Diary

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.

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?”

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.

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.

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.