“Who are you to have that in your head?” Angelica said. Then her eyebrows sort of got themselves together and her entire expression got harder. Ronan could tell that whatever she said next was going to be absolutely true and would absolutely destroy Hennessy. Before she could say it, Bryde held up a hand.
He turned to Ronan and Hennessy. “Get your things. Then get in the car.”
“Why?” Hennessy asked in a hollow voice.
“Actually, forget your things. I’ll get them. Just get in the car,” Bryde ordered. He turned back to Angelica, and as they left, Ronan heard him say, “You might remember that dreamer was a child once, too, not very long ago.”
Outside the car, Hennessy stopped dead and simply stared at it and through it. It was not because it was invisible. She was staring at and through everything in front of her; her eyes were so bleak and her shoulders so defeated that Ronan wrapped his arms around her.
“I’m not a doll, Ronan Lynch,” she said, her voice muffled. “Take your hands off me.”
He just hugged her tighter, though, as she cried into his chest.
A few minutes later, Bryde came out, looking worn and blank, Ronan’s and Hennessy’s bags over his shoulders.
“Call your brother,” he told Ronan. “Tell him we can see them for a few hours.”
A special kind of relationship happened between an artist and a piece of art, on account of the investment. Sometimes it was an emotional investment. The subject matter meant something to the artist, making every stroke of the brush weightier than it looked. It might be a technical investment. It was a new method, a hard angle, an artistic challenge that meant no success on the canvas could be taken for granted. And sometimes it was simply the sheer investment of time. Art took hours, days, weeks, years, of single-minded focus. This investment meant that everything that touched the art-making experience got absorbed. Music, conversations, or television shows experienced during the making became part of the piece, too. Hours, days, weeks, years later, the memory of one could instantly invoke the memory of the other, because they had been inextricably joined.
Copying and recopying Sargent’s Madame X would always be associated with Hennessy, because of how intensely the two of them had worked on making it, the process so intensely tangled that it was as if a single entity, Jordan Hennessy, had done it.
Copying Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit would forever be associated with June and the other girls, because of how it was the first time Jordan had truly imagined doing something original, thinking of how a portrait of all of Hennessy’s girls could be posed with a similar chaotic but structured array for good effect, their faces strikingly and eerily and poignantly the same.
Copying Niall Lynch’s The Dark Lady would forever be associated with the Fairy Market and the creeping desperation of those last days with Hennessy before the murders.
And copying Sargent’s El Jaleo would forever be grief and hope twined together. It was knotted tightly with the song that was leading the charts the first week she got to Boston, the bright new knowledge that sweetmetals existed, the sound of that little boy’s voice when he woke up at the Boudicca party, the quality of the light coming into the Blick’s as she bought new brushes to replace the ones she’d lost, the heart-pattering chance that artists just might be able to keep themselves awake if they were original enough.
Jordan was beginning to understand how it might be possible for ley energy to be tangled into the art-making process, too.
“Of course Ronan can’t tell me exactly when he’ll be here,” Declan said.
The sentence came quite out of the blue, as before that he had, in his singsong soothing patter, been telling her about Quantum Blue, a new blue pigment invented with nanotechnology, designed to replicate the exact color of the idyllic “blue hour” of a Greek dusk. He was still seated in his chair the way he always sat when he came over, one leg crossed over the other, his tie loosened, his jacket removed and laid over his knee as if he had just come in from work, because usually he had. She hadn’t told him the portrait was done, so he still posed. “It is not the Ronan Lynch way to provide enough information to prepare.”
“What’s it, exactly, that you’re hoping to prepare for?” Jordan asked. She herself had mixed feelings about the news that Ronan, Bryde, and Hennessy were paying a visit to Boston, because of one harsh fact: Hennessy still hadn’t called. Ten years of complete codependence, and suddenly Hennessy had gone radio silent. At first she’d put it down to Hennessy being unable to find Jordan once she’d moved to Boston and gotten a burner phone. But now Declan had gotten two calls from Ronan and Jordan still didn’t have even a message from Hennessy. Jordan went from worry to annoyance to zen and back again. Truthfully, what truly kept her up nights was the realization that Hennessy hadn’t given Jordan all of her memories when she made her.
She had been waiting weeks to demand an answer for that, and the call never came.
Declan said, “I’ve never been good at Ronan, and there’s no handbook for the conversation we need to have now.”
“Sure there is. It’s a snap, a quick group read. The handbook’s called Your Boyfriend Called, He Thinks You’ve Joined a Cult, Please Advise.”
“Ronan’s not much of a reader,” Declan said darkly. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You brought it up.”
“Did I? What was I talking about before?”
“Quantum Blue. Alexopoulou. Blue hour.”
Jordan knew, without having to think too hard about it, that this conversation would also be coded into the painting currently in front of her, Portrait of a Nameless Man. She would forever after see the words Quantum Blue and think of
