Diary

TODAY, A MAN CALLED from Long Beach. He left a long message on the answering machine, mumbling and shouting, talking fast and slow, swearing and threatening to call the police, to have you arrested.

Today is the longest day of the year—but anymore, every day is.

The weather today is increasing concern followed by full-blown dread.

The man calling from Long Beach, he says his bathroom is missing.

BY THE TIME you read this, you’ll be older than you remember.

The official name for your liver spots is hyperpigmented lentigines . The official anatomy word for a wrinkle is rhytide . Those creases in the top half of your face, the rhytides plowed across your forehead and around your eyes, this is dynamic wrinkling , also called hyperfunctional facial lines , caused by the movement of underlying muscles. Most wrinkles in the lower half of the face are static rhytides, caused by sun and gravity.

Let’s look in the mirror. Really look at your face. Look at your eyes, your mouth.

This is what you think you know best.

Your skin comes in three basic layers. What you can touch is the stratum corneum, a layer of flat, dead skin cells pushed up by the new cells under them. What you feel, that greasy feeling, is your acid mantle, the coating of oil and sweat that protects you from germs and fungus. Under that is your dermis. Below the dermis is a layer of fat. Below the fat are the muscles of your face.

Maybe you remember all this from art school, from Figure Anatomy 201. But then, maybe not.

When you pull up your upper lip—when you show that one top tooth, the one the museum guard broke—this is your levator labii superioris muscle at work. Your sneer muscle. Let’s pretend you smell some old stale urine. Imagine your husband’s just killed himself in your family car. Imagine you have to go out and sponge his piss out of the driver’s seat. Pretend you still have to drive this stinking rusted junk pile to work, with everyone watching, everyone knowing, because it’s the only car you have.

Does any of this ring a bell?

When a normal person, some normal innocent person who sure as hell deserved a lot better, when she comes home from waiting tables all day and finds her husband suffocated in the family car, his bladder leaking, and she screams, this is simply her orbicularis oris stretched to the very limit.

That deep crease from each corner of your mouth to your nose is your nasolabial fold . Sometimes called your “sneer pocket.” As you age, the little round cushion of fat inside your cheek, the official anatomy word is malar fat pad, it slides lower and lower until it comes to rest against your nasolabial fold—making your face a permanent sneer.

This is just a little refresher course. A little step-by-step.

Just a little brushing up. In case you don’t recognize yourself.

Now frown. This is your triangularis muscle pulling down the corners of your orbicularis oris muscle.

Pretend you’re a twelve-year-old girl who loved her father like crazy. You’re a little preteen girl who needs her dad more than ever before. Who counted on her father always to be there. Imagine you go to bed crying every night, your eyes clamped shut so hard they swell.

The “orange peel” texture of your chin, these “popply” bumps are caused by your mentalis muscle. Your “pouting” muscle. Those frown lines you see every morning, getting deeper, running from each corner of your mouth down to the edge of your chin, those are called marionette lines . The wrinkles between your eyebrows, they’re glabellar furrows . The way your swollen eyelids sag down is called ptosis . Your lateral canthal rhytides, your “crow’s-feet,” are worse every day and you’re only twelve fucking years old for God’s sake.

Don’t pretend you don’t know what this is about.

This is your face.

Now, smile—if you still can.

This is your zygomatic major muscle. Each contraction pulls your flesh apart the way tiebacks hold open the drapes in your living room window. The way cables pull aside a theater curtain, your every smile is an opening night. A premiere. You unveiling yourself.

Now, smile the way an elderly mother would when her only son kills himself. Smile and pat the hand of his wife and his preteen daughter and tell them not to worry—everything really will work out for the best. Just keep smiling and pin up your long gray hair. Go play bridge with your old lady friends. Powder your nose.

That huge horrible wad of fat you see hanging under your chin, your jowls, getting bigger and jigglier every day, that’s submental fat. That crinkly ring of wrinkles around your neck is a platysmal band . The whole slow slide of your face, your chin and neck is caused by gravity dragging down on your superficial musculo-aponeurotic system .

Sound familiar?

If you’re a little confused right now, relax. Don’t worry. All you need to know is this is your face. This is what you think you know best.

These are the three layers of your skin.

These are the three women in your life.

The epidermis, the dermis, and the fat.

Your wife, your daughter, and your mother.

If you’re reading this, welcome back to reality. This is where all that glorious, unlimited potential of your youth has led. All that unfulfilled promise. Here’s what you’ve done with your life.

Your name is Peter Wilmot.

All you need to understand is you turned out to be one sorry sack of shit.

A WOMAN CALLS FROM Seaview to say her linen closet is missing. Last September, her house had six bedrooms, two linen closets. She’s sure of it. Now she’s only got one. She comes to open her beach house for the summer. She drives out from the city with the kids and the nanny and the dog, and here they are with all their luggage, and all their towels are gone. Disappeared. Poof.

Bermuda triangulated.

Her voice on the answering machine, the way her voice screeches up, high, until it’s an air-raid siren by the end of every sentence, you can tell she’s shaking mad, but mostly she’s scared. She says, “Is this some kind of joke? Please tell me somebody paid you to do this.”

Her voice on the machine, she says, “Please, I won’t call the police. Just put it back the way it was, okay?”

Behind her voice, faint in the background, you can hear a boy’s voice saying, “Mom?”

The woman, away from the phone, she says, “Everything’s going to be fine.” She says, “Now let’s not panic.”

The weather today is an increasing trend toward denial.

Her voice on the answering machine, she says, “Just call me back, okay?” She leaves her phone number. She says, “Please . . .”

PICTURE THE WAY a little kid would draw a fish bone—the skeleton of a fish, with the skull at one end and the tail at the other. The long spine in between, it’s crossed with rib bones. It’s the kind of fish skeleton you’d see in the mouth of a cartoon cat.

Picture this fish as an island covered with houses. Picture the kind of castle houses that a little girl living in a trailer park would draw—big stone houses, each with a forest of chimneys, each a mountain range of different rooflines, wings and towers and gables, all of them going up and up to a lightning rod at the top. Slate roofs. Fancy wrought-iron fences. Fantasy houses, lumpy with bay windows and dormers. All around them, perfect pine trees, rose gardens, and red brick sidewalks.

The bourgeois daydreams of some poor white trash kid.

The whole island was exactly what a kid growing up in some trailer park—say some dump like Tecumseh Lake, Georgia—would dream about. This kid would turn out all the lights in the trailer while her mom was at work. She’d lie down flat on her back, on the matted-down orange shag carpet in the living room. The carpet smelling like somebody stepped in a dog pile. The orange melted black in spots from cigarette burns. The ceiling was water-stained. She’d fold her arms across her chest, and she could picture life in this kind of place.

It would be that time—late at night—when your ears reach out for any sound. When you can see more with your eyes closed than open.

The fish skeleton. From the first time she held a crayon, that’s what she’d draw.

The whole time this kid’s growing up, maybe her mom was never home. She never knew her dad, and maybe her mom worked two jobs. One at a shitty fiberglass insulation factory, one slopping food in a hospital cafeteria. Of course, this kid dreams of a place like this island, where nobody works except to keep house and pick wild blueberries and beachcomb. Embroider handkerchiefs. Arrange flowers. Where every day doesn’t start with an alarm clock and end with the television. She’s imagined these houses, every house, every room, the carved edge of each fireplace mantel. The pattern in every parquet floor. Imagined it out of thin air. The curve of each light fixture or faucet. Every tile, she could picture. Imagine it, late at night. Every wallpaper pattern. Every shingle and stairway and downspout, she’s drawn it with pastels. Colored it with crayons. Every brick sidewalk and boxwood hedge, she’s sketched it. Filled in the red and green with watercolors. She’s seen it, pictured it, dreamed of it. She’s wanted it so bad.

Since as early as she could pick up a pencil, this was all she ever drew.

Picture this fish with the skull pointed north and the tail south. The spine is crossed with sixteen rib bones, running east and west. The skull is the village square, with the ferryboat coming and going from the harbor that’s the fish’s mouth. The fish’s eye would be the hotel, and around it, the grocery store, the hardware supply, the library and church.

She painted the streets with ice in the bare trees. She painted it with birds coming back, each gathering beach grass and pine needles to build a nest. Then, with foxgloves in bloom, taller than people. Then with even taller sunflowers. Then with the leaves spiraling down and the ground under them lumpy with walnuts and chestnuts.

She could see it so clear. She could picture every room, inside every house.

And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people. Especially not her own hippie mom, always tired and smelling like French fries and cigarette smoke.

It got until Misty Kleinman gave up on ever being a happy person. Everything was ugly. Everyone was crass and just . . . wrong.

Her name was Misty Kleinman.

In case she’s not around when you read this, she was your wife. In case you’re not just playing dumb—your poor wife, she was born Misty Marie Kleinman.

The poor idiot girl, when she was drawing a bonfire on the beach, she could taste ears of corn and boiled crabs. Drawing the herb garden of one house, she could smell the rosemary and thyme.

Still, the better she could draw, the worse her life got—until nothing in her real world was good enough. It got until she didn’t belong anywhere. It got so nobody was good enough, refined enough, real enough. Not the boys in high school. Not the other girls. Nothing was as real as her imagined world. This got until she was going to student counseling and stealing money from her mom’s purse to spend on dope.

So people wouldn’t say she was crazy, she made her life about the art instead of the visions. Really, she just wanted the skill to record them. To make her imagined world more and more accurate. More real.

And in art school, she met a boy named Peter Wilmot. She met you, a boy from a place called Waytansea Island.

And the first time you see the island, coming from anyplace else in the entire world, you think you’re dead. You’re dead and gone to heaven, safe forever.

The fish’s spine is Division Avenue. The fish’s ribs are streets, starting with Alder, one block south of the village square. Next is Birch Street, Cedar Street, Dogwood, Elm, Fir, Gum, Hornbeam, all of them alphabetical until Oak and Poplar Streets, just before the fish’s tail. There, the south end of Division Avenue turns to gravel, and then mud, then disappears into the trees of Waytansea Point.

This isn’t a bad description. That’s how the harbor looks when you arrive for the first time on the ferryboat from the mainland. Narrow and long, the harbor looks like the mouth of a fish, waiting to gobble you up in a story from the Bible.

You can walk the length of Division Avenue, if you’ve got all day. Have breakfast at the Waytansea Hotel and then walk a block south, past the church on Alder Street. Past the Wilmot house, the only house on East Birch, with sixteen acres of lawn going right down to the water. Past the Burton house on East Juniper Street. The woodlots dense with oaks, each tree twisted and tall as a moss-covered lightning bolt. The sky above Division Avenue, in summer it’s green with dense, shifting layers of maple and oak and elm leaves.

You come here for the first time, and you think all your hopes and dreams have come true. Your life will end happily ever after.

The point is, for a kid who’s only ever lived in a house with wheels under it, this looks like the special safe place where she’ll live, loved and cared for, forever.

For a kid who used to sit on shag carpet with a box of colored pencils or crayons and draw pictures of these houses, houses she’d never seen. Just pictures of the way she imagined them with their porches and stained-glass windows. For this little girl to one day see these houses for real. These exact houses. Houses she thought she’d only ever imagined . . .

Since the first time she could draw, little Misty Marie knew the wet secrets of the septic tanks behind each house. She knew the wiring inside their walls was old, cloth-wrapped for insulation and strung through china tubes and along china posts. She could draw the inside of every front door, where every island family marked the names and height of each child.

Even from the mainland, from the ferry dock in Long Beach, across three miles of salt water, the island looks like paradise. The pines so dark green they look black, the waves breaking against the brown rocks, it’s like everything she could ever want. Protected. Quiet and alone.

Nowadays, this is how the island looks to a lot of people. A lot of rich strangers.

For this kid who’d never swam in anything bigger than the trailer park pool, blinded by too much chlorine, for her to ride the ferry into Waytansea Harbor with the birds singing and the sun bouncing bright off the rows and rows of the hotel windows. For her to hear the ocean rolling into the side of the breakwater, and feel the sun so warm and the clean wind in her hair, smelling the roses in full bloom . . . the thyme and rosemary . . .

This pathetic teenager who’d never seen the ocean, she’d already painted the headlands and the cliffs that hung high above the rocks. And she’d got them perfect.

Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman.

This girl came here as a bride, and the whole island came out to greet her. Forty, fifty families, all of them smiling and waiting their turn to shake her hand. A choir of grade school kids sang. They threw rice. There was a big dinner in her honor at the hotel, and everyone toasted her with champagne.

From its hillside up above Merchant Street, the windows of the Waytansea Hotel, all six stories of them, the rows of windows and glassed-in porches, the zigzag lines of dormers in the steep roof, they were all watching her arrive. Everyone was watching her come to live in one of the big houses in the shady, tree-lined belly of the fish.

Just one look at Waytansea Island, and Misty Kleinman figured it was worth kissing off her blue-collar mom. The dog piles and shag carpet. She swore never to set foot in the old trailer park. She put her plans for being a painter on hold.

The point is, when you’re a kid, even when you’re a little older, maybe twenty and enrolled in art school, you don’t know anything about the real world. You want to believe somebody when he says he loves you. He only wants to marry you and take you home to live in some perfect island paradise. A big stone house on East Birch Street. He says he only wants to make you happy.

And no, honestly, he won’t ever torture you to death.

And poor Misty Kleinman, she told herself, it wasn’t a career as an artist that she wanted. What she really wanted, all along, was the house, the family, the peace.

Then she came to Waytansea Island, where everything was so right.

Then it turned out she was wrong.

A MAN CALLS FROM the mainland, from Ocean Park, to complain that his kitchen is gone.

It’s natural not to notice at first. After you live anywhere long enough—a house, an apartment, a nation—it just seems too small.

Ocean Park, Oysterville, Long Beach, Ocean Shores, these are all mainland towns. The woman with the missing closet. The man with his bathroom gone. These people, they’re all messages on the answering machine, people who had some remodeling done on their vacation places. Mainland places, summer people. You have a nine-bedroom house you only see two weeks each year, it might take you a few seasons to notice you’re missing part. Most of these people have at least a half dozen houses. These aren’t really homes. These are investments. They have condos and co-ops. They have apartments in London and Hong Kong. A different toothbrush waits in every time zone. A pile of dirty clothes on every continent.

This voice complaining on Peter’s answering machine, he says there was a kitchen with a gas range. A double oven in one wall. A big two-door refrigerator.

Listening to him gripe, your wife, Misty Marie, she nods yes, a lot of things used to be different around here.

It used to be you could catch the ferry just by showing up. It runs every half hour, to the mainland and back. Every half hour. Now you get in line. You wait your turn. Sit in the parking lot with a mob of strangers in their shiny sports cars that don’t smell like urine. The ferry comes and goes three or four times before there’s room for you on board. You, sitting all that time in the hot sun, in that smell.

It takes you all morning just to get off the island.

You used to walk into the Waytansea Hotel and get a window table, no problem. It used to be you never saw litter on Waytansea Island. Or traffic. Or tattoos. Pierced noses. Syringes washed up on the beach. Sticky used condoms in the sand. Billboards. Corporate tagging.

The man in Ocean Park, he said how his dining room wall is nothing but perfect oak wainscoting and blue-striped wallpaper. The baseboard and picture molding and cove molding run seamless and unbroken from corner to corner. He knocked, and the wall is solid, plaster drywall on wood-frame construction. In the middle of this perfect wall is where he swears the kitchen door used to be.

Over the phone, the Ocean Park man says, “Maybe this is my mistake, but a house has to have a kitchen? Doesn’t it? Isn’t that in the building code or something?”

The lady in Seaview only missed her linen closet when she couldn’t find a clean towel.

The man in Ocean Park, he said how he took a corkscrew from the dining room sideboard. He screwed a little hole where he remembered the kitchen door. He got a steak knife from the sideboard and stabbed the hole a little bigger. He has a little flashlight on his key chain, and he pressed his cheek to the wall and peeked through the hole he’d made. He squinted, and in the darkness was a room with words written across the walls. He squinted and let his eyes adjust, and there in the dark, all he could read were snatches:

“. . . set foot on the island and you will die . . .” the words said. “. . . run as fast as you can from this place. They will kill all of God’s children if it means saving their own . . .”

In where his kitchen should be, it says: “. . . all of you butchered . . .”

The man in Ocean Park says, “You’d better come see what I found.” His voice on the answering machine says, “The handwriting alone is worth the trip.”

THE DINING ROOM at the Waytansea Hotel, it’s named the Wood and Gold Dining Room because of its walnut paneling and gold brocade upholstery. The fireplace mantel is carved walnut with polished brass andirons. You have to keep the fire burning even when the wind blows from the mainland; then smoke backs up and coughs out the front. Soot and smoke slip out until you have to pull the batteries from every smoke detector. By then the whole hotel smells a little on fire.

Every time someone asks for table nine or ten by the fireplace and then bitches about the smoke and how it’s too hot, and asks for a new table, you need to take a drink. Just a sip of whatever you’ve got. Cooking sherry works for your poor fat wife.

This is a day in the life of Misty Marie, queen of the slaves.

Another longest day of the year.

It’s a game anybody can play. This is just Misty’s own personal coma.

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

In the Wood and Gold Dining Room, across from the fireplace, are windows that look down the coastline. Half the glazing putty has dried hard and crumbled until the cold wind whistles inside. The windows sweat. Moisture inside the room collects on the glass and trickles down into a puddle until the floor is soaked through and the carpet smells bad as a whale washed up on the beach for the last two weeks of July. The view outside, the horizon is cluttered with billboards, the same brand names, for fast food, sunglasses, tennis shoes, that you see printed on the litter that marks the tide line.

Floating in every wave, you see cigarette butts.

Every time someone asks for table fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen by the windows and then complains about the cold draft and the stink of the squishy wet carpet, when they whine for a new table, you need to take a drink.

These summer people, their holy grail is the perfect table. The power seat. Placement. The place they’re sitting is never as good as where they aren’t. It’s so crowded, just getting across the dining room, you’re punched in the stomach by elbows and hipbones. Slapped with purses.

Before we go any further, you might want to put on some extra clothes. You might want to stock up on some extra B vitamins. Maybe some extra brain cells. If you’re reading this in public, stop until you’re wearing your best good underwear.

Even before this, you might want to get on the list somewhere for a donor liver.

You can see where this is going.

This is where Misty Marie Kleinman’s whole life has gone.

You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.

Whenever anyone from the mainland comes in with a group of her friends, all of them thin and tanned and sighing at the woodwork and white tableclothes, the crystal bud vases filled with roses and fern and the silver-plate antique everything, anytime someone says, “Well, you should serve tofu instead of veal!” take a drink.

These thin women, maybe on the weekends you’ll see a husband, short and dumpy, sweating so hard the black flock he sprays on his bald spot is running down the back of his neck. Thick rivers of dark sludge that stain the back of his shirt collar.

Whenever one of the local sea turtles comes in clutching her pearls at her withered throat, old Mrs. Burton or Mrs. Seymour or Mrs. Perry, when she sees some skinny tanned summer women at her own personal favorite table since 1865 and says, “Misty, how could you? You know I’m always a regular here at noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Really, Misty . . .” then you need to take two drinks.

When the summer people ask for coffee drinks with foamed milk or chelated silver or carob sprinkles or soy-based anything, take another drink.

If they don’t tip, take another.

These summer women. They wear so much black eyeliner they could be wearing glasses. They wear dark brown lip liner, then eat until the lipstick inside is worn away. What’s left is a table of skinny children, each with a dirty ring around her mouth. Their long hooked fingernails the pastel color of Jordan almonds.

When it’s summer and you still have to stoke the smoking fireplace, remove an article of clothing.

When it’s raining and the windows rattle in the cold draft, put on an article of clothing.

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

When Peter’s mother comes in with your daughter, Tabbi, and expects you to wait on your own mother-in-law and your own kid like their own personal slave, take two drinks. When they both sit there at table eight, Granmy Wilmot telling Tabbi, “Your mother would be a famous artist if she’d only try, ” take a drink.

