, there were three steps down into what she assumed was the gallery, but it was pitch dark and she felt anxious. Though she couldn’t make out its dimensions, the room felt cavernous and cold. Before she could turn back, there was a subsonic rumble followed by a metallic thunk and a square panel on the back wall of the gallery lit up. She gasped and nearly slipped on the stairs. She took another step, the sound repeated, and another panel next to the first one lit up. How was it possible? She had trouble finding her breath. She took another step, triggering the third panel.

After a decade of searching, she had found them. Rather than rush to take them in, she discovered she couldn’t move. It felt like a desecration, a betrayal. But she had come this far. The parlor trick continued with each step she took to cover the fifty feet between her and the first panel, but she no longer flinched.

She had never made it to see them in the twenty-month run they had. She meant to, but it just hadn’t been a priority. Like millions of other people, she had figured the panels would always be there — a fixture of the city as sure as the Brooklyn Bridge. She had dozens of future visits to the city to see them. Then on a bright morning in September, half a million tons of concrete, steel, and glass and 2,753 souls fell from the sky and buried them deep.

How was it possible they survived?

Standing before Panel #1, she could see the damage. Whoever Gaines had hired to restore the pieces had done an expert job, but had understood the value in not trying to erase history. The thick lucite had preserved the pieces but was considerably scarred and chipped. The top right corner of Panel #1 was charred black, and a trio of deep cracks ran like veins of lightning through the center. None of this mattered. The determined vibrance of the painting shone through. It was achingly beautiful — delicate green shoots of spring in Central Park, the slant of golden light bent and refracted through skyscrapers and illuminated the maze of streets bustling with life. Greta’s chest tightened, and she clutched at her heart — a thing that would have brought her deep shame had she been in a gallery anywhere else in the world.

After a moment, she stepped back and then back again as she looked to the right to take them all in like windows on a passing subway car. Just as thousands of lonely commuters had in the days before the panels were buried, she stepped through the door that opened in the first panel and disappeared. She would wander through the liminal space, suspended in the world Daedalia had created, a journey from birth to death in twelve frames. Greta understood she was one of perhaps twenty people in the whole world who had witnessed the miracle of their resurrection. But more importantly, she was one of three people in the whole world who knew who the artist was.

She had dismissed Lefty’s plain wife after meeting her for the first time when their child was born. Later she had dismissed her as being just plain crazy and irresponsible when she had run off to New York and left her family. But Greta had seen her chance with my father during my mother’s self-imposed exile, and she had taken it. I suspect it was during this time that Greta first started entertaining the idea that my mother was Daedalia. There was simply no other explanation for the hold Kelly had on my father. The hideous barnyard animals painted on rusty watering cans were a good sleight of hand for the rest of the world, but Greta hadn’t bought it.

A few years later, long after she had stopped talking to Lefty, she returned to Santa Fe under the guise of a ski trip with friends. She stepped into our little family gallery with “Desert. Family. Home.” stenciled on the window out front. Peering into each piece, she found the evidence that she was looking for. My mother had stepped a little too far out into the light. None of the sheep grazing through the Santa Fe art scene noticed, but Greta had. Daedalia’s mark was there in every one of those garish, kindergarten-finger-painting canvases just as it was in each of these twelve panels rescued from the 9/11 wreckage.

As Greta sat on the single, austere couch centered in front of the panels, she felt a renewed sense of hope. Lefty hadn’t returned her calls in over two years. That would change.

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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, 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.

The community art project went on for almost three months. Three days a week Kelly would open the shed and invite Maria’s family to make art with her. Sometimes they brought friends. Sometimes adults came along and participated. The pieces they produced began to stack up like cord wood around the walls of the studio and the question on everyone’s mind was: what were we going to do with all of it?

“Why can’t we sell them down at the gallery?” Kelly asked one evening as we were finishing dinner.

Lefty sighed and put his fork down. “You know why,” he said. “The point of the gallery was to be a decoy, a distraction, and we don’t really need that now. All it will do is draw attention back to us. We can’t have that again.”

Kelly had no response to this. How could she? Her guilt over what happened to me was a leash and all Lefty had to do was tug it once to remind her. But I had nothing holding me back.

“Why is it always your way, Daddy? Why does everybody have to do what you say? It’s not fair. We made those paintings with Mom — me and the other kids. What if they want people to see?”

“Mare, this is between me and your mother. You don’t get a say because you don’t fully understand the situation.”

“You’re mean and you just want to keep everything a secret. You just want to keep everything for yourself.”

