Diary

Yesterday Misty worked until she saw it was dark outside. Five or six hours had just disappeared. Vanished like a missing laundry room in Seaview. Bermuda triangulated.

Misty tells Dr. Touchet, “My head always hurts, but I don’t feel as much pain when I’m painting.”

His desk is painted metal, the kind of steel desk you’d see in the office of an engineer or accountant. The kind with drawers that slide open on smooth rollers and close with thunder and a loud boom. The blotter is green felt. Above it on the wall are the calendar, the old diplomas.

Dr. Touchet with his spotted, balding head and a few long brittle hairs combed from one ear to the other, he could be an engineer. With his thick round glasses in their steel frames, his thick wristwatch on a stretch-metal band, he could be an accountant. He says, “You went to college, didn’t you?”

Art school, Misty tells him. She didn’t graduate. She quit. They moved here when Harrow died, to look after Peter’s mother. Then Tabbi came along. Then Misty fell asleep and woke up fat and tired and middle-aged.

The doctor doesn’t laugh. You can’t blame him.

“When you studied history,” he says, “did you cover the Jains? The Jain Buddhists?”

Not in art history, Misty tells him.

He pulls open one of the desk drawers and takes out a yellow bottle of pills. “I can’t warn you enough,” he says. “Don’t let Tabbi within ten feet of these.” He pops open the bottle and shakes a couple into his hand. They’re clear gelatin capsules, the kind that pull apart into two halves. Inside each one is some loose, shifting dark green powder.

The peeling message on Tabbi’s windowsill: You’ll die when they’re done with you.

Dr. Touchet holds the bottle in her face and says, “Only take these when you have pain.” There isn’t a label. “It’s an herbal compound. It should help you focus.”

Misty says, “Has anybody ever died from Stendhal syndrome?”

And the doctor says, “These are green algae mostly, some white willow bark, a little bee pollen.” He puts the capsules back in the bottle and snaps it shut. He sets the bottle on the table, next to her thigh. “You can still drink,” he says, “but only in moderation.”

Misty says, “I only drink in moderation.”

And turning back to his desk, he says, “If you say so.”

Fucking small towns.

Misty says, “How did Peter’s dad die?”

And Dr. Touchet says, “What did Grace Wilmot tell you?”

She didn’t. She’s never mentioned it. When they scattered the ashes, Peter told Misty it was a heart attack. Misty says, “Grace said it was a brain tumor.”

And Dr. Touchet says, “Yes, yes it was.” He closes his metal desk drawer with a boom. He says, “Grace tells me you demonstrate a very promising talent.”

Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.

Misty askes about those Buddhists he mentioned.

“Jain Buddhists,” he says. He takes the blouse off the back of the door and hands it to her. Under each sleeve, the fabric is ringed with dark sweat stains. Dr. Touchet moves around beside Misty, holding the blouse for her to slip each arm inside.

He says, “What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.”

WHEN THEY WERE in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like Saint George and the Dragon or The Rape of the Sabine Women, but the angle you use, the lighting, the composition, the technique, they’re all you. Even the reason why you chose this scene, it’s you. You are every color and brushstroke.

Peter used to say, “The only thing an artist can do is describe his own face.”

You’re doomed to being you.

This, he says, leaves us free to draw anything, since we’re only drawing ourselves.

Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It’s all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand.

Everything is a self-portrait.

Everything is a diary.

With the fifty dollars from Angel Delaporte, Misty buys a round ox-hair number 5 watercolor brush. She buys a puffy number 4 squirrel brush for painting washes. A round number 2 camel-hair brush. A pointed number 6 cat’s-tongue brush made of sable. And a wide, flat number 12 sky brush.

Misty buys a watercolor palette, a round aluminum tray with ten shallow cups, like a pan for baking muffins. She buys a few tubes of gouache watercolors. Cyprus green, viridian lake green, sap green, and Winsor green. She buys Prussian blue, and a tube of madder carmine. She buys Havannah Lake black and ivory black.

Misty buys milky white art masking fluid for covering her mistakes. And piss-yellow lifting preparation for painting on early so mistakes will wipe off. She buys gum arabic, the amber color of weak beer, to keep her colors from bleeding together on the paper. And clear granulation medium to give the colors a grainy look.

She buys a pad of watercolor paper, fine-grained cold-press paper, 19 by 24 inches. The trade name for this size is a “Royal.” A 23-by-28-inch paper is an “Elephant.” Paper 26.5 by 40 inches is called a “Double Elephant.” This is acid-free, 140-pound paper. She buys art boards, canvas stretched and glued over cardboard. She buys boards sized “Super-Royal” and “Imperial” and “Antiquarian.”

She gets all this to the cash register, and it’s so far beyond fifty dollars she has to put it on a credit card.

When you’re tempted to shoplift a tube of burnt sienna, it’s time to take one of Dr. Touchet’s little green algae pills.

Peter used to say that an artist’s job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble.

If you’re at work and every table in your section is waiting for something, but you’re still hiding out in the kitchen sketching on scraps of paper, it’s time to take a pill.

When you present people with their dinner check and on the back you’ve drawn a little study in light and shadow—you don’t even know where it’s supposed to be, this image just came into your mind. It’s nothing, but you’re terrified of losing it. Then it’s time to take a pill.

“These useless details,” Peter used to say, “they’re only useless until you connect them all together.”

Peter used to say, “Everything is nothing by itself.”

Just for the record, today in the dining room, Grace Wilmot was standing with Tabbi in front of the glass cabinet that covers most of one wall. Inside it, china plates sit on stands under soft lights. Cups sit on saucers. Grace Wilmot points to them one at a time. And Tabbi points with her index finger and says, “Fitz and Floyd . . . Wedgwood . . . Noritake . . . Lenox . . .”

And shaking her head, Tabbi folds her arms and says, “No, that’s not right.” She says, “The Oracle Grove pattern has a border of fourteen-carat gold. Venus Grove has twenty-four carat.”

Your baby daughter, an expert in extinct china patterns.

Your baby daughter, a teenager now.

Grace Wilmot reaches over and loops a few stray hairs behind Tabbi’s ear, and she says, “I swear, this child is a natural.”

With a tray of lunches on her shoulder, Misty stops long enough to ask Grace, “How did Harrow die?”

And Grace looks away from the china. Her orbicularis oculi muscle making her eyes wide, she says, “Why do you ask?”

Misty mentions her doctor’s appointment. Dr. Touchet. And how Angel Delaporte thinks Peter’s handwriting says something about his relationship with his dad. All the details that look like nothing standing alone.

And Grace says, “Did the doctor give you any pills to take?”

The tray is heavy and the food’s getting cold, but Misty says, “The doc says Harrow had liver cancer.”

Tabbi points and says, “Gorham . . . Dansk . . .”

And Grace smiles. “Of course. Liver cancer,” she says. “Why are you asking me?” She says, “I thought Peter told you.”

Just for the record, the weather today is foggy with widely conflicting stories about your father’s cause of death. No detail is anything by itself.

And Misty says, she can’t talk. Too busy. It’s the lunch rush. Maybe later.

In art school, Peter used to talk about the painter James McNeill Whistler, and how Whistler worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, sketching the coastline settings for proposed lighthouses. The problem was, Whistler wouldn’t stop doodling little figure studies in the margins. He drew old women, babies, beggars, anything he saw on the street. He did his job, documenting land for the government, but he couldn’t ignore everything else. He couldn’t let anything slip away. Men smoking pipes. Children rolling hoops. He collected all of it in doodles around the margin of his official work. Of course, the government canned him for it.

“Those doodles,” Peter used to say, “they’re worth millions today.”

You used to say.

In the Wood and Gold Room, they serve butter in little crocks, only now each pad has a little picture carved in it. A little figure study.

Maybe it’s a picture of a tree or the particular way a hillside in Misty’s imagination slopes, right to left. There’s a cliff, and a waterfall from a hanging canyon, and a small ravine full of shade and mossy boulders and vines around the thick trunks of trees, and by the time she’s imagined it all and sketched it on a paper napkin, people are coming to the bus station to refill their own cups of coffee. People tap their glasses with forks to get her attention. They snap their fingers. These summer people.

They don’t tip.

A hillside. A mountain stream. A cave in a riverbank. A tendril of ivy. All these details come to her, and Misty just can’t let them go. By the end of her dinner shift, she has shreds of napkins and paper towels and credit card receipts, each one with some detail drawn on it.

In her attic room, in the heap of paper scraps, she’s collected the patterns of leaves and flowers she’s never seen. In another heap, she has abstract shapes that look like rocks and mountaintops on the horizon. There are the branching shapes of trees, the cluster of bushes. What could be briers. Birds.

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

When you sit on the toilet for hours, sketching nonsense on a sheet of toilet paper until your ass is ready to fall out—take a pill.

When you just stop going down to work altogether, you just stay in your room and phone for room service. You tell everyone you’re sick so you can stay up all night and day sketching landscapes you’ve never seen, then it’s time to take a pill.

When your daughter knocks and begs you for a good-night kiss, and you keep telling her to go to bed, that you’ll be there in a minute, and finally her grandmother takes her away from the door, and you can hear her crying as they go down the hallway—take two pills.

When you find the rhinestone bracelet she’s pushed under the door, take another.

When nobody seems to notice your bad behavior, they just smile and say, “So, Misty, how’s the painting coming along?” it’s pill time.

When the headaches won’t let you eat. Your pants fall down because your ass is gone. You pass a mirror and don’t recognize the thin, sagging ghost you see. Your hands only stop shaking when you’re holding a paintbrush or a pencil. Then take a pill. And before you’re half through the bottle, Dr. Touchet leaves another bottle at the front desk with your name on it.

When you just cannot stop working. When completing this one project is all you can imagine. Then take a pill.

Because Peter’s right.

You’re right.

Because everything is important. Every detail. We just don’t know why yet.

Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes.

Everything you do shows your hand.

Peter used to say, an artist’s job is to pay attention, collect, organize, archive, preserve, then write a report. Document. Make your presentation. The job of an artist is just not to forget.

ANGEL DELAPORTE holds up one painting, then another, all of them watercolors. They’re different subjects, some just the outline of a strange horizon, some of them are landscapes of sunny fields. Pine forests. The shape of a house or a village in the middle distance. In his face, only Angel’s eyes move, jumping back and forth on every sheet of paper.

“Incredible,” he says. “You look terrible, but your work . . . my God.”

Just for the record, Angel and Misty, they’re in Oysterville. This is somebody’s missing family room. They’ve crawled in through another hole to take pictures and see the graffiti.

Your graffiti.

The way Misty looks, how she can’t get warm, even wearing two sweaters, her teeth chatter. How her hand shakes when she holds a picture out to Angel, she makes the stiff watercolor paper flap. It’s some intestinal bug lingering from her case of food poisoning. Even here in a dim sealed room with only the light filtered through the drapes, she’s wearing sunglasses.

Angel drags along his camera bag. Misty brings her portfolio. It’s her old black plastic one from school, a thin suitcase with a zipper that goes around three sides so you can open it and lay it flat. Thin straps of elastic hold watercolor paintings to one side of the portfolio. On the other side, sketches are tucked in pockets of different sizes.

Angel’s snapping pictures while Misty opens the portfolio on the sofa. When she takes out her pill bottle, her hand’s shaking so much you can hear the capsules rattle inside. Pinching a capsule out of the bottle, she tells Angel, “Green algae. It’s for headaches.” Misty puts the capsule in her mouth and says, “Come look at some pictures and tell me what you think.”

Across the sofa, Peter’s spray-painted something. His black words scrawl across framed family photos on the wall. Across needlepoint pillows. Silk lampshades. He’s pulled the pleated drapes shut and spray-painted his words across the inside of them.

You have.

Angel takes the bottle of pills out of her hand and holds it up to light from the window. He shakes the bottle, the capsules inside. He says, “These are huge.”

The gelatin capsule in her mouth is getting soft, and inside you can taste salt and tinfoil, the taste of blood.

Angel hands her the flask of gin from his camera bag, and Misty gulps her bitter mouthful. Just for the record, she drank his booze. What you learn in art school is there’s an etiquette to drugs. You have to share.

Misty says, “Help yourself. Take one.”

And Angel pops the bottle open and shakes out two. He slips one in his pocket, saying, “For later.” He swallows the other with gin and makes a terrible gagging face, leaning forward with his red and white tongue stuck out. His eyes squeezed shut.

Immanuel Kant and his gout. Karen Blixen and her syphilis. Peter would tell Angel Delaporte that suffering is his key to inspiration.

Getting the sketches and watercolors spread out across the sofa, Misty says, “What do you think?”

Angel sets each picture down and lifts the next. Shaking his head no. Just a hair side to side, a kind of palsy. He says, “Simply unbelievable.” He lifts another picture and says, “What kind of software are you using?”

Her brush? “Sable,” Misty says. “Sometimes squirrel or oxtail.”

“No, silly,” he says, “on your computer, for the drafting. You can’t be doing this with hand tools.” He taps his finger on the castle in one painting, then taps on the cottage in another.

Hand tools?

“You don’t use just a straightedge and a compass, do you?” Angel says. “And a protractor? Your angles are identical, perfect. You’re using a stencil or a template, right?”

Misty says, “What’s a compass?”

“You know, like in geometry, in high school,” Angel says, spreading his thumb and forefinger to demonstrate. “It has a point on one leg, and you put a pencil in the other leg and use it to draw perfect curves and circles.”

He holds up a picture of a house on a hillside above the beach, the ocean and trees just different shades of blue and green. The only warm color is a dot of yellow, a light in one window. “I could look at this one forever,” he says.

Stendhal syndrome.

He says, “I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it.”

And Misty says, “I can’t.”

He takes another from the portfolio and says, “Then how about this one?”

She can’t sell any of them.

“How about a thousand?” he says. “I’ll give you a thousand just for this one.”

A thousand bucks. But still, Misty says, “No.”

Looking at her, Angel says, “Then I’ll give you ten thousand for the whole batch. Ten thousand dollars. Cash.”

Misty starts to say no, but—

Angel says, “Twenty thousand.”

Misty sighs, and—

Angel says, “Fifty thousand dollars.”

Misty looks at the floor.

“Why,” Angel says, “do I get the feeling that you’d say no to a million dollars?”

Because the pictures aren’t done. They’re not perfect. People can’t see them, not yet. There are more she hasn’t even started. Misty can’t sell them because she needs them as studies for something bigger. They’re all parts of something she can’t see yet. They’re clues.

Who knows why we do what we do.

Misty says, “Why are you offering me so much money? Is this some kind of test?”

And Angel zippers open his camera bag and says, “I want you to see something.” He takes out some shiny tools made of metal. One is two sharp rods that join at one end to make a V. The other is a half circle of metal, shaped like a D and marked with inches along the straight side.

Angel holds the metal D against a sketch of a farmhouse and says, “All your straight lines are absolutely straight.” He sets the D flat against a watercolor of a cottage, and her lines are all perfect. “This is a protractor,” he says. “You use it to measure angles.”

Angel sets the protractor against picture after picture and says, “Your angles are all perfect. Perfect ninty-degree angles. Perfect forty-five-degree angles.” He says, “I noticed this on the chair painting.”

He picks up the V-shaped tool and says, “This is a compass. You use it to draw perfect curves and circles.” He stabs one pointed leg of the compass in the center of a charcoal sketch. He spins the other leg around the first leg and says, “Every circle is perfect. Every sunflower and birdbath. Every curve, perfect.”

Angel points at her pictures spread across the green sofa, and he says, “You’re drafting perfect figures. It isn’t possible.”

Just for the record, the weather today is getting really, really pissy right about now.

The only person who doesn’t expect Misty to be a great painter, he’s telling her it’s impossible. When your only friend says no way can you be a great artist, a naturally talented, skilled artist, then take a pill.

Misty says, “Listen, my husband and I both went to art school.” She says, “We were trained to draw.”

And Angel asks, was she tracing a photograph? Was Misty using an opaque projector? A camera obscura?

The message from Constance Burton: “You can do this with your mind.”

And Angel takes a felt-tipped pen from his camera bag and gives it to her, saying, “Here.” He points at the wall and says, “Right there, draw me a circle with a four-inch diameter.”

With the pen, without even looking, Misty draws him a circle.

And Angel sets the straight edge of the protractor, the edge marked in inches, against the circle. And it’s four inches. He says, “Draw me a thirty-seven-degree angle.”

Slash, slash, and Misty marks two intersecting lines on the wall.

He sets on the protractor and it’s exactly thirty-seven degrees.

He asks for an eight-inch circle. A six-inch line. A seventy-degree angle. A perfect S curve. An equilateral triangle. A square. And Misty sketches them all in an instant.

According to the straightedge, the protractor, the compass, they’re all perfect.

“Do you see what I mean?” he says. He pokes the point of his compass in her face and says, “Something’s wrong. First it was wrong with Peter, and now it’s wrong with you.”

Just for the record, it seems Angel Delaporte liked her loads better when she was just the fat fucking slob. A maid at the Waytansea Hotel. A sidekick he could lecture about Stanislavski or graphology. First she’s Peter’s student. Then Angel’s.

Misty says, “The only thing I see is how you can’t deal with my maybe having this incredible natural gift.”

And Angel jumps, startled. He looks up, eyebrows arched with surprise.

As if some dead body just spoke.

He says, “Misty Wilmot, would you just listen to yourself?”

Angel shakes his compass point at her and says, “This isn’t just talent.” He points his finger at the perfect circles and angles doodled on the wall and says, “The police need to see this.”

Stuffing the paintings and sketches back in her portfolio, Misty says, “How come?” Zippering it shut, she says, “So they can arrest me for being too good an artist ?”

Angel takes his camera out and cranks to the next frame of film. He snaps a flash attachment to the top. Watching her through the viewfinder, he says, “We need more proof.” He says, “Draw me a hexagon. Draw me a pentagram. Draw me a perfect spiral.”

And with the felt-tipped pen, Misty does one, then the next. The only time her hands don’t shake is when she draws or paints.

On the wall in front of her, Peter’s scrawled: “. . . we will destroy you with your own neediness and greed . . .”

You scrawled.

The hexagon. The pentagram. The perfect spiral. Angel snaps a picture of each.

With the flash blinding them, they don’t see the homeowner stick her head through the hole. She looks at Angel standing there, snapping photos. Misty, drawing on the wall. And the homeowner clutches her own head in both hands and says, “What the hell are you doing? Stop!” She says, “Has this become an ongoing art project for you people?”

JUST SO YOU KNOW, Detective Stilton phoned Misty today. He wants to pay Peter a little visit.

He wants to pay you a little visit.

On the phone, he says, “When did your father-in-law die?”

The floor around Misty, the bed, her whole room, it’s cluttered with wet balls of watercolor paper. The crumpled wads of azure blue and Winsor green, they fill the brown shopping bag she brought her art supplies home in. Her graphite pencils, her colored pencils, her oils and acrylics and gouache watercolors, she’s wasted them all to make trash. Her greasy oil pastels and chalky soft pastels, they’re worn down to just nubs so small you can’t hold them anymore. Her paper’s almost gone.