The summer women, their diamond rings and pendants and tennis bracelets, all their diamonds dull and greasy with sunblock, when they ask you to sing “Happy Birthday” to them, take a drink.

When your twelve-year-old looks up at you and calls you “ma’am” instead of Mom . . .

When her grandmother, Grace, says, “Misty dear, you’d have more money and dignity if you’d go back to painting . . .”

When the whole dining room hears this . . .

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

Anytime Grace Wilmot orders the deluxe selection of tea sandwiches with cream cheese and goat cheese and walnuts chopped into a fine paste and spread on paper-thin toast, then she eats only a couple bites and leaves the rest to waste and then charges this and a pot of Earl Grey tea and a piece of carrot cake, she charges all this to you and you don’t even know she’s done this until your paycheck is only seventy-five cents because of all the deductions and some weeks you actually end up owing the Waytansea Hotel money, and you realize you’re a sharecropper trapped in the Wood and Gold Dining Room probably for the rest of your life, then take five drinks.

Anytime the dining room is crowded with every little gold brocade chair filled with some woman, local or mainland, and they’re all bitching about how the ferry ride takes too long and there’s not enough parking on the island and how you never used to need a reservation for lunch and how come some people don’t just stay home because it’s just too, too much, all these elbows and needy, strident voices asking for directions and asking for nondairy creamer and sundresses in size 2, and the fireplace still has to be blazing away because that’s hotel tradition, then remove another article of clothing.

If you’re not drunk and half naked by this point, you’re not paying attention.

When Raymon the busboy catches you in the walk-in freezer putting a bottle of sherry in your mouth and says, “Misty, cariño . Salud !”

When that happens, toast him with the bottle, saying, “To my brain-dead husband. To the daughter I never see. To our house, about to go to the Catholic church. To my batty mother-in-law, who nibbles Brie and green onion finger sandwiches . . .” then say, “ Te amo,Raymon.”

Then take a bonus drink.

Anytime some crusty old fossil from a good island family tries to explain how she’s a Burton but her mother was a Seymour and her father was a Tupper and his mother was a Carlyle and somehow that makes her your second cousin once removed, and then she flops a cold, soft, withered hand on your wrist while you’re trying to clear the dirty salad plates and she says, “Misty, why aren’t you painting anymore?” and you can see yourself just getting older and older, your whole life spiraling down the garbage disposal, then take two drinks.

What they don’t teach you in art school is never, ever to tell people you wanted to be an artist. Just so you know, for the rest of your life, people will torture you by saying how you used to love to draw when you were young. You used to love to paint.

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

Just for the record, today your poor wife, she drops a butter knife in the hotel dining room. When she bends to pick it up, something’s reflected in the silver blade. It’s some words written on the underside of table six. On her hands and knees, she lifts the edge of the tablecloth. On the wood, there with the dried chewing gum and crumbs of snot, it says, “Don’t let them trick you again.”

Written in pencil, it says, “Choose any book at the library.”

Somebody’s homemade immortality. Their lasting effect. This is their life after death.

Just for the record, the weather today is partly soused with occasional bursts of despair and irritation.

The message under table six, the faint penciled handwriting, it’s signed Maura Kincaid .

IN OCEAN PARK, the man answers his front door, a wineglass in one hand, some kind of bright orange wine filling it up to his index finger on the side of the glass. He’s wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe with “Angel” stitched on the lapel. He wears a gold chain tangled in his gray chest hair and smells like plaster dust. His other hand holds the flashlight. The man drinks the wine down to his middle finger, and his face looks puffy with dark chin stubble. His eyebrows are bleached or plucked until they’re almost not there.

Just for the record, this is how they met, Mr. Angel Delaporte and Misty Marie.

In art school, you learn that Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, the Mona Lisa, it has no eyebrows because they were the last detail the artist added. He was putting wet paint onto dry. In the seventeenth century, a restorer used the wrong solvent and wiped them off forever.

A pile of suitcases sits just inside the front door, the real leather kind, and the man points past them, back into the house with his flashlight in hand, and says, “You can tell Peter Wilmot that his grammar is atrocious.”

These summer people, Misty Marie tells them carpenters are always writing inside walls. It’s the same idea every man gets, to write his name and the date before he seals the wall with Sheetrock. Sometimes they leave the day’s newspaper. It’s tradition to leave a bottle of beer or wine. Roofers will write on the decking before they cover it with tar paper and shingles. Framers will write on the sheathing before they cover it with clapboard or stucco. Their name and the date. Some little part of themselves for someone in the future to discover. Maybe a thought. We were here. We built this. A reminder.

Call it custom or superstition or feng shui.

It’s a kind of sweet homespun immortality.

In art history, they teach how Pope Pius V asked El Greco to paint over some nude figures Michelangelo had painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. El Greco agreed, but only if he could paint over the entire ceiling. They teach that El Greco is only famous because of his astigmatism. That’s why he distorted his human bodies, because he couldn’t see right, he stretched everybody’s arms and legs and got famous for the dramatic effect.

From famous artists to building contractors, we all want to leave our signature. Our lasting effect. Your life after death.

We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.

That day in Ocean Park, Angel Delaporte shows Misty the dining room, the wainscoting and blue-striped wallpaper. Halfway up one wall is a busted hole of curling, torn paper and plaster dust.

Masons, she tells him, they’ll mortar a charm, a religious medal on a chain, to hang inside a chimney and keep evil spirits from coming down the flue. Masons in the Middle Ages would seal a live cat inside the walls of a new building to bring good luck. Or a live woman. To give the building a soul.

Misty, she’s watching his glass of wine. She’s talking to it instead of his face, following it around with her eyes, hoping he’ll notice and offer her a drink.

Angel Delaporte puts his puffy face, his plucked eyebrow, on the hole and says, “. . . the people of Waytansea Island will kill you the way they’ve killed everyone before . . .” He holds the little flashlight tight to the side of his head so it shines into the darkness. The bristling brass and silver keys hang down to his shoulder, bright as costume jewelry. He says, “You should see what’s written in here.”

Slow, the way a child learns to read, Angel Delaporte stares into the dark and says, “. . . now I see my wife working at the Waytansea Hotel, cleaning rooms and turning into a fat fucking slob in a pink plastic uniform . . .”

Mr. Delaporte says, “. . . She comes home and her hands smell like the latex gloves she has to wear to pick up your used rubbers . . . her blond hair’s gone gray and smells like the shit she uses to scrub out your toilets when she crawls into bed next to me . . .”

“Hmm,” he says, and drinks his wine down to his ring finger. “That’s a misplaced modifier.”

He reads, “. . . her tits hang down the front of her like a couple of dead carp. We haven’t had sex in three years . . .”

It gets so quiet Misty tries to make a little laugh.

Angel Delaporte holds out the flashlight. He drinks his bright orange wine down to where his pinkie finger is on the side of the glass, and he nods at the hole in the wall and says, “Read it for yourself.”

His ring of keys is so heavy Misty has to make a muscle to lift the little flashlight, and when she puts her eye to the small, dark hole, the words painted on the far wall say:

“. . . you’ll die wishing you’d never set foot . . .”

The missing linen closet in Seaview, the missing bathroom in Long Beach, the family room in Oysterville, whenever people go poking around, this is what they find. It’s always Peter’s same tantrum.

Your same old tantrum.

“. . . you’ll die and the world will be a better place for . . .”

In all these mainland houses Peter worked on, these investments, it’s the same filth written and sealed inside.

“. . . die screaming in terible . . .”

And behind her, Angel Delaporte says, “Tell Mr. Wilmot that he spelled terrible wrong.”

These summer people, poor Misty, she tells them, Mr. Wilmot wasn’t himself for the last year or so. He had a brain tumor he didn’t know about for—we don’t know how long. Her face still pressed to the hole in the wallpaper, she tells this Angel Delaporte how Mr. Wilmot did some work in the old Waytansea Hotel, and now the room numbers jump from 312 to 314. Where there used to be a room, there’s just perfect, seamless hallway, chair molding, baseboard, new power outlets every six feet, top-quality work. All of it code, except the room sealed inside.

And this Ocean Park man swirls the wine in his glass and says, “I hope room 313 wasn’t occupied at the time.”

Out in her car, there’s a crowbar. They can have this doorway opened back up in five minutes. It’s just drywall is all, she tells the man. Just Mr. Wilmot going crazy.

When she puts her nose in the hole and sniffs, the wallpaper smells like a million cigarettes came here to die. Inside the hole, you can smell cinnamon and dust and paint. Somewhere inside the dark, you can hear a refrigerator hum. A clock ticks.

Written around and around the walls, it’s always this same rant. In all these vacation houses. Written in a big spiral that starts at the ceiling and spins to the floor, around and around so you have to stand in the center of the room and turn to read it until you’re dizzy. Until it makes you sick. In the light from the key ring, it says:

“. . . murdered despite all your money and status . . .”

“Look,” she says. “There’s your stove. Right where you thought.” And she steps back and gives him the little flashlight.

Every contractor, Misty tells him, they’ll sign their work. Mark their territory. Finish carpenters will write on the subfloor before they lay the hardwood parquet or the carpet pad. They’ll write on the walls before the wallpaper or tile. This is what’s inside everybody’s walls, this record of pictures, prayers, names. Dates. A time capsule. Or worse, you could find lead pipes, asbestos, toxic mold, bad wiring. Brain tumors. Time bombs.

Proof that no investment is yours forever.

What you don’t really want to know—but you don’t dare forget.

Angel Delaporte, his face pressed to the hole, he reads, “. . . I love my wife and I love my kid . . .” He reads, “. . . I won’t see my family pushed down and down the ladder by you low-life parasites . . .”

He leans into the wall, his face twisting hard against the hole, and says, “This handwriting is so compelling. The way he writes the letter f in ‘set foot’ and ‘fat fucking slob,’ the top line is so long it overhangs the rest of the word. That means he’s actually a very loving, protective man.” He says, “See the k in ‘kill you’? The way the front leg is extralong shows he’s worried about something.”

Grinding his face against the hole, Angel Delaporte reads, “. . . Waytansea Island will kill every last one of God’s children if it means saving our own . . .”

He says, the way the capital I ’s are thin and pointed proves Peter’s got a keen sharp mind but he’s scared to death of his mother.

His keys jingle as he pokes the little flashlight around and reads, “. . . I have danced with your toothbrush stuck up my dirty asshole . . .”

His face jerks back from the wallpaper, and he says, “Yeah, that’s my stove all right.” He drinks the last of the wine, swishing it around, loud, in his mouth. He swallows it, saying, “I knew I had a kitchen in this house.”

Poor Misty, she says she’s sorry. She’ll rip open the doorway. Mr. Delaporte, he probably wants to go get his teeth cleaned this afternoon. That, and maybe a tetanus shot. Maybe a gamma globulin, too.

With one finger, Mr. Delaporte touches a big wet smear next to the hole in the wall. He puts his wineglass to his mouth and goes cross-eyed to find it empty. The dark, wet smear on the blue wallpaper, he touches it. Then he makes a nasty face and wipes his finger on the side of his bathrobe and says, “I hope Mr. Wilmot is heavily insured and bonded.”

“Mr. Wilmot has been unconscious in the hospital for the last few days,” Misty says.

Reaching a pack of cigarettes from his bathrobe pocket, he shakes one out and says, “So you run his remodeling firm now?”

And Misty tries to laugh. “I’m the fat fucking slob,” she says.

And the man, Mr. Delaporte says, “Pardon?”

“I’m Mrs. Peter Wilmot.”

Misty Marie Wilmot, the original shrewish bitch monster in the flesh. She tells him, “I was working at the Waytansea Hotel when you called this morning.”

Angel Delaporte nods, looking at his empty wineglass. The glass, sweaty and smeared with fingerprints. He holds the wineglass up between them and says, “You want I should get you a drink?”

He looks at where she pressed her face to his dining room wall, where she let one tear leak out and smeared his blue-striped wallpaper. A wet print of her eye, the crow’s-feet around her eye, her obicularis oculi behind bars. Still holding the unlit cigarette in one hand, he takes his white terry cloth belt in his other hand and scrubs at the tearstain. And he says, “I’ll give you a book. It’s called Graphology . You know, handwriting analysis.”

And Misty, who really did think the Wilmot house, the sixteen acres on Birch Street, meant happily ever after, she says, “You want to maybe rent a place for the summer?” She looks at his wineglass and says, “A big old stone house. Not on the mainland, but out on the island ?”

And Angel Delaporte, he looks back over his shoulder at her, at Misty’s hips, then her breasts inside her pink uniform, then her face. He squints and shakes his head a little and says, “Don’t worry, your hair’s not that gray.”

His cheek and temple, all around his eye, he’s powdered with white plaster dust.

And Misty, your wife, she reaches toward him, her fingers held open. Her palm turned up, the skin rashy and red, she tells him, “Hey, if you don’t believe I’m me,” she says, “you can smell my hand.”

YOUR POOR WIFE, she’s racing from the dining room to the music room, grabbing up silver candlesticks, little gilded mantel clocks, and Dresden figurines and stuffing them in a pillowcase. Misty Marie Wilmot, after working the breakfast shift, now she’s looting the big Wilmot house on Birch Street. Like she’s a goddamn burglar in her own house, she’s snatching up silver cigarette boxes and pillboxes and snuffboxes. Off fireplace mantels and nightstands, she’s collecting saltcellars and carved-ivory knickknacks. She’s lugging around the pillowcase, heavy and clanking with gilded-bronze gravy boats and hand-painted porcelain platters.

Still in her pink plastic uniform, sweat stains wet under each arm. Her name tag pinned to her chest, it lets all the strangers in the hotel call her Misty. Your poor wife. She works the same kind of shitty restaurant job her mom did.

Unhappily ever after.

After that, she’s running home to pack. She’s slinging around a string of keys as noisy as anchor chains. A string of keys like a cluster of iron grapes. These are long and short keys. Fancy notched skeleton keys. Brass and steel keys. Some are barrel keys, hollow like the barrel of a gun, some of them as big as a pistol, the kind a pissed-off wife might tuck in her garter and use to shoot an idiot husband.

Misty is jabbing keys into locks to see if they’ll turn. She’s trying the locks on cabinets and closet doors. She’s trying key after key. Stab and twist. Jab and turn. And each time a lock pops open, she dumps the pillowcase inside, the gilded mantel clocks and silver napkin rings and lead crystal compotes, and she locks the door.

Today is moving-out day. It’s another longest day of the year.

In the big house on East Birch Street, everybody’s supposed to be packing, but no. Your daughter comes downstairs with a total of nothing to wear for the rest of her life. Your loony mother, she’s still cleaning. She’s somewhere in the house, dragging the old vacuum cleaner around, on her hands and knees, picking threads and bits of lint out of the rugs and feeding them into the vacuum hose. Like it matters a good goddamn how the rugs look. Like the Wilmot family will ever live here ever again.

Your poor wife, that silly girl who came here a million years ago from some trailer park in Georgia, she doesn’t know where to begin.

It’s not like the Wilmot family couldn’t see this coming. You don’t just wake up one day and find the trust fund empty. All the family money gone.

It’s only noon, and she’s trying to put off her second drink. The second is never as good as the first. The first one is so perfect. Just a little breather. A little something to keep her company. It’s only four hours until the renter comes for the keys. Mr. Delaporte. Until they need to vacate.

It’s not even a real drink drink. It’s a glass of wine, and she’s only had one, maybe two swallows. Still, just knowing it’s nearby. Just knowing the glass is still at least half full. It’s a comfort.

After the second drink, she’ll take a couple aspirin. Another couple drinks, another couple aspirin, and this will get her through today.

In the big Wilmot house on East Birch Street, just inside the front door, you’ll find what looks like graffiti. Your wife, she’s dragging around her pillowcase of loot when she sees it—some words scribbled on the back of the front door. The pencil marks there, the names and dates on the white paint. Starting from knee high, you can see dark little straight lines, and along each line a name and number:

Tabbi, age five.

Tabbi, who’s twelve now with lateral canthal rhytides around her eyes from crying.

Or: Peter, age seven.

That’s you, age seven. Little Peter Wilmot.

Some scribbles say: Grace, age six, age eight, age twelve. They go up to Grace, age seventeen. Grace with her baggy jowls of submental fat and deep playsmal bands around her neck.

Sound familiar?

Does any of this ring a bell?

These pencil lines, the crest of a flood tide. The years 1795 . . . 1850 . . . 1979 . . . 2003. Old pencils were thin sticks of wax mixed with soot and wrapped with string to keep your hands clean. Before that are just notches and initials carved in the thick wood and white paint of the door.

Some other names on the back of the door, you won’t recognize. Herbert and Caroline and Edna, a lot of strangers who lived here, grown and gone. Infants, then children, adolescents, adults, then dead. Your blood relations, your family, but strangers. Your legacy. Gone, but not gone. Forgotten but still here to be discovered.

Your poor wife, she’s standing just inside the front door, looking at the names and dates just one last time. Her own name not among them. Poor white trash Misty Marie, with her rashy red hands and her pink scalp showing through her hair.

All this history and tradition she used to think would keep her safe. Insulate her, forever.

This isn’t typical. She’s not a boozer. In case anybody needs to be reminded, she’s under a lot of stress. Forty-one fucking years old, and now she has no husband. No college degree. No real work experience—unless you count scrubbing the toilet . . . stringing cranberries for the Wilmot Christmas tree . . . All she’s got is a kid and a mother-in-law to support. It’s noon, and she’s got four hours to pack everything of value in the house. Starting with the silverware, the paintings, the china. Everything they can’t trust to a renter.

Your daughter, Tabitha, comes down from upstairs. Twelve years old, and all she’s carrying is one little suitcase and a shoe box wrapped with rubber bands. With none of her winter clothes or boots. She’s packed just a half dozen sundresses, some jeans, and her swimsuit. A pair of sandals, the tennis shoes she’s wearing.

Your wife, she’s snatching up a bristling ancient ship model, the sails stiff and yellowed, the rigging as fine as cobwebs, and she says, “Tabbi, you know we’re not coming back.”

Tabitha stands in the front hallway and shrugs. She says, “Granmy says we are.”

Granmy is what she calls Grace Wilmot. Her grandmother, your mother.

Your wife, your daughter, and your mother. The three women in your life.

Stuffing a sterling silver toast rack into her pillowcase, your wife yells, “Grace!”

The only sound is the roar of the vacuum cleaner from somewhere deep in the big house. The parlor, maybe the sunporch.

Your wife drags her pillowcase into the dining room. Grabbing a crystal bone dish, your wife yells, “Grace, we need to talk! Now!”

On the back of the door, the name “Peter” climbs as high as your wife can remember, just higher than her lips can stretch when she stands on tiptoe in her black pair of high heels. Written there, it says “Peter, age eighteen.”

The other names, Weston and Dorothy and Alice, are faded on the door. Smudged with fingerprints, but not painted over. Relics. Immortal. The heritage she’s about to abandon.

Twisting a key in the lock of a closet, your wife throws back her head and yells, “Grace!”

Tabbi says, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s this goddamn key,” Misty says, “it won’t work.”

And Tabbi says, “Let me see.” She says, “Relax, Mom. That’s the key to wind up the grandfather clock.”

And somewhere the roar of the vacuum cleaner goes quiet.

Outside, a car rolls down the street, slow and quiet, with the driver leaning forward over the steering wheel. His sunglasses pushed up on top of his face, he stretches his head around, looking for a place to park. Stenciled down the side of his car, it says, “Silber International—Beyond the Limits of Being You .”

Paper napkins and plastic cups blow up from the beach with the deep thump and the word “fuck” set to dance music.

Standing beside the front door is Grace Wilmot, smelling like lemon oil and floor wax. Her smoothed gray head of hair stops a little below the height she was at age fifteen. Proof she’s shrinking. You could take a pencil and mark behind the top of her head. You could write: “Grace, age seventy-two.”

