They sat there silently for a moment. Milly felt at once deeply contented and wiped out, like she’d just run a marathon. There were a million other things she wanted to say, to ask him about, swimming in her head, but somehow she couldn’t grasp onto one of them. Then something occurred to her.
“I have something upstairs I need to give you,” she said.
Wariness flashed in his eyes. “I don’t think I’m ready yet to see the apartment after all these years.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You mean the scene of your sculpture demolition?”
He held a hand up to his forehead. “Oh, shit, please not that.”
Milly erupted in laughter. “You don’t know what perverse joy that memory has given me these past few years. Once I got over the initial horror.”
But her remark seemed to discomfit him. “I owe him an apology,” Mateo said.
Milly regarded him keenly. Then she sighed. “Sometimes I think I do, too,” she said.
“For what?”
But she shook her head. “It’s too much to go into now. And suffice to say, sometimes I think I don’t, so. .” She trailed off. “Anyway, just wait here a second.”
In the lobby, she smiled sheepishly at Ardit while she waited for the elevator.
“Reunion,” he said.
“Ish,” she replied.
Upstairs, she pulled the Polaroid from between the pages of a book on a shelf where she’d safe-kept it, then tucked it in a small manila envelope from her desk. Back outside, she sat down beside him again and handed it to him.
“You’ve gone a long time without this,” she said.
He glanced at her, then opened the envelope. He looked at the Polaroid, then buried his face in his hand. Then, only then, she noticed the small letters tattooed on his fingers. I, S, S, and Y.
“Issy Mendes,” he said, his face still buried away.
She sat closer to him, put an arm around him, and nestled his head on her shoulder. “Yes indeed,” she said. “Thank you, Issy Mendes.”
Three days later, Milly walked down to the UnderPark. “I’m Mateo Mendes’s mother,” she told the security guard.
“Yeah,” said the security guard, waving her through. “He told me to look for you today.”
Milly walked down a sloping old concrete passage that slipped suddenly underground into musty darkness, old wood and stone on both sides of her and above. Then the passage opened into a garden the size of a parking lot, full of an eerie sunlight filtered down from above. There were workers everywhere, laying down paving, carrying greenery, hoisting beds of tile up onto scaffolding.
“This is unreal,” she exclaimed to the guard. “Whatever happened to the old, abandoned Lower East Side that nobody cared about?”
“That place is long gone,” he said. He led her to a far corner of the garden, which had been cordoned off with sawhorses. Half of one wall shimmered with tens of thousands of tiny silvery-blue-and-green painted leaves.
Mateo was up on a scaffold, his back to her.
“Mateo, your mom’s here,” the guard called.
Mateo turned. “Hey!” he shouted down, waving. He and Char climbed down, wiped their hands on rags, walked over to Milly. Mateo pulled back a sawhorse so that she could enter their workspace.
“Milly, this is Charlie Gauthier. Char, this is Milly Heyman, my mom.”
From afar, a woman who’d been conferring with two assistants walked forward. “Millicent Heyman!” the woman exclaimed, her arms open. “Where have you been?”
Milly flushed in pleasure and shame. It was Ruby Levin, the head of Creative Production Fund. She was one of so many people Milly had dropped contact with over the past few years. Events not attended, e-mails not replied to, friendships not maintained.
Milly took her hug. “I’ve been a total disaster,” she said. “Can you forgive me?”
“Shut up!” Ruby crowed. “Forgive you? I’m just thrilled to see you. I’m going to pimp you out for our fall fund-raiser.”
“I’m useless!” Milly cried.
“Oh, shut up,” Ruby clucked. She stepped back, held both arms wide in her mama-bear manner. “Mother and son artists at the same project site!” she declared. “I am loving this moment!”
Embarrassed, Milly turned to Charlie. “It’s so great to meet you,” she said. “I think you’re so fantastically talented.”
Charlie shook her hand and lightly hugged her simultaneously. “It’s great to meet you, too,” he said. “I’ve been waiting to.”
Mateo looked down, blushing. Everyone was quiet a moment.
Ruby, reliably, broke the silence. “What do you think of this gorgeousness?” she asked, pointing at the shimmering leaves.
“They’re stunning,” Milly said. She stared at them, squinting, blinking, as they twinkled before her eyes. “They look like they’re dancing off the wall.”
“It’s the paint we’re using,” said Char. “It’s superspecial.”
“It’s the most expensive paint ever created in the history of humankind,” said Ruby.
“But how—” Milly began. She couldn’t stop staring at the forest of shimmering, tiny leaves. “How do you get—”
“Show her, Mateo,” Char boomed. “Take her up and show her.”
“Go look at the paint up close, Milly,” Ruby joined on.
“Well—”
“Come on.” It was Mateo. He grabbed Milly’s hand, led her over to the scaffolding.
“This is, what?” Milly asked. “Thirty feet high?”
“Thirty-two exactly,” he said. “Go up the ladder first. I’ll come up behind you.”
“This is crazy!” she cried, giggling. She felt a little dizzy, a little crazy.
But Milly climbed all the way up to the platform, then slowly dared to turn and look around. “Oh my goodness, it looks out over the treetops! It’s so beautiful.”
Mateo climbed up on the platform next to her. “Wave to the people,” he said, and they waved down to Char and Ruby and the rest.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Ruby called up. “Soon, this whole area”—she gestured with a sweep around her—“will all be trees. Gorgeous subterranean trees.”
Milly spied the paint in a bucket, full of rich, iridescent streaks of green, blue, and gold. “That is really some wonder-paint,” she marveled.
“So,” Mateo said, picking up a stencil with an array of leaves cut into it, “I just sort of place a stencil halfway over what I did last. Like this—” He held the stencil over a blank area where he’d left off. “And then — well, here, I’ll hold the stencil. Pick up the brush and try this one.”
“I’ll mess it up,” Milly said.
“You can’t mess it up. It’s stencils; it’s like kids’ play.”
Milly dipped the wide brush into the bucket and stirred it around in the paint, which glistened to life when disturbed. Briefly, it mesmerized her. Oh, paints! she thought. Oh, the beauty of paints in their jars. “It looks like there’s diamond dust in there,” she said. The paint shimmered on the edge of the brush.
“Now come here,” Mateo said.
Milly put the brush against the stencil, began to draw it downward as streams of luminous paint trickled beneath the brush.
“No, no,” Mateo said, “watch this stroke.” He put his hand over hers on the brush and flicked it quickly left to right, as though he were spackling something. “You see how the colors in the paint open up now? Watch the blue start to emerge.”
He was right. Blue and green bloomed out of the silver, so that when he pulled away the stencil, new leaves twinkled before Milly’s eyes.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” she said.
Mateo stepped back a pace, handed her the stencil and the heavy brush. “Here you go,” he said. “Your turn.”