“I think you do love me, Moses. And I love you back, though it would be easier not to,” I said in a rush.
“Why would it be easier not to?” he shot back quietly, as if he hadn’t told me he didn’t love me without hesitation. He could say he didn’t love me, but he didn’t especially like being told he was unlovable.
“Because you think you don’t love me. That’s why.”
“That’s one of my laws, Georgia. Thou shall not love.”
“That’s not a law in Georgia.”
“Not this again,” he sighed.
“What would make you love me, Moses? What would make you move to Georgia?” I waggled my eyebrows as if it was all just a big, funny joke. “I’ve told you I would go red. I told you I would let you in my head. And I’ve given you everything else I have.” I felt my voice catch all of a sudden and a flood of tears rushed toward my eyes like a dam had burst with those words. I turned away immediately and busied myself with folding the blanket that now smelled like him. I folded and straightened and then pulled on my boots while Moses stood frozen, six feet away. At least he hadn’t left, though part of me wished he would.
“You’re upset.”
“Yeah. I guess I am.”
“That’s why I have that law,” he whispered, almost gently. “If you don’t love, then nobody gets hurt. It’s easy to leave. It’s easy to lose. It’s easy to let go.”
“Then maybe you should have had a few more laws, Moses.”
I turned my head and smiled at him brightly, not sure if I was pulling it off. My nose stung and I was guessing my eyes were too bright. But I chattered on with forced cheer.
“Thou shall not kiss. Thou shall not touch. Thou shall not screw.” But I didn’t say screw. I called it like it was, as much as it felt like acid on my tongue. It wasn’t that to me. It was love, not sex. Or maybe it was both. But at least it was both.
“You found me, Georgia. You chased me. You wanted me. Not the other way around,” Moses said. He hadn’t raised his voice. He didn’t even sound upset. “I didn’t break any of my rules. You broke yours. And you’re mad at me because of it.”
He was right. He was absolutely right. And I was so wrong.
“I’ll see you later, okay?” I said quietly, not daring to look at him. “You and Kathleen are coming over for Thanksgiving, right? We eat early so we can eat all day.” I was proud of myself for my composure. I despised myself for not kicking his ass.
“Yeah. Eleven, right?”
Small talk never felt so fake. I nodded and he waited, watching me. He started to say my name, and then he sighed and turned away. And without another word, he left the barn.
“Sunrise, the smell of straw, Thanksgiving dinner, a hot shower, a new day.” I whispered my list of greats, trying not to let the tears fall, trying not to think about what came next and how I was going to get through the next few hours.
Moses
“GRANDMA!” She didn’t move.
“Gigi!” I shook her and patted her cheek. But her head just lolled a little to the side and her eyes stayed closed. She lay on the kitchen floor, a heap of fragile limbs wrapped in her quilted robe. A broken glass lay at her side in three fat pieces, sharp islands in a large pool of blood tinged water. She’d hit her head when she fell, and the blood had merged with the water from her glass. It wasn’t a lot of blood. It was as if she was dead before she hit the ground; the blood spilt looked insufficient, almost. Death should require more blood.
When I’d come home the night before, I’d gone straight up to the bathroom and then from there, straight to my room. I’d lain in bed trying to hold out on Georgia. She’d stayed scarce for a month. And now she wanted me? It made me angry. And yet I wanted to see her. I wanted to see her so bad. I finally gave in, threw on my jeans and a shirt and crept out of the house, not wanting to wake Gi.
What if she’d lain here all night?
I laid my head against her chest, and I waited, willing her heart to resume its beat against my ear. But she felt cold. And her heart stayed quiet. She was cold. Without realizing what I was doing, I ran for a blanket and covered her up, tucking the blanket around her body securely.
“Gigi!” I closed my eyes, needing her to tell me what to do. I could see people who were dead. I saw them all the time. I needed to see Gigi. I needed her to tell me what happened. I needed her to take me with her.