“You see what you’ve done with your little project?” Lefty said, his eyes focused on Kelly, who was poking her knife into what remained of a pork chop. She didn’t look up, so he continued. “Look, I know this has been fun and it’s been great to have everyone involved. You’ve done a kind thing for these kids, exposing them to art, but…”

“That’s not the only thing I was trying to do. You know there’s nine of them living in Maria’s two-bedroom apartment? Nine.”

“I do. Why do you think I’ve been making up projects for Enrique and Luis to do around here? If you want, we can just buy them a house. Wouldn’t that be better?”

“No, it wouldn’t. You can’t just pay everyone off. It doesn’t work like that. It’s about more than money. It’s about these kids and their parents feeling seen — their story being validated.”

“I don’t think we’re talking about Maria’s family anymore,” he said, pushing back from the table and taking his plate to the sink.

I knew a fight was coming, and I left the table without a word, retreating to my room where I could escape into the world of Mario and Luigi, a place where any obstacle could easily be overcome by mashing a button. But no matter how loud I turned up the volume, I could still hear them.

“FUCK YOU, LEFTY. I’m not your goddamned singing frog you can keep in a box and take out whenever it suits you.”

“Should I remind you that this was all your idea? The whole damned thing. Not mine. Not mine, Kelly.”

“Oh, but you’ve run with it, haven’t you? You built your own fucking empire on my work. My work. Not fucking Daedalia’s work, my work. Why shouldn’t I get credit for my work? Isn’t that a normal thing for someone to want?”

“You know it doesn’t work like that now. Why are you so conveniently blind when you want to be? You can see amazing things no one else can, but when it comes to the obvious things, you’re a complete child.”

“What are you afraid of, Lefty? What? And don’t say it’s Marabelle’s safety. I’ve paid and paid for what happened, and that’s not what this is about.”

Was he afraid? I didn’t know. I didn’t think my father was afraid of anything. I really wanted to know how he would answer this question, but they had moved into the living room. I turned the volume down and pressed my ear to the door.

“...won’t accept you and I couldn’t bear that,” I heard him say.

It was quiet after that. I’m not sure if my mother was whispering or crying or just didn’t have anything to say in response. An hour later Lefty came in to get me to turn the TV off and go to bed. His face looked sad and tired as he leaned in the doorframe of my bathroom while I brushed my teeth.

“I’m sorry you had to hear all that,” he said. “Mommy and I fight sometimes, and it sounds really horrible, but it doesn’t mean we don’t love each other.”

“Where is she? Did she go away?”

“No, sweetheart. She didn’t go anywhere. I’ll send her in to say goodnight.”

“Daddy, why can’t people know Mommy is Daedalia?”

I’m sure I had asked him some version of this question hundreds of times before, but this time it landed differently, and he didn’t have a ready answer. He came in and sat down on the toilet seat.

“It’s complicated, Mare. You get that, right? Daedalia’s work is known all over the world. She’s more of an idea than a person…”

“Like Santa Claus?” I asked.

“Kind of. Let’s go with that. Let’s say that tomorrow, Enrique told all of us that he was actually Santa Claus, and he had been keeping it a secret all these years, but now he was just here, living in New Mexico, painting houses and building decks? How would that make you feel?”

“Well, I don’t really believe in Santa Claus anymore…”

“Okay, but what if you still did. What if you were seven and not ten?”

“I guess I would be disappointed.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know because Enrique doesn’t look like Santa. He doesn’t have a big belly and a beard. He doesn’t live at the North Pole.”

“Exactly right. That’s how people all over the world would probably react if they found out that your mommy is Daedalia. They’d be disappointed and…”

“That would hurt mommy’s feelings.”

“Yeah, I think it would. You and I know how special mommy is and not just because she makes amazing paintings. But they won’t know that.”

A few minutes later, when I was in bed with the moon nightlight glowing on the opposite wall, my mother came in.

“Scooch over?” she asked, kneeling beside me.

I made room for her, and she crawled into bed next to me. She put her arms around me and spooned me. I was getting too big for such things, but I allowed it.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yes, sweetie. I’m fine. You know we fight sometimes. It doesn’t mean anything, and it’s certainly not your fault.”

“Are you going to go away again?”

“Oh no, sweetheart. I won’t do that again. I’m so sorry. That wasn’t fair to you. What can I ever do to make it up to you?”

“Why did you start doing the art project with Maria’s family?”

“I don’t know exactly. It was probably a dumb idea, wasn’t it?”

“No, I think it’s really cool. I just wanted to know why because you can make good art all by yourself.”

“It gets lonely making it all by myself sometimes.”

“Like when you were in New York City?”

“Yes, exactly like that.”

“But you could’ve come home if you wanted to…”

“You’re right, but it would’ve been hard.”

“How come?”

