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“Unlikely,” Camille had said. “It’s I who have held you back.”

AFTER THE FUNERAL THERE
was a family gathering with too much food and too many neighbors. Had the apartment always been this small? Camille was taller than anyone else there, and long-limbed; he had to crouch when passing over the threshold. The evening was both a funeral dinner and a homecoming, a confusing combination. Let grief be grief, Camille thought. He felt shamed to have any attention paid to him. He ducked his head and said, “Please ignore me,” but they did not. His sisters had arranged a dinner so lavish it covered the entire tabletop. Fish soup with tamarind, freshly baked bread flavored with molasses and cardamom, an apple tart made from the fruit of the tree in the courtyard, with apples so sharp they had to be sweetened with two cups of sugar water and molasses. His eldest sister, Hannah, the mother of nearly grown children, had gone to Helena James and commissioned a huge coconut cake. His pretty, pale sister, Delphine, however, was absent. Unknown to him, she’d been sent to France to live with relatives, accompanied by her niece, Alice, who was nearly the same age as she and already had small children of her own. When he heard this news, Camille felt a pang of jealousy. In truth Delphine was sickly and their mother wished for her to have better medical care living with the aunt and uncle outside Paris. Still, he wished he’d been the one to accompany his sister. He’d told Fritz that running away to Venezuela had saved him from the bondage of his bourgeois background, allowing him to be among real people with real concerns. Now here he was, in the thick of his family. Already he felt a noose around his throat.

Everyone greeted his return with great cheer, except for his mother, who had hardly spoken to him, and had gone to lie down in her chamber after the service. Jestine was there to embrace her old friend’s son and explained that Rachel was dizzy from the heat and would soon be with them.

“How is your daughter?” Camille asked. He’d often thought of how he’d followed Lydia for all that time, how he’d sketched her before she’d known he existed, and had come to know the planes and angles of her face before they’d said a single word.

“She writes twice a week or more. She often asks for you. I informed her that you ran away to see the world.”

“Not quite the world,” he said ruefully.

“More than I’ve ever seen,” Jestine informed him.

When at last Rachel came to supper, Camille went to her and kissed her three times, though her reception to him was cold. His posture straightened in the presence of his mother, and he felt a wave of embarrassment due to his patchy beard and threadbare clothes, even more so when it came to the old, ragtag shoes he had on, the same ones he’d worn when he left St. Thomas two years earlier, although now the leather was scuffed and marked up, the soles shredding. He waited to be berated for his appearance, but his mother merely greeted him in French. In truth, after two years of speaking Spanish, it was a great relief to slip back into his first language.

“I thought you might never come back,” she said.
Je ne savais pas si vous reviendriez un jour.
In French this sounded like an accusation, for she referred to him formally, as if they had only just met. If he was not mistaken there was a break in her voice. But of course this had been a terrible and trying day. All the same, his mother had a strange sort of expression, one that was surprisingly vulnerable.

“I did wish to stay away,” he admitted.

Rachel pulled back inside herself. She felt this was directed not only to this island but also to her. “Jestine will have to make you a new jacket,” she said after glancing at her son’s clothing. “You’re in dire need of it.”

Camille smiled, relieved. This was his mother as he’d always known her, unable to keep her disapproval to herself. She hadn’t been overtaken by another woman’s spirit after all. In a way it was a comfort that some things never changed.

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t here during Félix’s illness,” he said.

“Really?” his mother replied. “I would have thought you were quite happy to be in Venezuela. Certainly we hardly heard from you. One letter after Gus’s death.”

From her tone and the way she quickly moved on to greet some neighbors he could not tell whether or not she was happy to have him home. That night he slept in his own childhood room, one he used to share with his brothers. He had secretly sketched upon the wall, but during his absence his renegade artwork must have been discovered, for the wall was washed clean. He heard moths hitting against the shuttered windows and thought of Marianna, the girl he’d once thought he loved. Next time he felt such pangs, he wouldn’t wait to act or give a damn about anyone’s approval of the match. He longed for love, and in his too-small bed he felt more alone than he had in the alleyways of Caracas. Now that he was home he felt more lost than ever, but it was an inner loss. There was an emptiness inside him, an odd sense that the longer he stayed here, the more of a stranger he would be to himself.

