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swirls seemed to flutter at her throat, giving the impression of lace. Lina leaned in, but the overlapping text was nearly illegible, one sheet layered upon another and another. Finally she made out a single word in a small, no-nonsense, common font: “Enough.”
    Lina stepped back as if bitten. What did she know about her mother? Grace had been an artist too, though unsuccessful, not like Oscar. Lina had never met her maternal grandparents; she did not know their names, where they lived, or where Grace was born. She knew that Oscar met Grace in a bar in the Village, that they lived together in Brooklyn in the late seventies, married at City Hall, bought the dilapidated brownstone with the money from Oscar’s first show. They made art and they struggled and they were in love and Lina was born. And then, the icy sweep of road, the crash. On a brilliant, cold sunny day, Oscar had scattered Grace’s ashes at the Cloisters, a place she had loved for both its art collection and its sweeping views of the Hudson. Lina had not accompanied him; he had thought the task too upsetting for a child. As an adult Lina often wished she’d been with him that day, that she carried a memory of some physical act to mark Grace’s death. Instead, Lina recalled only a vanishing, an absence, an ache.
    Lina’s gaze skated over the canvases— Enough, the crimson part, the kneecap, the small figure against the blue—and Oscar’s open, expectant face as he stood before the next painting. But Lina didn’t want to see any more. Duke lay at Oscar’s feet, an old cat now, brought home from the animal shelter when Lina was ten. He was cleaning his face with little rolls of his one remaining foreleg.
    “I didn’t realize you were … ready. I mean, emotionally ready to do this,” Lina said.
    A tension appeared in Oscar’s face, and he crossed his arms against his chest. “It’s not like I just woke up one day and— bam —everything’s okay. For so long I didn’t want to think about her at all. But then, I don’t know, the past couple years have been different. I wanted to go back, to when she was young, and remember her. I loved your mother very much. I wasn’t a perfect husband, I know that, but, Jesus, I loved her.”
    Lina watched Duke, and her own memories ticked by: a curtain of dark hair, the tuneless song, pepper and sugar.
    “And look at you—you’re an adult!” Oscar spoke nervously into the silence. “And I’m practically an old man.” Here he grinned. “I wanted to … explain some things. Tell the truth. I’m better at showing than talking, you know that. These are for you, Carolina. I want to show you some things about your mother. Stuff we’ve never talked about. It’s time you knew.”
    Lina looked again at the Enough portrait, her mother’s elongated face—like an El Greco, she thought, one of those rapturous, wraithlike ghosts. Wasn’t this what she had always asked of Oscar? Tell me, she would say. Tell me about my mother . But now she felt only an urgency to leave the room. Oscar had caught her unprepared. The reckless girl who had flung that pot across the room was long gone, replaced by a Lina who did not like surprises or this sinking sensation of weakness and instability, like standing on sand as the tide pulled away. She needed time to consider Oscar’s pictures, to analyze and think through her reaction. And sleep. She needed sleep.
    “Carolina, have I upset you?” Oscar asked, his voice tight. “Why don’t we talk more tomorrow. You look exhausted.”
    Oscar’s tone, and the way he was standing now, his shoulders slightly rounded, his stomach slack, provoked Lina’s old concern. And of course—Natalie needed a show. In recent weeks the publicity had been mounting, all tied to the mysterious subject matter of Oscar’s new work: Why all the secrecy? What had Oscar Sparrow done now? Interviews with journalists, a spread in Artforum, all of it clever and enigmatic, Oscar deflecting questions