I grew up on a farm with horses. I had a very clear, graphic knowledge of the mechanics of the act. But nothing prepared me for the feelings, for the need, for the intense sensations, for the power, for the sweet agony. We occupied a space so primal and so ripe with the present that our heartbeats became a deafening metronome, denting time, marking the moment. I was so filled with wonder that I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t even close my eyes.
“Moses, Moses, Moses,” my heart cried and my mouth echoed behind.
His eyes were as wide as mine must have been, his breaths as shallow, and when his lips weren’t pressed to my lips, they were parted, panting as we clung to each other, hands clasped and eyes locked. Bodies moving in a rhythm as old as the ground we lay upon.
I knew myself enough to know that later on I wouldn’t be proud of my lack of restraint. I wouldn’t like the litter-strewn concrete edifice nearby and the weeds beneath my back. I knew I wouldn’t be able to look my dad in the eyes for a while. But I also knew that the moment had been completely inevitable. I had been hurtling toward it from the second I laid eyes on Moses. My parents were religious people, spiritual people. I thought I was. I’d been raised going to church, week after week, counseled on the sins of the flesh. But nobody told me how it would feel. Nobody told me that resisting would feel like trying to breathe through a straw. Futile. Impossible. Unrealistic.
So I’d pulled the straw away and filled my lungs with air, filled my lungs with Moses, pulling him in with great big gulps, unable to slow down or focus on anything but the next breath.
Maybe I could have stayed away from him. Maybe I should have stayed away. But last night I couldn’t. Last night I didn’t. And by the light of day, sitting in the faded sunshine of an October afternoon, with another girl’s face peering down at me, painted by my lover, by the boy who owned me body and soul, I wished that I had.
Moses
THE POLICE QUESTIONED ME. It wasn’t the first time I’d been questioned by the police over one of my drawings. I didn’t offer anything. I didn’t say much. There was nothing I could say, and they had nothing on me. The truth was, I didn’t know anything. But I knew she wasn’t alive. People who were alive didn’t come visit me at odd hours and invade my thoughts. I just told them I’d heard about Molly missing and wanted to draw something for her. It was the truth. Kind of. The truth wasn’t anything most people wanted to hear. People liked religion but they didn’t want to have to exercise any faith. Religion was comforting with all its structure and its rules. It made people feel safe. But faith wasn’t safe. Faith was hard and uncomfortable and forced people to step out on a limb. At least that’s what Gigi said. And I believed Gi.
My grandma came rushing into the police station with frizzy grey curls flying and a look on her face that warned of trouble. Not trouble for me, luckily, but for the police officer who hadn’t called her while I was being questioned. I was eighteen. They didn’t have to call her, but they backed down pretty quickly under her wrath, and I was released within the hour, after agreeing to paint over my drawing. Hopefully Molly wouldn’t come back when I did. It wasn’t until we got home that Gigi unloaded on me.
“Why do you keep doing that? Painting walls and barns and drawing on white boards? You made Ms. Murray cry, got yourself arrested, and now this? Stop it! Or for hell’s sake, ask permission first!”
“You know why, Gigi.” And she did. It was the dirty little secret in my family. My hallucinations. My visions. The meds I’d been on most of my life made it a hundred times worse. They were meds made for people who had totally different problems, and when one medication didn’t work, they would try something new. I’d spent my whole life in and out of doctor’s offices—a ward of the state, an enemy of the state. Nothing had helped, and it wasn’t until coming to live with Gigi that I had finally been free of the medication. No one ever considered that maybe they weren’t hallucinations. They hadn’t thought about the fact that maybe it was exactly like I said.
“I can’t ask permission, Gigi. Because then I would have to explain. And people might tell me no. And then where would I be?” It was a legitimate argument as far as I was concerned. “Forgiveness is usually easier than permission.”
“Only if you’re five! Not when you’re eighteen with a police record. You’re going to end up in jail, Moses.” My grandma was upset, and that made me feel like shit.
