THE THIEF

(a short story)

After my father died, four women I’d never met staked a late claim over him. They turned up at the gallery in the roiling, oppressive weeks following his death, each clutching a different version of the same tote bag (embroidered, garish) and a disintegrating tissue, and I listened as they told the same affecting story of how my father had won them over. My favorite of these women, short, with prominent gums, explained that they’d met when he ran over her beloved cat, and she always figured the cat had died in order to make space for him in her life. At the end, they all made sure to mention how proud he was of the person I’d become, like it might mean something coming from the mouth of a stranger. I listened to it all, nodding graciously when they asked if he’d ever mentioned them, and then I reserved each of them a seat in the front row for his cremation service.

I didn’t give the women much thought on the day, but I did catch this moment right before the ceremony began where (in between lavish, conspicuous tears) they introduced themselves to one another, and then I watched as they all froze at the exact same moment as if they’d been struck by lightning, or perhaps just by the unfortunate realization that they hadn’t known my father at all.

Even though I felt a little sorry for them, I figured my dad would have appreciated the synchronicity of it all.

♠

The woman walks into the gallery after 8pm, as I’m studying a set of negatives through a magnifier, marking the ones I plan to print tomorrow.

“We’re closed,” I say, barely looking up.

“I won’t be long,” she replies, an unfamiliar accent cropping her vowels as if to underscore her point.

After a moment, I shrug, but now I’m watching her over my glasses as she moves around the room. If she’s another of my father’s girlfriends, she’s an unfamiliar breed – younger than the others, around my age, with red hair that meets in a sharp widow’s peak before tumbling down her back. A winter storm has just passed, the snow already turning to charcoal slush outside, and she is dressed in an old wool coat that grazes the tops of her black boots.

I watch as she pauses in front of a small oil painting of a stretch of wetlands as familiar to me as my own back yard. It was his favorite piece.

“Who painted this?” she asks, her voice ringing out in the small room.

“They’re all my father’s,” I say.

“Oh,” she says. “It reminds me of home.”

She turns around, her eyes finally landing on mine.

“Is this one for sale?”

“Nothing’s for sale.”

“Sorry,” she says, curiously. “I thought this was a gallery.”

“It was,” I say.

 The stranger looks at me sadly and I turn back to my negatives, embarrassed at having solicited her pity.

“I really should close up now,” I say, and she nods, pulling her coat tighter around her body.

“Are you an artist too?”

“Sometimes,” I say. “I take photos.”

She nods, moves closer towards me, gestures at the chair on the other side of my desk. “Can I sit down?”

I reluctantly consider the question. Now that she is close, I can see that while she is young, maybe even younger than I thought, her expression is worn down and deficient somehow.

“Okay,” I say.

“Did you know him?” I ask, and when I gesture towards the open bottle of red beside me, the woman nods.

“Who?”

“My father.” I hand her a tumbler half-filled with wine. “He died last summer.”

An image swings briefly into focus – his clammy hand grasping for mine. I hold my breath, angling for more but, as always, the memory slips away.

The woman shakes her head. “I’m sorry for your loss. But I didn’t know him, no.”

“So, what are you doing here?”

“I told you, I took a wrong turn,” she says. “I’ve lived practically down the road for months, and I’ve never seen this place.”

Her eyes flick over me as if she’s making a decision.

“I lost something too,” she says. “And I needed to get away.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Well, aren’t we both just so terribly sorry,” she says, her strange accent even more pronounced than before. “Be careful, I almost feel at home here.”

I glance quickly at her as she takes a sip of wine.

“What kind of photographer are you?” she asks.

“I take self-portraits. But they’re not…they always come out a little weird.”

“Can I see?” she asks.

I’m about to blow her off, make an excuse, when she reaches out and puts her hand on my arm.

“I’m a stranger. If you can’t show them to me, who will you show them to?”