THE NEXT DAY, HE
went back to the wharf to retrieve his trunk, paying out a small fee to the custom man. He had very little money left, and that was an embarrassment as well. He would have to ask his parents for help, which would be humiliating. He had actually sold a few paintings and sketches, but most of what he earned had been spent on mere survival, food and supplies.

He was in such a hurry he barely noticed a dark-haired woman standing on the esplanade watching him, an umbrella over her head, for the day was brutal with white-hot sunlight. Then she called out his old name, Jacobo. He felt something go through him like a knife. He raised his eyes and recognized his mother. Her face was in the shadows and her expression was difficult to read. Jestine had always told him that he didn’t know Rachel Pomié Petit Pizzarro, not as she’d been, not as she truly was, or had been once. But surely if what Jestine said about her was true, she would not condemn him for his time away, which, despite his early fears about his talents, had been glorious and instructive and wild beyond his imaginings. He had bathed in rain barrels and in river water where there were enormous green fish with teeth. He had slept on beaches where luminous fleas jumped into the black, shimmering air, and in sheds that had sheltered donkeys, and in the arms of women he knew he would never see again. Yet all the while he’d been in Venezuela, he’d dreamed of rain and of snow-covered cobbled streets and of the garden behind his aunt’s house, where he would go to look at stars after Jestine’s daughter had taught him about the constellations. The stars in France were pale pink, set into patterns he’d never seen before. It was Lydia who had pointed out the Lion, and the Crab, and the Hunter whose dog followed him as he chased across the sky.

“Do you not wish to come back to St. Thomas?” he’d asked Lydia once.

“That is like asking would I wish to step off the end of the earth. This is real.” She nodded to the garden around them. “The other is merely a dream.”

He was walking through that dream right now, sweating through it. His mother was approaching on the wharf, and there was little he could do to escape her wrath. His brother had struggled for breath on his deathbed while Camille was dozing in a hammock, staring at the stars, for in Venezuela the stars were yellow and so very far away. They would have appeared unreal to Lydia, so used to the skies of Paris, but he had painted them that way, bits of gold tossed out across the night.

“This is yours, I assume?” Rachel nodded to the trunk. This time it wasn’t his father’s borrowed trunk; he’d left too quickly to pack. He’d bought this one cheaply in Caracas. Already, it was falling apart, the slats of wood having become unglued. His mother pointed and said, “Open it.”

“Here? Can’t it wait?” It had been a long journey due to weather and tides, and the funeral had been a sorrow, and then last night he’d found himself haunted by the heat and the slapping of insects against the windows.

Still his mother insisted. “I want to see what you’ve been doing for two years.”

Camille slid the latch over, then threw open the lid. There were twenty of his paintings, alongside countless sketches of the beaches where he’d set up house with Melbye, if a cooking pot and two cups could be considered home. There were drawings of the women he had been with, and several views of the harbor he most admired from a little fishing village where people called him le Français. He and Melbye both had aliases, which made them chuckle, most especially because Pizzarro wasn’t French but Creole. They were oddities wherever they went, their hands covered with paint and charcoal, two tall, gawky men who liked to drink and laugh and meet women. But Camille took his painting more and more seriously. He could barely be drawn away from his work. He used so many shades of purple and gray when painting landscapes that Melbye had laughed and called him color-blind. “Do you need glasses, my friend?” he’d said. But in the end, Fritz had become his champion. Perhaps it was his rendering of the gold stars in a painted night so black that every tree and shrub was black as well. Melbye had come to understand that his friend saw what others did not. If the bark of a tree was gray at twilight, and the foliage purple, then so be it.

“I see you did a great deal of work,” Rachel said as she examined the contents of the trunk. “If art can be said to be that.” She threw a look at her son, and he shrugged, annoyed.

“It’s a calling,” he said. “Whether or not you wish to think of it as work is entirely up to you.”