Your poor, bitter wife looks at a wooden box in Grace’s hands. Pale wood under yellowed varnish with brass corners and hinges tarnished almost black, the box has legs that fold out from each side to make it an easel.

Grace offers the box, gripped in both her blue, lumpy hands, and says, “You’ll be needing these.” She shakes the box. The stiff brushes and old tubes of dried-up paint and broken pastels rattle inside. “To start painting,” Grace says. “When it’s time.”

And your wife, who doesn’t have the spare time to throw a fit, she just says, “Leave it.”

Peter Wilmot, your mother is fucking useless.

Grace smiles and opens her eyes wide. She holds the box higher, saying, “Isn’t that your dream?” Her eyebrows lifted, her corrugator muscle at work, she says, “Ever since you were a little girl, didn’t you always want to paint?”

The dream of every girl in art school. Where you learn about wax pencils and anatomy and wrinkles.

Why Grace Wilmot is even cleaning, God only knows. What they need to do is pack. This house: your house: the sterling silver tableware, the forks and spoons are as big as garden tools. Above the dining room fireplace is an oil painting of Some Dead Wilmot. In the basement is a glittering poisonous museum of petrified jams and jellies, antique homemade wines, Early American pears fossilized in amber syrup. The sticky residue of wealth and free time.

Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.

Instead of packing anything of value, something they could sell, Grace brings this old box of paints. Tabbi has her shoe box of junk jewelry, her dress-up jewelry, brooches and rings and necklaces. A layer of loose rhinestones and pearls roll around in the bottom of the shoe box. A box of sharp rusted pins and broken glass. Tabbi stands against Grace’s arm. Behind her, just even with the top of Tabbi’s head, the door says “Tabbi, age twelve” and this year’s date written in fluorescent pink felt-tipped pen.

The junk jewelry, Tabbi’s jewelry, it belonged to these names.

All that Grace has packed is her diary. Her red leather diary and some light summer clothes, most of them pastel hand-knit sweaters and pleated silk skirts. The diary, it’s cracked red leather with a little brass lock to keep it shut. Stamped in gold across the cover, it says “Diary.”

Grace Wilmot, she’s always after your wife to start a diary.

Grace says, Start painting again.

Grace says, Go. Get out and visit the hospital more.

Grace says, Smile at the tourists.

Peter, your poor, frowning ogre of a wife looks at your mother and daughter and she says, “Four o’clock. That’s when Mr. Delaporte comes to get the keys.”

This isn’t their house, not anymore. Your wife, she says, “When the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the four, if it’s not packed or locked up by then, you’ll never see it again.”

Misty Marie, her wineglass has at least a couple swallows left in it. And seeing it there on the dining room table, it looks like the answer. It looks like happiness and peace and comfort. Like Waytansea Island used to look.

Standing here inside the front door, Grace smiles and says, “No Wilmot ever leaves this house forever.” She says, “And no one who comes here from the outside stays for long.”

Tabbi looks at Grace and says, “Granmy, quand est-ce qu’on revient ?”

And her grandmother says, “En trois mois,” and pats Tabbi’s head. Your old, useless mother goes back to feeding lint to the vacuum cleaner.

Tabbi starts to open the front door, to take her suitcase to the car. That rusted junk pile stinking of her father’s piss.

Your piss.

And your wife asks her, “What did your grandmother just tell you?”

And Tabbi turns to look back. She rolls her eyes and says, “God! Relax, Mom. She only said you look pretty this morning.”

Tabbi’s lying. Your wife’s not stupid. These days, she knows how she really looks.

What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.

Then, when she’s alone again, Mrs. Misty Marie Wilmot, when no one’s there to see, your wife goes up on her tiptoes and stretches her lips toward the back of the door. Her fingers spread against the years and ancestors. The box of dead paints at her feet, she kisses the dirty place under your name where she remembers your lips would be.

JUST FOR THE RECORD, Peter, it really sucks how you tell everybody your wife’s a hotel maid. Yeah, maybe two years ago she used to be a maid.

Now she happens to be the assistant supervisor of the dining room servers. She’s “Employee of the Month” at the Waytansea Hotel. She’s your wife, Misty Marie Wilmot, mother of your child, Tabbi. She almost, just about, nearly has an undergraduate degree in fine art. She votes and pays taxes. She’s queen of the fucking slaves, and you’re a brain-dead vegetable with a tube up your ass in a coma, hooked to a zillion very expensive gadgets that keep you alive.

Dear sweet Peter, you’re in no position to call anybody a fat fucking slob.

With your kind of coma victims, all the muscles contract. The tendons cinch in tighter and tighter. Your knees pull up to the chest. Your arms fold in, close to your gut. Your feet, the calves contract until the toes point screaming straight down, painful to even look at. Your hands, the fingers curl under with the fingernails cutting the inside of each wrist. Every muscle and tendon getting shorter and shorter. The muscles in your back, your spinal erectors, they shrink and pull your head back until it’s almost touching your ass.

Can you feel this?

You all twisted and knotted up, this is the mess Misty drives three hours to see in the hospital. And that doesn’t count the ferry ride. You’re the mess Misty’s married to.

This is the worst part of her day, writing this. It was your mother, Grace, who had the bright idea about Misty keeping a coma diary. It’s what sailors and their wives used to do, Grace said, keep a diary of every day they were apart. It’s a treasured old seafaring tradition. A golden old Waytansea Island tradition. After all those months apart, when they come back together, the sailors and wives, they trade diaries and catch up on what they missed. How the kids grew up. What the weather did. A record of everything. Here’s the everyday shit you and Misty would bore each other with over dinner. Your mother said it would be good for you, to help you process through your recovery. Someday, God willing, you’ll open your eyes and take Misty in your arms and kiss her, your loving wife, and here will be all your lost years, written here in loving detail, all the details of your kid growing up and your wife longing for you, and you can sit under a tree with a nice lemonade and have a nice time catching up.

Your mother, Grace Wilmot, she needs to wake up from her own kind of coma.

Dear sweet Peter. Can you feel this?

Everyone’s in their own personal coma.

What you’ll remember from before, nobody knows. One possibility is all your memory is wiped out. Bermuda triangulated. You’re brain-damaged. You’ll be born a whole new person. Different, but the same. Reborn.

Just for the record, you and Misty met in art school. You got her pregnant, and you two moved back to live with your mother on Waytansea Island. If this is stuff you know already, just skip ahead. Skim over it.

What they don’t teach you in art school is how your whole life can end when you get pregnant.

You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.

And just in case you forgot, you’re one chicken-shit piece of work. You’re a selfish, half-assed, lazy, spineless piece of crap. In case you don’t remember, you ran the fucking car in the fucking garage and tried to suffocate your sorry ass with exhaust fumes, but no, you couldn’t even do that right. It helps if you start with a full gas tank.

Just so you know how bad you look, any person in a coma longer than two weeks, doctors call this a persistent vegetative state. Your face swells and turns red. Your teeth start to drop out. If you’re not turned every few hours, you get bedsores.

Today, your wife’s writing this on your one hundredth day as a vegetable.

As for Misty’s breasts looking like a couple dead carp, you should talk.

A surgeon implanted a feeding tube in your stomach. You’ve got a thin tube inserted into your arm to measure blood pressure. It measures oxygen and carbon dioxide in your arteries. You’ve got another tube inserted into your neck to measure blood pressure in the veins returning to your heart. You’ve got a catheter. A tube between your lungs and your rib cage drains any fluids that might collect. Little round electrodes stuck to your chest monitor your heart. Headphones over your ears send sound waves to stimulate your brain stem. A tube forced down your nose pumps air into you from a respirator. Another tube plugs into your veins, dripping fluids and medication. To keep them from drying out, your eyes are taped shut.

Just so you know how you’re paying for this, Misty’s promised the house to the Sisters of Care and Mercy. The big old house on Birch Street, all sixteen acres, the second you die the Catholic church gets the deed. A hundred years of your precious family history, and it goes right into their pocket.

The second you stop breathing, your family is homeless.

But don’t sweat it, between the respirator and the feeding tube and the medication, you’re not going to die. You couldn’t die if you wanted to. They’re going to keep you alive until you’re a withered skeleton with machines just pumping air and vitamins through you.

Dear sweet stupid Peter. Can you feel this?

Besides, when people talk about pulling the plug, that’s pretty much just a figure of speech. This stuff all looks to be hardwired. Plus there’s the backup generators, the fail-safe alarms, the batteries, the ten-digit secret codes, the passwords. You’d need a special key to turn off the respirator. You’d need a court order, a malpractice liability waiver, five witnesses, the consent of three doctors.

So sit tight. Nobody’s pulling any plugs until Misty figures a way out of this crappy mess you’ve left her in.

Just in case you don’t remember, every time she comes to visit you, she wears one of those old junk jewelry brooches you gave her. Misty takes it off her coat and opens the pin of it. It’s sterilized with rubbing alcohol, of course. God forbid you get any scars or staph infections. She pokes the pin of the hairy old brooch—real, real slow—through the meat of your hand or your foot or arm. Until she hits a bone or it pokes out the other side. When there’s any blood, Misty cleans it up.

It’s so nostalgic.

Some visits, she sticks the needle in you, stabbing again and again. And she whispers, “Can you feel this?”

It’s not as if you’ve never been stuck with a pin.

She whispers, “You’re still alive, Peter. How about this ?”

You sipping your lemonade, reading this under a tree a dozen years from now, a hundred years from now, you need to know that the best part of each visit is sticking in that pin.

Misty, she gave you the best years of her life. Misty owes you nothing but a big fat divorce. Stupid, cheap fuck that you were, you were going to leave her with an empty gas tank like you always do. Plus, you left your hate messages inside everyone’s walls. You promised to love, honor, and cherish. You said you’d make Misty Marie Kleinman into a famous artist, but you left her poor and hated and alone.

Can you feel this?

You dear sweet stupid liar. Your Tabbi sends her daddy hugs and kisses. She turns thirteen in two weeks. A teenager.

Today’s weather is partly furious with occasional fits of rage.

In case you don’t remember, Misty brought you lambskin boots to keep your feet warm. You wear tight orthopedic stockings to force the blood back up to your heart. She’s saving your teeth as they fall out.

Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn’t bother to torture you if she didn’t.

You fucker. Can you feel this?

OKAY, OKAY. FUCK.

Just for the record, a big part of this mess is Misty’s fault. Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman. The little latchkey product of divorce with no parent at home most days.

Everybody in college, all her friends in the fine arts program, they told her:

Don’t.

No, her friends said. Not Peter Wilmot. Not “the walking peter.”

The Eastern School of Art, the Meadows Academy of Fine Arts, the Wilson Art Institute, rumor was Peter Wilmot had flunked out of them all.

You’d flunked out.

Every art school in eleven states, Peter went there and didn’t go to class. He never spent any time in his studio. The Wilmots had to be rich because he’d been in school almost five years and his portfolio was still empty. Peter just flirted with young women full-time. Peter Wilmot, he had long black hair, and he wore these stretched-out cable-knit sweaters the color of blue dirt. The seam was always coming open in one shoulder, and the hem hung down below his crotch.

Fat, thin, young, or old women, Peter wore his ratty blue sweater and slouched around campus all day, flirting with every girl student. Creepy Peter Wilmot. Misty’s girlfriends, they pointed him out one day, his sweater unraveling at the elbows and along the bottom.

Your sweater.

Stitches had broken and holes were hanging open in the back, showing Peter’s black T-shirt underneath.

Your black T-shirt.

The only difference between Peter and a homeless mental outpatient with limited access to soap was his jewelry. Or maybe not. It was just weird cruddy old brooches and necklaces made from rhinestones. Crusted with fake pearls and rhinestones, these are big scratchy old wads of colored glass that hang off the front of Peter’s sweater. Big grandma brooches. A different brooch every day. Some days, it was a big pinwheel of fake emeralds. Then it would be a snowflake made of chipped glass diamonds and rubies, the wire parts turned green from his sweat.

From your sweat.

Junk jewelry.

For the record, the first time Misty met Peter was at a freshman art exhibit where some friends and her were looking at a painting of a craggy stone house. On one side, the house opened into a big glass room, a conservatory full of palm trees. In through the windows, you could see a piano. You could see a man reading a book. A private little paradise. Her friends were saying how nice it looked, the colors and everything, and then somebody said, “Don’t turn around, but the walking peter is headed over here.”

Misty said, “The what?”

And somebody said, “Peter Wilmot.”

Someone else said, “Do not make eye contact.”

All her girlfriends said, Misty, do not even encourage him. Anytime Peter came into the room, every woman remembered a reason to leave. He didn’t really stink, but you still tried to hide behind your hands. He didn’t stare at your breasts, but most women still folded their arms. Watching any woman talk to Peter Wilmot, you could see how her frontalis muscle lifted her forehead into wrinkles, proof she was scared. Peter’s top eyelids would be half shut, more like someone angry than looking to fall in love.

Then Misty’s friends, in the gallery that night, they scattered.

Then she was standing alone with Peter in his greasy hair and the sweater and the old junk jewelry, who rocked back on his heels, his hands on his hips, and looking at the painting, he said, “So?”

Not looking at her, he said, “You going to be a chicken and run away with your little friends?”

He said this with his chest stuck out. His upper eyelids were half closed, and his jaw worked back and forth. His teeth ground together. He turned and fell back against the wall so hard the painting beside him went crooked. He leaned back, his shoulders squared against the wall, his hands shoved into the front pockets of his jeans. Peter shut his eyes and took a deep breath. He let it out, slow, opened his eyes to stare at her, and said, “So? What do you think?”

“About the painting?” Misty said. The craggy stone house. She reached out and turned it straight again.

And Peter looked sideways without turning his head. His eyes rolled to see the painting just past his shoulder, and he said, “I grew up next door to that house. The guy with the book, that’s Brett Petersen.” Then loud, he said, too loud, “I want to know if you’ll marry me.”

That’s how Peter proposed.

How you proposed. The first time.

He was from the island, everybody said. The whole wax museum of Waytansea Island, all those fine old island families going back to the Mayflower Compact. Those fine old family trees where everybody was everybody’s cousin once removed. Where nobody’s had to buy any silverware since two hundred years ago. They ate something meat with every meal, and all the sons seemed to wear the same shabby old jewelry. Their kind-of regional fashion statement. Their old shingle and stone family houses towered along Elm Street, Juniper Street, Hornbeam Street, weathered just so by the salt air.

Even all their golden retrievers were inbred cousins to each other.

People said everything on Waytansea Island was just-so museum quality. The funky old ferryboat that held six cars. The three blocks of red brick buildings along Merchant Street, the grocer, the old library clock tower, the shops. The white clapboards and wraparound porches of the closed old Waytansea Hotel. The Waytansea church, all granite and stained glass.

There in the art school gallery, Peter was wearing a brooch made from a circle of dirty blue rhinestones. Inside that was a circle of fake pearls. Some blue stones were gone, and the empty fittings looked sharp with ragged little teeth. The metal was silver, but bent and turning black. The point of the long pin, it stuck out from under one edge and looked pimpled with rust.

Peter held a big plastic mug of beer with some sports team stenciled on the side, and he took a drink. He said, “If you’d never consider marrying me, there’s no point in me taking you to dinner, is there?” He looked at the ceiling and then at her and said, “I find this approach saves everybody a shitload of time.”

“Just for the record,” Misty told him, “that house doesn’t exist. I made it up.”

Misty told you.

And you said, “You remember that house because it’s still in your heart.”

And Misty said, “How the fuck do you know what’s in my goddamn heart?”

The big stone houses. Moss on the trees. Ocean waves that hiss and burst below cliffs of brown rock. All that was in her little white trash heart.

Maybe because Misty was still standing here, maybe because you thought she was fat and lonely and she hadn’t run away, you looked down at the brooch on your chest and smiled. You looked at her and said, “You like it?”

And Misty said, “How old is it?”

And you said, “Old.”

“What kind of stones are those?” she said.

And you said, “Blue.”

Just for the record, it wasn’t easy to fall in love with Peter Wilmot. With you.

Misty said, “Where did it come from?”

And Peter shook his head a little bit, grinning at the floor. He chewed his bottom lip. He looked around at the few people left in the gallery, his eyes narrow, and he looked at Misty and said, “You promise you won’t be grossed out if I show you something?”

She looked back over her shoulder at her friends; they were off by a picture across the room, but they were watching.

And Peter whispered, his butt still against the wall, he leaned forward toward her and whispered, “You’ll need to suffer to make any real art.”

Just for the record, Peter once asked Misty if she knew why she liked the art she liked. Why is it a terrible battle scene like Picasso’s Guernica can be beautiful, while a painting of two unicorns kissing in a flower garden can look like crap.

Does anybody really know why they like anything?

Why people do anything?

There in the gallery, with her friends spying, one of the paintings had to be Peter’s, so Misty said, “Yeah. Show me some real art.”

And Peter chugged some of his beer and handed her the plastic mug. He said, “Remember. You promised.” With both hands, he grabbed the ragged hem of his sweater and pulled it up. A theater curtain lifting. An unveiling. The sweater showed his skinny belly with a little hair going up the middle. Then his navel. The hair spread out sideways around two pink nipples starting to show.

The sweater stopped, Peter’s face hidden behind it, and one nipple lifted up in a long point off his chest, red and scabbed, sticking to the inside of the old sweater.

“Look,” Peter’s voice said from behind, “the brooch pins through my nipple.”

Somebody let out a little scream, and Misty spun around to look at her friends. The plastic mug dropped out of her hands, hitting the floor with an explosion of beer.

Peter dropped his sweater and said, “You promised.”

It was her. The rusted pin was sunk in under one edge of the nipple, jabbed all the way under and coming out the other edge. The skin around it, smeared with blood. The hair pasted down flat with dried blood. It was Misty. She screamed.

“I make a different hole every day,” Peter said, and he stooped to pick up the mug. He said, “It’s so every day I feel new pain.”

Looking now, the sweater around the brooch was crusted stiff and darker with bloodstain. Still, this was art school. She’d seen worse. Maybe she hadn’t.

“You,” Misty said, “you’re crazy.” For no reason, maybe shock, she laughed and said, “I mean it. You are vile.” Her feet in sandals, sticky and splashed with beer.

Who knows why we like what we like?

And Peter said, “You ever hear of the painter Maura Kincaid?” He twisted the brooch, pinned through his chest, to make it glitter in the white gallery light. To make it bleed. “Or the Waytansea school of painters?” he said.

Why do we do what we do?

Misty looked back at her friends, and they looked at her, their eyebrows raised, ready to come to the rescue.

And she looked at Peter and said, “My name’s Misty,” and she held out her hand.

And slow, Peter’s eyes still on hers, he reached up and opened the clasp behind the brooch. His face winced, every muscle pulled tight for a second. His eyes sewed shut with wrinkles, he pulled the long pin out of his sweater. Out of his chest.

Out of your chest. Smeared with your blood.

He snapped the pin closed and put the brooch in her palm.

He said, “So, you want to marry me?”

He said this like a challenge, like he was picking a fight, like a gauntlet thrown down at her feet. Like a dare. A duel. His eyes handled her all over, her hair, her breasts, her legs, her arms and hands, like Misty Kleinman was the rest of his life.

Dear sweet Peter, can you feel this?

And the little trailer park idiot, she took the brooch.

ANGEL SAYS TO MAKE a fist. He says, “Hold out your index finger as if you’re about to pick your nose.”

He takes Misty’s hand, her finger pointed straight, and he holds it so her fingertip just touches the black paint on the wall. He moves her finger so it traces the trail of black spray paint, the sentence fragments and doodles, the drips and smears, and Angel says, “Can you feel anything?”

