Unbecoming (30 page)

“It’s hard,” she said flatly. She wanted him with her whole self, from the prickly hot soles of her feet up to her temples.

“You’ll be fine. I know it. He knows it.”

“How is he?” she asked.

“Depends on who you ask,” he said. “He acts like he’s been born again.”

“Ah,” she said, vaguely stung.

“I mean that in the lunatic sense,” he added quickly. “He’s like a hyper kid, tearing around, can’t slow down.”

“That doesn’t sound like him.”

“He’s in shock. He’s headed for a crash.” Alls chewed his lip and stared down at the potted shrub in front of him. “That’s why I’m here, to talk to you about that. This Wynne bullshit.”

No one was home. “You want anything to drink?”

“Water.”

She led him into the kitchen, pushing aside the tent the twins had pitched on the carpet to catch their soccer balls when it was raining outside. She poured him a glass of water and sat down behind her yogurt and newspaper.

“You weren’t really going to do it,” he said.

“No,” she said.

“I didn’t think it would go this far,” he said, and for a lost moment, Grace forgot that he was talking about the Wynne House.

“Greg always does the dumbest shit he can think of,” he went on, “and we all laugh about it. But Riley’s usually smarter.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s going on in his head.”

“He thinks this is going to work. He thinks he had a perfect idea. Stealing paperweights and selling them for millions of dollars.”

The fork in the road: Play dumb or don’t. She hadn’t thought Alls would come to her. She’d thought they had both chosen Riley, his good opinion.

“He said it would be a good project for me,” she said. “Identifying them, since I was so bored. I thought he was just trying to get me out of his hair.”

“And then he said you guys should rob the place? The both of you?”

“Well, I thought he was joking at first,” she said. “We all did.”

“Right.”

“But then, this painting thing.” She shook her head. “I mean, he’s really doing it.”

Her parents’ cuckoo clock whistled. “Excuse me a sec.”

Grace went into the bathroom and turned the water on. She put her hands on her hips. She just needed to get away from him for a moment and think. Her chest felt like it was going to crack open. He was here, in her house, alone with her. She had to get him out of there. She’d promise to talk Riley out of the forgery, and tonight, she would. That was all there was to do.

She came out and sat down across from him again. “He thinks he can get away with anything, just because he always has.”

“Is this really why you left him?”

Grace swallowed. Did he
want
her to have left Riley?

“Would it make a difference?” she asked. She looked at him, sitting in the sticky oak Windsor chair, elbows on his knees. Her hand slipped down the condensation on her water glass and she wiped it on her bare leg.

“What are you saying?” he asked quietly, watching her hand.

She saw then the narrowest chance that she had misread him, that he might be as torn up as she was, that he wanted her as much as she wanted him. “I thought you—I thought—”

But she didn’t want to say what she had thought. She wanted to have been wrong.

Grace knew that she couldn’t be both the good girl and the bad one anymore, but she was less and less sure which was which, and she had failed at good already, and she desperately wanted to fail at good again.

“I can’t be what he needs me to be,” she said. “Or I don’t want to anymore.”

“You’ll get back together. You’ll see.” He wasn’t trying to comfort her.

“The reason he shouldn’t rob the Wynne House,” she said, “is that it isn’t worth the risk. The antiques money wouldn’t last longer than a few years, not split like that. I tried to tell him, but he doesn’t do the math.”

“I bet he thinks he’s going to win you back or something. He thinks that way, you know.”

“I know.”

They hadn’t hurt Riley yet, she thought. She and Alls were just miserable, alone.

“What I didn’t tell him,” she said then, “is that his fake painting is a great idea, only there’s no way he can pull it off. He can paint well enough, I have no doubt.” She swallowed. “But Greg is going to fuck up and get them both caught.”

He nodded, intent on a plate of crumbs leftover from breakfast.

“The original is in the back, in the study. Reframed, easy to cut out and roll up. I can promise you that no one has looked at that painting since the day it went up. No one would ever notice, unless they hired a Dutch Masters scholar to do the dusting. But Riley and Greg, together—” She paused. “They don’t know how to keep a secret. Not like we do.”

Alls tapped his fingers on the table for what felt like hours. Did he know what she had meant to say? Would she have to say it more, worse, louder?

