Misty included.
Grace Wilmot holds her hand out and says, “Tabbi, come along. Let’s leave your mother to enjoy her afternoon.”
Tabbi takes her grandmother’s hand, and the two of them start back across the meadow to the dirt road where they left the car parked.
The sun’s warm. The meadow’s up high enough that you can look down and see the waves hiss and burst on the rocks below. Down the coastline, you can see the town. The Waytansea Hotel is a smudge of white clapboard. You can almost see the little dormer windows of the attic rooms. From here, the island looks pleasant and perfect, not crowded and busy with tourists. Ugly with billboards. It looks how the island must’ve looked before the rich summer people arrived. Before Misty arrived. You can see why people born here never move away. You can see why Peter was so ready to protect it.
“Mom,” Tabbi calls out.
She’s running back from her grandmother. Both her hands are clutching at her pink sweatshirt. Panting and smiling, she gets to where Misty is sitting on the blanket. The gold filigree earring in her hands, she says, “Hold still.”
Misty holds still. A statue.
And Tabbi stoops to pin the earring through her mother’s earlobe, saying, “I almost forgot until Granmy reminded me. She says you’ll need this.” The knees of her blue jeans are muddy and stained green from when Misty panicked and pulled them to the ground, when Misty tried to save her.
Misty says, “You want a sandwich to take with you, honey?”
And Tabbi shakes her head, saying, “Granmy told me not to eat them.” Then she turns and runs away, waving one arm over her head until she’s gone.
ANGEL HOLDS THE SHEET of watercolor paper, pinching the corners with the tips of his fingers. He looks at it and looks at Misty and says, “You drew a chair?”
Misty shrugs and says, “It’s been years. It was the first thing that came to me.”
Angel turns his back to her, holding the picture so the sunlight hits it from different angles. Still looking at it, he says, “It’s good. It’s very good. Where did you find the chair?”
“I drew it from my imagination,” Misty says, and she tells him about being stranded out on Waytansea Point all day with just her paints and two bottles of wine.
Angel squints at the picture, holding it so close he’s almost cross-eyed, and he says, “It looks like a Hershel Burke.” Angel looks at her and says, “You spent the day in a grassy meadow and imagined a Hershel Burke Renaissance Revival armchair?”
This morning, a woman in Long Beach called to say she was repainting her laundry room so they’d better come see Peter’s mess before she got started.
Right now, Misty and Angel are in the missing laundry room. Misty’s sketching the fragments of Peter’s doodles. Angel’s supposed to be photographing the walls. The minute Misty opened her portfolio to take out a sketch pad, Angel saw the little watercolor and asked to see it. Sunlight comes through a window of frosted glass, and Angel holds the picture in that light.
Spray-painted across the window, it says: “. . . set foot on our island and you’ll die . . .”
Angel says, “It’s a Hershel Burke, I swear. From 1879 Philadelphia. Its twin is in the Vanderbilt country house, Biltmore.”
It must’ve stuck in Misty’s memory from Art History 101, or the Survey of Decorative Arts 236 or some other useless class from art school. Maybe she saw it on television, a video tour of famous houses on some public television program. Who knows where an idea comes from. Our inspiration. Why do we imagine what we imagine.
Misty says, “I’m lucky I drew anything. I got so sick. Food poisoning.”
Angel’s looking at the picture, turning it. The corrugator muscle between his eyebrows contracts into three deep wrinkles. His glabellar furrows. His triangularis muscle pulls his lips until marionette lines run down from each corner of his mouth.
Sketching the doodles off the walls, Misty doesn’t tell Angel about the stomach cramps. That entire sucky afternoon, she tried to sketch a rock or a tree, and crumpled the paper, disgusted. She tried to sketch the town in the distance, the church steeple and clock on the library, but crumpled that. She crumpled a shitty picture of Peter she tried to draw from memory. She crumpled a picture of Tabbi. Then, a unicorn. She drank a glass of wine and looked for something new to ruin with her lack of talent. Then ate another chicken salad sandwich with its weird cilantro taste.
Even the idea of walking into the dim woods to sketch a falling, crumbling statue made the little hairs stand up behind her neck. The fallen sundial. That locked grotto. Christ. Here in the meadow, the sun was warm. The grass was humming with bugs. Somewhere beyond the woods, the ocean waves hissed and burst.
Just looking into the dark edges of the forest, Misty could imagine the towering bronze man parting the brush with his stained arms and watching her with his pitted blind eyes. As if he’s killed the marble Diana and cut the body to pieces, Misty could see him stalking out of the treeline toward her.
According to the rules of the Misty Wilmot Drinking Game, when you start thinking a naked bronze statue is going to bend its metal arms around you and crush you to death with its kiss while you claw your fingernails off and beat your hands bloody against its mossy chest—well, it’s time you took another drink.
When you find yourself half naked and shitting in a little hole you dig behind a bush, then wiping your ass with a linen hotel napkin, then take another drink.
The stomach cramps hit, and Misty was sweating. Her head spiked in pain with every heartbeat. Her guts shifted, and she couldn’t drop her underwear fast enough. The mess splashed around her shoes and against her legs. The smell gagged her, and Misty pitched forward, her open hands against the warm grass, the little flowers. Black flies found her from miles away, crawling up and down her legs. Her chin dropped to her chest, and a double handful of pink vomit heaved out on the ground.
When you find yourself, a half hour later, with shit still running down your leg, a cloud of flies around you, take another drink.
Misty doesn’t tell Angel any of that part.
Her sketching and him taking pictures here in the missing laundry room, he says, “What can you tell me about Peter’s father?”
Peter’s dad, Harrow. Misty loved Peter’s dad. Misty says, “He’s dead. Why?”
Angel snaps another picture and cranks the film forward in his camera. He nods at the writing on the wall and says, “The way a person makes their
Peter’s dad, Harrow Wilmot, everybody called him Harry. Misty only met him the one time she came to visit before they were married. Before Misty got pregnant. Harry took her on a long tour of Waytansea Island, walking and pointing out the peeling paint and saggy roofs on the big shingled houses. Using a car key, he picked loose mortar from between the granite blocks of the church. They saw how the Merchant Street sidewalks were cracked and buckled. The storefronts streaked with growing mold. The closed hotel looked black inside, most of it gutted by a fire. The outside, shabby with its window screens rusted dark red. The shutters crooked. The gutters sagging. Harrow Wilmot kept saying, “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” He said, “No matter how well we invest it, this is how long the money ever lasts.”
Peter’s father died after Misty went back to college.
And Angel says, “Can you get me a sample of his handwriting?”
Misty keeps sketching the doodles, and she says, “I don’t know.”
Just for the record, being smeared with shit and naked in the wilderness, spattered with pink vomit, this does not necessarily make you a real artist.
And neither do hallucinations. Out on Waytansea Point, with the cramps and the sweat rolling out of her hair and down the sides of her face, Misty started seeing things. With the hotel napkins she was trying to clean herself up. She rinsed her mouth with wine. Waved away the cloud of flies. The vomit still burned in her nose. It’s