What they don’t teach you in art school is how to hold a telephone conversation and still paint. Holding the phone in one hand and a brush in her other, Misty says, “Peter’s dad? Fourteen years ago, right?”

Smearing the paints with the side of her hand, blending with the pad of her thumb, Misty’s as bad as Goya, setting herself up for lead encephalopathy. Deafness. Depression. Topical poisoning.

Detective Stilton, he says, “There’s no record that Harrow Wilmot ever died.”

To give her brush a sharp point, Misty twists it in her mouth. Misty says, “We scattered his ashes.” She says, “It was a heart attack. Maybe a brain tumor.” Against her tongue, the paint tastes sour. The color feels gritty between her back teeth.

And Detective Stilton says, “There’s no death certificate.”

Misty says, “Maybe they faked his death.” She’s all out of guesses. Grace Wilmot and Dr. Touchet, this whole island is about image control.

And Stilton says, “Who do you mean, they ?”

The Nazis. The Klan.

With a number 12 camel-hair sky brush, she’s putting a perfect wash of blue above the trees on a perfect jagged horizon of perfect mountains. With a number 2 sable brush, she’s putting sunlight on the top of each perfect wave. Perfect curves and straight lines and exact angles, so fuck Angel Delaporte.

Just for the record, on paper, the weather is what Misty says it will be. Perfect.

Just for the record, Detective Stilton says, “Why do you think your father-in-law would fake his death?”

Misty says she’s just joking. Of course Harry Wilmot’s dead.

With a number 4 squirrel brush, she’s dabbing shadows into the forest. Days she’s wasted locked up here in this room, and nothing she’s done is half as good as the sketch of a chair she did while shitting her pants. Out on Waytansea Point. Being menaced by a hallucination. With her eyes shut, food-poisoned.

That only sketch, she’s sold it for a lousy fifty bucks.

On the phone, Detective Stilton says, “Are you still there?”

Misty says, “Define there .”

She says, “Go. See Peter.” She’s putting perfect flowers in a perfect meadow with a number 2 nylon brush. Where Tabbi is, Misty doesn’t know. If Misty’s supposed to be at work right now, she doesn’t care. The only fact she’s sure about is she’s working. Her head doesn’t hurt. Her hands don’t shake.

“The problem is,” Stilton says, “the hospital wants you to be present when I see your husband.”

And Misty says she can’t. She has to paint. She has a thirteen-year-old kid to raise. She’s on the second week of a migraine headache. With a number 4 sable brush, she’s wiping a band of gray-white across the meadow. Paving over the grass. She’s excavating a pit. Sinking in a foundation.

On the paper in front of her, the paintbrush kills trees and hauls them away. With brown paint, Misty cuts into the slope of the meadow. Misty regrades. The brush plows under the grass. The flowers are gone. White stone walls rise out of the pit. Windows open in the walls. A tower goes up. A dome swells over the center of the building. Stairs run down from the doorways. A railing runs along the terraces. Another tower shoots up. Another wing spreads out to cover more of the meadow and push the forest back.

It’s Xanadu. San Simeon. Biltmore. Mar a Lago. It’s what people with money build to be protected and alone. The places people think will make them happy. This new building is just the naked soul of a rich person. It’s the alternate heaven for people too rich to get into the real thing.

You can paint anything because the only thing you ever reveal is yourself.

And on the phone, a voice says, “Can we say three o’clock tomorrow, Mrs. Wilmot?”

Statues appear along the perfect roofline of one wing. A pool opens in one perfect terrace. The meadow is almost gone as a new flight of steps runs down to the edge of the perfect woods.

Everything is a self-portrait.

Everything is a diary.

And the voice on the phone says, “Mrs. Wilmot?”

Vines scramble up the walls. Chimneys sprout from the slates on the roof.

And the voice on the phone says, “Misty?” The voice says, “Did you ever request the medical examiner’s records for your husband’s suicide attempt?” Detective Stilton says, “Do you know where your husband might have gotten sleeping pills?”

Just for the record, the problem with art school is that it can teach you technique and craft, but it can’t give you talent. You can’t buy inspiration. You can’t reason your way to an epiphany. Develop a formula. A road map to enlightenment.

“Your husband’s blood,” Stilton says, “was loaded with sodium phenobarbital.”

And there’s no evidence of drugs at the scene, he says. No pill bottle or water. No record of Peter ever having a prescription.

Still painting, Misty asks where this is going.

And Stilton says, “You might think about who’d want to kill him.”

“Only me,” Misty says. Then she wishes she hadn’t.

The picture is finished, perfect, beautiful. It’s no place Misty’s ever seen. Where it came from, she has no idea. Then, with a number 12 cat’s-tongue brush full of ivory black, she wipes out everything in sight.

ALL THE HOUSES along Gum Street and Larch Street, they look so grand the first time you see them. All of them three or four stories tall with white columns, they all date from the last economic boom, eighty years ago. A century. House after house, they sit back among branching trees as big as green storm clouds, walnuts and oaks. They line Cedar Street, facing each other across rolled lawns. The first time you see them, they look so rich.

“Temple fronts,” Harrow Wilmot told Misty. Starting in about 1798, Americans built simple but massive Greek Revival façades. By 1824, he says, when William Strickland designed the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, there was no going back. After that, houses large and small had to have a row of fluted columns and a looming pediment roof across the front.

People called them “end houses” because all this fancy detail was confined to one end. The rest of the house was plain.

That could describe almost any house on the island. All façade. Your first impression.

From the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to the smallest cottage, what architects called “the Greek cancer” was everywhere.

“For architecture,” Harrow said, “it was the end of progress and the beginning of recycling.” He met Misty and Peter at the bus station in Long Beach and drove them down to the ferry.

The island houses, they’re all so grand until you see how the paint’s peeled and heaping around the base of each column. On the roof, the flashing is rusted and hangs off the edge in bent red strips. Brown cardboard patches windows where the glass is gone.

Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.

No investment is yours forever. Harry Wilmot told her that. The money was already running out.

“One generation makes the money,” Harrow told her once. “The next generation protects the money. The third runs out of it. People always forget what it takes to build a family fortune.”

Peter’s scrawled words: “. . . your blood is our gold . . .”

Just for the record, while Misty drives to meet Detective Stilton, the whole three-hour drive to Peter’s warehousing facility, she puts together everything she can remember about Harrow Wilmot.

The first time Misty saw Waytansea Island was while visiting with Peter, when his father drove them around in the old family Buick. All the cars in Waytansea were old, clean and polished, but their seats were patched with clear strapping tape so the stuffing stayed inside. The padded dashboard was cracked from too much sun. The chrome trim and the bumpers were spotted and pimpled with rust from the salt air. The paint colors were dull under a thin layer of white oxide.

Harrow had thick white hair combed into a crown over his forehead. His eyes were blue or gray. His teeth were more yellow than white. His chin and nose, sharp and jutting out. The rest of him, skinny, pale. Plain. You could smell his breath. An old island house with his own rotting interior.

“This car’s ten years old,” he said. “That’s a lifetime for a car at the shore.” He drove them down to the ferry and they waited at the dock, looking across the water at the dark green of the island. Peter and Misty, they were out of school for the summer, looking for jobs, dreaming of living in a city, any city. They’d talked about dropping out and moving to New York or Los Angeles. Waiting for the ferry, they said they might study art in Chicago or Seattle. Someplace they could each start a career. Misty remembers she had to slam her car door three times before it would stay shut.

This was the car where Peter tried to kill himself.

The car you tried to kill yourself in. Where you took those sleeping pills.

The same car she’s driving now.

Stenciled down the side now, the bright yellow words say, “Bonner & Mills—When You’re Ready to Stop Starting Over.”

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

On the ferry that first day, Misty sat in the car while Harrow and Peter stood at the railing.

Harrow leaned close to Peter and said, “Are you sure she’s the one?”

Leaned close to you. Father and son.

And Peter said, “I’ve seen her paintings. She’s the real deal . . .”

Harrow raised his eyebrows, his corrugator muscle gathering the skin of his forehead into long wrinkles, and he said, “You know what this means.”

And Peter smiled, but only by lifting his levator labii, his sneer muscle, and he said, “Yeah, sure. Fucking lucky me .”

And his father nodded. He said, “That means we’ll be rebuilding the hotel finally.”

Misty’s hippie mom, she used to say it’s the American dream to be so rich you can escape from everyone. Look at Howard Hughes in his penthouse. William Randolph Hearst in San Simeon. Look at Biltmore. All those lush country homes where rich folks exile themselves. Those homemade Edens where we retreat. When that breaks down, and it always does, the dreamer returns to the world.

“Scratch any fortune,” Misty’s mom used to say, “and you’ll find blood only a generation or two back.” Saying this was supposed to make their trailer lifestyle better.

Child labor in mines or mills, she’d say. Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.

Despite her mom, Misty thought her whole future was ahead of her.

At the coma center, Misty parks for a minute, looking up at the third row of windows. Peter’s window.

Your window.

These days, Misty’s clutching the edge of everything she walks past, doorframes, countertops, tables, chair backs. To steady herself. Misty can’t carry her head more than halfway off her chest. Anytime she leaves her room, she has to wear sunglasses because the light hurts so much. Her clothes hang loose, billowing as if there’s nothing inside. Her hair . . . there’s more of it in the brush than her scalp. Any of her belts can wrap twice around her new waist.

Spanish soap opera skinny.

Her eyes shrunken and bloodshot in the rearview mirror, Misty could be Paganini’s dead body.

Before she gets out of the car, Misty takes another green algae pill, and her headache spikes when she swallows it with a can of beer.

Just inside the glass lobby doors, Detective Stilton waits, watching her cross the parking lot. Her hand clutching every car for balance.

While Misty climbs the front steps, one hand grips the rail and pulls her forward.

Detective Stilton holds the door open for her, saying, “You don’t look so hot.”

It’s the headache, Misty tells him. It could be her paints. Cadmium red. Titanium white. Some oil paints are loaded with lead or copper or iron oxide. It doesn’t help that most artists will twist the brush in their mouth to make a finer point. In art school, they’re always warning you about Vincent van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. All those painters who went insane and suffered so much nerve damage they painted with a brush tied to their dead hand. Toxic paints, absinthe, syphilis.

Weakness in your wrists and ankles, a sure sign of lead poisoning.

Everything is a self-portrait. Including your autopsied brain. Your urine.

Poisons, drugs, disease. Inspiration.

Everything is a diary.

Just for the record, Detective Stilton is scribbling all this down. Documenting her every slurred word.

Misty needs to shut up before they put Tabbi in state custody.

They check in with the woman at the front desk. They sign the day’s log and get plastic badges to clip on their coats. Misty’s wearing one of Peter’s favorite brooches, a big pinwheel of yellow rhinestones, the jewels all chipped and cloudy. The silver foil has flaked off the back of some stones so they don’t sparkle. They could be broken bottles off the street.

Misty clips the plastic security badge next to the brooch.

And the detective says, “That looks old.”

And Misty says, “My husband gave it to me when we were dating.”

They’re waiting for the elevator when Detective Stilton says, “I’ll need proof that your husband has been here for the past forty-eight hours.” He looks from the blinking elevator floor numbers to her and says, “And you might want to document your whereabouts for that same period.”

The elevator opens and they step inside. The doors close. Misty presses the button for the third floor.

Both of them looking at the doors from the inside, Stilton says, “I have a warrant to arrest him.” He pats the front of his sport coat, just over the inside pocket.

The elevator stops. The doors open. They step out.

Detective Stilton flips open his notebook and reads it, saying, “Do you know the people at 346 Western Bayshore Drive?”

Misty leads him down the hallway, saying, “Should I?”

“Your husband did some remodeling work for them last year,” he says.

The missing laundry room.

“And how about the people at 7856 Northern Pine Road?” he says.

The missing linen closet.

And Misty says yeah. Yes. She saw what Peter did there, but no, she didn’t know the people.

Detective Stilton flips his notebook shut and says, “Both houses burned last night. Five days ago, another house burned. Before that, another house your husband remodeled was destroyed.”

All of them arson, he says. Every house that Peter sealed his hate graffiti inside for someone to find, they’re all catching fire. Yesterday the police got a letter from some group claiming responsibility. The Ocean Alliance for Freedom. OAFF for short. They want a stop to all coastline development.

Following her down the long linoleum hallway, Stilton says, “The white supremacy movement and the Green Party have connections going way back.” He says, “It’s not a long stretch from protecting nature to preserving racial purity.”

They get to Peter’s room and Stilton says, “Unless your husband can prove he’s been here the night of every fire, I’m here to arrest him.” And he pats the warrant in his jacket pocket.

The curtain is pulled shut around Peter’s bed. Inside it, you can hear the rushing sound of the respirator pumping air. You can hear the soft blip of his heart monitor. You can hear the faint tinkle of something Mozart from his earphones.

Misty throws back the curtain around the bed.

An unveiling. An opening night.

And Misty says, “Be my guest. Ask him anything.”

In the middle of the bed, a skeleton’s curled on its side, papier-mâchéd in waxy skin. Mummified in blue-white with dark lightning bolts of veins branching just under the surface. The knees are pulled up to the chest. The back arches so the head almost touches the withered buttocks. The feet point, sharp as whittled sticks. The toenails long and dark yellow. The hands knot under so tight the fingernails cut into bandages wrapped to protect each wrist. The thin knit blanket is pushed to the bottom of the mattress. Tubes of clear and yellow loop to and from the arms, the belly, the dark wilted penis, the skull. So little muscle is left that the knees and elbows, the bony feet and hands look huge.

The lips—shiny with petroleum jelly—pull back to show the black holes of missing teeth.

With the curtain open, there’s the smell of it all, the alcohol swabs, the urine, the bedsores and sweet skin cream. The smell of warm plastic. The hot smell of bleach and the powdery smell of latex gloves.

The diary of you.

The respirator’s ribbed blue plastic tube hooks into a hole halfway down the throat. Strips of white surgical tape hold the eyes shut. The head is shaved for the brain pressure monitor, but black scruffy hair bristles on the ribs and in the hammock of loose skin between the hipbones.

The same as Tabbi’s black hair.

Your black hair.

Holding the curtain back, Misty says, “As you can see, my husband doesn’t get out much.”

Everything you do shows your hand.

Detective Stilton swallows, hard. The levator labii superioris pulls his top lip up to his nostrils, and his face goes down into his notebook. His pen gets busy writing.

In the little cabinet next to the bed, Misty finds the alcohol swabs and rips the plastic cover off one. Coma patients are graded according to what’s called the Glasgow Coma Scale, she tells the detective. The scale runs from fully awake to unconscious and unresponsive. You give the patient verbal commands and see if he can respond by moving. Or by speaking. Or by blinking his eyes.

Detective Stilton says, “What can you tell me about Peter’s father?”

“Well,” Misty says, “he’s a drinking fountain.”

The detective gives her a look. Both eyebrows squeezed together. The corrugator muscles doing their job.

Grace Wilmot dropped a wad of money on a fancy brass drinking fountain in Harrow’s memory. It’s on Alder Street where it meets Division Avenue, near the hotel, Misty tells him. Harrow’s ashes, she scattered them in a ceremony out on Waytansea Point.

Detective Stilton is scribbling all this in his notebook.

With the alcohol swab, Misty wipes the skin clean around Peter’s nipple.

Misty lifts the earphones off his head and takes the face in both her hands, settling it in the pillow so he looks up at the ceiling. Misty unhooks the yellow pinwheel brooch from her coat.

The lowest score you can get on the Glasgow Coma Scale is a three. This means you never move, you never speak, you never blink. No matter what people say or do to you. You don’t react.

The brooch opens into a steel pin as long as her little finger, and Misty polishes the pin with the alcohol swab.

Detective Stilton’s pen stops, still on the page of his notebook, and he says, “Does your daughter ever visit?”

And Misty shakes her head.

“Does his mother?”

And Misty says, “My daughter spends most of her time with her grandmother.” Misty looks at the pin, polished silver and clean. “They go to tag sales,” Misty says. “My mother-in-law works for a service that finds pieces of china for people in discontinued patterns.”

Misty peels the tape off Peter’s eyes.

Off your eyes.

Misty holds his eyes open with her thumbs and leans close to his face, shouting, “Peter!”

Misty shouts, “How did your father really die?”

Her spit dotting his eyes, his pupils two different sizes, Misty shouts, “Are you part of some neo-Nazi ecoterrorist gang?”

Turning to look at Detective Stilton, Misty shouts, “Are you sneaking out every night to burn down houses?”

Misty shouts, “Are you an oaf?”

The Ocean Alliance for Freedom.

Stilton folds his arms and drops his chin to his chest, watching her out of the tops of his eyes. The orbicularis oris muscles around his lips clamp his mouth into a thin straight line. The frontalis muscle lifts his eyebrows so his forehead folds into three wrinkles from temple to temple. Wrinkles that weren’t there before now.

With one hand, Misty pinches Peter’s nipple and pulls it up, stretching it out to a long point.

With the other hand, Misty drives the pin through. Then she pulls the pin out.

The heart monitor blips every moment, not one beat more fast or slow.

Misty says, “Peter darling? Can you feel this?” And again Misty drives the pin through.

So you can feel fresh pain every time. The Stanislavski Method.

Just so you know, there’s so much scar tissue this is tough as pushing a pin through a tractor tire. The nipple skin stretches forever before the pin pops out the other side.

Misty shouts, “Why did you kill yourself?”

Peter’s pupils stare up at the ceiling, one wide open and the other a pinhole.

Then two arms come around her from behind. Detective Stilton. They pull her away. Her shouting, “Why the fuck did you bring me here?”

Stilton pulls her away until the pin Misty’s holding pulls out, little by little, until it pulls free. Her shouting, “Why the fuck did you get me pregnant?”

MISTY’S FIRST BATCH of birth control pills, Peter monkeyed with. He replaced them with little cinnamon candies. The next batch he just flushed down the toilet.

You flushed down the toilet. By accident, you said.

After that, student health services wouldn’t refill her prescription for another thirty days. They got her fitted for a diaphragm, and a week later Misty found a little hole poked through the center of it. She held it up to the window to show Peter, and he said, “Those things don’t last forever.”

Misty said she just got it.

“They wear out,” he said.

Misty said his penis wasn’t so big it hit her cervix and punched a hole in her diaphragm.

Yourpenis isn’t that big.

After that, Misty kept running out of spermicidal foam. This was costing her a fortune. Each can, Misty used maybe one time and then she’d find it empty. After a few cans, Misty came out of the bathroom one day and asked Peter, was he messing with her foam?

Peter was watching his Spanish soap operas, where all the women had waists so small they could be wet rags wrung dry. They lugged around giant breasts behind spaghetti straps. Their eyes smeared with glitter makeup, they were supposed to be doctors and lawyers.

Peter said, “Here,” and he reached around behind his neck with both hands. He pulled something from inside the collar of his black T-shirt and held it out. This was a shimmering necklace of pink rhinestones, strands of ice-cold pink, all pink flash and sparkle. And he said, “You want this?”