Just for the record, they’re a man and a woman standing close together in a small dark room. They’ve crawled in through a hole in the wall, and the homeowner’s waiting outside. Just so you know this in the future, Angel’s wearing these tight brown leather pants that smell the way shoe polish smells. The way leather car seats smell. The way your wallet smells, soaked with sweat after it’s in your back pocket while you’re driving on a hot summer day. That smell Misty used to pretend to hate, that’s how Angel’s leather pants smell pressed up against her.

Every so often the homeowner standing outside, she kicks the wall and shouts, “You want to tell me what you two are up to in there?”

Today’s weather is warm and sunny with a few scattered clouds and some homeowner called from Pleasant Beach to say she’d found her missing breakfast nook, and somebody had better come see right away. Misty called Angel Delaporte, and he met her when the ferry docked so they could drive together. He brings his camera and a bag full of lenses and film.

Angel, you might remember, he lives in Ocean Park. Here’s a hint: You sealed off his kitchen. He says the way you write your m ’s, with the first hump larger than the second, that proves you value your own opinion above public opinion. How you do your lowercase h ’s, with the last stroke cutting back underneath the hump, shows you’re never willing to compromise. It’s graphology, and it’s a bona fide science, Angel says. After seeing these words in his missing kitchen, he asked to see some other houses.

Just for the record, he says the way you make your lowercase g ’s and y ’s, with the bottom loop pulling to the left, that shows you’re very attached to your mother.

And Misty told him, he got that part right.

Angel and her, they drove to Pleasant Beach, and a woman opened the front door. She looked at them, her head tilted back so her eyes looked down her nose, her chin pushed forward and her lips pressed together thin, with the muscle at each corner of her jaw, each masseter muscle clenched into a little fist, and she said, “Is Peter Wilmot too lazy to show his face here?”

That little muscle from her lower lip to her chin, the mentalis, it was so tense her chin looked pitted with a million tiny dimples, and she said, “My husband hasn’t stopped gargling since this morning.”

The mentalis, the corrugator, all those little muscles of the face, those are the first things you learn in art school anatomy. After that, you can tell a fake smile because the risorius and platysma muscles pull the lower lip down and out, squaring it and exposing the lower teeth.

Just for the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn’t such a great skill to have.

In her kitchen, the yellow wallpaper peels back from a hole near the floor. The floor’s yellow tile is covered in newspapers and white plaster dust. Next to the hole’s a shopping bag bulging with scraps of busted plasterboard. Ribbons of torn yellow wallpaper curl out of the bag. Yellow dotted with little orange sunflowers.

The woman stood next to the hole, her arms folded across her chest. She nodded at the hole and said, “It’s right in there.”

Steelworkers, Misty told her, they’ll tie a branch to the highest peak of a new skyscraper or bridge to celebrate the fact that no one has died during construction. Or to bring prosperity to the new building. It’s called “tree topping.” A quaint tradition.

They’re full of irrational superstitions, building contractors.

Misty told the homeowner not to worry.

Her corrugator muscle pulls her eyebrows together above her nose. Her levator labii superioris pulls her upper lip up into a sneer and flares her nostrils. Her depressor labii inferioris pulls her bottom lip down to show her lower teeth, and she says, “It’s you who should be worried.”

Inside the hole, the dark little room’s lined on three sides with yellow built-in bench seats, sort of a restaurant booth with no table. It’s what the homeowner calls a breakfast nook. The yellow is yellow vinyl and the walls above the benches are yellow wallpaper. Scrawled across all this is the black spray paint, and Angel moves her hand along the wall where it says:

“. . . save our world by killing this army of invaders . . .”

It’s Peter’s black spray paint, broken sentences and squiggles. Doodles. The paint loops across the framed art, the lace pillows, the yellow vinyl bench seats. On the floor are empty cans with Peter’s black handprints, his spiraling fingerprints in paint, they’re still clutching each can.

The spray-painted words loop across the little framed pictures of flowers and birds. The black words trail over the little lace throw pillows. The words run around the room in every direction, across the tiled floor, over the ceiling.

Angel says, “Give me your hand.” And he balls Misty’s fingers together into a fist with just her index finger sticking out straight. He puts her fingertip against the black writing on the wall and makes her trace each word.

His hand tight around hers, guiding her finger. The dark creep of sweat around the collar and under the arms of his white T-shirt. The wine on his breath, collecting against the side of Misty’s neck. The way Angel’s eyes stay on her while she keeps her eyes on the black painted words. This is how the whole room feels.

Angel holds her finger against the wall, moving her touch along the painted words there, and he says, “Can you feel how your husband felt?”

According to graphology, if you take your index finger and trace someone’s handwriting, maybe you take a wooden spoon or chopstick and you just write on top of the written words, you can feel exactly how the writer felt at the time he wrote. You have to study the pressure and speed of the writing, pressing as hard as the writer pressed. Writing as fast as it seems the writer did. Angel says this is all similar to Method acting. What he calls Konstantin Stanislavski’s method of physical actions.

Handwriting analysis and Method acting, Angel says they both got popular at the same time. Stanislavski studied the work of Pavlov and his drooling dog and the work of neurophysiologist I. M. Sechenov. Before that, Edgar Allan Poe studied graphology. Everybody was trying to link the physical and the emotional. The body and the mind. The world and the imagination. This world and the next.

Moving Misty’s finger along the wall, he has her trace the words: “. . . the flood of you, with your bottomless hunger and noisy demands . . .”

Whispering, Angel says, “If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.”

Stanislavski, Sechenov, Poe, everybody was looking for some scientific method to produce miracles on demand, he says. An endless way to repeat the accidental. An assembly line to plan and manufacture the spontaneous.

The mystical meets the Industrial Revolution.

The way the rag smells after you polish your boots, that’s how the whole room smells. The way the inside of a heavy belt smells. A catcher’s mitt. A dog’s collar. The faint vinegar smell of your sweaty watchband.

The sound of Angel’s breath, the side of her face damp from his whispering. His hand stiff and hard as a trap around her, squeezing her hand. His fingernails dig into Misty’s skin. And Angel says, “Feel. Feel and tell me what your husband felt.” The words: “. . . your blood is our gold . . .”

The way reading something can be a slap in your face.

Outside the hole, the homeowner says something. She knocks on the wall and says, louder, “Whatever it is you have to do, you’d better be doing it.”

Angel whispers, “Say it.”

The words say: “. . . you, a plague, trailing your failures and garbage . . .”

Forcing your wife’s fingers along each letter, Angel whispers, “Say it.”

And Misty says, “No.” She says, “It’s just crazy talk.”

Steering her fingers wrapped tight inside his, Angel shoulders her along, saying, “It’s just words. You can say it.”

And Misty says, “They’re evil. They don’t make sense.”

The words: “. . . to slaughter all of you as an offering, every fourth generation . . .”

Angel’s skin warm and tight around her fingers, he whispers, “Then why did you come see them?”

The words: “. . . my wife’s fat legs are crawling with varicose veins . . .”

Your wife’s fat legs.

Angel whispers, “Why bother coming?”

Because her dear sweet stupid husband, he didn’t leave a suicide note.

Because this is part of him she never knew.

Because she wants to understand who he was. She wants to find out what happened.

Misty tells Angel, “I don’t know.”

Old-school building contractors, she tells him, they’d never start a new house on a Monday. Only on a Saturday. After the foundation is laid, they’ll toss in a handful of rye seed. After three days, if the seed doesn’t sprout, they’ll build the house. They’ll bury an old Bible under the floor or seal it inside the walls. They’ll always leave one wall unpainted until the owners arrive. That way the devil won’t know the house is done until it’s already being lived in.

Out of a pocket in the side of his camera bag, Angel takes something flat and silver, the size of a paperback book. It’s square and shining, a flask, curved so your reflection in the concave side is tall and thin. Your reflection in the convex side is squat and fat. He hands it to Misty, and the metal’s smooth and heavy with a round cap on one end. The weight shifts as something sloshes inside. His camera bag is scratchy gray fabric, covered with zippers.

On the tall thin side of the flask, it’s engraved: To Angel—Te Amo .

Misty says, “So? Why are you here?”

As she takes the flask, their fingers touch. Physical contact. Flirting.

Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal.

And Angel says, “It’s gin.”

The cap unscrews and swings away on a little arm that keeps it attached to the flask. What’s inside smells like a good time, and Angel says, “Drink,” and his fingerprints are all over her tall, thin reflection in the polish. Through the hole in the wall, you can see the homeowner’s feet wearing suede loafers. Angel sets his camera bag so it covers the hole.

Somewhere beyond all this, you can hear each ocean wave hiss and burst. Hiss and burst.

Graphology says the three aspects of any personality show in our handwriting. Anything that falls below the bottom of a word, the tail of a lowercase g or y for example, that hints at your subconscious. What Freud would call your id. This is your most animal side. If it swings to the right, it means you lean to the future and the world outside yourself. If the tail swings to the left, it means you’re stuck in the past and looking at yourself.

You writing, you walking down the street, your whole life shows in every physical action. How you hold your shoulders, Angel says. It’s all art. What you do with your hands, you’re always blabbing your life story.

It’s gin inside the flask, the good kind that you can feel cold and thin down the whole length of your throat.

Angel says the way your tall letters look, anything that rises above the regular lowercase e or x, those tall letters hint at your greater spiritual self. Your superego. How you write your l or h or dot your i, that shows what you aspire to become.

Anything in between, most of your lowercase letters, these show your ego. Whether they’re crowded and spiky or spread out and loopy, these show the regular, everyday you.

Misty hands the flask to Angel and he takes a drink.

And he says, “Are you feeling anything?”

Peter’s words say, “. . . it’s with your blood that we preserve our world for the next generations . . .”

Your words. Your art.

Angel’s fingers open around hers. They go off into the dark, and you can hear the zippers pull open on his camera bag. The brown leather smell of him steps away from her and there’s the click and flash, click and flash of him taking pictures. He tilts the flask against his lips, and her reflection slides up and down the metal in his fingers.

Misty’s fingers tracing the walls, the writing says: “. . . I’ve done my part. I found her . . .”

It says: “. . . it’s not my job to kill anybody. She’s the executioner . . .”

To get the look of pain just right, Misty says how the sculptor Bernini sketched his own face while he burned his leg with a candle. When Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa, he went to a hospital to sketch the faces of the dying. He brought their severed heads and arms back to his studio to study how the skin changed color as it rotted.

The wall booms. It booms again, the drywall and paint shivering under her touch. The homeowner on the other side kicks the wall again with her canvas boat shoes and the framed flowers and birds rattle against the yellow wallpaper. Against the scrawls of black spray paint. She shouts, “You can tell Peter Wilmot he’s going to jail for this shit.”

Beyond all this, the ocean waves hiss and burst.

Her fingers still tracing your words, trying to feel how you felt, Misty says, “Have you ever heard of a local painter named Maura Kincaid?”

From behind his camera, Angel says, “Not much,” and clicks the shutter. He says, “Wasn’t Kincaid linked to Stendhal syndrome?”

And Misty takes another drink, a burning swallow, with tears in her eyes. She says, “Did she die from it?”

And still flashing pictures, Angel looks at her through his camera and says, “Look here.” He says, “What you said about being an artist? Your anatomy stuff? Smile the way a real smile should look.”

JUST SO YOU KNOW, this looks so sweet. It’s Independence Day, and the hotel is full. The beach, teeming. The lobby is crowded with summer people, all of them milling around, waiting for the fireworks to launch from the mainland.

Your daughter, Tabbi, she has a strip of masking tape over each eye. Blind, she’s clutching and patting her way around the lobby. From the fireplace to the reception desk, she’s whispering, “. . . eight, nine, ten . . .” counting her steps from each landmark to the next.

The summer outsiders, they jump a little, startled by her little hands copping a feel. They give her tight-lipped smiles and step away. This girl in a sundress of faded pink and yellow plaid, her dark hair tied back with a yellow ribbon, she’s the perfect Waytansea Island child. All pink lipstick and nail polish. Playing some lovely and old-fashioned game.

She runs her open hands along a wall, feeling across a framed picture, fingering a bookcase.

Outside the lobby windows, there’s a flash and a boom. The fireworks shot from the mainland, arching up and out toward the island. As if the hotel were under attack.

Big pinwheels of yellow and orange flame. Red bursts of fire. Blue and green trails and sparks. The boom always comes late, the way thunder follows lightning. And Misty goes to her kid and says, “Honey, it’s started.” She says, “Open your eyes and come watch.”

Her eyes still taped shut, Tabbi says, “I need to learn the room while everyone’s here.” Feeling her way from stranger to stranger, all of them frozen and watching the sky, Tabbi’s counting her steps toward the lobby doors and the porch outside.

ON YOUR FIRST REAL DATE, you and Misty, you stretched a canvas for her.

Peter Wilmot and Misty Kleinman, on a date, sitting in the tall weeds in a big vacant lot. The summer bees and flies drifting around them. Sitting on a plaid blanket Misty brought from her apartment. Her box of paints, made of pale wood under yellowed varnish with brass corners and hinges tarnished almost black, Misty has the legs pulled out to make it an easel.

If this is stuff you already remember, skip ahead.

If you remember, the weeds were so high you had to stomp them down to make a nest in the sun.

It was spring term, and everyone on campus seemed to have the same idea. To weave a compact disc player or a computer mainframe using only native grasses and sticks. Bits of root. Seedpods. You could smell a lot of rubber cement in the air.

Nobody was stretching canvas, painting landscapes. There was nothing witty in that. But Peter sat on that blanket in the sun. He opened his jacket and pulled up the hem of his baggy sweater. And inside, against the skin of his chest and belly, there was a blank canvas stapled around a stretcher bar.

Instead of sunblock, you’d rubbed a charcoal pencil under each eye and down the bridge of your nose. A big black cross in the middle of your face.

If you’re reading this now, you’ve been in a coma for God knows how long. The last thing this diary should do is bore you.

When Misty asked why you carried the canvas inside your clothes, tucked up under your sweater like that . . .

Peter said, “To make sure it would fit.”

You said that.

If you remember, you’ll know how you chewed a stalk of grass. How it tasted. Your jaw muscles big and squared, first on one side, then on the other as you chewed around and around. With one hand, you dug down between the weeds, picking out bits of gravel or clods of dirt.

All Misty’s friends, they were weaving their stupid grasses. To make some appliance that looked real enough to be witty. And not unravel. Unless it had the genuine look of a real prehistoric high-technology entertainment system, the irony just wouldn’t work.

Peter gave her the blank canvas and said, “Paint something.”

And Misty said, “Nobody paint paints. Not anymore.”

If anybody she knew still painted at all, they used their own blood or semen. And they painted on live dogs from the animal shelter, or on molded gelatin desserts, but never on canvas.

And Peter said, “I bet you still paint on canvas.”

“Why?” Misty said. “Because I’m retarded? Because I don’t know any better?”

And Peter said, “Just fucking paint.”

They were supposed to be above representational art. Making pretty pictures. They were supposed to learn visual sarcasm. Misty said they were paying too much tuition not to practice the techniques of effective irony. She said a pretty picture didn’t teach the world anything.

And Peter said, “We’re not old enough to buy beer, what are we supposed to teach the world?” There on his back in their nest of weeds, one arm behind his head, Peter said, “All the effort in the world won’t matter if you’re not inspired.”

In case you didn’t fucking notice, you big boob, Misty really wanted you to like her. Just for the record, her dress, her sandals and floppy straw hat, she was all dressed up for you. If you’d just touch her hair you’d hear it crackle with hair spray.

She wore so much Wind Song perfume she was attracting bees.

And Peter set the blank canvas on her easel. He said, “Maura Kincaid never went to fucking art school.” He spit a wad of green slobber, picked another weed stem and stuck it in his mouth. His tongue stained green, he said, “I bet if you painted what’s in your heart, it could hang in a museum.”

What was in her heart, Misty said, was pretty much just silly crap.

And Peter just looked at her. He said, “So what’s the point of painting anything you don’t love?”

What she loved, Misty told him, would never sell. People wouldn’t buy it.

And Peter said, “Maybe you’d be surprised.”

This was Peter’s theory of self-expression. The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect. Results. Marketable product. We want dedication and discipline to equal recognition and reward. We get on our art school treadmill, our graduate program for a master’s in fine arts, and practice, practice, practice. With all our excellent skills, we have nothing special to document. According to Peter, nothing pisses us off more than when some strung-out drug addict, a lazy bum, or a slobbering pervert creates a masterpiece. As if by accident.

Some idiot who’s not afraid to say what they really love.

“Plato,” Peter says, and he turns his head to spit green slobber into the weeds. “Plato said: ‘He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.’ ”

He stuck another weed in his mouth and chewed, saying, “So what makes Misty Kleinman a maniac?”

Her fantasy houses and cobblestone streets. Her seagulls circling the oyster boats as they came back from the shoals she’d never seen. The window boxes overflowing with snapdragons and zinnias. No way in fucking hell was she going to paint that crap.

“Maura Kincaid,” Peter says, “didn’t pick up a paintbrush until she was forty-one years old.” He started taking paintbrushes out of the pale wood box, twisting the ends sharp. He said, “Maura got hitched to a good old Waytansea Island carpenter, and they had a couple kids.” He took out her tubes of paint, setting them next to the brushes there on the blanket.

“It wasn’t until her husband died,” Peter said. “Then Maura got sick, really sick, with consumption or something. Back then, being forty-one made you an old lady.”

It wasn’t until one of her kids died, he said, that Maura Kincaid ever painted a picture. He said, “Maybe people have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.”

You told Misty all this.

You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist.

You were digging in your pocket while you said this. You were fishing something out.

You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

“According to Thomas Mann,” Peter said, “‘Great artists are great invalids.’ ”

And there on the blanket, you set something. There, surrounded by tubes of paint and paintbrushes, was a big rhinestone brooch. Big around as a silver dollar, the brooch was clear glass gems, tiny polished mirrors in a pinwheel of yellow and orange, all of them chipped and cloudy. There on the plaid blanket, it seemed to explode the sunlight into sparks. The metal was dull gray, gripping the rhinestones with tiny sharp teeth.

Peter said, “Are you hearing any of this?”

And Misty picked up the brooch. The sparkle reflected straight into her eyes, and she was blinded, dazzled. Disconnected from everything here, the sun and weeds.

“It’s for you,” Peter said, “for inspiration.”

Misty, her reflection showed shattered a dozen times in every rhinestone. A thousand pieces of her face.

To the sparkling colors in her hand, Misty said, “So tell me.” She said, “How did Maura Kincaid’s husband die?”

And Peter, his teeth green, he spit green into the tall weeds around them. The black cross on his face. He licked his green lips with his green tongue, and Peter said, “Murder.” Peter said, “They murdered him.”

And Misty started to paint.

JUST FOR THE RECORD, the cruddy old library with its wallpaper peeling at every seam and dead flies inside all the milk-glass lights hanging from the ceiling, everything you can remember is still here. If you can remember it. The same shabby world globe, yellowed to the color of soup. The continents carved into places like Prussia and the Belgian Congo. They still have the framed sign that says “Anyone Caught Defacing Library Books Will Be Prosecuted.”

Old Mrs. Terrymore, the librarian, she wears the same tweed suits, except now she has a lapel button as big as her face that says “Find Yourself in a New Future with Owens Landing Financial Services!”

What you don’t understand, you can make mean anything.

People all over the island are wearing this same kind of button or T-shirt, selling some advertising message. They get a little prize or cash award if they’re seen wearing it. Turning their bodies into billboards. Wearing baseball caps with 1-800 telephone numbers.

Misty’s here with Tabbi, looking for books about horses and insects her teacher wants her to read before Tabbi starts seventh grade this fall.

No computers. No connections to the Internet or database terminals means no summer people. No lattes allowed. No videotapes or DVDs to check out. Nothing permitted above a whisper. Tabbi’s off in the kids’ section, and your wife’s in her own personal coma: the art book section.

