Starry Nights (21 page)

Instead, I put it in terms that she'll understand. “It's like finding a lost symphony.”

Thalia smiles, and she looks peaceful with my answer. “That sounds wonderful.”

“It is. So how do we reverse the curse? It's obviously infecting the other paintings, like the ones at the Louvre. For whatever reason, it's spread beyond the Renoirs you cursed. Clio tried to fix it. She placed her hands on Renoir's painting of Gabrielle last night. She even tried flicking it with Muse dust. It didn't do anything.”

“I'm not surprised. I tried myself this morning.”

“What?”

“Well, of course I would try! I was at the Louvre the second it opened. I laid my hands on all the damaged paintings,” Thalia says, and like I'm lining up the edges of a drawing I've traced, I can place her red hair. The mane of it that I saw on the steps of the Louvre this morning.

“I saw you. I saw you at the Louvre.”

“I tried to stop it. I had to wait until the museum opened, but as soon as it did I was the first one in,” she says, and it's almost funny how pedestrian being a Muse can be—she can't just appear and disappear in museums at will. She has to go through the
doors, like everyone else. No free pass is given even if you inspire what's on the walls.

“I even sent Calliope over to the National Gallery in London too,” Thalia says. “They're having the same problem with their Turners. The curse is spreading quickly now.”

My heart sinks. “They're flooding?” The National Gallery is home to so many beautiful J. M. W. Turners, gorgeous seascapes with dappled sunlight on the water.

“All over the floors, Calliope said.” Thalia's already been on various assignments today. I get why Clio would want to skip out for a few days. I don't want to think about what happens when Clio returns to being a Muse. Maybe we can meet up in La Belle Vie, or Bonheur's basement. There will be time to figure it out. There will be time to plan a stolen kiss here, a brief moment there. It will be worth it.

But first things first. “Clio tried to fix the paintings, Calliope tried, and you tried. And it didn't work. What are we supposed to do next?”

Thalia looks at me. “Well, have
you
tried?”

I bolt from the rue de Rivoli, nearly knocking over a young family pushing a baby carriage on the pedestrian bridge over the river.

“Sorry,” I mutter, but I'm gone, sprinting toward the museum.

My legs have never been this long. My body has never moved so fast. I've never been powered by such ragged desire.

The lines for the Musée d'Orsay snake around the block. It's summer and high tourist season. The museum will be packed inside. I run to one of the side entrances, slide my card key through, then grab hard on the door. Down the stairs, into the administrative wing, and back up to the main floor. There are crowds everywhere, visitors packed into the galleries and halls, just like any other June afternoon. I force myself to walk to
The Swing
, even though I want to shove everyone aside and see if it could possibly be true.

There it is. The painting I touched this morning.

A group of young children sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the image. A teacher explains to them how Renoir tried to capture the effects of sunlight through the trees and on the fabric of the woman's dress. I inch closer to the canvas, and I nearly collapse to my knees, so strung out am I now on a raw and naked kind of hope.

It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. I want to fold my hands together and say thank you to the only gods I've ever believed in because this is my holy ground, and this feels like the closest I've ever come to witnessing a miracle. I can't even contemplate that it happened because of my hands touching that painting, but there it is. The evidence in front of me. The woman's white dress is luminescent again, the blue bows on it are radiant. I nearly stagger back, so humbled, so awed that I've somehow done something no restorer could ever do. It's only fitting—the curse was over human muses; the antidote is one.

I want to shoo the visitors out the door and lay my hands on the Renoirs. I want to fix them this second, but I can't touch the paintings with these people here. Tonight, I'll take care of the others. I scan the room, mentally ticking off the half dozen or so Renoirs that have just begun to wither—the kind only I can see, and only I can stop.

I notice Gabrielle is missing. Her picture had hung next to
The Swing
just a few hours ago.

I head to my mother's office downstairs to see how bad off
Gabrielle
must be to have been shuttered away. Her door is open
and she's on the phone. Her expression is deadly serious. She motions quickly for me to come in. I take a seat as she finishes her call.

“Oh, that's terrible. I'm so sorry to hear. I've been talking to forensic scientists and even the canvas makers themselves to see if they know.”

She pauses and listens.

“They don't have any ideas. No one's seen anything like this before.”

She waits again. “I've got a new team of restorers coming to look at our Renoirs. I'll let you know what I find out. And please do the same for yours.”

She hangs up then, and sighs deeply. She slumps back in her chair.

“Who was that?” I ask.

“My colleague at the Met. They've got one of the sun-damaged Renoirs, and now a Vermeer—the one with the sleeping maid—well, apparently she's snoring and drooling. She drools in her sleep, evidently. So far, it's the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, and the Met in New York with this new spate of problems,” she says, and it's so weird how the curse manifests once it infects other paintings. Only the Renoirs seem to go simply, with a leaking of their colors. The others unravel in a mad exhuming of their insides. Perhaps the curse morphs into a new strain of sickness when it stretches beyond the Renoir hosts. “I'm sure we're going to have even more problems any minute, like the other museums. None of this makes any sense.”

But it makes perfect sense, I want to say. It makes all the sense in the world and it will all be fine. “Did you move Gabrielle? She's no longer upstairs.”

“Storage,” my mother says heavily. “The Met's taking the Vermeer down to its storage too. God knows that's where most of our paintings will wind up eventually.”

