Page 11 of Avalanche (Endless Winter #3)
Antoine
Main Street sparkles like the street of any mountain town where the aim is to relieve wealthy visitors of their money in exchange for things they don’t need.
Art galleries nestle between high-end shops selling the requirements for a fashionable ski season: parkas that would cost more than an instructor’s monthly salary, boots that look like an entire sheep died for their creation, knit sweaters promising everything that is both hygge and chic for the perfect après ski look.
Aside from a fashion lean that is decidedly, glaringly American, they are more or less the same as the shops lining the streets in Villars or Chamonix, or any of the other little ski towns I’ve visited with my family.
“Isn’t it dreamy?” Lily sighs. She squeezes Matty’s arm, holding it tight as she turns to look at me and Liam over her shoulder, a broad smile spread across her face.
Christmas lights and pale winter sun reflect in her hazel eyes, making the amber flecks glow like gold. The cold has her cheeks brushed pink, her breath clouding in front of her lips. I can’t help but smile back at her.
“It’s like a winter wonderland. Or a movie set,” she whispers excitedly, turning back around to crane her neck at each shop as we pass, at the lights slung like canopies between narrow alleyways and wrapped around naked trees.
She pauses at one of the art galleries—another commercial enterprise selling giclée prints of aspen forests and mountainscapes for exorbitant prices.
This particular one also has a bronze cast statuette of a wild horse poised in the front window—a tasteless piece that looks like it galloped from the lobby of some cheap hotel.
I lift my lip at it, feeling my disdain morph to a strange sort of vindication when I see the price tag.
Ten thousand dollars. Some idiot is going to pay ten thousand dollars to put this rubbish in their home.
Liam comes up beside me, the back of his hand brushing my own as he leans to see what’s caught my attention.
“What are you…” he trails off when he notices the price tag, a stifled laugh catches in his throat. “What in the western kitsch is that?”
He gives my deadpan look a broad smile, those grey eyes tilting mischievously at the corners.
“We can go in, if you want Lily,” Matty says, his attention fixed entirely on the woman clinging to his arm. He’s got that expression on his face that I used to hate, soppy and lovesick, as if he’s ready to drop to his knees in the snowmelt and worship her.
I find it rather endearing now, that look. Especially since this morning, when he’d turned that look on me. It had been fleeting and probably unintentional, but I had felt the effects of it all the same.
“Yes, let’s go in,” Liam says, shooting me a sadistic smile. “This looks like a good one.”
It is not, unsurprisingly, a good one.
Neither are the other three art galleries we visit after. I frown at piece after piece of manufactured art, tasteless copies of paintings and sculptures designed to fill underused winter vacation homes.
“They’re just like the galleries in Honolulu,” Lily muses, lips pressed into a slight frown as she reads the description of yet another mountain landscape. “I thought… I don’t know. I guess they looked different from the outside.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, voice soft as if we are in a true art gallery, and not the artistic equivalent of a McDonalds.
She tilts her chin at the price tag. Giclée print, 25/200, signed.
$5,000 . “I guess I was hoping to see some originals, you know?” She glances nervously at the shop’s proprietor, a stern looking woman who has been glaring at the four of us since we entered, then lowers her voice.
“Not that I have anything against prints. But I just feel like… I’m sure I saw this one already.
” Her brow dips, expression growing thoughtful as if searching for why, exactly, this bothers her.
I give her a grim, tight mouthed nod. “You wanted to see real art,” I tell her bluntly, no longer caring if my voice is loud enough to carry across to the glaring shopkeeper.
“Pieces made by real artists, unique pieces. You don’t understand why someone would pay this ridiculous sum of money for something hundreds of people already own.
When meanwhile, somewhere, probably in this very town, a real artist is struggling to find a gallery that will sell their artwork.
Art that is unique, meaningful. Art that is more than shadow and light printed across a canvas, but something that feels . ”
Lily nods, lips parted with surprise, hazel eyes wide.
“Yes,” she breathes. “Yes. Exactly. And it’s the same in Hawaii.
Not everywhere, of course, but a lot of the galleries in the tourist areas are like this—prints of the same art over and over again.
And who would want that, when you can go to a little gallery on the North Shore that no one has ever heard of, and find some hidden gem, some gorgeously unique piece that steals your breath away?
