That summer she turned six, the three of them drove down to Carmel-by-the-Sea and Monterey. It was ocean for miles, and her dad had swung her up onto his shoulders, and her mother had laughed like joy was light. Rushing air, the clean crash of waves. They’d had fresh fish stew at a restaurant, and her parents had split a bottle of wine, and Lili had swung her legs under the table, remembering the feeling of that smile in her chest—the way her dad watched her mom as she explained the latest progress with her dissertation, how animatedly her mom had waved her hands about to demonstrate concepts of physics, space, time, and how her dad had laughed, catching her glass before she’d accidentally flung it out into the aisle. Her blush, and the kiss he’d planted on her cheek, and Lili had felt her heart soar a little—
Pain is often simple but unfair.
They’d been driving back over the bridge from the East Bay. It was a weekend. Her mom had needed to check on labs running at the university, and her dad had driven her instead of taking BART.
They left Lili with their neighbor, a young art student who’d just graduated Berkeley. Lili had been painting with her—sitting in a patch of sunshine on her hardwood floors, giggling, dried colorful paint on the palms of her hands—
The group home afterwards was cold, sanitized. Fluorescent lighting, carefully measured doses of supplements. Maintained, but not taken care of. Existence, but not presence. Vitamin D, not sunshine. A gray, drab safety net with too-big holes in it. Matter-of-fact and numb.
She wasn’t there for long after the car crash. A few weeks for the state to run routine checks—parents had no will? No real family in the country? Friends of the family? International placement wasn’t an option, Israel had just invaded Lebanon, her mother’s few remaining relatives now living in a freshly enflamed war zone—before her state guardian informed her that she was being placed with a foster family. Lucky, really lucky: She was so young, and her parents had been intelligent, bright young folks, such a shame, mother a PhD student, father in tech—
Mill Valley, then. Redwoods, heavy questions, rich kids. Trees everywhere, sequoia and madrone that crowded out the sky. Mountain bikes, the skid of tires and dirt, huge houses slipping out of view in the forest. Too-expensive cars in the school parking lot. The laughter of her childhood there wasn’t kind—teenagers, the clink of bottles, house parties, absent parents. High school friendships, the loose, shifting cat’s cradle of adolescent alliances. She felt lonely in a way that ached deep inside her, like an internal tattoo. The dark sand of Tennessee Cove, hikes by herself, was her escape; sneaking out of the house as soon as she was a teenager for just a slice of freedom and nothing.
Jane bought her paints and let her read whatever she wanted. She smiled at Lili’s report cards and usually remembered her birthday. Robert, her husband who was rarely home but kind enough, taught Lili how to drive, and she helped him set up deer netting around the vegetable garden each spring. In Jane’s yellow house near the Dipsea trailhead, the different faces around the dining table changed frequently; other foster children moved on when things didn’t work out, or they were adopted, or they gotto return to their families, or went to new placements. Lili was never able to fully relax, to settle into some sense of trust that this was home, now.
In San Francisco, she’d felt at home. Warm, easy, safe. Everywhere she glanced, people looked like her and looked wildly different to her, and no one looked twice at anyone else. There were children at the playgrounds who resembled her, caught between different cultures. Lili would see women on the bus; having dinner with friends at restaurants; getting groceries after work; laughing, smiling, like sunshine. Women who could have been her when she grew up.
In this fog-swept, shaded enclave in the headlands, no one looked like her. No one gave her a glimpse of the future. Instead, she felt like an outsider, a small child isolated on the other side of unyielding glass. Dropped into the middle of this new town, barely a half hour from home, yet feeling like she didn’t even speak the same language as everyone else around her. The sense of her balance robbed; new gravity to adjust to, forced upon her. Like the geography she had traversed rendered her a different species.
She tried so hard. Grades, behavior, friends. Never complained, rarely faltered in her smile. She got very good, very young, at presenting a polished surface and keeping any depths—darkness, want, need, the ugliness of aching to be cared for—hidden. Parents, the parents of her friends, adored her. Just not her parents. If someone at school made a comment—What type of last name is Marwan?—she kept her head down, or turned away. If she ignored her aches, they might disappear.
It was constant, that striving. Exhausting, reaching for the tense safety of perfection, always braced for change to sweep in again, another car crash. If she just fit in enough, if she just excelled enough, she’d be enough to be wanted. For fostering to become adopting, for stability to finally fall into place around her. For Jane to knock on her bedroom door, and say,We’re making it official, it’s just a formality at this point, but we’d like to adopt you, we want you to be ours—
When Lili had gotten full rides to both Columbia and Stanford, hands shaking as she’d taken the thick packets from the mailbox, she’d asked Jane for her opinion.
Jane had shrugged. She was washing dishes, attention on their newly fostered toddlers who’d started crying.
Whichever you’d like, they’re both great schools,she’d said.Noah, please—
Lili mailed her acceptance to Columbia the next day.
Jane and Robert had dropped her off at the airport. They told her to come visit—visit, not come home—sometime, but she already knew her room wasn’t hers anymore.
Lili clears her throat. She looks away from the Böcklin.
“Anyway,” Lili says, glancing over the rest of the gallery. “I came here, first week of undergrad, determined to findmypainting.” She forces a self-deprecating laugh. “I was sort of disappointed, at first, that I kept coming back to this one. It’s not like there’s a lot going on in it.”
Beside her, Aleksandr doesn’t say anything.
After a few beats—her gaze skittering over the Rodin bronzes, the stretch of the empty gallery—Lili lets herself glance at him.
He’s looking at her, a bit too closely. With attention that’s too perceptive, interest that’s unashamed. Like there are questions he wants to ask, and he’s considering the phrasing. It makes her tense, uncomfortable.
She realizes she’s still holding his hand in hers. She lets go, and steps away.
“What’s your favorite painting?” she asks.
She thinks he’ll press, catching her deflection. He does catch it—a slight narrowing of his gaze—but he doesn’t press. “You tell me,” he says.
Lili tilts her head, considering. She breathes in art and controlled air, pushing back on the scent of redwoods, falafel, and salt air.
“I’d say Bosch, or Goya,” she says. “Honestly, maybe you’re really into Vermeer?”
Aleksandr smiles. “When I was younger, yes, I had an affinity for Bosch. But not quite.”
He guides them to the earlier European galleries. Just out of the medieval period, into the incoming tides of the Renaissance. Lili suppresses the urge to roll her eyes, thinking he’s heading to one of the absurdly large canvases: eighteen towering feet of Tiepolo, something Baroque caught between naturalism and theatricality. Art executed for churches and palaces, a scale meant to incur fear and worship.
Instead, he leads her into one of the smaller rooms. Religious iconography gleams on the walls.
