→ June 21
TODAY, A MAN CALLED from Long Beach. He left a long message on the answering machine, mumbling and shouting, talking fast and slow, swearing and threatening to call the police, to have you arrested.
Today is the longest day of the year—but anymore, every day is.
→ June 23
A WOMAN CALLS FROM Seaview to say her linen closet is missing. Last September, her house had six bedrooms, two linen closets. She’s sure of it. Now she’s only got one. She comes to open her beach house for the summer. She drives out from the city with the kids and the nanny and the dog, and here they are with all their luggage, and all their towels are gone. Disappeared. Poof.
Bermuda triangulated.
→ June 22
BY THE TIME you read this, you’ll be older than you remember.
The official name for your liver spots is hyperpigmented lentigines . The official anatomy word for a wrinkle is rhytide . Those creases in the top half of your face, the rhytides plowed across your forehead and around your eyes, this is dynamic wrinkling , also called hyperfunctional facial lines , caused by the movement of underlying muscles. Most wrinkles in the lower half of the face are static rhytides, caused by sun and gravity.
Let’s look in the mirror. Really look at your face. Look at your eyes, your mouth.
This is what you think you know best.
→ June 25
PICTURE THE WAY a little kid would draw a fish bone—the skeleton of a fish, with the skull at one end and the tail at the other. The long spine in between, it’s crossed with rib bones. It’s the kind of fish skeleton you’d see in the mouth of a cartoon cat.
Picture this fish as an island covered with houses. Picture the kind of castle houses that a little girl living in a trailer park would draw—big stone houses, each with a forest of chimneys, each a mountain range of different rooflines, wings and towers and gables, all of them going up and up to a lightning rod at the top. Slate roofs. Fancy wrought-iron fences. Fantasy houses, lumpy with bay windows and dormers. All around them, perfect pine trees, rose gardens, and red brick sidewalks.
→ June 26
A MAN CALLS FROM the mainland, from Ocean Park, to complain that his kitchen is gone.
It’s natural not to notice at first. After you live anywhere long enough—a house, an apartment, a nation—it just seems too small.
Ocean Park, Oysterville, Long Beach, Ocean Shores, these are all mainland towns. The woman with the missing closet. The man with his bathroom gone. These people, they’re all messages on the answering machine, people who had some remodeling done on their vacation places. Mainland places, summer people. You have a nine-bedroom house you only see two weeks each year, it might take you a few seasons to notice you’re missing part. Most of these people have at least a half dozen houses. These aren’t really homes. These are investments. They have condos and co-ops. They have apartments in London and Hong Kong. A different toothbrush waits in every time zone. A pile of dirty clothes on every continent.
→ June 28
THE DINING ROOM at the Waytansea Hotel, it’s named the Wood and Gold Dining Room because of its walnut paneling and gold brocade upholstery. The fireplace mantel is carved walnut with polished brass andirons. You have to keep the fire burning even when the wind blows from the mainland; then smoke backs up and coughs out the front. Soot and smoke slip out until you have to pull the batteries from every smoke detector. By then the whole hotel smells a little on fire.
Every time someone asks for table nine or ten by the fireplace and then bitches about the smoke and how it’s too hot, and asks for a new table, you need to take a drink. Just a sip of whatever you’ve got. Cooking sherry works for your poor fat wife.
→ June 29—The New Moon
IN OCEAN PARK, the man answers his front door, a wineglass in one hand, some kind of bright orange wine filling it up to his index finger on the side of the glass. He’s wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe with “Angel” stitched on the lapel. He wears a gold chain tangled in his gray chest hair and smells like plaster dust. His other hand holds the flashlight. The man drinks the wine down to his middle finger, and his face looks puffy with dark chin stubble. His eyebrows are bleached or plucked until they’re almost not there.
Just for the record, this is how they met, Mr. Angel Delaporte and Misty Marie.