I got my brushes. Assembled my paints. And I sat next to her and waited for her to come back to me, however she could. And when she did I would fill her walls with all her pictures. I would paint each day of her life until this one—this last terrible day—and she would tell me what the hell I was supposed to do now. I opened myself up, wide open like a gaping canyon with sharp edges and steep cliffs. I parted the waters, and as I concentrated, the walls of water grew so high I couldn’t see where they ended. Whatever wanted to cross could come. Everyone. Anybody. Just as long as they brought Gi back across.
But I didn’t feel Gigi. I didn’t see her. I saw my mother. I saw Georgia’s grandfather, I saw the girl named Molly and the man named Mel Butters who died inside his barn. He had his horses with him and he was happy. His happiness mocked me now, and I raged at him as I ran past his images of long rides and summer sunsets. He drew away immediately. I felt Ray, the man who loved Ms. Murray. He was worried about her and that worry pulsed out of him in grey waves. She wasn’t doing well. The picture we made for her didn’t comfort her.
I felt all their lives and their memories and I pushed them aside, trying to find my grandmother. There were others too. People I’d felt, pictures I’d seen before, memories that weren’t my own. These were people who had come to me over the years. People of all ages, of all colors. There was the Polynesian boy and his sister, Teo and Kalia, gang members who died in a turf war with the same gang I ran with for almost a year before being sent to live with Gigi. I’d resented losing that sense of belonging, though it had been a charade. I’d resented it like I resented all the other times I was uprooted. The brother and his sister tried to slow me down, to share their pictures of a younger sibling who was left behind, but I kept running, looking for Gigi.
As always, there were the lurkers, the gritty black smear that sat at the corner of my vision whenever I let myself get too deep. I never got too close or looked inside them. They stayed far away from the translucence that surrounded the people who showed me their lives. I wasn’t sure, but I suspected the lurkers were the dead who couldn’t let go, the dead who didn’t believe in an afterlife, so refused to see the life after, even though it glowed like a sea of candles and beckoned them sweetly. Maybe they couldn’t see it.
The sex, violence, and desperation of the kids in the gang, many who had abandoned all light, was a decadent cesspool for the lurkers. They were like a swarm around those kids. The longer I was in the gang, the better I could see them. Since coming to Levan, they’d stayed away.
And then there were people I didn’t know, people I’d never touched, people who had never touched me. There were generations of them, standing back to back in a long endless line, and they smiled at me like I was home. But I couldn’t find Gigi. And Gigi was home.
“Gigi!” I screamed, and my throat was so dry and sore that I stopped running through the world no one else seemed to be able to see. My head stopped spinning, but I was covered in paint. I had been painting the whole time I searched for my grandmother. The walls of Gigi’s house were covered in images that morphed from one to another without rhyme or reason. I’d painted the man I was certain was my great-grandfather, Gigi’s husband, a man I’d never met. I’d seen him in recent days. I’d seen him just beyond Gi’s right shoulder, shimmering, as if he was waiting for her to join him. Now his face was there among the others.
And there were so many others. I’d painted lurkers swarming the four corners of the room with hollow eyes and mournful faces. And between the faces of those I recognized and those I did not were grasping hands, burning barns, crashing waves and lig
htning. My mother’s face was there too, holding a basket, like she thought she needed to illustrate who she was. As if I didn’t know. I’d seen her a thousand times in my head. There were gang signs on the walls too, as if Teo and Kalia were warning me away. Red swirled into black, black swirled into grey, grey swirled into white, until the images stopped where I now stood.
“Moses! Moses, where are you?”
Georgia. Georgia was in the house. Georgia was in the kitchen. I heard her breathless rush of words, calling first to me and then babbling into the phone, telling whoever she was talking to that Kathleen Wright was “lying on the kitchen floor.”
“I think she’s dead. I think she’s been dead for a while. I can’t tell what happened to her, but she’s very, very cold,” she cried.