Or even better, when you can talk to the artist, see them working away in their workshop, barely half aware of their customers because they’re so absorbed in their work. ”
She gives a dreamy sigh, her gaze going distant as if she’s seeing through the jarringly perfect landscape in front of us to some dusty art den tucked in the bend of a road to nowhere.
I can imagine it—a wooden storefront painted bright, colors gleaming against dark shadows of palms and draping vines.
Lily rushing up the creaking steps with sandalled feet, the ends of her brown hair lightened with sun, her smile flashing over a bare shoulder.
A door swung open to reveal hundreds of unique pieces, some terrible, of course, but some incredible.
And I would buy them for her.
I blink, and the imagining becomes a memory.
The cluttered walls of my grandparents’ house.
Grand-mère smiling as she hung yet another piece of art in the hallway or living room or dining room or whatever room in the house had a patch of empty wall.
Grand-père grumbling but never outwardly complaining about the lack of white space.
Once, she told me, he’d bought her a Picasso. An investment piece, he had called it.
She refused to put it up. Told him he could put it in a vault if it was an investment.
I smile at the memory, then frown. All that art is in storage now. Has been since Grand-mère passed away. I don’t think Grand-père could bear the sight of it once she wasn’t there to admire it.
And now he’s left it all to me.
I blink, bending forward to press a kiss to Lily’s forehead in an effort to hide my face from her look of confused scrutiny. I hold her to me for a long moment, breathing in the clean scent of her shampoo, feeling her skin beneath my lips.
“Can I help you?” The sharp-edged voice of the curator has us pulling apart. I squeeze my eyes shut, take a steadying breath. I know, I just know when I open them, she’ll be glaring at me.
“If you’re looking for some of our more affordable prints,” she pauses, dragging the words out as her eyes rake over me from behind thin-rimmed glasses, “we have some unframed paper prints in those racks at the back.” There’s the faintest hint of confusion when her gaze snags on my clothes, the expensive remnants of a life I’ve left behind, but she smooths it away with a simpering smirk.
“We even have some postcards at the counter,” she adds brightly.
“Postcards,” Lily echoes flatly, squaring her shoulders to offer the curator an unsmiling stare.
The curator’s smile falters slightly, a look of uncertainty flitting across her face as she looks between me and Lily. “Well…” her jaw tightens, as if she’s come to some resolution. “You don’t really look… perhaps if you came in with your parents…”
Lily lets out a snorting sort of laugh, making the last remnants of false smile fall from the curator’s lips.
“Our parents?” Lily repeats, shaking her head in bewilderment. “I’m sorry, but that’s… my parents? No.” Lily takes my hand in hers, her eyes bright with hot indignation. “No, I don’t think we want any postcards from your shop, thank you.”
Lily throws a haughty glance around, chin raised imperiously, her lips curved in an exaggerated, disdainful frown. The expression is such a mockery of the one I’ve seen on my mother’s face, I’m not sure whether to laugh or be terrified.
“We were looking for something original,” Lily drawls. “Something that will hold its value. An investment. This,” she waves her free hand airily in the direction of the replica, “this is not at all what we are looking for.”
“Well…” the curator stammers, sliding her glasses up her nose, turning to look at me. I stare back at her, adopting the uninterested expression of indifference that I learned at my mother’s side.
“Thank you for your time,” I say, smiling inwardly when she starts at the sound of my accent.
I let it flow deeper than I normally would, let the French lilt come through more, set aside the tempered accent drilled into me at international school.
“Your little gallery has been most…” I pause, tilting my head as if searching for the word, “enlightening.”
Lily and I are laughing when we stumble out of the art gallery, the icy air buffeting our faces, making our cheeks burn.
“What was that all about?” Liam queries, looking at the pair of us as if we’ve lost our minds.
When the only response he gets is more laughter, he rolls his eyes and turns to Matty. “Coffee?” he asks. “I’ve had enough of window shopping.”
Matty’s shoulders slump with relief. “Same,” he admits, casting Lily a guilty look. “I mean, this was really nice,” he tells her hurriedly. “But I could definitely use some food.”
He rubs his stomach for emphasis and I find my eyes dropping to his hand, to where those thick fingers are splayed across a tight-fitting Henley. He must not feel the cold like the rest of us do, to have foregone a coat.