→ June 30
YOUR POOR WIFE, she’s racing from the dining room to the music room, grabbing up silver candlesticks, little gilded mantel clocks, and Dresden figurines and stuffing them in a pillowcase. Misty Marie Wilmot, after working the breakfast shift, now she’s looting the big Wilmot house on Birch Street. Like she’s a goddamn burglar in her own house, she’s snatching up silver cigarette boxes and pillboxes and snuffboxes. Off fireplace mantels and nightstands, she’s collecting saltcellars and carved-ivory knickknacks. She’s lugging around the pillowcase, heavy and clanking with gilded-bronze gravy boats and hand-painted porcelain platters.
Still in her pink plastic uniform, sweat stains wet under each arm. Her name tag pinned to her chest, it lets all the strangers in the hotel call her Misty. Your poor wife. She works the same kind of shitty restaurant job her mom did.
→ July 1
JUST FOR THE RECORD, Peter, it really sucks how you tell everybody your wife’s a hotel maid. Yeah, maybe two years ago she used to be a maid.
Now she happens to be the assistant supervisor of the dining room servers. She’s “Employee of the Month” at the Waytansea Hotel. She’s your wife, Misty Marie Wilmot, mother of your child, Tabbi. She almost, just about, nearly has an undergraduate degree in fine art. She votes and pays taxes. She’s queen of the fucking slaves, and you’re a brain-dead vegetable with a tube up your ass in a coma, hooked to a zillion very expensive gadgets that keep you alive.
Dear sweet Peter, you’re in no position to call anybody a fat fucking slob.
→ July 2
OKAY, OKAY. FUCK.
Just for the record, a big part of this mess is Misty’s fault. Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman. The little latchkey product of divorce with no parent at home most days.
Everybody in college, all her friends in the fine arts program, they told her:
Don’t.
No, her friends said. Not Peter Wilmot. Not “the walking peter.”
The Eastern School of Art, the Meadows Academy of Fine Arts, the Wilson Art Institute, rumor was Peter Wilmot had flunked out of them all.
You’d flunked out.
→ July 3
ANGEL SAYS TO MAKE a fist. He says, “Hold out your index finger as if you’re about to pick your nose.”
He takes Misty’s hand, her finger pointed straight, and he holds it so her fingertip just touches the black paint on the wall. He moves her finger so it traces the trail of black spray paint, the sentence fragments and doodles, the drips and smears, and Angel says, “Can you feel anything?”
Just for the record, they’re a man and a woman standing close together in a small dark room. They’ve crawled in through a hole in the wall, and the homeowner’s waiting outside. Just so you know this in the future, Angel’s wearing these tight brown leather pants that smell the way shoe polish smells. The way leather car seats smell. The way your wallet smells, soaked with sweat after it’s in your back pocket while you’re driving on a hot summer day. That smell Misty used to pretend to hate, that’s how Angel’s leather pants smell pressed up against her.
→ July 4
JUST SO YOU KNOW, this looks so sweet. It’s Independence Day, and the hotel is full. The beach, teeming. The lobby is crowded with summer people, all of them milling around, waiting for the fireworks to launch from the mainland.
Your daughter, Tabbi, she has a strip of masking tape over each eye. Blind, she’s clutching and patting her way around the lobby. From the fireplace to the reception desk, she’s whispering, “. . . eight, nine, ten . . .” counting her steps from each landmark to the next.
→ July 5
ON YOUR FIRST REAL DATE, you and Misty, you stretched a canvas for her.
Peter Wilmot and Misty Kleinman, on a date, sitting in the tall weeds in a big vacant lot. The summer bees and flies drifting around them. Sitting on a plaid blanket Misty brought from her apartment. Her box of paints, made of pale wood under yellowed varnish with brass corners and hinges tarnished almost black, Misty has the legs pulled out to make it an easel.
If this is stuff you already remember, skip ahead.
If you remember, the weeds were so high you had to stomp them down to make a nest in the sun.
