I had mistaken you, she thinks,for a fixed point.
She gulps quickly. The room is slipping into a merry nostalgia: Orson is animated, jumping around the kitchen at the excitement of reliving it all, the simpler time, before fame and secrecy and expectation. Everything she expected to feel—all the relief of her life coming together—is absent. What she feels is an old, petty envy.
Her mother has always belonged to her brother.
“Here, Viola, you be Susan,” Orson says, taking the trash bag out of the bin and cheating her away from Sebastian to cover up her stomach. “And that was you both in there, imagine it!” Orson rubs his chin and they do imagine it, the thought expanding in the room, and Viola wonders what she is lacking, that she has never been able to give him this kind of lightness.
“You’ve been holding out on me, Lola,” Sebastian says. He is smiling, but his eyes are full of lost time.
“Well, you know. I wasn’t sure what you’d think.”Ask. Say it out loud.
“How long has this—have you…?”
“A little while.”
“Since you told me you met? What, three years?”
“Not quite. Two and a bit.”
“It’s been hard, you know,” Orson says, “I’m away…”
“And I was studying…”
“Right.” Sebastian examines them. Her fingers find Orson’s. “And you haven’t told anybody else?”
“Well, Niamh.”
“Ah, okay. Wow. Didn’t pick her for a secret keeper.” He grins, cheeky. “Bet I could make loads of money if I were to rat you guys out.”
“Only if we go halves,” says Orson.
“Don’t,” says Viola.
“No? Okay. She’s the boss around here.” Orson’s eyes are dancing, clicking with Sebastian’s. He’s enjoying it, this new dynamic, someone else who knows her. When Sebastian excuses himself to go to the bathroom, he looks at her and smiles.
“What?”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay—”
“You don’t need to be nervous, I like him.”
“That’s what makes me nervous.”
How much longer can it last, this happy charade? Surely none of them can sit in it much longer. Maybe even now, her brother is scouring the house for evidence, preparing his great reveal. Orson is glowing at her, fitting his fingers against hers. Was it worth it, allowing him this sparkling, unsustainable moment?
“You’ve wanted this for a while, haven’t you,” she says, trying to keep the sadness from infecting her voice. “You’ve been tired of just me.”
“Not tired of it. Just. This is a really good step, Viola. I’m proud of you.”
She feels sick. When Sebastian reemerges, Orson brightens toward him, begins to ask about his art, and Sebastian is digging out his phone and the two of them are looking over it. She can’t really see and is trying to gather what it is from across the table. Her brother is using his fingerslike a pincer, moving in and out of something, explaining: “I actually found these photographs of her in Lola’s room—just another thing she was hiding from me, I guess—but Mom’s face in them was wonderful, so I used that as a base…”
The photographs. The nude photographs.The smoking gun—is this the test? Does Orson recognize, does he remember? Here is her mother’s body, that ancient horror, is no one else mortified at the sight of it? Oh God, what has she invited! But no, not a beat of knowing. The actor gives nothing away. Orson is only complimenting Sebastian’s eye and his instinct, and Sebastian is moving forward to other artworks.
“It’s like a stained-glass technique,” Orson says. “So clever. Saint Susie. Tell me what you remember.”
Slowly, Viola takes a bite of a mini-gougère and feels sick to her stomach. It occurs to her with deep, horrible certainty: her brother is not going to ask.