I wondered how that was possible, when I’d just covered her with a blanket. I wanted to go to Georgia. She was afraid. She hadn’t seen death before, not like me. But I was strangely numb, and my mind spun dizzily, still caught somewhere between the ground on which I stood and the Red Sea in my head.
But then she came to me, just like she always did. She found me. She wrapped her arms around me and started to cry. She pressed her face into my chest, ignoring the splotches of red, purple, and black that stained my shirt and smeared across her cheek.
“Oh, Moses. What happened? What happened here?”
But I couldn’t cry with her. I couldn’t move. I had to pull down the water. Gigi wasn’t coming back with me. I couldn’t find her, and I couldn’t stay any longer, not on the far side of the bank where there were only colors and questions.
Georgia pulled away, her face streaked with paint and confusion. “What’s wrong Moses? You’ve been painting. Why? Why, Moses? And you’re so cold. How can you be so cold?” Her teeth chattered as if she was truly chilled by my presence.
I laughed helplessly. I wasn’t cold. I was on fire. I wondered suddenly if Georgia had felt the ice in my hands, because that was the only place I was cold. I was hot. Burning. My neck and ears were on fire and my head was a raging inferno. So I concentrated on the walls of water, the towering sides of the channel in my mind, the channel that I needed to close. I didn’t answer Georgia. I couldn’t. I pushed away from her, blocking her out as I sought to block out the rest of them.
“Water is white when it’s angry. Blue when it’s calm. Red when the sun sets, black at midnight. And water is clear when it falls. Clear when it washes through my head and out my fingertips. Water is clear and it washes all the colors away, it washes all the pictures away.” I didn’t realize I was speaking until Georgia touched me. I pushed her away, needing to concentrate. I was pulling it down. The walls were starting to fall. I just needed to concentrate a little harder. Then I felt the ice start to spread from my hands up my arms and across my back, cooling my neck and calming my breath. And I was floating in it. The relief was so great my legs shook and finally, I reached out for Georgia. I could touch her now. I wanted nothing more than to hold onto her now. But just like the pictures in my head, Georgia was gone.
Georgia
WHEN I BURST THROUGH THE DOOR into the kitchen, the screen banging loudly, my mom whirled as if to reprimand me. But she must have seen something in my face. She set the bowl of potatoes down with a clatter.
“Martin!” She called for my dad as I stumbled toward her.
She’d been trying to keep everything warm on the stove. When Moses and Kathleen hadn’t shown up at eleven, we wondered a little. Kathleen Wright wasn’t the type to be late. At all. By 11:15 my mother was calling her house. But the phone just rang and rang, and Mom started to fret about cold turkey and mashed potatoes. So I volunteered to run over and see if Mrs. Wright needed help with anything and to hurry her and Moses along. She had insisted on bringing the pies for dessert even though my mom had resisted, saying they were our guests.
I hadn’t wanted to go. I felt raw and tired, and I didn’t need to see Moses any sooner than I had to. I already didn’t know how we were going to sit across from each other without a scarlet letter appearing on my chest. Moses would handle it fine. He just wouldn’t say anything. And I would sweat and squirm and not be able to taste anything I ate. Which made me angry and gave me courage as I flew out the door, the dusting of snow we’d gotten over night crunching beneath my boots. My Wranglers were stiff and clean, my best blouse pressed, and my hair carefully arranged in perfect waves. I even wore make-up. All dressed up for Thanksgiving and no one to see me. It was rude to be late for Thanksgiving dinner, and I picked up my pace as I neared Kathleen’s little, grey brick house and stomped up the front steps.
I knocked several times and then entered, calling out as I did.
“Mrs. Wright? It’s Georgia.”
The first thing I noticed was the smell. It smelled like turpentine. Paint. It smelled like paint. And it didn’t smell like pies. It should have smelled like pies.