“And how do you think of it?”

She had sharp black eyes, a bird’s eyes. Nothing escaped her. Or perhaps every mother could tell when her son was being forthright. Therefore he told the truth.

“I think of it as salvation.”

Rachel had begun to lift a painting from the trunk. It was a study of a harbor, filled with ships. There was a cloudiness to it, as if the seascape had been viewed through a mist. On the day Camille had begun it, he’d worked so feverishly he’d fallen ill and still he could not stop. “I’ll take this one.” She motioned for him to close the trunk and held the painting close.

“Will you?” He laughed. “Since when do you think I can paint? You told me to put it aside. You said none of it looked right.”

“I never said you
couldn’t
paint. I said I didn’t want you to. Now, it’s clear it doesn’t matter what I say.”

They had begun to walk toward Dronningens Gade, up to the steps where the werewolves were said to be tricked out of catching runaway slaves when they stumbled in the place where the hundredth step should be. Camille continued to be confused. He would have expected his father to have come to help him with his luggage at the harbor, not Madame Pizzarro. He dragged the trunk behind him. His arm was aching. He was sweating through his clothes, and he knew he looked like a man for hire found at the wharf. His mother carried her painting though it was quite cumbersome. She was clearly stronger than she looked, and she took the steps as if she were still a girl. He supposed the painting was hers if she wanted it; still, he wondered what it was that made her choose it.

WHEREAS SHE KEPT THE
painting of Jestine in her bedchamber, so that few had seen it, she hung the new painting in the parlor, on the wall above the settee. People noticed. How could they not? It was so unusual, a dreamscape as much as a seascape. Something quite unique, an image you couldn’t look away from. Some of Camille’s older Petit brothers had laughed at how unreal it seemed, but his eldest sister, Hannah, was entranced. When she came for a visit one afternoon she studied the painting for some time, then said, “I had no idea of what true talent you had.”

Camille, embarrassed by his sister’s attentions, thanked her, then shook his head. “I don’t know why our mother wanted it. She doesn’t like art, does she? And certainly she doesn’t like mine.”

“You’re wrong,” his sister said.

Hannah believed she could remember the day Rachel became her mother, or perhaps it was only that Rosalie had told her about that meeting so many times it was fixed in her mind. She’d been a tiny baby, but young children could recall more than people suspected. She knew that Rosalie was preparing lime chicken soup, and that Rachel had held her and called her a bluebell, then had sung her to sleep. Hannah often visited Rosalie on Sundays. She liked to hear stories not only about her two older brothers, both serious men near middle age now; and her father, Isaac; but also about her first mother, the one who refused to die until she was safely named so that Lilith would not summon her. Sometimes Rachel would read to Hannah’s children from her notebooks, stories which held them rapt with wonder.

“Our mother talks about you often,” Hannah told Camille. “You are the one in the family with talent. She goes on and on about it. Now I understand why.”

He looked at her, unsure, unable to believe that his mother spoke of him in such a light. But he saw in his sister’s eyes that it was true. Hannah insisted that he come with her for a walk. She had her youngest daughters with her, and Camille felt guilty that he could not remember their names. They found themselves at the cemetery. Camille laughed when he realized where they’d wound up.

“Is this the family tradition? To go for a ramble and always end up at the worst place on earth?”

“It’s lovely here,” Hannah insisted. She led him to the Petit grave site. The children danced and played. He could not remember their names, but one had blue eyes, and the other had a wash of freckles across her face. They wore gingham dresses, and their stockings had been rolled down. They tossed brown leaves into the air, which then rained down to the ground.

“I come here all the time with our mother,” Hannah went on. “We lay flowers on my first mother’s grave.”

Indeed, there were red flowers arranged in an earthen vase, so fresh it seemed as if they were still blooming on their branches. Both of Hannah’s daughters had come close, perhaps because they were afraid of ghosts. He hadn’t noticed that they’d slipped their hands into his, but now he did. Bees were buzzing. He was wrong and Hannah was right. This was perhaps the most beautiful place on earth. He felt tears in his eyes.