I shrugged helplessly. The threat wasn’t new to me, and it didn’t especially scare me. I didn’t think it would be much worse than the way I lived now. There were a lot of concrete walls in prison, or so I heard. But Gigi wouldn’t be there. And Georgia. I wouldn’t ever be able to see Georgia again. She thought I was crazy though, so I didn’t know why I cared.
But I did.
“It would be such a waste, Moses. Such a huge waste! Your art is awe-inspiring. It’s wonderful. You could make a life for yourself with your gift. A good life. Just paint pictures for heaven’s sake! Just paint quietly in a corner! That would be amazing! Why do you have to paint barns and bridges and walls and people’s doors?” Gi threw up her hands and I wished I could explain.
“I can’t. I can’t stop. It’s the only thing that makes it bearable.”
“Makes what bearable?”
“The madness. Just . . . the madness in my head.”
“Moses was a prophet,” she began.
“I’m not a prophet! And you’ve told me this story before, Gi,” I interrupted.
“But I don’t think you understand it, Moses,” she insisted.
I stared at my grandmother, at her round face, her adoring smile, her guileless eyes. She was the only person who had ever made me feel like I wasn’t a burden. Or a psycho. If she wanted to tell me about baby Moses again, I would listen.
“Moses was a prophet. But he didn’t start out that way. First he was a baby, an abandoned baby in a basket,” Gigi started up again.
I sighed. I really hated the story of how I got my name. It was completely messed up. It wasn’t cute or romantic. It wasn’t a Bible story. It wasn’t even Hollywood. But it was Gigi. So I stayed silent and let her do her thing.
“They were killing all the Hebrew baby boys. They were slaves and the Pharaoh was worried that if the Hebrew nation got too large they would rise up and turn against him. But Moses’s mother couldn’t allow him to be killed. So to save him, she had to let him go. She put him in a basket and let him go,” Gi repeated with extra emphasis.
I waited. This wasn’t the place she usually stopped.
“Just like you, sweetie.”
“What? You mean I’m a basket case? Yeah, Gigi. I know.”
“No. That’s not what I mean. Your mother was a basket case, though. She made a mess of her life. She got so deep and so sick that there was no way she could take care of you. So she let you go.”
“She left me in a laundromat.”
“She saved you from herself.”
I sighed again. Gigi had loved my mother, which made her more forgiving and compassionate. I didn’t love my mother and I was neither compassionate nor forgiving.
“Don’t mess up your life, Moses. You’ve got to find a way to save yourself now. Nobody can do it for you.”
“I can’t control it, Gigi. You act like I can control it.” Even as I spoke, the heat started rising up my neck, and the tips of my fingers felt like they were pressed up against an ice-filled glass. It was a feeling I knew all too well and what came next would happen whether I wanted it to or not.
“They won’t leave me alone, Gi. And it’s going to drive me crazy. It is driving me crazy. I don’t know how to live like this.”
Gigi stood and wrapped her arms around my head, pulling my face into her chest like she could stand between me and everything that was already inside me. I kept my face pressed against her, my eyes closed tight, trying to think about Georgia, about last night, about how Georgia had refused to look away from me, and how my heart had felt like it was going to explode when I felt her come undone.
But even Georgia wasn’t enough. Molly was back. She wanted to show me pictures.
“Moses parted the waters of the Red Sea. You know that story too, right?” My grandmother spoke urgently, somehow understanding that I was fighting with something she couldn’t see. “You know how he parted the waters so the people could walk across?”
I grunted in response as flashing images flipped through my head in rapid succession, like the girl who lingered nearby had opened a thousand page book in my head and made the pages turn at a dizzying speed. I groaned and Gigi held on tighter.
“Moses! You have to bring the waters back down, just like Moses did in the Bible. Moses parted the waters, just like you can do. You part the waters, and people cross over. But you can’t let everyone cross whenever they want. You have to bring the waters back down. You can bring the waters back down and wash all the pictures away!”
“How?” I moaned, not even fighting anymore.
“What color is the water?” she insisted.
And I tried to imagine how that much water would look, rising up in enormous walls, held back by an invisible hand. Immediately the flipping images Molly was shoving into my skull slowed.