After a moment, I find myself nodding. I open a drawer and sift through a pile of photographs before landing on the least revealing ones I can find – a series I call Emergency Landing, where I’m lying face down in a blanket of leaves in the woods behind my house, the shadow of a passing crow on my bare back. I hand a few over and watch as she arranges them carefully on the desk in front of her before taking them in, her eyes scanning each detail. Eventually she breaks into a small smile, her eyes crinkling at the corners.

“These are great,” she says. “Funny. You’re talented.”

I take the photos back. My father rarely praised my work, but would direct me instead towards the flaws, the opportunities missed. I was always waiting for the day my work would be good enough to impress him but, now that he’s gone, I understand this is an impossible goal.

“Why don’t you display your photos here?” she says, looking around the room.

“There’s not really any space,” I say.

“There’ll never be space if you don’t sell anything,” she says, sounding tired suddenly. “Look, I really love that painting, it reminds me of Northumberland, where I grew up. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back.”

I pretend to consider her request but I’m mostly tying to recall the smell of fresh turpentine and sweat, and how my dad would force air through the gap in his top teeth whenever he was focusing particularly hard on capturing something. I close my eyes for a moment, but I can’t see anything beyond my own fucking eyelids. When I open them, the woman is still staring at me.

“Give me your address and I’ll think about sending you a print,” I say, and she smiles ruefully, her lips pressed together.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I’ll be gone soon anyway.”

I finish the last sip of wine in my glass.

“Are you lonely without him?” she asks, and I find that I can’t answer her at all.

She looks away.

“I came out here to start over, but it’s too cold,” she says. “I should have gone further south.”

“Why don’t you leave then?” I ask.

 “Why don’t you?”

“This is my only home.”

“All the more reason to leave it behind.”

I look around the shack that once felt so alive it had its own pulse. I spent eighteen years learning a secret language that became obsolete overnight.

“I can’t remember him,” I say. “Even here.”

“Burn it all to the fucking ground,” she says.

There is a silence, then she takes a final sip of wine and hands her glass back to me, a garnet film now coating one side.

“Will you take a photo of me?” she asks.

“I don’t do commissions,” I say, even as I imagine how her abrupt widows peak would look out of context.

“Not a commission.” She points at my camera, a Hasselblad my dad gave me when I was fourteen, resting beside my elbow on the desk. “Just a portrait.”

After a moment, I shrug. “Fine.”

I gesture for her to stand, and she walks over to the painting she’d pointed out earlier. I grab my camera, instantly comforted by the weight of it, the familiar feel of the grainy texture against my skin.

“It reminds me of home,” she says again, looking at the painting. “Northumberland.”

I stand beside her, holding the camera by my chest as I take a few shots of her, her eyes following the strokes and crests of the thick oil. I can already see that she is transformed in the viewfinder, her strange gossamer appeal turned into something altogether more straightforward once it’s flattened.

“It gets easier,” she says, once I’ve finished. “The grief for what you thought your life would be.”

“Does it?” I ask.

She tilts her head to one side and smiles at me in a way that finally reveals her teeth, somehow perfectly crooked. Instinctively, I take another photo.

“I don’t know,” she says.

After a moment, I smile back at her.

“I should get going,” she says. “I always say too much after a glass of red wine.”

♠

 We’re already outside when the woman asks if she can use the bathroom. Irritated, I unlock the door and wait in the cold for her, watching the glittering fog of my breath in the moonlight. When she comes back out, I turn out the lights again and lock the door behind her.

“I’m Freya,” she says, and she reaches out and touches my cheek, her hand warm on my chilly skin. After a few seconds, she smiles and takes it away, and then I watch as she slips into her car, badly parked at the side of the road. She drives off, and I walk home, my long puffer jacket trailing along the melting snow.

It takes me two more days to realize she stole my dad’s painting.

♠

My father was sentimental about some things, and wilfully negligent in a thousand other ways. An example: he wouldn’t have dreamed of throwing out the ribbon I wore on my first day of school, but he let my mother walk away from us without a second thought. After he died, it was like the house lights turned on and I could see how flat, how small, the world he’d built for us had actually been: a life constructed from oil paint and memories alone. I sometimes thought I would die amongst these paintings.

