Crescent City Connection

a half smile. “Don’t worry about it. Y’all just try to be a little quieter next time. Don’t upset the neighborhood.”
    “Oh, gosh. I’m really embarrassed.”
    The cop went back to his car, and Isaac thumped a hand against his chest. When Lovelace didn’t react, he drew a heart in the air.
    “Love. Oh—my name.”
    He pulled on his shoelace, to prove he really knew her.
    “Uncle Isaac? It’s really you?”
    He nodded.
    “Why can’t you talk?”
    For answer, he beckoned her back to his house.
    Inside it was white. Walls, ceiling, floors, trim, and furniture, what little there was of that. It wasn’t sterile or grim, however, and it took her a while to figure out why. There were ceramic bowls on tables, some filled with fruit, and the walls were covered with paintings, mostly in primary colors. The figures in the paintings were flat, two-dimensional, offhand almost, as if they’d been drawn by children. Some were on pieces of wood rather than canvas.
    The place looked very, very clean, almost painfully so, and could certainly have used a rug, but she couldn’t say it didn’t have personality. Isaac went to the wall, plucked a picture, and brought it to her. It was an angel, rendered in colors that probably weren’t allowed in heaven. Puzzled, Lovelace took it and stared at it.
    It took a few moments, but she let out a little cry when she realized the angel’s face was her own. She saw another angel across the room and went to examine it—it, too, had her face. Feeling as if she were in a dream, completely ignoring Isaac, she walked around the room, looking carefully at the paintings. She saw that they were signed by several different artists, two of whom were represented in large numbers—someone named Revelas and someone who signed simply “W.M.”
    W.M. was the one who painted the angels—it had to be Isaac.
    “Why W.M.?” she asked, and he wrote on a yellow pad, “They call me the White Monk. In answer to your previous question, I have taken a vow of silence. Welcome to my house. I’m happy to see you.”
    “Thank you,” she said, and he wrote, “Why are you here?”
    “Oh, God.” She sat down in an old rocking chair her uncle had painted white. “May I sit?”
    He held out a hand in the “please” gesture, rolled out one of those Japanese mats, and sat down himself.
    “My father kidnapped me. And my mom’s—I don’t know—in Mexico, I think, with one of her boyfriends.”
    His face twitched a little, she thought, in sympathy. He had longish brown hair and a neat brown beard—very much the cliche image of Jesus—and enormous blue eyes that made him look vulnerable and sweet. Also, she noticed, he had a great smile. He was oddly attractive. The thought shocked her—he was her uncle.
    And he was weird.
    But it was so sweet the way he seemed to have perfect empathy—not, she thought, that it should have been surprising. He came from the same screwball family she did.
    He seemed to wince again when she came to the part about the drug.
And why not?
she thought, understanding again that this was an extraordinary thing for a father to do.
    It wasn’t a custody thing—she was grown.
    But in the back of her mind, she knew. She knew what it had to be.
    When Isaac asked, she said, “I’m pretty sure he’s with Grandpa.”
    He nodded as if he’d already deduced that.
    “But I still don’t get it. What do they want with me?”
    “Your father and my father are two of the most—” He spoke loudly and he sounded furious—absolutely furious—yet he was speaking. She was more frightened than surprised. Watching his blue eyes cloud over with anger, she felt her own fear get bigger, felt herself shrinking, drawing away from him.
    “The most what?” she asked.
    He shook his head, grinning, and started writing furiously:
    “This is the point of my vow of silence. I get mad and say too much and half the time I don’t even know what I’m talking about. Anyway, that’s one reason, the rest is that I just plain don’t understand anything anymore and therefore I have nothing to say. If I ever do figure anything out—just one thing, that’s all, even one—I’ll speak again. Are you hungry?”
    Lovelace said, “Starving.”
    He nodded.
    She said, “Listen, I love to cook. Let me make something, why don’t you?”
    He wrote, “Nonsense. You’re my guest. One thing, though. Just don’t mention my father’s name. You can call him ‘grandfather’ or