The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [108]
While Buster circled the gallery, avoiding conversation with anyone, his eyes darting from the paintings on the wall to the activity in the room, searching for their mother and father, Annie stayed absolutely still, her sentry post one that allowed her to see the only entrance to the gallery.
Buster walked over, holding a handful of cheese cubes. “Nothing yet,” he said. Annie looked down at the cubes of cheese resting on Buster’s open palm. “Why didn’t you get a plate for those?” she asked. Buster studied his hand with evident surprise. “I didn’t even know I was holding these,” he said. “Give me one,” she said, and she placed one of the cubes in her mouth, the cheese warm and tangy on her tongue. Buster slipped the rest of the cubes into the inside pocket of his suit coat and dusted off his hands. Annie was beginning to wish that he would retire to the exact opposite side of the gallery.
“I keep imagining how it will happen,” he whispered to her. “An hour or so from now, the place will be as crowded as it’s going to get, and we’ll hear someone shout, These paintings are fake! And everyone will turn toward that voice, and Mom and Dad will walk right into the gallery and everything after that will be chaos. That’s how I hope it will go down.”
“I think Caleb and Camille are going to break in through the bathroom window, hide in there until the place closes, and then they’ll take every painting and drive back to wherever they came from,” Annie replied. As soon as she said this, she felt an instant regret, as though her dreaming up the scenario would cause it to come true. And she did not want that. She did not want her parents to sneak in, undetected. She wanted them in the gallery, surrounded by witnesses, face-to-face with Annie and Buster. Whatever came next, she could not quite imagine, but she was content to wish simply for their presence and allow whatever followed to come to her later.
“I’m going to keep walking around, scan the crowd,” Buster said, and then he pushed his way through the small crowd of people in the gallery and disappeared. Annie felt her nerves jangling around inside of her. She resorted to the old Fang technique, slowly numbing every part of her body, a forced death, and as she felt the numbness climb up the nape of her neck, slip inside her brain, she held that moment as long as she could. She let her thoughts fade out, like the final scene of Sunset Boulevard, the clarity of the image turning opaque, unfocused, and then slowly fading to black. After a few seconds, though it could have been hours, for all she knew, she opened her eyes, felt her body return to her, when she saw Buster moving quickly toward her, shrugging, a strange look on his face, almost sheepish. Annie stiffened, wondered what she had missed, and tried to quickly reclaim the parts of herself that she needed for what would come next. Buster was now almost beside her, and yet she still could not quite hear what he was saying, her ears still readjusting, recalibrating. “What?” Annie asked as he touched her arm, and Buster pointed toward the entrance and then said, “Lucy.” Annie looked across the room and saw Lucy Wayne, a woman she hadn’t seen in more than two years, smiling at her. And Annie, reborn and feeling brand-new, shining and perfectly calibrated, smiled right back.
Lucy, so short, barely five foot two, her black hair pulled into a bun, walked through the gallery toward Annie and Buster, who made no movement at all. Lucy held her hand out in a way that seemed as though she was trying to navigate through the dark, but Annie realized she was just waving, nervously, hello. Annie waved back. So did Buster. Lucy was wearing a white blouse, the first four buttons undone, with a pair of horn-rimmed glasses hanging from the V of her neckline, complemented by a black-and-white checkered skirt, and she looked, to Annie, like the coolest librarian on the face of the earth, someone who spent most of her time having sex in the stacks.
“Hey there,” Lucy said, tapping Annie