What the Canvas Holds

"Who is C.Z.?" you ask, when you've turned the lights back on.

Vesna is standing by the window with her back to you. "Someone who has been dead a very long time."

"The painter?"

"Restorer." She turns. Her face is perfectly composed, and you've spent enough time looking at surfaces to know composure is just another kind of overpaint. "You're very good. I knew you would be. Is that enough for one night?"

It's not even three. "Sure," you say. "Plenty."

Barnaby drives you home in silence. At your door he says, "She doesn't talk about that. Not even to me," and then, more quietly, "Don't stop asking."

Hattie corners you at noon the next day while you're making coffee in your pajamas.

"So." She leans against the studio counter, picking gold leaf out of her cuticles. "Tell me about the eccentric client."

"She's a collector. Private. The painting is Venetian, early eighteenth century, and it's in terrible shape."

"Uh huh. And what does she look like?"

You pour coffee. "Why?"

"Because you came home at four in the morning and stood in the shower for forty minutes, and you only do that when you're thinking about a woman." Hattie points at you with a burnishing tool. "Is she hot?"

You think about Vesna by the fire, the light on her face. Silver eyes. A beauty mark you could paint with your eyes closed now.

"She's a client," you say.

"Oh my God. She's hot." Hattie throws her hands up. "Ava. The last time you got involved with someone you worked with—"

"I'm not involved."

"—she stole your altarpiece and moved to Vienna."

"She didn't move to Vienna. She went to Vienna. For a conference."

"Spiritually, she lives in Vienna." Hattie softens. "I just don't want you hurt. Somebody broke into our studio, babe. Somebody slashed Dr. Pruitt's boat. And now you're out every night with a woman nobody's ever seen in daylight."

"She has a condition," you say. "Light sensitivity."

It's not even a lie. It's just a very small, careful piece of the truth.

That night Vesna isn't in the studio when you arrive. There's a note on the worktable in her impossible handwriting: Roof. Bring your coffee.

The stairs to the roof are narrow and steep. At the top, a door opens onto something you didn't expect: a garden. A real one, with brick paths and iron benches and big terracotta pots, all of it planted with things that bloom at night. Jasmine climbing the chimneys. Moonflowers as big as saucers, glowing white. Something that smells like honey and pepper. Over it all, the sky, and the spires of Savannah, and the river beyond.

Vesna is sitting on a bench at the edge, looking out at the city.

"I'm sorry about last night," she says without turning. "I'm not used to being asked questions."

"I noticed." You sit beside her, not too close. "You don't have to tell me who C.Z. is. But you should tell me what I'm working on. Not the paint. The thing."

She's quiet for a moment. Then she nods.

"When one of us is turned, the soul doesn't go easily into the new body," she says. "It has to be housed. Given somewhere to live. So within a night of the turning, a likeness is begun, a portrait painted by a mortal hand, with the new one's blood worked into the pigment. Our reflection goes into it. That's why the mirror shows nothing. My face is there." She nods back toward the stairs and the studio. "In the paint."

You think of the red silk under your swab, glowing like it was painted yesterday.

"And if the likeness is finished?"

"Then we're whole. We feel. Taste, touch, warmth, all of it, as long as the canvas lasts. Which, with care, is forever." She looks down at her hands. "If it's unfinished, we're only half moored. We fade. Slowly. Over centuries. Taste goes first. Then warmth. Then color."

"Color."

"You're wearing a sweater," Vesna says. "I can see that it's a sweater. I can see it's lighter than your hair. I can't tell you what color it is."

You look down. It's a soft, bright green, the color of new leaves. It's your favorite sweater.

"It's green," you say, and your voice isn't steady.

"Green." She says the word like she's tasting it, though she can't taste anything. "I remember green. The lagoon in spring. It's nearly all gray now, Ava. Pale gray and dark gray and silver. A little red, still, sometimes, at the edges of things. Blood stays longest. Of course it does."

The moonflowers nod in a warm breeze. You think about living for three hundred years while the world drained slowly out of it, like water out of a cracked jar.

"And when the canvas fails?" you ask. "The paint that's lifting. If it goes?"

"Then I go with it."

She says it simply. Not looking for pity, just giving you the facts, the way you'd give a client a condition report.

"That's why the deadline," you say. "That's why you need me."

"That's why I need someone." She turns her head, and her eyes find yours in the dark. "I waited until I found someone I wanted."

Your breath catches. You open your mouth with absolutely no idea what's going to come out of it.

"Well," says a voice from the jasmine behind you. "Isn't this cozy."

You jump half off the bench. Vesna doesn't move at all, except that her jaw goes tight.

A woman steps out from between the chimneys like she's walking onto a stage. She's blonde, platinum, her hair in soft old-Hollywood waves, wearing a cream silk dress that costs more than your studio and lipstick the exact red of a stop sign. She's so beautiful it takes a second for your brain to catch up to the fact that you're on a roof three stories up and there's no door on that side.

She looks you over, slow, from your paint-stained sneakers to your green sweater to your face, and smiles like a cat.

"So this is the new painter," she purrs. "Darling, she's much prettier than the last one."