Oriana laughed and cozied up beside him. Her eyes were on the mountains overhead, where the sunset oozed through the spindly trees.
For a little while, they didn’t speak. Oriana ached to know what Reese was thinking about. Her own thoughts of Larry felt marginal by comparison. A part of her didn’t care if she cut Larry out of her life for good. Let some other art dealer manage him.
“One thing keeps coming to my mind about this whole thing,” Reese said finally. There was a quaver in his voice that alarmed her. “I just don’t want to be a burden. On you. On our family. On our kids. I want everyone to keep living as well and as wildly as they can, regardless of my situation.” His eyes refused to look down at her.
In the distance was the sound of a squawking bird. Oriana imagined it was enormous, the size of a small dinosaur.
“You could never be a burden to me,” she whispered to him, pressing a kiss to his knuckles, his cheek, his lips. “You are my love and my life. Everything else is extra.”
That night, rather than go out to a restaurant, they ordered dinner from a steakhouse and ate in their lush, beautiful bed. They watched films, ate till they were stuffed, and laughed about stories they hadn’t told in years. Oriana felt as though they were young again.
Just before she drifted off to sleep, she wondered if Henrietta had ever felt this way about Larry, if they’d ever celebrated their love with a big steak and stayed up too late.
Chapter Thirteen
The following morning at seven fifteen, Oriana was up and in the hotel gym, running fast on the treadmill, letting her long legs stretch out and pull back. Upstairs, Reese was still asleep. When she’d left him in bed, he’d again looked so meek, so gray-faced, that she’d had to fight the urge to burst into tears. She’d come down here to push her heart and her mind and her body in a way that might help her forget all her violent fears. At mile four, she gasped with a mix of adrenaline and panic and felt tears drip all the way to her chin. She stopped, gripping both sides of the machine, and realized an older woman on the exercise bike a few feet away was watching her. When Oriana turned to look at her, the older woman frowned and said something Oriana couldn’t hear over her music.
Oriana forced a smile and removed her headphones. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My music was too loud. Could you repeat yourself?” It felt bizarre to try to interact with someone when she felt so out of her mind.
But the older woman continued to cast her an annoyed look. “Your music,” she said. “I can hear it through your headphones. You need to turn it down.”
Oriana felt bashful, like a little kid who’d been caught doing something wrong. It was true that she’d tried to drown her sorrows with a mix of very loud Aerosmith, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen. She’d tried to stop her panicked thoughts. She hurried to clean her treadmill, then took the elevator up to the room she shared with Reese, where he was wide awake and smiling over a cup of coffee. “There she is,” he said. “How was the run?”
Oriana showered, scrubbing herself clean, then put on a robe and enjoyed a cup of coffee with her husband. She didn’t mention how strange it had been in the gym. Reese was in good spirits, eager to drive up to Larry’s cabin and “take his temperature.”
“You’ve been talking about him for months and months,” Reese said. “It’s made me wonder if I remember him correctly. Did we meet a monster without even knowing it?”
They took the SUV through the serpentine roads and deeper into the mountains. Larry was on his front porch with a cup of coffee, bundled up in what looked like old hunting gear. He raised a gloved hand and beckoned for them to hurry through the path he’d dug through the snow. Oriana’s ears froze on the brief walk from the car to the house.
“My eighty-year-old bones don’t take kindly to this weather anymore,” Larry said, laughing as Oriana and Reese shook themselves of snow. “Welcome back to Colorado. It’s been a whirlwind. But I have a surprise for you.”
Oriana was filled with sudden dread. But she put a smile on her face. “Can’t wait.” She and Reese removed their winter clothes and hung them in his mudroom before following him into the kitchen for mugs of steaming tea. If Larry noticed how different Reese looked from last time, he didn’t mention it. Being that old probably meant being well-versed in how quickly people could change over time or due to illness.
Larry set the steaming teas on the counter and put his wrinkled hands on his hips. “I don’t know if I ever told you this,” he began, his eyes alight, “but I had an art show in Boulder all the way back in 1975. Most of the paintings you’ve sold for mega-millions were shown at that very art show.”
Oriana already knew about the art show. Isabella had learned about it. It had been held the same summer his wife Henrietta had gone missing.
“Is that so?” Oriana shook her head in mock disbelief.
“People from Boulder came in and out and walked right past my paintings. They didn’t see them for what they really were,” Larry said. “I didn’t get a single buyer. Not one! I’m sure those same people are kicking themselves right about now. I mean, they could have a Larry Calvin Johannes original! I would have taken fifty bucks for one of them back then.”
Anxiety fluttered around Oriana’s heart.
She reminded herself that she was the one who plucked him out of anonymity. She was the one who gave him this arrogance. No one else was to blame but her.
Then again, it sounded as though he’d been born with this arrogance. The stories Isabella had dragged out from the townspeople around in the seventies certainly verified that.
“For years, I gave up on painting,” he said. “For years, I sat around this cabin, waiting to die. And then, you came into my life, Oriana. You saw my paintings the way I always wanted them to be seen. And that’s been the most inspiring thing of all. Let me show you.”
When Larry turned and beckoned for them to follow him, Oriana cast Reese a look of panic. Reese squeezed her hand to tell her he was right there, that nothing bad could happen. But how could he be so sure? Slowly, they walked to the back of the house, to the windowless room where Larry had kept the paintings he’d given them when they were first in Colorado—thesame paintings that now hung on the walls of mega-millionaires and the Manhattan elite.
Larry announced it grandly, as though he were a king. “I’ve been painting again. I have new paintings for you. I know it’s what you need if we’re going to keep making money together.”
Despite who Larry was and everything he might have stood for, Oriana couldn’t help but feel a jolt of happiness. Usually, she had to chase her artists for new works. But Larry had seen an opportunity and charged right in. He flicked on the light and showed them what he’d done.
Larry had finished six paintings. Like the others she’d sold so far, they had the themes of loneliness and isolation up here on the mountain. His use of color had changed slightly. It was almost otherworldly, as though his eyesight had become tinted through the years. The way he shaped trees had changed as well. They were almost cartoony rather than wicked and spindly. Oriana cocked her head and crossed her arms, assessing them.
She could feel Larry’s eyes on her. She could feel his expectation. He needed her to tell him how brilliant they were. He needed her to tell him that they would bring in millions.
