“She was law-abiding, as far as I know.” His voice pitched down the way it did when he smirked. “She had this way of absorbing the negative energy in the room and transforming it into something better. Just walking into her house made me feel calmer. Like I didn’t need to be so hypervigilant and I could just exist for a little while. When you were with her, you knew she had you, you know?”
Even without looking, Lainey could tell that Elliot was offeringa rare glimpse of himself. She had the urge to pull over simply to stare at him—to watch the way his face transformed as he let her in—but she knew that something about observing the act of his disclosure would inherently alter it.
The desire to know more about this man sprinted up her chest, but she forced it back down. Art and people were much the same. They had to reveal themselves to you in their own time. If she forced it, sure, she might learn some things, but not the right things. Not the true things. And despite herself, she only wanted to know the true things about Elliot.
“She sounds like she was a special person, too,” she told him, deciding not to push.
•••
For the restof the drive, they rode in silence, her watching the road and him rifling through his box of treasures. The tree branches swayed welcomingly in the evening breeze as they drove up the dirt path leading home.
At the crunch of the truck tires against the rocks, a woman wearing a pink camouflage jumpsuit—tactical gear for an unfathomable natural environment—popped up out of a crouched selfie stance in front of an unruly shrub like a spooked woodland animal. The two women made brief eye contact before Lainey pointed at the temporaryNo Trespassingsign she’d painted and nailed to a tree snag she’d carved into the image of Medusa. The woman mouthedSorry, then scurried in the direction of the main road in a flurry of magenta.
Lainey groaned. “Seriously? Aren’t they bored yet? Ever since people caught wind of the Groff thing, we’ve had so many lurkers. And always that one spot in front of the window.”
“They think that’s where the bridge is supposed to go,” Elliotsaid, unbothered by the lookie-loo. He squinted at a sketch pad and shot his eyes between the house and the image like a treasure hunter scrutinizing a tattered map of the Catacombs. “Shenevertold you this place was Forest’s Bridge?”
The truck didn’t lurch or groan menacingly when she shifted it into park. It was difficult not to see how poorly her car handled when faced with a direct comparison.
“I’m guessing she wanted to avoid people taking selfies in front of our house like some sort of giant ball of twine we have to sleep in.”
“Yougetto sleep in,” he corrected. “You really think this house possesses the same artistic value as a ball of twine?”
“You’re assuming I don’t hold roadside landmarks in high esteem, when, in fact, I have great appreciation for them,” she teased. “Prada Marfa is performance art.”
“Oh yeah? What’s the world’s largest bottle of ketchup? A cutting commentary on American consumerism?”
“I find ketchup inherently sinister, so I can’t be objective on that one.”
His face strained, determined not to laugh. “This place was his last design. It’s the man’s final word on every visual story he wanted to tell. And since it’s unfinished, it’s like his conversation with nature never ended. Aren’t you curious what it was he died trying to say?”
She’d heard countless pretentious idiots regurgitate Vincent Groff’s Wikipedia page in the back seat of her car, but no one had ever spoken about him the way Elliot did. Like he wasn’t some genius from on high, but an artist searching for something in his own work. A man staring down an unfinished piece, begging for it to reveal itself.
She leaned her head against the driver’s-side window to get abetter look at him. “You said that everyonethinksthat’s where the bridge was supposed to go. I’m assuming that means you know the truth.”
His eyes glinted with triumph. “Of course.” He beckoned her out of the truck and led her to the back of the house, past the carport and the wall of windows, all the way to the messy patch of pea gravel Gran had laid down ages ago, a place to watch the sun sink into the lake in an Adirondack chair.
He stood behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders, positioning her until she was centered against the exterior of her house. “See?” he whispered. His fingertips drifted lazily from the tops of her shoulders down her arms. For a second, she imagined the uninterrupted path of his fingers—the length of her wrists, the inside of her palms—but they stopped short just above her elbows. “There’s a building plan on Reddit that shows a shallow, sloped deck, and for years, people were searching these woods for it to find this place—”
“There isn’t a deck on the house.”
“But no one knew that, and even now, they’re all stuck on this idea that it’s a functional bridge over a water feature or something you actually cross, but in the sketches he left your grandmother, you can see that it’s not an actual bridge, but avisualbridge.”
He lowered his head until his chin hovered just above her shoulder—moving closer and closer before halting their kinetic energy with a rush of heat against her skin. Her breath caught. He wasn’t touching her in as many places as he easily could be, but she was just so…aware of him. The warmth radiating off his body. The smell of his soap. He was all over her but nowhere, all at once.
He swallowed hard beside her ear, her only clue as to whether their physical closeness had any effect on him at all.
“He was using the reflection of the sun on the lake right before sunset to connect with the angle of the deck so it created one continuous line stretching through the forest all the way to the other side of the water.” He raised his hand to her chin and let his thumb gently tug it down until her eyes were exactly where he wanted them. The lake blurred into the sun, her vision fuzzing at the edges. “See?” he asked her, dropping his hand. The touch lingered, a ghost of a physical presence just below her lips. “Imagine the edge of a platform at the bottom of your field of vision disappearing into the sunlight reflected on the water. It’s a bridge. Extending from the forest, over the water, all the way to…forever,” he said, twirling the ring on his left hand.
She squinted at the horizon, searching until the image in her head revealed itself. Then it did. She could see it. The yolky sun melting into the lake. Reflections of saturated yellows and oranges bursting every which way. Her lungs breathing in sunlight as her feet stood right at the edge of the world. A collision of vision and nature. It was the kind of beautiful that felt vast and made her seem insignificant in the best possible way.
“Each day,” he continued, “our perspective of the sun shifts, but what he planned is for the bridge to connect perfectly at sunset on the summer solstice.”
She frowned at the sky. “So the guy who was a terror and refused to let anyone sleep picked the longest day of the year for his little project?”
He laughed, a little defensive. “It’s poetic. People always talk about Vincent Groff like he’s this cold, modern architect, but the way he played with light and perspective was so…whimsical.And deeply romantic.” His whisper brushed against the shell of her ear. “He didn’t want to design stale, beautiful objects. He wanted his homes to force his residents to confront their surroundings and find the natural beauty in them.”
It was what she tried to do with her art. Grappling with the parts of nature that’d been abandoned, forcing herself to really see them.