What they teach you in art school is that famous old masters like Rembrandt and Caravaggio and van Eyck, they just traced. They drew the way Tabbi’s teacher won’t let her. Hans Holbein, Diego Velázquez, they sat in a velvet tent in the murky dark and sketched the outside world that shined in through a small lens. Or bounced off a curved mirror. Or like a pinhole camera, just projected into their tiny dark room through a little hole. Projecting the outside world onto the screen of their canvas. Canaletto, Gainsborough, Vermeer, they stayed there in the dark for hours or days, tracing the building or naked model in the bright sunlight outside. Sometimes they even painted the colors straight over the projected colors, matching the shine of a fabric as it fell in projected folds. Painting an exact portrait in a single afternoon.

Just for the record, camera obscura is Latin for “dark chamber.”

Where the assembly line meets the masterpiece. A camera using paint instead of silver oxide. Canvas instead of film.

They spend all morning here, and at some point Tabbi comes to stand next to her mother. Tabbi’s holding a book open in her hands and says, “Mom?” Her nose still on the page, she tells Misty, “Did you know it takes a fire of at least sixteen-hundred degrees lasting seven hours to consume the average human body?”

The book’s got black-and-white photos of burn victims curled into the “pugilist position,” their charred arms pulled up in front of their faces. Their hands are clenched into fists, cooked by the heat of the fire. Charred black prizefighters. The book’s called Fire Forensic Investigation .

Just for the record, today’s weather is nervous disgust with tentative apprehension.

Mrs. Terrymore looks up from her desk. Misty tells Tabbi, “Put it back.”

Today in the library, in the art section, your wife’s touching books at random on the reference shelf. For no reason, she opens a book, and it says how when an artist used a mirror to throw an image onto canvas, the image would be reversed. This is why everyone in so many old-master paintings is left-handed. When they used a lens, the image would be upside down. Whatever way they saw the image, it was distorted. In this book, an old woodcut print shows an artist tracing a projection. Across the page, someone’s written, “You can do this with your mind.”

It’s why birds sing, to mark their territory. It’s why dogs pee.

The same as the bottom of the table in the Wood and Gold Dining Room, Maura Kincaid’s life-after-death message:

“Choose any book at the library,” she wrote.

Her lasting effect in pencil. Her homemade immortality.

This new message is signed Constance Burton .

“You can do this with your mind.”

At random, Misty pulls down another book and lets it fall open. It’s about the artist Charles Meryon, a brilliant French engraver who became schizophrenic and died in an asylum. In one engraving of the French Marine Ministry, a classic stone building behind a row of tall fluted columns, the work looks perfect until you notice a swarm of monsters decending from the sky.

And written across the clouds above the monsters, in pencil, it says: “We are their bait and their trap.” Signed Maura Kincaid .

With her eyes closed, Misty walks her fingers across the spines of books on the shelf. Feeling the ridges of leather and paper and cloth, she pulls out a book without looking and lets it fall open in her hand.

Here’s Francisco Goya, poisoned by the lead in his bright paints. Colors he applied with his fingers and thumbs, scooping them out of tubs until he suffered from lead encephalopathy, leading to deafness, depression, and insanity. Here on the page is a painting of the god Saturn eating his children—a murky mix of black around a bug-eyed giant biting the arms off a headless body. In the white margin of the page, someone’s written: “If you’ve found this, you can still save yourself.”

It’s signed Constance Burton .

In the next book, the French painter Watteau shows himself as a pale, spindly guitar player, dying of tuberculosis as he was in real life. Across the blue sky of the scene, is written: “Do not paint them their pictures.” Signed Constance Burton .

To test herself, your wife walks across the library, past the old librarian watching through little round glasses of black wire. In her arms, Misty’s carrying the books on Watteau, Goya, the camera obscura, all of them open and nested one inside the next. Tabbi looks up, watching from a table heaped with kids’ books. In the literature section, Misty closes her eyes again and walks, trailing her fingers across the old spines. For no reason, she stops and pulls one out.

It’s a book about Jonathan Swift, about how he developed Ménière’s syndrome and his life was ruined by dizziness and deafness. In his bitterness, he wrote the dark satires Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, suggesting the British could survive by eating the increasing flood of Irish children. His best work.

The book falls open to a page where someone has written: “They would have you kill all of God’s children to save theirs.” It’s signed Maura Kincaid .

Your wife, she wedges this new book inside the last book, and closes her eyes again. Carrying her armload of books, she reaches out to touch another book. Misty walks her fingers from spine to spine. Her eyes closed, she steps forward—into a soft wall and the smell of talcum powder. When she looks, there’s dark red lipstick in a white powdered face. A green cap across a forehead, above it a head of curly gray hair. Printed on the cap, it says, “Call 1-800-555-1785 for Complete Satisfaction.” Below that, black-wire eye glasses. A tweed suit.

“Excuse me,” a voice says, and it’s Mrs. Terrymore, the librarian. She’s standing there, arms folded.

And Misty takes a step back.

The dark red lipstick says, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t destroy the books by piling them together that way.”

Poor Misty, she says she’s sorry. Always the outsider, she goes to put them on a table.

And Mrs. Terrymore, with her hands open, clutching, she says, “Please, let me reshelve them. Please.”

Misty says, not yet. She says she’d like to check them out, and while the two women wrestle over the armload, one book slips out and slams flat on the floor. Loud as a slap across your face. It flaps open to where you can read: “Do not paint them their pictures.”

And Mrs. Terrymore says, “I’m afraid those are reference books.”

And Misty says, No they’re not. Not all of them. You can read the words: “If you’ve found this, you can still save yourself.”

Through her black-wire glasses, the librarian sees this and says, “Always more damage. Every year.” She looks at a tall clock in a dark walnut case, and she says, “Well, if you don’t mind, we’ve closed early today.” She checks her wristwatch against the tall clock, saying, “We closed ten minutes ago.”

Tabbi’s already checked out her books. She’s standing by the front door, waiting, and calls, “Hurry, Mom. You have to be at work.”

And with one hand, the librarian fishes in the pocket of her tweed jacket and brings out a big pink gum eraser.

THE STAINED-GLASS windows of the island church, little white trash Misty Marie Kleinman, she could draw them before she could read or write. Before she’d ever seen stained glass. She’d never been inside a church, any church. Godless little Misty Kleinman, she could draw the tombstones in the village cemetery out on Waytansea Point, drawing the dates and epitaphs before she knew they were numbers and words.

Now, sitting here in church services, it’s hard for her to remember what she first imagined and what she saw for real after she’d arrived. The purple altar cloth. The thick wood beams black with varnish.

It’s all what she imagined as a kid. But that’s impossible.

Grace beside her in the pew, praying. Tabbi on the far side of Grace, both of them kneeling. Their hands folded.

Grace’s voice, her eyes closed and her lips muttering into her hands, she says, “Please let my daughter-in-law return to the artwork she loves. Please don’t let her squander the glorious talent God has given her . . .”

Every old island family around them, muttering in prayer.

Behind them, a voice is whispering, “. . . please, Lord, give Peter’s wife what she needs to start her work . . .”

Another voice, Old Lady Petersen, is praying, “. . . may Misty save us before the outsiders get any worse . . .”

Even Tabbi, your own daughter, is whispering, “God, make my mom get her act together and get started on her art . . .”

All the Waytansea Island waxworks are kneeling around Misty. The Tuppers and Burtons and Niemans, they’re all eyes-closed, knotting their fingers together and asking God to make her paint. All of them thinking she has some secret talent to save them.

And Misty, your poor wife, the only sane person here, she just wants to—well, all she wants is a drink.

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. And repeat.

She wants to yell for everybody to just shut up with their goddamn prayers.

If you’ve reached middle age and you see how you’re never going to be the big famous artist you dreamed of becoming and paint something that will touch and inspire people, really touch and move them and change their lives. You just don’t have the talent. You don’t have the brains or inspiration. You don’t have any of what it takes to create a masterpiece. If you see how your whole portfolio of work is just grand stony houses and big pillowy flower gardens—the naked dreams of a little girl in Tecumseh Lake, Georgia—if you see how anything you could paint would just be adding more mediocre shit to a world already crammed with mediocre shit. If you realize you’re forty-one years old and you’ve reached the end of your God-given potential, well, cheers.

Here’s mud in your eye. Bottoms up.

Here’s as smart as you’re ever going to get.

If you realize there’s no way you can give your child a better standard of living—hell, you can’t even give your child the quality of life that your trailer park mom gave you—and this means no college for her, no art school, no dreams, nothing except for waiting tables like her mom . . .

Well, it’s down the hatch.

This is every day in the life of Misty Marie Wilmot, queen of the slaves.

Maura Kincaid?

Constance Burton?

The Waytansea school of painters. They were different, born different. Those artists who made it look so easy. The point is some people have talent, but most people don’t. Most people, we’re going to top out with no glory, no perks. Folks like poor Misty Marie, they’re limited, borderline dummies, but nothing enough to get a handicapped parking space. Or get any kind of Special Olympic Games. They just pay the bulk of taxes but get no special menu at the steak house. No oversized bathroom stall. No special seat at the front of the bus. No political lobby.

No, your wife’s job will be to applaud other people.

In art school, one girl Misty knew, she ran a kitchen blender full of wet concrete until the motor burned out in a cloud of bitter smoke. This was her statement about life as a housewife. Right now, that girl is probably living in a loft eating organic yogurt. She’s rich and can cross her legs at the knee.

Another girl Misty knew in art school, she performed a three-act play with puppets in her own mouth. These were little costumes you could slip over your tongue. You’d hold the extra costumes inside your cheek, the same as the wings to a stage. Between scene changes, you’d just close your lips as a curtain. Your teeth, the footlights and proscenium arch. You’d slip your tongue into the next costume. After doing a three-act play, she’d have stretch marks all around her mouth. Her orbicularis oris stretched all out of shape.

One night in a gallery, doing a tiny version of The Greatest Story Ever Told, this girl almost died when a tiny camel slipped down her throat. These days, she was probably rolling in grant money.

Peter with his praise for all of Misty’s pretty houses, he was so wrong. Peter who said she should hide away on the island, paint only what she loved, his advice was so fucked.

Your advice, your praise was so very, very fucked.

According to you, Maura Kincaid washed fish in a cannery for twenty years. She potty-trained her kids, weeded her garden, then one day she sits down and paints a masterpiece. The bitch. No graduate degree, no studio time, but now she’s famous forever. Loved by millions of people who will never meet her.

Just for the record, the weather today is bitter with occasional fits of jealous rage.

Just so you know, Peter, your mother’s still a bitch. She’s working part-time for a service that finds people pieces of china after their pattern is discontinued. She overheard some rich summer woman, just a tanned skeleton in a knit-silk pastel tank dress, sitting at lunch and saying, “What’s the point of being rich here if there’s nothing to buy?”

Since Grace heard this, she’s been hounding your wife to paint. To give people something they can clamor to own. Like somehow Misty could pull a masterpiece out of her ass and earn the Wilmot family fortune back.

Like she could save the whole island that way.

Tabbi’s birthday is coming up, the big thirteen, and there’s no money for a gift. Misty’s saving her tips until there’s enough money for them to go live in Tecumseh Lake. They can’t live in the Waytansea Hotel forever. Rich people are eating the island alive, and she doesn’t want Tabbi to grow up poor, pressured by rich boys with drugs.

By the end of summer, Misty figures they can bail. About Grace, Misty doesn’t know. Your mother must have friends she can live with. There’s always the church that can help her. The Ladies Altar Society.

Here around them in church are the stained-glass saints, all of them pierced with arrows and hacked with knives and burning on bonfires, and now Misty pictures you. Your theory about suffering as a means to divine inspiration. Your stories about Maura Kincaid.

If misery is inspiration, Misty should be reaching her prime.

Here, with the whole island around her kneeling in prayer for her to paint. For her to be their savior.

The saints all around them, smiling and performing miracles in their moments of pain, Misty reaches out to take a hymnal. This is one book among dozens of dusty old hymnals, some without covers, some of them trailing frayed satin ribbons. She takes one at random and opens it. And, nothing.

She flips through the pages, but there’s nothing. Just prayers and hymns. No special secret messages scribbled inside.

Still, when she goes to put it back, carved there in the wood of the pew where the hymnal hid it, a message says: “Leave this island before you can’t.”

It’s signed Constance Burton .

ON THEIR FIFTH REAL DATE, Peter was matting and framing the picture Misty had painted.

You, Peter, you were telling Misty, “This. This picture. It will hang in a museum.”

The picture, it was a landscape showing a house wrapped in porches, shaded with trees. Lace curtains hung in the windows. Roses bloomed behind a white picket fence. Blue birds flew through shafts of sunlight. A ribbon of smoke curled up from one stone chimney. Misty and Peter were in a frame shop near campus, and she was standing with her back to the shop’s front window, trying to block if anybody might see in.

Misty and you.

Blocking if anybody might see her painting.

Her signature was at the bottom, below the picket fence, Misty Marie Kleinman . The only thing missing was a smiling face. A heart dotting the i in Kleinman.

“Maybe a museum of kitsch,” she said. This was just a better version of what she’d been painting since childhood. Her fantasy village. And seeing it felt worse than seeing the worst, most fat naked picture of yourself ever. Here it was, the trite little heart of Misty Marie Kleinman. The sugary dreams of the poor, lonely six-year-old kid she’d be for the rest of her life. Her pathetic, pretty rhinestone soul.

The trite little secret of what made her feel happy.

Misty kept peeking back over one shoulder to make sure no one was looking in. No one was seeing the most cliché, honest part of her, painted here in watercolors.

Peter, God bless him, he just cut the mat and centered the painting inside it.

You cut the mat.

Peter set up the miter saw on the shop’s workbench, and he cut the lengths for each side of the frame. The painting, when Peter looked at it, half his face smiled, the zygomatic major pulling up one side of his mouth. He only lifted the eyebrow on that side. He said, “You got the porch railing perfect.”

Outside, a girl from art school walked by on the sidewalk. This girl, her latest “work” was stuffing a teddy bear with dog shit. She worked with her hands inside blue rubber gloves so thick she could almost not bend her fingers. According to her, beauty was a stale concept. Superficial. A cheat. She was working a new vein. A new twist on a classic Dada theme. In her studio, she had the little teddy bear already gutted out, its fake fur spread open autopsy-style, ready to turn into art. Her rubber gloves smeared with brown stink, she could hardly hold the needle and red suture thread. Her title for all this was: Illusions of Childhood .

Other kids in art school, kids from rich families, the kids who traveled and saw real art in Europe and New York, all of them did this kind of work.

Another boy in Misty’s class, he was masturbating, trying to fill a piggy bank with sperm before the end of the year. He lived off dividends from a trust fund. Another girl drank different colors of egg temperas, then drank syrup of ipecac that made her vomit her masterpiece. She drove to class on a moped from Italy that cost more than the trailer where Misty grew up.

In the frame shop that morning, Peter fitted the corners of the frame together. He dabbed glue with his bare fingers and drilled holes in each corner for the screws.

Still standing between the window and the workbench, her shadow blocking the sunlight, Misty said, “You really think it’s good?”

And Peter said, “If you only knew . . .”

You said that.

Peter said, “You’re in my light. I can’t see.”

“I don’t want to move,” Misty told him. “People outside might see.”

All the dog shit and jack-off and barf. Running the glass cutter across the glass, never taking his eyes off the little cutting wheel, a pencil tucked in the hair behind one ear, Peter said, “Just smelling super gross doesn’t make their work art.”

Snapping the glass into two pieces, Peter said, “Shit is an esthetic cliché.” He said how the Italian painter Piero Manzoni canned his own shit, labeled “100% Pure Artist’s Shit,” and people bought it.

Peter was watching his hands so hard that Misty had to watch. She wasn’t watching the window, and behind them they heard a bell ring. Somebody’d walked into the shop. Another shadow fell over the workbench.

Without looking up, Peter went, “Hey.”

And this new guy said, “Hey.”

The friend was maybe Peter’s age, blond with a patch of chin hairs, but not what you’d call a beard. Another student from the art school. He was another rich kid from Waytansea Island, and he stood, his blue eyes looking down at the painting on the workbench. He smiled Peter’s same half smile, the look of somebody laughing over the fact he had cancer. The look of someone facing a firing squad of clowns with real guns.

Not looking up, Peter buffed the glass and fit it into the new frame. He said, “See what I mean about the picture?”

The friend looked at the house wrapped in porches, the picket fence and blue birds. The name Misty Marie Kleinman. Half smiling, shaking his head, he said, “It’s the Tupper house, all right.”

It was a house Misty had just made up. Invented.

In one ear, the friend had a single earring. An old piece of junk jewelry, in the Waytansea Island style of Peter’s friends. Buried in his hair, it was fancy gold filigree around a big red enamel heart, flashes of red glass, cut-glass jewels twinkled in the gold. He was chewing gum. Spearmint, from the smell.

Misty said, “Hi.” She said, “I’m Misty.”

And the friend, he looked at her, giving her the same doomed smile. Chewing his gum, he said, “So is this her? Is she the mythical lady?”

And slipping the picture into the frame, behind the glass, looking only at his work, Peter said, “I’m afraid so.”

Still staring at Misty, his eyes jumping around every part of her, her hands and legs, her face and breasts, the friend cocked his head to one side, studying. Still chewing his gum, he said, “Are you sure she’s the right one?”

Some magpie part of Misty, some little princess part, couldn’t take her eyes off the guy’s glittery red earring. The sparkling enamel heart. The flash of red from the cut-glass rubies.

Peter fitted a piece of backing cardboard behind the picture and sealed it around the edge with tape. Running his thumb over the tape, sealing it down, he said, “You saw the painting.” He stopped and sighed, his chest getting big, then collapsing, and he said, “I’m afraid she’s the real deal.”

Misty, Misty’s eyes were pinned inside the blond tangle of the friend’s hair. The red flash of the earring there, it was Christmas lights and birthday candles. In the sunlight from the shopwindow, the earring was Fourth of July fireworks and bouquets of Valentine’s Day roses. Looking at the sparkle, she forgot she had hands, a face, a name.

She forgot to breathe.

Peter said, “What’d I tell you, man?” He was looking at Misty now, watching her spellbound by the red earring, and Peter said, “She can’t resist the old jewelry.”

The blond guy saw Misty staring back at him, and both his blue eyes swung sideways to see where Misty’s eyes were pinned.

In the earring’s cut-glass sparkle, in there was the sparkle of champagne Misty had never seen. There were the sparks of beach bonfires, spiraling up to summer stars Misty could only imagine. In there was the flash of crystal chandeliers she had painted in each fantasy parlor.

All the yearning and idiot need of a poor, lonely kid. Some stupid, unenlightened part, not the artist but the idiot in her, loved that earring, the bright rich shine of it. The glitter of sugary hard candy. Candy in a cut-glass dish. A dish in a house she’d never visited. Nothing deep or profound. Just everything we’re programmed to adore. Sequins and rainbows. Those bangles she should’ve been educated enough to ignore.

The blond, Peter’s friend, he reached one hand up to touch his hair, then his ear. His mouth dropped open, so fast his gum fell out onto the floor.

Your friend.

And you said, “Careful, dude, it looks like you’re stealing her away from me . . .”

And the friend, his fingers fumbled, digging in his hair, and he yanked the earring. The pop made them all wince.

When Misty opened her eyes, the blond guy was holding out his earring, his blue eyes filled with tears. His torn earlobe hung in two ragged pieces, forked, blood dripping from both points. “Here,” he said, “take it.” And he threw the earring toward the workbench. It landed, gold and fake rubies scattering red sparks and blood.

The screw-on back was still on the post. It was so old, the gold back had turned green. He’d yanked it off so fast the earring was tangled in blond hairs. Each hair still had the soft white bulb where it pulled out at the root.

One hand cupped over his ear, blood running from between his fingers, the guy smiled. His corrugator muscle pulling his pale eyebrows together, he said, “Sorry, Petey. It looks like you’re the lucky guy.”

And Peter lifted the painting, framed and finished. Misty’s signature at the bottom.