And Misty was struck stupid as his Spanish bimbos. All she could do was reach out and take one end of the necklace in each hand. In the bathroom mirror, it sparkled against her skin. Looking at the necklace in the mirror, touching it, Misty heard the prattle of Spanish from the other room.

Misty yelled, “Just don’t touch my foam anymore. Okay?”

All Misty heard was Spanish.

Of course, her next period never came. After the first couple days, Peter brought her a box of pregnancy test sticks. These were the kind you pee on. They’d show a yes or no if you’re knocked up. The sticks weren’t sealed in any paper wrappers. They all smelled like pee. They already showed a “no” for not pregnant.

Then Misty saw how the bottom of the box had been pulled open and then taped shut. To Peter, standing, waiting outside the bathroom door, Misty said, “You just bought these today?”

Peter said, “What?”

Misty could hear Spanish.

When they’d fuck, Peter kept his eyes shut, panting and heaving. When he came, his eyes squeezed shut, he’d shout, “Te amo!”

Through the bathroom door, Misty shouted, “Did you pee on these?”

The doorknob turned, but Misty had it locked. Then, through the door, Peter’s voice said, “You don’t need those. You’re not pregnant.”

And Misty asked, so where was her monthly visit from dot?

“Right here,” his voice said. Then fingers poked through the crack under the door. They were shoving something white and soft. “You dropped these on the floor,” he said. “Take a good look at them.”

It was her panties, spotted with fresh blood.

JUST FOR THE RECORD, the weather today is heavy and scratchy and it hurts every time your wife tries to move.

Dr. Touchet’s just left. He’s spent the past two hours wrapping her leg in strips of sterile cloth and clear acrylic resin. Her leg, from the ankle to the crotch, is one straight fiberglass cast. It’s her knee, the doctor said.

Peter, your wife is a klutz.

Misty is the klutz.

She’s carrying a tray of Waldorf salads from the kitchen into the dining room when she trips. Right in the kitchen doorway, her feet go out from under her, and Misty, the tray, the plates of Waldorf salad, it all goes headfirst onto table eight.

Of course, the whole dining room gets up to come look at her covered in mayonnaise. Her knee looks fine, and Raymon comes out of the kitchen and helps her to her feet. Still, the knee is sprained, says Dr. Touchet. He comes an hour later, after Raymon and Paulette help her up the stairs to her room. The doctor holds an ice pack on the knee, then offers Misty a cast in neon yellow, neon pink, or plain white.

Dr. Touchet’s squatting at her feet while Misty sits in a straight chair with her leg propped on a footstool. He’s moving the ice pack, looking for signs of swelling.

And Misty asks him, did he fill out Harrow’s death certificate?

Misty asks, did he prescribe sleeping pills for Peter?

The doctor looks at her for a moment, then goes back to icing her leg. He says, “If you don’t relax, you may never walk again.”

Her leg, it already feels fine. It looks fine. Just for the record, her knee doesn’t even hurt.

“You’re in shock,” Touchet says. He brings a briefcase, not a black doctor’s bag. It’s the kind of briefcase a lawyer would carry. Or a banker. “For you, a cast would be prophylactic,” he says. “Without it, you’ll be running around with that police detective, and your leg will never heal.”

Such a small town, the whole Waytansea Island wax museum is spying on her.

Somebody knocks at the door, and then Grace and Tabbi come into the room. Tabbi says, “Mom, we brought you more paints,” and she holds a plastic shopping bag in each hand.

Grace says, “How is she?”

And Dr. Touchet says, “If she stays in this room the next three weeks, she’ll be fine.” He starts winding gauze around the knee, layers and layers of gauze, thicker and thicker.

Just so you know, the moment Misty found herself on the floor, when people came to help her, as they carried her upstairs, even while the doctor squeezed and flexed her knee, Misty kept saying, “What did I trip over?”

There’s nothing there. There’s really nothing near that doorway to trip over.

After that, Misty thanked God this happened at work. No way could the hotel beef about her missing work.

Grace says, “Can you wiggle your toes?”

Yes, Misty can. She just can’t reach them.

Next, the doctor wraps the leg in strips of fiberglass.

Tabbi comes over and touches the huge fiberglass log with her mother’s leg lost somewhere inside it, and she says, “Can I sign my name on it?”

“Give it a day to dry,” the doctor says.

Misty’s leg straight out in front of her, it must weigh eighty pounds. She feels fossilized. Embedded in amber. An ancient mummy. This is going to be a real ball and chain.

It’s funny, the way your mind tries to make sense out of chaos. Misty feels terrible about it now, but the moment Raymon came out of the kitchen, as he put his arm under her and lifted, she said, “Did you just trip me?”

He brushed the Waldorf salad, the apple chunks and chopped walnuts, out of her hair, and he said, “Cómo?”

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

Even then, the kitchen door was propped open and the floor there was clean and dry.

Misty said, “How did I fall?”

And Raymon shrugged and said, “On your culo .”

All the kitchen guys standing around, they laughed.

Now, up in her room, her leg cocooned in a heavy white piñata, Grace and Dr. Touchet lift Misty under each arm and steer her over to the bed. Tabbi gets her green algae pills out of her purse and sets them on the bedside table. Grace unplugs the telephone and loops the cord, saying, “You need peace and quiet.” Grace says, “There’s nothing wrong with you that a little art therapy won’t cure,” and she starts taking things out of the shopping bags, tubes of paint and brushes, and setting them in piles on the dresser.

Out of his briefcase, the doctor takes a syringe. He wipes Misty’s arm with cold alcohol. Better her arm than her nipple.

Can you feel this?

The doctor fills the syringe from a bottle and sticks the needle in her arm. He pulls it out and gives her a wad of cotton to stop any blood. “It’s to help you sleep,” he says.

Tabbi sits on the edge of the bed and says, “Does it hurt?”

No, not a bit. Her leg feels fine. The shot hurt more.

The ring on Tabbi’s finger, the sparkling green peridot, it catches light from the window. The rug edges along the bottom of the window, and under the rug’s where Misty’s hidden her tip money. Their ticket home to Tecumseh Lake.

Grace puts the phone into an empty shopping bag and holds her hand out to Tabbi. She says, “Come. Let’s give your mother a rest.”

Dr. Touchet stands in the open door and says, “Grace? If I could talk to you, in private?”

Tabbi gets off the bed, and Grace leans down to whisper in her ear. Then Tabbi nods her head, fast. She’s wearing the heavy pink necklace of shimmering rhinestones. It’s so wide it must feel as heavy around her neck as the cast does around her mother’s leg. A sparkling millstone. A junk jewelry ball and chain. Tabbi undoes the clasp and brings it to the bed, saying, “Hold up your head.”

She reaches a hand past each of Misty’s shoulders and snaps the necklace around her mother’s neck.

Just for the record, Misty’s not an idiot. Poor Misty Marie Kleinman knew the blood on her panties was Peter’s. But right now, at this moment, she’s so glad she didn’t abort her child.

Your blood.

Why Misty said yes to marrying you—she doesn’t know. Why does anyone do anything? Already she’s melting into the bed. Every breath is slower than the last. Her levator palpebrae muscles have to work hard to keep her eyes open.

Tabbi goes to the easel and takes down a tablet of drawing paper. She brings the paper and a charcoal pencil and puts them on the blankets beside her mother, saying, “For in case you get inspiration.”

And Misty gives her a slow-motion kiss on the forehead.

Between the cast and the necklace, Misty feels pinned to the bed. Staked out. A sacrifice. An anchoress.

Then Grace takes Tabbi’s hand and they go out to Dr. Touchet in the hallway. The door closes. It’s so quiet, Misty’s not sure if she hears right. But there’s an extra little click.

And Misty calls, “Grace?” Misty calls, “Tabbi?” In slow motion, Misty says, “Hey there? Hello?” Just for the record, they’ve locked her in.

THE FIRST TIME Misty wakes up after her accident, her pubic hair’s gone and a catheter is inside her, snaking down her good leg to a clear plastic bag hooked to the bedpost. Bands of white surgical tape strap the tube to her leg skin.

Dear sweet Peter, nobody has to tell you how that feels.

Dr. Touchet’s been at work again.

Just for the record, waking up on drugs with your pubic hair shaved and something plastic stuck in your vagina doesn’t necessarily make you a real artist.

If it did, Misty would be painting the Sistine Chapel. Instead she’s wadding up another wet sheet of 140-pound watercolor paper. Outside her little dormer window, the sun’s baking the sand on the beach. The waves hiss and burst. Seagulls tremble, hanging in the wind, hovering white kites, while kids make sand castles and splash in the rising tide.

It would be one thing to trade all her sunny days for a masterpiece, but this . . . her day’s been just one shitty smeared mistake after another. Even with her full-leg cast and her little bag of piss, Misty wants to be outside. As an artist, you organize your life so you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that’s no guarantee you’ll create anything worth all your effort. You’re always haunted by the idea you’re wasting your life.

The truth is, if Misty were on the beach, she’d be looking up at this window, dreaming of being a painter.

The truth is, wherever you choose to be, it’s the wrong place.

Misty’s half standing at her easel, balanced on a tall stool, looking out the window toward Waytansea Point, Tabbi’s sitting in the patch of sunlight at her feet, coloring her cast with felt-tipped pens. That’s what hurts. It’s bad enough Misty spent most of her childhood hiding indoors, coloring in books, dreaming of being an artist. Now she’s modeling this bad behavior for her kid. All the mud pies Misty missed baking, now Tabbi’s going to miss. Whatever it is teenagers do. All the kites Misty didn’t fly, the games of tag Misty skipped, all the dandelions Misty didn’t pick, Tabbi is making her same mistake.

The only flowers Tabbi’s seen, she found with her grandmother, painted around the rim of a teacup.

School starts in a few weeks, and Tabbi’s still so pale from staying inside.

Misty’s brush making another mess on the page in front of her, Misty says, “Tabbi honey?”

Tabbi sits, rubbing a red pen on the cast. The resin and cloth is so thick, Misty can’t feel a thing.

Misty’s smock is one of Peter’s old blue work shirts with a rusted fur clip of fake rubies on the front pocket. Fake rubies and glass diamonds. Tabbi’s brought the box of dress-up jewelry, all the junk brooches and bracelets and single earrings that Peter gave Misty in school.

That you gave your wife.

Misty’s wearing your shirt, and she tells Tabbi, “Why don’t you run outside for a few hours?”

Tabbi switches the red pen for a yellow one, and she says, “Granmy Wilmot said for me not to.” Coloring, Tabbi says, “She told me to stay with you as long as you’re awake.”

This morning, Angel Delaporte’s brown sports car pulled into the hotel’s gravel parking lot. Wearing a wide straw beach hat, Angel got out and walked up to the front porch. Misty kept expecting Paulette to come up from the front desk and say she had a visitor, but no. A half hour later, Angel came out the hotel’s front doors and walked down the porch steps. With one hand, he held his hat in place as he tilted his head back and scanned the hotel windows, the clutter of signs and logos. Corporate graffiti. Competing immortalities. Then Angel put on his sunglasses, slipped into his sports car, and drove away.

In front of her is another painted mess. Her perspective is all wrong.

Tabbi says, “Granmy told me to help you get inspired.”

Instead of painting, Misty should be teaching her child some skill—bookkeeping or cost analysis or television repair. Some realistic way she can pay her bills.

Sometime after Angel Delaporte drove away, Detective Stilton drove up in a plain beige county government car. He walked into the hotel, then went back to his car a few minutes later. He stood in the parking lot, shading his eyes with one hand, staring up at the hotel, looking from window to window, but not seeing her. Then he drove away.

The mess in front of her, the colors are running and smudged. The trees could be microwave relay towers. The ocean could be volcano lava or cold chocolate pudding or just six bucks’ worth of gouache watercolors, wasted. Misty tears off the sheet and wads it into a ball. Her hands are almost black with wadding up her failures all day. Her head aches. Misty closes her eyes and presses a hand to her forehead, where she feels it stick with wet paint.

Misty drops the wadded painting on the floor.

And Tabbi says, “Mom?”

Misty opens her eyes.

Tabbi’s colored birds and flowers down the length of her cast. Blue birds and red robins and red roses.

When Paulette brings up their lunch on a room service cart, Misty asks if anyone has tried to phone from the front desk. Paulette shakes out the cloth napkin and tucks it into the collar of the blue work shirt. She says, “Sorry, nobody.” She takes the warming cover off a plate of fish and says, “Why do you ask?”

And Misty says, “No reason.”

Now, sitting here with Tabbi, with flowers and birds crayoned on her leg, Misty knows she’ll never be an artist. The picture she sold Angel, it was a fluke. An accident. Instead of crying, Misty just pees a few drips into her plastic tube.

And Tabbi says, “Close your eyes, Mom.” She says, “Color with your eyes closed, like you did on my birthday picnic.”

Like she did when she was little Misty Marie Kleinman. Her eyes closed on the shag carpet in the trailer.

Tabbi leans close and whispers, “We were hiding in the trees and peeking at you.” She says, “Granmy said we had to let you get inspiration.”

Tabbi goes to the dresser and gets the roll of masking tape that Misty uses to hold paper on the easel. She tears off two strips and says, “Now close your eyes.”

Misty has nothing to lose. She can indulge her kid. Her work couldn’t get any worse. Misty closes her eyes.

And Tabbi’s little fingers press a strip of tape over each eyelid.

The way her father’s eyes are taped shut. To keep them from drying out.

Your eyes are taped shut.

In the dark, Tabbi’s fingers put a pencil in Misty’s hand. You can hear as she sets a drawing pad on the easel and lifts the cover sheet. Then her hands take Misty’s and carry the pencil until it touches the paper.

The sun from the window feels warm. Tabbi’s hand lets go, and her voice in the dark says, “Now draw your picture.”

And Misty’s drawing, the perfect circles and angles, the straight lines Angel Delaporte says are impossible. Just by the feeling, it’s perfect and right. What it is, Misty has no idea. The way a stylus moves itself across a Ouija board, the pencil takes her hand back and forth across the paper so fast Misty has to grip it tight. Her automatic writing.

Misty’s just able to hold on, and she says, “Tabbi?”

The tape tight over her eyes, Misty says, “Tabbi? Are you still there?”

THERE’S A LITTLE TUG between Misty’s legs, a little pull deep inside her when Tabbi snaps the bag off the end of Misty’s catheter and takes it down the hall to the bathroom. She empties the bag into the toilet and washes it. Tabbi brings it back and snaps it onto the long plastic tube.

She does all this so Misty can keep working in the pitch dark. Her eyes taped. Blind.

There’s just the feel of warm sunshine from the window. The moment the paintbrush stops, Misty says, “This is done.”

And Tabbi slips the drawing off the easel and clips on a new sheet of paper. She takes the pencil when it looks dull and gives Misty a sharp one. She holds out a tray of pastel crayons, and Misty feels them blind, greasy piano keys of color, and picks one.

Just for the record, every color Misty picks, every mark she makes, is perfect because she’s stopped caring.

For breakfast, Paulette brings up a room service tray, and Tabbi cuts everything into single bites. While Misty works, Tabbi puts the fork into her mother’s mouth. With the tape over her face, Misty can only open her mouth so far. Just wide enough to suck her paintbrush into a sharp point. To poison herself. Still working, Misty doesn’t taste. Misty doesn’t smell. After a few bites of breakfast, she’s had enough.

Except for the scratch of the pencil on paper, the room is quiet. Outside, five floors down, the ocean waves hiss and burst.

For lunch, Paulette brings up more food Misty doesn’t eat. Already the leg cast feels loose from all the weight she’s lost. Too much solid food would mean a trip to the toilet. It would mean a break in her work. Almost no white is left on the cast, Tabbi has covered it with so many flowers and birds. The fabric of her smock is stiff with slopped paint. Stiff and sticking to her arms and breasts. Her hands are crusted with dried paint. Poisoned.

Her shoulders ache and pop, and her wrist grinds inside. Her fingers are numb around a charcoal pencil. Her neck spasms, cramping up along each side of her spine. Her neck feels the way Peter’s neck looks, arched back and touching his butt. Her wrists feel the way Peter’s look, twisted and knotted.

Her eyes taped shut, her face is relaxed so it won’t fight the two strips of masking tape that run from her forehead down across each eye, down her cheeks to her jaw, then down to her neck. The tape keeps the orbicularis oculi muscle around her eye, the zygomatic major at the corner of her mouth, it keeps all her facial muscles relaxed. With the tape, Misty can open her lips just a sliver. She can only talk in a whisper.

Tabbi puts a drinking straw in her mouth and Misty sucks some water. Tabbi’s voice says, “No matter what happens, Granmy says you have to keep doing your art.”

Tabbi wipes around her mother’s mouth, saying, “I need to go pretty soon.” She says, “Please don’t stop, no matter how much you miss me.” She says, “Do you promise?”

And still working, Misty whispers, “Yes.”

“No matter how long I’m gone?” Tabbi says.

And Misty whispers, “I promise.”

BEING TIRED doesn’t make you done. Being hungry or sore doesn’t either. Needing to pee doesn’t have to stop you. A picture is done when the pencil and paint are done. The telephone doesn’t interrupt. Nothing else gets your attention. While the inspiration comes, you keep going.

All day Misty’s working blind, and then the pencil stops and she waits for Tabbi to take the picture and give her a blank sheet of paper. Then nothing happens.

And Misty says, “Tabbi?”

This morning, Tabbi pinned a big cluster brooch of green and red glass to her mother’s smock. Then Tabbi stood still as Misty put the shimmering necklace of fat pink rhinestones around her daughter’s neck. A statue. In the sunlight from the window, they sparkled bright as forget-me-nots and all the other flowers Tabbi has missed this summer. Then Tabbi taped her mother’s eyes shut. That was the last time Misty saw her.

Again, Misty says, “Tabbi honey?”

And there’s no sound, nothing. Just the hiss and burst of each wave on the beach. With her fingers spread, Misty reaches out and feels the air around her. For the first time in days, she’s been left alone.

The two strips of masking tape, they each start at her hairline and run down across her eyes to curve under her jaw. With the thumb and forefinger of each hand, Misty pinches the tape at the top and pulls each strip off, slow, until they both peel away. Her eyes flutter open. The sunlight is too bright for her to focus. The picture on the easel is blurred for a minute while her eyes adjust.

The pencil lines come into focus, black against the white paper.

It’s a drawing of the ocean, just offshore from the beach. Something floating. A person floating facedown in the water, a young girl with her long black hair spread out around her on the water.

Her father’s black hair.

Your black hair.

Everything is a self-portrait.

Everything is a diary.

Outside the window, down on the beach, a mob of people wait at the edge of the water. Two people wade toward shore, carrying something between them. Something shiny flashes bright pink in the sunlight.

A rhinestone. A necklace. It’s Tabbi they have by the ankles and under the arms, her hair hanging straight and wet into the waves that hiss and burst on the beach.

The crowd steps back.

And loud footsteps come down the hallway outside the bedroom door. A voice in the hallway says, “I have it ready.”

Two people carry Tabbi up the beach toward the hotel porch.