“Water is white,” I bit out. “Water is white when it’s angry.” I was suddenly so angry my temples throbbed and my hands shook. I was so tired of never having a minute’s peace.
“What else? Water isn’t always angry,” Gigi insisted. “What other colors?”
“Water is white when it’s angry. It’s red when the sun sets. It’s blue when it’s calm. It’s black when it’s night. It’s clear when it falls.” I was babbling, but it felt good. I was fighting back and my head felt clearer. Just like the water.
“So let the water fall. Let it come crashing down. Let it flow through your head and out your eyes. Water is clear when it washes the pain away, clear when it cleanses. Water has no color. Let it take the colors away.”
I could almost feel it, the walls tumbling down, being spun up inside it, the way I’d been churned in the surf the time I’d gone to the ocean when I was twelve. I had gotten beat up by the waves. But there had been no pictures inside the waves. No people. There had been nothing but water and breathlessness and raw, natural power. And I had loved it.
“What does it sound like, Moses? What does the water sound like?”
Niagara. It sounded like the falls. I’d heard the sound of the waterfall in Hawaii as it fell around Ms. Murray and the man she loved. Ray. Ray had shown me the inside of the waterfall. It had been so loud that there was no other sound but the water. And it had roared in my head then. Now it roared again.
“It sounds like a lion. It sounds like a storm.”
“So let the wall of sound fall down around you.” Gigi was speaking directly into my ear, yet I could barely hear her, as if we, too, stood inside a waterfall that was so loud all other sound disappeared.
I let myself get lost in the sound. Lost in the best way. Freed from myself, from my head. From the pictures.
I saw those towering walls of water held back by the hand of a God who could do all things, a God who had done as one Moses asked, long before I lived. And I asked Him to do it again. I asked God to release the water. And Molly disappeared completely.
Georgia
MOSES STOPPED GOING to school for good after the cops pulled him out of class because of the painting he’d plastered under the overpass. I stayed away from him for four weeks. For almost a solid month, I kept my distance. And he never sought me out. I didn’t know why I thought he would. But there were rules about this kind of thing, weren’t there? You didn’t have sex and then never call, never come by. You didn’t take someone’s virginity in the most epic, earthshattering way and go about your business. Or maybe he did.
But I knew he had felt what I felt that night. I knew he did. I couldn’t be the only one. And those feelings were wearing me down. The desire, the overwhelming need to do it all over, to let him cover me and make me do all the things I had sworn I wouldn’t do again was getting the best of me. I was absolutely miserable, and the Wednesday before Thanksgiving I couldn’t stand it anymore. I drove to the old mill and found his jeep, parked up close to the old rear entrance. He had to be about done with the clean-up he’d been hired to do. But he was here now, and I scribbled a note on the back of a service check-up I found in the glove compartment of Myrtle and I wrote –
Moses,
Meet me at the barn when you’re done.
~Georgia
I didn’t want to sign my name, but I wasn’t even confident enough to assume he would know it was me without my signature. Then I put the note under his windshield wipers, the words facing down so that if he missed it when he came out, he could almost read it right through the window, sitting in the driver’s seat.
Then I scurried back to my house, made sure I smelled like roses with fresh breath and clean undies and I tried not to think about how pathetic I was, how disappointed I was in myself as I put a little mascara on my lashes, staring into my own eyes, purposely not seeing myself.
I waited in the barn for an hour. My dad came out once, and I almost gave myself away, turning with a huge grin only to see him instead of Moses. I was instantly filled with terror that my dad would know something was up and disappointment that Moses still hadn’t come. There was a storm coming and as the weather turned colder, we often brought the horses in for the night. Lucky and Sackett, along with Dolly, Reba and Merle—the horses my parents used exclusively for equine therapy—were cozy in individual stalls, all of them brushed down and better groomed than they’d ever been. They gave me cover, and my dad fell for it. And I felt like a harlot when he headed back to the house, not a worry in his greying head, thinking his tomboy daughter was safe from the neighbor boy. Sadly, I probably was. But he wasn’t safe from me. And yet, there was not enough shame to make me leave the barn.