In my father’s lifetime, he sold exactly seven of his works, but that wasn’t because people weren’t interested in buying the rest. He didn’t like the idea of his life’s work being scattered around the country, its value determined by some bastard he’d never meet in a penthouse in Tribeca. At the time, I admired his principles, but now that all I’m left with is thirty-two paintings I will never sell, I think that it was reckless for us not to have considered my future when he was still here.

Thirty-one, I remind myself. Only thirty-one paintings now.  

♠

In the week that follows the theft, I find myself having to reconstruct the stolen painting in my mind’s eye - the strokes of russet gold and olive green more vibrant than ever now that it’s no longer here - and the thought that the stranger might have been right about anything disturbs me. I consider hanging one of my self-portraits up in its place, but it seems too neat. Too much like what the stranger would have expected. In the end, I print the photo of her, the one where she is smiling, her incisors protruding in a way that feels careless, and I mount it upside down so that she looks grotesque.

Next, I print off a small card and title the photograph THE THIEF. I figure that if anyone wants to buy this one, they can have it.

♠

WOMAN’S BODY FOUND IN LOCAL WOODLAND.

I scan the headline of the local paper as I hand my card over to Maura, the gas attendant on duty, and then I read it again while I’m waiting for her to swipe it.

I can see the top of the accompanying photo – a grainy still of CCTV footage of a woman inside a store. When I pull the paper out, I see that most of her face is obstructed by a mask, but that the woman’s hair meets in a sharp widow’s peak over her forehead. Behind the counter, Maura raises a sparse eyebrow, and I hand over five dollars to cover the cost of the paper and the local dog charity she’ll inevitably frisk me for next.

“You doing okay, hon?” Maura calls after me when I’m near the front door of the kiosk, but I pretend not to hear her. As I drive to the gallery, I feel strangely sick, like my fingerprints have been found at a crime scene I’d dreamed about once.

The woman’s body was found in the woodland on the edge of town last Sunday by a dog walker, and is yet to be identified. The police aren’t making any assumptions, but they want to talk to the woman in the CCTV footage from the general store near town. An anonymous source, a store employee, says the mystery woman had visited a few times over the winter months but she’d always paid cash, and nobody had ever thought to ask her name.

I tell myself that I’m just lonely, and reaching for meaning where there is none, but I still can’t shake a creeping feeling of responsibility for the woman who had stumbled into my father’s gallery and stolen his favorite painting. I try to recall when I had met her but the days are almost indistinguishable, bleeding into one another, until I remember that I’d had to watch an hour of Saturday Night Live when I got home in an effort to shake the uncanny feeling of having been disarmed by a stranger. According to the article, the body was found sixteen hours later by a curious whippet on her seventh birthday.

♠

After work, I turn on my dad’s old computer and search for various combinations of the words: Freya, missing, woman, but nothing comes back. I scour a map of England and add the name of her hometown, Northumberland, to the search field. A link to a lone Facebook post appears – an accountant, John Garrick, trying to locate his wife, Freya, last seen a year ago boarding a flight from Manchester airport to Quebec before she disappeared. I try to imagine what it would be like to walk out of your own life, and I feel an odd beat of envy in my chest. The husband’s voice is nasal but he has kind eyes, and I wonder whether he was her impetus to run or if he was just collateral damage.

When I search for Freya Garrick, I find one short, four-year old article from a local Northumberland newspaper that reported her return to the area. As a teen, Freya had trained as a ballerina with The Royal Ballet in London before she blew her knee out. When I search for a video of her dancing, there is one grainy video she’s tagged in from a few years back - an ensemble scene in The Nutcracker, her name one amongst a dozen more. I wonder what it must have felt like, to have had her future snatched away so prematurely there is barely a trace of it. I wonder if she compared every milestone in her life to those her shadow self might have achieved – the Freya still twirling on stage and soaking her bloodied toes each night.