The lock on the bedroom door, it goes click, and the door swings open, and Grace is there with Dr. Touchet. Flashing bright in his hand is a dripping hypodermic needle.

And Misty tries to stand, her leg cast dragging behind her. Her ball and chain.

The doctor rushes forward.

And Misty says, “It’s Tabbi. Something’s wrong.” Misty says, “On the beach. I’ve got to get down there.”

The cast tips and its weight pulls her to the floor. The easel crashing over beside her, the glass jar of murky rinse water, it’s broken all around them. Grace comes to kneel, to take her arm. The catheter’s pulled out of the bag and you can smell her piss leaking out on the rug. Grace is rolling up the sleeve on her smock.

Your old blue work shirt. Stiff with dried paint.

“You can’t go down there in this state,” the doctor says. He’s holding the syringe and taps the air bubbles to the top, saying, “Really, Misty, there’s nothing you can do.”

Grace forces Misty’s arm straight out, and the doctor drives in the needle.

Can you feel this?

Grace holds her by both arms, pinning her down. The brooch of fake rubies has come open and the pin is sunk into Misty’s breast, her blood red on the wet rubies. The broken jar. Grace and the doctor holding her to the rug, her piss spreads under them. It wicks up the blue shirt and stings her skin where the pin is stuck in.

Grace, half on top of her, Grace says, “Misty wants to go downstairs now.” Grace isn’t crying.

Her own voice deep with slow-motion effort, Misty says, “How the fuck do you know what I want?”

And Grace says, “It’s in your diary.”

The needle pulls out of her arm and Misty feels someone rubbing the skin around the shot. The cold feel of alcohol. Hands come under her arms and pull her until she’s sitting upright.

Grace’s face, her levator labii superioris muscle, the sneer muscle, pulls her face in tight around her nose, and she says, “It’s blood. Oh, and urine, all over her. We can’t take her downstairs like this. Not in front of everyone.”

The stink on Misty, it’s the smell of the old Buick’s front seat. The stink of your piss.

Someone’s stripping the shirt off her, wiping her skin with paper towels. From across the room, the doctor’s voice says, “This is excellent work. Very impressive.” He’s leafing through her stack of finished drawings and paintings.

“Of course they’re good,” Grace says. “Just don’t get them out of order. They’re all numbered.”

Just for the record, no one mentions Tabbi.

They’re tucking her arms into a clean shirt. Grace pulls a brush through her hair.

The drawing on the easel, the girl drowned in the ocean, it’s fallen onto the floor and blood and piss is soaked through it from underneath. It’s ruined. The image gone.

Misty can’t make a fist. Her eyes keep falling shut. The wet slip of drool slides out the corner of her mouth, and the stab in her breast fades away.

Grace and the doctor, they heave her onto her feet. Outside in the hallway, more people wait. More arms come around her from both sides, and they’re flying her down the stairs in slow motion. They’re flying past the sad faces that watch from every landing. Paulette and Raymon and someone else, Peter’s blond friend from college. Will Tupper. His earlobe still in two sharp points. The whole Waytansea Island wax museum.

It’s all so quiet, except her cast drags, thudding against every step.

A crowd of people fill the lobby’s gloomy forest of polished trees and mossy carpet, but they fall back as she’s carried toward the dining room. Here’s all the old island families, the Burtons and Hylands and Petersens and Perrys. There’s not a summer face among them.

Then the doors to the Wood and Gold Room swing open.

On table six, a four-top near the windows, there’s something covered with a blanket. The profile of a little face, a little girl’s flat chest. And Grace’s voice says, “Hurry while she’s still conscious. Let her see. Lift the blanket.”

An unveiling. A curtain going up.

And behind Misty, all her neighbors crowd around to watch.

IN ART SCHOOL, Peter once asked Misty to name a color. Any color.

He told her to shut her eyes and hold still. You could feel him step up, close. The heat of him. You could smell his unraveling sweater, the way his skin had the bitter smell of semisweet baker’s chocolate. His own self-portrait. His hands pinched the fabric of her shirt and a cold pin scratched across her skin underneath. He said, “Don’t move or I’ll stick you by accident.”

And Misty held her breath.

Can you feel this?

Every time they met, Peter would give her another piece of his junk jewelry. Brooches, bracelets, rings, and necklaces.

Her eyes closed, waiting. Misty said, “Gold. The color, gold.”

His fingers working the pin through the fabric, Peter said, “Now tell me three words that describe gold.”

This was an old form of psychoanalysis, he told her. Invented by Carl Jung. It was based on universal archetypes. A kind of insightful party game. Carl Jung. Archetypes. The vast common subconscious of all humanity. Jains and yogis and ascetics, this was the culture Peter grew up with on Waytansea Island.

Her eyes closed, Misty said, “Shiny. Rich. Soft.” Her three words that described gold.

Peter’s fingers clicked the brooch’s tiny clasp shut, and his voice said, “Good.”

In that previous life, in art school, Peter told her to name an animal. Any animal.

Just for the record, the brooch was a gilded turtle with a big, cracked green gem for a shell. The head and legs moved, but one leg was gone. The metal was so tarnished it had already rubbed black on her shirt.

And Misty pulled it out from her chest, looking at it, loving it for no good reason. She said, “A pigeon.”

Peter stepped away and waved for her to walk along with him. They were walking through the campus, between brick buildings shaggy with ivy, and Peter said, “Now tell me three words that describe a pigeon.”

Walking next to him, Misty tried to put her hand in his, but he clasped his together behind his back.

Walking, Misty said, “Dirty.” Misty said, “Stupid. Ugly.”

Her three words that described a pigeon.

And Peter looked at her, his bottom lip curled in between his teeth, and his corrugator muscle squeezing his eyebrows together.

That previous life, in art school, Peter asked her to name a body of water.

Walking next to him, Misty said, “The St. Lawrence Seaway.”

He turned to look at her. He’d stopped walking. “Name three adjectives describing it,” he said.

And Misty rolled her eyes and said, “Busy, fast, and crowded.”

And Peter’s levator labii superioris muscle pulled his top lip into a sneer.

Walking with Peter, he asked her just one last thing. Peter said to imagine you’re in a room. All the walls are white, and there are no windows or doors. He said, “In three words, tell me how that room feels to you.”

Misty had never dated anyone this long. For all she knew, this was the kind of veiled way that lovers interview each other. The way Misty knew Peter’s favorite flavor of ice cream was pumpkin pie, she didn’t think his questions meant anything.

Misty said, “Temporary. Transitory.” She paused and said, “Confusing.”

Her three words to describe a sealed white room.

In her previous life, still walking with Peter, not holding hands, he told her how Carl Jung’s test worked. Each question was a conscious way to access the subconscious.

A color. An animal. A body of water. An all-white room.

Each of these, Peter said was an archetype according to Carl Jung. Each image represented some aspect of a person.

The color Misty had mentioned, gold, that’s how she saw herself.

She’d described herself as “Shiny. Rich. Soft,” Peter said.

The animal was how we perceived other people.

She perceived people as “Dirty. Stupid. Ugly,” Peter said.

The body of water represented her sex life.

Busy, fast, and crowded. According to Carl Jung.

Everything we say shows our hand. Our diary.

Not looking at her, Peter said, “I wasn’t thrilled to hear your answer.”

Peter’s last question, about the all-white room, he says that room with no windows or doors, it represents death.

For her, death will be temporary, transitory, confusing.

THE JAINS WERE a sect of Buddhists who claimed they could fly. They could walk on water. They could understand all languages. It’s said they could turn junk metal into gold. They could heal cripples and cure the blind.

Her eyes shut, Misty listens while the doctor tells her all this. She listens and paints. Before dawn, she gets up so Grace can tape her face. The tape comes off after sunset.

“Supposedly,” the doctor’s voice says, “the Jains could raise the dead.”

They could do all this because they tortured themselves. They starved and lived without sex. This life of hardship and pain is what gave them their magic power.

“People call this idea ‘asceticism,’ ” the doctor says.

Him talking, Misty just draws. Misty works while he holds the paint she needs, the brushes and pencils. When she’s done he changes the page. He does what Tabbi used to.

The Jain Buddhists were famous throughout the kingdoms of the Middle East. In the courts of Syria and Egypt, Epirus and Macedonia, as early as four hundred years before the birth of Christ, they worked their miracles. These miracles inspired the Essene Jews and early Christians. They astonished Alexander the Great.

Doctor Touchet talking on and on, he says Christian martyrs were offshoots of the Jains. Every day, Saint Catherine of Siena would whip herself three times. The first whipping was for her own sins. Her second whipping was for the sins of the living. The third was for the sins of all dead people.

Saint Simeon was canonized after he stood on a pillar, exposed to the elements, until he rotted alive.

Misty says, “This is done.” And she waits for a new sheet of paper, a new canvas.

You can hear the doctor lift the new picture. He says, “Marvelous. Absolutely inspired,” his voice fading as he carries it across the room. There’s a scratching sound as he pencils a number on the back. The ocean outside, the waves hiss and burst. He sets the picture beside the door, then his doctor’s voice comes back, close and loud, and he says, “Do you want paper again or a canvas?”

It doesn’t matter. “Canvas,” Misty says.

Misty hasn’t seen one of her pictures since Tabbi died. She says, “Where do you take them?”

“Someplace safe,” he says.

Her period is almost a week late. From starvation. She doesn’t need to pee on any pregnancy test sticks. Peter’s done his job, getting her here.

And the doctor says, “You can start.” His hand closes around hers, and pulls it forward to touch the rough, tight cloth already prepped with a coat of rabbit-skin glue.

The Jewish Essenes, he says, were originally a band of Persian anchorites that worshiped the sun.

Anchorites. This is what they called the women sealed alive in the basements of cathedrals. Sealed in to give the building a soul. The crazy history of building contractors. Sealing whiskey and women and cats inside walls. Her husband included.

You.

Misty, trapped in her attic room, her heavy cast keeping her here. The door kept locked from the outside. The doctor always ready with a syringe of something if she gets uppity. Oh, Misty could write a book about anchorites.

The Essenes, Dr. Touchet says, lived away from the regular world. They trained themselves by enduring sickness and torture. They abandoned their families and property. They suffered in the belief that immortal souls from heaven were baited to come down and take a physical form in order to have sex, drink, take drugs, overeat.

Essenes taught the young Jesus Christ. They taught John the Baptist.

They called themselves healers and performed all of Christ’s miracles—curing the sick, reviving the dead, casting out demons—for centuries before Lazarus. The Jains turned water into wine centuries before the Essenes, who did it centuries before Jesus.

“You can repeat the same miracles over and over as long as no one remembers the last time,” the doctor says. “You remember that.”

The same way Christ called himself a stone rejected by masons, the Jain hermits had called themselves logs rejected by all carpenters.

“Their idea,” the doctor says, “is that the visionary must live apart from the normal world, and reject pleasure and comfort and conformity in order to connect with the divine.”

Paulette brings lunch on a tray, but Misty doesn’t want food. Behind her closed eyelids, she hears the doctor eating. The scrape of the knife and fork on the china plate. The ice rattling in the glass of water.

He says, “Paulette?” His voice full of food, he says, “Can you take those pictures there, by the door, and put them in the dining room with the others?”

Someplace safe.

You can smell ham and garlic. There’s something chocolate, too, pudding or cake. You can hear the doctor chew, and the wet sound of each swallow.

“The interesting part,” the doctor says, “is when you look at pain as a spiritual tool.”

Pain and deprivation. The Buddhist monks sit on roofs, fasting and sleepless until they reach enlightenment. Isolated and exposed to the wind and sun. Compare them to Saint Simeon, who rotted on his pillar. Or the centuries of standing yogis. Or Native Americans who wandered on vision quests. Or the starving girls in nineteenth-century America who fasted to death out of piety. Or Saint Veronica, whose only food was five orange seeds, chewed in memory of the five wounds of Christ. Or Lord Byron, who fasted and purged and made his heroic swim of the Hellespont. A romantic anorexic. Moses and Elijah, who fasted to receive visions in the Old Testament. English witches of the seventeenth century who fasted to cast their spells. Or whirling dervishes, exhausting themselves for enlightenment.

The doctor just goes on and on and on.

All these mystics, throughout history, all over the world, they all found their way to enlightenment by physical suffering.

And Misty just keeps on painting.

“Here’s where it gets interesting,” the doctor’s voice says. “According to split-brain physiology, your brain is divided like a walnut into two halves.”

The left half of your brain deals with logic, language, calculation, and reason, he says. This is the half people perceive as their personal identity. This is the conscious, rational, everyday basis of our reality.

The right side of your brain, the doctor tells her, is the center of your intuition, emotion, insight, and pattern recognition skills. Your subconscious.

“Your left brain is a scientist,” the doctor says. “Your right brain is an artist.”

He says people live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It’s only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into their conscious. When someone’s injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over for a flash, just an instant, and give them access to divine inspiration.

A flash of inspiration. A moment of insight.

The French psychologist Pierre Janet called this condition “the lowering of the mental threshold.”

Dr. Touchet says, “Abaissement du niveau mental.”

When we’re tired or depressed or hungry or hurting.

According to the German philosopher Carl Jung, this lets us connect to a universal body of knowledge. The wisdom of all people over all time.

Carl Jung, what Peter told Misty about herself. Gold. Pigeons. The St. Lawrence Seaway.

Frida Kahlo and her bleeding sores. All great artists are invalids.

According to Plato, we don’t learn anything. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything. Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know.

Our misery. This suppression of our rational mind is the source of inspiration. The muse. Our guardian angel. Suffering takes us out of our rational self-control and lets the divine channel through us.

“Enough of any stress,” the doctor says, “good or bad, love or pain, can cripple our reason and bring us ideas and talents we can achieve in no other way.”

All this could be Angel Delaporte talking. Stanislavski’s method of physical actions. A reliable formula for creating on-demand miracles.

As he hovers close to her, the doctor’s breath is warm against the side of Misty’s face. The smell of ham and garlic.

Her paintbrush stops, and Misty says, “This is done.”

Someone knocks at the door. The lock clicks. Then Grace, her voice says, “How is she, Doctor?”

“She’s working,” he says. “Here, number this one—eighty-four. Then, put it with the others.”

And Grace says, “Misty dear, we thought you might like to know, but we’ve been trying to reach your family. About Tabbi.”

You can hear someone lift the canvas off the easel. Footsteps carry it across the room. How it looks, Misty doesn’t know.

They can’t bring Tabbi back. Maybe Jesus could or the Jain Buddhists, but nobody else could. Misty’s leg crippled, her daughter dead, her husband in a coma, Misty herself trapped and wasting away, poisoned with headaches, if the doctor is right she could be walking on water. She could raise the dead.

A soft hand closes over her shoulder and Grace’s voice comes in close to her ear. “We’ll be dispersing Tabbi’s ashes this afternoon,” she says. “At four o’clock, out on the point.”

The whole island, everybody will be there. The way they were for Harrow Wilmot’s funeral. Dr. Touchet embalming the body in his green-tiled examining room, with his steel accountant’s desk and the flyspecked diplomas on the wall.

Ashes to ashes. Her baby in an urn.

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo’s David is just a million hits with a hammer. We’re all of us a million bits put together the right way.

The tape tight over each eye, keeping her face relaxed, a mask, Misty says, “Has anyone gone to tell Peter?”

Someone sighs, one long breath in, then out. And Grace says, “What would that accomplish?”

He’s her father.

You’re her father.

The gray cloud of Tabbi will drift off on the wind. Drifting back down the coastline toward the town, the hotel, the houses and church. The neon signs and billboards and corporate logos and trademarked names.

Dear sweet Peter, consider yourself told.

JUST FOR THE RECORD, one problem with art school is it makes you so much less of a romantic. All that garbage about painters and garrets, it disappears under the load you have to learn about chemistry, about geometry and anatomy. What they teach you explains the world. Your education leaves everything so neat and tidy.

So resolved and sensible.

Her whole time dating Peter Wilmot, Misty knew it wasn’t him she loved. Women just look for the best physical specimen to father their children. A healthy woman is wired to seek out the triangle of smooth muscle inside Peter’s open collar because humans evolved hairless in order to sweat and stay cool while outrunning some hot and exhausted form of furry animal protein.

Men with less body hair are also less likely to harbor lice, fleas, and mites.

Before their dates, Peter would take a painting of hers. It would be framed and matted. And Peter would press two long strips of extrastrong double-sided mounting tape onto the back of the frame. Careful of the sticky tape, he’d tuck the painting up inside the hem of his baggy sweater.

Any woman would love how Peter ran his hands through her hair. It’s simple science. Physical touch mimics early parent-child grooming practices. It stimulates your release of growth hormone and ornithine decarboxylase enzymes. Inversely, Peter’s fingers rubbing the back of her neck would naturally lower her levels of stress hormones. This has been proved in a laboratory, rubbing baby rats with a paintbrush.

After you know about biology, you don’t have to be used by it.

On their dates, Peter and Misty, they’d go to art museums and galleries. Just the two of them, walking and talking, Peter looking a little square in front, a little pregnant with her painting.

There is nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics.

Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.

Walking the galleries looking for a blank wall space, Peter was a living example of the golden section, the formula used by ancient Greek sculptors for perfect proportion. His legs were 1.6 times longer than his torso. His torso is 1.6 times longer than his head.

Look at your fingers, how the first joint is longer than the second, then the second is longer than the end joint. The ratio is called Phi, after the sculptor Phidias.

The architecture of you.

Walking, Misty told Peter about the chemistry of painting. How physical beauty turns out to be chemistry and geometry and anatomy. Art is really science. Discovering why people like something is so you can replicate it. Copy it. It’s a paradox, “creating” a real smile. Rehearsing again and again a spontaneous moment of horror. All the sweat and boring effort that goes into creating what looks easy and instant.

When people look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, they need to know that carbon black paint is the soot from natural gas. The color rose madder is the ground root of the madder plant. Emerald green is copper acetoarsenite, also called Paris green and used as an insecticide. A poison. Tyrian purple is made from clams.

And Peter, he slid the painting out from under his sweater. Alone in the gallery with no one around to see, the painting of a stone house behind a picket fence, he pressed it to the wall. And there it was, the signature of Misty Marie Kleinman. And Peter said, “I told you someday your work would hang in a museum.”

His eyes are deep Egyptian brown, the paint made from ground-up mummies, bone ash and asphalt, and used until the nineteenth century, when artists discovered that icky reality. After twisting years of brushes between their lips.

Peter kissing the back of her neck, Misty said how when you look at the Mona Lisa, you need to remember that burnt sienna is just clay colored with iron and manganese and cooked in an oven. Sepia brown is the ink sacs from cuttlefish. Dutch pink is crushed buckhorn berries.

Peter’s perfect tongue licked the back of her ear. Something, but not a painting, felt stiff inside his clothes.

And Misty whispered, “Indian yellow is the urine of cattle fed mango leaves.”

Peter wrapped one arm around her shoulders. With his other arm, he pressed the back of her knee so it buckled. He lowered her to the gallery’s marble floor, and Peter said, “ Te amo,Misty.”

Just for the record, this came as a little surprise.