He didn’t come. I waited until midnight and finally wrapped myself in one of the blankets I’d spread over the straw, blankets I told myself we could sit on while we talked. And I fell asleep alone in the barn.
I awoke to the sound of rain against the tin roof, warm, comforted by the stirring of the horses and the smell of the clean straw beneath the blanket that had come loose while I slept. It wasn’t especially cold. The barn was cozy and sturdily built, and I’d flipped on the space heater before I’d succumbed to sleep. The light above the door was just a bare bulb, and it threw a mellow light across the floor as I opened my heavy lids and considered staggering to the house and crawling in bed or just staying put. I’d slept in the barn before, many times. But those other times I’d brought a pillow and I wasn’t wearing a lace bra that cut into my sides and jeans that were a little too tight to substitute for pajama bottoms.
It was when I sat up, shaking straw from my hair, that I saw Moses, just sitting in the far corner on a low stool my dad used for shoeing the horses. He was as far away from the horses as he could get, and thankfully, none of them seemed especially alarmed by his presence. But I was, just for a moment, and I let out a startled squawk.
He didn’t apologize or laugh or even make small talk. He just eyed me warily, as if watching me sleep was what I had summoned him for.
“What time is it?” I whispered, my voice scratchy and my heart heavy. He just made me feel so damn heavy.
“Two.”
“You just got home?”
“No. I went home. Showered. Went to bed.”
“You’re sleep walking, then?” I kept my voice light, soft.
“What do you want, Georgia? I kind of thought you were done with me.” Ah. There it was. A flash of anger. Quiet, brief. But there. And I reveled in it. My mom always said negative attention is better than no attention at all. She was usually talking about foster kids who acted out. But apparently it also applied to seventeen-year-old girls who were in love with boys who didn’t love them back. That thought made me angry.
“Do you love me, Moses?”
“No.” His response
was immediate. Defiant. But he stood and walked toward me anyway. And I watched him come, my eyes roving over him hungrily, my heart a huge, needy knot in my chest.
I didn’t argue with him because I knew that’s what he was going to say. And I had already decided that I wouldn’t believe him.
He squatted down beside the square bales I’d turned into a love nest. But he said he didn’t love me, so maybe my bed needed a different name. I laid back down and pulled the blanket around my shoulders, suddenly chilled and incredibly tired. But he followed me, hovering above me, his arms braced on either side of my head as he watched me watch him. And then he closed the distance and kissed my mouth chastely. Once, twice. And then again, not so chastely, with more pressure and more intent.
I breathed deeply and wrapped my hands around his neck, bringing him into me. I soaked in his scent, the sharp tang of paint mixed with soap and the red striped, candy mints his grandma kept in a bowl on the kitchen table. And something else too. Something I had no name for, and it was that unknown part of him that I wanted most of all. I kissed him until I could taste it in my mouth and when that wasn’t enough, I pulled it through the palms of my hands and the brush of my skin against his as he moved his mouth to my neck and whispered in my ear.
“I’m not sure what you want from me, Georgia. But if this is it, I’m willing.”
Georgia
WHEN THE SUN STARTED to push pink fingers against the little barn window that faced east, Moses rolled away from me and started pulling on his clothes, his eyes on the window and the dawn. It was November, and the sun rose sluggishly. It had to be after six. Time to go. My parents would be up and about soon, Mom probably already was. Thanksgiving dinner was a big job. Moses and I hadn’t spoken much in the hours he’d stayed with me. I’d been surprised that he’d stayed at all, even sleeping for several hours before waking me again with kisses and warm hands, convincing me there was no way I could ever live without him. He had stayed silent throughout, and his silence now was almost more than I could take. I wondered how he’d learned to push the words away, to drown them, to not feel them pounding against his head and his heart, begging to be spoken. I told myself I could do it now. I could be as quiet as he was. At least until he left the barn. But as he walked toward the door, the words broke free.