“Well, it’s really hard to explain, but you know what it’s like when you’re mad and you need some time to get unmad or like when you’ve got a tummy ache and you have to throw up but you don’t want to?”

I nodded.

“If I had come home feeling like that, it would have made everything worse. I make art because it makes me better. It helps me work out things that get trapped inside me and make me feel bad. Remember when you had that high fever back in the winter and you were shivering? You couldn’t control it. What happens to me is kind of like that, and the art makes the fever go away.”

My mother was really good at explaining things that couldn’t be explained. It might have been her greatest gift if you didn’t count her artistic ability.

A few weeks later, Lefty and Kelly staged a big opening night at our little gallery downtown to unveil the paintings. Like the paintings, the event was a communal effort with everyone pitching in to hang the pieces, decorate the space, and get the word out. I went around town with the other kids handing out flyers to all the shops and restaurants. We called our show: Desert. Family. Home.. It was the youngest child, Sissy (short for Cecelia), who got credit for the name, though like everything else about the project, we had done it together. At Kelly’s prompting, we all wrote down three words that described what the paintings meant to us, and the slips of paper were put into three buckets. It was Sissy’s job to pick a word from each bucket. I was happy when one of her little hands fished out the word I felt most deeply when I had scrawled it in my careful hand. Home.

We had spent all of that Saturday setting things up and then went home to shower and get ready for the big night. When we drove back into town, the sun was low on the horizon, dropping into the notch between two mesas. My mother sat in the backseat with me and held my hand. Maria sat in the passenger seat. Lefty put on a Paul Simon CD, and we listened to it all the way into town. He sang all the words that needed to be said. Maria had fixed my hair and my mother’s. We had matching gardenias, and the fragrance filled the car. In the rearview mirror I saw my father’s eye meet my mother’s, and he smiled. Whatever they had needed to work out, they had.

We parked down the block from the gallery. The sidewalk was busy with tourists as it always is in summer. Maria rushed ahead to bring flowers to adorn the hair of her two nieces. I walked between my parents, and we held hands. It was dusk, and the sky was an azure blue deepening to black. Before we crossed the street to make our way over to the gallery, my father stopped us. The gallery windows glowed with a warm custard light, a composite of the vivid, primary hues that filled the many canvases that covered the walls. Unlike a Daedalia show, there was no mystery here, no hushed, darkened, industrial space, or haunting music. No Prosecco and canapés. No critics or journalists queuing up on the sidewalk. The gallery door was open, and the bright, jangly sound of Luis’s guitar strumming bounced across the pavement.

“Let’s wait just a minute,” my father said. “This is always my favorite part, but I’m usually by myself.”

I didn’t know exactly what he meant, but he squeezed my hand and when I looked up, I could see his eyes were glistening. My mother wasn’t looking at him or at me. She was looking across the street at the stenciled sign in the window:

There wasn’t a crowd of strangers, but family and friends of friends when we finally went inside. Us kids posed for pictures on demand in front of the paintings. The adults drank beer from a keg in the back room, laughed, and talked loudly to be heard over Luis’s guitar. I wandered from canvas to canvas accompanied by Maria’s nephew, Rocky, who was closest to my age. We tried to pretend we were grown-ups as we appraised the paintings and tried to remember which parts we had contributed. It wasn’t easy to do. While it was all there, our crude stamps, smears, and splatters had been smoothed, shaped, and transformed beneath my mother’s expert hand.

One of the paintings hangs in my front hall today, and sometimes, when I’m taking off my shoes after a long day, I will pause and look at this Daedalia that no dealer ever appraised. No piece in that show sold for more than a couple thousand dollars, and it took months for them all to find homes, but all the money went to Maria’s family. With it, they were able to make a down payment on some land and a small house.

On a cold night near the end of her life, as I spooned some warm chicken broth to my mother’s lips, I asked her what had made her decide to do the project.

“I needed to feel something more than that relentless gnawing inside me that never seemed to let me rest. You children, you did that for me.”

With the exception of those few months when I was ten years old, my mother’s work was always guided by whatever unknown force consumed her and propelled her to people and places that needed to be seen — to be excavated by her talent. But the Desert. Family. Home. project was one she chose of her own free will.

I’ll never really know how it felt for her, seeing those pieces hang in our little family gallery for months after the show, collecting dust. Had she expected the world to open up to them as it did for the Daedalia pieces, or did she understand she was making a trade? Did she have such control of her gift that she could deliberately throttle the magic to appease my father? It’s impossible to say, but I don’t think so. I believe sometimes she was the horse and sometimes she was the rider, but either way, she was always running.

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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, 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.

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…

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.

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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…

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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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…

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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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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