Cordelia “the museum curator”'s Arc

Chapter 6 of 8

Cordelia came down from the attic with the folded list in her coat and the carousel painting still propped in her office downstairs. She ate nothing. She locked the museum and walked home with the list pressing against her ribs. By midnight she was in bed and not sleeping. The purple covers slid off one side. A pillow ended up on the floor. The dark posts of the bed framed her like a cage. She kept seeing the painted girl's face, and her own face under it, and the carousel horse with the chipped foreleg. At two in the morning she sat up. The painting left at her door was downstairs at the museum, in her office. The portrait from the attic was still on the attic floor where she had left it. She needed them on one wall. She needed to stand in front of both at once. She pulled on her coat over her nightclothes and went out. She walked back to the museum and unlocked the front door. She climbed to the tapestry wing, opened the hidden shaft, and went up the ladder with a lantern. The attic was cold. The portrait of the pale girl lay where she had left it, face up beside the black stuffed horse. She lifted the frame with both hands and carried it down the ladder one rung at a time. She did not look toward the corner where the girl had stood. In her office she cleared the dark panel above her desk. She mounted the rail across it. She hung the carousel painting on the left. She hung the attic portrait on the right. The vines at the panel's edges brushed her wrist as she stepped back. The same child looked out from both frames. Same dark eyes. Same hair. Same mouth. One girl watched a black carousel horse turn on its pole. The other girl sat alone against a plain green wall, wearing a small necklace Cordelia did not recognize. She spread the handwritten list flat on her desk under the brass lamp. The ink was brown with age. She read the titles down the column. Halfway through she found Curious Carousel Gaze, dated 1908. Three lines below it she found Gloomveil Portrait, dated 1909. Both paintings on her wall were named on the list. Both were dated before her birth. The same hand had made them, recorded them, and meant them to be found together. Cordelia sat down. She had wanted the two paintings side by side to think. Now she had them, and the list, and a date, and a painter who had known her face and her toy and her horse sixty years too early. She did not know who he was. She did not yet know what the rest of the list named. But she knew the list was a map, and the map was not finished.