The truth is working on the dioramas has been exciting. When she began sponging the years of dirt and grime from the landscape Michael Everett had painted seventy-five years earlier, Mary started to sweat. It wasn’t the lighting, and it wasn’t the lack of air inside the glass booth. It wasn’t even the closeness of the stuffed animals, moved to the side so that she could have access to the wall. The heat seemed to be coming from the drawing itself, from the earth and trees of the Serengeti. Mary finished cleaning off a field of grasses and pressed her cheek against the wall. It was warm.

There is little information on Michael Everett in the orientation packet provided by Dr. Fisher. The photographs are blurry and the text obscure, but it is possible to discern that Everett was sick for most of his life. His body is thin and gaunt. There are shadows beneath his eyes, and in one picture there is a definite grimace, as if the flash from the camera pained him.

That night Mary reads through a history of the museum borrowed from the library. Everett was friends with the Roach family, who gave the original funding and land for the site, as well as their private collection of hunting trophies. There is a shot of him on safari with the whole clan. He is leaning on the shoulder of the youngest son. She holds the pictures up in front of her father.

“Do you know him, Pop?” she asks.

Her father shakes his head. He makes the smacking noise with his lips that means he is in trouble.

“Does it hurt?”

He nods. Mary takes out one of the prepared needles left by Mercedes, the hospice nurse, and pulls up his nightgown. With a grunt, her father turns, and she jabs the syringe into his small white flat buttock. Her father’s paintings hang in the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. Large canvases of abstract blues and greens, enveloping the viewer with emotion. There have been two books written about his life. He taught her how to mix colors, how to create perspective, and how to live without a mother. Now he wears a nightgown and lives from shot to shot.

A few minutes later her father is ready to talk. He sleeps for most of the day, but in the evenings, he needs distraction.

“What kind of artist was he?” her father asks.

“Landscape,” Mary says.

“Let me see the picture again,” he says. “Oh, yes. I’ve heard of him.” Her father points at the youngest Roach son. “They were lovers.”

“How do you know that?”

“Roach bought a few of my paintings. He made a pass at me once. Then he said Everett was the love of his life.”