Your future wife’s signature. Her bourgeois little soul.

Your future wife already reaching for the bloody spot of red sparkle.

“Yeah,” Peter said, “fucking lucky me.”

And still bleeding, one hand clamped over his ear, the blood running down his arm to drip from his pointed elbow, Peter’s friend backed up a couple steps. With his other hand, he reached for the door. He nodded at the earring and said, “Keep it. A wedding present.” And he was gone.

THIS EVENING, Misty is tucking your daughter into bed when Tabbi says, “Granmy Wilmot and I have a secret.”

Just for the record, Granmy Wilmot knows everybody’s secrets.

Grace sits through church service and elbows Misty, telling her how the rose window the Burtons donated for their poor, sad daughter-in-law—well, the truth is Constance Burton gave up painting and drank herself to death.

Here’s two centuries of Waytansea shame and misery, and your mother can repeat every detail. The cast-iron benches on Merchant Street, the ones made in England, they’re in memory of Maura Kincaid, who drowned trying to swim the six miles to the mainland. The Italian fountain on Parson Street—it’s in honor of Maura’s husband.

The murdered husband, according to Peter.

According to you.

The whole village of Waytansea, this is their shared coma.

Just for the record, Mother Wilmot sends her love.

Not that she ever wants to visit you.

Tucked in bed, Tabbi rolls her head to look out the window and says, “Can we go on a picnic?”

We can’t afford it, but the minute you die, Mother Wilmot’s got a drinking fountain picked out, brass and bronze, sculpted like a naked Venus riding a conch shell sidesaddle.

Tabbi brought her pillow when Misty moved them into the Waytansea Hotel. They all brought something. Your wife brought your pillow, because it smells like you.

In Tabbi’s room, Misty sits on the edge of the bed, combing her kid’s hair through her fingers. Tabbi has her father’s long black hair and his green eyes.

Your green eyes.

She has a little room she shares with her grandmother, next to Misty’s room in the attic hallway of the hotel.

Almost every old family has rented out their house and moved into the hotel attic. The rooms papered with faded roses. The wallpaper peeling along every seam. There’s a rusty sink and a little mirror bolted to the wall in each room. Two or three iron beds in every room, their paint chipped, their mattresses soft and sagging in the middle. These are the cramped rooms, under the sloping ceilings, behind their little windows, dormers like rows of little doghouses in the hotel’s steep roof. The attic is a barracks, a refugee camp for nice white gentry. People to-the-manor-born now share a bathroom down the hall.

These people who’ve never held a job, this summer, they’re waiting tables. As if everyone’s money ran out at the same time, this summer every blue-blood islander is carrying luggage at the hotel. Cleaning hotel rooms. Shining shoes. Washing dishes. A service industry of blue-eyed blonds with shining hair and long legs. Polite and cheerful and eager to run fetch a fresh ashtray or decline a tip.

Your family—your wife and child and mother—they all sleep in sagging, chipped iron beds, under sloping walls with the hoarded silver and crystal relics of their former genteel life.

Go figure, but all the island families, they’re smiling and whistling. As if this were some adventure. A zany lark. As if they’re just slumming in the service industry. As if this tedious kind of bowing and scraping isn’t going to be the rest of their lives. Their lives and their children’s lives. As if the novelty won’t wear off after another month. They’re not stupid. It’s just that none of them have ever been poor. Not like your wife, she knows about having pancakes for dinner. Eating government-surplus cheese. Powdered milk. Wearing steel-toed shoes and punching a goddamn time clock.

Sitting there with Tabbi, Misty says, “So, what’s your secret?”

And Tabbi says, “I can’t tell.”

Misty tucks the covers in around the girl’s shoulders, old hotel sheets and blankets washed until they’re nothing but gray lint and the smell of bleach. The lamp beside Tabbi’s bed is her pink china lamp painted with flowers. They brought it from the house. Most of her books are here, the ones that would fit. They brought her clown paintings and hung them above her bed.

Her grandmother’s bed is close enough Tabbi could reach out and touch the quilt that covers it with velvet scraps from Easter dresses and Christmas clothes going a hundred years back. On the pillow, there’s her diary bound in red leather with “Diary” across the cover in scrolling gold letters. All Grace Wilmot’s secrets locked inside.

Misty says, “Hold still, honey,” and she picks a stray eyelash off Tabbi’s cheek. Misty rubs the lash between two fingers. It’s long like her father’s eyelashes.

Your eyelashes.

With Tabbi’s bed and her grandmother’s, two twin beds, there’s not much room left. Mother Wilmot brought her diary. That, and her sewing basket full of embroidery thread. Her knitting needles and crochet hooks and embroidery hoops. It’s something she can do while she sits in the lobby with her old lady friends or outside on the boardwalk above the beach in good weather.

Your mother’s just like all the other fine old Mayflower families, getting their wagons into a circle at the Waytansea Hotel, waiting out the siege of awful strangers.

Stupid as it sounds, Misty brought her drawing tools. Her pale wood box of paints and watercolors, her paper and brushes, it’s all piled in a corner of her room.

And Misty says, “Tabbi honey?” She says, “You want to maybe go live with your Grandma Kleinman over by Tecumseh Lake?”

And Tabbi rolls her head back and forth, no, against her pillow until she stops and says, “Granmy Wilmot told me why Dad was so pissed off all the time.”

Misty tells her, “Don’t say ‘pissed off,’ please.”

Just for the record, Granmy Wilmot is downstairs playing bridge with her cronies in front of the big clock in the wood-paneled room off the lobby. The loudest sound in the room will be the big pendulum ticktocking back and forth. Either that or she’s sitting in a big red leather wing chair next to the lobby fireplace, reading with her thick magnifying glass hovering over each page of a book in her lap.

Tabbi tucks her chin down against the satin edge of the blanket, and she says, “Granmy told me why Dad doesn’t love you.”

And Misty says, “Of course your daddy loves me.”

And of course she’s lying.

Outside the room’s little dormer window, the breaking waves shimmer under the lights of the hotel. Far down the coast is the dark line of Waytansea Point, a peninsula of nothing but forest and rock jutting out into the shimmering ocean.

Misty goes to the window and puts her fingertips on the sill, saying, “You want it open or shut?” The white paint on the windowsill is blistered and peeling, and she picks at it, wedging paint chips under her fingernail.

Rolling her head back and forth on her pillow, Tabbi says, “No, Mom.” She says, “Granmy Wilmot says Dad never loved you for real. He only pretended love to bring you here and make you stay.”

“To bring me here?” Misty says. “To Waytansea Island?” With two fingers, she scratches off the loose flecks of white paint. The sill underneath is brown varnished wood. Misty says, “What else did your grandmother tell you?”

And Tabbi says, “Granmy says you’re going to be a famous artist.”

What you don’t learn in art theory is how too big a compliment can hurt more than a slap in the face. Misty, a famous artist. Big fat Misty Wilmot, queen of the fucking slaves.

The white paint is flaking off in a pattern, in words. A wax candle or a finger of grease, maybe gum arabic, it makes a negative message underneath. Somebody a long time ago wrote something invisible here that new paint can’t stick to.

Tabbi lifts some strands of her hair and looks at the ends, so close-up her eyes go crossed. She looks at her fingernails and says, “Granmy says we should go on a picnic out on the point.”

The ocean shimmers, bright as the bad costume jewelry Peter wore in art school. Waytansea Point is nothing but black. A void. A hole in everything.

The jewelry you wore in art school.

Misty makes sure the window’s locked, and she brushes the loose paint chips into the palm of one hand. In art school, you learn the symptoms of adult lead poisoning include tiredness, sadness, weakness, stupidity—symptoms Misty has had most of her adult life.

And Tabbi says, “Granmy Wilmot says everyone will want your pictures. She says you’ll do pictures the summer people will fight over.”

Misty says, “Good night, honey.”

And Tabbi says, “Granmy Wilmot says you’ll make us a rich family again.” Nodding her head, she says, “Dad brought you here to make the whole island rich again.”

The paint chips cupped in one hand, Misty turns out the light.

The message on the windowsill, where the paint flaked off, underneath it said, “You’ll die when they’re done with you.” It’s signed Constance Burton .

Flaking off more paint, the message says, “We all do.”

As she bends to turn off the pink china lamp, Misty says, “What do you want for your birthday next week?”

And a little voice in the dark, Tabbi says, “I want a picnic on the point, and I want you to start painting again.”

And Misty tells the voice, “Sleep tight,” and kisses it good night.

ON THEIR TENTH DATE, Misty asked Peter if he’d messed with her birth control pills.

They were in Misty’s apartment. She was working on another painting. The television was on, tuned to a Spanish soap opera. Her new painting was a tall church fitted together out of cut stone. The steeple was roofed with copper tarnished dark green. The stained-glass windows were complicated as spiderwebs.

Painting the shiny blue of the church doors, Misty said, “I’m not stupid.” She said, “A lot of women would notice the difference between a real birth control pill and the little pink cinnamon candies you switched them with.”

Peter had her last painting, the house with the white picket fence, the picture he’d framed, and he’d stuffed it up under his baggy old sweater. Like he was pregnant with a very square baby, he waddled around Misty’s apartment. His arms straight down at his sides, he was holding the picture in place with his elbows.

Then fast, he moved his arms a little and the painting dropped out. A heartbeat from the floor, from the glass breaking into a mess, Peter caught it between his hands.

You caught it. Misty’s painting.

She said, “What the fuck are you doing?”

And Peter said, “I have a plan.”

And Misty said, “I’m not having kids. I’m going to be an artist.”

On television, a man slapped a woman to the ground and she lay there, licking her lips, her breasts heaving inside a tight sweater. She was supposed to be a police officer. Peter couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. What he loved about Spanish soap operas is you could make what people say mean anything.

And stuffing the painting up under his sweater, Peter said, “When?”

And Misty said, “When what?”

The painting dropped out, and he caught it.

“When are you going to be an artist?” he said.

Another reason to love Spanish soap operas was how fast they could resolve a crisis. One day, a man and woman were hacking at each other with butcher knives. The next day, they were kneeling in church with their new baby. Their hands folded in prayer. People accepted the worst from each other, screaming and slapping. Divorce and abortion were just never a plot option.

If this was love or just inertia, Misty couldn’t tell.

After she graduated, she said, then she’d be an artist. When she’d put together a body of work and found a gallery to show her. When she’d sold a few pieces. Misty wanted to be realistic. Maybe she’d teach art at the high school level. Or she’d be a technical draftsman or an illustrator. Something practical. Not everybody could be a famous painter.

Stuffing the painting inside his sweater, Peter said, “You could be famous.”

And Misty told him to stop. Just stop.

“Why?” he said. “It’s the truth.”

Still watching the television, pregnant with the painting, Peter said, “You have such talent. You could be the most famous artist of your generation.”

Watching some Spanish commercial for a plastic toy, Peter said, “With your gift, you’re doomed to be a great artist. School for you is a waste of time.”

What you don’t understand, you can make mean anything.

The painting dropped out, and he caught it. He said, “All you have to do is paint.”

Maybe this is why Misty loved him.

Loved you.

Because you believed in her so much more than she did. You expected more from her than she did from herself.

Painting the tiny gold of the church doorknobs, Misty said, “Maybe.” She said, “But that’s why I don’t want kids . . .”

Just for the record, it was kind of cute. All of her birth control pills being replaced with little heart-shaped candies.

“Just marry me,” Peter said. “And you’ll be the next great painter of the Waytansea school.”

Maura Kincaid and Constance Burton.

Misty said how only two painters didn’t count as a “school.”

And Peter said, “It’s three, counting you.”

Maura Kincaid, Constance Burton, and Misty Kleinman.

“Misty Wilmot, ” Peter said, and he stuffed the painting inside his sweater.

You said.

On television, a man shouted “Te amo . . . Te amo . . .” again and again to a dark-haired girl with brown eyes and feathery long eyelashes while he kicked her down a flight of stairs.

The painting dropped out of his sweater, and Peter caught it again. He stepped up beside Misty, where she was working on the details of the tall stone church, the flecks of green moss on the roof, the red of rust on the gutters. And he said, “In that church, right there, we’ll get married.”

And duh-duh-dumb little Misty, she said how she was making the church up. It didn’t really exist.

“That’s what you think,” Peter said. He kissed the side of her neck and whispered, “Just marry me, the island will give you the biggest wedding anybody’s seen in a hundred years.”

DOWNSTAIRS, it’s past midnight, and the lobby is empty except for Paulette Hyland behind the desk. Grace Wilmot would tell you how Paulette’s a Hyland by marriage, but before that she was a Petersen, although her mother’s a Nieman descended from the Tupper branch. That used to mean a lot of old money on both sides of her family. Now Paulette’s a desk clerk.

Far across the lobby, sunk in the cushion of a red leather wing chair, is Grace, reading beside the fireplace.

The Waytansea lobby is decades of stuff, all of it layered together. A garden. A park. The wool carpet is moss green over granite tile quarried nearby. The blue carpet coming down the stairs is a waterfall flowing around landings, cascading down each step. Walnut trees, planed and polished and put back together, they make a forest of perfect square columns, straight rows of dark shining trees that hold up a forest canopy of plaster leaves and cupids.

A crystal chandelier hangs down, a solid beam of sunlight that breaks into this forest glade. The crystal doohickeys, they look tiny and twinkly so high up, but when you’re on a tall ladder cleaning them, each crystal is the size of your fist.

Swags and falls of green silk almost cover the windows. Daytime, they turn the sunlight into soft green shade. The sofas and chairs are overstuffed, upholstered into flowering bushes, shaggy with long fringe along the bottom. The fireplace could be a campfire. The whole lobby, it’s the island in miniature. Indoors. An Eden.

Just for the record, this is the landscape where Grace Wilmot feels most at home. Even more than her own home. Her house.

Your house.

Halfway across the lobby, Misty’s edging between sofas and little tables, and Grace looks up.

She says, “Misty, come sit by the fire.” She looks back into her open book and says, “How is your headache?”

Misty doesn’t have a headache.

Open in Grace’s lap is her diary, the red leather cover of it, and she peers at the pages and says, “What is today’s date?”

Misty tells her.

The fireplace is burned down to a bed of orange coals under the grate. Grace’s feet hang down in brown buckle shoes, her toes pointed, not reaching the floor. Her head of long white curls hangs forward over the book in her lap. Next to her chair, a floor lamp shines down, and the light bounces bright off the silver edge of the magnifying glass she holds over each page.

Misty says, “Mother Wilmot, we need to talk.”

And Grace turns back a couple pages and says, “Oh dear. My mistake. You won’t have that terrible headache until the day after tomorrow.”

And Misty leans into her face and says, “How dare you set my child up to have her heart broken?”

Grace looks up from her book, her face loose and hanging with surprise. Her chin is tucked down so hard her neck is squashed into folds from ear to ear. Her superficial musculo-aponeurotic system. Her submental fat. The wrinkled platysmal bands around her neck.

Misty says, “Where do you get off telling Tabbi that I’m going to be a famous artist?” She looks around, and they’re still alone, and Misty says, “I’m a waitress, and I’m keeping a roof over our heads, and that’s good enough. I don’t want you filling my kid with expectations that I can’t fulfill.” The last of her breath tight in her chest, Misty says, “Do you see how this will make me look?”

And a smooth, wide smile flows across Grace’s mouth, and she says, “But Misty, the truth is you will be famous.”

Grace’s smile, it’s a curtain parting. An opening night. It’s Grace unveiling herself.

And Misty says, “I won’t.” She says, “I can’t.” She’s just a regular person who’s going to live and die ignored, obscure. Ordinary. That’s not such a tragedy.

Grace shuts her eyes. Still smiling, she says, “Oh, you’ll be so famous the moment—”

And Misty says, “Stop. Just stop.” Misty cuts her off, saying, “It’s so easy for you to build up other people’s hope. Don’t you see how you’re ruining them?” Misty says, “I’m a darn good waitress. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not the ruling class anymore. We’re not the top of the heap.”

Peter, your mother’s problem is she’s never lived in a trailer. Never stood in a grocery line with food stamps. She doesn’t know how to be poor, and she’s not willing to learn.

Misty says, there’s worse things they can do than raise Tabbi to fit into this economy, to be able to find a job in the world she’ll inherit. There’s nothing wrong with waiting tables. Cleaning rooms.

And Grace lays a strip of lacy ribbon to mark her place in the diary. She looks up and says, “Then why do you drink?”

“Because I like wine,” Misty says.

Grace says, “You drink and run around with men because you’re afraid.”

By men she must mean Angel Delaporte. The man with the leather pants who’s renting the Wilmot house. Angel Delaporte with his graphology and his flask of good gin.

And Grace says, “I know exactly how you feel.” She folds her hands on the diary in her lap and says, “You drink because you want to express yourself and you’re afraid.”

“No,” Misty says. She rolls her head to one shoulder and looks at Grace sideways. Misty says, “No, you do not know how I feel.”

The fire next to them, it pops and sends a spiral of sparks up the chimney. The smell of smoke drifts out past the fireplace mantel. Their campfire.

“Yesterday,” Grace says, reading from the diary, “you started saving money so you could move back to your hometown. You’re saving it in an envelope, and you tuck the envelope under the edge of the carpet, near the window in your room.”

Grace looks up, her eyebrows lifted, the corrugator muscle pleating the spotted skin across her forehead.

And Misty says, “You’ve been spying on me?”

And Grace smiles. She taps her magnifying glass against the open page and says, “It’s in your diary.”

Misty tells her, “That’s your diary.” She says, “You can’t write someone else’s diary.”

Just so you know, the witch is spying on Misty and writing everything down in her evil red leather record book.

And Grace smiles. She says, “I’m not writing it. I’m reading it.” She turns the page and looks through her magnifying glass and says, “Oh, tomorrow looks exciting. It says you’ll most likely meet a nice policeman.”

Just for the record, tomorrow Misty is getting the lock on her door changed. Pronto.

Misty says, “Stop. One more time, just stop.” Misty says, “The issue here is Tabbi, and the sooner she learns to live a regular life with a normal everyday job and a steady, secure, ordinary future, the happier she’ll be.”

“Like doing office work?” Grace says. “Grooming dogs? A nice weekly paycheck? Is that why you drink?”

Your mother.

Just for the record, she deserved this:

You deserve this:

And Misty says, “No, Grace.” She says, “I drink because I married a silly, lazy, unrealistic dreamer who was raised to think he’d marry a famous artist someday and couldn’t deal with his disappointment.” Misty says, “You, Grace, you fucked up your own child, and I’m not letting you fuck up mine.”

Leaning in so close she can see the face powder in Grace’s wrinkles, her rhytides, and the red spidery lines where Grace’s lipstick bleeds into the wrinkles around her mouth, Misty says, “Just stop lying to her or I swear I’ll pack my bags and take Tabbi off the island tomorrow.”

And Grace looks past Misty, looking at something behind her.

Not looking at Misty, Grace sighs. She says, “Oh, Misty. It’s too late for that .”

Misty turns and behind her is Paulette, the desk clerk, standing there in her white blouse and dark pleated skirt, and Paulette says, “Excuse me, Mrs. Wilmot?”

Together—both Grace and Misty—they say, Yes?

And Paulette says, “I don’t want to interupt you.” She says, “I just need to put another log on the fire.”

And Grace shuts the book in her lap and says, “Paulette, we need you to settle a disagreement for us.” Lifting her frontalis muscle to raise just one eyebrow, Grace says, “Don’t you wish Misty would hurry up and paint her masterpiece?”

The weather today is partly angry, leading to resignation and ultimatums.

And Misty turns to leave. She turns a little and stops.

The waves outside hiss and burst.

“Thank you, Paulette,” Misty says, “but it’s time everybody on the island just accepted the fact that I’m going to die a big fat nobody.”