His weight on top of her, Peter said, “You think you know so much,” and he kissed her.

Art, inspiration, love, they’re all so easy to dissect. To explain away.

The paint colors iris green and sap green are the juice of flowers. The color of Cappagh brown is Irish dirt, Misty whispered. Cinnabar is vermilion ore shot from high Spanish cliffs with arrows. Bistre is the yellowy brown soot of burnt beech wood. Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

Even while they kissed, you closed your eyes.

And Misty kept hers open, not watching you, but the earring in your ear. Silver tarnished almost brown, holding a knot of square-cut glass diamonds, twinkling and buried in the black hair falling over your shoulders—that’s what Misty loved.

That first time, Misty kept telling you, “The paint color Davy’s gray is powdered slate. Bremen blue is copper hydroxide and copper carbonate—a deadly poison.” Misty said, “Brilliant scarlet is iodine and mercury. The color bone black is charred bones . . .”

THE COLOR BONE BLACK is charred bones.

Shellac is the shit aphids leave on leaves and twigs. Drop black is burnt grapevines. Oil paints use the oil of crushed walnuts or poppy seeds. The more you know about art, the more it sounds like witchcraft. Everything crushed and mixed and baked, the more it could be cooking.

Misty was still talking, talking, talking, but this was days later, in gallery after gallery. This was in a museum, with her painting of a tall stone church pasted to the wall between a Monet and a Renoir. With Misty sitting on the cold floor straddling Peter between her legs. It was late afternoon, and the museum was deserted. Peter’s perfect head of black hair pressed hard on the floor, he was reaching up, both his hands inside her sweater, thumbing her nipples.

Both your hands.

Behavioral psychologists say that humans copulate face-to-face because of breasts. Females with larger breasts attracted more partners, who insisted on breast play during intercourse. More sex bred more females, who inherited the larger breasts. That begat more face-to-face sex.

Now, here on the floor, Peter’s hands, his breast play, his erection sliding around inside his pants, Misty’s thighs spread above him, she said how when William Turner painted his masterpiece of Hannibal crossing the Alps to slaughter the Salassian army, Turner based it on a hike he took in the Yorkshire countryside.

Another example of everything being a self-portrait.

Misty told Peter what you learn in art history. That Rembrandt slopped his paint on so thick that people joked you could lift each portrait by its nose.

Her hair hung heavy with sweat down over her face. Her chubby legs trembled, exhausted but still holding her up. Dry-humping the lump in his pants.

Peter’s fingers clutched her breasts tighter. His hips pushed up, and his face, his orbicularis oculi, squeezed his eyes shut. His triangularis pulled the corners of his mouth down so his bottom teeth showed. His coffee-yellowed teeth bit at the air.

A hot wetness pulsed out of Misty, and Peter’s erection was pulsing inside his pants, and everything else stopped. They both stopped breathing for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven long moments.

Then they both wilted. Withering. Peter’s body relaxed onto the wet floor. Misty’s flattened onto him. Both of them, their clothes were pasted together with sweat.

The painting of the tall church looked down from the wall.

And right then, a museum guard walked up.

GRACE’S VOICE, in the dark, it tells Misty, “The work you’re doing will buy your family freedom.” It says, “No summer people will come back here for decades.”

Unless Peter wakes up someday, Grace and Misty are the only Wilmots left.

Unless you wake up, there won’t be any more Wilmots.

You can hear the slow, measured sound of Grace cutting something with scissors.

Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. There’s no point rebuilding the family fortune. Let the house go to the Catholics. Let the summer people swarm over the island. With Tabbi dead, the Wilmots have no stake in the future. No investment.

Grace says, “Your work is a gift to the future, and anyone who tries to stop you will be cursed by history.”

While Misty paints, Grace’s hands circle her waist with something, then her arms, her neck. It’s something that rubs her skin, light and soft.

“Misty dear, you have a seventeen-inch waist,” Grace says.

It’s a tape measure.

Something smooth slips between her lips, and Grace’s voice says, “It’s time you took another pill.” A drinking straw pokes into her mouth, and Misty sips enough water to swallow the capsule.

In 1819, Théodore Géricault painted his masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa . It showed the ten castaways that survived out of one hundred and forty-seven people left adrift on a raft for two weeks after their ship sank. At the time, Géricault had just abandoned his pregnant mistress. To punish himself, he shaved his head. He saw no friends for almost two years, never going out in public. He was twenty-seven and lived in isolation, painting. Surrounded by the dying people and cadavers he studied for his masterpiece. After several suicide attempts, he died at thirty-two.

Grace says, “We all die.” She says, “The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”

She runs the tape measure down the length of Misty’s legs.

Something cold and smooth slides against Misty’s cheek, and Grace’s voice tells her, “Feel.” Grace says, “It’s satin. I’m sewing your gown for the opening.”

Instead of “gown,” Misty hears shroud .

Just from the feel, Misty knows it’s white satin. Grace is cutting down Misty’s wedding dress. Remaking it. Making it last forever. Born again. Reborn. Misty’s Wind Song perfume still on it, Misty recognizes herself.

Grace says, “We’ve invited everyone. All the summer people. Your opening will be the biggest social event in a hundred years.”

The same as her wedding. Our wedding.

Instead of “opening,” Misty hears offering .

Grace says, “You’re almost done. Only eighteen more paintings to complete.”

To make an even one hundred.

Instead of “done,” Misty hears dead .

TODAY IN THE DARKNESS behind Misty’s eyelids, the hotel’s fire alarm goes off. One long ringing bell in the hallway, it comes through the door so loud Grace has to shout, “Oh, what is it now?” She puts a hand on Misty’s shoulder and says, “Keep working.”

The hand squeezes, and Grace says, “Just finish this last picture. That’s all we need.”

Her footsteps go away, and the door to the hall opens. The alarm is louder for a moment, ringing, shrill as the recess bell at Tabbi’s school. At her own grade school, growing up. The ringing is soft, again, as Grace shuts the door behind her. She doesn’t lock it.

But Misty keeps painting.

Her mom in Tecumseh Lake, when Misty told her about maybe marrying Peter Wilmot and moving to Waytansea Island, her mom told Misty that all big-money fortunes are based on fooling people and pain. The bigger the fortune, she said, the more people got hurt. For rich people, she said, the first marriage was just about reproduction. She asked, did Misty really want to spent the rest of her life surrounded by that kind of person?

Her mom asked, “Don’t you want to be an artist anymore?”

Just for the record, Misty told her, Yeah, sure.

It wasn’t even that Misty was so in love with Peter. Misty didn’t know what it was. She just couldn’t go home to that trailer park, not anymore.

Maybe it’s just a daughter’s job to piss off her mother.

They don’t teach you that in art school.

The fire alarm keeps ringing.

The week Peter and Misty eloped, it was over Christmas break. That whole week, Misty let her mom worry. The minister looked at Peter and said, “Smile, son. You look as though you’re facing a firing squad.”

Her mom, she called the college. She called the hospitals. One emergency room had the body of a dead woman, a young woman found naked in a ditch and stabbed a hundred times in the stomach. Misty’s mom, she spent Christmas Day driving across three counties to look at the mutilated dead body of this Jane Doe. While Peter and Misty marched down the main aisle of the Waytansea church, her mom held her breath and watched a police detective pull down the zipper on a body bag.

Back in that previous life, Misty called her mom a couple days after Christmas. Sitting in the Wilmot house behind a locked door, Misty fingered the junk jewelry Peter had given her during their dating, the rhinestones and fake pearls. On her answering machine, Misty listened to a dozen panicked messages from her mom. When Misty finally got around to dialing their number in Tecumseh Lake, her mom just hung up.

It was no big deal. After a little cry, Misty never called her mom again.

Already Waytansea Island felt more like home than the trailer ever had.

The hotel fire alarm keeps ringing, and through the door someone says, “Misty? Misty Marie?” There’s a knock. It’s a man’s voice.

And Misty says, Yes?

The alarm is loud with the door opening, then quiet. A man says, “Christ, it stinks in here!” And it’s Angel Delaporte come to her rescue.

Just for the record, the weather today is frantic, panicked, and slightly rushed with Angel pulling the tape off her face. He takes the paintbrush out of her hand. Angel slaps her one time, hard on each cheek, and says, “Wake up. We don’t have much time.”

Angel Delaporte slaps her the way you’d slap a bimbo on Spanish television. Misty all skin and bones.

The hotel fire alarm just keeps ringing and ringing.

Squinting against the sunlight from her one tiny window, Misty says, Stop. Misty says he doesn’t understand. She has to paint. It’s all she has left.

The picture in front of her is a square of sky, smudged blue and white, nothing complete, but it fills the whole sheet of paper. Stacked against the wall near the doorway are other pictures, their faces to the wall. A number penciled on the back of each. Ninety-seven on one. Ninety-eight. Another is ninety-nine.

The alarm just ringing and ringing.

“Misty,” Angel says. “Whatever this little experiment is, you are done.” He goes to her closet and gets out a bathrobe and sandals. He comes back and sticks each of her feet in one, saying, “It’s going to take about two minutes for people to find out this is a false alarm.”

Angel slips a hand under each of her arms and heaves Misty to her feet. He makes a fist and knocks it against her cast, saying, “What is this all about?”

Misty asks, What is he here for?

“That pill you gave me,” Angel says, “it gave me the worst migraine of my life.” He’s throwing the bathrobe over her shoulders and says, “I had a chemist analyze it.” Dropping each of her tired arms into a bathrobe sleeve, he says, “I don’t know what kind of doctor you have, but those capsules contain powdered lead with trace amounts of arsenic and mercury.”

The toxic parts of oil paints: Vandyke red, ferrocyanide; iodine scarlet, mercuric iodide; flake white, lead carbonate; cobalt violet, arsenic—all those beautiful compounds and pigments that artists treasure but turn out to be deadly. How your dream to create a masterpiece will drive you nuts and then kill you.

Her, Misty Marie Wilmot, the poisoned drug addict possessed by the devil, Carl Jung, and Stanislavski, painting perfect curves and angles.

Misty says he doesn’t understand. Misty says, Tabbi, her daughter. Tabbi’s dead.

And Angel stops. His eyebrows up in surprise, he says, “How?”

A few days ago, or weeks. Misty doesn’t know. Tabbi drowned.

“Are you sure?” he says. “It wasn’t in the newspaper.”

Just for the record, Misty’s not sure of anything.

Angel says, “I smell urine.”

It’s her catheter. It’s pulled out. They’re leaving a trail of pee from her easel, out the room, and down the hallway carpet. Pee, and her cast dragging.

“My bet,” Angel says, “is you don’t even need that leg in a cast.” He says, “You know that chair in the picture you sold me?”

Misty says, “Tell me.”

His arms around her, he’s dragging Misty through a door, into the stairwell. “That chair was made by the cabinetmaker Hershel Burke in 1879,” he says, “and shipped to Waytansea Island for the Burton family.”

Her cast thuds on every step. Her ribs hurt from Angel’s fingers holding too tight, rooting and digging under her arms, and Misty tells him, “A police detective.” Misty says, “He said some ecology club is burning down all those houses Peter wrote inside.”

“Burned,” Angel says. “Mine included. They’re all gone.”

The Ocean Alliance for Freedom. OAFF for short.

Angel’s hands still in their leather driving gloves, he drags her down another flight of stairs, saying, “You know this means something paranormal is happening, don’t you?”

First, Angel Delaporte says, it’s impossible she could draw so well. Now it’s some evil spirit just using her as a human Etch A Sketch. She’s only good enough to be some demonic drafting tool.

Misty says, “I thought you’d say that.”

Oh, Misty, she knows what’s happening.

Misty says, “Stop.” She says, “Just why are you here?”

Why since the start of all this has he been her friend? What is it that keeps Angel Delaporte pestering her? Until Peter wrecked his kitchen, until Misty rented him her house, they were strangers. Now he’s pulling fire alarms and dragging her down a stairway. Her with a dead kid and a comatose husband.

Her shoulders twist. Her elbows jerk up, hitting him around the face, smack in his missing eyebrows. To make him drop her. To make him leave her alone. Misty says, “Just stop.”

There on the stairs, the fire alarm stops. It’s quiet. Only her ears still ring.

You can hear voices from the hallway on each floor. A voice from the attic says, “Misty’s gone. She’s not in her room.”

It’s Dr. Touchet.

Before they go another step, Misty waves her fists at Angel. Misty whispers, “Tell me.” Collapsed on the stairs, she whispers, “Why are you fucking with me?”

ALL THE THINGS Misty loved about Peter, Angel loved them first. In art school, it was Angel and Peter, until Misty came along. They’d planned out their whole future. Not as artists, but as actors. It didn’t matter if they made money, Peter had told him. Told Angel Delaporte. Someone in Peter’s generation would marry a woman who’d make the Wilmot family and his whole community wealthy enough that none of them would have to work. He never explained the details of this system.

You never did.

But Peter said every four generations, a boy from the island would meet a woman he’d have to marry. A young art student. Like an old fairy tale. He’d bring her home, and she’d paint so well it would make Waytansea Island rich for another hundred years. He’d sacrifice his life, but it was just one life. Just once every four generations.

Peter had shown Angel Delaporte his junk jewelry. He’d told Angel the old custom, how the woman who responded to the jewelry, who was attracted and trapped by it, that would be the fairy-tale woman. Every boy in his generation had to enroll in art school. He had to wear a piece of the jewelry, scratched and rusted and tarnished. He had to meet as many women as possible.

You had to.

Dear sweet closeted bisexual Peter.

The “walking peter” Misty’s friends tried to warn her about.

The brooches, they pinned through their foreheads, their nipples. Navels and cheekbones. The necklaces, they’d thread through holes in their noses. They calculated to be revolting. To disgust. To prevent any woman from admiring them, and they each prayed another boy would meet the rumored woman. Because the day one unlucky boy married this woman, the rest of his generation would be free to live their own lives. And so would the next three generations.

Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.

Instead of progress, the island was stuck in this repeating loop. Recycling the same ancient success. Period revival. This same ritual.

It was Misty the unlucky boy would meet. Misty was their fairy-tale woman.

There on the hotel stairs, Angel told her this. Because he could never understand why Peter had left and gone off to marry her. Because Peter could never tell him. Because Peter never loved her, Angel Delaporte says.

You never loved her.

You shit sack.

And what you can’t understand you can make mean anything.

Because Peter was only fulfilling some fabled destiny. A superstition. An island legend, and no matter how hard Angel tried to talk him out of it, Peter insisted that Misty was his destiny.

Your destiny.

Peter insisted that his life should be wasted, married to a woman he never loved, because he’d be saving his family, his future children, his entire community from poverty. From losing control of their small, beautiful world. Their island. Because their system had worked for hundreds of years.

Collapsed there on the stairs, Angel says, “That’s why I hired him to work on my house. That’s why I’ve followed him here.” Misty and him on the stairs, her cast stretched out between them, Angel Delaporte leans in close, his breath full of red wine, and says, “I just want you to tell me why he sealed those rooms. And why the room here—room 313—here in this hotel?”

Why did Peter sacrifice his life to marry her? His graffiti, it wasn’t a threat. Angel says it was a warning. Why was Peter trying to warn everyone?

A door opens into the stairwell above them, and a voice says, “There she is.” It’s Paulette, the desk clerk. It’s Grace Wilmot and Dr. Touchet. It’s Brian Gilmore, who runs the post office. And old Mrs. Terrymore from the library. Brett Petersen, the hotel manager. Matt Hyland from the grocery store. It’s the whole village council coming down the stairs toward them.

Angel leans close, clutching her arm, and says, “Peter didn’t kill himself.” He points up the stairs and says, “They did. They murdered him.”

And Grace Wilmot says, “Misty dear. You need to get back to work.” She shakes her head, clucking her tongue, and says, “We’re so, so close to being done.”

And Angel’s hands, his leather driving gloves let go. He backs off, now a step lower, and says, “Peter warned me.” Glancing from the crowd above them to Misty, to the crowd, he backs off, saying, “I just want to know what’s happening.”

From behind her, the hands are closing around her shoulders, her arms, and lifting.

And Misty, all she can say is, “Peter was gay?”

You’re gay?

But Angel Delaporte is stumbling backward, down the stairs. He stumbles to the next floor lower, still shouting up the stairwell, “I’m going to the police!” He shouts, “The truth is, Peter was trying to save people from you !”

HER ARMS ARE NOTHING but loose ropes of skin. Across the back of her neck, the bones feel bundled together with dried tendons. Inflamed. Sore and tired. Her shoulders hanging from the spine at the base of her skull. Her brain could be a baked black stone inside her head. Her pubic hair’s growing back, scratchy and pimpled around her catheter. With a new piece of paper in front of her, a blank canvas, Misty picks up a brush or a pencil, and nothing will happen. When Misty sketches, forcing her hand to make something, it’s a stone house. A rose garden. Just her own face. Her self-portrait diary.

Fast as her inspiration came, it’s gone.

Someone slips the blindfold off her head, and the sunlight from the dormer window makes her squint. It’s so blinding bright. It’s Dr. Touchet here with her, and he says, “Congratulations, Misty. It’s all over.”

It’s what he said when Tabbi was born.

Her homemade immortality.

He says, “It might take a few days before you can stand,” and he slips an arm around her back, hooked under her arms, and lifts Misty to her feet.

On the windowsill, someone’s left Tabbi’s shoe box full of junk jewelry. The glittering, cheap bits of mirror, cut into diamond shapes. Every angle reflecting light in a different direction. Dazzling. A little bonfire, there in the sun bouncing off the ocean.

“By the window?” the doctor says. “Or would you rather be in bed?”

Instead of “in bed,” Misty hears dead .

The room is just how Misty remembers it. Peter’s pillow on the bed, the smell of him. The paintings are, all of them, gone. Misty says, “What have you done with them?”

The smell of you.

And Dr. Touchet steers her to a chair by the window. He lowers her into a blanket spread over the chair and says, “You’ve done another perfect job. We couldn’t ask for better.” He pulls the curtains back to show the ocean, the beach. The summer people crowding each other down to the water’s edge. The trash along the tide line. A beach tractor chugs along, dragging a roller. The steel drum rolls, imprinting the wet sand with a lopsided triangle. Some corporate logo.

Next to the logo stamped in the sand, you can read the words: “Using your past mistakes to build a better future.”

Somebody’s vague mission statement.

“In another week,” the doctor says, “that company will pay a fortune to erase its name from this island.”

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

The tractor drags the roller, printing its message again and again until the waves wash it away.

The doctor says, “When an airliner crashes, all the airlines pay to cancel their newspaper and television advertisements. Did you know that? None of them want to risk any association with that kind of disaster.” He says, “In another week, there won’t be a corporate sign on this island. They’ll pay anything it takes to buy their names back.”

The doctor folds Misty’s dead hands in her lap. Embalming her. He says, “Now rest. Paulette will be up soon for your dinner order.”

Just for the record, he goes to her night table and picks up the bottle of capsules. As he leaves, he slips the bottle into the side pocket of his suit jacket and doesn’t mention it. “Another week,” he says, “and the entire world will fear this place—but they’ll leave us alone.” Going out, he doesn’t lock the door.