It was spring term, and everyone on campus seemed to have the same idea. To weave a compact disc player or a computer mainframe using only native grasses and sticks. Bits of root. Seedpods. You could smell a lot of rubber cement in the air.
→ July 6
JUST FOR THE RECORD, the cruddy old library with its wallpaper peeling at every seam and dead flies inside all the milk-glass lights hanging from the ceiling, everything you can remember is still here. If you can remember it. The same shabby world globe, yellowed to the color of soup. The continents carved into places like Prussia and the Belgian Congo. They still have the framed sign that says “Anyone Caught Defacing Library Books Will Be Prosecuted.”
Old Mrs. Terrymore, the librarian, she wears the same tweed suits, except now she has a lapel button as big as her face that says “Find Yourself in a New Future with Owens Landing Financial Services!”
What you don’t understand, you can make mean anything.
→ July 7
THE STAINED-GLASS windows of the island church, little white trash Misty Marie Kleinman, she could draw them before she could read or write. Before she’d ever seen stained glass. She’d never been inside a church, any church. Godless little Misty Kleinman, she could draw the tombstones in the village cemetery out on Waytansea Point, drawing the dates and epitaphs before she knew they were numbers and words.
Now, sitting here in church services, it’s hard for her to remember what she first imagined and what she saw for real after she’d arrived. The purple altar cloth. The thick wood beams black with varnish.
It’s all what she imagined as a kid. But that’s impossible.
→ July 8
ON THEIR FIFTH REAL DATE, Peter was matting and framing the picture Misty had painted.
You, Peter, you were telling Misty, “This. This picture. It will hang in a museum.”
The picture, it was a landscape showing a house wrapped in porches, shaded with trees. Lace curtains hung in the windows. Roses bloomed behind a white picket fence. Blue birds flew through shafts of sunlight. A ribbon of smoke curled up from one stone chimney. Misty and Peter were in a frame shop near campus, and she was standing with her back to the shop’s front window, trying to block if anybody might see in.
Misty and you.
→ July 9
THIS EVENING, Misty is tucking your daughter into bed when Tabbi says, “Granmy Wilmot and I have a secret.”
Just for the record, Granmy Wilmot knows everybody’s secrets.
Grace sits through church service and elbows Misty, telling her how the rose window the Burtons donated for their poor, sad daughter-in-law—well, the truth is Constance Burton gave up painting and drank herself to death.
Here’s two centuries of Waytansea shame and misery, and your mother can repeat every detail. The cast-iron benches on Merchant Street, the ones made in England, they’re in memory of Maura Kincaid, who drowned trying to swim the six miles to the mainland. The Italian fountain on Parson Street—it’s in honor of Maura’s husband.
→ July 10
ON THEIR TENTH DATE, Misty asked Peter if he’d messed with her birth control pills.
They were in Misty’s apartment. She was working on another painting. The television was on, tuned to a Spanish soap opera. Her new painting was a tall church fitted together out of cut stone. The steeple was roofed with copper tarnished dark green. The stained-glass windows were complicated as spiderwebs.
Painting the shiny blue of the church doors, Misty said, “I’m not stupid.” She said, “A lot of women would notice the difference between a real birth control pill and the little pink cinnamon candies you switched them with.”
→ July 11
DOWNSTAIRS, it’s past midnight, and the lobby is empty except for Paulette Hyland behind the desk. Grace Wilmot would tell you how Paulette’s a Hyland by marriage, but before that she was a Petersen, although her mother’s a Nieman descended from the Tupper branch. That used to mean a lot of old money on both sides of her family. Now Paulette’s a desk clerk.
Far across the lobby, sunk in the cushion of a red leather wing chair, is Grace, reading beside the fireplace.
→ July 12
IN CASE YOU’RE CURIOUS, your friend from art school with the long blond hair, the boy who tore his earlobe in half trying to give Misty his earring, well, he’s bald now. His name’s Will Tupper, and he runs the ferryboat. He’s your-aged and his earlobe still hangs in two points. Scar-tissued.