IN CASE YOU’RE CURIOUS, your friend from art school with the long blond hair, the boy who tore his earlobe in half trying to give Misty his earring, well, he’s bald now. His name’s Will Tupper, and he runs the ferryboat. He’s your-aged and his earlobe still hangs in two points. Scar-tissued.

On the ferry this evening coming back to the island, Misty is standing on deck. The cold wind is putting years on her face, stretching and drying her skin. The flat dead skin of her stratum corneum. She’s just drinking a beer in a brown paper bag when this big dog noses up next to her. The dog’s sniffing and whining. His tail’s tucked, and his throat is working up and down inside his furry neck as he swallows something over and over.

She goes to pet him and the dog pulls away and pees right there on the deck. A man comes over, holding a leash looped in one hand, and he asks her, “Are you all right?”

Just poor fat Misty in her own beer-induced coma.

As if. Like she’s going to stand here in a puddle of dog pee and tell some strange man her whole fucking life story on a boat with a beer in one hand and sniffing back tears. As if Misty can just say—well, since you asked, she just spent another day in somebody’s sealed-off laundry room, reading gibberish on the walls while Angel Delaporte snapped flash pictures and said her asshole husband is really loving and protective because he writes his u ’s with the tail pointing up in a little curl, even when he’s calling her an “. . . avenging evil curse of death . . .”

Angel and Misty, they were rubbing butts all afternoon, her tracing the words sprayed on the walls, the words saying: “. . . we accept the dirty flood of your money . . .”

And Angel was asking her, “Do you feel anything?”

The homeowners were bagging their family toothbrushes for laboratory analysis, for septic bacteria. For a lawsuit.

On board the ferry, the man with his dog says, “Are you wearing something from a dead person?”

Her coat’s what Misty is wearing, her coat and shoes, and pinned on the lapel is one of the god-awful big costume jewelry pins Peter gave her.

Her husband gave her.

You gave her.

All afternoon in the sealed laundry room, the words written around the walls said: “. . . will not steal our world to replace the world you’ve ruined . . .”

And Angel said, “The handwriting is different here. It’s changing.” He snapped another picture and cranked to the next frame of film, saying, “Do you know what order your husband worked on these houses?”

Misty told Angel how a new owner should move in only after the full moon. According to carpenter tradition, the first to enter a new house should always be the family’s favorite pet. Then should enter the family’s cornmeal, the salt, the broom, the Bible, and the crucifix. Only then can the family and their furniture move in. According to superstition.

And Angel, snapping pictures, said, “What? The cornmeal’s supposed to walk in by itself?”

Beverly Hills, the Upper East Side, Palm Beach, these days, Angel Delaporte says, even the best part of any city is just a deluxe luxury suite in hell. Outside your front gates, you still have to share the same gridlocked streets. You and the homeless drug addicts, you still breathe the same stinking air and hear the same police helicopters chasing criminals all night. The stars and moon erased by the lights from a million used car lots. Everyone crowds the same sidewalks, scattered with garbage, and sees the same sunrise bleary and red behind smog.

Angel says that rich people don’t like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn’t pretty and perfect. You can’t put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.

That quest for something pretty. A cheat. A cliché. Flowers and Christmas lights, it’s what we’re programmed to love. Someone young and lovely. The women on Spanish television with big boobs and a tiny waist like they’ve been twisted three times. The trophy wives eating lunch at the Waytansea Hotel.

The words on the walls say: “. . . you people with your ex-wives and stepchildren, your blended families and failed marriages, you’ve ruined your world and now you want to ruin mine . . .”

The trouble is, Angel says, we’re running out of places to hide. It’s why Will Rogers used to tell people to buy land: Nobody’s making it anymore.

This is why every rich person has discovered Waytansea Island this summer.

It used to be Sun Valley, Idaho. Then it was Sedona, Arizona. Aspen, Colorado. Key West, Florida. Lahaina, Maui. All of them crowded with tourists and the natives left waiting tables. Now it’s Waytansea Island, the perfect escape. For everyone except the people already living there.

The words say: “. . . you with your fast cars stuck in traffic, your rich food that makes you fat, your houses so big you always feel lonely . . .”

And Angel says, “See here, how his writing is crowded. The letters are squeezed together.” He snaps a picture, cranks the film, and says, “Peter’s very frightened of something.”

Mr. Angel Delaporte, he’s flirting, putting his hand over hers. He gives her the flask until it’s empty. All this is just fine so long as he doesn’t sue her like all your other clients from the mainland. All the summer people who lost bedrooms and linen closets. Everybody whose toothbrush you stuck up your butt. Half the reason why Misty gifted the house so fast to the Catholics was so nobody could put a lien against it.

Angel Delaporte says our natural instinct is to hide. As a species, we claim ground and defend it. Maybe we migrate, to follow the weather or some animal, but we know it takes land to live, and our instinct is to stake our claim.

It’s why birds sing, to mark their territory. It’s why dogs pee.

Sedona, Key West, Sun Valley, the paradox of a half million people going to the same place to be alone.

Misty still tracing the black paint with her index finger, she says, “What did you mean when you talked about Stendhal syndrome?”

And still snapping pictures, Angel says, “It’s named after the French writer Stendhal.”

The words she’s tracing, they say, “. . . Misty Wilmot will send you all to hell . . .”

Your words. You fucker.

Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.

Stendhal syndrome, Angel says, is a medical term. It’s when a painting, or any work of art, is so beautiful it overwhelms the viewer. It’s a form of shock. When Stendhal toured the Church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1817, he reported almost fainting from joy. People feel rapid heart palpitations. They get dizzy. Looking at great art makes you forget your own name, forget even where you’re at. It can bring on depression and physical exhaustion. Amnesia. Panic. Heart attack. Collapse.

Just for the record, Misty thinks Angel Delaporte is a little full of shit.

“If you read contemporary accounts,” he says, “Maura Kincaid’s work supposedly brought about a kind of mass hysteria.”

“And now?” Misty says.

And Angel shrugs, “Search me.” He says, “From what I’ve seen, it’s okay, just some very pretty landscapes.”

Looking at her finger, he says, “Do you feel anything?” He snaps another picture and says, “Funny how tastes change.”

“. . . we’re poor,” Peter’s words say, “but we have what every rich person craves . . . peace, beauty, quiet . . .”

Your words.

Your life after death.

Going home tonight, it’s Will Tupper who gives Misty the beer in the paper bag. He lets her drink on deck despite the rules. He asks if she’s working on any paintings lately. Any landscapes, maybe?

On the ferryboat, the man with the dog, he says the dog’s trained to find dead people. When somebody dies, they give off this huge stink of what the man calls epinephrine. He said it’s the smell of fear.

The beer in the brown bag Misty is holding, she just drinks it and lets him talk.

The man’s hair, the way it recedes above each temple, the way the skin on his exposed scalp is bright red from the cold wind, it looks like he has devil’s horns. He has devil’s horns, and his whole face is red and squinting into wrinkles. Dynamic wrinkling. Lateral canthal rhytides.

The dog twists his head back over one shoulder, trying to get away from her. The man’s aftershave has the smell of cloves. Hooked on his belt, under the edge of his jacket, you can see a pair of chromed handcuffs.

Just for the record, the weather today is increasing turmoil with a possible physical and emotional breakdown.

Holding his dog’s leash, the man says, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

And Misty tells him, “Trust me, I’m not dead.”

“Maybe just my skin’s dead,” she says.

Stendhal syndrome. Epinephrine. Graphology. The coma of details. Of education.

The man nods at her beer in the brown paper bag, and he says, “You know you’re not supposed to drink in public?”

And Misty says, What? Is he a cop?

And he says, “You know? As a matter of fact, yeah, I am.”

The guy flips open his wallet to flash her a badge. Engraved on the silver badge, it says: Clark Stilton. Detective. Seaview County Hate Crimes Task Force .

TABBI AND MISTY, they’re walking through the woods. This is the tangle of land out on Waytansea Point. It’s alders here, generations of trees grown and fallen and sprouting again out of their own dead. Animals, maybe deer, have cut a path that winds around the heaps of complicated trees and edges between rocks big as architecture and padded with thick moss. Above all this, the alder leaves come together in a shifting bright green sky.

Here and there, sunlight breaks through in shafts as big around as crystal chandeliers. Here’s just a messier version of the lobby of the Waytansea Hotel.

Tabbi wears a single old earring, gold filigree and a haze of sparkling red rhinestones around a red enameled heart. It’s pinned through her pink sweatshirt, like a brooch, but it’s the earring that Peter’s blond friend tore out of his ear. Will Tupper from the ferry.

Your friend.

She keeps the junk jewelry in a shoe box under her bed and wears it on special days. The chipped glass rubies pinned to her shoulder glitter with the bright green above them. The rhinestones, spotted with dirt, they reflect pink from Tabbi’s sweatshirt.

Your wife and kid, they step over a rotting log that’s crawling with ants, stepping around ferns that brush Misty’s waist and flop on Tabbi’s face. They’re quiet, looking and listening for birds, but there’s nothing. No birds. No little frogs. No sounds except the ocean, the hiss and burst of waves somewhere else.

They push through a thicket of green stalks, something with soft yellow leaves rotting around its base. You have to look down with every step because the ground’s slippery and puddled with water. How long Misty’s been walking, keeping her eyes on the ground, holding branches so they don’t whip Tabbi, Misty doesn’t know how long, but when she looks up, a man’s standing there.

Just for the record, her levator labii muscles, the snarl muscles, the fight-or-flight muscles, all spasm, all those smooth muscles freeze into the landscape of growling, Misty’s mouth squared so all her teeth show.

Her hand grabs the back of Tabbi’s shirt. Tabbi, she’s still looking down at the ground, walking forward, and Misty yanks her back.

And Tabbi slips and pulls her mother to the ground, saying, “Mom.”

Tabbi pressed to the wet ground, the leaves and moss and beetles, Misty crouched over her, the ferns arch above them.

The man is maybe another ten steps ahead, and facing away from them. He doesn’t turn. Through the curtain of ferns, he must be seven feet tall, dark and heavy with brown leaves in his hair and mud splashed up his legs.

He doesn’t turn, but he doesn’t move. He must’ve heard them, and he stands, listening.

Just for the record, he’s naked. His naked butt is right there.

Tabbi says, “Let go, Mom. There’s bugs.”

And Misty shushes her.

The man waits, frozen, one hand held out at waist height as if he’s feeling the air for movement. No birds sing.

Misty’s crouched, squatting with her hands open against the muddy ground, ready to grab Tabbi and run.

Then Tabbi slips past her, and Misty says, “No.” Reaching fast, Misty clutches the air behind her kid.

It’s one, maybe two seconds before Tabbi gets to the man, puts her hand in his open hand.

In that two seconds, Misty knows she’s a shitty mother.

Peter, you married a coward. Misty’s still here, crouched. If anything, Misty’s leaning back, ready to run the other way. What they don’t teach you in art school is hand-to-hand combat.

And Tabbi turns back, smiling, and says, “Mom, don’t be such a spaz.” She wraps both her hands around the man’s one outstretched hand and pulls herself up so she can swing her legs in the air. She says, “It’s just Apollo, is all.”

Near the man, almost hidden in fallen leaves, is a dead body. A pale white breast with fine blue veins. A severed white arm.

And Misty’s still crouched here.

Tabbi drops from the man’s hand and goes to where Misty’s looking. She brushes leaves off a dead white face and says, “This is Diana.”

She looks at Misty crouching and rolls her eyes. “They’re statues, Mom.”

Statues.

Tabbi comes back to take Misty’s hand. She lifts her mom’s arm and pulls her to her feet, saying, “You know? Statues . You’re the artist.”

Tabbi pulls her forward. The standing man is dark bronze, streaked with lichen and tarnish, a naked man with his feet bolted to a pedestal buried in the bushes beside the trail. His eyes have recessed irises and pupils, Roman irises, cast into them. His bare arms and legs are perfect in proportion to his torso. The golden mean of composition. Every rule of art and proportion applied.

The Greeks’ formula for why we love what we love. More of that art school coma.

The woman on the ground is broken white marble. Tabbi’s pink hand brushes the leaves and grass back from the long white thighs, the coy folds of the pale marble groin meet at a carved leaf. The smooth fingers and arms, the elbows without a wrinkle or crease. Her carved marble hair hangs in sculpted white curls.

Tabbi points her pink hand at an empty pedestal across the path from the bronze, and she says, “Diana fell down a long time before I met her.”

The man’s bronze calf muscle feels cold, but cast with every tendon defined, every muscle thick. As Misty runs her hand up the cold metal leg, she says, “You’ve been here before?”

“Apollo doesn’t have a dick,” Tabbi says. “I already looked.”

And Misty yanks her hand back from the leaf cast over the statue’s bronze crotch. She says, “Who brought you here?”

“Granmy,” Tabbi says. “Granmy brings me here all the time.”

Tabbi stoops to rub her cheek against the smooth marble cheek of the Diana.

The bronze statue, Apollo, it must be a nineteenth-century reproduction. Either that or late eighteenth century. It can’t be real, not an actual Greek or Roman piece. It would be in a museum.

“Why are these here?” Misty says. “Did your grandmother tell you?”

And Tabbi shrugs. She holds out her hand toward Misty and says, “There’s more.” She says, “Come, and I can show you.”

There is more.

Tabbi leads her through the woods that circle the point, and they find a sundial lying in the weeds, crusted a thick dark green with verdigris. They find a fountain as wide across as a swimming pool, but filled with windfall branches and acorns.

They walk past a grotto dug into a hillside, a dark mouth framed in mossy pillars and blocked with a chained iron gate. The cut stone is fitted into an arch that rises to a keystone in the middle. Fancy as a little bank building. The front of a moldy, buried state capitol building. It’s cluttered with carved angels that hold stone garlands of apples, pears, and grapes. Stone wreaths of flowers. All of it streaked with dirt, it’s cracked and pried apart by tree roots.

In between are plants that shouldn’t be here. A climbing rose chokes an oak tree, scrambling up fifty feet to bloom above the tree’s crown. Withered yellow tulip leaves are wilted in the summer heat. A towering wall of sticks and leaves turns out to be a huge lilac bush.

Tulips and lilacs aren’t native to here.

None of this should be here.

In the meadow at the center of the point, they find Grace Wilmot sitting on a blanket spread over the grass. Around her bloom pink and blue bachelor buttons and little white daisies. The wicker picnic hamper is open, and flies buzz over it.

Grace rises to her knees, holding out a glass of red wine, and says, “Misty, you’re back. Come take this.”

Misty takes the wine and drinks some. “Tabbi showed me the statues,” Misty says. “What used to be here?”

Grace gets to her feet and says, “Tabbi, get your things. It’s time for us to go.”

Tabbi picks up her sweater off the blanket.

And Misty says, “But we just got here.”

Grace hands her a plate with a sandwich on it and says, “You’re going to stay and eat. You’re going to have the whole day to do your art.”

The sandwich is chicken salad, and it feels warm from sitting in the sun. The flies landed on it, but it smells okay. So Misty takes a bite.

Grace nods at Tabbi and says, “It was Tabbi’s idea.”

Misty chews and swallows. She says, “It’s a sweet idea, but I didn’t bring any supplies.”

And Tabbi goes to the picnic hamper and says, “Granmy did. We packed them to surprise you.”

Misty drinks some wine.

Anytime some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you’re a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink. That’s the Misty Wilmot Drinking Game.

“Tabbi and I are going on a mission,” Grace says.

And Tabbi says, “We’re going to tag sales .”

The chicken salad tastes funny. Misty chews and swallows and says, “This sandwich has a weird taste.”

“That’s just cilantro,” Grace says. She says, “Tabbi and I have to find a sixteen-inch platter in Lenox’s Silver Wheat Spray pattern.” She shuts her eyes and shakes her head, saying, “Why is it that no one wants their serving pieces until their pattern is discontinued?”

Tabbi says, “And Granmy is going to buy me my birthday present. Anything I want.”

Now, Misty is going to be stuck out here on Waytansea Point with two bottles of red wine and a batch of chicken salad. Her heap of paints and watercolors and brushes and paper, she hasn’t touched them since her kid was a baby. The acrylics and oils have to be hard by now. The watercolors, dried up and cracked. The brushes stiff. All of it useless.

Misty included.

Grace Wilmot holds her hand out and says, “Tabbi, come along. Let’s leave your mother to enjoy her afternoon.”

Tabbi takes her grandmother’s hand, and the two of them start back across the meadow to the dirt road where they left the car parked.

The sun’s warm. The meadow’s up high enough that you can look down and see the waves hiss and burst on the rocks below. Down the coastline, you can see the town. The Waytansea Hotel is a smudge of white clapboard. You can almost see the little dormer windows of the attic rooms. From here, the island looks pleasant and perfect, not crowded and busy with tourists. Ugly with billboards. It looks how the island must’ve looked before the rich summer people arrived. Before Misty arrived. You can see why people born here never move away. You can see why Peter was so ready to protect it.

“Mom,” Tabbi calls out.

She’s running back from her grandmother. Both her hands are clutching at her pink sweatshirt. Panting and smiling, she gets to where Misty is sitting on the blanket. The gold filigree earring in her hands, she says, “Hold still.”

Misty holds still. A statue.

And Tabbi stoops to pin the earring through her mother’s earlobe, saying, “I almost forgot until Granmy reminded me. She says you’ll need this.” The knees of her blue jeans are muddy and stained green from when Misty panicked and pulled them to the ground, when Misty tried to save her.

Misty says, “You want a sandwich to take with you, honey?”

And Tabbi shakes her head, saying, “Granmy told me not to eat them.” Then she turns and runs away, waving one arm over her head until she’s gone.

ANGEL HOLDS THE SHEET of watercolor paper, pinching the corners with the tips of his fingers. He looks at it and looks at Misty and says, “You drew a chair?”

Misty shrugs and says, “It’s been years. It was the first thing that came to me.”

Angel turns his back to her, holding the picture so the sunlight hits it from different angles. Still looking at it, he says, “It’s good. It’s very good. Where did you find the chair?”

“I drew it from my imagination,” Misty says, and she tells him about being stranded out on Waytansea Point all day with just her paints and two bottles of wine.

Angel squints at the picture, holding it so close he’s almost cross-eyed, and he says, “It looks like a Hershel Burke.” Angel looks at her and says, “You spent the day in a grassy meadow and imagined a Hershel Burke Renaissance Revival armchair?”

This morning, a woman in Long Beach called to say she was repainting her laundry room so they’d better come see Peter’s mess before she got started.

Right now, Misty and Angel are in the missing laundry room. Misty’s sketching the fragments of Peter’s doodles. Angel’s supposed to be photographing the walls. The minute Misty opened her portfolio to take out a sketch pad, Angel saw the little watercolor and asked to see it. Sunlight comes through a window of frosted glass, and Angel holds the picture in that light.

Spray-painted across the window, it says: “. . . set foot on our island and you’ll die . . .”

Angel says, “It’s a Hershel Burke, I swear. From 1879 Philadelphia. Its twin is in the Vanderbilt country house, Biltmore.”

It must’ve stuck in Misty’s memory from Art History 101, or the Survey of Decorative Arts 236 or some other useless class from art school. Maybe she saw it on television, a video tour of famous houses on some public television program. Who knows where an idea comes from. Our inspiration. Why do we imagine what we imagine.

Misty says, “I’m lucky I drew anything. I got so sick. Food poisoning.”

Angel’s looking at the picture, turning it. The corrugator muscle between his eyebrows contracts into three deep wrinkles. His glabellar furrows. His triangularis muscle pulls his lips until marionette lines run down from each corner of his mouth.

Sketching the doodles off the walls, Misty doesn’t tell Angel about the stomach cramps. That entire sucky afternoon, she tried to sketch a rock or a tree, and crumpled the paper, disgusted. She tried to sketch the town in the distance, the church steeple and clock on the library, but crumpled that. She crumpled a shitty picture of Peter she tried to draw from memory. She crumpled a picture of Tabbi. Then, a unicorn. She drank a glass of wine and looked for something new to ruin with her lack of talent. Then ate another chicken salad sandwich with its weird cilantro taste.