“I always knew you weren’t who they thought you were,” he said, finally raising his eyes. “But I guess I don’t know either.”

What
they
did he mean? It didn’t matter. “Join the club,” she said.

“He trusts you, even now.” He stood up.

She’d overplayed her hand. He didn’t want her as badly as she wanted him. She tried to think of something to say to undo it, to be just kidding.

He hesitated, standing behind her. She could feel him, but she didn’t move.

“Don’t tell him—” she started.

Don’t tell him what? She didn’t know how to finish.

He let the door slam behind him. She listened, but she didn’t hear his car engine turn. She went to the window and saw him sitting in his car, his head back. Finally, the engine turned, and he left.

How had she been so sure in that moment that he was hers for the taking? He had come to her as a friend—to
Riley
. She’d thought he’d known how wrong a person she was, hiding behind all that nice-girl hair that Kendall and Lana had dismissed so easily, under all those pastel sweaters Mrs. Graham had dressed her in, but she had been wrong. He’d thought she was a good person who’d made one awful mistake, the way he was a good person who’d made one awful mistake. But now he knew. She had told him herself.

23

T
hat night, Riley begged her to meet him at the playground.

“Gracie, my painting is
good
,” he protested. “No one is ever going to guess that
I
did this.” He looked at her as if he were on the verge of laughter. “Look at me, baby. Look at me.” He pointed to his face. His curls were aglow from the street lamp behind them. “No one—
no one
—in Tennessee is ever going to suspect that Riley Sullivan Graham would do something like this.”

A wave of nausea drowned her guilt for a moment. She wanted to kill him. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “Just forget the whole thing. This was supposed to be a game, right? A game.”

He tried to kiss her and she pulled away. “What is this? We didn’t break up.
That’s
the game.”

“No more games.”

“You want out? Fine, you’re out! You’re too sensitive for this anyway. You worry too much.”

“Riley,” she warned him.

“You’ll see.”

 • • • 

Alls called her the next morning. “We agreed that we would never tell him,” he said, “and we’re going to stick with that.”

She held her breath.

“But I know what I want,” he said. “And I can’t help that.”

She slid down the wall until she was on the floor. “Yes,” she said.

“We can’t let him rob the Wynne House,” he said. “It’s suicide.”

“Yes,” she said. “You told him you’re out?”

“He doesn’t care.”

“I’ve created a monster,” she said.

“How do we steal a painting?”

She had not expected that. She marveled at the
we
, which sounded now like a word she had never heard before.

“We—we have to replace it with a fake,” she said. “We could buy a fake online, a print of some crappy still life in the same colors, and we put an old frame around it, and we switch them.”

“No sweat,” he said doubtfully.

“It’s not a great idea,” she said. “And besides—he could still try to steal the original, not knowing. And then it would be very clear to him what we’d done.”

“So we can’t do that.”

“No.”

“We need to save him from himself,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, disbelieving. “How close is he to finishing the painting?”

“I don’t know how to tell. I can send you a picture.”

“Yes. He’ll tell me, though, when he’s done. He won’t be able to help it.”

“Oh, you guys are talking?”

“It’s like you thought,” she said. “He thinks this is his grand gesture.”

“And then?”

“Then you take his painting. When he’s in class, probably. And then you take the tour,” she said. “Once you’re upstairs, I come in and make the switch. You have to ask questions, upstairs, to give me time. We couldn’t sell it in America. That would be stupid.”

“Where are we going?”

“I go to Prague in two weeks,” she said.

“Me, too,” he said.

She laughed, a short burst that startled them both. “We don’t have any money,” she said.

“Riley’s going to pay you back for the rent,” he said. “He called it ‘priority uno.’”

How easily they slipped into mocking him, this person they were so determined to protect.

 • • • 

He did pay her back, and then some. Anne Findlay had gotten a call requesting one unsold painting.

“With interest,” he said, eyes gleaming. It was as if he were taunting her with his autonomy now. The
we
was gone. Her husband now showed off how easily he could act without her input. Riley seemed determined to prove that he could do whatever he wanted without losing her. But prove it to whom? If Riley wanted to show Grace that he held her under the thumb of his love, he had grossly miscalculated. Grace had been gone longer than even she had known.

