Read Online Fall from Grace by Richard North Patterson - Free Book Online

came back? Nostalgia? Once I got lymphoma, I hit the financial wall—I was too sick to work, my old paintings stopped selling, and I was all but uninsured. Then Brian died. In a few months, my life had become the train wreck Dad had always predicted. Mom wheedled the money from him for my treatment, then this ‘safe haven’ in which to recuperate—”
    “But you’re all right now, true?”
    Teddy twitched his shoulders. “As far as I know. Except for discovering that living with him wasn’t the worst part.”
    The quiet bitterness in Teddy echoed their mother’s. “How did you get along with him?” Adam wondered aloud.
    “Mostly by avoidance. Though it seemed to amuse him to keep me here on life support, and our mother dangling on yet another string.”
    The psychology of Teddy’s return, with its cycle of debasement for both son and mother, was painful for Adam to contemplate. But whatever the cost, he knew what Teddy had salvaged. Since boyhood, his brother had burned with the love of painting, the one thing—beyond the sexuality their father had scorned—that defined him. His partner had died; to lose the freedom to paint would have felt like another death, his own.
    Turning, Adam studied Teddy’s canvas. The landscape was both unsettling and unsurprising, reflecting Teddy’s originality and the seeds of his defeat. Though it portrayed Martha’s Vineyard, it lacked the soothing elements prized by the purchasers of popular art: the beaches of summer, bordered by sea grass; a sailboat breaching whitecapped waves; verdant farmland and trees at the height of their foliage. Instead, Teddy’s landscape captured winter—not the snowy landscape of a greeting card, but the bleak, pitiless gray of February, when short days and long nights led to drunkenness and domestic violence, families turning on one another. This was the Vineyard seen through a glass darkly, harsh and barren, its shadows distorted, its trees so stripped of life that they seemed the remnant of some terrible disaster, a nightmare terrain that would haunt anyone who saw it. Adam found it startling and unforgettable, evoking hidden truths perceived by a unique vision—and likely unsalable.
    As if reading Adam’s thoughts, Teddy remarked dryly, “Seems like I’ve got this corner of the market to myself.”
    Adam kept staring at the painting. “It’s astonishing, Ted—surreal yet all too real. When I was a kid, I wondered how you could do this. I still do.”
    Teddy smiled a little. “So do I, sometimes. It can be hard to live with.”
    Adam looked up at him. “And the Vineyard? Other than the obvious, how has living here been for you?”
    “Solitary.” His brother paused, stressing the word. “For a while I had a boyfriend—or thought I did. But then he got strange, in ways I won’t bother to describe. Except to say that I didn’t absorb enough of our mother’s masochism.” Teddy flashed a smile, interrupting himself. “Enough of that. Tell me when you’re escaping Afghanistan, so I’ll know when to quit worrying you’ll get yourself beheaded.”
    The jaunty air Adam tried to conjure sat on him uncomfortably, both because it was false and because he was certain that, for Teddy, it evoked Benjamin Blaine. “There’s nothing much to worry about,” he said easily. “I’m doing a tiny bit of nation-building in a nation that will never get built. Given that the place is crawling with our soldiers, the Taliban couldn’t care less about me.”
    Teddy gave him a penetrant look. “Cut the bullshit, Adam. Maybe this agrarian project you’re on is as pointless as you suggest. But they still deliver the New York Times here. Helmand Province is the most dangerous place on earth, filled with Taliban and laden with IEDs. You could get yourself killed by accident.”
    Adam shook his head. “Long ago, I stopped emulating Benjamin Blaine. Assuming that his death was, in fact, an accident.”
    Something flickered in Teddy’s eyes.