I pulled open Max’s flat files, went through all four of the huge storage units, and found nothing. I peered under tables, sweeping my hand across their undersides, and even looked in the trash, underneath the plastic bag, before I remembered about the box she’d kept my Randolph pictures in: MOST UNIQUE.

I ran to the back, opening the box to find the puffy photo album—and a huge ring of keys on a silver leather fob.

The keys were in my hand when I heard the garage door opening. It was too late to leave. I fled to the guest bedroom, locked the door, and turned out the lights as they came chattering inside.

*  *  *

I spent the entire night fighting with myself in a hallucinatory half sleep. I stared at the ceiling and wondered what would happen to me when I died. Would someone put my notebooks on display? If I managed the career that I wanted, then yes, almost certainly. Would I want them to put my unfinished paintings on display? Would I want to be contextualized by the Maxes, the Fleurs, the Charlies, people who could not ever begin to understand me? Would I want my life to be summarized and commodified—every detail of it interpreted without me?

No—especially when it came to Max—but I would want the chosen work, anything I’d put in a show, to be shown. I would want all of Ohne Titel reunited, all of Accounting for Taste, all of The Distance Between Our Moral Imaginations, all of my Rich Ugly Old Maids and whatever else was to come, to be together again. I loved them. I wanted them to survive. I wanted someone, someday, to see the passage of my life as it had truly been.

To see what my hands had done every good day of my life.

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

I left Eliot House well before dawn, stripping the bed and leaving a note on top of the bare mattress. So much to do. Thank you for the hospitality. I’ll be in touch when I’m free.

The woods were quiet as I drove, for them, anyway; the breezes still ruffled the trees but this time it felt like they wanted me to be there. Climbing out of the truck, I felt the dirt and the roots gathering around me in a swirling carpet. As though I were the only person the earth loved that night and she was folding me into her path, her trees watching me go, her lake doing the same.

I walked to the edge of the water, letting my feet absorb the cold, touch the sand, touch the algae. It furred between my toes. I reached down and pulled it up, and it stretched, long and wet, its caterpillar magic evaporated by the air. When it went back into the water it was itself again.

Some things are like that—themselves only in one single context.