Beautiful Nightmare (Dark Dream 2)

I shrugged and realized I was still clutching a photo of Lane, Brando and me when my little brother was newly born. Dad and I were bent, blond heads together, over a swaddled baby with twin expressions of reverence on our faces.

“I’ll never forgive Lane for leaving us in the dark,” I whispered the truth, the words carving up my throat like knives. “Even seeing this, even knowing he left provisions for us. Even knowing what it’s like to love a person to the point of madness. I’ll never forgive him for letting me believe he didn’t care. For leaving Aida broke and broken, for never being a parent to Brandon. Never.”

I sucked in a deep breath, struggling with my own despair and Beckett’s, whose face was crumpled and damp like a used napkin.

“But I love him. I love him because he’s my dad and human beings are programmed to love their parents, but also because now, I know.” My hand trembled as I flapped the photo in the air. “I know he loved us. I know he thought of us all the time and wanted the best for us even though he put us all in a position where we could never have the best. He used to be my hero.” I choked on the word then laughed. “But now I know he was just a man. I used to think his life here, all of this and all of you, was a fairy tale and now I know it’s all just a beautiful nightmare.”

A quivering silence descended, punctuated only by my harsh breath as I struggled with my rage and sorrow.

“If you want Tiernan to know you’re sorry, if you want him to know you love him, words will never be enough. True love in action.” I lifted my eyes to his. “What are you willing to do to win your son’s heart?”

I’d left after that, leaving Beckett behind me staring out the window at New York City as if it had the answer to my question. It was getting late, the sun falling deep behind the metal gates of the city’s skyline, but I didn’t go to Grand Central Station to catch the train back to Bishop’s Landing or order a car to take me home.

Beckett’s revelations had stirred a restlessness to life inside of me that burned through my limbs like an abundance of lactic acid. My legs took me out of the building and down the street to the right, heading toward Central Park and the place that had come to symbolize so much in my life. The Metropolitan Art Gallery.

I needed to see Child with a Dove again. As if that would make of all the chaos I’d witnessed since moving to Bishop’s Landing.

It was oddly empty in the marble foyer, only a few families with bored kids milling about the space, a handful of couples nuzzling on benches in front of the more romantic paintings like Pierre-Auguste Cot’s Springtime and Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Pygmallion and Galatea. My heels clicked against the smooth stone floors as I rounded the corner into the large room that housed Picasso’s first blue period painting.

The frame stood empty on the wall, a small white sign affixed to the blank space within that read Under maintenance.

Given how Tiernan had cut the canvas from the frame, I wasn’t entirely surprised by, but my heart still rattled against my ribs at the loss of it. I’d felt so irrationally sure that it held the answers to all of Lane’s unanswered mysteries.

My body sagged with sudden exhaustion and I staggered to a bench in the middle of the room to rest for a moment. When I sat, a crinkle of paper drew my attention to receipts I’d spirited away from Lane’s desk at Colombe Energy.

I stared at them blankly, flipping through a receipt for Child with a Dove, another for The Dove that hung in his home office, and finally, the last one, the original Le Rêve.

The Dream was one of Picasso’s later paintings, a portrait of his beloved mistress it was rumored he began and finished in a single day.

A sob bubbled up from my churning gut and caught at the back of my tongue.

Lane had called Aida his dream.

If he’d bought the painting, I had to believe it was for us, for me. Yet, I hadn’t seen it in any of The Met’s galleries, at Colombe Energy or in the Constantine Compound. If the painting was the missing piece of the puzzle, a trio of paintings for the trio of Dad’s other family, I had to find it.

“Excuse me,” I called to a passing museum employee who stopped for me. “Is Picasso’s Le Rêve on display here?”

The woman retrieved a phone from her pocket and looked up something on the display. “It was a number of years ago, but not since then.”