On the ferry this evening coming back to the island, Misty is standing on deck. The cold wind is putting years on her face, stretching and drying her skin. The flat dead skin of her stratum corneum. She’s just drinking a beer in a brown paper bag when this big dog noses up next to her. The dog’s sniffing and whining. His tail’s tucked, and his throat is working up and down inside his furry neck as he swallows something over and over.
→ July 13—The Full Moon
TABBI AND MISTY, they’re walking through the woods. This is the tangle of land out on Waytansea Point. It’s alders here, generations of trees grown and fallen and sprouting again out of their own dead. Animals, maybe deer, have cut a path that winds around the heaps of complicated trees and edges between rocks big as architecture and padded with thick moss. Above all this, the alder leaves come together in a shifting bright green sky.
Here and there, sunlight breaks through in shafts as big around as crystal chandeliers. Here’s just a messier version of the lobby of the Waytansea Hotel.
Tabbi wears a single old earring, gold filigree and a haze of sparkling red rhinestones around a red enameled heart. It’s pinned through her pink sweatshirt, like a brooch, but it’s the earring that Peter’s blond friend tore out of his ear. Will Tupper from the ferry.
→ July 14
ANGEL HOLDS THE SHEET of watercolor paper, pinching the corners with the tips of his fingers. He looks at it and looks at Misty and says, “You drew a chair?”
Misty shrugs and says, “It’s been years. It was the first thing that came to me.”
Angel turns his back to her, holding the picture so the sunlight hits it from different angles. Still looking at it, he says, “It’s good. It’s very good. Where did you find the chair?”
“I drew it from my imagination,” Misty says, and she tells him about being stranded out on Waytansea Point all day with just her paints and two bottles of wine.
→ July 15
IF THE FIRST MAN who looks at your boobs in four years turns out to be a cop, take a drink. If it turns out he already knows what you look like naked, take another drink.
Make that drink a double.
Some guy sits at table eight in the Wood and Gold Room, just some your-aged guy. He’s beefy with stooped shoulders. His shirt fits okay, a little tight across his gut, a white poly-cotton balloon that bumps over his belt a little. His hair, he’s balding at the temples, and his recessions trail back into long triangles of scalp above each eye. Each triangle is sunburned bright red, making long pointed devil’s horns that poke up from the top of his face. He’s got a little spiral notebook open on the table, and he’s writing in it while he watches Misty. He’s wearing a striped tie and a navy blue sport coat.
→ July 16
DR. TOUCHET SHINES a light into Misty’s eyes and tells her to blink. He looks into her ears. He looks up her nose. He turns out the office lights while he makes her point a flashlight into her mouth. The same way Angel Delaporte’s flashlight looked into the hole in his dining room wall. This is an old doctor’s trick to illuminate the sinuses, they spread out, glowing red under the skin around your nose, and you can check for shadows that mean blockage, infections. Sinus headaches. He tilts Misty’s head back and peers down her throat.
He says, “Why do you say it was food poisoning?”
→ July 17
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.
→ July 21—The Third-Quarter Moon
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.
→ July 24
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.
→ July 25
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 facades. 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.
→ July 28—The New Moon
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.
→ July 29—The New Moon
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.
→ July 30
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.
→ August 5
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?”
→ August 7
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?
→ August 12—The Full Moon
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.
→ August 15
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.
→ August 16
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.
→ August 20—The Third-Quarter Moon
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.
→ August 21
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.
→ August 21 . . . and One-Half
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.
→ August 23
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.”
→ August 24
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.
→ August 24 . . . and One-Half
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.”
→ August 24 . . . and Three-Quarters
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.
→ August 25
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.
→ August 26
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?”
→ August 27—The New Moon
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.
→ August 27 . . .and Three-Quarters
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.”
→ August 27 . . . and One-Half
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 Velazquez.
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.
→ August 27 . . . and Seven-Eighths
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.
→ August 28
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.
→ September 3—The First-Quarter Moon
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.