In her previous life, Peter and Misty, they’d sublet a place in New York when Grace called to say Harrow was dead. Peter’s father was dead and his mother was alone in their big house on Birch Street. Four stories tall with its mountain range of roofs, its towers and bay windows. And Peter said they had to go take care of her. To settle Harrow’s estate. Peter was the executor of the will. Just for a few months, he said. Then Misty was pregnant.

They kept telling each other New York was still the plan. Then they were parents.

Just for the record, Misty couldn’t complain. There was a little window of time, the first few years after Tabbi was born, when Misty could curl on the bed with her and not want anything else in the world. Having Tabbi made Misty part of something, of the Wilmot clan, of the island. Misty felt complete and more peaceful than she’d ever thought possible. The waves on the beach outside the bedroom window, the quiet streets, the island was far enough removed from the world that you stopped wanting. You stopped needing. Worrying. Wishing. Always expecting something more.

She quit painting and smoking dope.

She didn’t need to accomplish or become or escape. Just being here was enough.

The quiet rituals of washing the dishes or folding clothes. Peter would come home, and they’d sit on the porch with Grace. They’d read to Tabbi until her bedtime. They’d creak in the old wicker furniture, the moths swarming the porch light. Deep inside the house, a clock would strike the hour. From the woods beyond the village, they might hear an owl.

Across the water, the mainland towns were crowded, plastered with signs selling city products. People ate cheap food in the streets and dropped litter on the beach. The reason the island never hurt is—there was nothing there to do. There were no rooms to rent. No hotel. No summer houses. No parties. You couldn’t buy food because there was no restaurant. Nobody sold hand-painted seashells with “Waytansea Island” written on them in gold script. The beaches were rocky on the ocean side . . . muddy with oyster flats on the side that faced the mainland.

About that time, the village council started work to reopen the closed hotel. It was crazy, using the last bit of everyone’s trust money, all the island families chipping in to rebuild the burned-out, crumbling old ruin that rose on the hillside above the harbor. Wasting the last of their resources to attract reams of tourists. Dooming their next generation to waiting tables, cleaning rooms, painting souvenir crap on seashells.

It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness.

We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

Curled on the quilt, a part of every person for generations, Misty could put her arms around her daughter. Misty could hold her baby, her body cupped around Tabbi, as if she were still inside. Still part of Misty. Immortal.

The sour milk smell of Tabbi, of her breath. The sweet smell of baby powder, almost powdered sugar. Misty’s nose tucked against the warm skin of her baby’s neck.

Inside those years, they had no reason to hurry. They were young. Their world was clean. It was church on Sunday. It was reading books, soaking in the bathtub. Picking wild berries and making jelly at night, when the white kitchen was cool with a breeze, the windows up. They always knew the phase of the moon, but seldom the day of the week.

Just for that little window of years, Misty could see how her life wasn’t an end. She was a means to the future.

They’d stand Tabbi against the front doorframe. Against all the forgotten names still there. Those children, now dead. They’d mark her height with a felt-tipped pen.

Tabbi, age four.

Tabbi, age eight.

Just for the record, the weather today is slightly maudlin.

Here, sitting at the dormer window of her attic room in the Waytansea Hotel, the island is spread out under her, filthy with strangers and messages. Billboards and neon. Logos. Trademarks.

The bed where Misty curled around Tabbi, trying to keep her inside. Angel Delaporte sleeps there now. Some crazy man. A stalker. In her room, in her bed, under the window with the hiss and burst of ocean waves breaking outside. Peter’s house.

Our house. Our bed.

Until Tabbi turned ten years old, the Waytansea Hotel was sealed, empty. The windows shuttered, with plywood bolted into each window frame. The doors boarded over.

The summer Tabbi turned ten, the hotel opened. The village became an army of bellhops and waiters, maids and desk clerks. That was the year Peter started working off the island, doing drywall. Little remodeling jobs for summer people with too many houses to look after. With the hotel open, the ferry started to run all day, every day, cramming the island with tourists and traffic.

After that, the paper cups and fast food wrappers arrived. The car alarms and long lines hunting for a place to park. The used diapers people left in the sand. The island went downhill until this year, until Tabbi turned thirteen, until Misty walked out to the garage to find Peter asleep in the car and the gas tank empty. Until people started calling to say their laundry room was gone, their guest bedroom missing. Until Angel Delaporte is exactly where he’s always wanted to be. In her husband’s bed.

In your bed.

Angel lying in her bed. Angel sleeping with her painting of the antique chair.

Misty, with nothing. Tabbi, gone. Her inspiration, gone.

Just for the record, Misty never told anyone, but Peter had packed a suitcase and hidden it in the car’s trunk. A suitcase to take along, a change of clothes for hell. It never made sense. Nothing Peter did in the past three years has made much sense.

Outside her little attic window, down on the beach, kids are splashing in the waves. One boy wears a frilly white shirt and black pants. He’s talking to another boy, wearing just soccer shorts. They pass a cigarette back and forth, taking turns smoking it. The one boy in the frilly white shirt has black hair, just long enough to tuck behind his ears.

On the windowsill is Tabbi’s shoe box of junk jewelry. The bracelets, the orphaned earrings and chipped old brooches. Peter’s jewelry. Rattling around in the box with the loose plastic pearls and glass diamonds.

From her window, Misty looks down on the beach where she saw Tabbi for the last time. Where it happened. The boy with short dark hair is wearing an earring, something glittering gold and red. And with nobody to hear it, Misty says, “Tabbi.”

Misty’s fingers gripping the windowsill, she pushes her head and shoulders out and shouts, “Tabbi?” Misty must be half out the window, ready to fall five stories to the hotel porch, and she yells, “Tabbi!”

And it is. It’s Tabbi. With her hair cut. Flirting with some kid. Smoking.

The boy just puffs on the cigarette and hands it back. He flips his hair and laughs with one hand over his mouth. His hair in the ocean wind, a flickering black flag.

The waves hiss and burst.

Her hair. Your hair.

Misty twists through the little window, and the shoe box spills out. The box slides down the shingled roof. It hits the gutter and flips, and the jewelry flies. It falls, flashing red and yellow and green, flashing bright as fireworks and falling the way Misty’s about to, down to shatter on the concrete floor of the hotel porch.

Only the hundred pounds of her cast, her leg embedded in fiberglass, keeps her from pitching out the window. Then two arms come around her, and a voice says, “Misty, don’t.” Someone pulls her back, and it’s Paulette. A room service menu is dropped on the floor. Paulette’s arms come around her from behind. Paulette’s hands lock together, and she swings Misty, spinning her around the solid weight of the full-leg cast, planting her facedown on the paint-stained carpet.

Panting, panting and dragging her huge fiberglass leg, her ball and chain, back toward the window, Misty says, “It was Tabbi.” Misty says, “Outside.”

Her catheter is pulled out again, pee squirted everywhere.

Paulette gets to her feet. She’s making a nasty face, her risorius muscles cinching her face tight around her nose while she dries her hands on her dark skirt. She tucks her blouse back tight into her waistband and says, “No, Misty. No it wasn’t.” And she picks up the room service menu.

Misty has to get downstairs. To get outside. She’s got to find Tabbi. Paulette has to help lift the cast. They’ve got to get Dr. Touchet to cut it off.

And Paulette shakes her head and says, “If they take off that cast, you’ll be crippled for life.” She goes to the window and shuts it. She locks it and pulls the curtains.

And from the floor, Misty says, “Please. Paulette, help me up.”

But Paulette taps her foot. She fishes an order pad out of the side pocket in her skirt and says, “The kitchen is out of the whitefish.”

And just for the record, Misty’s still trapped.

Misty’s trapped, but her kid could be alive.

Your kid.

“A steak,” Misty says.

Misty wants the thickest piece of beef they can find. Cooked well done.

WHAT MISTY REALLY WANTS is a steak knife. She wants a serrated knife to cut through the side of this leg cast, and she wants Paulette not to notice when the knife’s missing from her tray after dinner. Paulette doesn’t notice, and she doesn’t lock the door from the outside, either. Why bother when Misty’s hobbled by a ton of fucking fiberglass.

All night, Misty’s in bed, picking and hacking. Misty’s sawing at the cast. Digging with the knife blade and scooping the fiberglass shavings into her hand, throwing them under the bed.

Misty’s a convict digging herself out of a very small prison, a prison felt-tip-penned with Tabbi’s flowers and birds.

It takes until midnight to cut from her waist, halfway down her thigh. The knife keeps slipping, stabbing and lancing into her side. By the time she gets to her knee, Misty’s falling asleep. Scabbed and crusted in dried blood. Glued to the sheets. By three in the morning, she’s only partway down her calf. She’s almost free, but she falls asleep.

Something wakes her up, the knife still in her hand.

It’s another longest day of the year. Again.

The noise, it’s a car door slamming shut in the parking lot. If Misty holds the split cast closed, she can hobble to the window and look. It’s the beige county government car of Detective Stilton. He’s not outside, so he must be in the hotel lobby. Maybe looking for her.

Maybe this time he’ll find her.

With the steak knife, Misty starts hacking again. Hacking and half asleep, she stabs her calf muscle. The blood floods out, dark red against her white, white skin, her leg sealed inside too long. Misty hacks again and stabs her shin, the blade going through thin skin, stuck into the bone.

Still hacking, the knife throws blood and splinters of fiberglass. Fragments of Tabbi’s flowers and birds. Bits of her hair and skin. With both hands, Misty grabs the edge on each side of the split. She pries the cast open until her leg is half out. The ragged edges pinch her, biting into the hacked skin, the needles of fiberglass digging.

Oh, dear sweet Peter, nobody has to tell you how this hurts.

Can you feel this?

Her fingers stuck with splinters of fiberglass, Misty grips the ragged edges and pulls them apart. Misty bends her knee, forcing it up out of the straight cast. First her pale kneecap, smeared with blood. The way a baby’s head appears. Crowning. A bird breaking out of its eggshell. Then her thigh. Her child being born. Finally her shin breaks up, out of the shattered cast. With one shake, her foot is free, and the cast slips, rolls, slumps, and crashes to the floor.

A chrysalis. A butterfly emerging, bloody and tired. Reborn.

The cast hitting the floor is so loud the curtains shake. A framed hotel picture flaps against the wall. With her hands pressed over her ears, Misty waits for someone to come investigate. To find her free and lock her door from the outside.

Misty waits for her heart to beat three hundred times, fast. Counting. Then, nothing. Nothing happens. Nobody comes.

Slow and smooth, Misty makes her leg straight. Misty bends her knee. Testing. It doesn’t hurt. Holding on to the night table, Misty swings her legs off the bed and flexes them. With the bloody steak knife, she cuts the loops of surgical tape that hold her catheter to her good leg. Pulling the tube out of her, she loops it in one hand and sets it aside.

It’s one, three, five careful steps to the closet, where she takes out a blouse. A pair of jeans. Hanging there, inside a plastic wrapper, is the white satin dress Grace has sewn for her art show. Misty’s wedding dress, born again. When she steps into the jeans and works the button and the zipper, when she reaches for the blouse, the jeans fall to the floor. That’s how much weight she’s lost. Her hips are gone. Her ass is two empty sacks of skin. The jeans sit around her ankles, smeared with the blood from the steak knife cuts in each leg.

There’s a skirt that fits, but not one of her own. It’s Tabbi’s, a plaid, pleated wool skirt that Grace must’ve picked out.

Even her shoes feel loose, and Misty has to ball her toes into a knot to keep her feet inside.

Misty listens until the hall outside her door sounds empty. She heads for the stairs, the skirt sticking to the blood on her legs, her shaved pubic hair snagging on her panties. With her toes clenched, Misty walks down the four flights to the lobby. There, people wait at the front desk, standing in the middle of their luggage.

Out through the lobby doors, you can still see the beige county government car in the parking lot.

A woman’s voice says, “Oh my God.” It’s some summer woman, standing near the fireplace. With the pastel fingernails of one hand hooked inside her mouth, she stares at Misty and says, “My God, your legs.”

In one hand, Misty still holds the bloody steak knife.

Now the people at the front desk turn and look. A clerk behind the desk, a Burton or a Seymour or a Kincaid, he turns and whispers behind his hand to the other clerk and she picks up the house phone.

Misty heads for the dining room, past the pale looks, people wincing and looking away. Summer women peeking from between their spidery fingers. Past the hostess. Past tables three, seven, ten, and four, there’s Detective Stilton, sitting at table six with Grace Wilmot and Dr. Touchet.

It’s raspberry scones. Coffee. Quiche. Grapefruit halved in bowls. They’re having breakfast.

Misty gets to them, clutching the bloody knife, and says, “Detective Stilton, it’s my daughter. My daughter, Tabbi.” Misty says, “I think she’s still alive.”

His grapefruit spoon halfway to his mouth, Stilton says, “Your daughter died?”

She drowned, Misty tells him. He has to listen. A week, three weeks ago, Misty doesn’t know. She’s not sure. She’s been locked in the attic. They put this big cast on her leg so she couldn’t escape.

Her legs under the plaid wool, they’re coated and running with blood.

By now the whole dining room’s watching. Listening.

“It’s a plot,” Misty says. With both hands, she reaches out to calm the spooked look on Stilton’s face. Misty says, “Ask Angel Delaporte. Something terrible is about to happen.”

The blood dried on her hands. Her blood. The blood from her legs soaking through her plaid skirt.

Tabbi’s skirt.

A voice says, “You’ve ruined it!”

Misty turns, and it’s Tabbi. In the dining room doorway, she’s wearing a frilly blouse and tailored black slacks. Her haircut pageboy short, she has an earring in one ear, the red enameled heart Misty saw Will Tupper rip out of his earlobe a hundred years ago.

Dr. Touchet says, “Misty, have you been drinking again?”

Tabbi says, “Mom . . . my skirt.”

And Misty says, “You’re not dead.”

Detective Stilton dabs his mouth with his napkin. He says, “Well, that makes one person who’s not dead.”

Grace spoons sugar into her coffee. She pours milk and stirs it, saying, “So you really think it’s these OAFF people who committed the murder?”

“Killed Tabbi?” Misty says.

Tabbi comes to the table and leans against her grandmother’s chair. There’s some nicotine yellow between her fingers as she lifts a saucer, studying the painted border. It’s gold with a repeating wreath of dolphins and mermaids. Tabbi shows it to Grace and says, “Fitz and Floyd. The Sea Wreath pattern.”

She turns it over, reads the bottom, and smiles.

Grace smiles up at her, saying, “You’re getting so I can’t praise you enough, Tabitha.”

Just for the record, Misty wants to hug and kiss her kid. Misty wants to hug her and run to the car and drive straight to her mom’s trailer in Tecumseh Lake. Misty wants to wave good-bye with her middle finger to this whole fucking island of genteel lunatics.

Grace pats an empty chair next to her and says, “Misty, come sit down. You look distraught.”

Misty says, “Who did OAFF kill?”

The Ocean Alliance for Freedom. Who burned Peter’s graffiti in all the beach houses.

Your graffiti.

“That’s what I’m here about,” the detective says. He takes the notebook out of his inside jacket pocket. He flips it open on the table and gets his pen ready to write. Looking at Misty, he says, “If you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions?”

About Peter’s vandalism?

“Angel Delaporte was murdered last night,” he says. “It could be a burglary, but we’re not ruling anything out. All’s we know is he was stabbed to death in his sleep.”

In her bed.

Our bed.

Tabbi’s dead, then she’s alive. The last time Misty saw her kid, Tabbi was on this very table, under a sheet and not breathing. Misty’s knee is broken, then it’s fine. One day Misty can paint, and then she can’t. Maybe Angel Delaporte was her husband’s boyfriend, but now he’s dead.

Your boyfriend.

Tabbi takes her mother’s hand. She leads Misty to the empty seat. She pulls out the chair, and Misty sits.

“Before we start . . .” Grace says. She leans across the table to tap Detective Stilton on his shirt cuff, and she says, “Misty’s art show opens three days from now, and we’re counting on you being there.”

My paintings. They’re here somewhere.

Tabbi smiles up at Misty, and slips a hand into her grandmother’s hand. The peridot ring, sparkling green against the white linen tablecloth.

Grace’s eyes flicker toward Misty, and she winces like someone walking into a spiderweb, her chin tucked and her hands touching the air. Grace says, “So much has been unpleasant on the island lately.” She inhales, her pearls rising, then sighs and says, “I’m hoping the art show will give us all a fresh start.”

IN AN ATTIC BATHROOM, Grace runs water into the tub, then goes out to wait in the hallway. Tabbi stays in the room to watch Misty. To guard her own mother.

Just for the record, just this summer, it feels as if years have gone by. Years and years. The girl Misty saw from her window, flirting. This girl, she could be a stranger with yellow fingers.

Misty says, “You really shouldn’t smoke. Even if you’re already dead.” What they don’t teach you in art school is how to react when you find out your only child has connived to break your heart. For now, with just Tabbi and her mother in the bathroom, maybe it’s a daughter’s job to piss off her mother.

Tabbi looks at her face in the bathroom mirror. She licks her index finger and uses it to fix the edge of her lipstick. Not looking at Misty, she says, “You might be more careful, Mother. We don’t need you anymore.”

She picks a cigarette out of a pack from her pocket. Right in front of Misty, she flicks a lighter and takes a puff.

Her panties loose and baggy on her stick legs, Misty slips them off under the skirt and kicks them free of her shoes, saying, “I loved you a lot more when you were dead.”

On her cigarette hand, the ring from her grandmother, the peridot flashes green in the light from above the sink. Tabbi stoops to lift the bloody plaid skirt off the floor. She holds it between two fingers and says, “Granmy Wilmot needs me to get ready for the art show.” Saying as she leaves, “For your show, Mother.”

In the bathtub, the cuts and scratches from the steak knife, they fill with soap and sting until Misty grits her teeth. The dried blood turns the bathwater milky pink. The hot water gets the bleeding started again, and Misty ruins a white towel, staining it with red smears while she tries to dry off.

According to Detective Stilton, a man called the police station on the mainland this morning. He wouldn’t give his name, but he said Angel Delaporte was dead. He said the Ocean Alliance for Freedom would keep killing tourists until the crowds quit stressing the local environment.

The silverware as big as garden tools. The ancient bottles of wine. The old Wilmot paintings, none of it was taken.

In her attic bedroom, Misty dials her mom’s phone number in Tecumseh Lake, but the hotel operator comes on the line. A cable is broken, the operator says, but it should be fixed soon. The house phone still works. Misty just can’t call the mainland.

When she checks under the edge of the carpet, her envelope of tip money is gone.

Tabbi’s peridot ring. The birthday gift from her grandmother.

The warning Misty ignored: “Get off the island before you can’t.”

All the hidden messages people leave so they won’t be forgotten. The ways we all try to talk to the future. Maura and Constance.

“You’ll die when they’re done with you.”