Afterwards, I distract myself by doing a shoot in the attic of our house, posing for a decadent tea party with a set of colorful mannequins my father painted decades ago, but I can hear Freya’s voice in my head the entire time.

Are you lonely?

♠

Over the next few days, local interest in the Jane Doe peaks and then wanes when no new information emerges. Conversations in the aisles of the general store shift from the mystery body to the rumored restoration of an old freeway exit as if the two are remotely comparable, but for me, the question mark over Freya’s death feels increasingly urgent. I feel both sticky with responsibility and furious that she has put me in this position without my consent. Every passing hour feels more stifling than the one before it, until I find that sitting alone in the gallery is no longer tenable.

On Thursday, I stop in for a drink at my local, The Oyster’s Nose. I sit at the bar and order a pint of Dogfish, pretending not to notice that a girl I went to elementary school with is sitting at a nearby table, absent-mindedly feeding her baby mashed potato and gravy. Jilly, I think. Her name was Jilly and she’d moved with her mom to Boston halfway through fifth grade after her parents got divorced. I heard she got a scholarship to Dartmouth but, looking at her now, perhaps not.

As I pretend to read a menu I know off by heart, I can feel her eyes on me, can hear the indignant shrieks of her baby not getting her full attention. Eventually, I turn and smile at her and her face momentarily brightens.

“Jilly, right?” I say. “Good to see you.”

“Wow,” she says. “You look exactly the same as you did in fifth grade.”

A strange compliment, I think, as I push my glasses up on my nose.

“Likewise,” I say, even though it’s a lie, and she looks as if twenty years have passed since we last sat cross-legged next to each other at assembly, instead of the ten it must have been.

“Adorable,” I say, when I realize she’s expecting me to comment on her baby. I am unable to think of any appropriate observation beyond this, so I just force a smile that is aimed more at Jilly than the child.

“Shane is seven months,” Jilly says proudly.

“Just incredible,” I say, but she looks at me sharply then in a way that informs me I’m not pulling it off. I think of how my father would behave if he were here, how he’d have come to life the moment he spotted an old friend, and I try to soften myself somewhat.

“What brings you to town anyway?” I ask.

“My husband’s overseas for a while so I thought I’d cash in a few grandpa day-care chips,” she says, then she winces –“Sorry. I actually heard…about your dad. He was always…such a presence. I had no idea you were still living out here with him. A real year rounder, huh. I don’t know how you do it.”

I take a sip of beer. Before he died, I would have leapt to my home town’s defense, but it seems I don’t have the stomach for it anymore.

“You never wanted to leave?” she asks. “Go to college?”

“I always figured if it was worth knowing, my dad had probably already taught it to me,” I say, and when Jilly still stares at me like I’m speaking German, I add: “How was Dartmouth, anyway?”

“Oh, I left after a few months,” she replies, her voice dipping slightly. “I met my husband and my priorities…shifted.”

I nod, as if I understand exactly how that could happen.

 “Mmmm,” I say, then: “My fiancé is away a lot too.”

“Oh yeah?” she says, squinting at me. “What does he do?”

“He’s a maxillofacial surgeon,” I say. “He does a ton of charity work in Europe.”

Jilly smiles at me strangely, her eyes automatically flicking to my bare left hand.

“What are you up to now anyway?” she asks, taking a long gulp of wine.

“I’ve taken over my dad’s gallery. Near the pier.”

“That’s cool,” she says, but she looks like she wants to say something else until her baby lets out a shriek so piercing she nearly knocks over her glass of wine. As I watch Jilly trying to angle a pacifier into the kid’s pinched mouth, I see that she seems genuinely exhausted and I feel bad for being a lying asshole, and for bringing up Dartmouth.

“You should come by,” I say. “If you have time.”

“Yeah, maybe, if I can get away,” she says. “My dad’s retired but he’s basically still down at the station all the time, so it hasn’t exactly been the trip I was hoping for.”

