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He grimaced as he rose from his chair. “I’ll have to take it to go.”
He wrapped it up in a napkin and was gone. After lunch, I did the dishes while Dad adjourned to the sofa to watch the Saints play the Falcons on television. I wandered through, not really feeling like watching football today. Dad stretched out on the sofa, shoes off, and propped his feet on the coffee table.
“That’s right, Drew! You got it!”
Touchdown. While Dad watched Drew Brees take the team to a victory, I walked up the wooden staircase to the second floor. I knew exactly where I was going, where I’d wanted to go ever since I had that nightmare at Jude’s house. My dad kept one room entirely devoted to my mother’s artwork, our own personal gallery. And memorial. After she died, he refused to part with any of her paintings, no matter how much collectors had offered for them. And they’d offered quite a lot.
The room’s décor was sparse but elegant. Underneath a Persian rug of burgundy and creams, a gold brocade sofa with a matching chaise sat around an oval cherry coffee table. A porcelain vase painted with two lovers in Victorian clothing on a picnic stood on a glass side table. A large mirror with gold trim squared itself above the antique fireplace. Having been built before central air-conditioning or heating, many of the rooms in our City Park home had fireplaces, not all functioning. There were no other furnishings except for the wall-to-wall paintings.
Starting with the wall to the right of the fireplace, I perused my mother’s art. She focused on remaking the masterworks with new vitality, energy, and emotion. Here she’d given her own rendition of Monet’s water lilies in shades of violet, purple and white. She recreated Degas’s dancers into otherworldly angels floating on the stage. The back wall was a random mix of reinvented works by Van Gogh, Matisse, and Renoir. All of them reflected an inner joy which might or might not have been present in the original.
The last wall waited for me like the midnight toll of a clock. Among some rather distorted renditions of Picasso’s works was “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”
The original had always given me the creeps. Still, my mother’s version transformed Picasso’s black period even blacker with the chopped, distorted limbs of prostitutes who stared wide-eyed out from the canvas. A horror show of twisted, mangled women, both beautiful and terrifying. More than this, two others had always haunted me.
My mother’s adaptation of Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” held the gaze of a young woman looking on in the face of fear. If you glanced at it, there was only a slight difference from the master’s version. The Baroque shadows were now dark crimson. But on closer study, you’d see the haunted expression in the girl’s eyes, as if whatever she beheld made her blood run cold.
She had frozen in fright upon seeing something, long enough for the artist to capture her fear. Her eyes widened just enough and in such a way to make the viewer tremble. In the glassy reflection of both eyes was the reflection of a dark figure approaching.
The worst part of this painting was that the girl had a distinct similarity to my mother. My stomach squeezed tight.
As my eyes wandered over canvas after canvas, my fingers played with the St. George medal around my neck, a nervous habit when Mom came to mind.
I moved on to the last one, far more disturbing. It was the remake of Paul DeLaRoche’s “Le Jeune Martyre.” I’d seen pictures of the original in the Louvre. A beautiful, angelic martyr floated in a pool with her hands bound. She was radiant, emanating an ethereal light as her gossamer gown drifted wide like a cloud. A golden halo crowned her head in death. The lingering shadows on the fringe of the painting hid a man leaving the scene, the one who had doomed her to this untimely death.
My mother painted itexactlylike the original. Not one change in hue, not one variation in line or form. Someone could’ve taken a picture of LaRoche’s in the Louvre, framed it side by side, and no one could detect the cheat. What troubled me most of all was the fact that this was the last work she ever painted.
I sucked in a breath. VS screaming. Flamma present and behind me. I spun around. Jude leaned against the fireplace with his arms crossed, shoulders rigid. Black eyes measuring, calculating. The door was still closed.
“How did you get in here? How did you get past my dad?”
He remained still, watchful.
“There are other means of entering a building than the front door.”
“Yeah, there are. It’s called breaking and entering.”
He made no reply. I felt invaded here in this private place. I’m not sure why it unnerved me so much.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving home today?”
“Actually, this is my home. My apartment is a temporary place where I live with my best friend, butthisis my real home. And I didn’t think I had to tell you where I was every second of the day.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“It’s Sunday. There are rules. You told me so. I’m safe.”
“I’ll cast this house in illusion as well. But you are never safe away from a protector. Be sure of that.”
“Away from you, right? And why do you even give a damn? What does a demon hunter have to do with a Vessel anyway? Is there an ulterior motive I should know about? Are you even listening to me?”
His gaze had strayed to the paintings behind me, specifically to the martyred beauty in a drowning pool. The expression on his face shifted, became harder. He straightened away from the mantel.
“These were your mother’s paintings.” He stated it as fact, not a question. His face had become a granite mask.
“Yes. And this is aprivatecollection.”
I wanted to shield her work from his eyes. Why was I so defensive?
