Lifeguard

Chapter 119

SPLIT ACES, wasn’t that what I called it a couple of years ago?

No, it’s a helluva lot more than split aces… It’s like hitting the lottery, mate, as Champ would say. It’s like the kick that wins the Super Bowl with no time left. You kick it over and over. The ball sails through. You can’t miss.

What do you do when the most valuable piece of art in the world falls into your hands?

Well, first you stare at it. Maybe a million times. A man in a white cap with his head tilted at a table and a melancholy look.

You stare at it until you know every stab of color, every line of the weary face. Trying to figure out how something so simple could be so magical. Or why it came to you.

Or if you ever wanted that kind of money.

Maybe a hundred million dollars, the lawyer estimated.

Then you tell your wife. You tell her everything. Everything you were sworn not to. Hell, Sollie’s secret was safe now anyway.

And after she yells at you for a while and wants to punch you, you bring her in and watch her see it for the first time. You see something beautiful in your wife’s face amid the astonishment and the awe. “Oh my God, Neddie…” Like watching a blind man discovering color for the first time. The magical caress of her eyes. The reverence. It takes your breath away, too.

And you bring in your ten-month-old baby and you hold him in front of it and say, One day, Davey, you’ll have a helluva story to tell.

You just won’t have a hundred million dollars, guy.

So it always comes back to that question. What do you do with it? After all, it’s stolen, right?

Throw some big Palm Beach bash. Get your face in “The Shiny Sheet.” On the Today show? Make the ARTnews Hall of Fame.

You stare at Gachet’s face. And you see it. In the angle of the cocked head. The wise, melancholy eyes.

Not the eyes of a doctor, sitting there in the hot June sun. But the eyes of the person painting him.

And you wonder: What did he know? Who does this really belong to?

Stratton? Sollie? Liz?

Certainly not me.

No, not me.

I mean, I’m just a lifeguard, right?

Chapter 120

NEXT YEAR…

“Ready…?” Ellie and I took Davey by the hand and led him down to the sea.

The beach was wonderfully quiet and empty that day. The surf was gentle, A couple of vacationers were strolling by, wetting their feet. An old woman wrapped all in white and wearing a wide straw hat, searching for shells. Ellie and I took Davey by the hand and let him jump off the dune to the surf.

“Ready,” my son replied, determined, his mop of blond hair the color of the sun.

“Here. This is how it’s done. ” I rolled up a piece of paper and threaded it into the mouth of the Coors Light beer bottle. Coors was always my brother’s favorite. Then I jammed the cap back on tightly and hammered it with my palm.

I smiled to Ellie. “That oughta hold.”

“I never met him, Ned, but I think Dave would like this.” Ellie looked on approvingly.

I winked. “Here.” I handed the makeshift bottle to Davey. We walked down to the rippling tide. “Wait for the current to draw back into the sea.” I pointed toward the foamy riptide. “You see it there?”

Davey nodded.

“Now,” I said, easing him toward the water, “throw!”

My twenty-month-old ran pitter-patter into the surf and hurled the bottle with all his might. It went only about three feet but caught the lip of the receding wave and was drawn, gently, by the undertow.

A new wave hit the bottle and it bobbed up high but rode on, as if it knew its purpose, and fell over the crest, farther away. We all cheered. A couple of seconds later, it was like a little craft that had righted itself, successfully riding the waves out to sea.

“Where’s it going, Daddy?” little Davey asked, shielding his eyes in the bright, ocean air.

“Maybe heaven,” Ellie said, watching it drift.

“What’s inside?”

I tried to answer, but my voice caught in my throat and my eyes grew a little tight.

“It’s a gift,” Ellie answered for me. She took my hand. “For your uncle Dave.”

It was a newspaper article, actually, that I had stuffed in the bottle. From the New York Times. In the past few days, it had also been reprinted in most other major newspapers in the world.

The art world was shocked Tuesday afternoon when a painting donated at a charity auction in Palm Beach, Florida, thought to be a reproduction of a missing van Gogh, astonishingly has been identified as an original.

A panel of art experts, consisting of historians and curators at major auction houses who studied the canvas for several days, authenticated the painting as van Gogh’s long-missing second portrait of Dr. Gachet, painted in the weeks before the renowned painter died. Dr. Ronald Suckling of Columbia University, who headed the panel, called its sudden appearance “irrefutable” and “a stu