“You are not a criminal,” she pleaded. “I won’t let you do it. I’ll set off the car alarms across the street. I’ll pretend I’m having a heart attack on the office’s steps. I’ll call in a bomb threat. I’m not going to leave you here when you’re like this.”

“Like what?” he said, gently biting her ear.

“Manic. Delusional. Like
this
.”

“Well, when I whisk you off to Paris, I won’t be like this anymore. I’ll be cured. I’ll be cured and I’ll be rich.”

For a moment, she hoped he
would
do it and get caught, once she was long gone. His family couldn’t save him then. And Greg, well—she longed to see him regret
anything
. But this was not in her best interest.

“I won’t be party to this,” she said stuffily. “It’s dangerous and it’s wrong and I won’t be associated with something like this.”

“We both know that’s not true,” he said.

 • • • 

The snag appeared when, just ten days before Grace was supposed to leave for Prague, Riley had still not finished his fake. Of course, he saw no hurry, since he believed he was meeting her there later. He bragged to her about his glazes, his shadows, his brushwork, the
luminescence
, until she gave him a warning look. “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said.

“I’m almost done,” he said. “Shame you won’t get to see the finished product.”

If Riley did not finish the painting in time, she and Alls would be sunk. The two of them had to switch the painting together, one upstairs, occupying the docent, while the other made the switch.

But, Grace thought, if Riley didn’t finish his fake in time, they would still have to steal the original. To protect Riley, so there would be no painting for him to steal. His heist would be ruined, and he would be safe in his little Garland life, and she and Alls would be gone, forever. Alls agreed. Again and again, they spoke of saving Riley from his own happy arrogance, from Greg’s caper-movie logic, from trying to win Grace back when she could no longer be won. She was not a prize.

“I’ll buy the fake,” she told Alls. “I’m sure I can find something close enough.”

He stood across the aisle from her, three feet between them. They had not been any closer than this since New York. Alls had called her on the phone with this condition: They had done something terrible and they were planning something worse, but until they were finished, alone together and away from Garland, away from Riley, there could be no physical contact. Alls wanted to hang on, he said, to some scrap of—of—

“Honor?” Grace had said, disbelieving. His was a
very
relative,
very
negotiated kind of honor. But she had agreed, more because she feared losing control. If she so much as touched his hand, her mind would leave her. She had to focus.

Now she knew it hadn’t mattered. A toddler was wailing for Pepsi in the aisle behind them, and Alls, backed by bright plastic vacuum cleaners, looked sallow and sleepless under the fluorescent lights, but Grace didn’t feel at all in control.

“Just for a few days,” he agreed. “Until I can swap in the better one.”
The better one
meant
Riley’s forgery
, which neither of them liked to say.

“How would you do that alone?”

“I’d have to follow another tour in,” he said.

She bit her lip. This was a rush play, sloppy and desperate, exactly the kind of talk that had made her sure that Riley had no business trying to pull off something like this himself.

“Or we could just leave it. No one would ever notice except Riley.”

“No, we have to get his forgery into Wynne House,” Alls said, swallowing, “so that he can’t rat us out.”

She nodded. She wished he hadn’t said it. She preferred the narrative that they were protecting Riley to the one in which she and Alls were only ensuring their escape.

“I can do it,” he said. “I could go at night, pick the lock.”

She nodded. They weren’t making sense anymore. They wanted it to work too badly.

 • • • 

Buying a fake painting was easy. There was an entire industry devoted to printing images cheaply on canvas of any size and then swabbing clear “brushwork” over the top, nonsensically, to approximate artistry. Grace’s fake Bosschaert wasn’t even a Bosschaert—his work was neither famous nor fun enough for hanging over couches—but a Willem van Aelst, who had worked in roughly the same time, place, and style. The
Bouquet of Flowers
she bought was identical in size, similar in composition and color palette. She opted not to purchase the fake brushwork, which looked like wrinkled plastic wrap and would attract more attention than the painting itself ever had. Her van Aelst cost $149 plus rush shipping and arrived in five days. Grace pulled the canvas from its bubble wrap and sucked in her breath. They were really going to do it.