It’s easy enough to get into room 313. Misty’s been a maid, Misty Wilmot, queen of the fucking slaves. She knows where to find the passkey. The room’s a double, a queen-size bed with a view of the ocean. It’s the same furniture as in every guest room. A desk. A chair. A chest of drawers. On the luggage stand is an open suitcase of some summer person. Slacks and flowered silk hangs in the closet. A damp bikini is flopped over the shower curtain rod.

Just for the record, it’s the best job of wallpapering Misty’s ever seen. Plus, it’s not bad paper, the wallpaper in room 313, pastel green stripes alternating with rows of pink cabbage roses. A design that looked ancient the day it was printed. It’s stained with tea to look yellowed with age.

What gives it away is the paper’s too perfect. Too seamless and even and straight, up and down. They’ve matched the seams too well. It’s definitely not Peter’s work.

Not your work. Dear sweet lazy Peter, who never took any art very serious.

Whatever Peter left here for people to find, sealed inside this room, when he drywalled over the door, it’s gone now. Peter’s little time capsule or time bomb, the people of Waytansea Island have erased it. The way Mrs. Terrymore erased the library books. The same way the mainland houses have all been burned. The work of OAFF.

The way Angel Delaporte is dead. Stabbed in bed, in his sleep.

In Misty’s bed. Your bed. With nothing taken, and no sign of a break-in.

Just for the record, the summer people could walk in at any time. To find Misty hiding here, clutching a bloody knife in one hand.

With the serrated blade, Misty picks at a seam and peels away a strip of wallpaper. Using the sharp tip, Misty peels off another strip. Peeling away a third long, slow strip of wallpaper, Misty can read:

“. . . in love with Angel Delaporte, and I’m sorry but I will not die for . . .”

And just for the record, this is not what she really wanted to find.

WITH THE WHOLE WALL shredded, all the old cabbage roses and pale green stripes peeled away in long strips, here’s what Peter left for people to find.

What you left.

“I’m in love with Angel Delaporte, and I’m sorry but I will not die for our cause.” Written around and around the walls, it says, “I won’t let you kill me the way you’ve killed all the painters’ husbands since Gordon Kincaid.”

The room’s littered with curls and shreds of wallpaper. Dusty with the dried glue. You hear voices in the hallway, and Misty waits frozen in the wrecked room. Waiting for the summer people to open their door.

Across the wall, it’s written, “I don’t care about our traditions anymore.”

It says, “I don’t love Misty Marie,” it says, “but she doesn’t deserve to be tortured. I love our island, but we have to find a new way to save our way of life. We can’t keep harvesting people.”

It’s written, “This is ritual mass murder, and I won’t condone it.”

The summer people, their stuff is buried, the luggage and cosmetics and sunglasses. Buried in shredded trash.

“By the time you find this,” the writing says, “I’ll be gone. I’m leaving with Angel tonight. If you’re reading this, then I’m sorry, but it’s already too late. Tabbi will have a better future if her generation has to fend for itself.”

Written under the strips of wallpaper, it says, “I’m genuinely sorry for Misty.”

You’ve written, “It’s true I never loved her, but I don’t hate her enough to complete our plan.”

It’s written, “Misty deserves better than this. Dad, it’s time we set her free.”

The sleeping pills Detective Stilton said Peter had taken. The prescription Peter didn’t have. The suitcase he’d packed and put in the trunk. He was planning to leave us. To leave with Angel.

You were planning to leave.

Somebody drugged him and left him in the car with the engine running, shut in the garage for Misty to find. Somebody didn’t know about the suitcase, packed and ready in the trunk for his getaway. They didn’t know the gas tank was half empty.

“Dad,” meaning Harrow Wilmot. Peter’s father, who’s supposed to already be dead. Since before Tabbi was born.

Around the room, it’s written, “Don’t unveil the devil’s work.”

Written there, it says, “Destroy all her paintings.”

What they don’t teach you in art school is how to make sense of a nightmare.

It’s signed Peter Wilmot .

IN THE HOTEL dining room, a crew of island people are hanging Misty’s work, all her paintings. But not separate, they fit together, paper and canvas, to form a long mural. A collage. The crew keeps the mural covered as they assemble it, only letting one edge show, just enough to attach the next row of paintings. What it is, you can’t tell. What could be a tree, could really be a hand. What looks like a face, might be a cloud. It’s a crowd scene or a landscape or a still life of flowers and fruit. The moment they add a piece to the mural, the crew moves a drape to cover it.

All you can tell is it’s huge, filling the longest wall of the dining room.

Grace is with them, directing. Tabbi and Dr. Touchet, watching.

When Misty goes to look, Grace stops her with one blue, lumpy hand and says, “Have you tried on that dress I made you?”

Misty just wants to look at her painting. It’s her work. Because of the blindfold, she has no idea what she’s done. What part of herself she’s showing to strangers.

And Dr. Touchet says, “That wouldn’t be a very good idea.” He says, “You’ll see it opening night, with the rest of the crowd.”

Just for the record, Grace says, “We’re moving back into the house this afternoon.”

Where Angel Delaporte was killed.

Grace says, “Detective Stilton gave his all clear.” She says, “If you’ll pack, we can take your things for you.”

Peter’s pillow. Her art supplies in their pale wood box.

“It’s almost over, my dear,” Grace says. “I know exactly how you feel.”

According to the diary. Grace’s diary.

With everyone busy, Misty goes to the attic, to the room Grace and Tabbi share. Just for the record, Misty’s already packed, and stealing the diary from Grace’s room. She’s carrying her suitcase down to the car. Misty, she’s still dusted with dried wallpaper glue. Paper shreds of pale green stripes and pink roses in her hair.

The book that Grace is always reading, studying, with its red cover and gold script across the front, it’s supposed to be the diary of a woman who lived on the island a hundred years ago. The woman in Grace’s diary, she was forty-one years old and a failed art student. She’d got pregnant and dropped out of art school to get married on Waytansea Island. She didn’t love her new husband as much as she loved his old jewelry and the dream of living in a big stone house.

Here was a ready-made life for her, an instant role to step into. Waytansea Island, with all its tradition and ritual. All of it worked out. The answers for everything.

The woman was happy enough, but even a hundred years ago the island was filling up with wealthy tourists from the city. Pushy, needy strangers with enough money to take over. Just as her family money was running out, her husband shot himself while cleaning a gun.

The woman was sick with migraine headaches, exhausted and throwing up everything she ate. She worked as a maid in the hotel until she tripped on the stairs and became bedridden, one of her legs splinted inside a massive plaster cast. Trapped with nothing to do, she started to paint.

Just like Misty, but not Misty. This imitation Misty.

Then, her ten-year-old son drowns.

After one hundred paintings, her talent and ideas seemed to disappear. Her inspiration dwindles away.

Her handwriting, wide and long, she’s what Angel Delaporte would call a giving, caring person.

What you don’t learn in art school is how Grace Wilmot will follow you around and write down everything you do. Turn your life into this kind of sick fiction. Here it is. Grace Wilmot is writing a novel patterned after Misty’s life. Oh, she’s changed a few bits. She gave the woman three kids. Grace made her a maid instead of a dining room server. Oh, it’s all very coincidental.

Just for the record, Misty’s waiting in line at the ferry, reading this shit in Harrow’s old Buick.

The book says how most of the village has moved into the Waytansea Hotel, turning it into a barracks. A refugee camp for island families. The Hylands do everyone’s laundry. The Burtons do all the cooking. The Petersens, all the cleaning.

There doesn’t look like one original thought in any of it.

Just by reading this shit, Misty’s probably going to make it come true. Self-fulfill the prophecy. She’ll start living into someone’s idea for how her life should go. But sitting here, she can’t stop reading.

Within Grace’s novel, the woman narrator finds a diary. The diary she finds seems to follow her own life. She reads how her artwork is hung in a huge show. On the night it opens, the hotel is crowded with summer tourists.

Just for the record, dear sweet Peter, if you’ve recovered from your coma, this might put you right back there. The simple fact is Grace, your mother, is writing about your wife, making her out to be some drunken slut.

This has got to be how Judy Garland felt when she read Valley of the Dolls .

Here in line at the ferry dock, Misty’s waiting for a ride to the mainland. Sitting here in the car where Peter almost died, or almost ran off and left her, Misty’s sitting here in a hot line of summer people. Her suitcase packed and in the trunk. The white satin dress included.

The same way your suitcase was in the trunk.

That’s where the diary ends. The last entry is just before the art show. After that . . . there’s nothing.

Just so you don’t feel bad about yourself, Misty’s leaving your kid the way you were abandoning them both. You’re still married to a coward. The same way she was ready to run away when she thought the bronze statue would kill Tabbi—the only person on the island Misty gives a shit for. Not Grace. Not the summer people. There’s nobody here Misty needs to save.

Except Tabbi.

JUST FOR THE RECORD, you’re still one chicken-shit piece of work. You’re a selfish, half-assed, lazy, spineless piece of crap. Yeah, sure, you were planning to save your wife, but you were also going to dump her. Stupid brain-damaged fuck that you are. Dear sweet stupid you.

But now, Misty knows just how you felt.

Today is your 157th day as a vegetable. And her first.

Today, Misty drives the three hours to see you and sit by your bedside.

Just for the record, Misty asks you, “Is it okay to kill strangers to prop up a way of life just because the people who live it are the people you love?”

Well, thought you loved.

The way people are coming to the island, more and more every summer, you see more litter. The fresh water is in shorter and shorter supply. But of course, you can’t cap growth. It’s anti-American. Selfish. It’s tyrannical. Evil. Every child has the right to a life. Every person has the right to live where they can afford. We’re entitled to pursue happiness wherever we can drive to, fly to, sail to, to hunt it down. Too many people rushing to one place, sure, they ruin it—but that’s the system of checks and balances, the way the market adjusts itself.

This way, wrecking a place is the only way to save it. You have to make it look horrible to the outside world.

There is no OAFF. There’s only people fighting to preserve their world from more people.

Part of Misty hates these people who come here, invaders, infidels, crowding in to wreck her way of life, her daughter’s childhood. All these outsiders, trailing their failed marriages and stepchildren and drug habits and sleazy ethics and phony status symbols, these aren’t the kind of friends Misty wants to give her kid.

Your kid.

Their kid.

To save Tabbi, Misty could let happen what always happens, Misty could just let it happen again. The art show. Whatever it is, she could let the island myth run its course. And maybe Waytansea would be saved.

“We will kill every one of God’s children to save our own.”

Or maybe they can give Tabbi something better than a future of no challenges, a calm, secure life of peace.

Sitting here with you now, Misty leans over and kisses your puffy red forehead.

It’s okay that you never loved her, Peter. Misty loved you.

At least for believing she could be a great artist, a savior. Something more than a technical illustrator or commercial artist. More than human, even. Misty loves you for that.

Can you feel this?

Just for the record, she’s sorry about Angel Delaporte. Misty’s sorry you were raised inside such a fucked-up legend. She’s sorry she ever met you.

GRACE TWIRLS HER HAND in the air between them, her fingernails ridged and yellow under clear polish, and she says, “Misty dear, turn around so I can see how the back hangs.”

Misty’s first time to confront Grace, the evening of the art show, the first thing Grace says is, “I knew that dress would look wonderful on you.”

This is in the old Wilmot house on Birch Street. There, the doorway to her old bedroom is sealed behind a sheet of clear plastic and yellow police tape. A time capsule. A gift to the future. Through the plastic, you can see the mattress is gone. The shade is gone from the bedside lamp. A spray of something dark ruins the wallpaper above the headboard. The handwriting of blood pressure. The doorframe and windowsill, the white paint is smudged with black fingerprint powder. Deep, fresh tracks from a vacuum cleaner crisscross the rug. The invisible dust of Angel Delaporte’s dead skin, it’s all been sucked up for DNA testing.

Your old bedroom.

On the wall above the empty bed is the painting Misty did of the antique chair. Her eyes closed out on Waytansea Point. The hallucination of the statue coming to kill her. Blood sprayed across it.

With Grace now, in her bedroom across the hallway, Misty says not to try anything funny. The mainland police are parked right outside, waiting for them. If Misty’s not out there in ten minutes, they’ll come in, guns blazing.

Grace, she sits on the shiny pink-padded stool in front of her huge vanity table, her perfume bottles and jewelry spread out around her on the glass top. Her silver hand mirror and hairbrushes.

The souvenirs of wealth.

And Grace says, “Tu es ravissante ce soir.” She says, “You look pretty this evening.”

Misty has cheekbones now. And collarbones. Her shoulders are bony and white and stick out, coat-hanger-straight, from the dress that was her wedding dress in its previous life. The dress falls from a shred over one shoulder, white stain draped in folds, already loose and billowing since Grace measured her only a few days ago. Or weeks. Her bra and panties, they’re so big Misty’s done without. Misty’s almost as thin as her husband, the withered skeleton with machines pumping air and vitamins through him.

Thin as you.

Her hair is longer than before her knee accident. Her skin is blanched pale from so much time inside. Misty has a waist and sunken cheeks. Misty has a single chin, and her neck looks long and stringy with muscle.

She’s starved until her teeth and eyes look huge.

Before the showing tonight, Misty called the police. Not just Detective Stilton, Misty called the state patrol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Misty said that OAFF would be attacking the art show tonight, at the hotel on Waytansea Island. After them, Misty called the fire department. Misty told them, seven or seven-thirtyish tonight, there would be a disaster on the island. Bring ambulances, she told them. Then she called the television news and told them to bring a crew with the biggest, strongest relay truck they had. Misty called the radio stations. She called everybody but the Boy Scouts.

In Grace Wilmot’s bedroom, in that house with the legacy of names and ages written just inside the front door, Misty tells Grace how tonight, her plan is ruined. The firemen and police. The television cameras. Misty’s invited the whole world, and they’ll all be at the hotel for the unveiling.

And clipping an earring on one ear, Grace looks at Misty reflected in the vanity mirror and says, “Of course you did, but you called them the last time.”

Misty says, What does Grace mean by last time?

“And we really wish you wouldn’t,” Grace says. She’s smoothing her hair with the palms of her lumpy hands, saying, “You only make the final death toll higher than it needs to be.”

Misty says there won’t be a death toll. Misty says how she stole the diary.

From behind her, a voice says, “Misty dear, you can’t steal what’s already yours.”

The voice behind her. A man’s voice. It’s Harrow, Harry, Peter’s father.

Your father.

He’s wearing a tuxedo, his white hair combed into a crown on his square head, his nose and chin sharp and jutting out. The man Peter was supposed to become. You can still smell his breath. The hands that stabbed Angel Delaporte to death in her bed. That burned the houses Peter wrote inside, trying to warn people away from the island.

The man who tried to kill Peter. To kill you. His son.

He’s standing in the hallway, holding Tabbi’s hand. Your daughter’s hand.

Just for the record, it seems like a lifetime ago that Tabbi left her. Ran out of her grip to grab the cold hand of a man Misty thought was a killer. The statue in the woods. The old cemetery on Waytansea Point.

Grace has both elbows in the air, her hands behind her neck fastening a strand of pearls, and she says, “Misty dear, you remember your father-in-law, don’t you?”

Harrow leans down to kiss Grace’s cheek. Standing, he says, “Of course she remembers.”

The smell of his breath.

Grace holds her hands out, clutching the air, and says, “Tabbi, come give me a kiss. It’s time the grown-ups went to their party.”

First Tabbi. Then Harrow. Another thing they don’t teach you in art school is what to say when people come back from the dead.

To Harrow, Misty says, “Aren’t you supposed to be cremated?”

And Harrow lifts his hand to look at his wristwatch. He says, “Actually, not for another four hours.”

He shoots his shirt cuff to hide the watch and says, “We’d like to introduce you to the crowd tonight. We’re counting on you to say a few words of welcome.”

Still, Misty says, he knows what she’ll tell everyone. To run. To leave the island and not come back. What Peter tried to tell them. Misty will tell them one man is dead and another is in a coma because of some crazy island curse. The second they get her onstage, she’ll shout “Fire.” She’ll do her damnedest to clear the room.

Tabbi steps up beside Grace, sitting on the vanity stool. And Grace says, “Nothing would make us happier.”

Harrow says, “Misty dear, give your mother-in-law a kiss.” He says, “And please, forgive us. We won’t bother you again after tonight.”

THE WAY HARROW told Misty. The way he explained the island legend is she can’t not succeed as an artist.

She’s doomed to fame. Cursed with talent. Life after life.

She’s been Giotto di Bondone, then Michelangelo, then Jan Vermeer.

Or Misty was Jan van Eyck and Leonardo da Vinci and Diego Velázquez.

Then Maura Kincaid and Constance Burton.

And now she’s Misty Marie Wilmot, but only her name changes. She has always been an artist. She will always be an artist.

What they don’t teach you in art school is how your whole life is about discovering who you already were.

Just for the record, this is Harrow Wilmot talking. Peter’s crazy killer father. The Harry Wilmot who’s been hiding out since before Peter and Misty got married. Before Tabbi was born.

Your crazy father.

If you believe Harry Wilmot, Misty’s the finest artists who’ve ever lived.

Two hundred years ago, Misty was Maura Kincaid. A hundred years ago, she was Constance Burton. In that previous life, Constance saw some jewelry worn by one of the island sons while he was on tour in Europe. It was a ring that had been Maura’s. By accident, he found her and brought her back. After Constance died, people saw how her diary matched Maura’s. Their lives were identical, and Constance had saved the island the way Maura had saved it.

How her diary matched her earlier diary. How her every diary will match the diary before. How Misty will always save the island. With her art. That’s the island legend, according to Harrow. It’s all her doing.

A hundred years later—when their money was dwindling—they sent the island sons to find her. Again and again, we’ve brought her back, forced her to repeat her previous life. Using the jewelry as bait, Misty would recognize it. She’d love it and not know why.

They, the whole wax museum of Waytansea Island, they knew she’d be a great painter. Given the right kind of torture. The way Peter always said the best art comes from suffering. The way Dr. Touchet says we can connect to some universal inspiration.

Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman, the greatest artist of all time, their savior. Their slave. Misty, their karmic cash cow.

Harrow said how they use the diary of the previous artist to shape the life of the next. Her husband has to die at the same age, then one of her children. They could fake the death, the way they did with Tabbi, but with Peter—well, Peter forced their hand.

Just for the record, Misty’s telling all this to Detective Stilton while he drives to the Waytansea Hotel.

Peter’s blood full of the sleeping pills he never took. The death certificate that didn’t exist for Harrow Wilmot. Misty says, “It’s got to be inbreeding. These people are lunatics.”

“The blessing is,” Harrow told her, “you forget.”

With every death, Misty forgets who she was—but the islanders pass the story along from one generation to the next. They remember so they can find her and bring her back. For the rest of eternity, every fourth generation, just as the money runs out . . . When the world threatens to invade, they’ll bring her back and she’ll save their future.

“The way you always did, you always will,” Harrow said.

Misty Marie Wilmot, queen of the slaves.

The Industrial Revolution meets the guardian angel.

Poor her, the assembly line of miracles. For all eternity.

Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, just for the record.

Harrow said, “You always keep a diary. In every incarnation. That’s how we can anticipate your moods and reactions. We know every move you’ll make.”