“They'll figure it out. They have to, right? Art doesn't just decompose,” I say, doing my best to comfort her.

“Well, that's certainly what I thought for the longest time. But everything I've ever learned is useless right now, Julien. Completely useless.”

I want to tell her about
The Swing
. I want to shout happily that it's healed, that all the others soon will be too. I don't know how I'm going to get myself to Boston or New York. But I can start here, and I can start by fixing
Gabrielle
.

“How happy would you be if all Renoirs were suddenly fixed?” I ask.

She manages the tiniest grin. “Ecstatic. And can you pull the moon down from the sky for me too?”

“I'm on it, Mom,” I say, then glance at my watch. “I don't have a tour for another hour. Would you mind if I visited the storage room? I'd love to see Gabrielle.”

She slides open a drawer to her desk and hands me a key. I head for the stairwell, and I go down one more flight of stairs to the lowest level of the museum tucked far belowground. The storage room is at the end of one hall and hardly anyone is ever in there. I stop in the men's room, wash my hands thoroughly, and then head back
down the hall. I unlock the main storage room, then relock the door once I'm inside. The storage room is a way station for art—it houses works that are coming or going, as well as a handful that are on sabbatical as they make room for the traveling paintings that come through. The art here is shelved in specialized units, not hung on the walls. The lights are always dim, and the temperature is cool. There are drawings, paintings, prints, and more. I find
Gabrielle
's frame easily; it's resting quietly next to other small paintings, since the art is arranged by size.

I slide the frame out carefully, resting it against the nearby wall. I glance back at the door. It may be locked, but plenty of people here have keys. I have to be fast. I'm not even sure what I did this morning, if it was where I touched
The Swing
or how, but I don't have time to parse out the details. I look at the shawl. It's barely visible, so I start there, pressing my hands gently against the canvas. Should I leave my palms on the painting and wait for the colors to fill in like it's some kind of paint-by-numbers magical ink? But I only touched
The Swing
briefly, so I take my hands off and wait. Nothing happens. I stand up, walk around, and wander through the other works. I look at my watch. Ten minutes pass. I check
Gabrielle
again. Still the same. What if my eyes were playing tricks on me with
The Swing
? What if desperate hope fooled me into believing?

I head to another darkened corner of the storage room. I force myself to lie down and close my eyes, and I'd love to take a nap, but I can't because my insides are twisted and torqued, and I am so full of wishing that I am like a coiled wire. But I must be more
tired than I think, because the next thing I hear is my mother's voice. “Julien, are you still here? It's time for your tour.”

I rub my eyes and sit up. I'm groggy and my head is fuzzy. “Sorry, I fell asleep.”

“Well, obviously.”

“Any more news?”

My mom nods sadly. “More bad news from the Met. They had just tried moving the Vermeer to storage, but the painting got worse there. I'm told the same thing happened with the other museums. So just to keep the art stable, they've all left them hanging in their galleries. Roped off but hanging. Just in case,” she says, then gasps. “Oh my God, oh my God. It's better.
Gabrielle
is better.”

I jump up and rush over to the wall where I left her frame. My heart soars when I see that my handiwork has done the trick again. Gabrielle is restored, and her shawl is glorious. It must take more than a few minutes for the healing to spread, but spread it does.

My mother turns to me, and tears are streaking down her face. She clasps me in a hug, though she has no idea what I did. “The paintings love you. Look, you come to visit them and they feel better.”

Indeed, it seems something like that has happened.

As the day winds down, my mother receives a happy call. It's the curator in Boston. It seems
Dance at Bougival
is starting to get its
color back too. She tells me this as she leaves. “Maybe it was all in our heads,” she says, laughing, as she taps her temple. Or perhaps the art is healing in the same way it turned ill. The curse spread from painting to painting; maybe healing spreads too. Tonight, I'll fix ours and hope for the best at the museums across the river and the ocean.

But for now, I'm hungry, so I walk out with my mom, say goodbye to her, and meet Simon down the street at a café. I order french fries, a croque monsieur with chicken instead of ham, since I can't stand ham, and then one more to go, just the same.

Simon raises an eyebrow. “Eating for two?”

“Maybe,” I say, then drink my coffee. I shift gears. “Want to see something really cool tonight?”

“A boxer? Or have you found a female sumo wrestler to tackle me next?”

“Better. All you have to do is watch this time. Because I can do something totally awesome with these here hands.” I hold my palms up to him and explain how I can heal art with them.

He looks skeptical but amused. “The thing about you, Garnier, is I know what you're saying is crazy, yet I almost believe you.”

I hold up a french fry victoriously. “See. It's my sweet innocent face, isn't it?” I give him my best angelic smile, then dip another fry in a ketchup bath.

When we're done, Simon says, “Let's go see the show.”

It's later now, and the sun is dropping below the horizon. Gustave opens the front door for us and we head to the faraway galleries to the paintings I need to repair. They're a few rooms
down from Clio, and I'll go see her soon to tell her the good news.

Then I hear footsteps, and they're not Gustave's. They're awkward and clunky. I know that sound, and it turns my marrow cold. I take off and run to the sound, my backpack smacking against me as I race.

There's another sound now. A muffled cry, but close by, and I turn the corner into Clio's gallery to see Max scraping off the paint of the signature.

Clio's no longer in the picture.

Next comes a low moan, laced with pain. My heart thuds, heavy in my chest, as I swivel around to find Clio on the ground, bleeding.