Even the idea of walking into the dim woods to sketch a falling, crumbling statue made the little hairs stand up behind her neck. The fallen sundial. That locked grotto. Christ. Here in the meadow, the sun was warm. The grass was humming with bugs. Somewhere beyond the woods, the ocean waves hissed and burst.

Just looking into the dark edges of the forest, Misty could imagine the towering bronze man parting the brush with his stained arms and watching her with his pitted blind eyes. As if he’s killed the marble Diana and cut the body to pieces, Misty could see him stalking out of the treeline toward her.

According to the rules of the Misty Wilmot Drinking Game, when you start thinking a naked bronze statue is going to bend its metal arms around you and crush you to death with its kiss while you claw your fingernails off and beat your hands bloody against its mossy chest—well, it’s time you took another drink.

When you find yourself half naked and shitting in a little hole you dig behind a bush, then wiping your ass with a linen hotel napkin, then take another drink.

The stomach cramps hit, and Misty was sweating. Her head spiked in pain with every heartbeat. Her guts shifted, and she couldn’t drop her underwear fast enough. The mess splashed around her shoes and against her legs. The smell gagged her, and Misty pitched forward, her open hands against the warm grass, the little flowers. Black flies found her from miles away, crawling up and down her legs. Her chin dropped to her chest, and a double handful of pink vomit heaved out on the ground.

When you find yourself, a half hour later, with shit still running down your leg, a cloud of flies around you, take another drink.

Misty doesn’t tell Angel any of that part.

Her sketching and him taking pictures here in the missing laundry room, he says, “What can you tell me about Peter’s father?”

Peter’s dad, Harrow. Misty loved Peter’s dad. Misty says, “He’s dead. Why?”

Angel snaps another picture and cranks the film forward in his camera. He nods at the writing on the wall and says, “The way a person makes their i means so much. The first stroke means their attachment to their mother. The second stroke, the downstroke, means their father.”

Peter’s dad, Harrow Wilmot, everybody called him Harry. Misty only met him the one time she came to visit before they were married. Before Misty got pregnant. Harry took her on a long tour of Waytansea Island, walking and pointing out the peeling paint and saggy roofs on the big shingled houses. Using a car key, he picked loose mortar from between the granite blocks of the church. They saw how the Merchant Street sidewalks were cracked and buckled. The storefronts streaked with growing mold. The closed hotel looked black inside, most of it gutted by a fire. The outside, shabby with its window screens rusted dark red. The shutters crooked. The gutters sagging. Harrow Wilmot kept saying, “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” He said, “No matter how well we invest it, this is how long the money ever lasts.”

Peter’s father died after Misty went back to college.

And Angel says, “Can you get me a sample of his handwriting?”

Misty keeps sketching the doodles, and she says, “I don’t know.”

Just for the record, being smeared with shit and naked in the wilderness, spattered with pink vomit, this does not necessarily make you a real artist.

And neither do hallucinations. Out on Waytansea Point, with the cramps and the sweat rolling out of her hair and down the sides of her face, Misty started seeing things. With the hotel napkins she was trying to clean herself up. She rinsed her mouth with wine. Waved away the cloud of flies. The vomit still burned in her nose. It’s stupid, too stupid to tell Angel, but the shadows at the edge of the forest moved.

The metal face was there in the trees. The figure took a step forward and the terrible weight of its bronze foot sunk into the soft edge of the meadow.

If you go to art school, you know a bad hallucination. You know what a flashback is. You’ve done plenty of chemicals that can stay in your fatty tissues, ready to flood your bloodstream with bad dreams in broad daylight.

The figure took another step, and its foot sunk into the ground. The sun made its arms bright green in places, dull brown in other places. The top of its head and its shoulders were heaped white with bird shit. The muscles in each bronze thigh stood up, tensed in high relief as each leg lifted, and the figure stepped forward. With each step, the bronze leaf shifted between its thighs.

Now, looking at the watercolor picture sitting on top of Angel’s camera bag, it’s more than embarrassing. Apollo, the god of love. Misty sick and drunk. The naked soul of a horny middle-aged artist.

The figure coming another step closer. A stupid hallucination. Food poisoning. It naked. Misty naked. Both of them filthy in the circle of trees around the meadow. To clear her head, to make it go away, Misty started sketching. To concentrate. It was a drawing of nothing. Her eyes closed, and Misty put the pencil to the pad of watercolor paper and felt it scratching there, laying down straight lines, rubbing with the side of her thumb to create shaded contour.

Automatic writing.

When her pencil stopped, Misty was done. The figure was gone. Her stomach felt better. The mess had dried enough she could brush the worst of it away and bury the napkins, her ruined underwear, and her crumpled drawings. Tabbi and Grace arrived. They’d found their missing teacup or cream pitcher or whatever. By then the wine was gone. Misty was dressed and smelling a little better.

Tabbi said, “Look. For my birthday,” and held out her hand to show a ring shining on one finger. A square green stone, cut to sparkle. “It’s a peridot,” Tabbi said, and she held it above her head, making it catch the sunset.

Misty fell asleep in the car, wondering where the money came from, Grace driving them back along Division Avenue to the village.

It wasn’t until later that Misty looked at the sketch pad. She was as surprised as anybody. After that, Misty just added a few colors, watercolors. It’s amazing what the subconscious mind will create. Something from her growing up, some picture from art history lessons.

The predictable dreams of poor Misty Kleinman.

Angel says something.

Misty says, “Pardon?”

And Angel says, “What will you take for this?”

He means money. A price. Misty says, “Fifty?” Misty says, “Fifty dollars ?”

This picture Misty drew with her eyes closed, naked and scared, drunk and sick to her stomach, it’s the first piece of art she’s ever sold. It’s the best thing Misty has ever done.

Angel opens his wallet and takes out two twenties and a ten. He says, “Now what else can you tell me about Peter’s father?”

For the record, walking out of the meadow, there were two deep holes next to the path. The holes were a couple of feet apart, too big to be footprints, too far apart to be a person. A trail of holes went back into the forest, too big, too far apart to be anybody walking. Misty doesn’t tell Angel that. He’d think she was crazy. Crazy, like her husband.

Like you, dear sweet Peter.

Now, all that’s left of her food poisoning is a pounding headache.

Angel holds the picture close to his nose and sniffs. He scrunches his nose and sniffs it again, then slips the picture into a pocket on the side of his camera bag. He catches her watching and says, “Oh, don’t mind me. I thought for a second I smelled shit.”

IF THE FIRST MAN who looks at your boobs in four years turns out to be a cop, take a drink. If it turns out he already knows what you look like naked, take another drink.

Make that drink a double.

Some guy sits at table eight in the Wood and Gold Room, just some your-aged guy. He’s beefy with stooped shoulders. His shirt fits okay, a little tight across his gut, a white poly-cotton balloon that bumps over his belt a little. His hair, he’s balding at the temples, and his recessions trail back into long triangles of scalp above each eye. Each triangle is sunburned bright red, making long pointed devil’s horns that poke up from the top of his face. He’s got a little spiral notebook open on the table, and he’s writing in it while he watches Misty. He’s wearing a striped tie and a navy blue sport coat.

Misty takes him a glass of water, her hand shaking so hard you can hear the ice rattle. Just so you know, her headache is going on its third day. Her headache, it’s the feeling of maggots rooting into the big soft pile of her brain. Worms boring. Beetles tunneling.

The guy at table eight says, “You don’t get a lot of men in here, do you?”

His aftershave has the smell of cloves. He’s the man from the ferry, the guy with the dog who thought Misty was dead. The cop. Detective Clark Stilton. The hate crimes guy.

Misty shrugs and gives him a menu. Misty rolls her eyes at the room around them, the gold paint and wood paneling, and says, “Where’s your dog?” Misty says, “Can I get you anything to drink?”

And he says, “I need to see your husband.” He says, “You’re Mrs. Wilmot, aren’t you?”

The name on her name tag, pinned to her pink plastic uniform—Misty Marie Wilmot.

Her headache, it’s the feeling of a hammer tap, tap, tapping a long nail into the back of your head, a conceptual art piece, tapping harder and harder in one spot until you forget everything else in the world.

Detective Stilton sets his pen down on his notebook and offers his hand to shake, and he smiles. He says, “The truth is, I am the county’s task force on hate crimes.”

Misty shakes his hand and says, “Would you like some coffee?”

And he says, “Please.”

Her headache is a beach ball, pumped full of too much air. More air is being forced in, but it’s not air. It’s blood.

Just for the record, Misty’s already told the detective that Peter’s in the hospital.

You’re in a hospital.

On the ferry the other evening, she told Detective Stilton how you were crazy, and you left your family in debt. How you dropped out of every school and stuck jewelry through your body. You sat in the car parked in your garage with the engine running. Your graffiti, all your ranting and sealing up people’s laundry rooms and kitchens, it was all just another symptom of your craziness. The vandalism. It’s unfortunate, Misty told the detective, but she’s been screwed on this as bad as anybody.

This is around three o’clock, the lull between lunch and dinner.

Misty says, “Yeah. Sure, go see my husband.” Misty says, “Did you want coffee?”

The detective, he looks at his pad while he writes and asks, “Did you know if your husband was part of any neo-Nazi organization? Any radical hate groups?”

And Misty says, “Was he?” Misty says, “The roast beef is good here.”

Just for the record, it’s kinda cute. Both of them holding pads, their pens ready to write. It’s a duel. A shoot-out.

If he’s seen Peter’s writing, this guy knows what Peter thought of her naked. Her dead fish breasts. Her legs crawling with veins. Her hands smelling like rubber gloves. Misty Wilmot, queen of the maids. What you thought of your wife.

Detective Stilton writes, saying, “So you and your husband weren’t very close?”

And Misty says, “Yeah, well, I thought we were.” She says, “But go figure.”

He writes, saying, “Are you aware if Peter’s a member of the Ku Klux Klan?”

And Misty says, “The chicken and dumplings is pretty good.”

He writes, saying, “Are you aware if such a hate group exists on Waytansea Island?”

Her headache tap, tap, taps the nail into the back of her head.

Somebody at table five waves, and Misty says, “Could I get you some coffee?”

And Detective Stilton says, “Are you okay? You don’t look so hot right now.”

Just this morning over breakfast, Grace Wilmot said she feels terrible about the spoiled chicken salad—so terrible that she made Misty an appointment to see Dr. Touchet tomorrow. A nice gesture, but another fucking bill to pay.

When Misty shuts her eyes, she’d swear her head is glowing hot inside. Her neck is one cast-iron muscle cramp. Sweat sticks together the folds of her neck skin. Her shoulders are bound, pulled up tight around her ears. She can only turn her head a little in any direction, and her ears feel on fire.

Peter used to talk about Paganini, possibly the best violin player of all time. He was tortured by tuberculosis, syphilis, osteomyelitis in his jaw, diarrhea, hemorrhoids, and kidney stones. Paganini, not Peter. The mercury that doctors gave him for the syphilis poisoned him until his teeth fell out. His skin turned gray-white. He lost his hair. Paganini was a walking corpse, but when he played the violin, he was beyond mortal.

He had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a congenital disease that left his joints so flexible he could bend his thumb back far enough to touch his wrist. According to Peter, what tortured him made him a genius.

According to you.

Misty brings Detective Stilton an iced tea he didn’t order, and he says, “Is there some reason why you’re wearing sunglasses indoors?”

And jerking her head at the big windows, she says, “It’s the light.” She refills his water and says, “It hurts my eyes today.” Her hand shakes so much she drops her pen. One hand clamped to the edge of the table for support, she stoops to pick it up. She sniffs and says, “Sorry.”

And the detective says, “Do you know an Angel Delaporte?”

And Misty sniffs and says, “Want to order now?”

Stilton’s handwriting, Angel Delaporte should see it. His letters are tall, soaring up, ambitious, idealistic. The writing slants hard to the right, aggressive, stubborn. His heavy pressure against the page shows a strong libido. That’s what Angel would tell you. The tails of his letters, the lowercase y ’s and g ’s, hang straight down. This means determination and strong leadership.

Detective Stilton looks at Misty and says, “Would you describe your neighbors as hostile to outsiders?”

Just for the record, if you have masturbation down to less than three minutes because you share a bathtub with fourteen people, take another drink.

In art theory, you learn that women look for men with prominent brows and large, square chins. This was some study a sociologist did at West Point Academy. It proved that rectangular faces, deep-set eyes, and ears that lie close to their heads, this is what makes men attractive.

This is how Detective Stilton looks, plus a few extra pounds. He’s not smiling now, but the wrinkles that crease his cheeks and his crow’s-feet prove he smiles a lot. He smiles more than he frowns. The scars of happiness. It could be his extra weight, but the corrugator wrinkles between his eyes and the brow-lift wrinkles across his forehead, his worry lines, are almost invisible.

All that, and the bright red horns on his forehead.

These are all little visual cues you respond to. The code of attraction. This is why we love who we love. Whether or not you’re consciously aware of them, this is the reason we do what we do.

This is how we know what we don’t know.

Wrinkles as handwriting analysis. Graphology. Angel would be impressed.

Dear sweet Peter, he grew his black hair so long because his ears stuck out.

Your ears stick out.

Tabbi’s ears are her father’s. Tabbi’s long dark hair is his.

Yours.

Stilton says, “Life’s changing around here and plenty of people won’t like that. If your husband isn’t acting alone, we could see assault. Arson. Murder.”

All Misty has to do is look down, and she starts to fall. If she turns her head, her vision blurs, the whole room smears for a moment.

Misty tears the detective’s check out of her pad and lays it on the table, saying, “Will there be anything else?”

“Just one more question, Mrs. Wilmot,” he says. He sips his glass of iced tea, watching her over the rim. And he says, “I’d like to talk to your in-laws—your husband’s parents—if that’s possible.”

Peter’s mother, Grace Wilmot, is staying here in the hotel, Misty tells him. Peter’s father, Harrow Wilmot, is dead. Since about thirteen or fourteen years ago.

Detective Stilton makes another note. He says, “How did your father-in-law die?”

It was a heart attack, Misty thinks. She’s not sure.

And Stilton says, “It sounds like you don’t know any of your in-laws very well.”

Her headache tap, tap, tapping the back of her skull, Misty says, “Did you say if you wanted some coffee?”

DR. TOUCHET SHINES a light into Misty’s eyes and tells her to blink. He looks into her ears. He looks up her nose. He turns out the office lights while he makes her point a flashlight into her mouth. The same way Angel Delaporte’s flashlight looked into the hole in his dining room wall. This is an old doctor’s trick to illuminate the sinuses, they spread out, glowing red under the skin around your nose, and you can check for shadows that mean blockage, infections. Sinus headaches. He tilts Misty’s head back and peers down her throat.

He says, “Why do you say it was food poisoning?”

So Misty tells him about the diarrhea, the cramps, the headaches. Misty tells him everything except the hallucination.

He pumps up the blood pressure cuff around her arm and releases the pressure. With her every heartbeat, they both watch the pressure spike on the dial. The pain in her head, the throb matches every pulse.

Then her blouse is off, and Dr. Touchet’s holding one of her arms up while he feels inside the armpit. He’s wearing glasses and stares at the wall beside them while his fingers work. In a mirror on one wall, Misty can watch them. Her bra looks stretched so tight the straps cut into her shoulders. Her skin rolls over the waistband of her slacks. Her necklace of junk jewelry pearls, as it wraps around the back of her neck, the pearls disappear into a deep fold of fat.

Dr. Touchet, his fingers root, tunnel, bore into her armpit.

The windows of the examining room are frosted glass, and her blouse hangs on a hook on the back of the door. This is the same room where Misty had Tabbi. Pale green tiled walls and a white tiled floor. It’s the same examination table. Peter was born here. So was Paulette. Will Tupper. Matt Hyland. Brett Petersen. So was everyone on the island under the age of fifty. The island’s so small, Dr. Touchet is also the mortician. He prepared Peter’s father, Harrow, before his funeral. His cremation.

Your father.

Harrow Wilmot was everything Misty wanted Peter to become. The way men want to meet their prospective mother-in-law so they can judge how their fiancée will look in another twenty years, that’s what Misty did. Harry would be the man Misty would be married to in her middle age. Tall with gray sideburns, a straight nose, and a long cleft chin.

Now when Misty closes her eyes and tries to picture Harrow Wilmot, what she sees is his ashes being scattered from the rocks on Waytansea Point. A long gray cloud.

If Dr. Touchet uses this same room for embalming, Misty doesn’t know. If he lives long enough, he’ll prepare Grace Wilmot. Dr. Touchet was the physician on the scene when they found Peter.

When they found you.

If they ever pull the plug, he’ll probably prepare the body.

Your body.

Dr. Touchet feels underneath each arm. Rooting around for nodes. For cancer. He knows just where to press your spine to make your head tilt back. The fake pearls folded deep in the back of her neck. His eyes, the irises are too far apart for him to be looking at you. He hums a tune. Focusing somewhere else. You can tell he’s used to working with dead people.

Sitting on the examination table, watching them both in the mirror, Misty says, “What used to be out on the point?”

And Dr. Touchet jumps, startled. He looks up, eyebrows arched with surprise.

As if some dead body just spoke.

“Out on Waytansea Point,” Misty says. “There’s statues, like it used to be a park. What was it?”

His finger probes deep between the tendons on the back of her neck, and he says, “Before we had a crematorium in this area, that was our cemetery.” This would feel good except his fingers are so cold.

But Misty didn’t see any tombstones.

His fingers probing for lymph nodes under her jaw, he says, “There’s a mausoleum dug into the hill out there.” His eyes staring at the wall, he frowns and says, “At least a couple centuries ago. Grace could tell you more than I could.”

The grotto. The little stone bank building. The state capitol with its fancy columns and carved archway, all of it crumbling and held together with tree roots. The locked iron gate, the darkness inside.

Her headache tap, tap, taps the nail in deeper.

The diplomas on the examining room’s green tiled wall are yellowed, cloudy under glass. Water-stained. Flyspecked. Daniel Touchet, M.D. Holding her wrist between two fingers, Dr. Touchet checks her pulse against his wristwatch.

His triangularis pulling both corners of his mouth down in a frown, he puts his cold stethoscope between her shoulder blades. He says, “Misty, I need you to take a deep breath and hold it.”

The cold stab of the stethoscope moves around her back.

“Now let it out,” he says. “And take another breath.”

Misty says, “Did you know, did Peter ever have a vasectomy?” She breathes again, deep, and says, “Peter told me that Tabbi was a miracle from God so I wouldn’t abort.”

And Dr. Touchet says, “Misty, how much are you drinking these days?”

This is such a small fucking town. And poor Misty Marie, she’s the town drunk.

“A police detective came into the hotel,” Misty says. “He was asking if we had the Ku Klux Klan out here on the island.”

And Dr. Touchet says, “Killing yourself is not going to save your daughter.”

He sounds like her husband.

Like you, dear sweet Peter.

And Misty says, “Save my daughter from what ?” Misty turns to meet his eyes and says, “Do we have Nazis out here?”

And looking at her, Dr. Touchet smiles and says, “Of course not.” He goes to his desk and picks up a folder with a few sheets of paper in it. Inside the folder, he writes something. He looks at a calendar on the wall above the desk. He looks at his watch and writes inside the folder. His handwriting, the tail of every letter hanging low, below the line, subconscious, impulsive. Greedy, hungry, evil, Angel Delaporte would say.

Dr. Touchet says, “So, are you doing anything different lately?”

And Misty tells him yes. She’s drawing. For the first time since college, Misty’s drawing, painting a little, mostly watercolors. In her attic room. In her spare time. She’s put up her easel so she can see out the window, down the coastline to Waytansea Point. She works on a picture every day. Working from her imagination. The wish list of a white trash girl: big houses, church weddings, picnics on the beach.