Harrow looped a strand of pearls around Grace’s wrist and fastened the clasp, saying, “Oh, we need you to come back and start the process, but we don’t necessarily want you to complete your karmic cycle.”

Because that would be killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Yeah, her soul would go on to other adventures, but three generations later the island would be poor again. Poor and crowded with rich outsiders.

Art school doesn’t teach you how to escape your soul being recycled.

Period revival. Her own homemade immortality.

“In fact,” Harrow said, “the diary you’re keeping right now, Tabbi’s great-great-grandchildren will find it extremely useful in dealing with you the next time around.”

Misty’s own great-great-great-grandchildren.

Using her book. This book.

“Oh, I remember,” Grace said. “When I was a very little girl. You were Constance Burton, and I used to love it when you’d take me kite flying.”

Harrow said, “Under one name or another, you’re the mother of us all.”

Grace said, “You’ve loved us all.”

To Harrow, Misty said, Please. Just tell me what’s going to happen. Will the paintings explode? Will the hotel collapse into the ocean? What? How does she save everyone?

And Grace shook her pearl bracelet down around her hand and said, “You can’t.”

Most fortunes, Harrow says, are founded on the suffering and death of thousands of people or animals. Harvesting something. He gives Grace something shining gold and holds out one hand, his jacket sleeve pulled back.

And Grace holds the two ends of his cuff together and inserts a cuff link, saying, “We’ve just found a way to harvest rich people.”

THE AMBULANCES are already waiting outside the Waytansea Hotel. The television news crew hoists a broadcast dish from the top of its van. Two police cars are nosed up to the hotel front steps.

Summer people edge between the parked cars. Leather pants and little black dresses. Dark glasses and silk shirts. Gold jewelry. Above them, the corporate signs and logos.

Peter’s graffiti: “. . . your blood is our gold . . .”

Between Misty and the crowd, a newscaster stands on camera. With the crowd milling behind him, the people climbing the hotel steps and entering the lobby, the newscaster says, “Are we on?” He puts two fingers of one hand to his ear. Not looking into the camera, he says, “I’m ready.”

Detective Stilton sits behind the wheel of his car, Misty beside him. Both of them watch Grace and Harrow Wilmot climb the front steps, Grace lifting her long dress with the fingertips of one hand. Harrow holds her other hand.

Misty watches them. The cameras watch them.

And Detective Stilton says, “They won’t try anything. Not with this kind of exposure.”

The oldest generation of every family, the Burtons and Hylands and Petersens, the aristocracy of Waytansea Island, they fall in line with the summer crowds entering the hotel, their chins held high.

Peter’s warning: “. . . we will kill every one of God’s children to save our own.”

The newscaster on camera, he lifts a microphone to his mouth and says, “Police and county officials have given a green light to tonight’s reception on the island.”

The crowd disappears into the dim green velvet landscape of the lobby, the forest clearing among polished, varnished tree trunks. The thick shafts of sunlight stabbing into the gloom, heavy as crystal chandeliers. The humped sofa shapes of boulders covered in moss. The campfire, so much like a fireplace.

Detective Stilton says, “You want to go in?”

Misty tells him no. It’s not safe. She’s not making the same mistake she’s always made. Whatever that mistake would be.

According to Harrow Wilmot.

The newscaster says, “Everyone who’s anyone is arriving here tonight.”

And there, then there’s a girl. A stranger. Someone else’s child with short dark hair, climbing the steps to the hotel lobby. The flash of her peridot ring. Misty’s tip money.

It’s Tabbi. Of course it’s Tabbi. Misty’s gift to the future. Peter’s way to keep his wife on the island. The bait to get her into a trap. A moment, a green flash, and Tabbi’s gone inside the hotel.

TODAY IN THE DARKNESS of the dim forest clearing, the green velvet landscape inside the lobby doors, the hotel’s fire alarm goes off. One long ringing bell, it comes out the front doors so loud the newscaster has to shout, “Well, this sounds like trouble.”

The summer people, the men, their hair all combed back, dark and wiry with some styling product. The women all blond. They shout to be heard over the alarm’s din.

Misty Wilmot, the greatest artist throughout history, she’s grabbing her way through the crowd, clawing and pulling herself toward the stage in the Wood and Gold Dining Room. Clutching at the elbows and hipbones of these skinny people. The whole wall behind the stage draped and ready for the unveiling. The mural, her work still hidden. Sealed. Her gift to the future. Her time bomb.

Her million smears of paint put together the right way. The urine of cows eating mango leaves. The ink sacs from cuttlefish. All that chemistry and biology.

Her kid somewhere in this mob of people. Tabbi.

The alarm ringing and ringing, Misty steps up on a chair. She steps up on a table, table six where Tabbi was laid out dead, where Misty found out about Angel Delaporte being stabbed to death. Standing above the crowd in her white dress, people looking up, summer men grinning up at her, Misty’s not wearing any underwear.

Her born-again wedding dress tucked between her bony thighs, Misty shouts, “Fire!”

Heads turn. Eyes look up at her. In the dining room doorway, Detective Stilton appears and starts swimming through the crowd.

Misty shouts, “Get out! Save yourselves!” Misty shouts, “If you stay here, something terrible will happen!”

Peter’s warnings. Misty sprays them out above the crowd.

“We will kill every one of God’s children to save our own.”

The curtain looming behind her, covering the whole wall, her own self-portrait, what Misty doesn’t know about herself. What she doesn’t want to know.

The summer people look up, their corrugator muscles contracted, their eyebrows pulled together. Their lips pulled thin and down by triangularis muscle.

The fire alarm stops ringing, and for as long as it takes to draw the next breath, all you can hear is the ocean outside, each wave hiss and burst.

Misty is shouting for everybody to shut up. Everybody, just listen. Shouting, she knows what she’s talking about. She’s the greatest artist of all time. The reincarnation of Thomas Gainsborough and Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt. She shouts how her soul has been Michelangelo and da Vinci and Rembrandt.

Then a woman shouts, “It’s her, the artist. It’s Misty Wilmot.”

And a man shouts, “Misty honey, enough with the drama.”

The woman shouts, “Pull down the curtain, and let’s get this over with.”

The man and woman shouting, they’re Harrow and Grace. Between them, they each hold Tabbi by one hand. Tabbi, her eyes are taped shut.

“Those people,” Misty shouts, pointing at Grace and Harrow. Her hair hanging in her face, Misty shouts, “Those evil people, they used their son to get me pregnant!”

Misty shouts, “They’re holding my kid!”

She shouts, “If you see what’s behind this curtain, it will be too late!”

And Detective Stilton gets to the chair. One step, and he’s up. Another step, and he’s beside her on table six. The huge curtain hanging behind them. The truth about everything just inches away.

“Yes,” another woman shouts. An old island Tupper, her sea turtle neck sagging into the lace collar of her dress, she shouts, “Show us, Misty!”

“Show us,” a man shouts, an old island Woods, leaning on his cane.

Stilton reaches one hand behind his back. He says, “You almost had me thinking you were the sane one.” And his hand comes out holding handcuffs. He’s clicking them on her, pulling Misty away, past Tabbi with her eyes taped shut, past all the summer people shaking their heads. Past the aristocrats of Waytansea Island. Back through the forest glade of the green velvet lobby.

“My kid,” Misty says. “She’s still in there. We have to get her out.”

And Detective Stilton gives her to a deputy in a brown uniform and says, “Your daughter who you said was dead?”

They faked her death. Everyone watching, they’re just statues of themselves. Their own self-portraits.

Outside the hotel, at the foot of the porch steps, the deputy opens the back door of a patrol car. Detective Stilton says, “Misty Wilmot, you’re under arrest for the attempted murder of your husband, Peter Wilmot, and the murder of Angel Delaporte.”

Blood was all over her the morning after Angel was stabbed in her bed. Angel about to steal her husband away. Misty, the one who found Peter’s body in the car.

Strong hands shove her into the backseat of the patrol car.

And from inside the hotel, the newscaster says, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the moment of the unveiling.”

“Take her. Print her. Book her,” the detective says. He slaps the deputy on the back and says, “I’m going back inside to see what all this fuss has been about.”

ACCORDING TO PLATO, we live chained inside a dark cave. We’re chained so all we can see is the back wall of the cave. All we can see are the shadows that move there. They could be the shadows of something moving outside the cave. They could be the shadows of people chained next to us.

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.

Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight.

The camera obscura.

Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down. Distorted by the mirror or the lens it comes through. Our limited personal perception. Our tiny body of experience. Our half-assed education.

How the viewer controls the view. How the artist is dead. We see what we want. We see how we want. We only see ourselves. All the artist can do is give us something to look at.

Just for the record, your wife’s under arrest. But she’s done it. They’ve done it. Maura. Constance. And Misty. They’ve saved her kid, your daughter. She’s saved herself. They’ve saved everyone.

The deputy in his brown uniform, he drove Misty back over the ferry to the mainland. Along the way, the deputy read her rights. He passed her off to a second deputy, who took her fingerprints and wedding ring. Misty still in her wedding dress, that deputy took her bag and high-heeled shoes.

All her junk jewelry, Maura’s jewelry, their jewelry, it’s all back in the Wilmot house in Tabbi’s shoe box.

This second deputy gave her a blanket. The deputy was a woman her own age, her face a diary of wrinkles starting around her eyes and webbed between her nose and mouth. The deputy looked at the forms Misty was filling out, and she said, “Are you the artist?”

And Misty said, “Yeah, but just for the rest of this lifetime. Not after that.”

The deputy walked her down an old concrete hallway to a metal door. She unlocked the door, saying, “It’s after lights-out.” She swung the metal door open and stepped aside, and it’s right there Misty saw it.

What they don’t teach you in art school. How you’re still always trapped.

How your head is the cave, your eyes the cave mouth. How you live inside your head and only see what you want. How you only watch the shadows and make up your own meaning.

Just for the record, it was right there. In the tall square of light from the open cell door, written on the far wall of the little cell, it said:

If you’re here, you’ve failed again. It’s signed Constance .

The handwriting cupped and spread, loving and nurturing, all of it’s her handwriting. In this place Misty’s never been before, but where she ends up, again and again. It’s then she hears the sirens, long and far way. And the deputy says, “I’ll be back to check on you in a little.” The deputy steps out and locks the door.

There’s a window high up in one wall, too high for Misty to reach, but it must face the ocean and Waytansea Island.

In the flickering orange light from the window, the dancing light and shadow on the concrete wall opposite the window, in this light Misty knows everything Maura knew. Everything Constance knew. Misty knows how they’ve all been fooled. The same way she knew how to paint the mural. The way Plato says we already know everything, we just need to remember it. What Carl Jung calls the universal subconscious. Misty remembers.

The way the camera obscura focuses an image on a canvas, how the box camera works, the little cell window projects a mess of orange and yellow, flames and shadows in a shape on the far wall. All you can hear are the sirens, all you can see are the flames.

It’s the Waytansea Hotel on fire. Grace and Harrow and Tabbi inside.

Can you feel this?

We were here. We are here. We will always be here.

And we’ve failed again.

OUT ON WAYTANSEA POINT, Misty parks the car. Tabbi sits beside her, each of Tabbi’s arms wrapped around an urn. Her grandparents. Your parents. Grace and Harrow.

Sitting next to her daughter in the front seat of the old Buick, Misty rests a hand on Tabbi’s knee and says, “Honey?”

And Tabbi turns to look at her mother.

Misty says, “I’ve decided to legally change our names.” Misty says, “Tabbi, I need to tell people what really happened.” Misty squeezes Tabbi’s skinny knee, her white stockings sliding over her kneecap, and Misty says, “We can go live with your grandma in Tecumseh Lake.”

Really, they could go live anywhere now. They’re rich again. Grace and Harrow, and all the village old people, they left millions in life insurance. Millions and millions, tax free and safe in the bank. Drawing enough interest to keep them safe for another eighty years.

Detective Stilton’s search dog, two days after the fire, the dog dug into the mountain of carbonized wood. The first three stories of the hotel gutted to the stone walls. The concrete turned to green-blue glass by the heat. What the dog smelled, cloves or coffee, led rescue workers to Stilton, dead in the basement below the lobby. The dog, shaking and peeing, his name is Rusty.

The images are worldwide. The bodies spread out on the street in front of the hotel. The charred corpses, black and crusted, cracked and showing the meat cooked inside, wet and red. In every shot, every camera angle, there’s a corporate logo.

Every second of video shows the blackened skeletons laid out in the parking lot. A total of one hundred and thirty-two so far, and above them, over them, somewhere in the frame, you see some corporate name. Some slogan or smiling mascot. A cartoon tiger. A vague, upbeat motto.

“Bonner & Mills—When You’re Ready to Stop Starting Over.”

“Mewtworx—Where Progress Is Not Staying in One Place.”

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

Some island car silk-screened with an advertisement is parked in every news shot. Some piece of paper trash, a cup or napkin is printed with a corporate name. You can read a billboard. Islanders are wearing their lapel buttons or T-shirts, doing television interviews with the twisted smoking bodies in the background. Now the financial services and cable television networks and drug companies are paying fat kill fees to buy back all their advertising. To erase their names from the island.

Add this money to the insurance, and Waytansea Island is richer than it’s ever been.

Sitting in the Buick, Tabbi looks at her mother. She looks at the urns she holds in the crook of each arm. Her zygomatic major pulls her lips toward each ear. Tabbi’s cheeks swell up to lift her bottom eyelids just a little. With her arms hugging the ashes of Grace and Harrow, she’s her own little Mona Lisa. Smiling and ancient, Tabbi says, “If you tell, then I tell.”

Misty’s artwork. Her child.

Misty says, “What will you tell?”

Still smiling, Tabbi says, “I set fire to their clothes. Granmy and Granby Wilmot taught me how, and I set them on fire.” She says, “They taped my eyes so I wouldn’t see, so I’d get out.”

In the bits of news video that survive, all you can see is the smoke rolling out of the lobby doors. This is moments after the mural was unveiled. The firemen rush in and don’t come out. None of the police or guests come out. Every second of the time stamp on the video, the fire is bigger, the flames whipping orange rags out of the windows. A police officer crawls across the porch to peek in the window. He stoops there, looking inside. Then he stands. The smoke blowing him in the face, the flames blowtorching his clothes and hair, he steps over the windowsill. Not blinking. Not flinching. His face and hands on fire. The police officer smiles at what he sees inside and walks toward it without looking back.

The official story is the dining room fireplace caused it. The hotel’s policy that the fire always had to burn, no matter how warm the weather, that’s how the fire started. People died a step away from open windows. Their dead bodies found an arm’s length away from exit doors. Dead, they were found creeping, crawling, crowding toward the wall in the dining room where the mural burned. Toward the center of the fire. Whatever the policeman saw through the porch window.

No one even tried to escape.

Tabbi says, “When my father asked me to run away with him, I told Granmy.” She says, “I saved us. I saved the future of the whole island.”

Looking out the car window to the ocean, not looking at her mother, Tabbi says, “So if you tell anyone,” she says, “I’ll go to jail.” She says, “I’m very proud of what I did, Mother.” She looks at the ocean, her eyes following the curve of the coastline, back to the village and the black hulk of the ruined hotel. Where people burned alive, transfixed by Stendhal syndrome. By Misty’s mural.

Misty shakes her daughter’s knee and says, “Tabbi, please.”

And without looking up, Tabbi reaches over to open the car door and step out. “It’s Tabitha, Mother,” she says. “From now on, please call me by my given name.”

When you die in a fire, your muscles shorten. Your arms pull in, pulling your hands into fists, your fists pulling up to your chin. Your knees bend. The heat does all that. It’s called the “pugilist position” because you look like a dead boxer.

People killed in a fire, people in a long-term vegetative state, they all end up posed about the same. The same as a baby waiting to be born.

Misty and Tabitha, they walk past the bronze statue of Apollo. Past the meadow. Past the crumbing mausoleum, a moldy bank built into a hillside, its iron gate hanging open. The darkness inside. They walk to the end of the point, and Tabitha—not her daughter, no longer part of Misty, someone Misty doesn’t even know—a stranger, Tabitha pours each urn off a cliff above the water. The long gray cloud of what’s inside, the dust and ash, it fans out on the breeze. It sinks into the ocean.

Just for the record, the Ocean Alliance for Freedom hasn’t issued another word and police have made no arrests.

Dr. Touchet has declared the only public beach on the island closed for health reasons. The ferry has cut service to just twice each week, and only to island residents. Waytansea Island is to all intents and purposes closed to the outsider.

Walking back to the car, they pass the mausoleum.

Tabbi . . . Tabitha stops and says, “Would you like to look inside now?”

The iron gate rusted and hanging open. The darkness inside.

And Misty, she says, “Yes.”

Just for the record, the weather today is calm. Calm and resigned and defeated.

One, two, three steps into the dark, you can see them. Two skeletons. One lying on the floor, curled on its side. The other sits propped against the wall. Mold and moss grown up around their bones. The walls shine with trickles of water. The skeletons, her skeletons, the women Misty’s been.

What Misty’s learned is the pain and panic and horror only lasts a minute or two.

What Misty’s learned is she’s bored to death of dying.

Just for the record, your wife knows you were bluffing when you wrote about putting every toothbrush up your ass. You were just trying to scare people back into reality. You just wanted to wake them up from their own personal coma.

Misty’s not writing this for you, Peter, not anymore.

There’s nowhere on this island she can leave her story where only she’ll find it. The future her in a hundred years. Her own little time capsule. Her own personal time bomb. The village of Waytansea, they’d dig up every square inch of their beautiful island. They’d tear down their hotel, looking for her secret. They have a century to dig and tear and hunt before she comes back. Until they bring her back. And then it will be too late.

We’re betrayed by everything we do. Our art. Our children.

But we were here. We are still here. What poor dull Misty Marie Wilmot has to do is hide her story in plain sight. She’ll hide it everywhere in the world.

What she’s learned is what she always learns. Plato was right. We’re all of us immortal. We couldn’t die if we wanted to.

Every day of her life, every minute of her life, if she could just remember that.

September 10

1445 Bayside Drive

Tecumseh Lake, GA 30613

Chuck Palahniuk

c/o Doubleday

1745 Broadway

New York, NY 10019

Dear Mr. Palahniuk,

My guess is you probably get a lot of letters. I’ve never written to an author before, but I wanted to give you a chance to read the attached manuscript.

Most of it I wrote this summer. If you enjoy it, please pass it along to your editor, Lars Lindigkeit. Money is not really my goal. I only want to see it published and read by as many people as possible. Maybe in some way it can enlighten just one person.

My hope is this story will be read for generations, and it will stay in people’s minds. To be read by the next generation, and the next. Maybe to be read by a little girl a century from now, a little girl who can close her eyes and see a place—see it so clear—a place of sparkling jewelry and rose gardens, that she thinks will save her.

Somewhere, someday, that girl will pick up a crayon and start to draw a house she’s never seen. My hope is this story will change the way she lives her life. I hope this story will save her—that little girl—whatever her name will be the next time.

Sincerely,

Nora Adams

Manuscript enclosed