I stopped immediately. A little foyer lay beyond the front door, just big enough for a coat rack, a little bench, and a flight of stairs. To the left there was a tiny sitting room, to the right, the dining room, which sat off the kitchen. Along the back of the house was a big family room that Kathleen Wright’s husband had added on forty years ago. It was accessible by walking through the kitchen or walking through the tiny sitting room. The first floor rooms made a sloppy, misshapen circle around the miniscule foyer with the staircase leading up to a bathroom and three small bedrooms on the second floor. I looked up the stairs, wondering if I dared go up them. The house was so quiet.
Then I heard a soft, swishing sort of sound. Swish, swish, swish. And then a foot fall. And one more. I placed the sound almost immediately. I’d listened with closed eyes to that sound several nights in a row as Moses painted my room.
“Moses?” I called, and I stepped through the door into the little dining room. Three steps and I saw her. Kathleen Wright was laying on the kitchen floor, covered in a lacy quilt that looked as if it had been dragged from her bed.
“Kathleen?” My voice squeaked as it rose in question. Maybe I should have run to her side. But it was so bizarre. I guess I didn’t know what I was seeing. So I tip-toed, as if she were truly sleeping and I was intruding on her odd little nap.
I knelt by her side and pulled back the covers just a bit. Her grey curls were visible above the edge of the quilt, but I couldn’t see her face.
“Mrs. Wright?” I said again, and then I knew. She wasn’t sleeping. And this wasn’t real. I must be the one sleeping.
“Kathleen?” I shrieked, falling back from my haunches. I caught myself instinctively, but felt a sharp slice, almost a tug, and yanked my hand away, scrambling and shrieking like death was biting and it was going to take me too. The seat of my freshly washed jeans were wet. I’d sat in some water and there was glass on the floor. It was just glass. Not death. But Kathleen Wright was dead and someone had covered her up, knowing she was dead.
I yanked a dish towel from the counter and realized I’d uncovered the pies—beautiful pies, all laid out on the counter. Four of them. There was a piece missing from the apple pie. I stared at the missing section for a second, wondering if Kathleen had sampled her baking before she died. It suddenly made the moment real and all the more tragic, and I turned away, wrapping my bleeding hand and clamoring for Kathleen’s old phone on the wall. I had to step over her to get to it, and that’s when I started to shake.
I dialed 911, just like we’re all told to do in an emergency. It didn’t take too many rings before an operator was there, an efficient-voiced woman, asking me all types of questions. I rattled off answers, even as my mind moved on to the horror I still hadn’t faced. Where was Moses? I could smell paint. I could smell paint and I had heard someone. Paint meant Moses. I set the phone down, the operator still talking, asking me something that I’d already answered. Then I walked through the little door that led to the family room on wooden legs, my rear-end wet, my hand bleeding, my heart on pause.
He was covered in paint—hea
d, arms and clothing streaked with blue and yellow, doused in red and orange, splattered with purple and black. He still wore the clothes he’d worn when he left me that morning, though nothing looked the same. The tail of his shirt was the only part that was untucked, strangely enough. But that wasn’t the strangest thing. Not by far. The walls were covered in paint too, but there was nothing splattered or haphazard about the paint on the walls.
It was both manic and mesmerizing, it was controlled chaos and detailed dementia. Moses had painted right over the pictures and the windows too. The curtains were streaked with paint, incorporated into the pictures like he couldn’t stop to pull them aside. From the amount of wall space he’d covered, he’d been at it for hours. There was graffiti and horses and people I’d never seen before. There were hallways and pathways and doorways and bridges, as if Moses was running from one place to the next, painting every inexplicable thing he saw. There was a woman’s face over a laundry basket. Her long, blonde hair streamed out around her and the basket was full of babies. It was both beautiful and bizarre, one image becoming another and another, without rhyme or reason. And there Moses stood, staring at the wall in front of him, a section of white yet to be filled, his hands by his sides.
And then he looked at me, his eyes hollow and rimmed with circles so dark they made his burnished skin look pale in comparison. The streaks of paint across his face made him look like a weary warrior returning from battle, only to find devastation at his doorstep.