I sit up a little straighter, remembering how when we were kids, Jilly and her dad would win every three-legged race at our school sports’ day. They had the same long legs and stocky torsos, and her dad would always wear his black Eastham Police Department uniform even though he was off duty.

“How is your dad anyway?” I ask.

Jilly frowns as she works out how to answer.

“I don’t know if you remember much about him,” she says. “But he’s almost exactly the same. It’s tricky for him, retirement.”

“He worked a lot,” I say.

“You’re generous. Being a cop was his sole personality trait,” she says. “Still is.”

Jilly picks up a teething ring and puts it in the bottom of the baby’s stroller, scanning the table for anything else she doesn’t want to leave behind. I can already feel her drifting away from the conversation.

“Has he said anything about the Jane Doe they found in the woods?”

“Is someone you know missing?” she asks, but her baby is reaching for her arm now, tugging at her fair-isle sweater sleeve. I frown, wanting Jilly’s attention to stay on the subject at hand.

“No,” I say. “But it feels a little close to home.”

“I think you’re safe,” Jilly says, standing up and putting on her matted faux fur jacket before leaning down to lift the baby up out of the high chair. “It doesn’t look like anyone else was involved.” 

♠

At home, I make dinner slowly, streaky bacon draped over an English muffin with a few drops of Worcestershire sauce, and I try to remember more details of my conversation with Freya, wanting to understand why a woman with no future would steal a dead man’s painting. And, as the night bleeds into the day, I begin to wonder whether I’m looking at it all wrong. Perhaps Freya hadn’t taken the painting because she needed something to tether her to the world. Perhaps she’d taken it to leave something behind.

For the first time since he died, I find myself driving to the grassy wetlands my dad had rendered in the stolen painting. I stand in my thermals under the cool violet sky and wait for the winter sun to rise, the shallow water shimmering like a rainbow trout under the changing light. When the sky finally turns copper, my skin feels like it’s on fire.

 ♠

The next morning, I sit on the gallery floor and stare up at the canvasses lining the walls, landscapes I know so well I barely look at them anymore. I wonder if, like with the wetlands, they will all become more vivid when I close my eyes. The room is warm, lit by a stream of winter sunlight for once.

I walk into the kitchen at the back of the gallery. There are some yellow birthday candles left over from when we celebrated my dad’s first year of sobriety, and I stick four of them into a sponge I find in the bottom drawer, before lighting each one. I watch them flicker for a moment, then I turn on the gas of our camp stove. I gather my belongings and then I walk out the door, pulling down the heavy navy shutters until they lock into place over the windows.

I load my car up with the portrait of The Thief on the passenger seat, right next to my Hasselblad camera, and then I look up at the gallery one final time - the peeling clapboard, the discreet Charlie’s Place sign over the door. For just a moment, I can almost hear my dad singing to himself in the kitchen in the back as he fixes himself a cup of coffee, can almost see his stubby index finger dragging across each frame of the contact sheet I’ve handed him. I remember now that he called me ‘a stór’ when I was very little – my treasure – and how bittersweet it felt the day we realized he’d stopped, and neither of us could say when it happened.

I start the engine and pull out onto the road without another glance behind me. My father may have been a sentimental man, but he always knew when to cut his losses.

♠

The town is quaint, the foliage lush from the type of rain we rarely get at home, and, once I’ve dumped my bag at another motel, I look around for somewhere to grab some food. The restaurant I land on has dark red walls and a TV mounted on the wall, and I sit alone at the bar, my feet dangling over the hardwood floor. When the barman asks what I want to drink, I order an old fashioned even though I’ve never had one before.

“You need anything else?” he asks, as he pushes the drink towards me.

I take a sip before telling him I’m good.

“Where are you headed?” he asks.

“South,” I say.

“South,” he repeats, grinning a little as he bends down to find something.

“What’s your name, little snowbird?” he asks as he straightens up and leans across the bar to insert a thin straw into my glass.

I stare at him for a moment, then a small smile unfurls across my lips.

 “Freya.”